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Windfalls

by A. G. Gardiner · English · Gutenberg #47429 · 375,833 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Windfalls

Author: A. G. Gardiner

Illustrator: Clive Gardiner


        
Release date: November 22, 2014 [eBook #47429]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47429

Credits: Produced by David Widger from page images generously
        provided by the Internet Archive


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***




Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive








WINDFALLS

By Alfred George Gardiner

(Alpha of the Plough)

Illustrations by Clive Gardiner

J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.

1920


[Illustration: 0002]

[Illustration: 0008]

[Illustration: 0009]


TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS

I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
anything in particular--which it cannot--it is, in spite of its delusive
title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer it to
those who love them most.

[Illustration: 0013]




PREFACE

|In offering a third basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is
hoped that the fruit will not be found to have deteriorated. If that is
the case, I shall hold myself free to take another look under the
trees at my leisure. But I fancy the three baskets will complete the
garnering. The old orchard from which the fruit has been so largely
gathered is passing from me, and the new orchard to which I go has not
yet matured. Perhaps in the course of years it will furnish material for
a collection of autumn leaves.

[Illustration: 0015]

[Illustration: 0021]




JEMIMA

|I took a garden fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes.
When Jemima saw me crossing the orchard with a fork he called a
committee meeting, or rather a general assembly, and after some joyous
discussion it was decided _nem. con_. that the thing was worth looking
into. Forthwith, the whole family of Indian runners lined up in single
file, and led by Jemima followed faithfully in my track towards the
artichoke bed, with a gabble of merry noises. Jemima was first into the
breach. He always is...

But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
you said, “How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but
twice----” Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion
blameless. It seems incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima
was the victim of an accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of
a brood who, as they came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the
shell, received names of appropriate ambiguity--all except Jemima. There
were Lob and Lop, Two Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy
and Baby, and so on. Every name as safe as the bank, equal to all
contingencies--except Jemima. What reckless impulse led us to call him
Jemima I forget. But regardless of his name, he grew up into a handsome
drake--a proud and gaudy fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call
him so long as you call him to the Diet of Worms.

And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble,
gobble, and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to
drive in the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman
keeps his eye on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the
sound of a trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through
fire and water in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical
connection with worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity.
The others are content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his
larger reasoning power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that
the way to get the fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way
he watches it I rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork.
Look at him now. He cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork,
expecting to see large, squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy
nips in under his nose and gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent
friend, I say, addressing Jemima, you know both too much and too little.
If you had known a little more you would have had that worm; if you had
known a little less you would have had that worm. Let me commend to you
the words of the poet:

               A little learning is a dangerous thing:

               Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
much but don't know enough. Now Greedy----

But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners
about. Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard
without an idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a
perpetual gossip. The world is full of such a number of things that they
hardly ever leave off talking, and though they all talk together they
are so amiable about it that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them....
But here are the scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you
say to that, Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.

The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it,
I said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast
tomorrow. You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will
devour you. He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that
gleams with such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right,
Jemima. That, as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm,
and the large, cunning animal eats you, but--yes, Jemima, the crude
fact has to be faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the
Mighty leaves off:

                        His heart is builded

               For pride, for potency, infinity,

               All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,

               Arrased with purple like the house of kings,

               _To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm_

               _Statelily lodge..._

I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like
you, am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries,
who creates to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And
driving in the fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I
present you with this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...

[Illustration: 0024]

[Illustration: 0025]




ON BEING IDLE

|I have long laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person.
It is an entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in
conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am
idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art
of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a
verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm
you by laying down my arms. “Ah, ah,” I expect you to say. “Ah, ah, you
an idle person. Well, that is good.” And if you do not say it I at least
give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.

This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things
about ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about
us. We say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way
some people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their
early decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as
remote as it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating
the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be
missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember
a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was “When I am gone.” One day
he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee,
what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up
cheerfully and said, “When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at
the funeral?” It was a devastating question, and it was observed that
afterwards the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his
formidable grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.

And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were
to express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad
as the old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and
I daresay I should take care not to lay myself open again to such
_gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling
self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about “Alpha of the Plough”
 without asking for any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how
he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was
never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has
been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The Star_.

It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being about
quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it back?--for
summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and
there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved
to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint his
pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of
this May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare
carolling with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled
wonder of the beech woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself
with the sunshine. You cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it
in. That, said he, is plain to the meanest understanding. So he took it
in. He just lay on his back and looked at the clouds sailing serenely in
the blue. They were well worth looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds
that drifted along silently and dreamily, like vast bales of wool being
wafted from one star to another. He looked at them “long and long” as
Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer of genius, he said, would have
loved to lie and look at those woolly clouds.

And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not
have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began
enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the
wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could
hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin
whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of
the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech
near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of
the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo
sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside, the
“spink-spink” of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a distant
field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the ring
of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech woods,
the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in the
wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many other
things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the heavenly
bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy softness
invited to slumber....

When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and
the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the
blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you
preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He
would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did
not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds.
To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always “up and
doing.” It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make ten
times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do all
the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of these
lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour like
the honey bee.

But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came
out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives
alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put
on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time
flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do
and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure
that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took
more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one
of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other
hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was
visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward. At
last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found.
This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason,
rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne
appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last
the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of
her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped
notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the merciless
law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and before
he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard
announced another interruption of his task.

And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article
about how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one
virtue. It exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.

[Illustration: 0030]

[Illustration: 0031]




ON HABITS

|I sat down to write an article this morning, but found I could make
no progress. There was grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels
refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new fountain pen
that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration of an
anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which one
or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me. It
was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a most
satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could have
written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink and
give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end without
a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead of
galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no more
speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in the
Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally without
effect on my Modestine.

Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without
my using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a
whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to
me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke
of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to
Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my
hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as
they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an
eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten.
But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen
in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an
atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and my
thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a foreign
language in which nothing pleased me.

This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
of his school days. “There was,” he said, “a boy in my class at school
who stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant
him. Day came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would;
till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always
fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in
an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know
the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was
again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not
to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen no
more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was
the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him
smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some
reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed
my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe
he is dead, he took early to drinking.”

It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come.
to grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits,
so long as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little
more than bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take
away our habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about.
We could not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life.
They enable us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we
had to give fresh and original thought to them each time, would make
existence an impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our
commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more
leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but
not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up
your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long
time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant
hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found it
absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats and
coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself with
such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering
forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in search
of my own garments murmuring, “Where _did_ I put my hat?” Then one day a
brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on
a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to
it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked
like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding
them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to
its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.

But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally
break them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ
them, without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once
saw Mr Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial
breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of
Trinity House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House.
It is his custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the
most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms
about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief
and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no
lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they wandered about
pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their parents on
Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung
to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed
the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with
the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did everything
but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a characteristic
omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to disaster as
the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent. He
struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was obvious
that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels on
which to hang them.

I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out
a pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit,
ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I
hope) pardonable result.

[Illustration: 0036]




IN DEFENCE OF WASPS

|It is time, I think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He
is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been
unusually prolific this summer, and agitated correspondents have been
busy writing to the newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how
by holding your breath you may miraculously prevent him stinging you.
Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He
is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable weapon, not a
bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone. He is
a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound
to confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those
correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We
shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like jam and honey.
But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the plate, and he
is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no doubt. He is
an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously helpless condition
from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness for beer. In the
language of America, he is a “wet.” He cannot resist beer, and having
rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully tight and
staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that he
won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so waspishly
about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about beer.

This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty
beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets
out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings.
He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody
and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of
things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin
that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he went
in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You
can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight
for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.

His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.

If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he
cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its
time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night
during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and
for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow
stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank
you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----. He
runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time
in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving
only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of
20,000 or so next summer.

But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet
he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than
the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel
competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for
I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the
orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million bees
and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never
deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around
me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp,
the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some
obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction of
its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been taking
sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had nineteen
stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle tyre.

It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked,
and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little
joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real
virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean
fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of
that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is
very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He
got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed
off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape,
and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away.
And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a
whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.

And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
help a fellow in distress.

Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to
one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was
continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to
stroke gently the injured wings.

There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp
as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to
kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we
wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for
their enemy.

[Illustration: 0040]

[Illustration: 0041]




ON PILLAR ROCK

|Those, we are told, who have heard the East a-calling “never heed
naught else.” Perhaps it is so; but they can never have heard the call
of Lakeland at New Year. They can never have scrambled up the screes of
the Great Gable on winter days to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the
Needle, the Chimney and Kern Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty
Pillar Rock beckoning them from the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn
lights far down in the valley calling them back from the mountains when
night has fallen; never have sat round the inn fire and talked of the
jolly perils of the day, or played chess with the landlord--and been
beaten--or gone to bed with the refrain of the climbers' chorus still
challenging the roar of the wind outside--

               Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,

                   Come, let us link it round, round, round.

               And he that will not climb to-day

                   Why--leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.

If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells--least of
all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and
the chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and
wind the rope around you--singing meanwhile “the rope, the rope,”--and
take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out
at that gateway of the enchanted land--Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
open the magic casements at a breath.

And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go
to Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.

The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon
jolting down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is
an old friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder
Stone and there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of
Cat Bells. (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking
wimberries and waking the echoes of Grisedale.)

And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
Rosthwaite and lunch.

And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is
a myth and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the
sanctuary and the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your
rucksack on your back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on
the three hours' tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.

It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and
these December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by
the landlord and landlady--heirs of Auld Will Ritson--and in the flagged
entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
climbers' boots--boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots that
have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing nails
has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is--a master from a
school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young clergyman, a
barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham, and so on.
But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and the eternal
boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.

Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?--of the songs that
are sung, and the “traverses” that are made round the billiard room and
the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and
the departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich
with new memories, you all foregather again--save only, perhaps, the
jolly lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell,
and for whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up
out of the darkness with new material for fireside tales.

Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day--clear and
bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the
air. In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes,
putting on putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots
(the boots are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails).
We separate at the threshold--this group for the Great Gable, that for
Scafell, ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It
is a two and a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as
daylight is short there is no time to waste. We follow the water course
up the valley, splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross
the stream where the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the
steep ascent of Black Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely
Ennerdale, where, springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain,
is the great Rock we have come to challenge. It stands like a tower,
gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600 feet from its northern base to its
summit, split on the south side by Jordan Gap that divides the High Man
or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser rock.

We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn--one in
a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that
leads round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the
grim descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which
it invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious
(having three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East
face by the Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New
West route, one of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs
is from the other side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish
to speak, but of theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find
the Slab and Notch route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is
held in little esteem.

With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the
wind blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the
peaks of Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the
book that lies under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the
West face for signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices
comes up from below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse
of their forms. “They're going to be late,” says George Abraham--the
discoverer of the New West--and then he indicates the closing stages of
the climb and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most
thrilling escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock--two men
falling, and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those
three, two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next
year on the Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn
cheerfully to descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which
ends on the slope of the mountain near to the starting point of the New
West route.

The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds
no light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite
distinct, coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions
and distinguish the speakers. “Can't understand why those lads are
cutting it so fine,” says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down
cracks and grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety.
And now we look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing
is visible--a figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full
stretch. There it hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.

[Illustration: 0047]

The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to
the right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb--a manoeuvre in
which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
fellows pass him. “This is bad,” says George Abraham and he prepares
for a possible emergency. “Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?” he
cries. “Yes, wait.” The words rebound from the cliff in the still air
like stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey,
still moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word
they speak echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You
hear the iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on
the ringing wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both
feet are dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold.
I fancy one or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at
each other in silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now
growing dim, is impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices
come down to us in brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is
sailing into the clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.

At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery “All
right” drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the
scattered rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs,
which in the absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by
the easy Jordan route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that
it is perhaps more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.

And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great
Doup, where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly
fence that has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of
Black Sail Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we
have rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.

In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one
to his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
only the word “Wastdale” to them and you shall awake its echoes; then
you shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable
things. They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the
mountains.

[Illustration: 0049]

[Illustration: 0050]




TWO VOICES

|Yes,” said the man with the big voice, “I've seen it coming for years.
Years.”

“Have you?” said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat
on the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube
strike that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.

“Yes, years,” said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the
admission as possible. “I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way
off. Suppose I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.”

“Ah,” said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.

“Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George--that's the man that
 up to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and
property and things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.'
Why, his speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's
it's come back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.”

“Did you, though?” observed timid voice--not questioningly, but as an
assurance that he was listening attentively.

“Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years--years, I did.
And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said.
But was it done?”

“Of course not,” said timid voice.

“I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why,
but there it is. I'm not much at the platform business--tub-thumping,
I call it--but for seeing things far off--well, I'm a bit psychic, you
know.”

“Ah,” said timid voice, mournfully, “it's a pity some of those talking
fellows are not psychic, too.” He'd got the word firmly now.

“Them psychic!” said big voice, with scorn. “We know what they are.
You see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word,
he'll turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's
German money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money
behind them.”

“Shouldn't wonder at all,” said timid voice.

“I know,” said big voice. “I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
Boer War. I saw that coming for years.”

“Did you, indeed?” said timid voice.

“Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it
was in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned
out--two years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties.
That's what I said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win,
and I claim they did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all
they asked for.”

“You were about right,” assented timid voice.

“And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
finger--that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
fleet as big as ours.”

“Never did like that man,” said timid voice.

“It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
means. They've escaped--and just when we'd got them down.”

“It's a shame,” said timid voice.

“This war ought to have gone on longer,” continued big voice. “My
opinion is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded.
That's what they are--they're too crowded.”

“I agree there,” said timid voice. “We wanted thinning.”

“I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to
have gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to
know his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says _John Bull_, and
that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society--regular
chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society
went smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.”

“I don't like those goody-goody people,” said timid voice.

“No,” said big voice. “William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what
that man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
players,' he said. Strordinary how he knew things.”

“Wonderful,” said timid voice.

“There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
knew--not one-half.”

“No doubt about it,” said timid voice.

“I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before
_or_ since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson
and he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a
pity we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith
are not in it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare.
Couldn't hold a candle to him.”

“Seems to me,” said timid voice, “that there's nobody, as you might say,
worth anything to-day.”

“Nobody,” said big voice. “We've gone right off. There used to be men.
Old Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about
Tariff Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all
right years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out
of date. I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's
the result of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to
Free Trade this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We
_are_ done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I
believe in looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they
wouldn't believe I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the
English are so slow,' they said, 'and you--why you want to be getting on
in front of us.' That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.”

“It's the best way too,” said timid voice. “We want more of it. We're
too slow.”

And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the
light of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both
well-dressed, ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street
I should have said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business
class. I have set down their conversation, which I could not help
overhearing, and which was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant
for publication, as exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal
more of it, all of the same character. You will laugh at it, or weep
over it, according to your humour.

[Illustration: 0055]




ON BEING TIDY

|Any careful observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of
an adventure--a holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary
liquidation (whatever that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a
conspiracy, or--in short, of something out of the normal, something
romantic or dangerous, pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm
current of my affairs. Being the end of July, he would probably say:
That fellow is on the brink of the holiday fever. He has all the
symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his negligent, abstracted manner.
Notice his slackness about business--how he just comes and looks in and
goes out as though he were a visitor paying a call, or a person who had
been left a fortune and didn't care twopence what happened. Observe his
clothes, how they are burgeoning into unaccustomed gaiety, even levity.
Is not his hat set on at just a shade of a sporting angle? Does not
his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible emotions? Is there not the
glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not hear him humming as he
came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is going for a holiday.

Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my
private room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my
desk has been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of
mine once coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat.
His face fell with apprehension. His voice faltered. “I hope you are not
leaving us,” he said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else
that could account for so unusual an operation.

For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do
not believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them
into disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at
us when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have
all these papers to dispose of--otherwise, why are they there? They get
their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
tremendous fellows we are for work.

I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out
of the water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable
imposture. On one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner
in a provincial city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey
was observed carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a
salver. For whom was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused
behind the grand old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him.
The company looks on in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing
old man cannot escape the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his
neighbour at the table looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own
hand-writing!

But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost.
It was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers
and books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging
up to the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him.
When he came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land.
He did not know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he
promptly restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things.
It sounds absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness
must always seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that
there is a method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths
through the wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are
rather like cats whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets.
It is not true that we never find things. We often find things.

And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes
and your cross references, and your this, that, and the other--what do
you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly
and ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
delighted discovery. You do not shout “Eureka,” and summon your family
around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims
into your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at
all, for you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can
be truly found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before
he could experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the
world. It is we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who
know the Feast of the Fatted Calf.

This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder.
I only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope
of reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously
as my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on
my friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901,
and had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit
of emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger
was the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first
magnitude. It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes.
It was a desk of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them
all separate jobs to perform.

And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said
I, the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns
in Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will
leap magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every
reference will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of
Prospero.

                   “Approach, my Ariel; come,”

I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will
appear with--

               “All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come

               To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,

               To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride

               On the curl'd clouds.”

I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are,
and my cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and
notebooks, and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be
short of a match or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or--in
short, life will henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it
worked like a charm. Then the demon of disorder took possession of the
beast. It devoured everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless
deeps my merchandise sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it.
It was not a desk, but a tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a
second-hand shop.

Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality
of order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of
external things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that
perhaps may be acquired but cannot be bought.

I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at
me as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I
do not care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures
new. To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors
for my emancipated spirit.

[Illustration: 0061]

[Illustration: 0062]




AN EPISODE

|We were talking of the distinction between madness and sanity when one
of the company said that we were all potential madmen, just as every
gambler was a potential suicide, or just as every hero was a potential
coward.

“I mean,” he said, “that the difference between the sane and the
insane is not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he
recognises them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He
thinks them, and dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner.
The saint is not exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil,
is master of himself, and puts them away.

“I speak with experience,” he went on, “for the potential madman in me
once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if
I had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all
time as a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of
safety. Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.”

“Tell us about it,” we said in chorus.

“It was one evening in New York,” he said. “I had had a very exhausting
time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends
at the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that
evening we agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue,
winding up with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being
presented. When we went to the box office we found that we could not get
three seats together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of
the house and I to the dress circle.

“If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous
dimensions and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but
one to one of the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had
begun. It was trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and
between the acts I went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks
in the promenades. I did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did
I speak to anyone.

“After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to
my seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a
blow. The huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake
through filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames.
I passed to my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the
conflagration in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled
the great theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire
in this place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my
brain like a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through
my mind, and then '_What if I cried Fire?_'

“At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance.
I felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to
be two persons engaged in a deadly grapple--a sane person struggling to
keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight--tight--tight the raging
madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that
in moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were
a third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still
that titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched
teeth. Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious
surrender. I must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from
it. If I had a book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I
would talk. But both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to
my unknown neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or
a request for his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye.
He was a youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But
his eyes were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by
the spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course
would have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense
silence was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what
was there to say?...

“I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the
monster within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the
ceiling and marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at
the occupants of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into
speculations about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the
tyrant was too strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I
looked up at the gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my
thoughts with calculations about the numbers present, the amount of
money in the house, the cost of running the establishment--anything. In
vain. I leaned back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still
gripping the arms of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled
it seemed!... I was conscious that people about me were noticing my
restless inattention. If they knew the truth.... If they could see the
raging torment that was battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How
long would this wild impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction
that would

               Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff

               That feeds upon the brain.

“I recalled the reply--

               Therein the patient must minister to himself.

“How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a
mystery was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild
drama. I turned my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were
playing?... Yes, it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How
familiar it was! My mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw
a well-lit room and children round the hearth and a figure at the
piano....

“It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked
at the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake
from a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still
behind, but I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But
what a hideous time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out
my handkerchief and drew it across my forehead.”

[Illustration: 0066]

[Illustration: 0067]



ON SUPERSTITIONS

|It was inevitable that the fact that a murder has taken place at a
house with the number 13 in a street, the letters of whose name number
13, would not pass unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that
have been committed, I suppose we should find that as many have taken
place at No. 6 or No. 7, or any other number you choose, as at No.
13--that the law of averages is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But
this consideration does not prevent the world remarking on the fact when
No. 13 has its turn. Not that the world believes there is anything
in the superstition. It is quite sure it is a mere childish folly, of
course. Few of us would refuse to take a house because its number was
13, or decline an invitation to dinner because there were to be 13 at
table. But most of us would be just a shade happier if that desirable
residence were numbered 11, and not any the less pleased with the dinner
if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept him away. We would
not confess this little weakness to each other. We might even refuse to
admit it to ourselves, but it is there.

That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are
numerous streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which
there is no house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a
bed in a hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though
it has worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations
of a discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house,
and into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of
a bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession
to the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery
is a matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow
on the mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat
recovery. Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers
in the sick bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of
a certain state of mind in the patient. There are few more curious
revelations in that moving record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences
during the war, than the case of the man who died of a pimple on his
nose. He had been hideously mutilated in battle and was brought into
hospital a sheer wreck; but he was slowly patched up and seemed to have
been saved when a pimple appeared on his nose. It was nothing in itself,
but it was enough to produce a mental state that checked the flickering
return of life. It assumed a fantastic importance in the mind of the
patient who, having survived the heavy blows of fate, died of something
less than a pin prick. It is not difficult to understand that so fragile
a hold of life might yield to the sudden discovery that you were lying
in No. 13 bed.

I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of
all the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that
I constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have
associated the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had
anything but the most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved
a bus, and as free from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I
would not change its number if I had the power to do so. But there are
other circumstances of which I should find it less easy to clear myself
of suspicion under cross examination. I never see a ladder against a
house side without feeling that it is advisable to walk round it rather
than under it. I say to myself that this is not homage to a foolish
superstition, but a duty to my family. One must think of one's family.
The fellow at the top of the ladder may drop anything. He may even
drop himself. He may have had too much to drink. He may be a victim of
epileptic fits, and epileptic fits, as everyone knows, come on at the
most unseasonable times and places. It is a mere measure of ordinary
safety to walk round the ladder. No man is justified in inviting danger
in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle fancy. Moreover, probably
that fancy has its roots in the common-sense fact that a man on a ladder
does occasionally drop things. No doubt many of our superstitions have
these commonplace and sensible origins. I imagine, for example, that the
Jewish objection to pork as unclean on religious grounds is only due to
the fact that in Eastern climates it is unclean on physical grounds.

All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather
glad that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing
so. Even if--conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to
myself--I walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not
done so as a kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have
challenged it rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way
of dodging the absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the
ladder. This is not easy. In the same way I am sensible of a certain
satisfaction when I see the new moon in the open rather than through
glass, and over my right shoulder rather than my left. I would not for
any consideration arrange these things consciously; but if they happen
so I fancy I am better pleased than if they do not. And on these
occasions I have even caught my hand--which chanced to be in my pocket
at the time--turning over money, a little surreptitiously I thought,
but still undeniably turning it. Hands have habits of their own and one
can't always be watching them.

But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover
in ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a
creed outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the
laws of the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and
man seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of
their hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon
of life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of
battles being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more
relation to the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When
Pompey was afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted
to the Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election
postponed, for the Romans would never transact business after it had
thundered. Alexander surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took
counsel with them as a modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers.
Even so great a man as Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as
Cicero left their fate to augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were
right and sometimes they were wrong, but whether right or wrong they
were equally meaningless. Cicero lost his life by trusting to the wisdom
of crows. When he was in flight from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to
sea and might have escaped. But some crows chanced to circle round his
vessel, and he took the circumstance to be unfavourable to his action,
returned to shore and was murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece
consulted the omens and the oracles where the farmer to-day is only
careful of his manures.

I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later
day and who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the
better end of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad.
We do not know much more of the Power that

                   Turns the handle of this idle show

than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons
does not adjourn at a clap of thunder.

[Illustration: 0072]

[Illustration: 0073]




ON POSSESSION

|I met a lady the other day who had travelled much and seen much, and
who talked with great vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one
peculiarity about her. If I happened to say that I too had been, let us
say, to Tangier, her interest in Tangier immediately faded away and
she switched the conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not
been, and where therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about
the Honble. Ulick de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had
the honour of meeting that eminent personage. And so with books and
curiosities, places and things--she was only interested in them so long
as they were her exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and
when she ceased to possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have
Tangier all to herself she did not want it at all.

And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else
in the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching
that appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he
was getting something that no one else had got, and when he found that
someone else had got it its value ceased to exist.

The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything
in the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
material thing. I do not own--to take an example--that wonderful picture
by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his grandchild. I
have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own room I could
not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for years. It
is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries of the
mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have read, and
beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it whenever I
like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the painter saw in
the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the bottle nose as he
stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long centuries ago. The
pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may share this spiritual
ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine, or the shade of
a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or the song of the
lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is common to
all.

From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of
solitude which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient
Britons hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense
a certain noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether
he has seen these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the
little hamlet know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them
for a perpetual playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but
we could not have a richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on
every tree. For the pleasure of things is not in their possession but in
their use.

It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised
long ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who
scurried through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to
say that they had done something that other people had not done. Even
so great a man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive
possession. De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at
the mountains, he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene,
whereupon Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone
else to praise _his_ mountains. He was the high priest of nature,
and had something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of
revelation, and anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence,
except through him, was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to
nature.

In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and
Bernard Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy
of the free human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of
communism. On this point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's
doctrine and pointed out that the State is not a mere individual, but
a body composed of dissimilar parts whose unity is to be drawn “ex
dissimilium hominum consensu.” I am as sensitive as anyone about my
title to my personal possessions. I dislike having my umbrella stolen
or my pocket picked, and if I found a burglar on my premises I am sure I
shouldn't be able to imitate the romantic example of the good bishop in
“Les Misérables.” When I found the other day that some young fruit trees
I had left in my orchard for planting had been removed in the night I
was sensible of a very commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean
Valjean was I shouldn't have asked him to come and take some more trees.
I should have invited him to return what he had removed or submit to
consequences that follow in such circumstances.

I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who
ventured to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or
two hence. Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control
and the range of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If
mankind finds that it can live more conveniently and more happily
without private property it will do so. In spite of the Decalogue
private property is only a human arrangement, and no reasonable observer
of the operation of the arrangement will pretend that it executes
justice unfailingly in the affairs of men. But because the idea of
private property has been permitted to override with its selfishness the
common good of humanity, it does not follow that there are not limits
within which that idea can function for the general convenience and
advantage. The remedy is not in abolishing it altogether, but in
subordinating it to the idea of equal justice and community of purpose.
It will, reasonably understood, deny me the right to call the coal
measures, which were laid with the foundations of the earth, my private
property or to lay waste a countryside for deer forests, but it will
still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of ownership. And the
more true the equation of private and public rights is, the more secure
shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and common
interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the grotesque
and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of private
property which to some minds make the idea of private property itself
inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea of
private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger
of attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard
without any apprehensions as to their safety.

But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment.
I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. “I do
not know how it is,” said a very rich man in my hearing, “but when I
am in London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I
want to be in London.” He was not wanting to escape from London or the
country, but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions
and was bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher “his hands were full
but his soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.” There
was wisdom as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that “he who was
born first has the greatest number of old clothes.” It is not a bad rule
for the pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage
to those who take a pride in its abundance.

[Illustration: 0078]


[Illustration: 0079]




ON BORES

|I was talking in the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat
blunt manner when Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and
began:

“Well, I think America is bound to----” “Now, do you mind giving us two
minutes?” broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom, unabashed
and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group. Poor
Blossom! I had almost said “Dear Blossom.” For he is really an excellent
fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that he is a
bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable company.
You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away. If
you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send
a wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
numerous children.

But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When
he appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not
see you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand
upon your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new
new's and good news--“Well, I think that America is bound to----” And
then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.

Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He
advances with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he
is welcome everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have
nothing but the best, and as he enters the room you may see his
eye roving from table to table, not in search of the glad eye of
recognition, but of the most select companionship, and having marked
down his prey he goes forward boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle
with easy familiarity, draw's up his chair with assured and masterful
authority, and plunges into the stream of talk with the heavy impact
of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a bath. The company around him melts
away, but he is not dismayed. Left alone with a circle of empty chairs,
he riseth like a giant refreshed, casteth his eye abroad, noteth another
group that whetteth his appetite for good fellowship, moveth towards it
with bold and resolute front. You may see him put to flight as many as
three circles inside an hour, and retire at the end, not because he is
beaten, but because there is nothing left worth crossing swords with. “A
very good club to-night,” he says to Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.

Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine
where Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly
as one who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and
examines the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so
much alone that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the
corner who keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them
may catch his eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper
sedulously, but his glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or
over the top of the page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets
his. He moveth just a thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now
he is well within hearing. Now he is almost of the company itself.
But still unseen--noticeably unseen. He puts down his paper, not
ostentatiously but furtively. He listens openly to the conversation,
as one who has been enmeshed in it unconsciously, accidentally,
almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed in his paper until this
conversation disturbed him? And now it would be almost uncivil not to
listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then gently insinuates
a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice breaks and the
circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.

I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at
whose approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that
they feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any
other fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as
I saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
friendly ear into which he could remark--“Well, I think that America is
bound to----” or words to that effect. I thought how superior an animal
is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish did. He
hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb. He
looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth even
to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
feelings.

It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but
this is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must
not be that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of
borrowed stories. “Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang,
and Heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,”
 says De Quincey, “the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.”
 It is an over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the
essential truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic
emanation of personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to
be a bore. Very great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay,
with all his transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the
thought of an evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of
facts and certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I
find myself in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he
was “as cocksure of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.” There is
pretty clear evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was
a bore, and I am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable
bore. And Neckar's daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was
assuredly a prince of bores. He took pains to leave posterity in
no doubt on the point. He wrote his “Autobiography” which, as a wit
observed, showed that “he did not know the difference between himself
and the Roman Empire. He has related his 'progressions from London to
Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the same monotonous, majestic
periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” Yes, an
indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and even great men.
Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be discomfited. It may be
that it is not they who are not fit company for us, but we who are not
fit company for them.

[Illustration: 0084]

[Illustration: 0085]




A LOST SWARM

|We were busy with the impossible hen when the alarm came. The
impossible hen is sitting on a dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy
on the burning deck, obstinately refuses to leave the post of duty. A
sense of duty is an excellent thing, but even a sense of duty can be
carried to excess, and this hen's sense of duty is simply a disease. She
is so fiercely attached to her task that she cannot think of eating, and
resents any attempt to make her eat as a personal affront or a malignant
plot against her impending family. Lest she should die at her post, a
victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were engaged in the delicate
process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and it was at this moment
that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5 was swarming.

It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You
pass it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops
the hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles
on some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure
with the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense
with the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against
their impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins
and expands as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to
know whither the main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of
motion. The first indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards
the beech woods behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put
up a barrage of water in that direction, and headed them off towards a
row of chestnuts and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard.
A swift encircling move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again
under the improvised rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a
fine day as they had thought after all, and that they had better take
shelter at once, and to our entire content the mass settled in a great
blob on a conveniently low bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of
a ladder and patient coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep,
and carried off triumphantly to the orchard.

[Illustration: 0089]

And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the
war, there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers
could have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by
in these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the
other common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be
had, though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the
swarms of May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage,
and never a hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would
arrive, if not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures
would make themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....

But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found
the skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants,
perhaps--but who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures?
Suddenly the skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the
orchard sang with the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud
seemed to hover over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe
was at work insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a
dreadfully wet day on which to be about, and that a dry skep,
even though pervaded by the smell of other bees, had points worth
considering. In vain. This time they had made up their minds. It may
be that news had come to them, from one of the couriers sent out to
prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home elsewhere, perhaps a
deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or in the bole of an
ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final. One moment the
cloud was about us; the air was filled with the high-pitched roar of
thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the cloud had gone--gone
sailing high over the trees in the paddock and out across the valley. We
burst through the paddock fence into the cornfield beyond; but we might
as well have chased the wind. Our first load of hay had taken wings
and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two there circled round the
deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had apparently been out when
the second decision to migrate was taken, and found themselves homeless
and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter other hives, but they
were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries who keep the porch
and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of the hive. Perhaps
the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young colony left in
possession of that tenement.

We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of
hope, for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench
under the pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane,
and before nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it
never rains but it pours--here is a telegram telling us of three hives
on the way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will
harvest our loads of hay before they take wing.

[Illustration: 0090]

[Illustration: 0091]




YOUNG AMERICA

|If you want to understand America,” said my host, “come and see
her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it.”

He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured
victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but
consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was
as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of
Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It
was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the
great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated
men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow for
Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to the
platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and,
coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered
away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country,
through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off
towers of Princeton.

And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges,
such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
“how-d'ye-do's” and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured
in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some
terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular wall
of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval,
or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the
level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand
spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side,
with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.

Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
game is much more complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
minute record of the game.

The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.

Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.

The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war.
Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They
shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line,
they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with
that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of
cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of
a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl rising
to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.

The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their
limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off
with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand
lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our
cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad
dervishes, we shout back the song of “Har-vard! Har-vard!”

And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into
the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson,
that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and
helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic
muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the
megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and
repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the
challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with
the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence
that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of
numbers. “Five!” “Eleven!” “Three!” “Six!” “Ten!” like the rattle of
musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There
is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and
men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst
in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought
down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a
projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.

I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
thrilling minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension
of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of
victory, how Princeton drew level--a cyclone from the other side!--and
forged ahead--another cyclone--how man after man went down like an ox,
was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another
brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a
man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient
interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up
and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match
ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that
is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is recorded
in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as
a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous “rag” in which young and old, gravity
and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.

“And what did you think of it?” asked my host as we rattled back to New
York in the darkness that night. “I think it has helped me to understand
America,” I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.

[Illustration: 0095]

[Illustration: 0096]




ON GREAT REPLIES

|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain
politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has
eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one
defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much
talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly
at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the
Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound
up triumphantly with the remark:

“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”

“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the
table.

It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things
for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through
the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There
was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash
of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift,
searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that
went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed
on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that
gave it larger significance and range.

It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour
and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and
personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning
phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental
things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of
Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon
about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial
ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought
of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was
nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling
down what you are setting up_.”

And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud
Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was
prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
Christendom.

“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares
for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you
be then--where will you be then?”

“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
God.”

<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the
profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of
the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of
the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the
Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this
great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had
discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And
Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and
female and gave the earth for their inheritance.”</b>

It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,”
 said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same
mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know,
madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”

And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you
were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving
the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he
rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely
keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an
enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother
asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse
bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him
go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm
not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_” If
one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not
unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been
dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke
six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on
thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than
by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he
accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to
have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I
have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often
struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that
the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained
by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and
he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her.
'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the
host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman
returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer,
'I dwell among mine own people.'”

It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if
by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the
spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty
replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp
tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or
cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never
made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to
the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a
point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come
from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant
adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau
than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with
all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on
the world's stage.

[Illustration: 0101]

[Illustration: 0102]




ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES

|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business,
and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear
interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was
only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared
with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume
on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that
makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are
you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity.
All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business
point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank
heaven for that.

But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought
to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How,
for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of
a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope
to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it
as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no
bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the
symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional
values. In Dante's “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted
to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room
for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever
among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying
amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily
“waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms
to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be “real and
earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came
about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.

I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
learned and articulate boiler.

Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in
boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect
was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit.
The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if
I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved
brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come,
I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could
whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room,
surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from
the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and
butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of
South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged
in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of
coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings
folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they
lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure,
he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of
natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its
survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key
of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the
magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on
the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.

There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of
direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial
a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it
will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in
continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is
written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of
life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and
everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every
hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass
for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely
smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world
is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field
of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable
foundation.

It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who
knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might
be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not
know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of
measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters.
He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at
home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged
into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of
circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further
our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that
baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to
dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by
storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the
wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within
a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.”
 And we share the poet's sense of exile--

               In this house with starry dome,

                   Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,

               Shall I never be at home?

                   Never wholly at my ease?

From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with
Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the
sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden
of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of
intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the
spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman
in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying
Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in
the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the
things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly
before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and
he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the
marks! or-----” And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity,
too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book
down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the
enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in
books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example
of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little
world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and
friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an
answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby
that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he
expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces
infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only
outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit
of happy and confident adventure.

[Illustration: 0108]

[Illustration: 0109]




ON HEREFORD BEACON

|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she
died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble
range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon
to Gloucester beacon.

It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way
up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its
descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire
country.

Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the
deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as
this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman
legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural
ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the
work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell
his own story.

He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of
the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
road, Hereford beacon came in view.

“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”

He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.

“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.

“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
from about here you know, sir.”

“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”

The cabman yielded the point without resentment.

“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard
tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”

He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.

“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed
away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”

He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of
Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.

“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why
should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”

And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
us to Wynd's Point.

The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an
old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the
little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out
on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently
declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred
to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and
singer.

It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of
a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room
bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter
pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute
eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres,
whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet
simplicity of her name.

“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for
the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for
charity.

Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.

“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for
this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”

There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
deepening gloom of the vast plain.

Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the
road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the
broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come
out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the
green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of
Worcester beacon.

Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon
to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these
ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled
at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of
exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It
is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of
the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and
look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills,
Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where
southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the
imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you
may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and
plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are
grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that
ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of
smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of
the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the
field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as
Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and
far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that
great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester,
where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and
where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.

The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
Now is the moment to turn westward, where

                   Vanquished eve, as night prevails,

                   Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the
far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of
alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western
slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and
flurry of its flight.

The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....

Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through
the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great
sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads
of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an
unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all
save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its
graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come
those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close
the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.

          And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,

          In an ocean of dreams without a sound.

Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.

[Illustration: 0115]

[Illustration: 0116]




CHUM

|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a
familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor
at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place
was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the
veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him
away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No
matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep,
he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to
blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head.
Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber,
satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well
with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.

I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will
pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and
in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that
I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he
enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom
he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to
go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person.
It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned
after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would
leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent
her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's
schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and
explained that “he didn't know his own strength.”

But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the
woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his
reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there
was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was
precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up.
His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but
he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain
of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat
was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and
his genius for friendship.

There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had
been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin,
and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about
his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to
the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled
to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and
watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury
and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the
qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into
an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your
voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.

He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or
his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more
than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man's a man, for a'
that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came
to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the
former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly
hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any
one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso
facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of
clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair.
Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction
affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many
ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door;
they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of
propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for
him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that
incident was not unconnected with his passing.

One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or
had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted.
But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all
the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to
the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a
cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense
as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and
left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the
hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into
the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to
be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a
place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream
of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there
waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.

[Illustration: 0120]

[Illustration: 0121]




ON MATCHES AND THINGS

|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I
went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses
by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that
cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take
it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in
disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only
happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she
returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was
transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of
indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and
assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.

It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future
became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine)
had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be
sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.

Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised
how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my
friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump
person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the
spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer
did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere
survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the
back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the
tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It
keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with
your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up
the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are
people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand,
and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such
a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle
soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence
his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking,
talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.

It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon
the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all
the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious
than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days
knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the
National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the
darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in
the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that
chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds
like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And
matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would
strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same
reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match
and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using
it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking
or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a
mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying
on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would
get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was
simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking
them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny
or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with
boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some
accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the
stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time
o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a
commonplace civility.

And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven't any.” They
simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the
habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem
to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach
you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years
and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let
the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you
had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.

No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me
with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting
to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket,
preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment
when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out
the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps
the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting
for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless
world.

I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which
I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips
I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that
excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine,
and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other
man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it
quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so
often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having
borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room
and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the
Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He
knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has
one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his
pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man
Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.

But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
Lords and the Oval.

And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning,
Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is
sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds
instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters
who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on
historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or
clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your
galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you
look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he
is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago,
and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far,
in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing
the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a
stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from
Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one
“of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and
lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir,
nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”

Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men
and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those
who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound
of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we
enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the
stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the
credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We
have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the
moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we
can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old
pastures.

[Illustration: 0127]

[Illustration: 0128]




ON BEING REMEMBERED

|As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods
watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows
chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were
looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an
old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars.
Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of
the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those
white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are
reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits
from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging,
leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever
fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit
by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area,
more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was
lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech
trees are initials carved deep in the bark--some linked like those of
lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.

What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is
as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school
desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of
the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted
them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood
or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled.
And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found
pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice
white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's
hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies.
But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials
on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of
immortality--terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would
like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and
tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.

If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great.
One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will
trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries
to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's “Exegi
monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he
knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he
says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings;
a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by
the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight
of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud
declaration--

               Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

               Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
written a song of a sparrow--

               And in this bush one sparrow built her nest

               Of which I sang one song that will not die.

Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but
behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for
immortality.

Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable
confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after
I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on
an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus.
“Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of
me comes but once in centuries.”

Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on
slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of
years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room
will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if
ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le
Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he
said grandly; “_I quit the time_.” And beside this we may put Victor
Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”

But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he
said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has
ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life,
then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true,
suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a
terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.

Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject
is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in
books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable
terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:--

_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should
imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able
to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established
himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any
danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his
weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those
who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us
under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved
book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (“_You were drunk
last night, you dog_”), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius
when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he
never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and
discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are
at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may
cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great
object of the noblest minds in all ages._

We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition.
Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of
Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull
cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy
and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of
“Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the
year two thousand--or it may be three thousand--yes, let us do the thing
handsomely and not stint the centuries--in the year three thousand and
ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the
Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for
democracy--at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has
been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic
to the Patagonian capital--swished, I need hardly remark, being the
expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in
being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made
to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be
desired--bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered
by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous
subterranean passages of the ancient British capital--those passages
which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the
Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers,
and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become
so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities
underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It
creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the
Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian
dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is
discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the
ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.

[Illustration: 0134]

An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha--a gentleman with a flowing
beard and a dome-like brow--that overlooks the market-place, and places
wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells
and a salvo of artillery.

There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you,
my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in
the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved
for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world
to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who
writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox,
who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb,
even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the
temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military
feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza
of the poem in which he poured out his creed--

               He either fears his fate too much,

                   Or his deserts are small.

               That dares not put it to the touch

                   To win or lose it all.

Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship
with Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he
befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the
name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of
Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would
like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went
to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his
praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for
so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the
temple.”

“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the
statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the
ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer
paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of
the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of
Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their
dedication. But one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise
you to go and give Mr -------- £200 and a commission to send your name
echoing down the corridors of time.

Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr -------- (you will fill in the
blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be
safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an
overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest
immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Maréchal Neil is
wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable
a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is
talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even
Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would
not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought
of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes
is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.

But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike,
and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as
if the world babbles about us for ever.

[Illustration: 0137]

[Illustration: 0138]




ON DINING

|There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can
hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy,
for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up
that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and
that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending
what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of
the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race,
finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a
cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the
sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent
his money--while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other
people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or
please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which
we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request “to say
nothing about it.” We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave
the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out
and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that
it shan't escape, I have done it myself--often. I have no doubt that
I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I
shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons,
which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with
mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have
I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can
dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the
atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate--in short, the happy
mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the
uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no
satisfaction.

It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to
a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
families that enjoyed their “vittles” more than her's did, and I can
claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that
I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I
could join very heartily in Peacock's chorus:

                   “How can a man, in his life of a span,

                   Do anything better than dine.”

Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads
the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who
insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life.
That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few
things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by
taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise
for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good
dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and
a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city--a famous man,
too--who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out
to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to
enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record
that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with
Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses
that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season
of fasting, “I fear,” said one of them, “that there is a lobster salad
side to the Cardinal.” I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side
too. A hot day and a lobster salad--what happier conjunction can we look
for in a plaguey world?

But, in making this confession, I am neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet_.
Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
the great language of the _menu_ does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have
for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as
the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way
with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against
his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at
the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel
when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things.
I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and
rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say “Good evening” to
the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once
cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of
his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a
neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress
and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility
and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship--obliging,
but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The
napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a
mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced
dish of hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the
modest four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light
your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only
dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement,
touched with the subtle note of a personality.

And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall
not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It
may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's
Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you
because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it
I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the
Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous
moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling,
popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is
“discovered” it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so
I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back
and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry
between us.

[Illustration: 0142]

[Illustration: 0143]




IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA

|I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the
Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre
and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A
mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon
hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that
morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the
Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on
this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By
the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In
thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver,
and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage.
And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught
yesterday up.

But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always
the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of
it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind
as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we
were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by
sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight
across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it
was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a
confusion of all three.

In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom--a parochial illusion
of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that
they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away
on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length
of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
and dark--what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever
and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark--not many days, but
just one day and that always midday.

At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck
of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A
few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of
dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo
sky--specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of
ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the
astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years?
Think of it--our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round
a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and
live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see
the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our
ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune--if,
that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.

And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts
of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this
regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and
numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons
by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of
other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to
have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the
unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time:
there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of
fable.

As I reached this depressing conclusion--not a novel or original one,
but always a rather cheerless one--a sort of orphaned feeling stole over
me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly
in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a
gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during
yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of
his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges
before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!”
 counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he
doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and
the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a
grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked
up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three
years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me
as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring
scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers
were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and
scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously
happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of
radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold
and merry eye.

The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass,
not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The
experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and
the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the
Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other
experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a
companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain.
We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were
going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was
robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of
no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would
not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and
shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of
the mountains--by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the
moorlands into the Vale of St John.

All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung
low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to
be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious
loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the
late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the
Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the
road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the
dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked
myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream,
in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your
thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering
consciousness.

Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember
that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.”
 It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it
is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for
Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that
goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so
on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or
to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road
which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of
his signature, thus:

[Illustration: 0148]

Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw
through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that
fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses
that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the
outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds
and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The
image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the
similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.

Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and
we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As
we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds
and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere,
far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same
mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been
years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might
have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was
this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the
impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had
passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished,
and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I
had walked through the shadow into the deeps.

But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when
I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very
earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next
day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings
brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just
below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread,
one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck
from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed
along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of
the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the
brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had
gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this
time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch
back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the
fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.

[Illustration: 0150]

[Illustration: 0151]




TWO DRINKS OF MILK

|The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between
Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and
out to the open Atlantic.

A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
the rocks.

We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to
the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received
us.

Milk? Yes. Would we come in?

We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade
of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother
of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and
having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen
floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and
on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.

She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me
on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she
played the hostess.

If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm
of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the
look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a
spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and
to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of
Kerry, O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities
of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always
warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted
with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving
pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every
peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted
if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be
your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among
elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.

The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess
in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that
a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of
Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin
and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she
had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out
there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of
exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been
for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle
accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There
was no word of complaint--only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees
of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the Kérry
temperament--the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.

The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
to the brim, and a couple of mugs.

We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
pay.

“Sure, there's nothing to pay,” said the old lady with just a touch of
pride in her sweet voice. “There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
be welcome to a drink of milk.”

The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane,
and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they
added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague
M'Carty's hotel--Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker,
whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits
among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
many-coloured flies--we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and
heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.

When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take
the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much
better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before
the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)

In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a
day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the
lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage--neat and
well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense
of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark
of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt
that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver
affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.

Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back
to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed
suddenly less friendly.

In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
glasses--a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature.
While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep,
looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion
dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and
talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.

“What have we to pay, please?”

“Sixpence.”

And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.

It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
memory.

[Illustration: 0155]

[Illustration: 0156]




ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH

|It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large
company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation
with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked
that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt
and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the
delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was
especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even
that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their
natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From
the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts
necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt
independently is entirely harmful.

“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the
elements necessary for the growth of a chicken--salt among the rest.
That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article
of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise
its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he
concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example
of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take
salt when they want to die.”

At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with
great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we
eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?”
 I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our
foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw
state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that
that was an argument for eating things _au naturel_ more than is the
practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of
salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw,
with or without salt. What comparison is there?”

“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about
the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,”
 said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of
salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of
the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause
or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute
exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of
salt to eat with their food they die.”

After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening
in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt
I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the
face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have
quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians.
Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the
facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice,
the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the
world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat
their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would
go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.

But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about
which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be
a commonplace thing like the use of salt.

Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random--men
whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its
requirements--whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism.
They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary
sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly
different form for each.

It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
judicious manipulation.

A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our
air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it--that
was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject.
<b>I don't like people who brim over with facts--who lead facts about,
as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few
people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His
conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot
sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès
called “loose, unstitched minds.”

Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember
whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her
husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so
bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact
away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not
infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something
chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my
references.

But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was
that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell
you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the
week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to
descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out
of it--simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were
right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken
account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of
consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had
been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen
had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over
the enemy's lines--as much as fifty miles over--and had come back with
priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but
the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this
time the most victorious element of our Army.

I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are
not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor
Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
catastrophe.

But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
knife discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of
the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt
uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was
doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a
timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches
came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it,
having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The
pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were
of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.

You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story
of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before
he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?

Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any
consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of
the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less
cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts
that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a
lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is
wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter)
which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute, so
incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts,
their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a
famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in
another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government
experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And
this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:

“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”

“Yes.”

“The whole facts?”

“No.”

“What facts?”

“_Selected facts_.”

It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the
midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody
bearing his name.

If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things,
we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of
politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a
speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of
which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is
so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in
the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation
is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is
displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by
justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is
truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.

[Illustration: 0163]

[Illustration: 0164]




ON GREAT MEN

|I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since
Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down
my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of
action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed
that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a
still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd
of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and
Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived
them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the
blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere
homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind,
but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he
had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not
exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry
Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,”
 he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind,
and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the
traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
“The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the
Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful
ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought
of nature.

Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was
a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about
Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds
down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must
have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere
accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured
by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of
the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living.
Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For
our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the
greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the
world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a
magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never
to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a
lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, “poor indeed.” There is
nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or
no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our
Shakespeare.”

For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
indisputably to him who had

               ”... a voice whose sound was like the sea.”

Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of
the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men”--the
“great bad man” of Burke--the one man of action in our annals capable of
measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the cheek
of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda)
first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.

But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as
the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning
eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his
soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding
eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all
statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court
in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this
amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of
life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and
Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less
wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others
aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the
legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still
one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened
man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great
Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be
Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range
of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through
which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.

I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the
lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not
because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of
great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among
our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the
intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically
at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his
place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness
be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to
the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper
mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.

There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.

There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher.
If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness
cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left
out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature,
we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see
the great name of Turner.

[Illustration: 0169]

[Illustration: 0170]




ON SWEARING

|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and
self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier
of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems
to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging
is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay
their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern
times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of
a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary,
who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a
new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole
and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who
talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that
commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to
be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country
would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.

But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to
write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It
was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and
he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it
as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear
that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.

And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is 

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