NEW LEAVES BY FILSON YOUNG NOVELS THE SANDS OF PLEASURE. WHEN THE TIDE TURNS. NARRATIVE HISTORY CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD OP HIS DISCOVERY. THE RELIEF OF MAFEKING. ESSAYS IRELAND AT THE CROSS ROADS. MEMORY HARBOUR. LETTERS FROM SOLITUDE. TITANIC. VENUS AND CUPID. THE JOY OF THE ROAD. WITH THE FLEET. MASTERSINGERS. MORE MASTERSINGERS. POEMS THE LOVER S HOURS. THE WAGNER STORIES. THE OPERA STORIES. THE COMPLETE MOTORIST. THE HAPPY MOTORIST. NEW LEAVES BY FILSON YOUNG LONDON MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI First published 1915 To Edmund Gosse, Esq., C.B., LL.D. My dear Gosse, No compliment that I can pay you can add to the distinction which you enjoy in our contemporary world of letters ; but I may be allowed in this way to pay you a part of the homage which my generation of English writers owes to you. No one, I think, values recognition more justly than you ; that is to say, you do not despise it, however modest its source may be, provided you know that it is genuine and perceptive ; and you are well aware that in our day those of us who take writing as an art seriously, do not get too much of it. New Leaves : what an opening is here (I think I hear you say) for the commonplace and platitudinous philosopher ! We are always turning over new leaves, and there are not wanting among us those who attach too much importance to the turning and not enough to the leaf. We both know people who derive great comfort and satisfaction from actual beginnings, from whose lips such phrases as Starting Afresh, A Clean Sheet, Another Volume, and A New Leaf are frequently heard ; but who never seem to succeed in 5 419999 NEW LEAVES writing very much on the new leaf when it is turned, nor in putting upon the clean sheet anything more to the purpose than was on the dirty one. In my case it is just because of my high regard for you as a critic that I do not hesitate to offer you this little sheaf, know ing as I do that you will be more anxious to discover obscure merits in it than to perceive its obvious faults. And you will remember that all leaves have this quality in common, that they do not remain always new ; and that when they are dry they can be burned. So if I cannot thrill your heart with vernal freshness I may perhaps provide an Autumn fire at which you may warm your hands. Yours affectionately, FILSON YOUNG. September 1914. CONTENTS PAGE CHAP. Q I. ON OPENING A LETTER II. ON GETTING UP EARLY III. UNDER THE STARS IV. MIDDLE-AGE SPREAD V. ON CALLING IN THE DOCTOR VI. THIRST VII. ACCESSORIES VIII. FEAR 6l IX. THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF X. "I PICKED IT UP" 81 XI. THE UNPUBLIC HOUSE XII. SPRINGTIME IN LONDON XIII. MONTE CARLO REVISITED XIV. THE LONDON SEASON XV. THE SILLY SEASON XVI. THE MOABITE S HOLIDAY XVII. A NIGHT JOURNEY XVIII. A MORNING AT ELY XIX. AN ADMIRAL OF TO-DAY XX. RIQUET AND ANOTHER XXI. BROWNING AND HENRY JAMES XXII. MAX S SECRET XXIII. ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES 183 CONTENTS CHAP. XXIV. THE AMAZING MISSIONARY XXV. THE NEGLECT OF WINE XXVI, Wno s WHO? XXVII. THE FASHION is ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL XXVIII. CONCERNING FUNERALS XXIX. MEDITATIONS IN A HANSOM XXX. ON MISSING A TRAIN XXXI. SUNDAY AFTERNOON XXXII. A MORNING ADVENTURE XXXIII. CHRISTMAS PRESENTS XXXIV. MR. JOEY PAGK 195 203 211 219 225 233 241 249 255 263 271 I ON OPENING A LETTER THERE are few habits of daily life which more clearly reveal character than one s method of receiving and opening letters. This is true whatever the time of day at which they arrive ; but it can be most profitably observed at the delivery of the morning letters. They are the first event of the day, the first impinging of the outer world upon our personal lives, and as we have been without letters for twelve hours we have an appetite for them, as we have for breakfast. There are many ways of receiving one s morning letters ; some people have them brought to the bedside, where they can be read and dealt with in privacy ; such people come down to breakfast as though they had received no letters at all, and thereby deprive the curious among their fellows of a certain amount of entertainment. In other houses letters are laid out in little piles on a hall table ; and this is an arrangement much more gratifying to the curiously minded, for if they come down early they can look at everyone else s pile of letters and at the same time remove their own 9 LEAVES from the vulgar gaze. A third method, charac teristic of family life in modest establishments, is to have the letters disposed beside the plates on the breakfast table ; and this is the least satisfac tory to the retiring, and the most gratifying to the prying mind except the intolerable but fortunately rare custom of having all the letters brought in to the head of the house, who examines them one by one, and distributes them to their rightful owners. There is a publicity in this arrangement which offends against all the ethics of private corres pondence. There are many people who would not dream of opening or reading anyone else s letters, but who think nothing of commenting on the unopened envelope, saying, "I see you have a letter from so-and-so " and then waiting to be told something of its contents. This habit, although it seems so harmless, may lead to the most fatal results ; it has in fact been the cause of more mortification, embarrassment, and downright de ception than those who indulge in it ever realise. There are all kinds of sensations and emotions precedent to the actual opening of letters. One becomes skilful in diagnosing their character and contents, and, even before the face of the envelope has been uncovered, the very edges of some of them will give rise to apprehension or hope. There are letters the mere sight of which gives one a troubled and anxious sensation ; everyone has his or her own particular brand. There are others which 10 ON OPENING A LETTER produce a sense of boredom ; we know so well all that the writer is likely to say, and that almost certainly there will be nothing of news or interest in them ; that it will be a weariness to read them, and that they will go immediately into the fire when read. There are a few how few as life goes on ! the sight of which gives one a thrill of delight ; and these, according to individual temperament, we either open greedily at first or reserve as a bonne-bouche for the last. It is when we are young that the receipt of letters in public at the break fast-table, for example is most likely to cause us embarrassment, for in youth a business letter is a rare thing ; nearly all one s communications are of a personal character, and many of them are not unconnected with romantic emotions. We feel that the eyes of the breakfast-table those deadly, observant eyes of the surrounding family are upon us ; if we do open the letter we shall have to read it under that fire of glances ; if we do not, we thereby advertise the fact that it is of too private and sacred a nature to be read in public. We feel it impossible, if we open it and read it, that some casual glance will not observe the disposition of writ ing on the front pege whether it begins with three short words like " My dear John " ; whether there are only two words (the longer one first), which can only be " darling " or " dearest " ; whether there is only one short word, which is certainly one of endearment ; or whether there is no line of 11 NEW LEAVES apostrophe at all, and the front page is a solid block of writing which conveys to the most careless straying glance the fact that a certain degree of intimacy has been reached between the writer and the reader. In the eyes of the embarrassed recipient the handwriting is magnified to several dimensions ; it seems impossible, as he turns to the second page, that the first cannot be read like a placard from halfway across the room. If by any chance such a thing as a photograph or a flower falls out of the letter there is no possibility of con cealing the fact ; and one sits there in agonised em barrassment, a leisurely study for the surrounding public of a Young Person receiving an Affectionate Epistle. But these things pass with the years, and as we grow older our correspondence becomes so diluted with the trivial and the commonplace that the most tremendous and fateful epistles can be received and opened without exciting any comment. But, hav ing received your letters, how do you open them? Do you turn them all over one by one from the top to the bottom of the pile and select one for opening ? Do you make a dash at the one that looks most interesting ? Do you begin at the top and go steadily through, reading and dealing with one letter before you open the next ? Do you methodically open all the envelopes first, and then take out their contents in turn and examine them ? Or do you choose here and there, taking either the 12 ON OPENING A LETTER most formidable or the most trivial first according as your nature is of the impulsive or cautious type ? Any of these methods will reveal a great deal about your character to the observant onlooker. Do you examine the envelope critically first to see whether you know the writing ; or, if that is un familiar, look at the back to see if there is a crest or a cipher ; or, failing that, do you examine the post-mark to see if that will give you any clue to the writer s identity ? Probably you do, because the one way of finding out whom a letter is from opening and reading it is only adopted by the majority of people after all other means have been tried. There is a childish pleasure in this brief moment of puzzledom akin in its small way to the abiding joy of opening a parcel containing a pre sent, and wondering, as the successive wrappings are removed, whatever can be inside. My average morning post contains the following items : A catalogue of second-hand books ; a green packet from the Press-cutting agency ; an invoice ; two statements of accounts rendered ; a confidential letter from a money-lender ; a notice in a halfpenny envelope of some kind of meeting ; an invitation or so ; a communication from some unknown reader ; a letter from a publisher, editor, or literary agent ; ditto from a lord mayor or duke telling me that as he has consented to take the chair at an annual dinner he thinks it a suitable occasion for me to subscribe largely to a charity ; and, only 13 NEW LEAVES occasionally, a letter from some friend or relation on purely human and personal matters. There is not much room for variety in that, you would think ; and yet I go through the daily game of looking at them all in turn and hoping that there will be some thing so unfamiliar that I cannot diagnose it at once and will still be in doubt as to its contents when I open it. But there are certain times when one receives letters which one fears to open, which one puts on one side unopened ; somehow, one thinks, the calamity or inconvenience which they herald will be put off as long as they remain unopened ; one s heart sinks at the sight of them, and one tries to pretend that they have not arrived. And there are certain frames of mind, in periods of depression or anxiety, when one will carry such a letter about with one for a day or two unopened. Sometimes when it is opened we find that it was not what we had feared, and that we have been suffering for nothing ; but, in any case, such a form of procedure is a sign that our equipment for the business of life is not what it should be ; that we are below par, and ought instantly to take our selves in hand, physically or mentally as the case may be, and get into a more courageous state of mind. The letter itself is nothing ; if its news is ill, the ill has already happened and we cannot avert or prevent it ; whatever it is, the sooner we know it and deal with it, the better for ourselves. 14 ON OPENING A LETTER Then there is the letter that tells you, quite sud denly and unexpectedly, that some one you cared for is dead. Such letters have a stealthy way of lying unimportantly among one s other corres pondence ; they get themselves taken up without scrutiny and opened mechanically while we are thinking of something else, and their dread message is suddenly spoken to us from the opened page. As one pauses with such a letter in one s hand and thinks back to the time when it was written or of which it tells, one sees with the mind s eye the letter hurrying on its way, in the post-cart, in the mail- bag, in the train flying over bridges and by river valleys and through sleeping towns in the dark ness, to come and tell one that a part of one s life has been torn away and the world will never be quite the same again. How one remembers all the trivial things one has been doing during that time, unconscious that any blow had fallen ; and how the tremendous fact made no difference at all by its actual happening, but only when the little letter came and told us that it had happened ! And one thinks at such a time of how all the other letters are hurrying about the world by sea and land, being tied into bundles in the lighted post-office vans, or shot through pneumatic tubes, or jogging along on dark and scented country roads, dealing similar little blows at other little people all over the round world ; and how the round world swings on into darkness and light, no slower for the joy, and 15 NEW LEAVES no faster for the grief, that is thrilling on its surface ! There is one kind of caution with regard to letters, not cowardly, but merely a piece of legitimate pru dence, which I strongly advise ; and that is, never to read a letter the last thing at night. It requires a little determination ; the pile of letters that comes by the late post and is left in your room shortly before you go to bed sometimes looks very harmless and alluring ; but it is a good rule to have nothing to do with them. Not once in a hundred times can you take any action at that hour of the night which cannot as well be taken in the morning ; and there may be matter in some of those letters which will disturb your tranquillity and set going trains of thought, tiresomely or even pleasantly ex citing, by which your night s rest will not be im proved. It is much better to make sure of sleep, and with it of the necessary degree of courage to open all your letters, whatever they may contain, in the morning. 16 II ON GETTING UP EARLY THERE are many things in life which ought to be governed by principle, but which in fact are governed by accident ; and among them our method of dividing the sleeping and work ing hours takes no unimportant place. Most people are agreed about the value of the early hours of the day, when there is no sense of hurry, and time seems to extend indefinitely before us. But the simple fact remains that few of us get up as early in the morning as we should like to. Our principle is that it is well to start the day in good time ; but the principle does not govern our actions. Acci dent, in the form of unpunctual housemaids, of occupations the night before, of disturbed sleep, and a hundred other things, steps in and prevents us from doing what we really wish to do. If I want to get up early in London, for example as I some times wish to do in spring and summer I am dis couraged and deterred on every hand. My letters and newspapers, with which I begin the day, have not come ; but they will come while I am out, and lie unattended to until my return, and so make B 17 NEW LEAVES me actually later instead of earlier in beginning my morning s work. Then my clothes will not have been brushed, nor any hot water brought, nor any matutinal refreshment prepared ; I shall move like an intruder in my own disordered rooms, and be a witness of scenes which are not intended for my eye. I know that the unsympathetic per son will say that if I really want to get up I can wear another suit, wash in cold water, go without tea and toast, and keep out of the housemaid s way. Of course I can, and sometimes do. But all these things take away from the pleasure of getting up early ; they make it appear as an eccentric and troublesome thing ; it becomes actually incon venient. You cannot lightly break in on the rou tine of domestic life in London. Your servants arrangements are all made on the assumption that you will get up, say, at nine ; and they silently resent, stubbornly obstruct, and finally defeat any attempt on your part to get up at seven. A whole world is against you, and you give it up, retaining only your principle and the fond belief that it is a good thing to get up early. But in the country, where life is, or ought to be, much simpler in its habitual circumstances, how different ! For the last four mornings I have been getting up two hours before my usual time ; and am, in consequence, not free from that absurd pride in the fact which makes one wish to tell everyone about it, like a hen that has laid an egg. 18 ON GETTING UP EARLY This, by the way, is one of the disagreeable associa tions of early rising. It has been treated too much as a virtue, and not enough as a luxury. People who get up early in the morning, instead of being looked upon as more fortunate and more luxurious than others, are held up as examples of virtue and self-denial ; and their habits are enshrined in copy-books, to the mortification of little children. Children naturally like to get up early, and would continue to do so if it were not for this copy-book morality. When a thing is held up to them, not as being pleasant and agreeable, but as something uncomfortable which they ought to do, naturally they will cease to wish to do it ; will soon actively wish not to do it. And those of us who are ordi narily human dislike the person who gets up earlier than we, and who prates of it as if it were a virtue. It is not a virtue ; it is only an advantage. Even the copy-book philosopher recognises that : " The early bird gets "... what ? A quiet heart, a charitable soul, an increase of courage, or humanity, or kindness ? Not at all. " The early bird gets . . . the fattest worm " ! This clearly is not the kind of virtue which is content to be its own re ward ; it demands to be paid for handsomely, and at the expense of everyone else. The early bird is well paid indeed ; for such payment every com pany promoter, every City shark and sharper would rise with the lark. Perhaps they do ; for there is another ugly saying connected with early rising : 19 NEW LEAVES " You would have to get up very early in the morn ing to get the better of So-and-so." So this is the company of early risers, and this is the spirit in which they practise their virtue ! Nice doings in deed on the moral upland lawn where they go to meet the sun, and get the better of each other ! Fortunately there are people who are content with something less than the very fattest prizes of life, and who can wait to take quietly, and at their own time, what the greedy haste of the pushers has left for them. So much for the absurd moral point of view about early rising. To me it is a piece of pure luxury and self-indulgence far more so than sitting up late at night. As I have said, I think it is a mistake in town, where the world is not ready for its inhabi tants before a certain hour. But tell me whether, for indulging in such pleasures as these, I should be praised for my great virtue, or envied for my good fortune. I opened my eyes at half-past six, and saw that the sun Was shining. There were no pre liminaries to be gone through ; no darkened rooms, untidy with the cigar-ends and empty glasses of midnight to be traversed ; I had but to put on a pair of slippers, open a door, and step out through a smell of wallflowers on to the dewy grass. The sun, although low, was hot upon my back, and struck through the flimsy clothing to my delighted skin. The place was very remote, and there was no sound in the world at all except the choiring of 20 ON GETTING UP EARLY birds. The trees in the garden were full of thrushes and finches ; the sky was alive with larks ; the larger trees outside the garden had their various loud-voiced inhabitants ; and from beyond this area, where notes could be distinguished, all round the inverted blue cup of the sky to the horizon a murmuring harmony, the invisible content of that cup, hummed and bubbled. There is a well of wonderful water in this garden ; and, having pumped until it began to flow ice-cold from the depths, I filled my glass, which instantly became covered with a frosty bloom, and sipped. A cloud less April morning in an English garden ; the first hot sunshine of spring ; the smell of wallflowers ; the loveliest music in chorus from a thousand little throbbing throats ; and the taste and sparkle of the coldest and purest of waters I ask again, Is the seeking of these things to be regarded as a virtue, or as a piece of voluptuous self-indulgence ? But I do not ask for information : I know. 21 Ill UNDER THE STARS SINCE first I discovered the joys of sleeping in the open air I have made my bed under the stars whenever and wherever I could on the high veldt of South Africa, on the decks of ships, on garden-lawns, on the summit of the Bass Rock, on the high cliffs of Cornwall, and by the seashore. There is not one of these resting-places that I can not remember quite clearly as an occasion by itself, although that which I recall with the greatest pleasure is my sleeping-place on the turf at the very edge of the Bass Rock during a week of wonder ful May nights, when I had the whole island to my self but for the gannets that wheeled and cried below me, the puffins, the seagulls, the rock-pipits, the rabbits, and a stray blackbird that used to come from the wood behind Tantallon Castle and whistle to me in the early morning. The least satisfactory of such al fresco slumbers have been those in a garden. In theory it is delightful to sleep on a lawn amid the radiant inhabitants and night perfumes of a garden ; but in fact there is something incongruous in the idea as well as in the 23 NEW LEAVES practice of using a garden as a sleeping-place. Our occupation of it is so much associated with the sunshine and things of day that one feels like an intruder among plants and shrubs when they have gone to sleep at night ; and also, apart from its vegetable population, there are too many inhabi tants of a garden, both winged and creeping things, to make it an entirely satisfactory sleeping-place. It seems delightful to be wakened by the song of birds ; but birds do not sing their best or their sweetest in the early morning. They are busy getting food and quarrelling over it ; and the sounds made by a colony of thrushes industriously tapping snails against stones and chirping loudly to one another concerning the preparation of break fast are, however pleasant they may be when heard faintly through the closed curtains of a bed room, altogether too noisy close at hand to make sleep easy or indeed possible. And as these sounds are in full blast at half-past three on a summer s morning one s hours of sleep are apt to be unduly curtailed by them. But last week I had a new experience of sleeping out which proved also to be one of the simplest and best. I was staying in a cottage built literally on the beach of an unfrequented strip of the coast a steep beach of shingle or gravel which each receding tide from spring to neap left piled in a series of little terraces that stretched down from the mark of the last spring tide to that of yesterday s high water. 24 UNDER THE STARS On the lowest of these, within six feet of the sea, my bed w r as spread ; a proximity that was made possible by the steepness and nature of the beach and of course by the calmness of the weather ; for the sea here washed against the steep bank of shingle as against a wall and sent no intruding tongues of foam or showers of spray, like those which even a gentle surf spreads over a flat sandy shore. One might think that the stones of the shingle beach would make a harsh resting-place, even through a mattress ; but it was not so. The sea had smoothed my terrace quite level, and had carefully rounded and polished every individual stone so that it might give a little when thrust by its neighbour or by some super-imposed weight ; and the flatness and support of a bed which thus rests on the actual surface of the earth give a com fort and repose of their own. This indeed I found one of the great advantages of the beach bed. Dryness and warmth are essential to one s comfort in sleeping out, and there are few spots of actual earth except, perhaps, in very dry weather, the heather of a mountain -side, which are so free from damp and exhalations of any kind as the bank of shingle close to the sea. In most other situations some kind of a camp bedstead is almost a necessity, and the fact that one is resting even a few inches from the earth makes a difference, and deprives one of that sensation of closeness to and unity with the actual stuff of the revolving world which one 25 NEW LEAVES derives from lying prone on the ground. I lay flat on my back with my feet to the sea and the sunrise, as the dead lie, and found it a very com fortable and reposeful attitude. By turning my head a little the limits of my view were disclosed on either hand. To the north the horizon was the actual hog s back of the beach itself, a mile or so away ; to the right, and much nearer, it was bounded by a cliff that rose up like a wall cutting off the rest of the world. When one is accustomed to it there is a sense of excitement induced by being thus out alone in the night which, after a period of indoor habit, keeps one awake and attentive long. One sleeps lightly too ; and though one awakes refreshed in the morning there has not been an hour in which one has not been aware of what was going on the solemn changes of the stars, the shifting aspect of the sky, the gathering and grouping of clouds, and, above all, the voice of the sea which, speaking thus close to one s ear, is not monotonous, but full of an almost articulate though incomprehensible variety. One listens to it raking gently at the gravel, lifting and lapsing upon it, dragging it back a little and heaving its liquid breath again ; and thus listening one falls asleep, to be wakened half an hour later by some momentary change in its voice, some reinforcement of its energy thrilling to it here from the far-away Channel tides, or the last impulse of some unbroken wave that has rolled 26 UNDER THE STARS out from its unquiet heart, flowing across leagues of silence, to find voice at last against the shingle. And in such momentary intervals of consciousness one is aware of a change in the disposition of the stars, of the wheeling of the heavens above and spinning of the earth beneath one s head, and of the banking and massing of the clouds and changing colour of the steel-grey sky that tell of the coming of day. There are no inhabitants of this beach but two fishermen, who work in a dreamy and de liberate manner with lobster-pots. They have a tiny shelter on the beach, in which by day they sit for hours scanning the horizon, or from which they at times issue and launch their boats, row out to where their creels are set, and row in again ; mov ing slowly and stiffly up the beach like penguins, and settling again on their perch to scan the blank horizon. Very early in the morning, a good while before sunrise, which is about four o clock at this time, I turned in my sleep and saw one of these men sitting on his customary perch, motionless, looking out over the sheet of rippled steel that the sea was at that hour. And I observed him there for at least ten minutes, fascinated by his immobility, almost guilty with the thought that I also was awake and in truding on his solitude ; and, falling asleep, awoke again an hour later, when the sun was eating like a red-hot coal into the cloud-bank of the horizon, to see him sitting there still and gazing upon it. 27 NEW LEAVES I will not deny that on one morning it began to rain soon after sunrise. I was awakened by a pattering noise about my head and realised that the sky was heavy and dark, and that the rain which was beginning was no passing shower. With a curious cowardice I buried my head beneath the clothes, drew them over my pillow, and tried to go to sleep and forget about it ; hoping that while I slept the clouds would disperse, and the sun shine out and dry my coverlet. But it was not so. The rain increased, pattering louder on the sheet, and presently a cold rivulet ran down beside my neck and warned me that, since I must sooner or later face the wet journey over the shingle to the house, I had better do it before I and my bed were soaked. There was something humilia ting in being thus chastised by the elements whose intimacy I had sought, and something (I have no doubt) humorous enough to an onlooker in the sight of a wet draggled bed on the beach and a wet and thinly clad figure hurrying up to the house in the cold rain of dawn. But there was no onlooker ; that made all the difference to my self-respect. The bed was dried again in the sunshine of the morn ing, and my appreciation of a dry bed in a bedroom, although it took nothing from the pleasure of the earlier part of the night, was by no means impaired by the fact that I had failed to carry out all my programme. It would have been easy to contrive a tentlet 28 UNDER THE STARS over my pillow and waterproof cover over the bed, which would have made me independent of these gentle vicissitudes of a summer night ; I have made such provision in other places where my situa tion was more permanent, and have found a quite separate and real pleasure in being thus snugly protected against rain and wind while lying out in the midst of them, and in observing, warm and dry, the passing over me of a storm of wind and rain. It is not really the weather that makes sleeping out difficult ; that can easily be provided against. What is really essential and difficult to be sure of in England is privacy. I know not why, but the ordinary person has a singular shame in being ob served by the public in his bed ; and that shame is increased when the situation and method of his repose are anything out of the ordinary. Had this beach been a frequented beach, open to the passage of idle strangers, I confess that I should not have slept there. The pleasure which I had was a secret and intimate pleasure ; I should have been shy of strangers observing me enjoy it ; while the pos sible facetious comments of the unromantic prowler would have been quite unbearable. I suppose there is something instinctive in this unwillingness to be overlooked in our slumbers, when we are off our guard and the masks we assume in our waking hours are put away. But it is a pity ; it makes what is a simple and pure pleasure difficult and complicated to achieve. Indeed if we do not mind 29 NEW LEAVES lying open to the tremendous inquest of the skies and the scrutiny of the sea and stars, we need hardly fear the eye of our fellow-men ; for the stars are never facetious, and the sea has no curiosity. 30 IV MIDDLE-AGE SPREAD THERE are tragedies that can be sung and acted ; there are tragedies that can be spoken and read ; and there are others that cannot be uttered, but are silently performed with shut doors in the mirrored secrecy of the soul. Here the solitary actor is also the spectator ; it is the essence of the tragedy ; for were an audience to be admitted the tragedy would in nine cases out of ten cease to be a tragedy and become a comedy or a farce. The solitary actor does not know this ; and he goes on wringing his own heart with his performance, and (if the truth be told) nourishing a false sense of dramatic values. For pain and grief are solitary possessions ; in so far as they are not or cannot be shared they sting and hurt, and in so far as they are shared they become inevitably dispersed and diluted, or perchance transformed and ennobled. Among these secret tragedies few are more poig nant than those connected with what is too often regarded as the doleful business of growing old. If growing old be really a tragedy, then is the whole 31 NEW LEAVES of life a tragedy ; the bursting of a seed-pod and the breaking of a blossom are tragedies, and the whole affair of existence an unmitigated evil. But this is not true ; and since the whole of life con sists in growing old, since it is a process that begins from the cradle or the March seedfield, it is clearly something which is to be regarded as an essential part of life itself. I feel sure that on the whole the tragic view of life is the wrong one if only because it makes life unbearable, and for an im mense majority of people life is not only bearable, but extremely interesting and worth while. Al though, however, we may be convinced that this is an obvious truth, it does not reconcile us to the process of growing old ourselves. We may see it as a beautiful development in other people, as a mellowing and ripening process ; but we are not a little shocked when we begin to realise quite clearly that it is also happening to us. The thought that we can never be young again is a sad thought ; but it is nothing to the realisation of the first moment when other people, whom we look upon as belonging more or less to our own genera tion, give clear evidence that they regard us in quite another light, and treat us either with the respect or the neglect that youth habitually accords to those who have passed the meridian of life. Again, the ageing of a beautiful woman is always something of a tragedy to herself ; and yet it is so obvious, it excites so much sympathy, that it 32 MIDDLE-AGE SPREAD can hardly be regarded as a secret tragedy, and so loses something of its bitterness. The real tragedy exists in the case of some plain man, the loss of whose youth can make little difference to his friends, since it carries no very obvious disabilities with it, when he first realises that in face and in figure he no longer looks like a young man. For there is at first something quite absurd and incredible in the idea that this business of growing old can touch oneself. Most of us think of our selves as being younger than we really are. There is, for example, such a thing as being thirty-seven. In a general way I should describe a man of thirty- seven as being in the full maturity of life, properly interested in grave matters, a vehicle of affairs, and bearer of responsibilities. Now technically and by the calendar I am thirty-seven ; but I cannot help feeling that the figures are extremely misleading in my case. I feel very much as I did when I was twenty-seven ; and then I felt the same as I did when I was twenty-four. I am not entirely preoccupied with the graver sides of life ; I often secretly long to share the amusements of children ; my shoulders seem to me unsuitable for heavy responsibilities ; it would be better, I think, to wait until I am more like what other people are when they are thirty-seven. I have still the sense that there is a long time yet in which to do the greatest and most serious things that I wish to do. When I am forty, I think, would be a good C 33 NEW LEAVES time to begin. Once I am forty it seems to me there will be no getting away from the fact, and I shall be willing to rank myself with the middle- aged. But I know that is not true that when I am forty I shall feel very much the same, and look upon fifty as a suitable age at which to take a more sober view of life. Imagine, then, with what a shock it must come to me to find that I am ob viously regarded by many people as a sober, middle- aged person, one who will obviously prefer to sit with the elders, and who would be bored and mystified by the high-spirited doings of young people. With my contemporaries I feel I am acting a part that I am only pretending, and pretending badly, to be a person with experience behind him ; I am always afraid of being found out. And yet when I am with my contemporaries of twenty-six it is only I who am quite at ease, and I perceive a tendency on their part to talk to me in a way that they think will interest me, deferring the more natural expression of themselves until I have left the room. I feel too young for the contemporaries of my age, and too old for the contemporaries of my spirit. The other day my tailor informed me that the measurements round my hips and my chest (I am glad it was not only the hips) had increased one inch since last they were taken. The dog actually laughed, and thought that the news would interest 34 MIDDLE-AGE SPREAD and amuse me. When he saw that I clearly re garded it as a disaster, he hastened to reassure me, saying, with a geniality for which I could have whipped him, " Why, sir, that s nothing at all ; it s only middle-age spread." Middle age ! How dared he use such an expression to me ? It rankled in my mind like a clumsy and ignorant affront, until, on soberly considering the matter, I realised that I had not only reached but had actually passed middle age, and that in the probable anticipation of life the years that remained to me must be less than the years that were gone. I know that this is a fact ; I have earnestly tried to realise it, and have quite genuinely failed to do so. It means nothing to me. My brain receives the fact and automatically checks the logic of it, but I do not receive it with my whole intelligence. There must be a mistake ; I must be an exception ; and though it is on record that I was born in the year 1876 it is quite clear that my years have been shorter than other people s, that there must have been some group of years which went by at light ning speed, which became fused in the heat of passage and melted into one, and that the next decade will proceed at a much more reasonable pace. There is no tragedy here, you see, because (for I think my experience is not an exception) we do not readily apply the fact of age to ourselves. But the Middle-age Spread is another matter. 35 NEW LEAVES There is no getting away from the tailor and his tape. There is the fact ; and to go back to the tragedy of the plain man who was never valued for his beauty, and whom a touch of obesity cannot really depreciate, there is the real inner tragedy the moment when he looks in the glass and realises that his figure and his countenance are assuming a more fleshly habit. It may be desirable that we should see ourselves as others see us ; but we wish also that other people could sometimes have the advantage of seeing us as we see ourselves. We look upon our image in the glass as no other eye looks upon us. No one may have noticed the youth and facial proportions of the plain man of my in stance, but he noticed them ; his face was interest ing to himself, if to no one else ; and the appear ance of curves where once had been straight lines, and the rounding of what were once clean angles, is tragic to him ; it is a tragedy which he can share with no one else. It is dreadful to him to see flesh where once he saw spirit, and to realise that he is well on the way to old age. For although, as I said, growing old is a constant process which begins at the moment of birth, it is one of which we are not continuously aware. There are times in youth when growing is painful and troubling, and a time in age when it is melancholy and solem nising. But there are long stretches in between when we are not very conscious of it, and for most men at any rate the years between twenty and 36 MIDDLE-AGE SPREAD thirty bring with them little sense of growing old. Time is a stream that is always flowing, but where it is broad and deep we hardly notice the current ; and we entertain ourselves on its shore, watching others floating by on the tide, until the moment comes when the current gets us too, and we realise that it is bearing us away. And for many people this moment is the moment when they first become aware of Middle-age Spread. It is a pregnant moment almost, I think, the last great deciding moment in one s life. One must decide either to fight it or acquiesce. It- is now, if ever, that we need to make a call upon our remaining youth, to summon it to our assistance. We may or may not decide to fight the spread of the body ; we may or may not run to dietists and doctors and indulge in violent exercises. Whether that is worth while or not is largely a matter of individual circumstance ; but what we must see to is that the spread of the body does not communi cate itself to the mind, and result in a fatuous acquiescence in our destinies. This is the moment at which people first drift out of sympathy with what is young and bold in life and in thought. They think it merely silly ; they see all its fallacies, without sufficiently respecting its vitality and renovating influence. The mind which has been attacked by Middle-age Spread expresses a quite angry contempt for young and daring ideas, more especially and this is strangest of all if it was 37 NEW LEAVES once daring and rebellious itself. " Why," says middle age, " I have been through all that ; I once thought like that, there is nothing in it," and if it were really honest it would add, " The only things there can really be anything in are the things which were new when I was young. They were real and inspiring things ; they have come to some thing ; I represent them ; but these are shams, the silly ideas of very young people who have not had the advantage of being born when I was born." One has only to state this position to see the pathetic futility, the entire negativeness of it ; and yet how many of us who have reached middle age can boast that we have never felt, if we have not uttered, a like sentiment ? So I would say to all who are beginning mentally or physically to spread : Have patience with the new generation ; be interested in and curious about them ; do not laugh their futurism and cubism entirely out of court ; if it is nothing itself it means something ; there is something behind it ; there is your own lost youth behind it. Have patience with them, encourage them, and, above all, do not lose touch with them ; lest haply even the current which bears you along discards you and leaves you float ing in some backwater, spreading, and spreading, and spreading. V ON CALLING IN THE DOCTOR ONE of the most sobering events of middle age is the first realisation that one s health is a thing that must be taken care of, and that one s body will resist undue demands upon it. Hitherto we have been busy with other things, and in the glorious crowded morning-time of life have had little time or necessity for preoccupations as to the maintenance of physical health. We took it as a right and a matter of course, like the air we breathe and the water we drink. But after wards, in that trying time when a man must realise that his youth is gone, that the season of hope and promise is over, and that from now to the end it must be either performance or remembrance, it comes upon him with sometimes painful realisation that attached to, mysteriously involved with, his eager and still aspiring spirit, is a creature of flesh, which shows signs of rebellion, and even oh horror! of decay. With something like shame and humiliation he realises that this physical machinery is of immense importance in hindering or further ing his prime activities. Memories of that happy 39 NEW LEAVES period when the flesh was no burden assail him ; he becomes increasingly conscious that he has a vile body, and wistfully dreams of a glorious body. It is then that, with something like desperation, we begin to cast about us in the search for some remedy for disease, or some conserving elixir of life. Youth and health themselves have little preoccu pation with such matters ; it is middle age and the age that follows it, and broken health and the symptoms of disease which set man forth on the quest of the glorious body, or of some one who will help him to attain to it. I may say at once that I have never yet found the ideal doctor. My indispositions are few and simple, and of a kind for which conscience rather than science indicates the treatment ; so my oppor tunities of choice have been few. And one s choice is rather more limited than appears. I live in a part of Mayfair which is much inhabited by doctors ; their plates gleam upon every hand as I walk to my own door. I feel that I would like to try them all, but an inherent sense of loyalty keeps me faith ful to one, especially as when he was first called in he had the tact carefully to inquire into my habits, and to explain that none of the things I enjoyed most was bad for me, provided, &c. But some times unworthy doubts assail me. I wonder whether, by employing some other doctor, I might not enjoy buoyant health without any moderation at all. And then I look at the brass plates as a 40 ON CALLING IN THE DOCTOR child with a shilling to spend looks in at various shop windows, and wonder, supposing I were to make a change, in which quarter my money would be best expended. The mere brass plate or con dition of the hall door no longer deceives me. I have seen the shabbiness behind too many smart hall doors to take them as an indication of any thing at all except a desire to keep up appear ances. Window curtains and the condition of the windows themselves are a much better guide ; but all these externals are really fallacious ; and there is no safe guide to the choice of a doctor ex cept by actual trial. Even that is apt to be dis appointing, as in the case of Carlyle, who thus describes the attempt to deal with one of his hygienic crises : " I had ridden to Edinburgh, there to consult a doctor, having at least reduced my complexities to a single question : Is this disease curable by medi cine, or is it chronic, incurable except by regimen, if even so ? This question I earnestly put ; got response, It is all tobacco, Sir ; give up tobacco. Gave it instantly and strictly up. Found after long months that I might as well have ridden sixty miles in the opposite direction, and poured my sorrows into the long, hairy ear of the first jackass I came upon, as into this select medical man s, whose name I will not mention." And even when we do try a new doctor, how many of us want the same thing from him ? If 41 NEW LEAVES we are really ill of course we want to be made well ; but the majority of a doctor s work is attendance on people who are not really very ill at all and to whom his visits are a luxury. I confess that I like ex tremely to be visited by the doctor. I cherish the thought that a man who has spent years in the arduous and difficult pursuit of exact scientific knowledge is concentrating the whole of his re sourceful experience upon me. I feel sure that he cannot fail to be struck by the peculiarity and exceptional interest of my case ; and here I may point out that the first duty of a desirable doctor is to appear to be so struck and impressed. If he does not, the awful thought seizes me that famili arity with disease has made him contemptuous of it and that his perceptions are dulled by custom. He may be blind to the vital significance of my symptoms. Nothing therefore that he can do can restore him to my confidence. If I get worse it is through his blunder ; if I get well it is owing to the inherent nobility of my constitution. And in either case I inevitably regard him as a man who may be very well for ordinary, everyday people, but who is unworthy to attend upon me. Then there is the doctor who takes you too seriously, and he is the most undesirable of all. He forbids you this and that, and tells you that you must not smoke at all for three weeks, and also gives you other commands which, as he ought to know, any child would disobey. You do not 42 ON CALLING IN THE DOCTOR choose him a second time. Perhaps the most alluring type of doctor is he who flatters you by assuming that you have a scientific knowledge almost equal to his own, and who discusses your symptoms, not in insulting language which you can understand, but in terms which he would employ if he were consulting with a fellow practi tioner. He takes you into his confidence as it were. He says, " I am not going to give you medicine because you are quite sensible enough not to believe in it. I have found that a little dry champagne in these cases works wonders ; but there is one thing you must on no account touch, and that is sherry." Here he draws a bow, pretty safely, at a venture, hoping that you detest sherry. If, on the other hand, it should have proved to be a really bad shot, and that you really are fond of sherry, he will say, " Very well, then, a glass or two of dry sherry ; but, remember, no cham pagne " ! The two tastes hardly ever go together. The ideal doctor will proceed on a system of this kind, but he will, in addition, cure you. That is essential. What one asks from a doctor is, in short, that he will employ the particular kind of manner and method which is most attractive to you, and that he will, in addition, get rid of your ailment. It is asking a good deal, I admit, but one does ask a good deal from doctors ; and, to do them justice, one generally gets it. There is no doubt that the old type of family 43 NEW LEAVES physician had this great advantage over men of the more modern school that he did acquire the knack of approaching every case with a gravity and seriousness, or appearance of gravity and seriousness, which were very reassuring to the patient. Something of the mystic, or at any rate sonie sense that there is a mystery in the healer s art, was part of the equipment of the old physician. The modern attempt to treat the practice of medi cine as an exact science has not been entirely suc cessful. The truth is that healing is an art, and not a science. It is an art of which science is the hand maid, not a science with a little art thrown in. And when this is understood, all the gravity, all the mystery, and all the ritual that accompanied the old " bedside manner " have a certain use and propriety. How wonderful is the sensation of confidence and hope which a really impressive manner, backed by a sound knowledge and experi ence, can inspire in a sick person ! You may say that it is the knowledge and experience that effect the cure, and not the manner ; and yet we have all known cases in which the most undeniable attainments, being allied with an awkward, diffident, or unsympathetic manner, have failed to inspire just that degree of confidence that will induce a patient to make the little effort that may be vital to recovery. We all have our superstitions ; in the slums it is the exhibition of some black and nauseous draught which inspires the patient with 44 ON CALLING IN THE DOCTOR confidence in his doctor s ability ; in my case, the draught must be of a little more subtle and delicate kind, and be administered per aurem in stead of by the mouth ; but the difference is only the difference of composition ; the draught or the cachet, the bolus or the linctus, must still be ad ministered. I see that the Government are to make the doctors a certain allowance for the drugs they use ; but I fear they will make them no allow ance for, and so probably discourage, the use of those more subtle, intellectual applications which give such variety and such pleasure to the experience of being mildly out of sorts. 45 VI THIRST IT is one of the few privileges of the dyspeptic that he thoroughly understands what thirst is, and consequently thoroughly enjoys the quenching of it. Not for him the moderation of the exasperatingly well-balanced man who, in the hottest weather, only moistens his lips with a little water, or at the most washes out his mouth but does not swallow the cooling liquid. No ; the dyspeptic requires his drinks to be very long, and either very cold or very hot, and when in weather like this the dyspeptic hears the tinkle of ice and glass, and sees the dullness of frost on the outside of the tumbler, he knows that one of the pleasantest physical sensations procurable for him in this world is at hand. His imagination is stirred, not only by the thought of liquid matter passing down his throat, but by the artificial differences of temperature which he is about to produce ; by the idea of a cold glacial stream being poured into the arid desert of his system. In all imaginative people and in this matter the imagination of the dyspeptic is hypersensitive 47 NEW LEAVES the sensation of thirst is almost as much a literary sense as it is a physical one ; it is extraordinarily stimulated by words and ideas. Most of us know some particular food or drink, the desire for which is stimulated in us by reading about it. But the writing must be skilful, or, if not skilful, artlessly good. The cruder method of the stage produces the same effect ; all smokers have experienced the almost overwhelming desire to smoke which comes upon them when some one lights a cigarette on the stage ; and on me, at any rate, those strange and rapid restaurant meals of the fashionable theatre, when a party sits down at a table and is whirled through six courses in about five minutes, surrounded by champagne bottles in ice buckets and trays of liqueurs, have an absurdly exciting effect. It is an entirely imaginary hunger which I suffer on these occasions, for if I were to be sud denly led forth and given a seat at the feast, I probably could not eat anything ; but sitting help lessly in my stall, half an hour after dinner, I suffer all the pangs of starvation. And the literary stimu lation of these symptoms is exactly the same thing on a somewhat higher scale. Tobacco, food, and drink are the things which most lend themselves to this kind of treatment one may call it verbal hypnosis. It is a science as yet only partially understood by advertisers ; when it is fully under stood advertisements will only be written by the most skilful and imaginative literary artists. 48 THIRST The treatment of food and drink in literature, and especially of drink and thirst, is one of the most interesting of the minor literary studies. Some of the greatest authors, and some who have treated the subject most freely, have never understood it. Dickens, for example, who was a master in the literary treatment of the more homely kinds of food, never really understood drink. Pickwick is full from cover to cover of brandy and water, hot and cold, but chiefly cold a most nauseous drink, and, what is more to the purpose, not one of the drinks which lend themselves to true literary treat ment. It is only the very simplest drinks that are suitable, because it is not appetite or the palate which can be appealed to by verbal hypnotics so much as the elementary sensation of thirst. Water is easily, therefore, the chief fluid for which desire can be created by the literary method. The Bible contains all the classical examples of the literary treatment of water, whether in the form of seas, or rivers, or streams, or fountains, or mere re viving draughts. And, next to water, which really stands by itself, as one of the elements, the best drinks for literary purposes are milk, tea, and coffee. The point is not so much whether you like these drinks above all others, as whether, if you read about them in skilful writing, you may be brought to imagine that you greatly like and desire them. Personally I think milk is a delicious drink, although many people do not like it ; but I could guarantee to D 49 NEW LEAVES make it appear delicious to anyone in half a page of writing. The last word on tea was not Cowper s much-quoted and rather artificial " cup that cheers but not inebriates " ; but Lamb s simple phrase " whole goblets of tea," which, in a quite incredible way, can produce in the ordinary reader in an arm chair all the sensations of fatigue, heat, and refresh ment by tea. Coffee comes into a rather different category ; for literary purposes it should never be used but in connection with cold, as a heating and reviving thing. The proper group of words is " hot coffee and rolls," which, even used with moderate skill and a little atmosphere of wintry weather, or exposure to a snowstorm on the top of a coach, will generally produce an overwhelming desire for coffee in the minds even of people who dis like it. But there, for English readers, the list al most ends. You can make a Frenchman thirsty by writing about wine, but not an Englishman ; and beer, when you have rung all the changes on " nut- brown " and " foaming tankards," is a strangely disappointing stuff for literary purposes. I like beer very much, but I have never been made thirsty for it by reading except in one case, where a charac ter of Mr. Arnold Bennett s, who is drinking beer, keeps wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and ejaculating at intervals one word, " Beer ! " nothing else. This, I think, must be accepted as the correct treatment of beer in literature. Thackeray stumbled heavily in the matter of 50 THIRST drink in his books ; " potations of cold brandy and water " is a phrase which he frequently em ploys a phrase both deplorable in itself and for the images it conjures up. Meredith wrote zest fully of Claret, of Port, of vintage champagne and the greater wines of Burgundy and the Rhine, and even of Ale ; but he deals with nothing so simple as thirst, and he keeps you waiting for your drink while he spins long and highly artificial essays on the philosophy of bubbles. Mr. Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, is faithful to cider, which in his hands, but in his hands only, becomes one of the classical literary drinks worthy to rank with the wine of Greece, the water of the Bible, and the tea of Charles Lamb. Such things as lemonade and ginger-beer are utterly useless for literary purposes ; the nearest thing that one could get to them would be lime-juice but you must not call it lime-juice ; you must call it " the juice of a fresh lime squeezed into a tumbler of cold spring water." As a matter of fact, lemon- squash is a far pleasanter drink than lime-juice ; but by the literary method I would undertake to make ten people want to drink lime-juice for one that I could make want to drink lemon- squash. This literary stimulation of appetite is a very real thing. I remember that when I was a very little boy I used, in the interval between breakfast and going to church on Sunday mornings, to be given 51 NEW LEAVES a book called Line upon Line to read, and I used regularly to go through the following remark able ritual. I used to turn up the passage about Elijah being fed by the ravens ; the words in the narrative were, " And the ravens used to bring Elijah bread and meat." There was a woodcut of the prophet sitting in a kind of rocky grotto in a dressing-gown and very long beard, with the ravens giving him in their beaks slices of bread, apparently cut from a loaf, with slices of what looked like sirloin laid upon them. When I had read this passage and looked at the picture, I used to go down to the larder where certain foods were always prepared in advance on Sundays. Among them was a plate containing slices of a kind of currant-bread buttered ; one of these I used to ab stract and eat, carefully arranging the others so that its absence should not be noticed. It repre sented to me the bread and meat of the picture. No other substance would have been of the least use to me ; there were many things I liked better in the larder, but it was for this that the sacred work had created an appetite, and this alone which would satisfy it. The time must have been about an hour after breakfast, so it cannot have been genuine appetite ; it was false, or literary, appetite. But let me put my own theories to the test. Probably you do not like buttermilk, or more likely, you do not know what it really is. Fast disappearing now in the days of patent separators 52 THIRST and agricultural co-operation, it was in my childish days an honoured drink in Ireland, and among the poor more than that " food and raiment both," as I have heard an old peasant ejaculate after a deep draught of it, while indeed some surplus drops were adorning his coat. But the butter milk of my memory is associated with the most wonderful larder, lying deep in the stone outworks of an ancient house, lit dimly at one end by a door veiled with boughs of jasmine, and giving on to a walled garden, and at the other end open ing, by mysterious partitions, into a store-room sacred to the mistress of the house, where one was given delicious things to eat, and whence there came always a faint odour of spices. Out of the glare of the strong sunshine and play among the salt spray and surges of the shore I would come as a child into this magic world of coolness and darkness. At the far end of the larder stood always a great crock or jar kept half full of butter milk, with a dipper hanging on the side, and cups and glasses always there for the use of the thirsty children of the house. Out of the glare, I say, from one s toiling play by the loud seashore, one would hurry for a moment into this cool and frag rant darkness. The crock was very thick and of a coarse substance, allowing a certain amount of evaporation, so the buttermilk was always very, very cold. The dipper would be seized and the cold depths of the crock gently agitated ; up would 53 NEW LEAVES come the dipper, dripping snow and milk and ice ; the cup would be filled, a deep breath fetched, and the nectar, cold, astringent, and aromatic, would be drained with great gulps and sighs. The dipper would be returned and sink with a gurgle into the buttermilk ; and children emerging from the larder would appear to be wearing a small white moustache. And as we came out thus from the cool darkness, the wind and the sun and the sea, rough playfellows of our childhood, would greet us like brothers. Innocent, delicious draught ! More potent still than any drug to conjure visions of gardens and the sea, and to bring back the dream scents of salt and honey and jasmine and verbena ; but power less as any cup of Circe, or any draught of Lethe, to quench that most divine of thirsts, the thirst of the soul for its own youth, and the good things that are gone. 54 VII ACCESSORIES I HAD occasion the other day to turn out an old box which had lain for years in a lumber- room, in which someone had from time to time put away things which I had ceased to use. This was long enough ago for me to have forgotten completely what the box contained, and when I opened it, and began to discover its contents, it was like a journey back into time. I found, as it were, layers of my former self, some of them very early indeed ; and the material of these layers was chiefly composed of the accessory rubbish which accumulates round some hobby or interest. The first thing I came upon was a motoring layer goggles, gloves, road books, and the like. Then a war layer, dating from my war-correspondent days in South Africa odds and ends of weapons, maps, spurs, filters, and articles of camp equip ment. Then there was a photographic layer, con sisting of a number of printing frames, chemicals, and elaborate devices for taking perfect photo graphs, and along with them, spotted and fading even in the darkness of the trunk, were some of 55 NEW LEAVES the truly lamentable results of my effort. Lower down still were indications, dim and fragmentary, but conclusive, of a cycling period clips, a tin of some patent fraud for imitating silver plating, a device for expanding forks, and a map ; and at the very bottom evidences of another and much ear lier and cheaper photographic period, where the fragments were on a very small and inexpensive scale, and less remotely connected with the actual processes of crude photography. All these deposits represent interests and occupations which have waxed and waned. And, although there is noth ing which appears so absolutely worthless as the accessories, extinct as an old love, of an abandoned hobby, yet it is always wise to keep them, for one never knows when oneself or someone else after wards may come round to them again. At the moment I do not possess a motor-car or a bicycle, and my interest in military equipment has ceased to be a personal onel On the other hand, I have just started on a new period of photography ; I am in the act of accumulating an entirely new set of impedimenta, and am even capable of taking an indulgent and patronising interest in the obso lete accessories of five years ago. There are men and women to whom the chief interest of anything lies, not in its centre, but in its circumference ; and who at heart really care more for the accessories of some sport, or hobby, or work, than for the thing itself. I confess to being 56 ACCESSORIES one of these people. There is evidently a huge number of us, because vast departments of com merce batten upon us, and on the foundation of our voracious appetite has been built up the mo dern science of newspaper advertising. We seldom excel in any of our occupations ; that is another matter altogether, reserved, as a rule, for the man whose equipment of implements is of the very simplest, although of the best. But for me the mere duty of the thing is nothing ; it is the extent to which the doing of it can be complicated and diluted by the employment of complementary machinery that has always appealed to my im moderate fancy. Thus, when at school I learnt carpentry, I was all agog for it until a complete set of tools had been purchased ; then my inter est rather evaporated. Failing actual accessories, printed matter will, to some extent, satisfy an ap petite like this, and when I have bought a dog and equipped him with collar and lead, and found that there has been little more scope in this direc tion, I have fallen back on various works upon the management and breeding of dogs. When I had a horse I haunted the saddlers and the corn merchants, and ran riot in currycombs, body- brushes, blankets, headstalls, and hoof polish. In my motoring days my car was more like a Christ mas-tree than a car, so many things were fastened upon it ; and as for photography, although I could never take a decent photograph, there was hardly 57 NEW LEAVES a chemical, or a kind of dish, or a device for hand ling prints, or a pattern of mount that I had not tried. Within a fortnight of my beginning the game of golf I had read eight books on the subject and possessed about a score of clubs. So inveterate is my taste for accessories that I am even capable of that advanced form of the appetite which consists in an appreciation of the accessories of some occupation of which one is entirely ignorant ; so that I have found myself in idle moments gazing with the eye of desire upon collections of copper utensils for the use of cooks, and on various powders, pastes, and implements connected with cleaning with which the windows of a certain kind of shop are filled. The first necessity, both to the accessory-monger and to the victim of the habit, is a catalogue. Whether your hobby be the collection of postage- stamps or the keeping of ferrets, a catalogue is the first thing to have. There you find set forth the different kinds of mounts and albums to which the stamps can be set, the different kinds of hutches and food utensils which the ferrets can use. What gardener does not know the joys and tempta tions of the catalogue, with its glowing descriptions of trees and plants ? What though, when they arrive, they appear as almost indistinguishable little bundles of mud ? It is their printed de scription that matters. Brooms and brushes, too, are things which are very attractive accessories in any hobby, whether it be gardening or paint- 58 ACCESSORIES ing ; and they come into a great many. There is no hobby so humble that it has not got its para site host of accessory providers, each with his catalogue. You would hardly think, for example, that there would be much room for the indulgence of this passion in connection with goldfish ; yet I can assure you from experience that the possession of a tank of fishes led in my case just as surely to the accumulation of accessories as the possession of a motor-car. Even the aquarium man had a catalogue a mean document and ill-spelled, but enough to account for all my pocket-money for the time being. I remember two entries in it to this day : " Hot-water grown Valisneria, 2d. a bunch ; monster bunch, 3d." ; and " Water-beetle, Dityscus, rows himself like a boat, 6d." I sup pose the humblest of all hobbies is the keeping of birds ; yet the man who keeps a few linnets is catered for, not only in catalogues, but in a whole mass of contemporary journalism called the Fancy Press, in which his appetite is stimulated by the announcement of a new line of " tin drinkers, 4>d. a dozen " ; " cock larks, 8d., 9d. ; fierce in song, Is. ; giants, Is. 3d." ; or " Hartz Mountain canaries, bold birds, guaranteed cocks, not half hens, very fierce in song, daylight or gas light " to say nothing of an endless variety of inexpensive rubbish in the form of foods, medi cines, perches, nests, cages, and implements made of wire and pottery. NEW LEAVES Well, and why not ? We can only live once, and the more we live the better ; and I find upon examination that the passion for accessories is only an expression of a passion for life. Not to follow up those engaging byways of temptation is to miss a great deal of agreeable and accidental information and knowledge of the kind that makes life full and interesting. You can press the button of your camera and send your films to be developed and remain unenlightened ; but if you equip yourself with half its accessories, photo graphy will lead you far into the sciences of physics and chemistry. If you have a horse and someone to look after him you need not occupy yourself very much about his needs ; but if you have this interest in accessories and take a pleasure in think ing, not how little, but how much, you can do towards making your horse s stable a kind of shrine, it will not only bring you nearer to him and make you understand him better, but it will make you understand a great many other things, such as the rotation of crops and the working of leather. In short, accessories are the circumfer ence of the circle of which the thing itself is the centre ; they are leads and links which take us out from ourselves (and at our own expense) into the surrounding life of the world. 60 VIII FEAR IN my sleep in the stillest part of the night I became aware that something was moving. One of those outlying sentries of the brain which seem to be empowered to deal with minor disturbances without awaking the general intelli gence registered it at first simply as movement, although not of a kind sufficient to alarm or awake me. But it was persistent ; and, like one view dissolving into another on a screen, the state of dreams gradually gave way to a state of con sciousness. Something was moving in the room, rustling and fidgeting with a noise that suggested some soft substance in contact with wires. I thought at first that my goldfinch, who dreams on a perch not far from my bed, was stirring in his sleep ; but I have known him for years, and it is his habit to sleep as soundly as his master, and to make no movement until, when the curtains are withdrawn, he sings a short reveille and descends to his breakfast of teazle and thistle and corn flower seeds. But the noise continued ; it was something like the sound of a bird jumping and 61 NEW LEAVES fluttering in a cage ; and, alarmed lest some malady should have visited my old friend, I slid out of bed and switched on the light. The noise ceased absolutely. There was my goldfinch with his crimson head under his brown wing, fast asleep in his accustomed place, and nothing stirred in the room. Not a little puzzled, I went back to bed and tried to sleep ; but I had not been un conscious for many minutes when I was again aroused by the rustling and leaping, this time accompanied by an actual chirping which made me think that Sir Japp Silk (for that is the gold finch s name ; he used to be called Mr. Silk, and was created a baronet after his last moult) must be indulging in a seizure of some kind. But a cer tain defmiteness in the sound directed my atten tion to the top of a cupboard in another part of the room, and there I remembered that an empty bird-cage had been placed. I lay and listened ; certainly the sounds came from there, but they were the sounds of some creature demented, rustling and scrambling, shrieking and tumbling within the wires of the cage. And suddenly I remembered that some seed had been left in the bottom of the cage ; some hungry mouse toiling up the stairs of three storeys had discovered it, and was rioting and rejoicing in the possession of so excellent and abundant a repast. I stole out of bed and again switched on the light, and as the room sprang into brightness the scrambling 62 FEAR stopped, and a dark object with a tail leaped out of the cage, ran along a shelf and down a curtain, and disappeared behind a chest. I went back into bed, but had not been there five minutes before the scrambling recommenced, and with it the leapings and squeaks of excitement. I had left the light on and had only to open my eyes and look ; and there sure enough was the mouse, nibbling and jumping with strange antics on the floor of the cage. I sat up ; he turned and looked at me ; and in the same instant fear laid hold upon him and me. We looked at one another in terror. Until he had seen me I had been conscious only of interest ; but now that he was alarmed and stood for a paralysed moment before running away, I was conscious of being thoroughly frightened. I am not more fearful than most people, and in mo ments when danger of any kind has threatened me I have only been aware of a slightly increased in terest in life ; but now I was conscious of fear, and could actually hear my heart thumping within me. For a moment the mouse stood up and looked at me, and then, with an incredible darting furtiveness, disappeared. I turned the light out and lay down again thor oughly shaken, my nerves on edge and my senses on the stretch for the first warning of the crea ture s return. I tried to quiet myself by analysing this preposterous emotion ; but I could come to no other conclusion than that it was the fear in the 63 NEW LEAVES mouse s heart which had evoked and awakened fear in mine ; and I tried to comfort myself with the reflection that I was only exemplifying in my own person the truth that fear begets fear. But my peace had been wrecked ; an uncanny terror had entered my quiet room and inhabited there with me. I could not spend another night like that ; so on my instructions a trap was set, and by the time I retired to rest the next night I had forgotten my fear. But I was again awakened in the dead of night by scratching and chirping this time, alas, from the place on the floor where the trap had been set. I tried to endure this for a little while, but fear and compassion both wrought in me to such an extent that I rose and gingerly picked up the trap, and, with a sinking heart, carried it to a place of execution. There by a familiar machinery I created a maelstrom, and, shutting my eyes, opened the trap and violently shook it. When I looked again the trap was empty and the mouse had disappeared. I re turned to my couch literally shaking, and feeling like a murderer. But, having embarked on this fatal path, I felt I must continue. Perhaps there were two mice ; if so, justice must be done upon the second one ; I would not have fear in the room with me. Again the trap was set, and again in the chill hours of the dawn I heard the scratchings and whimper ings of a second prisoner. I lay and considered 64 FEAR the horrors of the previous night, and that I must now rise and repeat them ; and my blood froze at the thought. Not again, by my hand, that murderous act ! I would leave it until the morn ing and let other hands do the fell deed. And I began to count the hours until my servant should call me and bring relief ; but sleep had fled, the whimpering voice continued, and I could bear it no longer. Once more I rose up, determined to cast out fear once and for all. I grasped the trap, but as I approached the place of execution my heart totally failed me and my feet refused to continue in the way. Instead, I took another direction, turned downstairs still carrying the trap, until I had reached regions of the house quite unfamiliar to me. And here (to be truth ful) I opened the trap and enlarged the mouse ; and the last I saw of him was a disappearing tail that fled through an open grating to freedom and the vicinity of stables. With a light heart I returned, and, with a per fect inward confidence that it would not be needed, reset the trap and returned to bed, and slept sweetly and dreamlessly until the morning. When I awoke the trap still gaped ; and since that day neither mouse nor fear has visited me while I sleep. 65 IX THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF I HAVE been studying the literature of golf, especially that part of it devoted to the instruction of beginners, and I am aston ished to find how little the expert seems to know, or how much he seems to have forgotten. It is the beginners who should write the books ; it is they who really know everything about the game, though they cannot play it. Their minds are stored with a magazine of theory and of method that contains all the advice of all the experts. That the expert has forgotten all about the game except how to play it is apparent from the kind of advice he invariably gives to the beginner. There are several types of book on golf. The type most familiar is the general book on the game written by some famous champion. The plan of such books is always the same. There is, first of all, a chapter on the history and origin of the game ; and, as nobody knows its origin, this chapter generally consists of a more or less diffuse statement of that 67 NEW LEAVES fact. The next chapter is probably called " The Choice of Clubs." The beginner is told that there are a great many kinds of clubs, that he must not get too many, and that he must not get too few. There are good clubs and bad clubs, he is told, and the advice of the expert is, all things con sidered, that he should get good ones, but he had better put himself into the hands of a professional and let him choose his clubs for him ; he will know better than the beginner. It is from this moment that the repressive and discouraging attitude to wards the beginner is apparent. That innocent soul, who has taken up the game with the idea of getting some pleasure from it, is told pretty roundly that he had better not attempt to do this for a long time. If he is doing anything pleasant with his clubs, such as hitting the ball with them, or happily carving his way round the links, he is told that he can never learn to play golf that way. If he light-heartedly wishes to go and choose a set of handsome clubs, he is ordered to throw them away, and go and put himself in the hands of a professional, and take what he is given. Perhaps the next chapter in the book is on balls, and the beginner learns that there are many kinds of balls, good and bad, the chief dif ference being that the good ones fly true and the bad ones do not. Here the advice as to clubs is reversed. The beginner must not buy good balls ; any old thing will do for him. When he is an ex- 68 THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF pert, then he may put down on the tee a glossy " zone-zodiac " or a shining * colonel " ; in the meantime, any common, rough, uninteresting ball will do for him. It is almost suggested that it would be bad for him to play with a good ball. At any rate, let him put himself in the hands of a professional, who will sell the necessary balls to him. The next chapter, on learning to play the game, is, as a rule, equally dispiriting. The be ginner must not try to play ; he must not even use his new balls or his clubs, or go on the links at all. Let him stand in his own room and swing with an old umbrella for a month or two, when, if his spirit be sufficiently broken, he may be stood out in the corner of a meadow with an old club and a gashed ball to take his first lesson in using the sacred implements. That is the burden ; he must not try to play or enjoy himself ; he must practise. He is seriously advised to go into some 44 quiet corner " with a ball and a club to practise the same stroke over and over again, replacing the turf every time, then going and fetching his ball, hitting it again, replacing the turf, and so on as if anyone could continue such an occupa tion for more than ten minutes without going out of his mind. The beginner is told that the swing is everything, and that the full swing is the supreme joy and perfection of golf. He is also told that he must not attempt to swing. Let that be reserved for the finished player ; the begin- 69 NEW LEAVES ner must be content with something else which is never quite clearly defined, but it must be some thing without joy or satisfaction in it. And there, suddenly, advice to the beginner ends. The next chapter is probably on the mashie, a club the pupil so far has not been allowed even to buy, with elaborate hints as to imparting under-spin and cut to the ball, and the different tactics to be employed if one wishes to play a stroke of a hundred yards or only of ninety -nine. Out swims the expert into the wide sea of talk and theory, leaving the unhappy beginner with a brassie (a club of which he is in dread), a cleek (which he fears and hates), and an iron, whose only apparent use to him so far has been as a turf-cutter. There is another type of book, written by some one who has adopted some patent grip or stance of his own and won an open championship. In order to impress his patent on the public he, too, must write a complete book on the game of golf, the frontispiece of which probably consists of a large photograph of his hands tied in a knot, or a ground-plan of his feet. This contrivance and its bearing on the game are discussed through some three hundred pages, and at the end he probably says : " Although this is the only cor rect method in golf, I do not advise it for the be ginner ; let him be content," etc. etc. Then there is the other little book of a very disarming kind, and more dangerous than any. 70 THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF In it the writer seeks to brush aside all that has been written by anyone else. Let the beginner attend to these few simple pages, and it is pro mised that, if he does not become a champion, he will at least have no difficulty in acquiring a good steady game, and have a handicap of not more than six. The student sighs with relief, and thinks that here, at any rate, is something that he can master ; and it is a very alluring method. The secret is that you are not to do anything that is uncomfortable ; that the old theories and rules are wrong ; that you must just stand comfortably in front of the ball and hit it. There is only one thing one tiny little thing ; and that is the position of your little toe. If you are standing right, and have your little toe in an easy, natural, and free position, the ball cannot help going straight. Swinging does not matter, hitting hardly matters. " Just attend to the little toe," the writer seems to say, " and see that it is comfortable and doing what it likes, and the ball must get up of itself off the tee, and fly to the green, and drop into the hole." And then he adds : " But if the beginner finds that he plays better with the toe in a stiff position, then he had better not attempt for the present to adopt what is, nevertheless, the only natural, logical, and scientific method of golf." The time comes when the beginner must put some at least of these theories into practice ; when, 71 NEW LEAVES having got the professional, in whose hands he is supposed to have placed himself, safely out of the way, and bought a really good driver at a shop in the Haymarket, he puts a new half-crown ball on the tee and prepares light-heartedly to enjoy himself. It is then, of course, that the baleful influence of the experts begins to assert itself. He addresses the ball and wonders if he is in a natural position, or, finding he is not, decides on one or other of the many stances laid down, and realises for the first time that it has not occurred to any of the book-writers to publish photographs of the ball and the club as they look from the player s point of view, instead of from the onlooker s. He fixes his eye on the white ball and, as the club swings back, all that he has ever read on the subject rushes through his mind. I suppose there is no moment so packed with pure mental processes as that occupied by the swing back of the beginner s club. Pages and pages of printed matter flash across his mind like a line off a reel. When the club is shoulder-high he has decided to take Taylor s advice ; and when it is at the top of the swing he thinks that perhaps Braid is safer for a beginner ; as he begins to come down he thinks of Vaile, and tries to remember what it was he said. And so packed with thought has been this second or two that it appears to him like an agony that has been endured for months and must be ended somehow, and that instantly, lest he sink under the torture 72 THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF of it. And somehow in the final swing, or rather tumbledown of the club, he remembers with a guilty pang that all is not as it should be with his little toe. There is a horrible concussion, and the ball is seen lying twenty yards away to the left. It is then, from these dreadful birth-throes, that the true golfer begins to be born. He snatches up his clubs and runs after the ball as though it might escape his vengeance, determined only upon one thing, to hit it, and to hit it far away, mentally registering a vow that should he miss it he will go home. He runs up to it, seizes an iron club, and, without any thought of stance or address, strikes it, strikes it hard and in anger ; and lo, with a click and a song in the air the ball flies up and away, straight and true, now a grey dot against the sky, now a running and bouncing white spot on the green slope a hun dred and fifty yards ahead. The murderous anger in his face is smoothed out into a happy smile ; he says to himself, " I will do that again." And he goes up to the ball and smites once into the air and then digs up a pound and a half of turf. Then he gives it up, and does not care how he hits ; and once more the ball mounts like a lark, and drops a yard away from the hole, into which it is rolled by the beginner s lucky putt. " Down in six," says his companion in congratulatory terms ; but in the private register of his mind the beginner marks it as three, and feels that with a little more care he might have done it in two. And when he 73 NEW LEAVES has done that his feet have entered upon the road that has no end. The golf professional is often a curious person. He may have been a member of the artisan class who has begun life as a caddie, and who, probably to the grief of his parents, refused to forsake the links for any more disciplined and regular occupation ; who nevertheless has survived physically and morally the loafing years of caddieship, who has worked in a desultory way at clubmaking, or rather club assembling, who has shown a definite aptitude for the game and gained an entrance into the envied ranks of the " plus " men, and who has ulti mately got permanent employment as a professional at a golf club. I am not speaking now, of course, of the brilliant few who have achieved at some time or other the open championship, but of the ordinary working professionals who are unknown to anything but a local fame. It is these men who are responsible for the so-called teaching of nine golfers out of ten ; and a more haphazard, ineffi cient business it would be hard to find. To the innocent beginner there is something magical in the word " professional " : it is held to imply a knowledge of all the mysteries of the most mys terious game in the world ; and because the pro fessional can himself play the game, it is taken for granted that he can also teach it. I have before me six books on golf, all written by professionals ; and each book, in the part devoted to an attempt 74 THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF to expound the proper methods of learning the game, contains the advice " Put yourself in the hands of your professional." Of every ten people who begin to play the game of golf I suppose that five pick it up for themselves, and arrive, by natural aptitude and practice, at a form which represents pretty well their full capability in the matter. Of the other five, perhaps one will seriously look until he finds a really efficient teacher, and so in time achieve a good style and a decent game ; the other four confidingly " place them selves in the hands of their professional," and either give up the game in disgust as a consequence or else spend the rest of their golfing life as con firmed slicers, toppers, founderers, and more or less contented foozlers. I know it is a serious thing to say a word in criticism of a body of men who are held in almost superstitious esteem ; who are, moreover, for the most part, very decent, agreeable fellows. 15ut I do seriously say that the average professional, considered as a teacher of golf which is one of the things which he professes is a complete though probably unconscious fraud. Let us consider what happens to the golfer who " places himself in the hands of his professional." You may see him about on the links in these early spring days, accompanied by this same professional and a caddie carrying a very new and expensive bag heavily stocked with clubs. For the first thing a professional does is "to fit you out with a 75 NEW LEAVES bag of clubs." A part of his living, of course, is derived from these sales, and if he did his business competently he would be much the best person to act as a beginner s adviser and provider. But he understands the business of selling no better than the business of teaching. Instead of selling his victim one club at a time, and teaching him the use of that club and making him able to play with it, and so producing such confidence that the learner feels that it is these clubs, and these alone, with which he can play, he loads him at once with a full assortment of mysterious implements. " Let me see," he says, estimating the enthusiasm and purse of the victim with a hungry eye, " you will want a driver, and a brassie to match it." He selects one of these ; but the victim, preferring the polish and finish of another one, indicates a faint preference for that. " Yes, that s a good club too," says the professional, and allows him to make his own ignorant choice. " Then you will want a cleek the poor wretch will not want it, and probably will soon earnestly desire to be without it " and an iron, and a mashie, and a putter." The one club that a beginner probably wants to possess is a niblick, for he is attracted and re assured by its large surface. This is also chosen for him, and he feels that he is complete. " There s a beautiful club," says the professional, handing him a driving mashie ; " you can get a very long, straight ball with that." As the learner wishes to 76 THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF get long, straight balls he buys it. " Then you want a jigger for running up," says the professional, " and on this course a baffy is very useful ; in fact you must have it on this course. You won t want any more clubs." With a pair of gloves, a tin of some adhesive substance, and a box of half- crown balls ("they fly much farther than the shilling ones ") the victim sallies forth to the first tee, feeling that the battle is more than half won. He makes several attempts to hit the ball with his driver ; the professional gives him a few simple directions, and tells him to take it easy, and not try to hit the ball too hard. The first time that he misses it he is told that he took his eye off it ; the second, that he raised his head ; the third, that he moved his body ; the fourth, that he came down on it ; the fifth, that he took his eye off it ; the sixth, that he fell over on to it ; the seventh, that he took his eye off it ; the eighth, that he went back too quick ; and the ninth, that he took his eye off it. How the professional could be sure of this, seeing that at the moment the stroke was made he was interestedly watching an approach shot by a scratch player, it is difficult to! know ; but the victim takes his word for it. The profes sional then himself takes the club, and saying, " You want to do it more like this," drives with lightning rapidity a very satisfactory and agree able ball straight away for some two hundred and twenty yards. He likes it so much that he does 77 NEW LEAVES another, and another ; the sensation of driving new half-crown balls off the tee being one which custom has not staled even for the jaded profes sional. "Do it more like that," he says, and reluctantly surrenders the club into the hands of the beginner, who by this time, stimulated by ad miration and the appearance of ease with which it is done, is thirsting to have another lunge at it. A heavily socketed stroke, accompanied by a faint crack, sends the ball about thirty yards to the extreme left. The professional picks up the driver and examines its heel. " I am afraid you have done for it," he says ; " you came right down on it." The fracture of the driver is beyond a doubt. " I can put a new head on it," says the professional, " but of course it won t be the same club. I tell you what I will do ; you had better have another driver, and I will fix this one up for you so that you can play with it, and keep it as a second one. Now I think we had better try some brassie shots." The same process is gone through again, all except the breaking of the club. Perhaps by this time the learner is showing some dawning ability to hit the ball ; but he never knows why he hits it. The professional never tells him that, although it is the only thing worth knowing and learning at golf. There may be any one of a hundred reasons why he fails to hit the ball, but if he does get it fairly, it is because he is doing something right ; it is that something which it is so important he should know. 78 THE BAD TEACHING OF GOLF The pupil s grip, his stance, position of his body and shoulders, the action of his left arm and wrist are all wrong ; and as he makes stroke after stroke the teacher draws attention now to one, now to another of these defects ; he never addresses him self to one at a time in order to get it right. And just as the pupil is getting dimly to understand some of the first principles of handling one club, he is put on to another that requires quite different treatment, so his mistakes begin all over again. At the end of the lesson he retires with an aching body and a collection of hacked and gashed balls, and with an understanding that if he would learn to play golf, he must repeat this process continually with the professional, and " stick at it." He does stick at it until he is weary. The professional, feeling that there are no more sales to be effected, grows weary also, and departs to some new victim. By this time the learner is convinced that it is his clubs that are wrong, and goes secretly by himself to a shop and buys new ones. He is ashamed to be seen by the professional playing with them, so he avoids him ; and this is one of the many reasons why the professional is a bad business man. The teaching of a thing is a science quite different from the performance of it. As a rule only a man can teach a thing who has either learned it or who has thoughtfully analysed and discovered the principles which govern his instinctive and natural doing of it. But the ordinary golf professional is 79 NEW LEAVES equipped in neither way. Poor teacher, how can he teach who never learned ? He picked his golf up as a little boy, in the bright sunshine of some seaside links, trudging through the bents with the other ragamuffins, with the noise of the sea in his ears and the wind in his face ; he never thought how the thing was done, he just did it. And now that he is making a living out of his ability to do it, he is called upon out of his own knowledge and experience so to converse with some stiff, middle- aged, sedentary gentleman that he also will be able to do it. No wonder that such teaching is a failure. You might as well ask some peasant from a vine yard on the banks of the Rhone to teach French in an English academy of young ladies. The golf links of Great Britain are studded with the re sults of such teaching. You may recognise them anywhere men playing stiffly, awkwardly, and anxiously, with the hands far apart, the left arm bent like a bow, the club overs wung till it is point ing almost to the ground, the heels of their drivers marked as though with a punch. They are happy or unhappy, according to temperament, but what they are playing is not golf. 80 X "I PICKED IT UP" WHEN a poor man shows contempt for money his attitude is commonly likened to that of the fox towards unattainable grapes. He is indeed quite often regarded as wanting in enterprise and ambition if he does not cherish as a principal aim in life the financial en richment of himself and his family. This is especi ally so in a place or time when success in life is reckoned by bank balances. It is more especially the case in a time like ours when great wealth is ceasing to be associated with the possession of land, and merely represents an accumulation of coinage. Coin is, after all, but the symbol of wealth, and people who are rich without great possessions and corresponding responsibilities may by a very defensible paradox be said to possess the symbol rather than the substance of wealth. That is why, I suppose, they seek so restlessly to turn these golden symbols into things that shall have at least the appearance or fashion of value ; that is why, as the fashion changes, they are always getting rid of their possessions and buying F 81 NEW LEAVES new ones ; that is why they are always buying and selling and becoming, in the inevitable cycle of things, mere tradespeople again. The embarrassments of wealth without obliga tion or useful employment for it are so obvious that I marvel at the increasing estimation in which people hold it. The number of things by which a man who has not had a long education in making the most of life without money can actually through his riches gratify himself is extremely limited. Great houses and retinues of servants give no great pleasure if they are used only by the possessor ; they only cease to be a nuisance and become agreeable when they are used for the enjoyment of other people. Spending money in shops, on the other hand, which is interesting for the ordi nary person whose money has to be made to go as far as possible, is one of the poorest possible occupations for people to whom it does not matter whether they pay three times or twenty times the value of the article they buy. There is left for them only the sorry excitement of the bargain hunter, with its sordid victories and defeats. They have all the humiliation of the defeats without tasting any such reality of victory as that of the poor mother who waits for hours in the rain on a Saturday night comparing prices until the last butcher s shop is on the point of closing, and then for her few pence carries home in triumph the material for a substantial meal on the morrow. 82 " I PICKED IT UP " That is hunting indeed, with the hunter s risks ; there is perhaps death or life in the issue ; at any rate there is an alternative between hunger and repletion. The sham hunt of the rich bargain seeker has as much relation to it as the urchin s pursuit of a lame puppy has to big-game shooting. It will be perceived by this time that I have some grievance against some of those who, if I adopted the common method of describing those who are richer than ourselves, I should call my more fortunate friends. And so I have. Every one who mixes with any kind of leisured society must be aware of the increasing nuisance of what I can only call the Magpie Habit. Everyone is collecting something. Women are the chief offen ders. Half the women who ought to be either usefully busy or gracefully and happily idle are rushing about hither and thither in the pursuit of various articles, chiefly of furniture or decora tion, which are for the moment in the fashion. And when I speak of the Magpie Habit I wish to make a clear distinction between this trick of mere collecting for collecting s sake, and the fascinating pastime of the true collector who loves things because of their beauty, and to whom every new treasure is but a joy and an education in itself. The real collector is indeed the first person to be inconvenienced by the Magpie people, who put up prices and cause the market to be flooded by the elaborate imitations which their insatiable 83 NEW LEAVES appetite demands. Women seem to be losing all that regal unconsciousness of their surroundings which is surely the best mark of breeding and good manners. Not what they are, but what they have seems to be their chief preoccupation ; and they make it yours, too. It is more than tiresome to be obliged to talk a kind of dealer s " shop " with amateurs who, you are convinced, do not really understand what they are talking about. The only person with whom it is really interesting to talk " shop " is the shopman. But the mere collecting, even of pretentious rubbish which has corrupted everything concerned with it, from the craftsman who " faked " it to the dealers who handle it and the dupe who buys it, would be less intolerable than the unseemly thirst for achieving a bargain which accompanies it. It would really seem as if these sham col lectors care for things, not for their intrinsic beauty, but for their cheapness. You will not have to listen long to a rich woman in New York before the expression " I ve got " will crop up several times. But the English Magpie women have improved on that. They never say " I bought this," but always " I found this," or " I picked it up." This last is one of the most un seemly expressions which ever crept into what ought to be polite conversation. It goes beyond the sordidness of the mere driven bargain ; it implies that "you stooped to do that which other 84 " I PICKED IT UP " people disdained ; that you, with predatory glee and the scavenger s lack of pride, picked up that which someone else had thrown away. It is a low action at the best of it, but we all know that even the industrious scavenger is at times re warded, and that long raking over rubbish heaps may result in the finding of an occasional pearl ; for they are not only worthless things that people throw away any more than they are only valuable things which the Magpies collect. But not even the scavenger expects to find a pearl every time ; yet the Magpie collectors are so imbued with the idea of " picking things up," of stooping down to them, so to speak, instead of receiving them at their own level, that all the worthless old furniture shops, all the second-hand sale-rooms in London are strewn with that most degraded of all things, the faked bargain : the thing, that is to say, which, originally worthless, is made to look as if it had once been worth a very great deal, and now, appearing to be worth little, might in suit able surroundings be taken to be worth consid erably more. The rubbish heaps are sown with sham pearls, and the obedient Magpies come and " pick them up," and tell you how little they gave for them. According to an eminent naturalist the magpie was unknown in Ireland in 1617, but it had already appeared there a hundred years later when Swift wrote his journal to Stella. It is now common 85 NEW LEAVES enough in that country, and there is a widespread but unfounded belief that it was introduced by the English out of spite. " It is a species that when not molested is extending its range, as J. Wolley ascertained in Lapland, where within the last century it has been gradually pushing its way along the coast and into the interior from one fishing-station or settler s house to the next, as the country has been peopled." It will thus be seen that the habit of picking up things and collecting them is not the only one which the Pica melanoleuca of naturalists has in common with its human prototype. Indeed, I would prefer to run the risks which superstition associates with the appearance of the solitary magpie in the winter fields than endure the cer tainty of boredom arising from the proximity of the human bird. There is no doubt that, for me at any rate, the sight of the bird in that case is a presage of sorrow. 86 XI THE UNPUBLIC HOUSE IF someone with a mental endowment corre sponding to our own were to descend from some other planet and look upon our English life with clear open eyes, unclouded by prejudice and undulled by custom, he would regard with amazement many things which we take for granted ; and, perhaps, among our established institutions he would regard the public-house as the most entirely ugly and hateful thing in England. Not the rural wayside inn, nor the more considerable hostelry serving some useful purpose in the High Street of a country town, but the corner public- house that is so conspicuous a feature of every large town in England. There it is, a thing always out of harmony with its surroundings, prospering amid poverty, well maintained where the houses in which people have to live are tumbling into ruins, sleek and hideous and blatant where all else is dingy or dull or re tired. The ugliness of its decorations seems to be almost deliberate ; bright glazed tiles or bricks, great sheets of glass basely engraved, huge lamps 87 NEW LEAVES which in construction and decoration represent all that money can do to debauch honest crafts manship these are the elements of a kind of gaudy ostentation that is meant to represent splendour and luxury to the dull eyes that look upon it. At night it blazes with light light raying from the hideous lamps and reflected from endless mirrored surfaces, making in the murk and the fog and the squalor a specious effect of that joy and comfort of which light in darkness is a symbol. But go inside, and you will find that the luxury is all a sham and the comfort all a delusion ; there is often nowhere even to sit down only infinite furniture of bottles, a sawdust floor, and a mahogany counter at which to stand and drink as much strong liquor as possible in the shortest time. The thing is so disgusting, so patently wrong, that it has bred violent and angry opposition ; opposition right in its angry origin, but unreason able in its angry expression. Those whom the sight of it thus rouses to anger desire simply to sweep it away ; not to reform it, but to abolish it. Drinking is by them looked upon as a vice, and for the poor man, at any rate, a degrading and disgraceful proceeding ; and places where people drink are therefore looked upon as being, and indeed they tend to become, degrading and dis graceful places. Between the people drinking inside the public-house and the people outside 88 THE UNPUBLIC HOUSE who loathe it for its ugliness and sordid wicked ness, the wall of glazed bricks and tiles is an im penetrable barrier. There is no possible means of understanding between them. One does not know the inside and the other does not know the outside point of view, and between them the in stitution itself flourishes. This is a hopeless state of affairs ; and it is the people outside the public-house who are most in the wrong. It may possibly be disadvantageous to use alcoholic liquor at all as a beverage ; if as a nation we ceased entirely to use it, we might possibly reap incalculable benefit. But drinking, although it may be disadvantageous, is not wrong according to any practical standard of working morals. It has simply become a human habit to drink for pleasure, and it is a habit that no law can abolish. Common sense, then, suggests the attempt to regulate its use and to prevent its abuse. Various organisations in England have attempted this, mostly with disheartening results. A very real effort started some years ago to reform the public-house has not been by any means a success, the reason being that the reform was attempted in the country, in the village inn, where all the advantages and few of the disadvantages of the public-house system are manifest. The country inn is a kind of club where men drink among their fellows ; where they are known and where public opinion is a strong force. It is not 89 NEW LEAVES the country inn that is in such crying need of reform, but the town public-house ; and this the reformers have been unable to touch because of the great financial interests involved because it is, in fact, to the direct interest of some of the most important people in this country that poor and unimportant people in the towns should drink as much as possible. Every reform which can be regarded as an attack upon the public-house is bound to fail at present. But there is one reform which, allied with a gradual and proper regulation and supervision of the licensing system, might do some real good and that is not to attack the public-house, but to make it more public. I should like to see the public-house made more attractive I don t mean by the provision of coffee and cocoa and buns, because it is a simple fact that people do not frequent public -houses for the purpose of con suming these dainties. They go there chiefly to drink beer and spirits ; they will continue to go there for that purpose, and no just authority can possibly try to prevent them. But if the public- house were made, as I say, really attractive, some at least of its worst horrors would vanish. The place to make this experiment is not in the country, but in the town ; and of all towns London is the most suitable, partly because it would be most difficult to accomplish anything there, and partly because the influence of the reform would be 90 THE UNPUBLIC HOUSE greatest, since fashions are set in London. This is a chance for a Government, if indeed such can possibly exist in our day, that dared to attempt to carry a measure for other reasons than that it would be immediately popular. A Public-House Reform Bill would, if it w r ere carried, make the Government that passed it historical ; if it were lost, no Government could have a more glorious defeat. And among the provisions of this ideal Bill, which would necessarily have to deal with licences and with the quality of drink sold, would be an enactment that public-houses were to be public. Among their many degrading influences at present, none is more degrading than the as sumption that drinking is a thing to be done in private, in a place screened from the public gaze, and that the drinker must slink in by a side door or, if she be some tatterdemalion woman desiring a drink of gin, enter a door genteelly inscribed " Ladies Wine Bar." The quite monstrous and hideously symbolic fact that all the doors, although labelled with different designations, open immedi ately into the same place, and that the patron of the " Private Buffet," once the doors have swung behind him, stands elbow to elbow with the drinkers in the " Ladies Wine Bar," is eloquent beyond all need of comment of the state which the town public-house has reached. I would make it illegal for a public -house to be shut in at all ; it should be open to the street and the pavement, 91 NEW LEAVES the country inn that is in such crying need of reform, but the town public-house ; and this the reformers have been unable to touch because of the great financial interests involved because it is, in fact, to the direct interest of some of the most important people in this country that poor and unimportant people in the towns should drink as much as possible. Every reform which can be regarded as an attack upon the public-house is bound to fail at present. But there is one reform which, allied with a gradual and proper regulation and supervision of the licensing system, might do some real good and that is not to attack the public-house, but to make it more public. I should like to see the public-house made more attractive I don t mean by the provision of coffee and cocoa and buns, because it is a simple fact that people do not frequent public -houses for the purpose of con suming these dainties. They go there chiefly to drink beer and spirits ; they will continue to go there for that purpose, and no just authority can possibly try to prevent them. But if the public- house were made, as I say, really attractive, some at least of its worst horrors would vanish. The place to make this experiment is not in the country, but in the town ; and of all towns London is the most suitable, partly because it would be most difficult to accomplish anything there, and partly because the influence of the reform would be 90 THE UNPUBLIC HOUSE greatest, since fashions are set in London. This is a chance for a Government, if indeed such can possibly exist in our day, that dared to attempt to carry a measure for other reasons than that it would be immediately popular. A Public-House Reform Bill would, if it were carried, make the Government that passed it historical ; if it were lost, no Government could have a more glorious defeat. And among the provisions of this ideal Bill, which would necessarily have to deal with licences and with the quality of drink sold, would be an enactment that public-houses were to be public. Among their many degrading influences at present, none is more degrading than the as sumption that drinking is a thing to be done in private, in a place screened from the public gaze, and that the drinker must slink in by a side door or, if she be some tatterdemalion woman desiring a drink of gin, enter a door genteelly inscribed " Ladies Wine Bar." The quite monstrous and hideously symbolic fact that all the doors, although labelled with different designations, open immedi ately into the same place, and that the patron of the " Private Buffet," once the doors have swung behind him, stands elbow to elbow with the drinkers in the " Ladies Wine Bar," is eloquent beyond all need of comment of the state which the town public-house has reached. I would make it illegal for a public-house to be shut in at all ; it should be open to the street and the pavement, 91 NEW LEAVES with tables and chairs under proper awnings and shelters, as is the manner in France and Belgium, so that the people may sit openly in sight of each other and of the public, and refresh themselves how and when they will. If people frequent public-houses they ought not be made to feel that they are doing something wrong and shame ful ; they should not have to slink in furtively and hide themselves ; for the sense of shame, when it is not strong enough to act as a preventive, is merely very degrading. The people who would abstain from drinking because they are seen in the cafe at high noon would be very much bene fited by their abstention ; while the man who wanted to drink, and intended to drink, would also be the better for not being encouraged to behave as though he were engaged in some furtive mis demeanour. Is there anything to be said against a system of open licensed cafes in the streets ? If there is, I should like to hear it, although my impression is that at present they are not permitted. It may be said that they are not suited to our climate. But there are many months in the year when with proper shelter they would not only be possible but pleasant ; and for bad and cold weather in winter the system of glass screens, which make a cafe in Paris, although practically an open, a perfectly comfortable place even on a snowy day in February, could be used. This is but an idea ; 92 THE UNPUBLIC HOUSE the machinery by which it might be carried out is not for me to suggest. It is one of those things about which nearly all unprejudiced and experi enced persons are in agreement, and which for that very reason are difficult to get done under the party system of politics. Yet there is so much thought and so much money devoted to the better ment of the social conditions of our time that the discussion of ideas relative to their direction can not be quite useless. Public-house reform in the country has failed because there is no crying need for it ; but I believe that an attempt to reform the town public-house, gigantic as the task may seem, might meet with success for the very reason that it is so difficult and so necessary. At any rate, it cannot be called a revolutionary idea to try to reform the public-house by making it public, and by making it attractive to decent people. 98 XII SPRINGTIME IN LONDON PERHAPS you have forgotten it already, that sudden breath of the warm south-west that came and told us that Winter was over. For all of us there is a moment in every year when we receive this first message of the returning Spring ; somewhere it comes and finds us, and takes us by sur prise. To one it will come in the form of a sunbeam that strikes at a new angle into a dusky room ; to another it will appear in the colour of a strip of sky seen between crowded roofs ; to another in the reflection of light from a puddle on the ground. But everything living feels it and knows it the prisoner in the prison, the seaman on the ship, the engine-driver suddenly rounding a curve and feeling amid the steam and dust and clatter that he has entered a sweeter world creeping things and flying things, and perhaps even the fishes in the sea. The day on which this message comes to us is one of the great days of the year, greater even than that day in January when we first realise that the afternoons are lengthening and that the sun is coming back to us again. And as when a friend 95 NEW LEAVES returns to his kindred after a long absence, or a monarch to his country, we make it a day of festival, should we not make a little celebration, even if it be only in words, of the return of Spring ? Believe me, it requires a little courage to write about Spring, or about any of the familiar miracles that are commonplaces with us ; there is nothing new to say about them. But when we perform a ceremony we do not invent new things to say ; we repeat old forms of words that are hallowed by association with the occasion celebrated. Hence the outcrop of verses in the poets corners of the newspapers an annual ceremony like the break ing of the lilac buds and unfolding of the almond blossom ; and hence this tribute to the first breeze of Spring. I think it was Mr. George Moore who said that the constant temptation of the writer was to go and see someone to look for an external stimulus instead of the one within his own breast. But there is another temptation for anyone whose work is done indoors, and that is simply to go out, not in search of a stimulus, but for the sheer pleasure of being out-of-doors. To this temptation I suc cumbed this morning. At a time when I should have been busy working I shamelessly gave up and, answering the pleading of two small very bright brown eyes, went for a walk in the Park, accompanied by about fifteen inches of leaping, barking insanity. And it was there in the broad 96 SPRINGTIME IN LONDON undulating fields sacred to babies and dogs that I met the breath from the south-west which told me that Winter was a thing of the past. It was a promise ; rough weather would still come ; March would bring its gales and April its cold rains and biting winds, but the main forces of Winter were broken up and scattered, and the armies of the Spring and the Summer were already on the march. There was the advance guard, the crocuses in battalions of gold and purple and white already occupying the grass which a little while ago was deep with snow. And I was not the only one to feel the promise. The dogs barked and raced ; great ripples spread and fled over the grass before the breath of the warm wind ; even the babies in their carriages lolled and slumbered with blander stupefaction than usual ; and down by the Serpen tine, which a fortnight ago was a sheet of ice and iron, little warm wavelets lapped and laughed against the shore, and the waterfowl ,in their island home screamed and gobbled and splashed as though the business of the year had begun in earnest. Over in Whitehall, Ministers and miners were discussing the tremendous and fateful issue of the day ; I could not help thinking that if they could all have come out and sat in the sun in the Park, and talked it over there, the idea of a coal strike would have struck them all as an absurdity. Insanity demanding that I should throw sticks for it to a great distance in order that they should G 97 NEW LEAVES be rapidly retrieved, I for some time devoted my self to that business. Then I became involved in a canine dispute concerning the rights of treasure- trove in a partially eaten india-rubber ball. The settlement of this to the satisfaction of all con cerned took some time, and when I turned to go the morning had clouded over, as our London mornings will, and the mysterious whisper of promise was no longer in the wind. But the pro mise had been given ; in earnest of it the crocuses lay there still, a golden payment on account of riches to come ; and I returned in the faith and knowledge that nothing had happened to the miraculous machinery, and that all the lovely and inevitable wonders of the year would really come again. 98 XIII MONTE CARLO REVISITED IN one respect, and in one only, Monte Carlo is like heaven: it is assumed that everyone wishes to go there, and that everyone who is at all able to, does go there. It stands as a kind of symbol of the desirable ; and if at this time of year you say to anyone " I am going to Monte Carlo," the countersign is invariably " Lucky dog ! " And to the credit of Monte Carlo it must be admitted that one s own sensations on setting forth for it are not unsuitably described in those words. It is the first holiday of the year, and it expresses our impatience to rush to meet the returning Spring, instead of waiting for it in England. Certainly the setting out is fun. The sight of the Mediterranean express at Calais, with the long lines of brown sleeping-cars with their polished lettering and magic label " Calais Vintimille," is agreeable ; it is fun to wander up and down the corridors and see what acquaintances you have among the travellers ; it is even fun to resume your acquaintance with the interior domestic economy of the august corpora tion in the spelling of whose name sixty-three 99 NEW LEAVES gimmetal letters are employed ; to wonder what 44 tisane sleeping-car " is like, and what dread potion is designated by the word " grog." Some day I intend to tear down this veil, but I post pone it because one must keep some mysteries in the world, and if these two were gone I should feel that the possibilities of life had been diminished for me. It is delicious to open one s window in the early morning somewhere near Orange or Avignon, and to get the first breath of the cool and tranquil airs and smell the perfumes of another Spring. And best of all it is to wake up on one s first morning in Monte Carlo, to go out on the balcony in the hot sunshine and look out over the peacock shallows and the turquoise depths of the Mediter ranean, to stroll in the garden among scents of lemon and stock and roses and geranium and verbena, to eat the tiny sweet oranges warm off the trees, and to realise that the sun shines and that you have no work to do. That first morning is really the best thing that Monte Carlo has to give you, and perhaps the best way to taste its pleasures would be to spend but one night there and, if by any chance the first morning was not fine, to return as far as Marseilles or Lyons and make a fresh descent upon it, and so procure a full indulgence of its delicious surprise. But beyond that, and your first luncheon in one of its exquisite restaurants, Monte Carlo ceases to live quite up to its reputation. I feel a certain 100 MONTE CARLO REVISITED diffidence about suggesting that there can be any qualification of the virtues of a place from which I have just returned, and to which everyone who has not been there would like to go. But it is six years since I was there last, and will probably be as long before I am there again ; and though I am capable of the keenest enjoyment, I do begin to think that Monte Carlo is something of a delusion. One is supposed to " cast care to the winds " when there, and one pictures a society of free, careless, happy people, gay and beautiful, laughing and enraptured, moving to enchanted music about the flower-perfumed terraces of this azure shore. What one does see is a haggard, dissipated, care worn crowd blinking in a sunshine which is ob viously afflicting to their fevered brows ; a crowd for the most part of unsightly Teutonic people whose grey and shabby ranks are but slightly leavened by the trim and cool-looking English and American visitors. The people who enjoy Monte Carlo best are those who do not live in the place itself but in the villas surrounding it ; and as my host was among these fortunate few I was able to enjoy the beauty, and avoid the sordidness of Monte Carlo. For there, the word has slipped out ; Monte Carlo is on the whole a sordid place. It is obvious that it must be so, since the crudest form of gam bling is the central pulse of its life ; but it seems a pity. I can attain to no heights of moral indigna tion about gambling ; if people like to amuse them- 101 NEW LEAVES selves that way, it is all one to me ; and I share the common frailties of the gambler in feeling a fool when I lose, and extraordinarily clever and far- sighted when I win. But most of the time there is no real gambling at Monte Carlo. People play desperately with what they can well afford to lose, and the people who can t afford to lose take care as a rule not to gamble. You see millionaires toiling for hours at some system by which they must risk at least ten times what they stand to win, and having won perhaps fifty pounds after a hard day s work, rising haggard but exultant from the table. Or you see some fortunate being with a practically unlimited credit at the Bank who has taken his twenty louis to play with and lost them, enjoying all the sensations of the ruined man and telling you with rather a tragic air of finality that he has not got a five-franc piece left with which to buy a drink. And to-morrow he goes to the Bank and draws another fifty pounds and goes through the same performance. " Come and play golf to-morrow morning," you say. " I am afraid I can t, old chap," he answers. " I am rather down, and I have got to go and work to get it back." And he does work ; and his work consists of sitting at a green table with knitted brows, with a pile of money and a little card covered with calculations in front of him, and watching his money raked away into the bottomless tills of the Bank. 102 MONTE CARLO REVISITED All this is play and make-believe, of course. For most of the players the coins are mere counters, although they happen to be made of gold instead of brass. There is only one law which I am quite sure of with regard to this form of gambling ; and that is that if you want the money very much, are in real need of it and could make good use of it, you will not get it. It would hardly be fair if you did. Money that does good is not got in that way. The wrong kind of courage is needed to win. One of the many reasons, apart from a purely mathe matical one, that the Bank wins so enormously is that people exhibit plenty of courage when they are losing, and none at all when they are winning. The loser goes on increasing his stakes without a tremor until his last coin is gone ; but the winner gets timid, and instead of holding on to a big chance in the strength of his winnings, rushes about hither and thither over all the chances, until his winnings have melted away again. One of the chief disappointments of Monte Carlo is that this commerce in coin, superficial and make- believe though it is for though people come hoping to make money, they come prepared to lose it produces an atmosphere of sordidness and ugliness which does not mingle at all well with the extravagant daintiness and sumptuousness and luxury of the stage which it envelops. The public gambling rooms with their preposterously extrava gant decorations are in the crowded hours a really 103 NEW LEAVES most unpleasant place, with their hot atmosphere and their ill-dressed throng of ugly and covetous people. The so-called private rooms of the Cercle des Strangers are exactly the same, except that the ugly people are richer and wear more finery ; while the rooms of the Sporting Club, which are supposed to be reserved for the elite, and are in fact open to practically everybody who cares enough to take the slight trouble involved in gaining ad mission to them, reveal the nicest people in the most unbecoming light. If gambling is such fun and I dare say it is, under certain conditions it ought surely to be possible to make it pretty to look at, especially when pretty people are engaged in doing it ; but it is really quite the ugliest amuse ment from the point of view of an onlooker that can be imagined. It is very banal to say all this ; I had quite hoped to discover something charming and attractive in what attracts so many others ; and as I didn t, perhaps I should say no more about it. Doubtless one of the charms of the whole world of Monte Carlo is its extreme unreality, and a Londoner who has never seen it would form the best idea of it if he imagined the crowd in the Park on Ascot Sunday transferred to the White City on a hot summer morning. Even the innocent flowers look expensive and unreal, and Mont Agel is like a painted background. You come upon a church in Monte Carlo with a sense of impropriety ; and 104 MONTE CARLO REVISITED such a reality as death is so out of place that it is not only never mentioned, but it is so kept in the background as to foster the illusion that it does not exist. And yet I had an experience coming away which seemed to summarise the whole spirit of the place. I had left my friends poring over the tables in the Sporting Club, and had come down to the station, which is on the very edge of a cliff, so that you can look down over the platform railings to the sea breaking below. A storm came suddenly up from the sea that afternoon; the bay was covered with white horses, and a strong wind from the south sang on the exposed platform. Suddenly there was a rush to the railings ; and we saw that there was a man in the water about five hundred yards from the shore. No boat was in sight ; he must have been in a boat which had capsized. He was lying on his back evidently trying to husband his strength and let himself be floated in to the shore ; but there was a big sea in the bay, and every quarter of a minute a white crest foamed over his head, while his body was tossed about like a piece of wet cloth. Somebody telephoned down to the harbour, but we knew that it would be at least a quarter of an hour before the fastest boat could reach him, and he had obviously been in the water for some time, and must have been nearly spent. We, who looked on, sick with horror and pity, could do nothing. The cliff was steep -to, and the strongest swimmer in the world would have had 105 NEW LEAVES the life dashed out of him if he had tried to swim out from its foot where the heavy seas were break ing on the rocks. So we stood looking, while the little arms attached to the wet sop that was a centre of human agony waved themselves about, and sea after sea flung itself easily and heavily on their poor efforts. And in the middle of it all the train de luxe arrived, and amid cries of " En voiture, messieurs ! " and the hoisting of luggage through windows, and the identification of jealously-re served places, the general attention was diverted. There was no time to see him sink and die, and he would never be rescued. The sun came out from behind a cloud and flooded the sea, turning it to a milky-green and, as the train moved out, illu minated the last mouse-like struggles of the drown ing man. Three hundred yards above me they w r ere calmly intent on the spinning of the roulette- wheel ; three hundred yards below me a man was being so inconsiderate as to spoil the view of the sea by dying in it an act so unusual that there was no apparatus either for saving him or tidying him up ; and about me were voices disputing about the occupancy of certain peacock-plush compart ments. The train ran under the tunnel and out again into the sun, and the whole thing was gone. What happened to the man I knew, but would never hear. What happened to the others I might hear, but would never know. Wise men fight 106 MONTE CARLO REVISITED against chance and play with certainties ; behind me beyond the hill the play was with chance, and the fight against certainty. I thought it a highly characteristic, if somewhat dramatic, ending to a week in Monte Carlo. 107 XIV THE LONDON SEASON IT is some time ago now since those scribes whose singular duty it is to chronicle the doings of the social world discovered with alarm that the season was about to " collapse." Here was a pretty how-do-you-do. Rushing hither and thither in the commotion of one kind or another which is their element, they had observed that something was amiss with the foundations of their world ; and suddenly discovering that there were at least two dates in July on which no " important " social function was to take place, they became apprehen sive as to the security of the whole social fabric, and brayed out their fears above the general up roar. The truth was that they had deceived themselves. The art of making a fuss about things in print, of creating a social commotion in ink and type, had been cultivated by them with so much success, that they were blinded, like the squid, by their own discharges ; and the season was half-way through before they discovered that the brilliancy and splendour which they had been so busy describing had not existed at all, save in 109 NEW LEAVES their own otherwise empty heads. So long ears were pricked forward, and loud braying voices declared that the season had collapsed. Now that the secret is out, it may not be unin teresting to consider some of the changes which have taken place in what is called the London season. It has certain structural features in which there is little change from year to year. The public part of it consists of certain race meetings, operas, flower shows, tournaments, and charity functions, which are annual fixtures, and in which a large portion of society is concerned. These things occupy the newspapers, and are the occasion of a certain amount of that bustle, spectacle, and money-spending of which the commotion of social life consists. But what makes a season really memorable, and gives it a hall-mark of its own, is the degree of success attained in quite private functions. There are a dozen houses in Mayfair and St. James s perhaps half a dozen which can make or mar a season from this point of view, by giving or withholding the kind of entertainment in which the many circles that form London society may touch one another and revolve round the same sun. Entertainments of this kind are purely formal and not intimate ; and they are rapidly falling into disfavour. It is the almost total absence of them, I think, which has made some recent seasons such very unbrilliant affairs. Commotion and rush there have been ; but they 110 THE LONDON SEASON have been undistinguished commotion, and rush which is merely the normal affliction of the idle world raised to a higher point. People are be coming more and more shy of entertaining on the grand and formal scale. One reason for this undoubtedly is that society is becoming less and less patient of formality of any kind. In its clothes, in its manners, in its speech, and in the things which really amuse it, the tendency is to become more free and easy, more impulsive, more impromptu. People prefer to meet in small gatherings at short notice, and do whatever amuses them most, rather than fix a distant date for some formal function which, when it comes, will be voted a bore and a nuisance. Moreover, entertaining, even on a grand scale, is a domestic affair transacted by a family in its own house. And functions in which a family unites to do anything at all are becoming more and more difficult to arrange. Different members of the family have their different sets of friends and different occupations ; they are not interested in the same things or the same people. The greatly increased independence of young people, and the highly organised machinery which exists for their separate amusement, has made it difficult to get them to regard family functions of any kind at all seriously. But there is another reason. Entertaining in the way I have described requires hostesses of a 111 NEW LEAVES certain age and dignity, and with a social gift for carrying a great many people in their minds, and keeping in touch both with the new and old in habitants of the social world. And people like this are disappearing. What happens to them I do not know ; but there is now hardly anyone in London old enough to entertain in the way I have described. The hostesses grow younger and younger. For a season or two, when their daugh ters come out, they unwillingly play the part of the fond parent, and stand publicly revealed as such ; but once the daughters are safely married they revert to their own youthful condition, cultivate their own special friends, wear larger and larger hats and smaller and smaller dresses, and remain at / whatever age is fashionable. Just at present nearly all the hostesses in London are between thirty and thirty-five ; and people whom I seem to remember a few years ago as kind elderly ladies now look at me coyty from under large shady hats, and are to be seen with some special faithful male friend at operas or picture shows, thrilling once again to the dawn of emotion, and discover ing anew what a wonderful thing life is. It would be absurd to ask such people to stand at the head of a staircase for four hours, saying the right and tactful thing to everybody. It would be cruel to snatch them from their new-found joys ; cruel to take them away from the freedom and independ ence which they seem to be tasting for the first 112 THE LONDON SEASON time, and require dull, domestic, and social duties of them. You see one of them, perhaps at the wedding of her grandson, and it is remarked how beautiful is her devotion and fidelity to some portly Cabinet Minister. " Isn t it too divine the way she has stuck to him and he is so dull," is the world s comment upon one of these perennial romances ; and no one seems to think it funny or even at all unusual. This total refusal to grow old on the part of women in society cannot but have its effect on the whole social machinery, and has not a little to do with the changes that have been observed in the London season. In the true social fabric a woman at a certain age sinks her individuality and becomes the centre of something, represents something. Now people represent merely them selves and seem, like rival tradesmen, to disclaim any connection with anyone else of the same name. It is every one for himself or herself in society nowadays, and Mrs. Grundy takes the hindmost. Another reason for the change is in the part played by Royalty. The King and Queen have shown a very definite conception of where their own social duties lie, and it is not the conception of the world that lives entirely for amusement. There is some thing extremely significant in the thought that at the height of the London season they were engaged in that marvellous tour in Lancashire, shaking hands with poor old labouring men and H 118 NEW LEAVES this period and a comparison of their contents then with their contents, say, in May or June, does not by any means explain the title ; for by any sane estimate these contents are no whit sillier in August than they are in May ; are less silly, in fact. But they are less official. One of the developments of journalism in the last ten years has been certainly to increase the importance of officialism in England. In the newspaper offices every public man is catalogued as being " good for " certain subjects. There are a few privileged people, like Lord Rosebery, who are heard on every subject, and who, if they utter the simplest platitude, will hear it banging up and down the columns of the Press for a week afterwards. But as a general rule it is one man one topic ; and when these topics " come up " the appropriate man is telegraphed to or interviewed for an opinion. Then there is the great officialism of Parliament which absorbs so much of the ordinary stuff of news ; there are the official preachers and actors, whose doings and sayings form part of the daily official information ladled out to the public. But when all these people go away from London and cease from their official functions, the newspapers are thrown back on the ordinary affairs of life for their news. Quite human and interesting facts are recorded, and quite important questions dis cussed, for which no space could be afforded while news was still official. In to-day s paper, for 116 THE SILLY SEASON example, I find a most interesting account of the British Museum watch cat, and its method of eject ing dogs from the precincts of that institution a piece of knowledge which I could probably have gained only in the silly season. Instead of long columns about charity balls and the costumes worn thereat, instead of verbatim reports of end less speeches in which insincere men speak some thing other than the truth at great length, one has reasonably brief reports of the natural and un official doings of plain people all over the world ; that is, instead of accounts of dull things, one reads accounts of interesting things. There comes a sudden expansion and broadening of the mind of the newspaper which cannot but be refreshing to anyone who reads it for the purpose for which it was originally designed that is, to give the news. If you would know how a people are really living, you will not read the accounts of their Parliaments and the movements of their Courts, but the small items of information which in the French papers are called faits divers, and are in truth facts, various and far-gathered, which teach you not how the ten thousand, but how the twenty million are living. But there is another feature of the silly season which is more commonly recognised, and that is the correspondence on some purely humane sub ject to which the newspapers open their columns at this time. In the younger days of our era it 117 NEW LEAVES was things like the sea serpent which occupied the August correspondence. But we have got a little further than that ; and the subject which now most commonly occupies us is some form or other of the great woman question ; whether women are selfish or not, whether they are better-looking than they used to be, whether they make as good wives as they used to make, whether marriage is a failure, and if so, why ? These and kindred topics are now the common material of the silly season. Well, when all is said and done, all of them are of perennial interest, and some of them of the first importance to the human race. I do not profess to read these discussions, but an occasional glance at them seldom fails to reveal some interesting point of view, or some expression of quiet common- sense that in the absence of other things, deemed more important, has managed to get itself uttered. One can only compare London newspapers with London streets at this time of year. In many of them, ordinarily filled with chaotic movement and haunted by endless clamour, there is at this time something approaching peace and silence. You can walk in a leisurely way and hear yourself think. And in the newspapers there is also a kind of peace and silence from the more blatant and strident voices ; in the absence of which certain still small voices, which have a value and import ance of their own, become audible for the first 1 ime. As a rule we do not hear them, so great is 118 THE SILLY SEASON the overwhelming noise; and it is worth while staying behind for a little when that has passed, if only to be reminded of the quiet diapason of existence which is always sounding for those who have ears to hear it. 119 XVI THE MOABITE S HOLIDAY I SUPPOSE that in the minds of the English people there is no idea so closely associated with the month of August as the idea of change. The month divides the year into two halves ; it is the end of the half in which we look forward, the point in which outdoor life with us reaches its climax, and it is the beginning of that other and darker half, when we regretfully turn our backs upon sun and flowers and begin to go down into the valley of the year, with mists and fog and winter night at the end of it. In this respect the month does itself imply change, the most complete change, so far as our habits of life are concerned, of the whole year. But when people talk of " going away for a change " they generally talk of something which does not really exist. If one takes a little trouble at this time of the year to observe the holiday habits of people, or goes to any of the principal places which holiday-makers frequent, one cannot help seeing how genuine and deep-seated is the average man s fear of change. The ordinary 121 NEW LEAVES middle-class summer holiday is a thing of routine, convention, and habit. It is true that the govern ing idea with the majority who live in inland towns is to go to the sea and procure a change of air, and this is almost the only change actually achieved. People who frequent watering-places on the coast have really very little to do with the sea. It is there as a kind of background to exist ence ; but it is a property sea, a thing to be waded or swum into for a few yards, whose blank horizon is agreeably suitable to a point of view which has vacancy for its background. For the rest, what does the average man seek in his so-called change ? He comes from a crowded town ; he betakes himself to a place where there are crowds. The " season " of Little Puddleton is not considered a success unless its strip of beach or promenade is actually thronged with visitors. More than this, the aver age holiday-maker of this class, fearful of anything unfamiliar or new, likes to go to the same place every year, and to be able, in the crowd with which he mingles, to recognise many habitues like him self in short, to meet the same people year after year. He likes the same food that he gets in London, he reads the same newspapers, his amuse ments are the same picture-palaces, concerts, music-halls, variety entertainments. He eats a little more, drinks a little more, smokes a little more, sleeps a little more, and thinks, if possible, a little less ; that is the extent of his change. If 122 THE MOABITE S HOLIDAY you pay a visit at this time to such places as Brighton or Southend, you will see all this ex emplified in the persons of thousands of Londoners of two distinct classes. Brighton s name of 44 London-by-the-Sea " is explanatory of its popu larity with the well-to-do Londoner ; his whole atmosphere is imported there to a world which is as familiar to him as Piccadilly. To another class Southend means exactly the same thing. It is crowded, and it is familiar; and therefore they seek it when they go for a change. The more one considers the habit of holiday- making the more does one realise how little use is made of real change as a restorative and recreative influence. People whose whole lives are a holiday or might be if they knew how to take one hardly ever get any real change. The same little world moves from London to Carlsbad, or Vichy, or Aix, or some other foreign watering-place, where its settled habits are provided for ; and from there to Scotland, and from Scotland on wards to pay various visits. The same people are encountered in the same houses, living the same kind of life, surrounded by the same circum stances. Then people, servants, motor-cars, photo graphs, and table toys are all carted wholesale to the south of France ; and from there return to the country, or to London, or move backwards and forwards between the two always the same kind of food, the same servants, the same books 123 NEW LEAVES and newspapers to read, the same people to talk to. All this may sound very material, and it may be said that these are but the mere clothing and externals of ourselves, and that it is no more absurd to carry them with us than it is to take with us the kind of clothing to which we are accus tomed. But if you consider how large a part of any life such things must mean and they almost entirely fill and occupy some lives you will see how desirable it is to import some little change and variety into them. When I see people with large yachts which are, except for a fortnight in the year, chiefly at anchor in the Solent ; with motor-cars whose chief mileage is covered in carrying the chauffeur between a house in London and a house in the country ; with freedom to do as they like, which seems to be employed almost entirely in doing things which they protest are a boredom, I think, perhaps quite wrongly, what wonderful uses I could make of such machinery. My yacht should not take me to Cowes or to Deau- ville, but to the Baltic or the Adriatic, to wander amid the isles of Greece, or the Sounds of Scandi navia ; my motor-cars would carry me, not on any routine path of habit, but along the broad roads of Europe, not on any fixed plan, but as the fancy took me ; and my freedom should be used in wandering, and seeing, and comprehending, and always consciously choosing. There are people who have both the means and the sense to live 124 THE MOABITE S HOLIDAY like this, but the world that is written about in newspapers sees or knows little of them. The truth is that deep in the heart of ordinary men and women lies a great dislike, a positive fear of change. Change implies trouble to the mind and fatigue and possible discomfort to the body. Discomfort is it not the bogey that is waiting for us all as middle-age approaches, which at heart we really fear far more than real danger and real distresses ? How many things do we cease to do or abstain from doing because they are uncomfortable ? How many of the limited ex periences we do achieve are only acceptable on the condition that they are made quite comfort able and easy for us ? It is less trouble and more comfortable to sit in an armchair with a book than to take a walk through East End streets on a stormy night ; no trouble at all is required to extract a certain amount of interest from the one ; a great deal of trouble and fatigue is required to discover the larger interest that may lie in the other. Strange sights, strange food, strange wines, strange music, strange points of view are not really acceptable to the ordinary person in whom curi osity is dead. Not only are they unacceptable, but they have no chance of being acceptable ; the fact that they are strange is enough to shut them away from his experience. And it is so with the whole of life, although, since the dimen sion of time is fixed for us, the only way in which 125 NEW LEAVES we can expand our lives is by filling them with change and variety of experience. It is in this way that so many people make failures of their lives, or, in the words of the Psalmist, " change their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass." And the ordinary holiday-maker, in his total lack of enterprise in this matter, and in his apparent fear of change and its results, seems to be very much in the case of Moab, according to Jeremiah, that gloomy prophet : "Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into captivity ; therefore his taste hath remained in him, and his scent is not changed." 126 XVII A NIGHT JOURNEY I HAVE an angel who bears me up when I set forth upon a journey ; who transforms my experience, and sees to it that I do not dash my feet against the stone of dulness. Sense of Adventure, or whatever you may like to call him, he is probably some near relation to that angel of Make-believe who accompanies us through our childhood, and with whom most of us part company far too soon. Perhaps he is only that angel grown a little older and more diffident, no longer so intimate a part of our lives, and not always sure of a welcome ; but whoever he is, he has the power to make many commonplace things interesting and even exciting. I am especially sure of finding him waiting for me at railway- stations and at the quay-sides of seaports. The other night circumstances ordained that I should rise from my comfortable chair by the fire, lay aside my after-dinner pipe, and set forth for the country of Scotland. Now, however glad I might be to arrive, the business of getting there seemed, on this stormy winter night, an inconvenient and even 127 NEW LEAVES formidable affair. I summoned my angel, but he did not appear, and I had to set out alone in a taxi cab. I am one of those who can never set out on a journey without a sensation of disturbance and depression. Many and far as my journeys have been, my heart sinks when it comes to the moment of getting up and going. Free as we may imagine ourselves to be, our existence always and every where runs on rails ; if it is only for a few days, we still must go on the track defined for us by circumstance, and when we change our destination or remove ourselves, we go through the process of switching ourselves off to some other track. And though I may be only going away for a few days, if my journey is to be any distance at all I look round my room ere I depart with a sense that something has come to a period, and may or may not be resumed. True, there are no great affairs to be adjusted or interests to be provided for when I move. My preparations can be very easily and simply made. But I feel when I set forth, and I know it is a feeling commonly shared, as though I were not only taking myself up by the roots, but also doing considerable damage to the soil in which they have been imbedded. I had this feeling to a full degree as I drove through that part of London which for so many of us is associated with journeys to the North. There is a street called Goodge Street, through 128 A NIGHT JOURNEY which one invariably drives on these occasions ; I have never noticed it at any other time, but I believe it to be the most gloomy thoroughfare in the world, and it is certainly the one in which the sinking sensation becomes extreme. But having made the passage of Goodge Street I felt that there was no turning back, and that I must indeed launch myself. And although it cannot be called a hardship to go to bed in a modern railway train, and may, as things go, be accounted by some standards an almost extravagant luxury, yet if you regard it merely as a way of passing the night, it is not really a pleasant thing to be in a bed that shakes and jerks, and swings violently from side to side, and lurches and vibrates, and has, a foot or two beneath it, an iron machinery of wheels that groans and hums loudly in various keys throughout the night. To be made to sleep in such a bed in an ordinary house would be re garded as an ingenious form of torture. Never theless my spirits rose not a little when I entered the lighted orderliness of St. Pancras ; for St. Pan- eras is a station with which I have only pleasant associations. And let me tell you that it matters very much to the traveller who sets forth with these de pressing sensations which station he departs from. Of all London railway stations Waterloo depresses me the most, and although the two longest jour neys I have ever made began there, travel seems I 129 NEW LEAVES to me a sordid and a petty business when I start from Waterloo. Euston has two associations in my mind one, the dreary one of going back to everyday life after the paradise of youthful visits to London ; the other, the more agreeable adven ture of the Irish mail. King s Cross means Scot land or week-end visits. Paddington I associate entirely with Cornwall, for I never go up the river and I never go to race meetings. Victoria I asso ciate with trivial journeys for trivial purposes ; Liverpool Street with chaos and sordid discomfort, ending in a headache and the green stupor of Suffolk ; Charing Cross with the continent of Europe, and the sense of spending more money than I can afford. But St. Pancras has been re served for me almost entirely as the gateway to pleasant things, and the Midland Railway an organisation founded and conducted for the pur pose of taking me to desirable places and people whom it makes me happy to see. Perhaps this is because I have used it so little in the past ; but I shall try to use it more in the future. Well, I found my angel waiting for me beside the long train ; and as I had some time to spare, we walked up and down and looked at this strange articulated conveyance in which I was to be dragged out into the night. Only a little of it was devoted to the accommodation of people ; the rest was parcel and mail vans, with gaping sides through which packages of every kind and 130 A NIGHT JOURNEY shape were being passed. I noticed among other things some boxes containing grapes, consigned from a merchant in Covent Garden to a fruiterer in Glasgow ; and I thought that I detected here a piece of canny Scotch economy. These, I said, are grapes which arrived early this morning at Covent Garden, which London has all day had the chance of buying and has not bought ; now they are being sent to Glasgow in the hope that the Glasgow people will think they are entirely fresh. No doubt the Glasgow fruiterer made an arrange ment with him of Covent Garden that he would take certain stock remaining unsold at the end of the day at a reduction ; and as people do not buy grapes in the middle of the night, no time would be wasted by their conveyance in this manner. I dare say this was all wrong ; but I am convinced that someone was getting the better of someone else over those grapes, and that the only person who would really pay would be the person who ultimately bought them to eat. My angel further pointed out to me with what extraordinary care this train had been prepared ; although it was going out into the night to be hauled through a gale of sleet and snow, every coach had been cleaned and polished as though for an exhibition. And when the two great engines were backed on, they too were beautiful in ruddy paint and polished brass ; and although no gallery of spectators ad mired them, hours and hours had been spent in 131 NEW LEAVES making them beautiful for their rush through the night. And then the mail carts came driving up, and the bags with their various destinations marked upon them were thrown into the vans ; and to see in imagination through the canvas fabric all the different handwritings, all the different subjects and purposes of the human brain that were thus being communicated to so many different kinds of people, to consider how many destinies would be affected by the contents of even one of those bags to feel all this was to be imbued with a sense, not that one was embarking on a wearisome and un interesting journey, but that one was taking part in a highly romantic adventure. We crept stealthily out of the station, and im mediately the gale began to hum and roar in the ventilators. I had some talk with the guard in his spacious apartment as to the road we were to travel, and marvelled not a little at the bulk and intricacy of the work that was to occupy him through the night, if none of the parcels and pack ages in his charge was to fail to reach its destina tion punctually. And presently I lay down and turned the light out and tried to go to sleep, al though the beating of the wheels and the calling of the gale, and the shaking and swinging of my couch, kept me long awake. But almost pleasanter than sleep was the thought that I was lying more or less comfortably between linen sheets in a little bedroom, while so many attentive and strenuous 132 A NIGHT JOURNEY forces were at work hurling me through the air at the speed of a rocket. I thought of the engine- drivers and firemen sweating in the open air among the grit and cinders in front of me, of the red glow of the fires shining up into the snowy air ; of the signalmen reading and listening in their signal- boxes, those jewels of light with which the whole of the way was threaded. We passed through Melton Mowbray ; and I thought of the foxes returning to their earths, of the hounds dreaming in the kennels, of the wonderful horses dozing and sighing in their sleep, and all the high passions of the chase sunk down to nothing while we thun dered along by copse and cover. And so thinking, I fell farther and farther away towards uncon sciousness, now made aware, by the sound of a voice echoing under some empty station roof, that we were momentarily at rest, now warned by the sense of time and by an increasing sense of cold that we were up on the high wild moors by Hawes or Kirkby Stephen. And the last and most vivid picture I had was when at half-past five in the morning I looked out and found the train pulled up at the station of Hawick. It was dark and windy, and bitterly cold ; the town stood revealed by the feathers of steam and smoke that flourished above the mill chimneys in the frozen moonlight, and by the squares of yellow light that showed in every building where Scotch people were already getting 133 NEW LEAVES up in the frosty darkness to begin a new day of labour. It was with some sense of thankfulness and with no further need of the angelic services, that after that vision I got back between the sheets of my warm bed. 134 XVIII A MORNING AT ELY EST Monday morning I played truant on my way back from a visit to the country, and escaped from the train for three morning hours to visit the cathedral of Ely. It is difficult to say why I should have had such a sense of tru- antry, but undoubtedly, as the train disappeared that should have been carrying me on to London, I walked forth into the town of Ely with that lightness of heart which in properly constituted people is associated with adventure and mis doing. The morning mists were lying white over the fens, and their chill touch and the autumnal smell in the air spoke sharply of the end of summer and the departure of the sun. I walked up the unknown street towards the unknown cathedral with the confidence of an ex plorer approaching the North Pole by compass. I had never seen the cathedral, but its attraction was definite and strong ; I could have found it blindfold, for in such a place all roads lead to the cathedral, as for centuries it has been the centre 135 NEW LEAVES to which so many journeying feet, so many loads of material, so much treasure and so much piety have been drawn. A massive wall appeared on my right with a great arch in it filled with mist ; I turned in at the arch and found myself in the elaborate peace of the close. And there suddenly on my left loomed something enormous. The mist cleared a little and revealed masses of grey masonry occupying an incredible bulk of the sky, but masonry so far without visible form. I walked along seeking for some gate of access, and as I looked up at the long buttresses, the soaring lantern, and the flowing curves of the window traceries, I had a sense of that extraordinary com bination of magnitude and stability combined with aerial lightness which Winchester also produces a suggestion that the cathedral is n6t plante(l in the ground, but afloat, like a great ship at anchor, in the green close. And lookirig up at the towering walls and at the confusing perspective of the pin nacles one could almost have sworn that the fabric moved a little, as though at the impulse of some unseen tide. I was pleased, as one is always pleased by a discovery which can be interpreted in one s own favour, to learn afterwards that the Abbot Simeon, who was the original builder of the cathedral, was a brother of Bishop Walkelin of Winchester, where he had himself been prior. So that the shiplike aspects of the two cathedrals and their 136 A MORNING AT ELY many other points of resemblance may perhaps not be accidental. At last I found an open door, and entering was aware of that sensation of dizziness which the confounding proportions of a great interior in duce. That soon passed, and I began to wander about on the preliminary feat of pedestrianism which is necessary before one can begin to grasp the design of such a building. It was so early that I was practically alone, and felt as though I had boarded a great deserted treasure-ship and were exploring all her holds and cabins. Up and down the immense nave of thirteen bays, and be fore its glorious facade of arches superimposed in perfect proportion I marched unwearied ; stopping to marvel at the great beauty of the Galilee porch with its trefoiled arches, the curling leafage of its capitals, and the elaborate dog-tooth ornament that had so patiently and so elaborately been cut to enrich the mouldings. I stood and looked up into the wonderful central dome or lantern does any other English cathedral, except the modern St. Paul s, possess a central dome ? and con sidered what I had read of its engineering and of its romantic beginnings. For Ely, like so many of our cathedrals, which we think of as monu ments of slow and solid labour, suffered once from the plague of jerry-building. Such was the zeal of its founders ; such was the wealth of treasure that was brought to it by long 137 NEW LEAVES pilgrimage across the fens ; such, I have no doubt, the pious haste on the part of the Benedictines to extend the very handsome business that was being done in the way of offerings at St. Ethel- dreda s shrine, that safety in the building was sacrificed to speed, with the result that the great central tower, which was part of Abbot Simeon s original design, fell down in 1322 ; and the third great period in the life of the fabric, which was to crown it with its distinctive loveliness, began. The same kind of accident has happened at some time or another in almost every English cathedral, resulting often in the destruction of a glorious thing and the putting of something less glorious in its place. But at Ely the ruin of the central tower was perhaps a blessing in disguise. For when Alan of Walsingham set to work to clear away the debris of the piers of the tower, and saw the great open space left at the crossing, it oc curred to him that a light octagonal tower support ing a lantern and spire could be evolved out of the ruins. The difficulty lay in the engineering, as is apparent even to the lay visitor who looks upward into the apex of that great octagon. Vaulting was impossible, for the width is over seventy feet, and nowhere outside of Spain had such a space been vaulted. Neither could there be a ceiling, for no beams of seventy feet could be obtained, or, if obtained, could safely have borne any weight. 138 A MORNING AT ELY The solution, at once poetic and daring, was found in the construction of an octagonal collar of wood from which eight posts could rise, form ing a wooden lantern with vertical sides. The stonework was finished in six years, but it was twelve years more before the persevering prior, although he searched all over England, could find eight oak trees of the dimensions necessary for the mighty angle posts and realise his dream. But after an hour or two I grew oppressed with the dumbness of all this beauty and wanted to hear its voice. So I called upon the organist, and together we climbed up to the dizzy heights of the triforium and explored the inmost recesses of Harrison s fine new organ, and then, with a really sympathetic generosity rarely shown by cathedral organists to the intruding stranger, he left me for a little to play by myself. Gradually, in whispers first, and long slow waves of sound advancing and retiring, and then as the farthest distances were gradually awakened, in thunders, the whole glorious fabric gave me back its voice. It was not my music, but the music of the cathe dral ; there is no such ecstatic and artistic collabo ration as that which is possible in such an ex perience, for the building is alive and will answer to you, thrill for you, whisper and tremble for you, if you are patient and have the instinct to find the tonal and rhythmic progressions that are the key to its acoustic secret. When you thus 139 NEW LEAVES play in such a building, with understanding and without self-consciousness, it is as though the cathedral were singing to itself. Afterwards I went down under the lantern and listened to the organ while its own master played upon it with excellent skill. I delighted in its many beauties, in the delicate family of viols which are its chief distinction, in the smooth and velvety diapasons, and in the tubas, whose majesty and smoothness of tone might awaken some of the sleeping saints to preparation for the Last Judg ment. Lewis s tubas at South wark seem to me always to be like flames ; Willis s at St. Paul s to be like coals of fire that eat their way into the heart of the harmony ; Harrison s at Ely suggest, not red heat, but white heat, and seem to reach a point of physical fusion between sound and light at which sound becomes incandescent. When I came out of the cathedral the mists had cleared away and the sun had come out, and the whole bulk and length and height of the building, like a scarp or mountain in a flat land, filled the horizon and seemed to follow me as I went down the road to the station. There I came back to strange unrealities ; the railway bun and sandwich, the grotesque ritual of the railway station, the damp and dusty construction in which I was to be hurried back to London. There is indeed a living soul in alj beautiful things, and a corruption as of death in all things ugly, dishonest, and inefficient. 140 A MORNING AT ELY Certainly as I came back that morning it was the cathedral that seemed real and living to me, and the things about me which spoke of a dead and dark age of superstitions and abuses. I sat remembering what I had seen and considering the wonder and worth of it. The presbytery at Ely, a presbytery of six bays, with its clustered marble piers, its wealth of floriated capitals, and still richer corbels that hold up the marble shafts of the vault, with all its glory of sculpture and design, cost five thousand pounds the equiva lent, I am told, of about ninety thousand pounds of our money. That is what they did with their money in those days ; and to-day there are people who think it a creditable thing to collect a quarter of a million to buy the Crystal Palace. 141 XIX AN ADMIRAL OF TO-DAY THE wind begins to hum in the rigging and the great grey hull beneath your feet to tremble a little as the hidden forces ani mate her with an increasing energy. It is a summer morning in the North Sea ; the early mists that the sun has turned to saffron and gold before drinking them up altogether, v are being whirled away from round about you., and the blue sea begins to unfold itself to the horizon. From your perch above the signal bridge the grey deck below seems like an island in that sea an island packed with boats and guns and casings and turrets; and looking *aft through the web of wire rigging and signal halliards you see three other grey islands looming up and swinging into position astern of you. For the First Battle Cruiser Squadron of the British Navy, consisting of the greatest and fleetest warships of the world, is putting to sea. You are standing on a platform that is one of a tier of five in the centre of the flagship. Above you is the navigating platform ; and through the 143 NEW LEAVES thrum of the wind on the wire stays you can hear from time to time the voices of the navigating commander and the officer of the watch, who, with their instruments before them and speaking- tubes gaping all round them, are conning the ship on her way. Almost certainly with them on this platform is the Captain that august and isolated authority who knows everything, sees everything, is responsible for everything, and says next to nothing. But your platform, a story below this, is empty except for yourself. It is indeed sacred to one greater than the Captain the Admiral whose guest you are ; and it behoves you, since you are privileged to be here at all, to keep out of the way and offend as little as possible against that searching vision of the seaman to -whom the presence of a mere onlooker, spectator, or passenger is a glaring impropriety. There is a light quick step on the ladder below you and the figure of the Admiral swings into your view. For though each of these mighty ships is an august unit within herself, her personnel divided and sub-divided into all the ranks that extend from the captain to the least of the ship s boys, yet on board the flagship there is another court, a greater state. Each captain of a ship is king of his country ; but the Admiral of a fleet is emperor, and rules over all the kings and all the coun tries. He has his own quarters, his own staff, a flag commander, a flag-lieutenant, secretary, and 144 AN ADMIRAL OF TO-DAY writers ; his own coxswain, his own staff of ser vants, his own cook ; for in the day-cabin that extends across the mighty beam of the ship he must entertain his fellow emperors of the sea, as well as sometimes the crowned monarchs of other lands which his squadron may visit. And from this platform where^ie now stands he directs the movements, not of his ship alone, but of all the ships in the squadron ; and also, according to the nature of his command, the ships of other squadrons miles away out of sight below the horizon, to whom the crackle of the wireless and its threadlike buzz and whine in the receivers far away convey hourly and daily his commands. Look well at this man as he paces backwards and forwards across the airy platform out among the smoke and rigging and sea wind. It is a small figure, for he is a little man little and neat and well-proportioned, yet giving an impression of physical strength and a contained energy that is positively disturbing. I have never seen any one who gives me such a sense of the energy and vitality that can be contained in one human body. It is as if energy had been poured out into him at enormous pressure, that it is working and boiling within him, and that someone is sitting on the safety-valve. His face is a curious combination of heavy lines and sharp and clear-cut angles heavy wrinkles and lines, as though written by age and care, that diverge upon a youthful outline ; K 145 NEW LEAVES quick, flashing grey eyes that can rest upon you for a moment searchingly and glance away again like a bird s. There is indeed something birdlike about the whole man in his quickness, his neatness, his smooth plumage, his effortless exercise of strength and appearance of happiness and light-heartedness. His voice is deep and resonant strangely deep to issue from so small and slim a body ; and as he snaps out an order to his flag-lieutenant " Q 16 " ! and as the signal flags on the word run up to the yardarm, and the answering pen nants on the other ships are hoisted, and the flags run down, and the throb of the engines deepens, and the white bone that each ship carries in her teeth spreads wider and bigger as the speed of the squadron is increased to sixteen knots, you realise a little what an Admiral s word stands for and what powers are those entrusted to him. The brilliant action of the British Fleet off Heligoland in the first month of the war was the first intimation to the world at large that in Vice- Admiral Sir David Beatty, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., D.S.O., the British fleet possessed a young admiral in whom the priceless qualities of dash, coolness, and judgment were conspicuously combined. But it was far from being a surprise to those who knew him. For years he has been a marked man, marked by fortune, as well as by his own qualities, for the highest positions in the British Navy. If things continue to go with him as they have 146 AN ADMIRAL OF TO-DAY hitherto gone he will be one of the three or four men by whom during the next twenty years the destinies of the Navy will be largely influenced. Since he first stepped upon it as a midshipman thirty years ago the road of his destiny has lain clear and straight before him. In the service his luck is proverbial. He has always been lucky. Springing from one of those sporting Irish families that do so little for themselves and Ireland if they stay there, and so often come to distinction in the larger world, David Beatty was not originally intended for the Navy, and it is only by a kind of chance that he entered the one service in which his qualities could find their fullest scope. That was one piece of luck ; the others followed hard upon it. He got on well from the first ; went through his routine training rapidly and efficiently, and got his chance with Kitchener in the Soudan campaign of 1898. That great winnower of human wheat from the chaff found in Beatty s combined coolness and dash, and above all in his common-sense efficiency, qualities after his own heart. If there were anyone to tell it adequately, a romantic story might be made of the building of a British gunboat far away on the banks of the Nile, and of the things which happened on her trial trip. At the end of the campaign Beatty was decorated and promoted to Commander, a rank which he attained at the unusually early age of twenty-seven. Luck gave him another chance in 147 NEW LEAVES the Boxer rising of 1900, when he again distin guished himself in war service, and created a new record by being promoted to Captain at the age of twenty-nine. His last command as captain was the Queen and on relinquishing her he went to the Admiralty as Naval Adviser to the First Lord. There are many ways of being a First Lord, and there are many ways of giving naval advice ; it is enough to say here that the views of Mr. M Kenna and of the Naval Adviser were so inharmonious that Captain Beatty was put on half -pay. But when Mr. Churchill went into that office one of the first things that he did was to send for Beatty and reinstate him as his adviser ; an association which continued, with the happiest results, until Beatty returned to the sea to command what is perhaps the most formidable squadron unit at present occupying the seas ; there in grim earnest not only to test his luck but to give proof of the qualities that have brought him with so brilliant a rush to the most distinguished position that any man of his age, not even excepting Nelson, has held in naval history. For by his promotion to the rank of Rear-Admiral at the age of thirty- nine (for which a special Order in Council was necessary), and again on his appointment as act ing Vice-Admiral at the outbreak of the war, he created the highly interesting record of being the youngest officer of either rank in the British Navy. If you saw the Admiral hunting with the Quorn 148 AN ADMIRAL OF TO-DAY or the Cottesmore you would think he had never seen a ship in his life. If you saw him on the quarter-deck you would think he did not know one end of a horse from the other. But anywhere else, I think, you would know him for one of those on whom the sea has set its seal. The extra ordinarily forceful and clear-cut features, the compact, well-knit frame, the quick, alert move ments, and yet with it all the curious effect of a restrained, contained, and most ponderable energy, produce an effect at once distinguished and for midable. In general society he never talks shop or about himself, but chatters the ordinary tune of our trivial world ; and therefore people in society who hate and mistrust manifestations of superiority or difference, whether of character or intellect, love the Admiral and regard him as a charming and simple man, quite nice and harm less and like everybody else, with no tiresome seriousness or strenuous nonsense about him ; who has the good sense to love a day s hunting better than anything else in the world, and to be infinitely bored at having to go to sea and swing about in a huge brute of a ship with a spyglass under his arm. Well, that is quite as it should be. The clean isolations of the sea, the grim business transacted out in the waste spaces of the Atlantic which are the playground of the battleships and cruisers, the minute and patient organisation, the effort 149 NEW LEAVES and concentration of the serious naval life even in peace times, are not things which the people whose judgments I have indicated are capable of under standing, or on which their comments would be seemly. No wonder sailors never talk about their work to laymen. In this, as in all other ways, the Admiral is a typical sailor, though not a theatrical one. There is nothing of the drawing- room sea-dog about him, nor will he ever be one of ouiv hornpipe admirals. But where there is work to be done, \ such terrible work as has been doing and is yet to do in the North Sea, he will be there doing it doing it with a quiet and quite cheery spirit which supports such a strain as no layman can have the faintest sense of, a strain that is never relieved for a moment, and that must increase as the war goes on. His great qualities do not stand alone or isolated. He is surrounded by men in some measure like himself the strongest, the bravest, the cleanest and most efficient men in the world. Whatever one may be anxious about in this war, one need have no anxieties about such men as these ; and when I think of this British Admiral out there grappling day and night with the tremendous problems of his command, I am perfectly happy as one is happy when one thinks of things well done and well ordered, and of the right man in the right place. I know that whatever happens it will be well with him ; well if his luck holds and 150 AN ADMIRAL OF TO-DAY he comes gloriously triumphant out of some bloody and shattering combat on a grand scale ; well still, if his victories are destined to be of the invisible kind that keep the seas clear by means of the sheer efficiency and terror of the British command ; well also and for ever, if destiny should give him her highest crown and send him in the hour of combat to join that great company of his fellows who fill the ranks of heroes in Val halla, and keep alive the inspiration of noble and brave deeds. 151 XX BIQUET AND ANOTHER IT is a curious fact that although the study of animals has been the life occupation of some of the most acute minds, the attempt actually to put oneself in the place of animals and to see the world through their eyes has very rarely been made. There is quite a considerable literature about dogs, for example, but it nearly all expresses man s point of view towards the dog, and hardly ever seriously attempts to convey the dog s point of view about man. The dog being a satellite and a flatterer, we suppose him, no doubt quite rightly, to be chiefly concerned with our doings and our temper. We look into his eyes ; and seeing there affection and adoration, we assume, with a singular complacency, that this is the ex pression of a mental attitude comparable to our own, which is in our case augmented and qualified on every hand by knowledge which the dog only possesses in a very limited degree. Everyone has read Maeterlinck s touching essay on his dog, which, otherwise full of perception, is neverthe less marred by sentimentality ; if the dog feels or 153 NEW LEAVES suffers anything it is through the author s psy chology that we are made to feel it, and not the dog s. Stevenson was probably franker and more true to nature than most other writers when he laid bare the hopeless servility of the dog nature ; but he went a very little way below the surface. Mr. L. T. Hobhouse has proved, I think, by the experiments narrated in his Animal Psychology, that such animals as dogs and cats really do think and reason ; it would be therefore a study well worth making to attempt to discover what they really think about, and what are their mental processes. It is a profoundly difficult study, abounding with traps both for the sentimentalist and for the scientist ; but even a very moderate attempt at it never fails to interest us. Whole generations of children have been influenced and absorbed by the book called Black Beauty ; not because of any great power or enchantment in the story itself, but because it was an attempt to look at things from the point of view of a horse. It was, of course, entirely unscientific and inexact ; but the idea of a horse thinking and telling us his thoughts was enough to make the book a classic. The other day I renewed my acquaintance with one of the few really careful studies in this direc tion. It is by Anatole France an author equipped with at least three of the necessary qualities for this task lo^ic, sympathetic imagination, and great facility and control over the means of ex- 154 RIQUET AND ANOTHER pression. It is one of his less well-known books, the collection of stories which includes that called " Riquet " a fragmentary but exquisite little narrative of the feelings of M. Bergeret s dog during a household removal ; disappointing, as so much of this author s work is, in that it raises expectations which it does not fulfil, and is masterly only on a small scale. But at the end of the story comes a set of meditations called " Pensees de Riquet " which, simple as they seem, contain what is probably a very clear glimpse into the work ings of an intelligent canine mind. As they are probably known to comparatively few English readers, I offer a translation of them. The ex treme simplicity both of the ideas and of the language in which they are conveyed will be noticed ; there are no metaphors or similes ; the word " fetich " is used simply as a description of the sacred articles of furniture in the house. The first, seventh, and eighth reflections contain, I think, a whole philosophy of life in which phenomena are merely observed without being correlated in the mind with other phenomena by knowledge and experience. Riquet is not personally described, but one conceives him to have been a little dog of a dark and inconspicuous colour, whose eyes looked through a fringe of hair, and who was accustomed to receive his share of spoiling, certainly with, affection, -but probably with" a certain amount of/ 155 NEW LEAVES dignity and reserve. A French dog has, in litera ture, certain advantages ; and a little dog that frotts with his patts, and japps (il frottait avec ses pattes, et il jappait) seems somehow nearer to our hearts than if he merely put up his paws on our knees and yelped. These are the " Pensees de Riquet " : Men, animals, and stones get bigger as they ap proach, and become enormous when they are above me. I am different. I remain always the same size, wherever I am. ii When my master holds out to me under the table food which he was going to put into his own mouth, it is so that he may tempt me and punish me if I yield to the temptation. For I cannot believe that he would deprive himself of it to give it to me. in The smell of dogs is delicious. IV My master keeps me warm when I am lying be hind him in his arm-chair. That is because he is a god. There is a warm flagstone in front of the fireplace, and that flagstone too is divine. 156 RIQUET AND ANOTHER I speak when I want to. From my master s mouth also there come sounds that mean some thing. But their meaning is much less distinct than that which I express by the sounds of my voice. In my mouth everything has a meaning. In my master s mouth there are many empty sounds. It is difficult and necessary to divine my master s thoughts. VI To eat is a good thing. To have eaten is better. For the enemy who spies upon you to take your food away is quick and wily. VII Everything comes and goes. Only I remain. VIII I am always in the middle of everything, and men, animals, and things are ranged, hostile or friendly, round about me. IX One sees in one s sleep men, houses, trees, the forms of friendly things and the forms of terrible things. And when one wakes these forms have disappeared. 157 NEW LEAVES X Meditation : I love my master because he is powerful and terrible. XI The action for which one has been beaten is a bad action. The action for which one has re ceived caresses or food is a good action. XII When night falls mischievous powers roam about the house. I bark, to warn my master to chase them away. XIII Prayer : O my master, thou god of life and death, I adore thee ! Praise to thee, terrible one ! Praise to thee, merciful one ! I crouch at thy feet, I lick thy hands. Great art thou and beautiful when, seated at thy furnished table, thou devourest thine abundant viands. Great art thou and beautiful when, making flame with a thin splinter of wood, thou turnest night into day. Keep me in thy house to the exclusion of all other dogs. And thou, goddess of the kitchen, good and great divinity, I fear and reverence thee, to the end that thou mayest give me abundantly to eat, XIV The dog who is lacking in piety towards men, and who does not respect the fetiches that are 158 RIQUET AND ANOTHER contained in his master s house, leads an erring and miserable life. xv One day a leaking jug full of water, which was crossing the drawing-room, wet the polished floor. I am sure that this slovenly jug was whipped. XVI Men use their divine powers to open all doors. I am able to open only a small number of them. Doors are large fetiches which do not obey the wishes of little dogs. XVII The life of a dog is full of danger. And to avoid suffering one must be wide awake at all times during one s meals, and even during one s sleep. XVIII One never knows if one has acted well towards men. One must adore them without trying to understand them. Their wisdom is mysterious. XIX Invocation : O Fear, great and maternal Fear, Fear holy and salutary, enter into me and animate me in time of danger ; that so I may avoid that which might hurt me, and lest, throwing myself on an enemy, I should suffer through my im prudence. 159 NEW LEAVES xx There are carriages that horses draw through the streets. They are terrible. There are other carriages that go by themselves breathing very hard. They also are entirely hateful. Men in rags are odious, as also are they who carry baskets on their heads, or who roll casks. And I have no love for children who, chasing and flying from one another, run about and utter loud cries in the streets. The world is full of hostile and formid able things. " I, also, who write these pages, possess or am possessed by a Riquet, and at his suggestion I transcribe for my readers an account, communi cated by him, of a specimen day of his life. The words are mine ; but the ideas represented, so far as I can apprehend them, are his. " I am called a brindled Aberdeen ; why, I can not tell. If Aberdeen is a place, I have never been there. I have heard my aunt say that I have Chippendale legs, which is perhaps why I cannot jump up on to a high place, but have to be lifted. I dislike being lifted, but it is better than being always on the ground. I am now two years old and settled in life. Nothing ever changes. " My day begins at seven in the morning when I get out of my basket -kennel and whine beside my master s bed. Then he lifts me up. If my bed 160 RIQUET AND ANOTHER has been hot it is cool at the foot of his bed ; if mine has been cold his is warm. This is a strange fact which I do not understand, but it is useful to me. At eight my master is called and goes to his bath ; I remain on his bed until he comes back to it. He then opens large crinkling things called newspapers, the edges of which sometimes tickle my ears. I greatly dislike this, but it is better than being on the floor, where nothing happens. The next thing of importance in the day is that Jones the valet a quiet, punctual man, useful to me comes into the room again and begins to arrange things. At this point I jump down off the bed. I do this because I know that in a minute Jones will call me to go out for a walk ; and although I know that I shall have to do so, and indeed wish to do so, I do not want Jones to think that I do so in obedience to him. I would rather he thought that it just occurred to me to go out. I walk round the Mews and the neighbouring streets for ten minutes with Jones ; or rather I walk by myself, and he attends me to open the door for me when I return. Then I go upstairs again and lie under my master s bed. If one is on the floor it is better to be in a dark place. One can then sleep a little without keeping one s eyes open, and without being afraid that some thing will touch the tips of one s ears. " The next thing is that someone comes whom I like ; she writes a great deal on paper while my L 161 NEW LEAVES master talks, and she plays upon an instrument that makes a clicking sound, which is convenient for me, as I know where she is. I like people to do things that make noises, for then I know where they are without seeing them. This friend brushes me. I am not sure that I like being brushed. It is nice when the brush gets down near one s tail, but often it tickles one s ears ; and to have one s paws brushed is a grievous nuisance. But it is better to be brushed every morning, for then one can roll in the dust with some result. Later in the morning she takes me for a walk in the Park. This is the most important part of my day. It is done in order that I may investigate the changes that have taken place in the street since the day before, and discover what other dogs have been there. In the Park there are large level floors of grass on which one may run very fast and very far without having to turn round. There are a good many pieces of paper on the grass in the Park in the morning ; it is worth while smelling them as one passes, for once I found the leg of a chicken in one, and had eaten it, bone and all, before my master discovered what I was doing. He was angry and I laid my ears back and wriggled my body and pretended to look sorry ; but I was glad. " I find my dinner waiting for me when I come back from my walk ; often it is not interesting. Dinner is a thing which you need every day, and of which, if you like it, you never get enough, 162 RIQUET AND ANOTHER and if you do not like it you always get too much. In the afternoon when my master is out I sleep in his chair and listen to the voices of the people passing on the stairs. I know them nearly all ; but if I hear a strange one I growl in order to drown the sound of it. I do not like strange voices. Sometimes I go with my master himself into the Park, and sometimes for a walk through the streets to shops. Shops are places in which dogs are made to hurry along and are not allowed to stop at interesting corners ; they are places also in which one has to wait a very long time. It is a pity to be in a shop when one might be in the street. At night I have another dinner, and then I either go back to my master s study or, if I feel the need of company, go down to where Jones lives in the hope that he or someone else may take me out in the evening. It is not the same thing, because the servants take me on a lead, which means that I have to pull them along ; but it is better than nothing, and smells are de licious in the dark. Often I have to wait very late for my master ; and when I know that he will not go out again I go to sleep under his chair until he says " Come to bed," and I get up and go with him to our bedroom. " When walking in a crowd I think what strange creatures men are. One knows them by their feet. If your head is only four inches from the ground you see a great deal of people s feet. Feet are 163 NEW LEAVES very different. They rise and fail in different ways, some are broad and flat, and some topple over as though they were on stilts ; some take very large and slow and regular steps, and about others you never know where they are going. It is seldom necessary to look up at people s faces to know what they are like. Little feet are the most uncertain, and are nearly always attached to children. People who reach only a short way up into the air are called children. The farther away a person s face is from you the more he is to be trusted. People whose faces are near the ground are not to be trusted at all. The only good thing about them is that they sometimes run, and it is pleasant to run beside little feet. Big feet are very serious and never run ; but you can always know where to find them, and where they will go. " The world has been arranged very well round about me. I would alter very little in it except that I would arrange that more things should happen on the ground ; most things happen a good deal above the ground, about half-way up to a man s face ; otherwise the world is a pleasant place, and the other dogs in it seem to realise that what I am doing is of more importance than what they do. Nothing can ever change." A 164 ^ XXI BROWNING AND HENRY JAMES I AM no lover of centenary celebrations, which are generally the occasion of indifferent oratory and third-rate panegyric ; nor of visits to graves, which only serve to remind us that people are dead. If it had not been for the Royal Society of Literature and the good fortune of its Academic Committee in securing the ser vices of Mr. Henry James, the Browning celebra tions would have been as sentimental and as unworthy of the strong and brave spirit of the poet as such things usually are. In the Abbey, where the daily evensong was surely with doubtful wisdom " dedicated " to the memory of the poet, people paid their visit to the tomb where his poor ashes lie ; in Caxton Hall, on the other hand, it was the shrine that we visited, where the living spirit was shown to us in that marvel lous working by which it subdues all things, in cluding death and time, to itself. Mr. Edmund Gosse is always a happy presence on such occa sions ; he is far and away our best official repre sentative of the dignity and life -of literature. He 165 NEW LEAVES is no literary undertaker, presiding at the obse quies, arranging wreaths and palls, and marshal ling a company of mourners. On the contrary with his clear brevity, and in a manner which is a model of the style in which such functions should be conducted, he emphasizes the living and im mortal aspect of things, and is to the younger generation like a pleasant master of ceremonies, introducing them to their predecessors, breaking down the barriers that time and death would raise between them, and putting them on good terms with one another. What Sir Arthur Pinero had to say about Brown ing as a writer for the stage was said with all the authority to which Sir Arthur s success in that field entitles him, and with all the vocal emphasis of which he is master. When, after a pause and formidable glance around the audience, he an nounced in what can only be described as sten torian tones the subject of his address " Browning as a Dramatist " one felt that poor Browning had already been tried and convicted, and that it only remained to pronounce sentence of death ; which Sir Arthur did with a certain gloomy gusto that would have made it clear to the prisoner, had he been present, that no hope of mercy in the theatrical world could be held out to him. Needless to say, when the lecturer spoke of the drama he meant the theatre ; and if in his address one had substituted the word " theatrical " for 166 BROWNING AND HENRY JAMES the word " dramatic " throughout, it would have been all exactly true. But between the spiritual drama of which Browning was a master and the theatrical drama of which Sir Arthur Pinero is a master, there is a great gulf fixed ; and what the one man had to say of the other was in nowise illumi nating. What it really amounted to was that some things and some methods of success, as clear as daylight to Sir Arthur Pinero, were hidden from Robert Browning ; and one s only consolation is that there may have been some other things revealed to Robert Browning which are, and will for ever remain, hidden from Sir Arthur Pinero. When sentence of death had been duly passed and the shade of Browning, convicted of having utterly failed to conquer the box-office, had been removed to the condemned cell, Mr. Henry James got up and began at once, in his mellow conver sational voice, to read the most impossibly con structed, the most involved and entangled, the most fearful and wonderful and altogether delight ful address that I have ever listened to. I was sitting near him and could hear every word ; I am afraid that at least half of the audience could hear nothing at all ; but such was the charm in the voice, such was the magic of this dear old man s personality, and such were the affection and regard in which he was held by his audience, that not a sound or movement disturbed the silence of the room during the whole of that long 167 NEW LEAVES and infinitely complicated address. There was no prisoner here being condemned for what he had failed to do ; it was another Browning, living and wonderful, who was evoked by those quiet tones and appeared to us in a glory, in just such a cloud of gold-dust as that in which he was shown to have enveloped his own subjects. All true charm is indescribable, and that of Henry James is more indescribable than most. Anything more strange from one point of view than this address could hardly be imagined ; nor anything more beautiful from another point of view. Things spoken should have, above all other qualities, clarity of outline and simple grammatical con struction ; whereas Mr. Henry James s spoken sentences, many of which found their author him self breathless in mid-stream, far out of sight of the subject and with no sign of the waters shallow ing towards that farther shore where the still in visible object and full stop awaited him, were more deliciously complicated than anything which I remember in his writings. Yes, there always was a key to them, there always was a farther shore at which we all ultimately arrived, flounder ing and breathless, but infinitely happy. There were quite lovely things, too, in it, rare and delicate patterns of thought that were in them selves creatively new and alive. This was no " gaudy ware like Gandolf s second line " ; and after the " Elucescebat " of the previous speaker, 168 BROWNING AND HENRY JAMES tcse Tiillian sentences were as grateful to the snses, and fell as clearly and memorably upon the rind as letters carved on the jasper of a bishop s vaib. I could not in a few sentences attempt t> give any summary of what Mr. Henry James sid about the story of The Ring and the Book ; noticed that even the most experienced reporters p-ve it up in despair, laid down their pencils, ad sat hypnotised. What he did was to evoke te whole essence and atmosphere of an ideal >vel from his contemplation of the poem. Here is a fragment as an example of the style : Under the huge lens of his own prodigious ision he makes out in them (Browning s creatures) oundless treasures of truth truth even when it nppens to be, as in the case of Count Guido, bt the shining wealth of constitutional falsity. i is not too much to say of Pompilia, Pompilia icrced with twenty wounds, Pompilia on her oath-bed, Pompilia but seventeen years old, nd but a fortnight a mother, that she acquires an :tellectual splendour just by the fact of the vast overing charity of imagination with which her rcording avenger, never so much so as in this cse an avenger of the wronged beautiful things c life, hangs over and breathes upon 1ier. . . . Greatest of all the spirits exhibited, however, is hat of the more than octogenarian Pope, at *hose brooding, pondering, solitary vigil we assist 169 NEW LEAVES as intimately as at every other step of the case, and on whose grand meditation we heavily hang. What remains with us all this time, none the less, is the effect of magnification, the exposure of each of these figures, in its degree, to that iridescent wash of personality, of temper and faculty, that our author ladles out to them, as the copious share of each, from his own great reservoir of spiritual health, and which makes us seek the reason of a perpetual anomaly." One did not think or analyse ; one merely lis tened to the voice of this charming old artist as though in the enchantment of a dream. I felt as though he had blindfolded me and then taken my hand saying, " Come, and I will lead you by devi ous ways and winding paths through the alleys of an enchanted garden, where you shall taste golden fruits and smell strange perfumes and hear unearthly music ; if you open your eyes you will lose yourself, but if you keep hold of my hand I will lead you out through the maze and return you safely to the world again." And when the mellow voice, a little weary now, had dropped to its final cadence, I felt as though the spell were broken, as though the bandage had been taken from my eyes, and I was back in the familiar world again with the echoes of songs and dreams in my heart. Mr. Henry James spoke very prettily of his 170 BROWNING AND HENRY JAMES tribute as a sprig of bay which might strike root and grow ; but in fact it had a more solid and enduring quality than that. To go back to my image of the .shrine, there was something archi tectural in this edifice of thought, and it was worthy to enshrine the living memory of the man who inspired it. It was built of no " paltry onion- stone/ but of something both precious and beautiful ; for there is in Henry James s uttered thought, when it is allied with his person ality and clothed in the living tones of his voice, all the clear colour and solidity of a precious sub stance ; not clear and bright like a diamond or emerald, but smooth opaque, yet full of colour, like true lapis-lazuli won from its hiding-place in some Italian vineyard where, in a bed of rotten fig-leaves, bound tight in an olive-frail, it awaits the trembling hand of the finder. Long may that thought and utterance continue to enchant us ; and far off be the day when it shall be said that there is " no more lapis to delight the world/ 171 XXII MAX S SECRET . . . No collector, I. Not mine the proud anxiety of portfolios of French drawings, or cabinets of Sevres and Dresden, or great basons and tankards of William and Mary silver, or gems of the Italian Renaissance, or collections of r jade, majolica, harp sichords, first editions, ivories, copes, enamels or scarabcei, or any other of the treasures by which men advertise their taste or gratify their vanity. Mine the humbler, pleasanter part of mere critic and appraiser. I am content that my friends should possess and that I should merely enjoy. Bending over their collections with a few well-chosen words of discerning praise, I am credited with unerring judgment and faultless taste. Enough. But I stray from the point. 1 have a sheet of stout white paper before me, a new pen in my hand, and an article of value l beside me. Why should I delay to give judgment ? I am sitting in my cosy room ; a bright fire burns in the hearth, and its crackle mingles pleasantly with the murmur of London without my curtained windows. The hour 1 A Christmas Garland. Woven by Max Beerbohm. 173 NEW LEAVES approaches midnight ; no one will disturb me ; the telephone bell will not ring ; that marble bust, to which annually on Shakespeare s birthday I climb by means of a step ladder and reverently affix a chaplet of laurel, beams down upon me from my bookcase. In nowise daunted, inspired rather, by that august regard, I dip my pen in the ink. Glossy black shines, liquid ebony, on snow-white quill. Yes, reader, I admit it ; when I write I am fain of a quill. Those curving bundles, rubber-cinct, feather-tipped, are symbols to me of the days when I, fond youth, did wander forth upon the flowery slopes of Parnassus, and slake my infant thirst at the springs of Helicon. Now, when everyone carries a black pocket-barrel that empties itself in a flash, they are rare ornaments of the writer s table ; and save in the musty recesses of venerable clubs, and on the fair porphyry of altars furnished daily by assiduous grooms of chambers, you do nowhere find them en- stacked. I am glad to pay tribute to them here. Their dull odour, faintly reminiscent of the goose and therefore repugnant to the nostrils of the vulgar, is more delicious to me, more melancholy sweet, than scent of soever long-stored rose-leaves. . . . But I have wandered into sentiment. Back to the point, then And the point is, as Mr. Max Beerbohm has paro died everybody except himself, even though he has caricatured himself, I contribute this fragment to be included in some future edition of his Garland. 174 MAX S SECRET To say that a man has no enemies is, as a rule, to say that he has no qualities ; a rule to which Mr. Max Beerbohm is a distinguished exception. What is his secret ? Is it the pursuit of some safe and neutral occupation ? Is it merely the habit of amiability ? Or is it that most common of all methods of the unhated the negative method of never being or doing anything that can com mand either hate or love ? Clearly the method of Max is not to be found among these. He pur sues the most dangerous of trades that of critic and caricaturist ; he is constantly making studies of people s weaker or more grotesque sides ; he is an inveterate teller of the truth ; and there are no habits so likely as these to earn for their pos sessor the hatred and ill-will of his fellow-men. Yet no one hates Max ; no one bears him ill-will. Why ? Why should he thus walk immune when the rest of us suffer in the cause of truth ? Why should he be found supping joyfully in the house of the rich Jew whose nasal and other disad vantages he has so ruthlessly exaggerated ? Why should the acquaintance whom he has just de picted as a kind of tall candle guttering over its socket weary you with praises of his character and personality ? Why, in short, should quite stupid and commonplace people, who are un worthy to speak well of him, and who ought to be incapable of appreciating him, speak of him with both warmth and appreciation ? The secret is a 175 NEW LEAVES double one ; it is to be found in his writings and in his drawings. To his personality as a writer intelligent English readers need no introduction ; but all of them who are within reach of London would do well, when there is opportunity, to sup plement their knowledge of Max by a careful study of the caricature exhibited there, from time to time, and see if they cannot arrive with me at the solution of the mystery which he presents. Nothing need be said about his technique, which is perfectly simple and direct, and entirely adapted to his particular mode of expression. It is the human significance of his drawings that distinguishes them from a host of other caricatures no less technically competent. It is commonly said, by people who insist upon reading what they know of Max s personality into his work, that good humour is characteristic of all these carica tures. To me that seems nonsense. They are not in the least good-humoured ; there is none of that bland, insufferable, patronising kindness of the caricaturist, who says, " I know you have a red and bulbous nose, but I will not draw attention to it ; rather let me depict and exaggerate your innate goodness of heart." If his subject has a red and bulbous nose, the wide and childlike vision of Max will not only observe it, but be fascinated by it until it fills the foreground of his picture. He is no more good-natured than he is ill-natured ; his vision, as I have said, is as frank and curious 176 MAX S SECRET as that of a child who, seated in an omnibus, fixes his embarrassing gaze on anything at all odd or un fortunate in the appearance of the person opposite to him. Thus no one who comes into his field of vision escapes. The body of Mr. Sargent swells, and his head dwindles, like the body and head of a man seen in a bilious nightmare. Lord Rose- bery s pale, round eyes grow rounder and paler and blanker. The chorus-girl prettiness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, the heavy, bovine patience and rumination of Mr. W. L. Courtney, the hollow and pretentious domination of Mr. Alfred de Roths child, the busybody importance of Sir Sidney Colvin, and the compact and sinister power of the late Sir George Lewis, come inevitably into the front of the pictures, characteristics from which, like the child in the omnibus, we cannot remove our eyes. Only rarely does the observa tion seem to fail, as, for example, in the case of Count Benckendorff, who in Max s eyes is surely less of a grand seigneur than he appears in actual life ; or in the case of the Duke of Marlborough, whose personality in Max s drawing has an im portance which it is far from possessing in the flesh. The rest of the caricatures have all the fidelity which one meets with only in good por traiture ; that is to say, you would not recognise a face from your knowledge of one of these carica tures, but you recognise the drawing instantly for its likeness to the face you know, and, study- M 177 NEW LEAVES ing it, you seem to add to your knowledge of the original personality. I observed that soon after the opening of these exhibitions a large proportion of the drawings are marked as sold ; and I cannot help wondering who it is that buys them, and from what motives. For these are emphatically not caricatures of the kind that the victim always likes to hang upon his study wall. They are the kind which the enemy of the victim would like to hang upon his study wall. Were they bought, then, by enemies of the people portrayed ? Probably not, for it is a rare and respectable enmity that would spend five-and-tw r enty pounds on the privilege of gloat ing over the distorted features of the hated one. No, I think the subjects themselves are the buyers ; and I think they buy these caricatures so that their enemies may not be able to possess them, and they probably hang them in a dark passage or pretend they have lost them. Or else, being compelled to exhibit them, they say with an indulgent smile, " Yes, that is a drawing Max did of me ; not one of his best, I think. " But they have bought them and paid for them, and the amiable and gentle Max takes his toll of them and, if he had an enemy, might thus be represented as adding to his other dangerous trades that of levying a kind of artistic blackmail. And yet he walks through life smiled upon by everybody. The mystery deepens. 178 MAX S SECRET The careful observer will note among the por traits of people adorning the walls of this exhibi tion a considerable proportion of the climbing fraternity ; Sir Gilbert Parker is indeed wonder fully depicted in the very act of climbing a ladder ; but he is only one among many of that great social band whose feet we hear upon the stairs and whose motto is " Excelsior." Upon these Max seems to lavish his art with the greatest affection, so that London is full of people who are going about half in hope and half in fear that he will make caricatures of them. In hope, because to be caricatured by Max is a definite stage in climbing ; to a man in politics or art it is what is being painted by Sargent is to a woman in Society ; and in biographies of these people we read either, " Presented in 1890 ; painted by Sargent in 1896 ; " or " Entered Parliament in 1890 ; caricatured by Max Beerbohm 1896." In fear, because one never knows what dread secret, which we had thought was known only to ourselves and our mirror, the childlike pen of Max will not reveal. He is thus at once the scourge and the reward of the climbers ; the pleasant scourge, the bitter reward. But as Balzac has truly said, " Parvenus are like monkeys ; seen from above, we admire their agility in climbing, but when they have reached the top it is only their more shameful parts that are visible." Some of his caricatures are extremely severe, 179 NEW LEAVES such as the group of well-known Jews, favourites of the late Court, entitled, " Are we as welcome as ever ? " : some are notably sympathetic, like those of Mr. George Moore, whose melancholy sensitive ness broods always over the dull, cold eye of the realist ; and that of Sir George Frampton, who merely seems, as he seems in the flesh, always to be about to face rough weather. And some are ex tremely funny, notably those of Dawn meeting Mr. Robert Hichens in the Desert, the Archbishop of Canterbury in his seat in the House of Lords, and Sir Alfred Mond congratulating Mr. Austin Harrison on the current issue of the English Review. Most of them are severely true ; but there is one person upon whom Max is never severe, and that is himself. His eyelashes may curl a little more, and his forehead bulge a little more, but his eyelashes and his forehead are things upon which Max need not fear to dwell. He is entirely indulgent to himself, and herein he exhibits his true sincerity ; for if we do not appreciate our own good points, who else is likely to ? Both as a writer and a draughtsman Max has most curiously earned a reputation as a kind of fantastic person, someone who is never serious, who is always playing and posing. That is a very stupid and unintelligent misconception. His most striking quality, and the real secret of that immunity with which he practises dangerous arts, 180 MAX S SECRET is his sincerity. There are two ways, remember, of telling the truth ; you may tell it sincerely, and you may tell it insincerely. Now the truth is such a dangerous thing that it cannot safely be handled with affectation or insincerity. If you decide to tell the truth you must not only be in earnest about telling it, but, in writing at any rate, you must learn and practise how to do it. Sincerity is not a natural gift ; it is a fine art. Hardly anyone can be naturally sincere. Long before he learns to be natural, the child has begun to learn to veil and disguise his natural impulses. Even the dog and the cat practise a lifelong dis simulation, and their lapses into sincerity are apt to be treated as startling misdemeanours. But the artist has to learn to be sincere and natural ; to discover, by bold facing of facts and clear and honest reflection, what he really thinks or feels ; and then he must learn and labour to say it in the simplest possible language. All this Max has done in his writings and in his drawings. Do not for a moment regard either as airy trifles ; rightly con sidered they are serious and formidable, and in the case of personal studies all the more serious and formidable if the subjects of them imagine them to be conceived in the spirit of good-humoured banter. Like many people who build on the solid rock, Max has chosen to surround his work with a ring of laughter. The dull and ignorant, approaching 181 NEW LEAVES it in the dark, are aware only of the ripples on the surface, and think that there is nothing beyond ; but across the moat, and protected by it from the desecrating feet of fools, is a castle that lifts its towers to the clear sky. 182 XXIII ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES N I WAS looking the other day in the British Museum at some of the toys with which little children played in Egypt thousands of years ago, and also at some of those which in a later age enlivened the nurseries of Greece and Rome. And afterwards, wandering through the bewildering galleries of a modern Christmas toy fair, I could not but be struck, not only by the essentially changeless nature of our playthings, but also by the tendency manifested throughout the ages for toys to become over-elaborate and com plicated until, like civilisation itself, they defeat their own ends and have to revert to elementary simplicity again. The little Egyptian children had simple things like soft balls or hard ones made of porcelain or papyrus, and the most elaborate toys of theirs which I have seen are two quite simple little figures, one a bronze woman carrying a vessel on her head, and the other, in earthenware, a mother carrying her child. But the little Romans and Greeks were much more complicated in their tastes, and there are still in existence dolls of 183 NEW LEAVES theirs elaborately dressed, with jointed arms and legs, and tiny doll s-house chairs and tables, with little cups and utensils of pottery painted with scenes from the lives of children. In our own age there have been many develop ments of elaborateness in toys, which perhaps were brought to their perfection in the workshops of South Germany in the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries ; and we are just now at the cul mination of another similar, although less noble development, and on the eve of a return, appar ently, to simpler and more primitive toys. Cer tainly although the childish ambition is to have something which " works " and is " real," it is not these things which abide most securely in our memories and affections ; but things which were so unreal as to be mere grotesque symbols of what they were supposed to represent. In fact it was the toys which gave us most to do, and laid on our imaginations the greatest task of pretence and make-believe, that really won our hearts. How simple are the first things with which a little child learns to play ! First something soft that can be taken into the mouth ; then something that rattles or jingles ; then the simple ball or sphere that can be rolled or bounced, then the doll in some shape or form ; then the wheel, and then, according to the child s inclination or opportunity, the reins that help him to pretend to be a horse, the sword or helmet which makes him into a 184 ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES soldier, the gun for killing enemies or wild beasts, the railway train, the boat, and so on. The most precious toys which I remember were an imper fectly cured cowhorn which gave out, in addition to its wavering note, a most overpowering smell ; a species of gaily-painted wheel mounted on a handle, which I called (quite inaccurately) my 44 whirligig " ; a small boat with black topsides and a salmon-coloured bottom, which has sailed many voyages on the green tablecloth, now bring ing up alongside Webster s Dictionary to discharge cargo, and now lying at anchor in the shelter of a promontory of Bibles ; and a common iron hoop burnished by friction of its stick to the colour of silver, beside and behind which I ran, over paved footpaths dappled with sunshine filtered through the hawthorn and laburnum of suburban gardens, many a long, un weary mile. It is strange to me to think that these objects, once so living and crowded upon with poetry and imagination, so closely associated with all that was lovely and adventurous in the mind of childhood, must long ago have crumbled away and been restored to their chemical elements, and that I should still be walk ing about and looking into toyshop windows, reduced to the sorry business of writing about toys instead of gloriously playing with them. But it is of no use. I made an experiment not very long ago ; did actually purchase, for an ab surdly small sum, a clockwork railway of a kind 185 NEW LEAVES that was totally beyond my reach in the days when I would have gloried in it ; and carrying it home in a large red cardboard box, and making sure that my servant was well out of the way, did actually set it out on the floor and attempt to play with it. But the glory had departed ; I could not become sufficiently like a little child to enter into that kingdom. But I knew what to do with the train. I parcelled it up again and bestowed it upon a family of little children into whose wildest dreams the idea of possessing such a thing could never have entered, and I believe it is to this day brought out on a Sunday or a birthday by their father, and played with for their benefit, surrounded in their minds with the same glamour and glory in which it first fell upon them from the skies. I am constantly seeing my little friends being deprived of this great pleasure of the rarely-used " best " toy. Everything is delivered into their hands aeroplanes that fly, electric trains with signals and switches that work, toy battleships and motor-cars that are marvels of ingenuity, armies that are patterns of accuracy in their uni forms and equipment. But when you have put into a child s hand an extremely elaborate model, it cannot and does not satisfy his imagination. He will play for a whole day with a train made of chairs, because imagination enters into the game ; the arm-chair is an engine, the sofa is a sleeping- 186 ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES car, another arm-chair is the luggage-van. But if you give him a perfect thing his imagination is left out in the cold ; there is no part for it to take in the game except a destructive part ; in short, there is nothing to be done with the mechanical model except to break it open and see how it works. Indeed, more summary methods are quite natur ally attractive. I have seen a little boy of four years old, to whom an elaborate working model of a motor-car had been presented, after watching it work for a few minutes, take it up in his hand and hurl it to the ground with a smile of satis faction. It was the only thing he could think of doing with it. That is why the hoop or the train of chairs or the rough and grotesque toy train will always give more real pleasure than the most elaborate machinery that can be conceived ; that is why the rag doll or the woolly lamb will always lie nearer the heart s affections than the most wonderfully equipped and elaborately clothed French poupee. As I have said, however, I believe there is some sign of a return to the more primitive style of toy. I see mysterious objects in toyland with quaint names, of which the golliwog and the teddy bear were the precursors. There is one which particu larly pleases me called " A dada." I like it first for its name ; it is not called " dada " or "the dada," but " a dada " ; and it has thus been christened, I suppose, in order to facilitate refer- 187 NEW LEAVES ence to it by the very youngest of its possessors. It is, moreover, a simple doll, of a bright and cheery countenance, and can be made by simple means to assume various postures. It is more natural and purely primitive than the rather affected and artificial type of American invention known as " Billy kins " ; in fact, it is a charming and attractive toy, which will probably take an abiding place among those " solid joys and lasting pleasures " which happy children should be laying up for themselves in the fragrant cabinet of memory. A touch of the grotesque is admirable in a toy ; it separates it from the common things of life, and gives definition to the memories as sociated with it ; but it should above all things be simple. Do you remember those trains stamped out of tin, with wheels of brass wire, and no re semblance at all to any known vehicle ? Was there ever a red like that of the red carriage, or a yellow and a blue like the colours that followed it ; or any green to equal the greenness of the engine ? Do you remember the fragrant smell of them yes, and the taste of them when licked ? Or do you remember a little passe-partout glass box edged with yellow, containing a tortoise that trembled and shook whenever the box was moved ? When the mind is putting out its first feelers to wards beauty, it is things like this, vivid, definite, and comprehensible, which enchant and satisfy it, yet lead it on to the pursuit of ever finer things. 188 ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES Pray think of this when you are making the choice, so wearisome to you, so momentous to them, of Christmas toys for your little friends. When people grow up and become possessed of the numerous and elaborate toys for which their ambition has striven, a curious change takes place in their attitude towards those who come to play with them. In the nursery the sentiment inspired by the possession of toys is, as a rule, simply selfish. The child desires to enjoy them alone, to exercise his own imagination upon them ; and he is apt to look askance at visiting playmates, and to resent the suggestion that they should be allowed to play with the particular toys which are highest in his favour at the moment. But that attitude de parts with experience. The most absorbed man soon finds that the amount of pleasure he can by himself extract from any particular possession is limited. If he be of a kind and generous dis position he wishes to share his pleasures ; but even if he be selfish he will desire that others shall see him using his toys. In all sports that are enjoyed in association, such as hunting and shooting, this principle is active, although it is entirely sub conscious. In addition to enjoying a day s hunt ing people like to show off their horses, or to have witnesses of their extraordinary and continuous propinquity to hounds. And in addition to the joy of hitting a difficult mark and all the other 189 NEW LEAVES pleasures of the covert side, there is for the man who shoots well a certain sober joy in having other people to see it and know it. Thus it happens that the man who is possessed of toys constantly invites others who are less fortunate to share his pleasures. And it is in the interest of those who themselves are without luxurious possessions, and who are continually invited to partake of the hospitality of people who have, that I would offer a few words of advice concerning the use of other people s toys. f It not infrequently happens that the man with out possessions knows a good deal more about their use than the proud proprietor. Not always, of course, but often. If that be your case, my poor friend, be careful to conceal your knowledge. There was a time, perhaps, when you had motor cars and your friend had not ; and out of your large experience perhaps you taught him what little he knows about them, and started him on his career as a possessor of them. And here comes a curious instance of the influence of pro perty. If you still possess a motor-car your pupil will, in matters connected with his own, still treat you possibly with deference, and at the least as an equal. But if you should cease, and he con tinue, to possess, even although your experience increases too, a change will come over his attitude towards you. He will become ever so slightly patronising, and if you differ from him or venture 190 ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES to point out anything in which you think him mis taken, he will immediately take refuge in the fact of possession. He will even explain to you that his car is in some mysterious way different from others of the same class ; but really the only differ ence is that he possesses it, that it belongs to him, that he has paid for it, and that even though his ideas about it be wrong he can afford to act as though they were right. My advice to you in these circumstance^ is not to argue with him ; to accept the nonsense he talks and let him s,uppose that you agree with him. Perhaps you are driv ing his car ; you may be an expert and he a blun dering, gear-chipping beginner ; but when he nervously asks, on your approaching a piece of country such as you have driven through thou sands of times, " Would you like me to take her here, as it s a bad bit of road and I know the car ? " surrender your place with alacrity. Try not to be irritated or alarmed at the series of mistakes which he proceeds to commit ; he really thinks that this particular car is safer in his hands than in yours, although he might admit that any other car would be safer in yours than in his. It belongs to him, you see, it is the only car he knows, and he not unnaturally thinks that its qualities are as peculiar to it as they are unique in his own experience. There is perhaps a certain rough justice in all this, because it often happens that the man who spends the first part of his life making himself ex- 191 NEW LEAVES pert in the appreciation of luxuries must spend the second part of his life in going without them. The man who has them is the man who was doing some thing else while you were studying them. He may be a boor and a duffer in his use of them, but he has got them, and you must remember that all your knowledge and experience in their use will be lightly esteemed by him unless you have got them too. It is a nice point for you to consider whether you would rather be cultivated in the knowledge of beautiful or luxurious or amusing things with out possessing them, or possess them without knowledge. The combination of both states is rare. How many men who possess a fine cellar of wine have a real palate, or could tell the differ ence between a Gorton and a Romance ? And how many men who have a really discriminating palate possess a cellar of wine ? If you have known what it is in youth, when according to copy-book rules you should have been saving money, to spend your whole available capital upon a meal and a bottle of old wine, you are not likely to be rich in your old age. Not rich in money, I mean ; you may be rich in knowledge, and must comfort yourself with the reflection that possession does not imply either knowledge or understanding of the things possessed. It is really better, if you have the strength of mind, to abstain altogether from playing with other people s toys, and merely to look on at their attempts to enjoy themselves, 192 ROSEMARY AND BAUBLES and applaud. But it is not everyone who can resist the temptation to enjoy the good things which are offered to him. So if you ride your friend s horse be prepared to learn afterwards, if he commits any fault, that he is a very discrim inating animal who knows very well when anyone is on his back with whom he can take liberties. If your friend sails his yacht within a bowsprit s length of someone else s main boom, it is a tricky and expert piece of steering ; but remember that if you do it you will be held to have had a narrow and fortuitous escape from disaster. If he takes a long shot in his own deer-forest and misses, well, it was a justifiable risk ; if you do so it was an impossible shot which ought not to have been attempted. Do not suppose for a moment, when your friend hideously vamps upon his new Stein- way grand, that what he wants is to hear its tone brought out, and that he would enjoy it more if you, with the most exquisite artistic finish, should perform an impromptu of Chopin. He would be merely in a state of fidgets and ill-concealed im patience until you had finished, when he would make haste to take your place as one who should say, " Now let us hear the real tone." He does not want to hear beautiful tone ; he wants to play upon his own piano, and to hear with his own ears the noises which he makes with his own fingers. Apparently, from all this, the man who under stands things without possessing them comes off N 193 NEW LEAVES much worse than the man who possesses them without understanding ; the one has all the suffer ing and the other all the fun. The only consola tion for the non-possessor lies in the knowledge that if his friend has the accident of possession, he has the certainty of knowledge ; and there are many things which it is better to understand than to possess. The ideal thing is to do both ; al though sometimes I think it is only the things which we understand that we can be said to possess, and that the only things which we can really understand are the things which we truly love. 194 XXIV THE AMAZING MISSIONARY I KNOW very little about missionaries ; my associations with them are chiefly childish impressions received at Sunday afternoon services when some unfamiliar, plausible-looking person would get up to plead the cause of the Tokahookoos, or some other benighted tribe, and, after the usual sugaring of comic-pathetic anec dotes about some precocious little Tokahookoo nicely calculated to rouse the interest of a juvenile congregation, would come to the real business of money-boxes and collecting-cards, explaining what incredible things would happen if each child gave a penny. And I remember somehow being always sorrier for the missionary than for the Tokahookoos, and wishing, when he afterwards poured the rattling coins into the salver at the altar steps, that he could keep the money for him self. And I have other vague remembrances of perusing leaflets distributed in the pews as a kind of legitimate literature that could be read even in church containing reports from various outlying stations of some Liberian swamp, in which 195 NEW LEAVES the composition was almost always divided into two parts : first, giving reasons why the work had not advanced more rapidly of late, owing to the rains or some other act of an interfering Provi dence ; and secondly, a pretty blunt and direct intimation that unless more funds were imme diately forthcoming the whole success of the work, past, present, and future, would be seriously jeopardised. As a child I contributed under com pulsion, or in some momentary spirit of emula tion (afterwards bitterly regretted), to missionary societies ; but I never gave gladly, and I am afraid I regarded every coin swallowed up by the narrow and papered maw of the missionary box as utterly and irretrievably lost. I am therefore not competent to write about ordinary missionaries ; but I have never been able to understand how or when the missionary became one of the stock objects of jest, like mothers-in-law and Scotchmen, seeing that their ranks have fur nished heroes and martyrs as famous as any whose names are written on the scroll of fame. It cannot be really amusing or easy work, whether you are toiling in the swamps of Liberia or pleading the cause to stingy congregations at home. Here and there, no doubt, a few people find congenial excitement and adventure in the work, but they must be a very small proportion. There was one missionary, however, who was working fifty years ago to spread the Gospel in Spain, who never knew 196 THE AMAZING MISSIONARY a dull moment, and that was George Borrow. One does not somehow think of him as a mission ary, and yet the most active as well as the happiest years of his life were spent in literally forcing the Gospel, not upon the heathen, but upon the more benighted Roman Catholics of Spain. To our generation Borrow seems best known through the pages of Lavengro, although The Bible in Spain has much the larger circulation of the two books ; but to most of us he has hitherto been a mysterious person, concerning whose accounts of himself it was always difficult to know how much to accept and how much to reject. Now, however, the mists that surround him have suddenly been dis persed, and in the pages of Mr. Jenkins s Life, 1 he stands out clear and recognisable as a living human being who wandered and did battle in the cause of sincerity and truth through the first half of the nineteenth century. As a vagabond and friend of gipsies we have not much that is new to learn of him, but as a servant of the British and Foreign Bible Society he appears in a new light, whether he is clearing away the mists for the recep tion of the New Testament in Spain or writing long letters describing his doings to the grave com mittee of religious gentlemen assembled at Earl Street in London. 1 The Life of George Borrow. Compiled from Unpublished Official Documents, his Works, Correspondence, etc. By Herbert Jenkins. 197 NEW LEAVES Certainly he was the most remarkable mission ary who ever went forth with the Bible in one hand and a stick in the other. It did not matter to him whether he brought peace or a sword ; if people would not have peace, then they should have the sword. Physical adventure was the breath of life to him ; and yet he could combine it with a most patient and diplomatic strategy for the achievement of the ends he had in view, which received only too little appreciation from his employers. When he was preparing the fourth edition of The Bible in Spain he wrote to John Murray : " Would it be as well to write a preface to this fourth edition, with a tirade or two against the Pope, and allusions to the Great North Road ? " And there you have the man. A tirade or two against the Pope, and allusions to the Great North Road, and imprisonment for the Gospel s sake, and the breaking-in of wild stallions which were to be the property of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and adventures on his great horse, Sidi Habismilk (" My Lord the Sustainer of the King dom ") it was in such ways that his wild energy was expended, whatever the cause in which he was embarking. Of the actual value of his work in Spain, even from the point of view of his employers, it is difficult to speak. The number of copies of the Scriptures a few thousand in all which he dis tributed while he was there, is very small com- 198 THE AMAZING MISSIONARY pared with the work of others at the same time and immediately afterwards ; but it must be re membered that whereas they distributed whole sale in towns, Borrow rode through the remotest part of the country and planted the Gospel among people, unreached by any other agency, who had time to study and consider its message. More over, he did the pioneer work and broke the ground for others. In his life in England Borrow had some curious points of resemblance with a man physically and mentally his exact opposite Samuel Johnson. Both found themselves launched on the world with no means of livelihood but the pen, and that in days when journalism had not yet developed into a firm jumping-off place for a literary career. And both men solved the problem of combining the earning of a living by their pens with the uncompromising utterance of such truth as they had to tell, without depending upon patrons, and without being false to themselves. This was as great an achievement in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth ; is always a great achieve ment, wherever and by whomsoever it is done. But Johnson was venerated and applauded until his death, whereas Borrow fell back into the trough of the wave of his public success and had the humiliation of seeing his own work on gipsy lore, in which he had been the pioneer, outdone and outclassed, and himself forgotten before he was dead. 199 NEW LEAVES Only in one respect does Mr. Jenkins fail us as a biographer. He shows us the missonary, he shows us the gipsy, and most vividly he shows us the lonely old landlord of Oulton living like a hermit, and so isolated in his old age that the very children ran away from him when they met his tall shaggy figure stalking along the road ; but he has not shown us clearly the man in one rela tion which is always interesting and illuminating his relation with women. Handsome and athletic in appearance, with his white hair and kindling brown eyes, his high-pitched voice, his power over horses and his restless unexpended energy, he seems some times to conform to a type which, although fiercely energetic, lacks some of the fundamental attri butes of a man. His strange marriage, and the mysterious and exasperating relations with Isopel Berners, rather give colour to the idea ; yet there are other things which seem to contradict it. At any rate he was no phantom, and perhaps his own de scription of himself is the nearest : "I believe that some of those who say I am a phantom/ he wrote to John Murray, " would alter their tone provided they were to ask me to a good dinner ; bottles emptied and fowls devoured are not exactly the feats of a phantom. No ! I partake more of the nature of a Brownie or Robin Goodfellow, goblins, tis true, but full of merriment and fun, and fond of good eating and drinking/ True missionary that he was, George Borrow s 200 THE AMAZING MISSIONARY life was not happy. He knew no rest. In his happiest years in Spain he was like a hound strain ing at the leash and labouring under an endless sense of the lack of imagination of his employers at home. That he had moments of highest joy, probably when he was alone with his horse on some of the heaths he loved to frequent, there can be no doubt, but his spirit was darkened constantly by an impatience and intolerance that made him con stantly misrepresent himself. It was not only at the Pope that he had a tirade or two it was at anybody or anything that attempted to oppose him. And he died an angry, solitary old man, with the hunger for happiness in him still, but with no power of communicating with the world about him a missionary to the end, living among a people whose language he had forgotten. 201 XXV THE NEGLECT OF WINE I SUPPOSE there is more wine bought in Eng land about Christmas time than at any other ; and at no season are there so many outrages committed upon the spirit of the vine. Tepid Champagne, warm Burgundy, icy young Bordeaux (uncorked the moment before it is served), and crusty Port decanted within a day or two of its arrival by railway, are regular incidents of the festive season. Yet inasmuch as the liquid so treated is often drunk more as a symbol of festivity than for any love of its intrinsic qualities, it may be said to serve at least one of its purposes which is, even by such strange misuses, to make glad the heart of man. But it is not the people whose annual outbreak of headaches they never dream of associating with the unwonted mixture of fearsome vintages that I accuse of neglect of wine, but rather the possessors of cellars and the people who drink it daily and habitually. The ignorance about wine in England, even among those who have every opportunity of studying it, is colossal. The Eng- 203 NEW LEAVES lish butler, to whose grim mercies the whole matter is too often left, is an arch offender in this respect ; the wine-merchant is sometimes another, and the family doctor is a third. To the majority of physicians wine is simply wine, a medium for the administration of alcohol in mild doses. The difference in medicinal values between, let us say, a Chateau Margaux 1890 and a Romance or Cham- bertin of 1904, is a mystery to them ; although the alterative and curative properties of the Bordeaux and the toning and vitalising effects of the Bur gundy are so different as to be almost opposite in their physiological effects. And I may add that there is not one household in a thousand in Eng land where a bottle of either of these vintages could be brought to the table from the cellar in its proper condition for drinking. The butler (and indeed the owner of the wine) would see to that. The wholesale murder of rare wine goes on daily in England ; a veritable massacre of the inno cents. There are thousands of dozens of rare vintage wines in English cellars which have either perished long since or are gradually perishing from neglect and improper treatment. " I know you like Burgundy/ said a friend to me the other day ; " I have some wonderful old stuff in the cellar ; I don t know what it is, but I know it s very, very old. I ordered up a bottle for you." I feared the worst and waited. In five minutes I h6ard the 204 THE NEGLECT OF WINE loud pop of a cork, and the butler appeared, jauntily carrying oh, horror ! a decanter. To decant a very old Burgundy in that manner would of itself be enough to ruin it, and there was further evidence that the decanter had actually been warmed. Of course the wine was absolutely dead, and tasted of nothing at all but weak vine gar. Another bottle was brought up and, at my earnest request, carried carefully to the table in its cradle, and the cork gently and carefully drawn as it lay there. There was just the suggestion of a ghost of a wine nothing more. It turned out to be an old Gorton which twenty years ago must have been in its glory ; but which, kept in the same cellar as Bordeaux, and exposed to frequent changes of temperature, had probably suffered great deterioration of character before it had died ten years ago of old age. There was nothing to be done with the whole bin but pour it away, although if I had suggested this, my friend would have regarded me as a very ignorant fellow, for he was one of those who cannot believe that; a famous vintage wine which had lain for over half a century undisturbed in the dust of his cellars could be anything but precious, and the more precious the older it grew. In the same cellar were thousands of bottles of the wines of Champagne, Bordeaux, of the Rhine, the Mosel, and the Saar yes, and even of Oporto all suffering a similar fate ; things that had once been mighty and glorious now fallen 205 NEW LEAVES to decay or death ; while their owner was drinking undistinguished wine from the Stores, ordered month by month, in order to " save " the contents of the cellar. And this is only an example of what is going on in hundreds of houses in England where the wine cellars, instead of being shrines in which the fruit of the most perfect marriages between sun and soil is resting and growing and developing a mature and generous vitality, are mere catacombs or mausoleums containing the corpses and envelopes of what were once living things, but from which the life principle and with it all their use and beauty and beneficence for us has long since fled. For it is also a fact of which people are surpris ingly ignorant that wine has a life of its own ; that in every bottle there is actually some germ or principle which curiously corresponds with the animating principle within ourselves. Like us it knows youth and age and death ; like us it knows sickness and health ; like us it is liable to destruc tion either from disease within itself or from shock or accident from without. Like the life of men, it has the inimitable charm of youth, an " awk ward age " of development, a strength of maturity, an increasing mellowness and sunset decline of age. It passes through certain changes of life, and is sensitive, like all living things, to the changes of the earthly seasons. Deep down in the chalk of the Burgundy district, far from any effect of heat or 206 THE NEGLECT OF WINE cold, where the mercury in the thermometer never moves from one year s end to the other, sealed and corked hermetically from the atmosphere, the wine is nevertheless reached by those same subtle forces that move and stir in our blood at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. At such times a bottle of wine will become sick and de ranged, and in a week or two will become well and sound again. Like our three score and ten, there is appointed for every bottle of healthy wine a span of life which varies considerably ac cording to the amount of sunshine in the year of its birth, and according to the state of the soil and the plants. A bottle of Champagne of a good vin tage may last as long as twenty years ; a rare Port that has been bottled two instead of three years after the vintage may last for seventy ; and other wines in proportion, according to their vinosity. There are exceptions, of course. Only the other day I tasted, from a magnum of Perrier Jouet 1876, wine that could still foam a little in the glass and whose flavour remained delicate and characteristic, although its strength was far gone ; and the fellow to this magnum had actually blown out its cork as it lay in the bin during the hot summer of 1909. Such valiancy, such vigour of old age, are rare indeed in the wines of Champagne, which, if they come of a good vintage, are at their best between the tenth and twentieth years^of their age. 207 NEW LEAVES But our neglect of wine in England is shown in many other ways than by the mere ignorance of elementary facts concerning it. The increased consumption of Champagne has done much to oust other wines from favour. Champagne is pre-eminently the drink of social London ; it goes best, perhaps, with the hurried feverish life that we lead. But a curious thing about the drinking of Champagne is that, apart from being a taste, it becomes a habit, like drug-taking or cigarette smoking ; and this adds formidably to the effect of its rivalry with other wines. It is all very well to drink Champagne if you drink only the best ; yet there are thousands of people who habitually spend on a bottle of indifferent Champagne a sum which would procure them a Bordeaux or Bur gundy, a Berncastler or Rudesheimer of the finest vintage. Again, English people have lately taken to the bad habit of neglecting vintage Ports for so-called tawny Ports, and innocently believe that lightness of colour in the wine is a measure of its harmlessness ; whereas many of these wines from the wood are crude liquor, doctored for the wine-merchant s trade ; taste of sugar instead of wine, and burn on the throat like young Cognac. True tawny Port should be as dry as sand, un sweetened and unfortified ; otherwise the true Port flavour is found only in vintage wines which have matured in the bottle. But why should Port be our only after-dinner 208 THE NEGLECT OF WINE wine ? How foolish it is of people whose means enable them to have the best of such things that the world affords to confine themselves to the banal round of Hock or Sauterne for luncheon, and Champagne and Port for dinner ! Lovely, delicate Burgundies, the sun-filled Chateau wines of Bordeaux, the gorgeous and recuperative and truly imperial Tokay, the old Amontillados and Olorosos of Spain, the Boals and Malmseys of Madeira, to say nothing of the rarer wines of Hungary and Austria (but not of Italy) here in es sence are the sunshine and soil of a thousand happy slopes where the very essences of life are steeped and concentrated. It seems a pity to neglect them ; and one of these days some physician will make a fortune who, instead of studying fashion able drugs, which in his heart he despises, turns his attention to the curative and hygienic properties of different wines ; who orders his happy patients perhaps a goblet of Chateau d Yquem, or, per- ad venture, a couple of glasses of old Tokay one when the sun is at the meridian, and one when he is at his setting. O 209 XXVI WHO S WHO ? "W~1T 7"HO, indeed ? I have been searching through ^^ the two thousand odd pages of the new edition of the famous red book, in order to find out. I have been trying to discover what exactly it is, what quality, or combination of qualities, that entitles one to the relative pronoun. It is not fame, for I have looked in vain for parti culars of the lives and careers of some eminent music-hall artists, who are probably among the most famous people in England, people about whose lives I would gladly learn some parti culars ; but I find not even the name of Harry Lauder. So it is not fame. It is not character and attainment ; for some of the men of the highest character and of the most consummate attain ment who are known to me find no place in the pages of this book. It is not merely great official position, or aristocratic birth, for thousands of these biographies are concerned with people who have no official position, and are of what is called obscure origin. What is it, then ? As far as I can make out, the people whose names you will 211 NEW LEAVES find in these pages are for the most part people who either have been born with, or in their course through life have acquired, a label of some kind with which to distinguish their personality. They are the people concerning whom the question, What is he ? can be readily and plainly answered. And in this respect the book really reflects admir ably the condition of our complex and well-mixed society. To the small world of Society there is, for a man at any rate, only really one rule of admission. He must be, not someone, but some thing, that people can easily remember. This is contrary to the common and fond superstition that membership of the very mixed club of Metro politan society implies all kinds of qualifications. It does not. All that is necessary is that a man should speak the language and have the habits of that society ; that he should know and be known to a considerable number of other members ; and above all, that he should possess some label by which he can be identified, and by which he can be rapidly described when the inevitable ques tion is asked, " Who is that man who sat opposite to me at dinner ? " His name may be plain Mr. Abel Cain ; that may convey nothing at all ; but when the pendant description is added, " You know the controller of this, the editor of that, the man who runs the other thing, the writer, the owner, inventor, organiser, believer in, fugitive from, desirer of, partner with, settler on, speculator 212 WHO S WHO ? in, so and so/ he takes his place in the ordered world and becomes entitled to a paragraph in Who s Who. The title of the book should rather be either Who s What or What s Who; for the question " Who s Who ? " is really never answered. It is not a little strange that a man should thus be identified by qualities, occupations, or achieve ments, which he shares with numberless other people, rather than by his own individuality, which he shares with no one. If a name could only be put so that it would be the true distinction and identification. There are thousands of peers, painters, writers, soldiers, baronets, professors, heads of this, that, and the other. In what a man does he can never be original. But the miracle of individuality remains, and personality, as far as we know, is never duplicated, never repeated throughout infinite time. My copy of Who s Who opens easily and naturally at that page on which my own name appears. No one knows better than I how futile is this paragraph in attempting to answer the question, Who I am. I see there a list of statements of fact in which the best face and most imposing presentment possible are made of my small record of doings. It grows a little longer year by year, and will soon disappear from these pages, to be replaced by a line in the obituary list, and thereafter as a record vanish utterly from the mind of man. Concerning what 213 NEW LEAVES I do and have done, I say, there is certain rather unnecessary information here ; of what I am and have been, no information at all. So that, to return to our friend Mr. Abel Cain, it is no answer to the question, Who s who ? as applied to him to say " C. M. G. 1908 ; Commissioner for Oaths in the Cockahoopoo Islands 1909 ; Assistant Com missioner 1907 ; Deputy Assistant Commissioner 1903 ; born, etc. etc. etc. etc." The nearest answer to the question would be contained in the entry, " CAIN, ADAM ABEL, C.M.G. ; Adam Abel Cain." And even that would be only a label too, for our very names are not private or peculiar to us ; they are worn by other people in our own and other times, whose lives and individualities are as distant from our own as that of his Highness Maharana Shri Mohandevji Narandevji, Maharana of Dharampur, is different from the Reverend John Jones, author of Elims of Life. Having regard to the great and increasing bulk of this book, one cannot help thinking that the time has come when some revision of the system on which it is edited should be attempted. It is already in price beyond the means of many, even of the people whose names are to be found in it ; and the addition of a vast number of biographies of eminent foreigners, while adding to its use as a work of reference, has increased its size to the point of unwieldiness. It is a pity, I think, that the length at which a person s achievements, and 214 WHO S WHO ? the achievements of his ancestors, and his recrea tions should be set forth, should depend entirely upon his own sense of proportion. An even super ficial study of these pages convinces me that that sense is not a safe guide. I have before me a notice nearly a page long devoted to the biography of a painter and journalist whose name I had riot heard before. It sets forth immediately after his name that he is a member of the Society of Authors ; and, as anybody can be that for a guinea, it is not worth a line in Who s Who. It tells us that his father was a landowner, and that he adopted his present name by Deed Poll, 1894. It tells us what profession he was intended for, although he did not pursue it ; it tells us the schools at which he studied, and the names of the masters ; where he painted and exhibited pictures ; and sets forth at great length the titles of articles which he contributed to various sixpenny magazines, with the names of the magazines. It seems to me that some mild editorial curb should be applied to enthusiasm of this kind. And as for people s recreations, information about them may give the reader some cynical amusement if he have the patience to study them, but they are rather silly, and mostly untrue. I mean that the majority of people who describe their recreations as shooting, hunting, fishing, polo, and so forth, are people to whom these are not recreations, but hard work ; whose real recreation, did they but know it, is 215 NEW LEAVES a little serious reading or labour. Attempts at facetiousness under the heading of recreations are generally failures. The Reverend Silvester Home s " golfing, cycling, and agitation " is a fair example ; also the Reverend Prebendary Carlile s " open-air preaching " and Colonel Maude s "Nil." Some times they are pathetic, as in the entry " for merly polo, hunting, steeplechasing, deer-stalking, shooting ; now golf, walking, reading." There are about twenty-five thousand biographies ; I think the word golf occurs nearly twenty thousand times. There is one man who gives his recreation as bulb-growing. It seems to be a somewhat periodic and intermittent thing to be dependent upon for one s recreation. It is exciting enough, to be sure, when the bulbs are coming up, and interesting enough when the ground is being pre pared, but I imagine that there must be long days in the summer and autumn which must hang rather heavy on the hands of this contributor. From the point of entertainment this book would be considerably enlivened by a reduction of the number of biographies of military officers who are possessed of inferior decorations. There might be something to be said for printing biographies of all officers of the rank of captain and over who have not received the D.S.O., and of all the colo nial officials who have escaped the C.M.G. That would reduce the size of the book by about a quarter ; and if the distinguished foreigners were 216 WHO S WHO ? relegated to a separate volume, it might be possible to reduce the book to something like its former size and price of five shillings. For my part, I felt some ten years ago, when my own name was first included, that the book had then reached an ideal stage of convenience and completeness, and that the addition of further names was unnecessary. But I suppose there are other people who have been arriving at that opinion every year since then. 217 XXVII THE FASHION IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL THE other day I heard a group of women at luncheon discussing, with the charming gravity which they always bring to bear on matters of personal adornment, the fashions of the immediate future. One of them had just returned, from a shopping expedition to Paris, and the others listened to her reports much as the headquarter staff in a great campaign might listen to news brought in by scouts and patrols, on whose deposi tions their information must be based. This lady electrified the others by assuring them that they would all be wearing flounces next year. Every thing, she said, was going in the direction of flounces ; whereupon two of her audience expressed disappointment and protest, but the third and prettiest said, "But the fashion is always beautiful." For some reason this not very striking expression remained in my memory and haunted me as I went about my affairs ; and as the only way to get rid of such an idea is to think it out, I set myself, when I got home, to consider what amount of truth might lie in it. 219 NEW LEAVES If you pass in review through your mind all the fashions in dress which you have known in your own time, you will I think find none that seems so beautiful as that of the present moment. By dress I mean, of course, women s dress and adornment generally, because that is the highest and most artistic form which dress takes with us. I do not mean the extreme of the fashion, or that exaggerated style which likes to overstep the mode a little in every direction ; but rather the style of dress worn by pretty women whose clothes are perhaps their chief preoccupation, and who have ample means to cultivate and give expression to their own individual taste as applied to the mode of the moment. It is always, then, the latest fashion which has seemed to us most beauti ful. If one leaves out the fashions of the last year or two and reviews those that succeeded them one may, it is true, make critical discrimination among them. Thus the early Victorian fashions were obviously much prettier than the late Victorian, which were, indeed, probably the ugliest that human beings have ever devised. Yet at the time one thought them beautiful at any rate I know that I did ; although now when I turn over those old volumes of Punch which were my chief source of information upon social matters I wonder how we could have borne to see our friends so disguised and bedecked. My earliest studies in clothes and the fashion 220 THE FASHION IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL were made in Church that being the place where I had most material before me to consider and most time in which to consider it. It was the era of bustles, and one watched the people coming down the aisle of the church, each woman carrying on her back a draped protuberance, by the ex tent, adornment, or " set " of which, among other things, the extent of her adherence to the fashion might be judged. One by one the bustles came in, glided down the aisle, and disappeared into pews. Whether they were sat upon or merely leaned against I had not then, and have not to this day, ascertained ; but I have seen them put on, and, in that careless intimacy with which a very small child is made free of the most sacred scenes of feminine toilet, observed a beautiful woman, half clothed, tying by means of a tape a kind of pack or hump stuffed with horsehair upon her back. I remember even at the time thinking it a singularly brutal and undignified scene, like the harnessing of a cart-horse ; and the memory and impression remained with me, and often, when almost intoxicated by the dignity with which some bustle or other went rocking down the aisle, I have remembered and visualised the sordid founda tion on which it rested, and my joy in it has de parted, like the joy of one who sees through to the mean motives that lie behind magnificent actions. Sometimes, if I remember aright, there was 221 NEW LEAVES substituted for the bustle a kind of cage made of metal girders covered with cloth, although whether this belonged to the bustle era or was some relic of the fashion which had preceded it I do not know. But I remember the mode called the " waterfall," which seemed to me at the time one of the most ravishing things conceivable for the adornment of feminine beauty. The " waterfall " was a group of closely parallel vertical pleats (if that be the proper word), which began somewhere in the small of the back, curved magnificently over the bustle, and descended to the ground. The idea was apparently of a stream of water which, rising somewhere between the shoulder-blades, broke as it were upon the bustle, and poured in a Niagara of pleats to the hem of the garment comparable, had it only been employed in front instead of the back of the dress, to that river of precious oint ment that ran down Aaron s beard to the skirts of his garments. But whatever its origin may have been, there was a day when this device was the very latest fashion ; and on that day I for one thought it extremely beautiful. To take another extreme case of the same kind, I remember a device by which the sleeves, where they joined the shoulders of the dress, sprouted or were continued upwards, giving the impression of either a morbid growth or of shouldersiHiideously shrugged. These were called " ears " ; at first they were flat, like a bat s or mouse s ; but, gradually 222 THE FASHION IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL becoming fuller, and the fulness extending further and further down the sleeves, they developed at last into the puffed and swollen sleeves which were the joy of a later day. But there was a day when nobody without ears to her sleeves could be re garded as being properly dressed at all ; the ab sence of them gave a wretchedly poor and mean appearance to the whole person ; while the set of a pair of smart ears would of itself be enough to give distinction and chic to their wearer. It was thus with hair-dressing, with jewellery, and with every kind of garment. You, good reader, may have had all the beauty and romance of your life associated with a being upon whose forehead was reared an edifice of tightly and artificially curled hair ; from whose ears depended lumps of gold shaped like a coil of rope, round whose neck hung a locket or kind of safe deposit structure of the same precious metal, and on whose gentle breast there rose and fell a great brooch consisting of a large oval pane of glass behind which, a grisly relic, was stored a mass of human hair ; who daily tied upon herself with tapes the stuffy burden of a bustle ; whose sleeves sprouted into a pair of ears, and who wore a bonnet and a dolman upon which yards of jet beads and bugles were strung. I remember distinctly and this has a particularly interesting bearing on my subject that in my earliest childhood the picture called into my mind by the word " pretty " (and 223 NEW LEAVES all words are associated in our minds with some picture) was that of a tightly curled fringe. For a long time I thought that to be pretty was to have a fringe ; that those who had it could properly be called pretty, and those who lacked it could not. To-day we consider all these things ugly and disfiguring, and we are right ; but in their own day we thought them beautiful they sym bolised beauty for us. And although in my own mind I feel convinced that the fashions of to-day are more beautiful than anything in the last two hundred years, at any rate, it is probable that they, too, with all their simplicity and fidelity to the beauties of the body s own form, will be regarded by some future generation as not ugly, perhaps, but at any rate absurd. The real reason, I think, why the fashion is always beautiful, at any rate, while it lasts, is that it is associated with some of the most beautiful things and the most beautiful people that we know ; that it enshrines something more than can appeal merely to the eye some thing that springs from the heart, belongs to our griefs and our joys, and is a part of our living and breathing existence. The fashion is a symbol of the contemporary, of the present hour, of life itself ; and as life is always beautiful, it is perhaps for that reason that we are right in finding the fashion beautiful also. 224 XXVIII CONCERNING FUNERALS THIS is a subject that concerns us all ; we can hardly escape having to do with one funeral, be it merely our own ; but it is a matter on which most people habitually abstain from forethought, and upon which, when they are called upon to deal with it, they find themselves without definite ideas. The English people have a lively appreciation of funerals ; they are among the chief of the more elaborate pleasures in the lives of a quite large class ; and with their accom paniment of sumptuary indulgences, the union of scattered relatives and friends, solid eating and drinking, and a general loosening of the purse- strings, they are the nearest approach to a high festival that occurs in many a drab life. One of the things which most closely bound Queen Victoria to the mass of her people was her splendidly instinctive funeral sense, if I may so put it ; crape and coffins became almost symbolic of domestic and civic virtue, and her letters and diaries reveal how closely the great Queen was in sympathy with the feelings of her people in this matter. She P 225 NEW LEAVES dearly loved a funeral ; and although her position made it impossible for her to be in actual attend ance at many, she made up for it in reading and writing about them. There is indeed a touch of the undertaker in us all. I myself have outgrown my innocent love of funerals, as I have lost my infant joy in slaughter-houses and other delights of the golden age ; but I can remember the day when the sound of a tolling bell and the sight in the distance of a black and white procession emerging slowly from a church porch would set me running headlong, sick with apprehension lest I should be late. I suppose that one explanation of this is that when one is young and happy and grief is missing from one s experience one blindly craves for and seeks out its symbols, in the instinctive knowledge that it is one of the constituents of human life which, without it, is incomplete. But the fuller one s experience of real life becomes, the more willing, I think, one is to avoid all indulgence in these merely dramatic expressions of its experience. But I have been wondering lately if funerals and memorial services need be quite such de pressing and disheartening ceremonies as they too often are. For the social world of London the memorial service in some West End church has taken the place of the ordinary funeral, and it is to the conduct of these services that I particularly wish to draw attention. Of the last five which I 226 CONCERNING FUNERALS have attended, there has been only one which did not outrage my sense of dignity and of man s proper attitude in the face of death. It is not so much the service itself which is at fault, as the manner and rendering of it. One of the justi fications of ritual is that the average person cannot be trusted to give a dignified or seemly expression to his own emotions. The emotions may be poor, feeble, frightened, pitiable things, but the ritual encloses them as in a casket, hidden from all uncomprehending eyes, and, gathering them with others with which they have a common inspiration, presents them united in grace and dignity. That is what should be, and all fine rituals are impersonal. The English Burial Service, although less tremendous and impersonal than the Roman Requiem Mass, provides, without the committal portion, a perfectly dignified memorial service. For ninety-nine out of a hundred Eng lish people there is indeed no possible alternative. Attempts to improve on it are almost always a failure. It is sometimes thought necessary in the case of people of unorthodox views, or of scep tics, to invent something in the way of a service that will be in harmony with what the deceased believed ; but the results are generally ghastly. Who can say what the poor dust believed in his secret soul ? Yet many of us have had painful experiences, probably at Golder s Green, of the ethical young man in half-clerical attire who reads 227 NEW LEAVES emotional poetry, or pages of lofty but aggressively agnostic morality, or sentences from Emerson. Anything more awkward or unsatisfying could hardly be imagined. In every sense, even the purely literary sense, the ritual is better. For my own part, on that ground alone, if there is to be reading aloud over my dead body, and it is a choice between Emerson and St. Paul, give me St. Paul. The truth is that this desire to be buried with rites different from those adopted by one s fellow-men springs from mere intellectual pride, from egoism and vanity. Some people seem to think that it is taking a cowardly advantage of a dead agnostic to read over him the Burial Service of the Church. But the national Church is, or should be, the spiritual mother of all her children, whether they are bad or good, whether they stay at home or wander away into lonely or rocky places ; and it is not the literal meaning of the words used so much as the spiritual gesture with which she lays them to rest that should consecrate to all alike the ritual form employed in doing it. It has now become the fashion in West End churches to make the Burial Service as much like a lamentation as possible. The modern fashion, inaugurated by a sentimental choirmaster, is to sing the whole thing almost sotto voce. The breathy voices of little boys murmuring almost inaudibly to an accompaniment of shimmering organ string- tones, " Before the mountains were brought forth, 228 CONCERNING FUNERALS or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting and world without end," are to be heard on every such occasion. If hymns are sung on these occasions, they are almost always unsuitable hymns. " Peace, perfect Peace " a hymn totally lacking in the strengthening and heartening recollections demanded by the occa sionis sung at nine out of ten of these services ; its effect is purely sentimental, of a kind to assault people s feelings, and to make those who have been bravely controlling themselves cry. Moreover these hymns are as a rule sung so softly and with so little support of organ tone that it is impossible, even for those who wish to do so, to join in them ; so that the tonic effect, after an impressive ceremony, of singing some simple and stately hymn in chorus is entirely lost. Thus the whole thing defeats itself even on the dramatic side. The dramatic effect of singing some simple and not too gloomy hymn to a familiar diatonic tune that everyone could join in, would be, and is, when it is employed, magnificent ; but to take leave of one s dead amid snufflings and whimperings is the reverse of everything that is manly, and a negation, I should have thought, of the Christian spirit. The terror and abject penitence produced by the Dies Irce is one thing, but the tearful self-pity of the mood in which " Lead, kindly Light " leaves the average funeral congregation is quite another. And sometimes the hymns 229 NEW LEAVES chosen are flagrantly out of harmony with con spicuous qualities of the dead. At a recent ser vice commemorating a brave and gallant spirit the congregation was asked to sing on its knees (and of course sotto voce) a whining and whimpering appeal to the Almighty that when our own time came He would remember it in our favour that we had bowed here on our bended knees ; that we had owned His presence ; and that far from deny ing Him, we had had the discernment above less perceptive people to glorify His greatness. The attempt to strike this miserable bargain was fol lowed by a demand for light, and honour, and glory, and also for consolation consolation not at the loss of our friend, but for our own approach ing death. And the beautiful balance of the service itself was totally destroyed by the inter- spersion of fourteen verses of doggerel litany in this manner : " Thou who didst let fall the tear On the grave at Bethany ; Who at Nain didst stay the bier That lone Mother s tear to dry," which was sung at a faldstool by one of the offici ating clergy, with a chorused intercession by the choir. The number of people whom I heard expressing something like disgust at this service was considerable. What is wanted is a Master of Ceremonies whom 230 CONCERNING FUNERALS people would consult on these occasions, who would translate what they wish into what is possible, and what they think would be effective into what is really effective ; who would be supreme over clergy, choir, and organist ; who would see that the hymns are sung with breadth and dignity ; that the music performed is both sober and solemn, and is not merely emotional and sentimental. Failing this, I strongly advise everyone who desires at his own death to spare his friends the distress of one of these performances to give the matter half an hour s serious consideration now, and take a sheet of notepaper and set down his wishes in the matter in some detail not only as to what he desires to be done, but also as to what he desires to be left undone. 231 XXIX MEDITATIONS IN A HANSOM THE other day I went for a drive in a hansom, just for fun, as I might have gone in those days when to drive in a hansom was rather smart and exciting, when arrival in London was associated with the sensation of smooth and digni fied rolling from the station in a spick-and-span vehicle, and with meditations on the strange Eng lish of the printed request : " Please not injure the cab/ And in my drive the other day I re covered something of those early sensations. I had an unwonted sense of dignity, as of someone who should be carried about in a sedan-chair. I felt as if I were going for a drive in a picture, in one of those old illustrations drawn before the snap-shotting camera had destroyed people s eye for the appearance of things, when horses were all arched and curly, and wheels were oval, and all things were pictorially represented, not as they actually were, but as they appeared to be. And I felt also as if life were not such a desperate hurry after all ; that I had a great deal of time to spare time to think, to observe the clouds in the sky, 233 NEW LEAVES the expressions on the faces of horses and men, the cool alertness of birds hopping about the streets among the wheels and hoofs, and a hundred other interesting and agreeable things. I had forgotten, of course, the particular nervous afflic tions of the hansom days the horse that always backed and staggered when one was getting in, the strange contortion one had to make to avoid entangling one s hat in the reins and striking it against the roof of the cab, the dreaded dangers of a broken glass, the driving of rain into the cab, and the frantic attempts to push open the trap on the top when it was loaded with the driver s personal effects, the trickling of water down one s knees through defective joints in the apron, and so forth. These things were afflictions in their day, but the sting of them has departed, and another set of afflictions has taken their place, worse, I think, because less natural and human. The discipline of the hansom was a good discipline, exercising both our ingenuity in the avoidance of suffering, and our patience in putting up with it when it was inevitable. But once we were safely inside the hansom we knew that there was an inter val of comparative peace, an interval in which to meditate and to observe. Thus sitting calmly in the hansom, I also be came aware of an unwonted ease and relaxation of body ; my muscles were not all braced up and rigidly strained in order to keep my body securely 234 MEDITATIONS IN A HANSOM wedged in one corner of the vehicle. The easy rocking of the hansom was like the rocking of a boat, to which I found my body swaying gently and, I trust, gracefully. When the hansom turned a corner I was not hurled over from one side to the other ; moreover, with all the length of the horse and some of the hansom in front of me, it was plainly advertised to me that we were about to turn a corner, and I had plenty of time to ac commodate myself to a new direction. The taxi, on the other hand, turns suddenly at right angles without warning and, if it be lined with shiny leather, leaves you bruised against its hard side. Another thing that I enjoyed in my hansom ride was the sensation of seeing a great deal. I was able to look out of the windows at the side and see what was going on all round me as well as in front. But we all know what happens in a taxi or any other kind of motor. The occupant stares rigidly and anxiously straight in front of him, like a cap tain on the bridge of a ship in a fog. We dare not look to right or to left for fear something should cross our path in front. We go through all the nervous exhaustion of the actual driver with the additional agony of knowing that we are helpless to check or guide the vehicle. Taxis have made motor-drivers of us all ; and everywhere in London not only the licensed driver with his enamelled number, but thousands of other people without training or licence cripples, the deaf and the 235 NEW LEAVES dumb, children and old ladies are painfully driving taxicabs through the crowded streets all day long, and, in imagination at any rate, suffer ing all the nervous wear and tear of the man who sits at the wheel. But when we sit in a hansom we are not in imagination driving a horse ; we are looking about us and seeing the world. I was grateful to the taxi strike for this benefit among others that it lifted for a moment the veil that is descending on the immediate past, and allowed us to compare it with the modern development which we are always too ready to call progress. Of the merits of the dispute between the drivers and the owners I will not speak ; the opinion of a man sitting in a hansom, and prefer ring it, would perhaps not be regarded as valuable. I am content to be merely grateful to the drivers for showing us that they are not in the least essen tial to existence in London, and that during the few days they were idle London was a quieter, more convenient, and more agreeable place. The merits of the taxi are almost all concerned with the illusion of time. Everyone thinks nowadays of doing everything in as short a time as possible, of extending life, that is to say, in one dimension. But the dimension of time is probably the least important dimension of life. Breadth, intensity, fulness do we try very hard to extend it in these dimensions ? I don t think we do ; and I very much suspect that the modern craze for the time 236 MEDITATIONS IN A HANSOM dimension merely results in a compression in other ways, and that what we gain in length we lose in breadth. When I used to drive home in a hansom from Fleet Street in the small hours of the morning it used to take me at least half an hour ; modern progress would enable me to cover the distance now in about twelve minutes ; but in the old way I had half an hour of solitude and detachment in which my brain could work upon its own affairs. In the taxi my brain is not free ; it is driving a taxicab, and alternately preoccu pied and distracted by the business of the streets. Who meditates in a taxicab ? What quality of thought can one enjoy in it ? For answer, look at the people you see driving in taxis and motors ; observe the motor stare, the stony gaze mechani cally intent on what lies straight ahead ; the answer lies there. But although I steadfastly believe that what I have written is true, observe the unhappy result of hurry. As soon as the truce came in the taxi strike, I was back again riding in taxicabs. The hansoms were still there for me, but I should not have been happy in them ; I could not have en dured the taxis flashing by me. It would be an affectation and a vanity to pretend that I want to go more slowly than everybody else. What I wish is that everyone would go more slowly ; but if everyone else hurries, why, I must hurry too. And there is the mischief of it, the unhappy result 237 NEW LEAVES of what we call progress when it takes the form of hustle and hurry. Such things are epidemic, and tend to make people discontented with what really suits them very well. Half the haste we make is absolutely unnecessary ; it is an infectious disease which we catch from each other, and if there were no railway trains and no motor-cars, the human business of the world would get itself transacted at least as well as it is transacted with these aids to haste. Every new stage of development we are apt to regard as final. " The taxi has come to stay." This, I am glad to say, is a lie ; the taxi has come to depart, as the sedan-chair departed, as the cabriolet departed, as the hansom is departing. Who knows but in ten years I may be taking a ride in a taxicab through the streets of London, and writing another set of meditations, and lament ing the happier days when people could be driven about on the solid earth instead of being whisked up into the air, or subjected to some radial pro cess by means of which they may be translated rather than conveyed from place to place ? It is better, perhaps, to love the hour and make the most of it than to waste emotion in hopes or re grets. But the taxi strike was part of the hour, and the momentary restoration of the hansom cab ; and I think I have extracted my share of profit and delight from it. Certainly as I drove on this fine autumn day 238 MEDITATIONS IN A HANSOM through the busy streets I had an extremely agreeable and entertaining vision of things not only of the things that change from year to year, but I hope also of the things that, if they are not eternal, at least seem eternal to our transient glances. The unending river of human life in the streets, perishing and renewing itself almost before one s eyes, the driving purpose in all those human breasts, the uncomprehended impulse that was sending them hither and thither by hundreds and thousands upon so many various errands ; the labour in every form labour which almost alone among human occupations seems to be worth while as an end in itself such things as these were more apparent to me from my hansom, trotting soberly along by the kerb, than to the occupants of the swift motors that keep passing me by. And I had a quite unusual pleasure and zest in the sight of a little group of workmen at work on road- mending in the very middle of Regent Street, who were sitting round a can of blazing coals, eating their dinner, with nothing but a frail barrier of cords dividing them from the roaring, swift stream of wheels and snorting engines all about them. And it is in gratitude for visions like this that I feel inclined to echo, with a clear though useless emotion : " Please not injure the cab/ 239 XXX ON MISSING A TRAIN THERE are certain accidents in life which, although they cause annoyance at the time, are a means of procuring for us ex periences outside our original programme which often turn out to be of advantage to us, and which have the value of all things that are bestowed on us unexpectedly and that seem like additions to our reasonable share of good fortune. Every one can remember in his or her own experience some such apparent disaster, of a greater or less degree ; it may have been an illness, or a dis appointment, or a loss, about which we are able to say afterwards, " But for that accident I should never have known So-and-so, or done or possessed such-and-such a thing/ The secret of what is called a philosophical mind lies in the conscious realisation of this fact ; in the belief that life con sists for most of us in an average of fortunate or unfortunate experience, and that the things which seem at first sight most fortunate are apt to turn into something very different, while apparent disaster is generally compensated by some corre- Q 241 NEW LEAVES spending or resultant advantage. The fact is a commonplace of copy-book moralities. It is the realising it, and the belief that it will really work in our own lives, which is rare enough to make those who possess it seem to be endowed with an extra degree of wisdom and intelligence. No one, not even the professed philosopher, really likes missing trains. To run after some thing which is not there is a futile proceeding ; the late arrival for a train is apt not only to look, but, what is worse, to feel both undignified and foolish ; and as there has most certainly been a precedent condition of haste, neither the nerves nor the temper are likely in a normal person to be in the best condition for accepting misfortune gracefully or calmly. And that is why I would like to point out that the missing of a train, which we generally regard as an undiluted, although per haps slight, misfortune, need not as a rule be re garded as a misfortune at all. True, one s plans are dislocated ; and that is so annoying to some people that if they are going to pay a visit in the country and miss a train they are quite capable of abandoning the whole visit. But it is not such a bad thing to have one s plans dislocated, especially if they are only plans for pleasure. One is obliged to make new arrangements on the spur of the moment, which is always a good thing, awakening alike to the faculties of invention and resource. To the modern mind the chief trouble is that a 242 ON MISSING A TRAIN space of time, probably one or two hours, lies unmapped and unplanned before us ; and there are many to whom such an interval between two pre-arranged events in their time-table represents sheer vacancy and waste of life. My suggestion is that it should be regarded as pure gain. The train you missed left at three, and there isn t another till five ; you will arrive at your destina tion in time for dinner instead of tea, and so escape the tiresome, dawdling couple of hours at the beginning of the visit. Here, however, at the other end, are two hours absolutely added to your day, given to you to use and enjoy entirely for your own private advantage. That, I submit, is, in such circumstances, the proper way to look upon the accident of missing a train. Your first duty is to telegraph to your destina tion. Failing to arrive by the train one has mentioned is so commonly caused by the accidental missing of it that people should by this time have learned what to do when guests fail to turn up at the station ; but in fact they hardly ever do. The trap goes to meet you at the other end ; and when you fail to appear, instead of finding out when the next train is, and putting up near by and return ing to meet it, the coachman generally returns to headquarters and reports your non-arrival. It is then just too late, or the horse is too tired, for the trap to be sent back to meet the second train, 243 NEW LEAVES and you are thrown upon the resources of the local livery stable. It is a curious fact that the number of trains running to country places is so cunningly devised in proportion to the length of the jour ney and to the distance from the station of your friend s residence, that a telegram despatched im mediately after the train s departure just fails to arrive in time to prevent a horse-drawn vehicle setting forth to meet you. Motor-cars, it is true, have considerably mitigated this aspect of the mis adventure ; but even motors have a way of start ing unnecessarily early, either to collect parcels in the town or to take some departing person to another train. Anyhow, most railway time-tables were designed before the days of almost universal motor-cars, and the railway companies could not be expected to foresee their advent. Nevertheless, you send the telegram and dis charge your conscience. Having then disposed of your luggage and opened a credit account with the porter who performed prodigies of unavailing speed in trundling it to the closed gates, you set forth from the station a really free man or woman for the next couple of hours. No one except a real enthusiast about railways would think of re maining in a station, for that way lies depression, weariness, and probably indigestion. No, you go forth into the town and for once look about you. I can assure you that the environment even of Liverpool Street or Waterloo may provide you 244 ON MISSING A TRAIN in such circumstances with entertainment at least as engaging as that of Brighton or Scarborough. Usually one only sees such neighbourhoods when beginning or finishing a journey, and has no time to wander about and study them ; yet there are all kinds of interesting and unaccustomed sights there, and you have within yourself the pleasant and unwonted sensation of being in a place not because you are passing through it, but for the simple reason that you choose to be there. There are, it is true, other methods of employing this holiday interval. If you are enterprising enough, and have a sure enough hold on the time-table, you may take a journey by a slow train along your line to some intermediate station at which the later train will also stop, and, alighting there, explore a new town and a new world. It is an adventurous thing to do, and may turn out well ; you may make the discovery of your life in Chip pendale or Jacobean oak. But you must be pre pared also for its turning out unfortunately. The railway stations of small provincial towns have a way of being very remote from what is really the centre of the town the church or the High Street, or the river, or whatever it is you want to see. A long and depressing road leads from the railway station into an apparent labyrinth of sordid and equally depressing streets. You have an instinctive fear of cutting yourself off by too great a distance from the station itself. Mistrust of the time- 245 NEW LEAVES table seizes you ; for while the missing of one train may be turned to advantage, to miss two in succes sion indicates a certain unfitness for prolonged sojourn in this vale of tears. Also it may come on to drizzle, and it may be early closing day in the wayside town, and in that case the necessity of spending an hour without an umbrella in a wet and unknown country town where all the shops are closed puts you in a worse case than if you had remained under the steamy and resounding vault of the original railway-station. There are many ways, of course, in which the philosophy outlined in this article may be applied. If there is a stage on a journey which you have wished but failed to reach, you derive advantage from better quarters for the night and an early start in the morning. If there is a horse or a picture which you had set your heart on possess ing but which another has secured before you, well, you may regard yourself as being so many pounds in pocket, as having a sum to spend or give away which you would not otherwise have possessed. If there is an appointment which you hoped and failed to get you may console yourself by reflecting that those who had the appointment to give were obviously not intelligent people, and would not have been satisfactory to work with. And if there is a woman you had set your heart on marry ing, and she either could not or would not well, perhaps your moment was ill-timed and you missed 246 ON MISSING A TRAIN the departure of that particular train for happi ness. In that case also I would recommend not hanging about the station. Take a walk and see the sights, and come back again in good time ; perhaps she will have changed her mind and you may catch the train at last. In the final resort it is worth remembering that there are other trains, other stations, and other destinations ; although this is a somewhat desperate remedy, and is not to be regarded as bearing on the proper and philo sophical method of missing trains. 247 XXXI sSUNDAY AFTERNOON IT is different from any other afternoon ; it has a different melancholy ; as different from the dire and squalid gloom of Saturday afternoon as Sunday, which I always think of as showing a glossy black amid the spectroscope of the days, is different from the pale yellow ochre of Saturday. The sense of Sunday will be one of the last things to die in a race that has sat under the shade of Puritanism, and even those people who have never observed the rites of any religion are subject to strange recurring qualms every seventh day, and will be pricked by the desire to do some thing on that day which is different from their ordinary occupations. It needs no bell or calendar to tell the Anglo-Saxon that it is Sunday ; and even if he has forgotten it for the first few hours of the day, it will find him out towards three o clock in the afternoon. On ships far out at sea, on the burning sands of the desert, on the wide African veldt, in trains storming across the continents, men are every week suddenly remembering that it is Sunday afternoon. I do not know how it may be with others, but with me the sensation is 249 NEW LEAVES a depressing one. In fact the whole week-end is a very dangerous time. Things which would be grasshoppers on Monday or Wednesday become burdens on Saturday or Sunday. The attack sets in with acute symptoms early on Saturday after noon, when in certain quarters of any town there is a change in the note of the traffic, a kind of empty resonance in which the dreadful clangour of the barrel-organ echoes unchecked. You remem ber that it is Saturday afternoon, and therefore a rest for hundreds of thousands of toiling people, and you ought to be happy at the thought ; but somehow the thought does not make you happy. Then is the time that I am first threatened with panic. What am I doing this afternoon and this evening, and to-morrow afternoon and to-morrow evening ? A chasm separates me from Monday, when the wheel of life will begin to turn again ; and if no one has thrown a bridge for me across it I am certain to be engulfed. That there is something universal in these symp toms is shown by the pains people have taken to relieve them ; even for people who do not go to church there remains the instinct to do something regularly on Sundays. Hence the Sunday concert, which for so many people fills the unconfessed but none the less uncomfortable gap left by a cessation of public devotional ceremonies. The audiences at the Queen s Hall and the Albert Hall on Sunday afternoons are not audiences so much as 250 SUNDAY AFTERNOON congregations. They have the demeanour of con gregations, and they are congregations of a dif ferent religious persuasion. Queen s Hall is inclined to be High Church ; the Albert Hall is undoubtedly Low Church ; indeed, the appearance of the pave ment outside after the concert is over, black with a multitude of respectable people who have finished digesting a heavy dinner and are going home to eat a heavy tea, is like that outside some vast temple of dissent. But there the analogy ends ; the music inside is happily free from any taint of the atmosphere which it is meant to relieve ; and for thousands of people in London there is at least one hour in which Sunday afternoon is robbed of its terrors. Yet even here one is in continual danger of the black dog. The mere fact that one so often sits in a certain place on Sunday afternoon and hears certain music becomes dangerous for the music. What if one were to associate it definitely with Sunday afternoons ? Its charm and beauty would be gone ; it would merely call up in one s mind visions of the Albert Memorial or Langham Place, the frock coats that still seem to linger in the fashions of the Albert Hall congregations, and the unbridged gulf between now and Monday morn ing. But happily the music resists these dread influences, partly because at both concerts it is so extremely well chosen. I do not know whether they are aware of it, but the compilers of these 251 NEW LEAVES programmes have an infinitely more difficult task than they have when they make programmes for any other concerts. Are they aware of what they have to fight against ? Does Sir Henry Wood ever say to himself, " This will do for Wednesday even ing, but it will never do for Sunday afternoon ? " Consciously or unconsciously, I think he must ; because although his programmes have nearly always the spirit of afternoon, they never have the spirit of Sunday afternoon. And what is this spirit ? In my case, I am pretty sure that one reason for its depressing influence is that my childish memories of Sunday afternoon are chiefly memories of things forbidden. In the country especially, by the sea, my childish impression was generally that Sunday afternoon was a time terribly wasted. It seems always, more over, to have been absurdly fine ; the rain might pour or a gale blow on Saturday night or Monday morning, but the Sundays of my childhood seem always to have been of a superlative beauty, steeped in sunshine and stillness days perfectly adapted for doing all the pleasant things forbidden on Sundays. I remember coming out of church and finding the tide brimming up to an unwonted height, the sea like glass, and the stones of the shore visible through the green water to a depth of several feet ; the boats dreaming uselessly at their moorings, and all the little creeks and coves among the rocks, navigable only at high water of 252 SUNDAY AFTERNOON spring tides, perforce unvisited by my exploring keel. To Sunday afternoon also seems to belong that memory of the great heat stored up in the woodwork of a boat lying on the beach, and of the unwonted feeling of treading on the shifting pebbles on the beach in patent-leather Sunday shoes. The feeling, moreover, that a wet rope was a thing that might damage or soil one s clothes was a feel ing entirely associated with Sunday. My further grudge against these summer Sundays of long ago is that on those days I was a child ravished from my sea pursuits and forced to inland occupations ; obliged to contemplate the flowers in walled gardens, and take walks over rolling turf and amid groves of trees from which not even a view of the sea could be obtained. Church I accepted as in evitable and (granted the necessity of going there at all) not without interests of its own ; but the waste of the sunshine and the high tide out of doors was a thing that seemed unreasonable and unjustifiable. It is curious how false one s memory may be : for as in my recollection the Sundays were always fine, so was the tide always brim-high about one o clock a thing impossible in nature. And I remember no Sunday after noon which had that empty feeling, caused by the tide being low and the shore ugly with misshapen and unfamiliar seaweeds, that made even the sea distasteful during week-day hours. But I am grateful for the rule which obliged me 253 NEW LEAVES to do different things on Sundays from what I did on other days. I cannot help thinking that the modern fashion of allowing children to do only what they like is a bad one ; for there are many things which children are glad in after years to have done, which they would never do of their own choice and initiative. Among these, perhaps, the restrictions of Sunday and the appa rent waste of its golden afternoons may be counted. Something still and shining hovers on the hori zon of memory where they lie ; something that punctuated and divided life, solemnly perhaps, but simply and not unhappily. I was reminded of it when I saw in a visitors book in a little inn in Cornwall the verses in which Professor Blackie had sung the praises of Mary Munday s hospitality, enjoyed by him in that little cottage inn that lies between Mullion Church and the sea ; a place half hidden in the angle of the road, where the church dreams in a peace as of the eternal Sab bath, and no rumour or drift of spray from the shouting sea ever reaches the sheltered graveyard. " And I advise you all to hold By the well-tried things that are good and old, Like this old house of Munday ; The old church and the old inn, And the old way to depart from sin By going to church on Sunday." Certainly the Carlton and the Albert Hall are poor substitutes. 254 XXXII A MORNING ADVENTURE 1AM not what is called an early riser. On the other hand, I sit up late at night. It seems to me just as human and meritorious a pro ceeding, although the copy-books give one no credit for it. It has always been a custom to sneer at the man who lies abed while the rest of the world is up and doing ; but the merits of the man who remains up and doing while the rest of the world is snoring under blankets have never been sufficiently recognised. Such is the force of inherited prejudice, however, that I feel no pride in my nightly feat of sitting up reading or talking till the small hours, whereas, if by any chance I do get up fairly early in the morning, I am filled with an unwonted sense of virtue and heroism, and behave as if I accepted all the conventional superstitions that a man who rises early has a sense of buoyancy and clarity of mind, and in spires in these early hours a store of energy lasting throughout a long day. The truth with me is exactly the contrary. If I sit up till two in the 255 NEW LEAVES morning and rise at nine, I feel fit and well and have as much appetite for work as it is possible for me to have, and a zest for any kind of amuse ment that the day may bring which is, I am glad to say, unfailing. If, on the contrary, I go to bed at half-past ten and get up at six I spend the night in stark wakefulness, and go out into the world with a sense of heroism, it is true, but also with a slight sense of dissipation. I have a faint burning sensation in the eyes, feel strangely languid and drowsy, am incommoded by the sensation that I have swallowed and am carry ing about with me a smouldering coal, have no appetite whatever for breakfast, and pro bably doze off into an uneasy slumber about 11 A.M. Mere early rising getting up before other people, that is to say seems to me an overrated virtue, chiefly esteemed as a means of getting the better of other people. We all know the proverbial breakfast of the early bird. Well, I do not want the fattest worm ; I am more than content that someone else should have it ; and a little bit of a quite lean one will do for me, provided that I am let alone to choose for myself what I think desirable, and to fix the standard by which I shall measure my own wisdom or folly. All the same, as I say, I got up this morning and went out to taste the first breath of summer in London streets that were strangely unfamiliar. 256 A MORNING ADVENTURE All the houses in my neighbourhood were shut and shuttered as in the middle of August ; the streets were almost empty except for a few pedes trians of an unfamiliar kind. A group of house breakers were assembling to begin their dusty job of destruction ; a chimney-sweep was wheeling a little hand-cart full of brushes and soot, with the legend " Established 1851 " painted on it ; and this furnished me with some reflections on the nature of pride, and on how, even in being a chimney sweep for three score years and ten, there may be something more than labour and sorrow. Cats sat unashamed in the middle of roadways which at other hours are filled with the brimming tide of wheeled traffic, and there were long un wonted vistas, such as the lion on Dickens and Jones shop in Regent Street seen in a perspective from Park Lane, a suggestion of blue hills filling the opening of Orchard Street, and the spire of Harrow Church standing apparently at the end of Park Street. There were no taxis nor motor- omnibuses running, but I found a hansom which took me at an agreeable trot along the empty streets. And the first discovery that I made was that London, at any rate in the West End, goes back to her more innocent ways in these early morning hours. Motor-cars are almost entirely absent, hansom-cab drivers, milkmen, dustmen and costermongers alone occupying the thorough fares, and there is peace and silence, and a taste of R 257 NEW LEAVES the old thrill of a more sober, spacious, and digni fied London. My destination was Co vent Garden, for I had never seen Covent Garden in the early morning ; that being one of the many exciting and agreeable things which all Londoners are supposed to have done, and many pretend to have done, but few in fact have done. All the rest of the West End was deserted, but in the neighbourhood of Garrick Street my hansom was blocked by a line of carts bearing fruit and flowers and vegetables. Here I met a friend by appointment, and together we strolled for a little round a network of streets all of which were entirely filled with carriers horse- drawn carts. Whoever else was asleep, there was plenty of life going on here, and as yet we were only on the outskirts. How the traffic changes from hour to hour in these narrow London thoroughfares ! One hour of the day they will be traversed by heavy motor- vans, and those huge waggons that the railway companies scatter from their stations ; at another hour there will be nothing but lines of carriages and motors and taxicabs, with shining lamps and varnish, and throngs of liveried servants ; but now there was nothing but the smell of flowers and fruit, and brilliant splashes of colour, and horses tossing their nosebags, and all the ancient busi ness of collecting and distributing the fruits of the earth. One was continually being jostled 258 A MORNING ADVENTURE by people bearing pine boxes which might con tain any edible vegetable thing from onions to strawberries, from mushrooms to asparagus ; the wilderness had blossomed like the rose, and the morning air smelled like a garden. All the porters and burden bearers were engaged on the same business, and knew and greeted each other ; but we felt like idlers and strangers who had strayed into a foreign city where we did not know the language. As we drew nearer to the centre of this great commotion of flowers and fruit the throng became denser, and the menace of wooden boxes swiftly borne on broad shoulders became greater. I have said that the scene was curiously foreign ; and so it was, but only perhaps because a Londoner is more familiar with such scenes in foreign places than in his own town. There were certainly two particularly English characteristics in the occasion. One was its silence. There was practically no shouting, and not much conversa tion, and as the commodities were all being carried by hand from the market to the waiting carts in the adjacent streets there was little sound of traffic other than of feet on the pavement. In any foreign town there would have been yelling and gesticulating, a carnival of sound as well as of movement. Even in Ireland or in Scotland what I remember of such morning scenes is that they are accompanied by loud shouting. But here the swift streams of movement ran quietly, and those 259 NEW LEAVES who greeted each other did not need to raise their voices. And the other notable thing was the extraordinary order and efficiency with which the whole business of transportation was carried out. Everything, even the purchase, seemed to have been settled long ago. It was as if people were carrying out, not a commercial transaction of the moment, but a law of nature as old as mankind. The organisation was perfect ; it was not an arti ficial or a disciplined organisation, but a natural organisation. In France or Germany or Belgium, for example, there would have been policemen and officials at every corner ; queues would have been formed, and the whole business carried on under the iron hand of authority. But here the order was natural and spontaneous, like that of people long used to seemly and efficient ways. Out of this great cornucopia a delicious plenty of colour and light was flowing in immense volume, and in every direction, but, as I said, the organisa tion was spontaneous ; the flood had not to be kept in by dykes and groins and embankments ; it ran in natural channels that Time and itself had worn, and ran without inconvenience or risk or confusion. And now I am nearly falling asleep, having done little justice to my theme. For that you must blame this indulgence in the virtue of early rising, and the " fact that when I should have been quietly asleep in my bed I was idling and 260 A MORNING ADVENTURE dissipating among the flowers. The next time I go to Covent Garden I shall stay up all night ; I shall then merely go to bed a little later than usual, and rise a little later a much more orderly proceeding. 261 XXXIII CHRISTMAS PRESENTS CHRISTMAS shopping is an invention of the devil whereby people are induced to pur chase things that are of no value, and give them to other people who do not want them. It has also the effect, during any of the four weeks preceding Christmas, of turning the purchase of any simple article in a shop into an adventure that is something between a battle and a night mare. For the shopkeeper at this season thinks it necessary to put into the background the more or less useful things which it is his habit to sell, and to import into his shop a quantity of flimsy rubbish known as " The Season s Goods/ " Suit able Gifts for Xmas/ " Useful Presents/ and " Artistic Gifts." Not one in a hundred of these articles is either useful, artistic, or seasonable. Most of them are substantive lies, made to look passably like the thing which they imitate for about a week. After that, fortunately, they begin to disintegrate ; for if Christmas gifts were not of a perishable nature the world would soon be piled so high with rubbish and shams that no true or 263 NEW LEAVES genuine thing could exist on it. Here and there this transitory nature of the Christmas gift causes distress, as when the deluded recipient finds the gorgeous present coming to pieces in his hands at the first attempt to put it to genuine use ; but it is an apparent rather than a real affliction. Here and there, in the darker corners of any house you may come upon the Christmas present of a year or two ago in a state of arrested decay ; and a grisly relic it is. Parts of it resemble plush, and other parts tarnished gold or silver, other parts are almost unrecognisable ; but careful examination will probably reveal it as a re presentation of a pig stooping over a trough, and bearing a label with the legend " For what we are about to receive." What was its purpose ? Was it a pen- wiper, or a receptacle for pins, or for we must not flinch in our research was it possibly intended to contain salt upon the table, or was it an ash-tray ? Even echo does not answer. I have before me several advertisements on a page of a daily newspaper, all purporting to give me real assistance in the choice of Christmas pre sents. Here is a list from one of them, headed " Suitable Xmas Gifts " : carpets and rugs, fancy linens, down quilts, children s chairs, antiques, gramophones, Oriental ware, clocks and bronzes, electric lamps, fancy goods. Of course, I am greatly helped by this. I have now merely to decide for myself whether I shall give my friend some fancy 264 CHRISTMAS PRESENTS linen, a child s chair, a carpet, or an electric lamp. What I will not buy in any circumstances is fancy goods. I do not know exactly what they are, but I know them to be the abomination of desola tion ; and I believe them to be the shopkeeper s name for the things which he cannot even pre tend are of any use, and which do not even look like anything else on earth. Fancy Goods ! In what desolate fancy are they conceived ; to what degraded fancy do they appeal ? And here is a nasty thing : " Caned fire-screen. In birch, stained walnut, reproduced from quaint old model/ It is not itself quaint, or old, or walnut, you see ; and it is of course flimsy and perish able ; one of those turned knobs will almost in stantly disappear, and it will ultimately be found kicking about in some dark corner, and will trip up some unoffending housemaid whose indigent employer has failed to keep up her Insurance book, and will consequently be heavily fined and have to maintain her for a long time in hospital, so that he will be ultimately ruined and his chil dren go begging in the streets. And here is another list of suggestions also called " Useful Presents " : attache-cases, book-carriers, hand-bags, writing-cases, card-tables, " library re quisites of every description." These, if you are unlucky enough to receive them all, may be put to a variety of uses. You may either put the writing-case in the book-carrier, and carry it, or 265 NEW LEAVES you may put the hand-bag into the attache-case and pretend that you are an Attache, or you may fold up the book-carrier tightly, put it in the hand-bag, and put both in the writing-case into the attache-case and lay it on the card-table. As for the library requisites, you had better leave them alone. The greatest outrage I have ever suffered was in the reception of a Christmas gift in the form of a thing which I imagine to have been a library requisite. It was a mauve box which purported to be of leather, but in fact was fabricated in some preparation of dyed paper. It had an imitation gold clasp which broke off as I opened it. My deepest misgivings were fulfilled. It contained three compartments, one of them filled with many-coloured balls resembling small marbles, which on investigation proved to be an impure kind of sealing-wax. Another compart ment contained an ugly little instrument of imita tion silver, in which the balls were supposed to be melted ; another a seal, engraved with the initial letter of my name and fitted with a handle made of some explosive substance, pretending to be a precious stone. It was the cause of the only moment of doubt and disappointment I ever knew with regard to my secretary ; for when I asked her to take it away and have it destroyed, she said she would like to keep it. But the crowning terror of Christmas time is the calendar. Here it is, of course, on the page in 266 CHRISTMAS PRESENTS front of me : " Beautiful Art Calendars." You know them. There is hardly any kind of shop which does not at this time include in its wares a collection of calendars ; and there is no kind of ugly or false thing which cannot be adapted to the purposes of a calendar. The most familiar form, and not the least offensive, is a collection of large sheets of stiff paper held together by a coloured ribbon, by which they are to be suspended on the wall. A large legend in some kind of base lettering will probably announce that it is " To give you greeting." Underneath will be the word " January," with a photogravure picture of an old woman collecting sticks in the neighbour hood of a church, with either a line of verse de scriptive of the state of the weather, or a sentence from some prose work expressive of stalwart purpose in life. And somewhere in the corner there will be a faint little table of the days of the month. What may be on the other sheets hardly matters, for even in the most pious home the calendar is abandoned long before the middle of the year has gone. Through January it hangs crookedly from a gas bracket ; and through Febru ary also the January legend and picture are still exposed ; because the mechanical problem of turn ing the front page over the blue ribbon is regarded as insoluble, and to tear it off would be to spoil the calendar. Late in February, having become darker round the edges and curling hideously, 267 NEW LEAVES and having collected a deposit of dust, it is re moved to the kitchen, where the February page is exposed, revealing a woodland scene through which a little girl in a red cap is wending her solitary way carrying a basket. And having thus existed throughout March, curled by the kitchen heat almost into the form of a cylinder, it is suddenly removed on a cleaning day, is never replaced, and disappears thenceforth from the sight of man. But that is only one of the simplest forms of the Christmas calendar. Sometimes it takes the form of a little book the size of a postage stamp " for the waistcoat pocket," which will subsequently be found in the kind of drawer in which servants keep wire and corks and dusters and string and brushes. Or it may take the form of a dog, or a church tower, or a stuffed plush bear with eyes made of beads, or a very expensive leather case, or a pipe, or a little boat with sails, or a framed picture with the calendar inserted in the frame of anything at all, in fact. This is not a nice spirit in which to write of Christmas presents ; but after all it is only the shopman s idea of Christmas to which I take exception. I object to its seizure and exploita tion as a great commercial event. There is no joy in that or any real good for anybody. It is not a good thing to give employment to people in making rubbish, and it is as a lover of this season that I am grieved to see it made a festival of 268 CHRISTMAS PRESENTS ugliness and imposture. A world that sits sur rounded by a collection of sham articles sham in substance, base in design, false in sentiment, and vain in purpose, is putting too much on the bells when it asks them to " ring out the false, ring in the true." 269 XXXIV MR. JOEY VERY trivial beginnings come to great ends. Our beginning, twelve years ago, was in a shop in Great Portland Street, where I saw a small fox-terrier puppy whining in a cage, and suddenly realised that for the sum of thirty shil lings I could take him out of it. I paid, and took him. He disgraced me on the way home, and exposed me to indignant contumely. If I stopped to speak to him he cowered on his belly and whined ; when I tried to lead him on the leash he assumed the attitude of a tortoise, and had to be dragged along in such a way that humane people looked askance at me, saying, " There is a monster : even his dog knows his black heart, and will not follow him." I found that he suffered from both rickets and cataract. The second complaint was cured by a vet. ; the first gradually yielded to good food and fresh air, and to an apple suspended from a piece of string under the bough of an apple-tree, with which he was never tired of playing. And gradually, too, he began to dare to walk erect upon his legs, and not to 271 NEW LEAVES collapse if he were spoken to ; whatever memories of human cruelty were in his heart gradually faded from it, and gave place to a kind of sur prised conviction that not everybody wished to hurt him. But all the inconvenient things that a young dog can do, he did. The art of being sick was carried by him to amazing lengths ; he had stronger appetites, and a weaker stomach, than any dog I ever knew, and the moments which he chose for his demonstrations were wonderful in their combination of unexpectedness, inconveni ence, and humiliation for his owner. But his own humility was such that he invariably apologised for drawing attention to himself. The latter half of his body was entirely devoted to the demonstra tion of this humility. If he stood barking (for he soon learned to bark) with his forepaws planted firmly, his squirming rear-part would apologise for barking. When he ate, his tail wagged apology. When, an hour afterwards, he was sick, the tail vibrated like that of a rattlesnake. If he was drinking, and I happened to cough or make any sound, he would leave his bowl with dripping jaws, quivering apology for having presumed to satisfy his thirst. And there were other necessary and natural functions which he could in nowise be brought to perform except by a studied aversion of gaze on the part of his master, who, standing in the garden on a wet night, had to pretend to be studying the heavens. Every attempt to notice 272 MR. JOEY him evoked a silent paraphrase of the reply of Uriah Heep : " Thank you, sir ; we know our station, and are thankful in it." But that phase passed. Time taught him that he was indeed of some consequence in this world, and that he might retain his food without danger of appearing to be unduly presumptuous. And with this knowledge dawned an affection, a capa city for love and devotion, that proved to be the great theme and tragedy of his life. He had his doggy ways and appetites, but they were ever subordinate to the following of his human star or stars ; for happily there were both sun and stars in his heaven, and all shone benignantly upon him. It was his lot to spend many changeful and wandering years with me, now in this place, now in that : in railway trains, in boats, by strange firesides, in field and street, on roads and com mons. He witnessed the morning of the motor movement, and travelled many a thousand miles tucked under my left arm while I steered, know ing well that independent movement was not allowed, and staring always, with the true motor ing habit, out on the strip of road that flowed and wriggled before us, snuffing anxiously the while, and taking heaven knows what compli cated bearings, and registering endless smells and views, lest haply it should be required of him to retrace the long way alone. And after motor ing days were over it was long before he broke S 273 NEW LEAVES himself off the habit of leaping into any motor car he saw standing still ; for what he had early learned about motor-cars was that there was only one place to be, and that was inside them. Most of us know it now, but he knew it from the first. One of his great trials was the sea, for it hap pened that at one time I was much upon the sea, and it was a case of choosing whether to come and suffer, or to be left at home in stomachic security. He always chose the nobler part. When the dinghy came alongside the slip, his lips would draw away from his set teeth in disgusted anticipation, but he would leap in ; when it drew alongside the boat I sailed in he would be the first on board, and hastily, like a model passenger, retire to the depths, out of the way of hurrying feet and slatting ropes. Thereafter, when the floor on which he lay became unstable, he would uneasily shift his position, looking at me with reproachful eyes ; and presently, after moving rapidly over the floor boards with his back humped like a earners, would take his stand swayingly in a public position, and deliver himself over to the crisis in a way that indicated his intention of doing full justice to it. The rest would be an un easy, dreaming doze, with a final emergence on deck and snuffing of the land as we approached, and whining, barking, and tail- wagging threats to throw himself into the water and swim to the converging shore. 274 MR. JOEY Those were days of youth and adventure ; later days brought him, as they should, a sense of ease and security and dignity, in a world of love tem pered by hunger. For he had his besetting weak ness what dog worth the name has not ? His was ashpits. He would as soon have thought of drowning himself as of stealing at home ; but oh, the delicious combination of blood and sawdust at the door of a butcher s shop, and the grisly treasures to be snatched there ; and oh, the fear ful joys of heaps that appeared to be nothing but ashes and egg-shells, but that, in fact, like life itself, contained pearls of price for those who could diligently seek ! They were well worth the conscience-stricken return home, and almost worth the days of abstinence that followed. It is the time he spends in eating that a dog values not the quantity of nourishment he gets. He was dieted like a Marienbad patient, and his dinner consisted of carefully selected food of the finest quality ; but what was that compared with the long, barren chewing at a fowl s leg, or the guilty gulping of some unidentified organic sub stance that could be measured, not in inches, but in feet ? His earthly friends were supreme with him, but his god was his belly, and it was a god that instantly responded to any sacrifice offered to it. Latterly it seldom rejected any. His figure, since a fat fox-terrier is a misery to himself and his friends, was a matter of constant watchful 275 NEW LEAVES consideration and discussion. Members of his family who had been absent from him for a time would be eagerly asked if he looked any thinner, and it was considered tactless to say he did not. If he escaped for half an hour he would come back distinctly fatter, and be overcome by a strange and far from silent sleep. If it was thought that he had come down a little too fine, it could be put right in one meal ; but if he had to be reduced, it was a matter of anxious weeks spent on a task which might be frustrated by one moment s lack of vigilance. Yet no mess of food ever existed that he would not leave, and leave gladly, at the sound of a voice that he loved. If it is chiefly on his material weaknesses that I have dwelt, it is because his strength was spiritual and unspeakable ; because the affections of his heart, that were his true life, cannot be measured or described to those to whom he was not dear. And suddenly he died, falling like a shock of corn when it is ripe and perfect; without pain, without struggle, with the hands about him that had meant human care and protection and love. It is only to a friendly audience that one could speak of him, a,nd^ I like to think of my readers as not unfriendly to anything that is humanly concerning to any of us. I can raise no stone to him ; but I may be forgiven for making this little funeral celebration. He was a part of life as I know it. And as we do not live 276 MR. JOEY or grow gradually, so we die, not suddenly, but by degrees ; every parting is a little death. There are griefs that it is weak to indulge, idle to dwell upon, useless to communicate ; one can only try to change them into something else. . . . Where is he to-night ? Where shall I look for him ? Not in the empty basket ; not in his strange new bed under the orchard grass. Not here or there, I swear, but everywhere in the universe where there is love, and the happiness that love brings, shall that little spirit inhabit, as fresh and fragrant as the blossom of the apple- trees under which he rests. Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. Edinburgh &* London SPRING NOVELS Young Earnest By Gilbert Caiman Peter Paragon By John Palmer Columbine By Viola Meynell The Dark Tower By F. Brett Young The Child at the Window By William Hewlett The Sea-Hawk By Rafael Sababini Battles of Life By Austin Philips Years of Plenty By Ivor Brown The Final Selection By Barry Pain The Salamander By Owen Johnson MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET