Lonewood Corner. By John Halsham. New
York: E. P. Button & Co.
One of the marvels of English rustic life
lies in the rich material it still affords,
after such reapers as Walton, Borrow, Jef-
fries, Hardy, and the whole host of outdoor
chroniclers have loved and described its
mind and aspect. A poorer field would offer
scant reward to the most patient gleaner.
In dealing with this life, "Lonewood Cor-
ner" arrives at a certain charm from its
impregnation with the quality so grateful
to some palates of being unutterably,
deeply English. The author respects tra-
dition; he enjoys looking back. It is high-
ly characteristic that he despises Marcus
Aurelius ("Stodge" is the epithet he ap-
j plies) as "one of those people who can only
j think of infinity in one ^direction. t aa4f-it-
- ' -AJ01S
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-jaiua AV9A -3 lifts' st }i 'i^ 18ra ui
-ndo A- lS nojaisodaad a}mb saran W JI '
st n-e TiaqA puy -asn o^ ^nd aaaq uaaq
srao^sna mojj 'I91T
uaaq P^q ^^ 2uiq^AJ8Ag
aaaqdsora^ aq^ o;
enp ui ejB uadd^q iTJqi sSuiq^ aq; aoj i
iBjanaS aq; jo
si siq^ }
-an? pm? AaamiiTta aq^ aa pan^^P s 'saan
-u-em jo iaAou aqi s^uaos auo saran W '**
s^uapioui aq^ ^nq 'Jioiq^ AIJIBJ st
aqx 'uosBaa; PUB 'Sui^ai-POOW <8A l
PUB aAOi ana^ 'siBqBO lanoo sapisaq
30
LONEWOOD CORNER
ol apyo\ r}]v ttdvoiav
LONEWOOD CORNER
A COUNTRYMAN'S HORIZONS
BY
JOHN HALSHAM
AUTHOR OF "IDLBHURST"
Satius est . . , otiosum esse quam nihil agere
NEW YORK
E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY
3I WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
1907
PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED
LONDON AND EECCLES
NOTE
THE Author's thanks are due to the Editor
of The Saturday Review for leave to embody
here the substance of five articles which
have appeared in that Review.
961695
LONEWOOD CORNER
INTRODUCTORY
My DEAR PATERSON,
Ten years ago I addressed to you, and
through you to what we call the reading public, a
few pages by way of introduction to the country
journal which I named " Idlehurst." Here is
another book ready to go into the world ; and it
seems fitting, as both you and I have maintained
our fixity of place and of humours through so
considerable a portion of our course, that I should
mark our consistency in a fleeting scene by making
you in the second book fulfil the same office which
you did in the first. I have indeed moved my
tabernacle a few geographical miles, to drive my
stakes all the faster in the clay of the Weald ; and
you, though you no longer look over the Heath to
the great cauldron simmering under its fumes, yet
tell me that Golder's Green is practically Hamp-
stead still ; in all other conditions I think we may
claim to have resisted very fairly Time's alteration.
I B
LONEWOOD CORNER
And yet there is a large difference between the
antecedents of the first book and of the last.
" Idlehurst " grew together with an ease that seems
almost astonishing now, in desultory fits and odd
hours of summer out-of-doors ; there was, I sup-
pose, a certain amount of matter, the accumulation
of a good many years, undrawn-on and ready to
run over on to paper by a sort of capillary
attraction in the fingering of a pencil. With the
second collection, though there was no doubt
something of old material unexhausted, and some-
thing of new has accrued in the interval, the vein
never seemed to run with the unlaborious trickle
of earlier days. The reason is perhaps not far to
seek: the first papers were casual and irrespon-
sible, taken up and left at the sole instance of
humours and chances, with scarcely a thought of
public suffrages till they had almost come to full
shape. When an author has once spoken with the
world, that early ease and carelessness can never
come again ; the shield is suspended on the
pavilion, or if you like the figure better, the shutters
are down, and the adventurer is under the law of
the comparative. By the public I mean here not
the unknown vast into which an author pitches his
voice, the void which, for any human echo that
comes back to him, might be the primal chaos
itself ; but the tangible few here and there in the
profound candid friends and friends of friends,
strangers who turned into friends, one or two
2
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reviewers, material instead of vaguely kind, critics
casual but pertinent, heard of at the third or
fourth rebound from whom some sort of personal
answer has returned. It is these, I think, which
an author in the earlier stages of his career, at
least should have in mind ; more, perhaps, than
some more customary censures. For myself, in
presenting my new book, I take a good deal of
pains to consider the criticism of the old, as it
comes back to me from those points of solid mean-
ing in the intangible vast. I note a consensus of
feeling that there was no harm in the thing: a
general attribution of a sedative, if not a soporific
effect, acceptable in certain kinds of fatigue or
convalescence, and sometimes serviceable as a
nightcap : of a desultoriness which made it suitable
for reading piecemeal at odd times, together with
a certain homogeneous quality which has made
people sometimes quite unlikely people, as I
should have judged capable of reading it through
as much as a dozen times. These are charac-
teristics, among those which it is proper to discuss,
which I can admit at once ; a gift of mild-eyed
melancholy, though I fail to observe it myself, I
will not dispute against some very respectable
critics. In reply to a few hints that there are here
and there pedantic leanings to be discovered, and
a too liberal sprinkling of quotations and tags in
the dead languages, I would ask the anti-classical
rebukers to skip the offending scraps, and believe
3
LONEWOOD CORNER
that they are an old sort of Abracadabra spell,
which, even if it does not conjure, as some old-
fashioned people declare it does, is at least harm-
less to robuster minds, and may be avoided without
seriously dislocating the text. To ladies if there
be any still who are not learned I make no
apology ; I know how they appreciate the air of
those light italics which relieve the solid page.
It is critics with some such prepossessions as
these that I should wish to please, and that I run
the risk of disappointing, with my new collection.
I believe that I am at least conscious of the various
mishaps possible in the carrying out of the design ;
I know the Nemesis which not infrequently attends
upon continuations and sequels ; I recognise the
chance that all the lighter spirit which originally
worked to a perhaps half lucky result may have
altogether evaporated in the repetition, the just-
caught balance of humours may have passed into
a weighty pose. I know the sad declensions
unawares to disproportionate emphasis, to formula,
to sentiment, to sermons. You, at least, will not
accuse me of making light of the peculiar dis-
advantages of middle age ; you will have heard
me blame the unbent nerves, the hesitation about
sticking the point of one's mind into the middle of
sometimes tvvy-seeming truth ; I see that a man
may accustom himself to the pleasures of the
fallentis semita vita till, like a rabbit in the
poacher's wire, he hangs himself up through
4
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treading his one little track across the green
meadows of the world. Other habits and states
there are which hinder a free traffic in feelings and
opinions ; such as the natural lowering of tempera-
ture in one's enthusiasm, the temptation to love
irony for its own sake, the position in which I
have been for some time pretty well rooted that
one's adversaries in various sorts of debate have
ceased to count, while the main difficulties come
from the upholders of one's own side.
Against these discouragements I can set a
tolerable array of gains. Ten years can do a
good deal to condense the aqueous principle of
sentiment into solid bottoming of knowledge ; in
that space I find that humanity has supplied me
with support and proof to my theories in the
kindest possible way ; my dealings with books
(more and more among the untainted witnesses
of the old world) bring me continuous accessions
of confidence and ratifications of lucky shots.
Every day adds a touch to fill in the sketch-ideas
of the prime ; early notions, shooting out in seem-
ing-random right lines like the first growth of
ice-crystals on a pond, are crossed and recrossed
by others at all angles, and are presently meshed
up to a practicable solidity. (The illustration has,
no doubt, a suggestion of frigidity, but I leave it
to your good sense.) There is clear gain in the
middle-aged frame of mind which knows that
"il-y-a des pertes triomphantes a 1'envy des
5
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victoires," which can let the press go by, and is
content to serve with a clear-eyed courage that
mistress who neither grants nor refuses anything,
neither follows nor flies. And, lastly, there is gain
in a detail of the domestic management of one's
mind, the usage of reserve so that a man may
keep open house, and let the world have the run
of his hall and stairs, his picture-gallery or library,
may admit accredited people even to a private
parlour, yet keep the key of a room or so to
himself, perhaps even have a little oratory in the
heart of the house, unsuspected behind the secret
door in the panelling.
I have admitted that there may be dangers in
the making of continuation or sequel-books ; but
perhaps after all the present volume will be found
to follow its predecessor at a safe distance. You
will see that the ten years have shifted the scene
and changed the persons. My walks are no more
in Arnington ; and even if they were, I could not
have drawn many of the old faces. The Rector,
talking of having been too long on the ground,
has gone away to a small living in Lincolnshire ;
Alice is married in India ; Bob is working on a
railway in Natal ; Margaret Fletcher is a nurse
in the North ; Gervase French is in London,
gone out of my ken. Others of the old company
I sometimes see for a moment at street corners
and over cottage gates when I make one of my
rare visits to the old neighbourhood. Bish touches
6
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his hat the battered billycock of the past from
the wood-pile at Dogkennel, a little greyer and
more stooped than of yore, his face yet more
melancholy-lined, and we exchange hollow senti-
ments about the season and the crops ; Liza
Packham I doubtfully perceive in the roundabout
mother of six ; sometimes, at garden parties whose
net has made a wider sweep, I come across Mrs.
Kitty French or Mrs. Latimer, shadows of what
I recollect. The General is dead, and Tomsett
and Avery. Zero's successor already begins to
blink at me with eyes a little misty in the sunlight,
and I think to hunt the hedges with less furious
zeal. Only old Lucy, faithful still, but beginning
to fail a little, has followed to the new estate.
There are natural differences in the general
outlook upon our world then and now. The
frenzy of haste and the destruction of natural
beauty continue at much the old rate ; but I think
with even less protest raised than before : we are
so far poorer as a people that we cannot even
think of affording ourselves an hour of clear leisure,
or a piece of unspoiled country larger than a deer-
park. The older graces of living continue to
vanish in the natural progression ; the democratic
standards of decency and civility in converse, the
sense of amenity in being have mechanically de-
clined, very much as it seemed probable they
would ten years ago. But the general inundation
which I sometimes apprehended shows no sign of
7
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breaking over us yet ; it still seems imminent, to
certain kumours ; but the wave has now for some
while hung above us in a nodding fixity, like the
Red Sea in the old pictures of the passage of the
Children of Israel. The blight of flat monotony
still spreads upon our world, beginning from the
schools ; but there are energies of resistance and
sources of refreshment which I did not sufficiently
allow for in my former estimate. I have come to
the cautious conclusion that in this direction things
may last our time.
So much for variety in the matter of the book ;
I think you will also find differences in the handling
of it. I have proposed to take in a wider sweep of
the horizon with my spy-glass ; the doings of the
village and the fields have a more general reference
to the needs of humanity and the portents of the
time. You will find a good deal less about the
garden, and something more about people and
books than the former work contained. Altogether
I think that those who, like you, have once or
twice suggested a further chapter of " Idlehurst "
will find here something more than a mere decant-
ing of an old vintage under a new label. There
have been fresh gatherings of grapes ; and if there
were a few sour ones among them, in these pre-
cocious days a jar sealed down for ten years has
quite a claim to have digested its ranker humours.
If all prove flat in the drinking, as may well be,
for the grower, who has a taste for the plump
8
LONEWOOD CORNER
purples of his vine rows, is as a rule a poor judge
of the bin put it down to bad seasons, or unkindly
soil, or the influence of baleful comets, and do not
believe that the thinness is due to any dilution
of the old lees, or squeezings of remainder grape-
skins in the press.
You see that I have been beforehand with a
variety of exceptions, possible to be taken by you
and the critics which you so kindly typify for me.
If these defences fail, I retire to my impregnable
hold ; the book is a parergon, as all literature of
the tertiary rank and under should be. Say it is
vapid, irritatingly cocksure, precious, strains after
humour, meddles with matters above its range;
lay on and spare not ; you do not touch me. You
know all the time that my business is with my
turnips and onions, my Beurre pears, my pansies
and long-tailed columbines. The book goes out
by itself, a sub-product of the spade and hoe : you
may remember my old opinion that all authors
would be the better for an independence earned
among saladings and worts. For critics, too,
something of the back-bending discipline would
often be very salutary ; it would, for one thing,
show them the true place and possibilities of a
parergon. There is, in the " Itinera Phantastica "
of Carbonarius Secundus, a story of a hermit of
Lower Egypt, who cultivated onions near his cell
by the side of the Nile. He wrote a treatise on
the bulb, wherein he praised God for all its virtues
9
LONEWOOD CORNER
of taste and smell and comely proportions and
healthful properties, and for all the meanings
mystically contained in it its spherical, tunicated
form, its aroma, so mixed of bitter-sweet that as
he said he contemplated it SaKpvotv ytXaaag. He
extended his thanksgiving to ninety-nine articles,
and for all his pains was unable to excogitate a
hundredth clause. One morning he woke to find
that an angelic hand had filled in the hiatus in his
papyrus : he had forgotten to give thanks for that
onions were made with tails to hang them up by.
There is a moral of uses here which I leave to
your apprehension, though you may never have
bunched your onions in September sun, nor found
occasion to trouble your head to think what devices
a man may find in after-works, at the second or
the third remove.
10
II
January I.
IT is, perhaps, well for us to be taken up by the
roots and transplanted two or three times in our
lives, as certain shrubs in nursery-gardens with a
view to their better standing, as gardeners say,
the final shift. Though my last remove was not
accomplished without some rending of the stiffened
fibres, and I think that some part of me was left
behind in the familiar ground, yet sooner than I
could have fancied the wounds barked over, the
roots began to stir in their new station, to burrow
and lay hold round about them for the anchorage
and sustenance which must be found if there is to
be any more leaf or flower fruit, shall I say ?
from the old stock, as the sap moves at the season.
In the present case, the remove was not to any
great distance, in terms of space. In no very long
walks I still pass the old gate now and then, and
sometimes stop a minute to look over it. I have
not been inside it since my tenancy ended,
though the house remains empty and the garden
is fast going back to wildness. That is all done
with and put away in its proper place. To revisit
ii
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the borders I planted, the rooms I grew to, except
in the immunity of dreams, those night-long
summers whose magic air brings all our crude
remembrances together to a mellow unity, would
be too gross a confusion. If one must be a ghost,
disembodied and sent adrift, this at least remains,
to vow by Styx never to haunt and hang about
the old domain. Five miles away from the land-
mark fir-clump that for so many years set me my
course for home, and still beckons sometimes in
evening walks to the indocile mind, five miles away
as the wood-dove flies, is the new quarter into
which I begin to grow a narrower close and a
somewhat lowlier roof than the old, as befits the
shrinkage, natural to the increase of days, in
energy and in other material of life. I am again
on the outskirts of a village : I still enjoy seclusion
or society at my choice. Sheringham is not half
so large a place as Arnington, and is some ten
years behind it in its stage of growth. The
invasion of consequential cottages and modest-
simpering villas, which began to overpower the old
rustic grace of Arnington's looks, has hardly
reached the remoter settlement. Here are also
larger remnants of the old life and ways, excre-
scences which so far have escaped the jack-plane
of Progress. Above all things the place owns the
priceless gift of A CHARACTER, an idiosyncrasy
of talents and humours, a proper twist in ways
of seeing and doing, differences other than those
12
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by which its more progressive neighbours seem
distinguishable by the possession of a heavier
rate, that is to say, of a less considerable Parish
Council, of a more heatedly personal squabble
over the drains. In due time the rising tide will
no doubt overflow this higher ridge of the vanishing
shore; but meanwhile here is some dozen years'
respite from the crawling invasion and a dozen
years should suffice for a comfortable breathing-
space, perhaps even for the achieving of projects
of several kinds. The lesser circuit of my bound-
aries leaves me rather more leisure than I once
enjoyed. I find myself putting away my book
and strolling down to the village of a morning in
a way which not so long ago I should have called
mere slacking. In the new order of things four
years still leaves it new to a slow-moulded tem-
perament a feeling of detachment which is an
old failing grows stronger, a sense of walking
about among my kind, speculant, aloof. I find
myself, after the change in life that had run un-
broken into the fourth lustrum, more than ever
an onlooker ; I have no less interest in my neigh-
bours' concerns, I hope, but I observe them more
consciously from without. It is partly due to this
contemplative humour, perhaps, that I often end
my daily walks at the church, and by an estab-
lished understanding with old Lewry the sexton,
find my way through the dark tower-postern and
up the rickety ladders to the belfry. There
13
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among the huge crooked timbers, bleached by
centuries of wind and weather, with the bells,
silent monsters, at rest in the pits of their cage
beneath me, I lean on the edge of the trefoil
window, and in a compendious bird's-eye view,
consider the village spread out below. I have
had, for as long as I can remember, a liking for
belfries ; one of my earliest heroes was Moses
Branch, the little surly man who kept spades and
mattocks and certain ominous planking in a dark
hole under the tower at Sandwell, and was master
of the key of the winding stair, strewn with the jack-
daws' litter, leading to the ringing-chamber and the
giddy platform of the leads, whence one looked
breathlessly between the battlements over the flat
world, the dwarfed, slow-moving traffic of the
roads, the works of men, to the lifted verge of the
hills. Moses, I remember, dispensed the green
grease from the bearings of the bell-trunnions,
a sovereign remedy for the bad legs of the parish,
whose virtue lay as much, no doubt, in an attributed
sanctity as in its oxides. Here, as I clamber over
the frames, the clotted oil drips from the brasses
and soaks into the flooring, but no sexton's knife
scrapes it now for the needs of the good women in
the street. Our faith, when our legs are bad and
we are a much-afflicted race in that way is nowa-
days exercised on other, perhaps no less simple
medicaments.
From this pinnacle above the common levels
LONEWOOD CORNER
of mankind, where the swifts shriek in an ecstasy
of play as they whirl across the sun-baked southern
face of the tower, and the jackdaws come and go
upon their own devices with jerky inconsequence,
I watch the life of the street, of the yards and
gardens, the suburb fields, with my instinct of
detached speculation at fullest play. The point
of observation has its peculiar influence ; one is
here at the very heart of the parish, the centre
about which it has shaped itself for a thousand
years. I am in the secrets of the clock which
rules the republic down below ; the sudden stroke
of the hour, which sets a hundred labourers in the
fields to their dinners, or calls the children in to
school, is notified to me by premonitory clicks
and whirrings of the machine ; and visible tuggings
of cranks and wires prepare me for the uproar of
the halting chimes and the thunderous clang of
the tenor, whose note, a scarcely heard vibration
of melancholy sound, used at times to reach me on
the south-west wind in the garden under the fir-
clump at Idlehurst. The great bell, whose crown
bears the legend PRAIS GOD. 1601. still sounds
the knell to call the tenth generation to their place
where the headstones lean and weather, and the
unmarked mounds sink to the level of the grassy
plot below. The very masonry of the belfry has,
I cannot help thinking, a sort of sonority, that
answers the chance noises of the street the clink
of the smith's hammer or the rumble of the mill-
15
LONEWOOD CORNER
waggons with a peculiar retentiveness. I like to
think that this is due to the saecular vibration of
the bells, a sympathy of matter acquired in the
course of time. These ancient louvre-boards of
split and hoary oak have, I assert, a timbre of their
own, absorbed from the million rounds, backstroke
and handstroke, that have sounded over them to
the ears below Sunday chimes, lulling slumbrous
afternoons in harvest, or blown in gusty syncopa-
tions through the roaring elms ; all the wedding
treble-bob majors ; the melancholy changes for the
old year, heard over frosty fields ; the muffled
peals for the departed great ; the clash of the
" firing " for Trafalgar or Waterloo. The tower
has so long spoken to the street, and for the street,
that one may well take that material sympathy
for a probable opinion, at least.
From the height the village lies spread like a
map before me; the highroad, fringed with the
irregular line of comely cottages and self-respecting
houses which make up Sheringham Street, winds
away past the gates of the Park, the great house
half hidden in groves of oak and fir, across the
wide stretches of heathy common lying to the
south, towards the long wall of the Downs. The
street itself, embowered in old polled limes that
border the wide grass verges on either side, is still
sufficiently rural. The line of the houses is broken
by the purlieus of two farms, the grey and green
squares of whose fields are interchanged with the
16
LONEWOOD CORNER
cottage-gardens and yards of the hamlet. There
are but five or six houses of the better sort all
ancient, with tiled or timbered fronts, stone roofs,
and red-brick towers of chimney-stacks whose
outward look alone means security and repose.
The two inns, the Talbot and the Dolphin, and
the little beershop, the Crocodile, hang their signs
over the short stretch of brick pavement which
marks the forum, the busy centre of the commune.
Close underneath the church lies the Almshouse
our Hospital of Saint Mary and Saint John in
Sheringham of the foundation of Ralphe Noyes ;
its green quadrangle, the gaping mouths of its
chimneys, its mossed red roofs, its bell-turret, its
gardens, trim hedged and plotted out in little
squares ; its wood-yard, its Warden's lodge, are
all laid out, neat and fine as an architect's plan,
before the observer's eyes. About the court and
the gardens move the bent, slow-pacing figures of
the almsmen, or sit motionless an hour together
on the benches under the southern wall. At the
hours of the Rule the turret-bell calls the com-
moners to Chapel or to Hall ; and long after the
parish clock has told the hour, a slumbrous note,
like a bell in a dream, gives the little world its
own time. Sometimes from his Lodge comes the
Warden, spare, erect, abruptly moving, stopping a
minute to speak to one of the bedesmen at the
gate, and then with raised hand and quickened
pace striding into the greater world. He looks
17 c
LONEWOOD CORNER
up at the church tower as he passes, to mark the
time, and those piercing eyes beneath the bushy
grey brows, though a hundred feet below, seem
as though they must espy me in my covert under
the shingles of the spire. He makes no sign, but
passes on to the street, bound on pastoral errands,
which as locum tenens for the Vicar he has, during
the last year, added to his charge at the Hospital.
During an hour's watch from the belfry window
on a fine forenoon you shall see almost every
figure of our commonwealth. About twelve there
is a sort of excursus of the gentry of the street.
The Misses Walcot, the two old ladies from The
Laurels, take their morning walk to the Post
Office, punctual as the sun. Captain Prendergast
fetches his newspaper, and if affairs be strenuous,
unfurls it there and then, and reads as he makes
quarter-deck turns up and down the pavement
between the Dolphin and the Pond. From the
Park gates, in dowdiest country things, to do
her shopping, walks Lady Anne, whose ancient
barouche and reverend greys were never known
to appear before the hour of the afternoon drive.
A dashing, yellow-wheeled dog-cart brings down
from Frogswell Place Mrs. Sims-Bigg, one of our
leaders of society and a personage in politics, to
send off her telegrams and meet her trains. And
now that he is home on leave, Harry Mansel, with
his pipe and his dachshund, saunters down to look
at his mare at the Talbot stables, attaching himself
18
LONEWOOD CORNER
impartially to all he meets, Lady Anne or the
ancient sisters of The Laurels, and visibly welcome
to all.
At eleven o'clock the proletariat drifts from the
hod or the hoe to its morning beer ; the forge is
silent, the swish of the cross-cut ceases at the saw-
pit. There you may see, making towards the
Dolphin, Tom Prevett, our demagogue, a terrible
Radical yet a very honest man, surly, pugnacious,
entirely trustworthy, a tremendous worker, putting
through, with a touch of the heroic age, day by
day, year in year out, the work of three men of
this degenerate time. There is Jack Miles with
his inseparable lurcher at heel, the satyr-faced old
tatterdemallion whose career of oddly mixed good
and bad ends in unredeemed loafing about the
Dolphin yard and the slow soak of body and soul
in " twopenny." There is Tom Gates and a dozen
like him, " only labourers," chance workers at any
job that barely taxes hand or head : thriftless,
aimless, uncontrolled, drunk or starved by the
chance of a fortnight's wages ; an interesting class,
a product a portent, some will have it entirely
of our own making. There, too, not yet grown
superior to the forenoon habit of his youth, is
Mr. Alpheus Myram, their master "employer,"
the wise it call our builder, contractor and under-
taker, a District Councillor and the people's warden,
a man of views, who has dreams of a future
for Sheringham and bides his time for the fair
19
LONEWOOD CORNER
opportunities of local government on the proper
scale, when we shall be ripe for kerbed concrete
pavements and a drainage-schems oh noun of
sagest meaning ! There are other workers who
have no eleven o'clock recess, but are to be seen
punctual to their hours the year round ; old Abram
Reed the walking postman, who has done his
eighteen miles a day for twenty-seven years,
shuffles down the road with his wallet and sack,
to meet at the Crossways the higher official lately
promoted to a cart and horse. Elihu Dean the
carrier brings his van out of the Talbot yard and
begins to collect his weekly chaos of parcels and
errands for the county town, all sorted in that
black bullet-head of his without so much help as a
pencil-tick ; Alf Tulley mounts the box of the
conveyance which calls itself totidem literis, " THE
SHERINGHAM Buss," a hearse-like wagonette
with a top to it for bad weather, and whistling to
advertise the street, rouses his horses to a walk
and departs for the railway station and the great
world, four sound miles away. The doctor comes
from the surgery, takes the reins and slashes the
kicking mare whose play has been entertaining
the street, and spins away on his twenty-mile
round of cases, the rich variety of the country
practitioner, amputation of a finger caught in a
chaff-cutter, midwifery, measles, a typhoid outbreak
at Manvil's Green, the end of one cancer case, and
the diagnosis of another. The Warden, in his
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pastoral capacity, comes back from sick-visiting in
Jubilee Cottages, making slow progress up the
street with many tacks and crossings, pursuing
and pursued, hailing Mr. Churchwarden Myram
from the Dolphin steps, or held for five minutes
while Widow Roser, curtseying like a clock-work
toy, pours out her interminable complaints and
needs. Tomkins the constable comes from the
cottage where the inscription COUNTY POLICE
hides among vine-leaves and monthly roses ; an
officer stout and bucolic of aspect, but very effectual
for good, in a personal and paternal way not
perhaps altogether contemplated by the regula-
tions. No sort of justice has as yet been done
to the village policeman ; the difficulties of his
position, the importance of his personal character,
and his influence, preventive and monitory, in all
sorts of indirect ways, are still quite insufficiently
recognised.
Now all these characters, be it observed, belong
to the village itself a compact and well-defined
area in the midst of the real solitudes. Save on a
market-day, it is rarely that the genuine rustic,
the unmistakable weathered features and uncouth
figure, to say nothing of the long leggings, the
green cotton umbrella, the round frock, are seen in
Sheringham Street. The division between town
and country holds even here: in its degree, the
difference is perhaps as sharply marked as in any
other region. The two races seldom mix ; the
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older breed keeps apart, but is quietly disappearing
before the new. We no longer even see the sun-
bonnet of old Mrs. Gaston, which for a time defied
the modern hats of her peers in the street ; after
six months' sojourn with her daughter in Jubilee
Cottages, she went back to live by herself at
Beggar's Bush, a mile from the nearest house.
She could not afford to live down in Sheringham
Street, she said ; " you had to pay for everything
you had there ; " there was no windfall fuel after
a gale, no chance rabbit from the keeper, no eggs
from the half-dozen hens that foraged for them-
selves on the roadsides, no apples from the old
untended trees. Good reasons for going back to
the wild, no doubt ; yet one guesses at other
causes, to the full as cogent, if not quite so easy
to put into words. The magnetic attraction which
produces the Rural Exodus, as the tag-chewers
call it, has its repellent pole, and helps to widen
the gulf between old and new both ways. And
that exodus is not only towards the large towns :
there is a drift even into such a centre as our
village, which takes a man from the life of the
fields as completely and irrevocably as though it
had stranded him in the Tower Hamlets. There
is one way, however, in which our town and
country elements mix effectually enough. Morn-
ing and afternoon there goes up or down the street
the straggling procession to school and home
again. Loitering as only school-children can
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loiter, loaded with baskets, ancient umbrellas,
mother's marketings, dragging with them babies
committed to their charge, the rising race covers
its two, three, or four miles a day of field-path
across the swampy plough, of quagmire lane, of
blinding highroad dust, as chance and the seasons
provide, to and from the factory of minds, that
they may sit long hours on benches under blank
walls, droning in listless chorus half the morning,
and eat their bread-and-dripping dinner and play
their marbles in the street. And we, ingenuous
creatures that we are, who think that these matters
can be managed by the sort of brains adapted for
Post Offices and Boards of Works ; who, when we
find our codes and methods have been entirely
wrong for twenty years, allow ourselves to be
dashed by no base misgivings about our primordial
sapience, but rescind and remodel with yet more
perfect certainty for the elimination of one more
mistake ; we, I say, are justified in scratching our
heads, as I observe we begin to do, and wondering
why the carefully selected syllabus of rudiments
which the children are to learn and to be pre-
vented from learning, should for once result in the
precise character it was calculated to form.
I observe that my meditations in the belfry
have a way of ending in criticism of fundamentals.
Perhaps the sense of elevation here, the looking
down as one does from some other altitudes on
the heads of one's fellows in dwarfed perspective,
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encourages the censorial twist of mind. It be-
comes time to descend and mix again on the
levels with one's kind ; and presently, when the
last of the red-cloaked or long-legginged little
school-people have straggled up the street and
taken the country way home again by stile or
lane, I follow their track to the upland paths and
the wooded hill, to the beloved solitude and the
secret guarded in the silence of the waste fields.
Ill
January 12.
DURING the past year I have a good deal im-
proved my acquaintance with my neighbours, the
Miss Walcots. This is mainly due to the arrival
at The Laurels of Mary Enderby, a friend of the
family in the third generation, on a visit which, the
wise heads of the village declare, will last as long as
the old ladies need any looking after. Mary is one
of those plain, healthy women who seem to have
been about forty as long as one can remember,
towers of strength in all manner of domestic
alarms, whose qualities of a certain useful hard-
heartedness and a complete lack of nerves are
constantly in request for the propping up and
bucklering of more impressionable people. She
happens to be a very distant cousin of mine, some-
where at the farthest stretch of kin ; but the fibre
of the race is tough and elastic, and traditionally
responsive to such strains, and we both acknow-
ledge our duty to the family tree. Now and then
I go to tea at The Laurels, and sometimes Mary
comes up the hill for strawberries or cucumbers or
other seasonable foison, and sometimes we meet in
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the village on marketing mornings and walk a
length or two of the pavement together. And so
I come to know the ladies of The Laurels better
than I had done for a long time. Of course I
knew the sisters by sight well enough, one tall and
something masculine, very old indeed, with that
curious contrast of strongly marked features and
vacant expression sometimes to be seen in aged
faces, and with a manner whose unremitting
courtesy was a little awful ; the other, white-haired,
and with the colour still clear in the wrinkled
cheek, beautiful not only with the proper beauty of
old age, but with a kind of afterglow of early light,
slight, still graceful in carriage, shy, apt at times to
be a little fluttered in manner. I knew all the
oddities of character and methods of the pair
which the village looks upon with a sort of pro-
prietary amusement not far from pride ; the daily
walk to the post-office for letters, when Miss
Louisa, in the belief that she goes too fast for
Miss Fanny, paces the pavement some three yards
in front of her sister, neither more nor less in their
half-mile's excursion ; I had observed the quaint
habiliments, the wardrobe of an older day, upon
which Miss Louisa's taste engrafts astonishing
embellishments in the way of bows and ribbons ;
I knew the ladies' habit of taking the air on fine
evenings between June and September under the
clipped peacocks of the yew hedge in their garden
(a little plot which is understood to possess a
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peculiarly salubrious climate, not shared by any of
the other back gardens on that side of the street),
until at a fixed moment of the clock the damps
begin to rise, they retire, and the house is locked
and shuttered for the night. I have found them
doing their marketing at Peskett's, the general
shop, while Mr. Peskett matched their ribbon or
weighed out their groceries with a fine deference
not always shown to far more considerable cus-
tomers. I have heard old Hobden, the butcher-
greengrocer, recognising the survivors of an older
race, relapse into a dialect almost forgotten in the
village, and in the broader accent of the country
forty years ago, commend to their notice " a proper
mess o' peas ; dey's ' Early Sunrise ' from my own
gar'n, ladies," or " a middlin' nice parcel of Iron
pears what I've had off dat Ditchling party as
you'll rec'lect." Something of the life within doors
at The Laurels is also public property ; one
admires to hear of the rules of the household, the
inexorable early hours which ignore the seasons,
the stringent economy which counts the knobs of
coal, and banishes cold with half-an-hour's turning
of the mangle, if April make one of its bitter
returns after the almanack date for the last parlour
fire. Such characteristics as these I have long
known and honoured as distinctions which help to
give our village its mark of outstanding personality
amid the grey monotony steadily spreading over
the lower levels hereabouts. My closer acquaintance
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with the garden-walk and the parlour at The
Laurels since Mary Enderby's arrival has filled in
for me the outline of well-marked character mainly,
but not wholly, in the way I had surmised. There
is, I find, at least one very solid ground of agree-
ment between the sisters, in the religion of putting
by all that can be spared from the slender accounts
in order that they may do their duty to the family
estate, and that a few hundreds the more may go
to swell the half-million or so of the head of the
house, a sporting Yorkshire squire whom they have
never seen. On most other subjects there is room
for difference. "They manage to fratch a little
now and then," says Mary Enderby, herself a
Yorkshire woman. Miss Louisa was always the
clever one of the family, the manager, the fighter
when need was. She upholds an ancient standard
of propriety which the village admires, but scarcely
emulates. Miss Fanny is altogether of gentler
mould ; her face, as I have said, is beautiful, spite
of worn eyes and fallen mouth ; at times one sees
in it something more than beauty in the customary
sense a softening of expression as towards entire
rest, the tenderness which sometimes comes to
people who have not been fortunate, yet have kept
their thoughts kind. The elder sister's features, as
far as I have seen, are set and fixed a mask
without the light of eyes.
There is no doubt that Miss Louisa was always
the clever one. Miss Fanny was, I should judge,
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never of too accurate memory or consequent
reason, and she has had to give way all her life to
the superior mind. She has not yet wholly learned
to recognise her place, and still contends for her
poor tumbled recollections and loose-ended argu-
ments ; but perhaps more from long habit than
from any thought of ever having her own way.
It may be that Miss Louisa's rigid accuracy is,
after all, a kind of prop or stay against which Miss
Fanny has leaned ever since school-days, and
that if by any chance the prop were to give way,
the infallible head be proved for once irrefragably
wrong, the result might be disastrous. We talk,
says Mary Enderby, of second childhood ; but
some folk have but one. The sisters have scarcely
altered that standing and regard towards each
other which their difference of four or five summers
gave them when they left the school-room seventy
years ago.
I pay calls at The Laurels much oftener than I
should have ventured to do before the coming of
Mary Enderby : the breach that was made in the
walls to admit her has never been fully closed up
against the world again. One drenched evening
of late I found the ladies by the parlour fire, a
cheerful blaze which had been made, I understood,
for the benefit of the chair-covers and the books,
and so could be enjoyed with a tolerable con-
science. As summer wanes, the taking of the air
under the yew hedge in the garden is replaced by
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a long hour in the parlour before it is dark enough
to condone the lighting of candles and the settling
down to the evening's employ. As winter draws
on, and the fire wastes the counted billets quicker
and quicker, I understand that the grand economy
of bedtime is advanced more and more upon the
silent hours in which Miss Fanny dozes over her
book and Miss Louisa knits without a pause. To
Mary I imagine that this early retirement is her
opening day ; when she has seen the sisters safely
upstairs, she makes her own world for a little,
writes her letters, fetches down her books, or flings
out for trudging walks about the village lanes.
She does not seem to make many new friends in
the place, beyond the Warden at the Almshouse
and his niece Molly Crofts when she is staying
here ; and I think she is glad, in a way, to see me
at reasonable intervals, and to talk out of our
common stock of memories and traditions. She
has told me that Miss Louisa seems to fail a little
of late : once or twice there has been some strange
fumbling in her recollections, when Miss Fanny
might have carried her point in the debate if she
had not been stricken with sudden doubts and
remorse at the other's unwonted hesitation, and
tried in a half-frightened way to prove that she
herself must have been wrong all the time.
My last visit interrupted a difference of opinion
about the wages of a certain dairymaid at the
old home, fifty-something years ago, After the
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exchange of our accustomed sentiments upon the
season and the village chronicle, the argument
was resumed, and Miss Louisa producing from a
marvellously orderly bureau several bundles of old
housekeeping books, proved conclusively that at
the time when poor brother John died in the
trenches before Sebastopol, and the legacy enabled
the household to enlarge its borders, Bessy Chat-
field had come to Wallcroft with no character to
speak of, and six pounds a year in wages. There
was no sign of failure in the way Miss Louisa
conducted her case, nor in the lesson which, as she
tied up the account books with their strips of list
and put them back in the drawer, she read to her
sister on the virtues of exactitude and a methodical
mind. Miss Fanny took the rebuke almost as a
child at lessons might have done, her hands clasped
nervously upon her book, and her head with its
little tremulous motion stooping over them. My
cousin had shown signs of restiveness during Miss
Louisa's lecture, and presently pushed back her
chair with unnecessary energy, upsetting a work-
box on the table, and giving utterance to that
emphatic Tck which on a lady's lips has all the
virtues of an oath. After the diversion caused by
hunting for cotton-reels in far corners of the
parlour, I took my leave, receiving the formal
curtseys and the wishes for a pleasant journey and
salubrious repose with which The Laurels speeds its
guests. Mary came to the door with me ; the rain had
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cleared and it was a fine light evening ; but though
she stood a moment on the step and looked abroad,
I doubt if she observed the mild dusk or the young
moon. Her face bore a thinking frown, with a
rather grim lifting of the lip, an expression which
would have become Nemesis about to foreclose, and
certainly had a look of Miss Louisa. She held out
her hand with an abrupt good night, and went
back to her charges ; and on my way home I
thought of times when I have seen her face reflect
rather Miss Fanny's softened melancholy, and
mused as I went on two sorts of destiny, and
guessed at some prophylactic root of the Moly
tribe which found in early days may preserve one's
features in the pleasanter cast of expression when
they have grown too set and stiff to change.
IV
February 2.
IT is at this time of year that one comes to under-
stand the fundamental charm of the country,
seeing it in its bare elements, without the additions
of spring or summer ; here, rure vero barbaroque,
the wonted walks about the fields show what
power lies in a keen moist wind, a muffled silence
of the woods, a grey-blue distance fading into
formless mists a power of unity, of resting force,
of fine searching air and even breadth of light
which makes the thought of streets every whit as
abhorrent as it is under April hedge-sides. The
mind's contrast of this clear freshness with the
sounds and smells of town is all the more vivid
for the imagination of certain town-folk foundered
in these drenched wood-paths, halting with a scared
concern for their boots in the hollows where the
drifted leaves half bridge over and half conceal
the pits of water among the churned-up clay, in
the paths where not so long ago they disported
themselves, in the lightest of shoe-leather, with all
the airs of holiday ownership. It is an easy
digression, as one pauses for a balanced stride
33 D
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across some wider puddle in Plash Lane, careful
of the take-off on the poached edge, to think how
this usurpation of footpaths summer-dry, paying
no footing in November mud or February rime,
figures the common position of the town intellect
towards country affairs. The mind which observes
our rural physiology and prescribes for its com-
plaints is by a curious necessity the mind which
makes expeditions indeed into the wilderness, but
has its home in the world of clubs and cabs,
among the fogs and the restaurant-fumes and the
eternal ground-bass of the traffic. Such intellect
comes down to the country with its capacious
butterfly-net and its irresistible geological hammer ;
it collects its specimens and returns to its own
place ; and presently to us, wading dimly about
our Plash Lanes in our winter solitude, arrive some
of the results of the expedition new laws and
codes and economics, studies of land and labour,
novels of rustic life which we acknowledge with
respectful wonder as to how it is done. It is
clever beyond words. Suppose that I, whose
centre is my cabbage-plot and my radius Plash
Lane, on the strength of certain visits to town
were to draw up regulations for the housing of the
poor in Wandsworth, or to write a romance whose
chapters careered through Park Lane, Capel Court,
St. Stephen's and the Ghetto, I doubt whether,!
could manage to display a grasp of facts or secure
a truth of presentment which would appear at all
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magisterial to the critics dwelling within that
radius of four miles. And so, with a rebellious
fling of the moral sense towards an ideal of com-
pensatory advantages, one sometimes feels that
the solitude traversed, the cold-driving rain and
the quagmire road taken on their naked merits, the
mental dialect of the countryside learned for
twenty years without a holiday, ought to have
some make-weight gift intimacy, one pretends to
one's self, some small power of seeing the inside of
things, exemption from the subtle blight which
falls upon the amateur. But this is not to be
pressed closely ; there is a proper Nemesis for
such aspirations ; even that brief excursion into
speculative morality may suffice to land one over-
shoes, where all the reluctant tracks converge
perforce at the stile into one desperate slough.
Plash Lane ends at Burntoak Farm ; and when
I come this way, I usually face the struggle
through the last and deepest morass of the occu-
pation-road and the yard, wipe my boots, after a
preliminary purgation on the grass-tufts at the
gate, on the birch-broom cleaner at the side of
the porch, and pay a visit to the mistress of the
farm.
It is generally allowed that Mrs. Ventom is a
remarkable woman. She manages a large farm,
as farms go hereabouts, incomparably better than
most of the neighbouring farmers manage theirs,
and her talent for business is looked up to with
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a respect not far from awe. She has been a
Guardian for a good many years ; and there are
those who say that she can do what she likes with
the Board. Her private activities amongst the
labourers and cottage-folk about her own holding
are, in method and result, quite unlike the usual
endeavours of our Ladies Bountiful. But beyond
all this, there are personal qualities which make it
worth Plash Lane twice over to take the settle by
the down-fire, when it is neither churning-day nor
Board-day, and poach an hour's talk from a winter
afternoon.
No one would think Mrs. Ventom to be sixty-
five who did not remember that it is seventeen
years since she took up the farm single-handed at
her husband's death, and knew that the pair were
middle-aged when they first came to Burntoak
from the other side of the county. The widow is
handsome, in a spare, strenuous way ; has the least
touch of grey in hair as smooth and brown as a
thrush's wing ; the expression of her face, given
mainly by almost the clearest pair of eyes I have
ever seen, is one of reserved strength, wise with
the wisdom that is learned and taught. She is apt
to be critical, with a humour of drolling a little on
the matter in hand, with occasional indulgence to
motions of much-loved fence, bearing ever so little
on the foible of the opponent. The expression
which suits her best is perhaps one that has
grown upon her of late years, a look of thinking
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recollection, grave and wise, almost tender at times.
Her manners are of that kind which people inex-
perienced in a lapsed world sometimes attribute
to duchesses. Her father was bailiff on a historic
estate ; and a youth spent among great people
people who were great some forty years ago with
the " keeping of one's place " as a religious principle
to counterbalance any of the common penalties of
familiarity, seems capable of producing a notable
sort of character a race of stately housekeepers
and grave dependents, of which Elia's Grand-
mother Field is the type, and to which our Mrs.
Ventom, whether talking round the Guardians
or standing over her poultry in the Square on
Tisfield market-day, or receiving his lordship at
a shooting-lunch at the farm, without question
belongs.
She rules her work-people with a benevolent
tyranny, kind but very consistently just, of the
sort to which, if the ingredients be but evenly
mixed, the rustic mind almost always responds
generously, going back, it may be, to inherited
traditions of bond-service, perhaps to conditions
more fundamental still. The last time I was at
Burntoak, she was considering the fate of Tom
Gates, an odd-job man, excellent when sober for
heavy haulage, for standing up to the knees in
water through a winter's day at cleaning ditches,
for all sorts of works where the brain can go to
sleep comfortably. As Tom is very often drunk,
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and when drunk is a mere destructive beast, he
would have been turned off the farm long ago, but
for the usual complication of a wife and family.
We have in the village plenty of working men of
his sort, strong enough in body, till the incessant
swilling does its work, too dull-witted to reach
even the lowest form of skilled labour; on the
whole perhaps not quite so intelligent as, certainly
far less profitable to the country than a well-
behaved cart-horse. Tom, owing to his particular
weakness, suffers (in common with not a few
others) from inability to go up ladders, and is thus
debarred from the several careers connected with
hods and scaffolding. He is meant for drains and
ditches, for the roughest navvy-work with pick and
shovel ; and at this his wages, if not interrupted
by controllable accidents, taken the year round,
with allowance made for average out-of-work
intervals, would easily suffice to keep him and his
family comfortably and to leave something over
for the club or the savings bank. As it stands,
he hands over to his wife, out of his fifteen shillings
a week, seven, five, nothing, according to the
liberality of his humour ; the balance goes, almost
intact, into the till of the Dolphin and the Croco-
dile. The first frosty week in the winter which
stops ground-work means absolute starvation in
the Gates' cottage ; but, as Tom is quite aware,
there is a special Providence ready to interfere at
such a pass. This way of life, with an occasional
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domestic broil or a bit of a fight in the street on
a Saturday night, would hardly serve to distinguish
Tom amongst a dozen of his mates ; he has other
characteristics, such as the keeping of a lurcher,
a faithful beast that risks the keeper's barrels on
Sunday mornings to get his master the casual
rabbit ; his language has caused the neighbours
in a not too fastidious row to shut their windows
during the dog-days ; he has been in jail twice for
assaults. Naturally, such a workman does not
stay very long at one job; a day lost while the
Saturday booze is being slept off, an abusive out-
break at some fault found in his work, and Tom
is on the street again. He has been doing some
draining at Burntoak and has taken the oppor-
tunity to poach the adjoining coverts during the
dinner-hour; and Mrs. Ventom holds her hand,
Justice brought up in her career, musing grimly
on the customary complication of the hungry
children and the tight-lipped wife in Jubilee
Cottages.
It is a nice question ; because, of course, every
charitable penny which goes to pay the old score
at the baker's, sets free another for the Crocodile
till. The thick-witted brute perfectly appreciates
the system of lady-visitors, their "tickets" and
soup-kitchen, which enable him to lurch into the
steaming bar night after night with a clear con-
science. And certainly the anaemic wife and the
five miserable children and the new baby must not
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be left without a crust or a stick of firing in the
house ; impressionable people, discovering actual
emptiness every way, have even ordered in bones
for soup and a half-hundred of coal. It is a very
nice question indeed, and one that ancient famili-
arity seems to bring us no nearer solving. There
are the usual expedients ; impounding the black-
guard's wages, persuading the wife to throw herself
on the parish and get her husband summoned, or
to apply for a separation. Mrs. Ventom has tried
these and more in her time ; but what in the world
is to be done when there is a capital traitor in the
camp, when Mrs. Tom, an apron-corner to her face
to conceal the traces of a black eye, declares she
wishes she may be in her grave before she'll hear
any one say a word against her man, or lift a finger
to break up that happy home, and so slams the
door on the black hearth and the empty cupboard,
and leaves us to work out the problem for ourselves ?
It is not often that the mistress of the farm allows
herself to look beyond the corners of the matter
in hand ; but the present case being apparently
insoluble in practice, she for once indulges her
imagination so far as to sketch out a fancy picture
of a reformed local government which would make
the hopeless nuisance a useful asset to the nation.
There should be buildings and fields, she thinks, in
every parish, something between a workhouse, a
prison, and a lunatic asylum, where Tom Gates
and his kind should be kept out of mischief and
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made useful, without a penny of wages, fed and
kept plainly and healthily, and put out to work in
gangs under an overseer.
" And punished if they broke out or turned sulky,
Mrs. Ventom ? "
" To be sure ! They should be well whipped if
they misbehaved. Some would have to be chained
up, as a rule."
"And would you allow them to marry?" I
inquire.
"Well, some of them might ; the best ones. Of
course," she goes on, following up with some
relish, I think, the deviations of her unwonted ex-
cursion amongst the foundations of society ; " of
course there are worthless women, as well as men,
and we should have to have places for them too.
And it wouldn't be only for the working classes ;
oh no ! there'd be room for ever so many others,"
she goes on, in a meditative tone charged with
occurring instance.
"And," I suggest, "I suppose after a certain
record of good behaviour a man might get his
discharge, and his full rights again ? "
" Of course, if But the sort of men I was
thinking of would generally stay there for good.
And oh, the mercy it would be to the country and
to all the decent people ! "
" But think, Mrs. Ventom ! " I interpose, gravely.
" It would be nothing better than slavery. The
Greeks and Romans had just such a state of things
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workhouses or ergastula, chained gangs, whips
they gave them some chances of liberty too ; are
we to go back to the dark ages of Plato and ? "
"We needn't trouble our heads about those
days,' 1 says the philosopher, coming back from
theory to life, as the maid announces that Micah
wants to speak to her about his wages, and please
what's to be done about the fence the bullocks
broke in the middle meadow ?
"Their liberty's safe enough nowadays. No
one'll ever touch their right to get drunk every week
and starve their families, and scamp their work, and
help to ruin the whole country."
" I imagine," I said, " that the calamitous Tom
has a voice in his country's counsels ? "
" Of course he has ! We have to thank you for
that!"
" Us ? Who ? " I demand.
"Why, you gentlemen who arrange all these
things in your clubs and committees, and take care
that a brute like Tom Gates shall have his precious
say in taxing and governing me."
" But I don't belong to a single committee, and
I don't go to my club three times in a year, and I
didn't even vote at the last election. And I am
really in favour of female suffrage with certain
qualifications "
" No, thank you ! " says Mrs. Ventom, as she sees
me out of the porch, and I prepare to plunge into
the abysses of the yard. " No, thank you ! Keep
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your own responsibilities to yourselves. At least
I can thank goodness that I haven't a hand in all
the stupid mess we have to live amongst."
I had picked my way to an outcrop of the native
sand-rock, which made a sort of island in the yard ;
and at this speech I looked back, with something
in the look, I suppose, which applied the words to
the brown swamp about me. At any rate, Mrs.
Ventom took it so, for she laughed and shook her
head.
"No, I'm not responsible for the yard either.
That's the agent ; he promised me the stone to
mend it with last year, and perhaps in another six
months I shall get it. I've written half a dozen
times. . . ."
"If you were to see him, Mrs. Ventom," I suggest.
"Ah," she replies, "if I had him in my own
kitchen ! But do you think I've got the time to
go up and find him in London ? A big estate
may be managed that way, but not a small farm,
if I know anything about it."
" And plenty more besides small farms," said I,
as I latched the gate and struck out into the road
again.
43
February 14.
I MADE a long round to-day by Beggar's Bush
and Nyman's Corner, and came back through the
village as the light began to fail. We had a week
of dark weather, with a restless peevish wind just
on the wrong side of west, which would not let one
be ; but yesterday there were signs of something
better behind it, and when about sunset next day
the air fell suddenly to a dead calm, there was
beyond any doubt the first touch of spring. Your
cockney, who must have spring's coming burned
into him by a glaring drought of May, would have
hardly noticed one of the fine indications : the
breath of the wintered meadow-grass coming
across the smell of the dew on the dry road, or of
the fresh-turned mould in cottage gardens ; a
subtle change since yesterday in the misty screen
of the Park elms ; the new meaning in the evening
chorus of thrush and blackbird. There was a stir
of spring in the street too ; people were sauntering
or talking at cottage doors, oblivious of the breath
of heaven ; there was a general sense of content
and expansion of the soul, partly referable, no
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doubt, to sensible promises of good times coming,
when fuel shall scarcely matter, when there shall
be full work at the shop and the yard, and the
baker's score shall be no more a burden : but
mainly, I think, unconscious ; as much a matter
of instinct and as little of calculation as the new
richness in the concert of the birds. Every
creature responds to the spirit in the air ; Ben
the higgler's old pony hangs his head over the
gate in drowsy ease ; the black column strag-
gling home to the Park rookery across the rose
and grey of the afterglow makes a mellower
and a less solicitous uproar than of late; the
school-children on their way home fill the street
with livelier noise which the mild influence of the
hour almost persuades me to think a less strident
cacophony than on other eves.
As I reached the top of the village the dusk
began to take a ruddy flush from the low red in
the west ; it was no direct light aloft on roof or
gables, but a pervading rosy air, a suffusion that
transformed the whole street, the church steeple,
the timbered houses, the dark mould of garden
plots with the snowdrops under the box-bushes,
the faces at doors, the very cobble stones under
one's feet. It was one of those times when a
man slackens his pace as he goes, and takes deeper
breaths, with a half meaning of making the most
of a blest hour. The light was of that kind which
puts the very best construction upon the human
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faces it illuminates ; and when by the churchyard
gate I met Mary Enderby coming across towards
the Almshouse, I began to myself a handsome
apology for having in times past considered
" strong-featured " a sufficient tribute to her
looks. I could have wished to look into the
rights of such a transformation ; but my cousin
would not stop to talk, because she was on her
way to the Lodge. Molly Crofts had arrived that
afternoon, and she wanted to catch her before
dinner. She turned in to the Almshouse entry,
and I went on up the street with a feeling that
the bland Saturnian promise of the twilight was
mainly accounted for. The coming of Miss Molly
always seems, in a quite disproportionate way,
to tune us up, to quicken, so to say, the tempo
of our accustomed measures. I know that the
Warden consciously heaves off a full ten years
of his age, and sometimes a good deal more, when
Molly is with him. Here is Mary Enderby over
at the Lodge without loss of time, hardly stopping
to speak to one it was not alone that rose-
twilight which so improved her looks. Do I not
know that Harry Mansel will pay a call on the
Warden to-morrow for a certainty? Shall I not
see Lady Anne stop the old barouche, and hammer
on the glass which always sticks, and carry off
Molly with her on her afternoon round ? Once
more the tradesfolk and the cottagers and the
children will respond to the charm wftich the
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young woman seems to carry with her wherever
she goes.
That charm is not a matter for simple analysis.
Molly is twenty-three, and pretty with a prettiness
that depends a good deal on lights and hours and
humours, and something on a very sure taste in
dress ; her colour is not quite so constant as it
should be, and I think there is no feature of her
face which a critic certainly not a critic with an
Elgin-Marbles standard like mine would consider
more than tolerable, except her eyes, sometimes,
when she looks at you ; and when it comes to
eyes, we Greek-statue people speak without book.
With that catholicity of taste, which in a young
lady so often fills me with envious wonder, she
seems to read somewhat more than her peers
generally do ; she is rather less endowed in the
way of athletics than they. When she is not on
her holidays and these seem to be chiefly at
the Lodge she looks after an ancient cousin in
Wiltshire. Her likings for dances and junket-
ings, Oxford eights and Canterbury cricket weeks ;
her labours conscientious needleworks and a
weight of sponsorial and Sunday-school liabilities
for her small Wiltshire rustics, are at the ordinary
rate of her kind. With a gift near genius she
makes what I understand are very spare resources
cover her visiting and her dressing, and, I fear, the
demands of two or three charitable leeches. I
have heard several people call her " poor Molly,"
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and the adjective, which in Mrs. Sims-Bigg's mouth
would probably refer to the sort of dinner she was
accustomed to, has a different meaning when it
comes from Lady Anne. I make no attempt to
analyse the subtle attribute, to guess at dim in-
adequacies or unlikelihoods in a character or a
career; but I feel vaguely that it is just. What
shall be done with you, Molly, in this ponderous,
jostling world, you whose peculiar gift is a singular
grace in small things? If any one ever lived to
show beyond all shadow of doubt how to pour out
tea, to manage a train on a staircase, to sit on the
hearthrug and look into the fire, to make an un-
likely petition to a busy uncle, it is Molly Crofts.
If ever there should be an Elgin-gallery for such
graces as these, Molly would have the throne
in it.
So far I had got in one of my customary search-
ing analyses, when I came all at once at the
Crossways upon Miss Molly herself. Mary Enderby
had missed her, for she had been foraging round
the village to replenish her uncle's starved larder,
and was on her way back to the Almshouse with
two baskets. We stopped but a moment to speak,
as she was hurrying home ; but in the ten seconds
or so in which I met her eyes, how my neatly
parcelled analysis went to the winds, what a full
revenge she took for my cocksure sorting-out of a
young woman's qualities ! The rose light was almost
gone from the air, and it was fast darkening ; but
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there surely never could be any other hour so
fated to bring out from beneath that mingled
and varying prettiness the authentic sign of
mere beauty. Whether it was the effect of
the broad even illumination, or of some deeper
motion of Molly's spirit showing in her face, or
whether something was owed to a quickening of
apprehension on my part, a remembering and
comparing power, it matters little : I made
a very whole-hearted obeisance to the vision
disclosed.
I said I hoped she had come for a good long
visit, and she smiled very delightfully, and said
she thought a fortnight, and so we took our
several roads ; and most of the way home I had
the image of Molly before me. It was not the
voice nor the smile that stuck so in my mind,
though they came back with still renewed
pleasure. It was a momentary meaning of her
face in the failing light, and this given, I think,
mainly by the eyes, a pathetic grace, a vague
trouble which I have seen before, and thought to
imply the first half-incredulous pity, for one's self
and the rest, waking to the meaning of the world.
It may be that such an attribution is only one more
trick of an over-analytic temper, putting the mean-
ings of a well-worn philosophy upon the fresh
charm of twenty-three. I wish I could be sure of
it. The charm had power, spite of philosophies,
to make me stop ten minutes by the last gate up
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the hill, looking back into the misty darkness and
the points of light glimmering out in the valley
below musing, with a somewhat wiser analysis
this time, I hope, on the elements, transient or
durable, which make up the spell.
VI
February 18.
Now and then in the round of the seasons there
come times when I am inclined to admit the
possibility of compensations for an indoor exist-
ence. Such lapses from the higher choice are not
unknown in November glooms ; but they are
commonest in February, when the turning of the
year seems to have come to a stand, when the
forerunners of spring that had already begun to
stir dissemble their daring, the crocuses shutting
their pale outsides close over the deeper gold
within their cups, the blackbird who had sung for
a week in the elm by the gate moping with ruffled
feathers about the lawn. There is neither sun nor
wind nor visible motion of clouds to give the least
sign of change ; the garden plots are grey with
rime, or half drowned in sludgy snow, and the last
pretence at preparations in the way of stick-
cutting or sorting of seeds has been exhausted. A
walk, merely for the sake of a walk, through the
silent, mist-wrapped fields is apt to become a too
mechanic exercise, ending in half-conscious count-
ing of one's steps, and the like dreary introversions.
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At such times as these a tramp down to the
village, with a fire-lit room and tea-cakes and
small scandal at the end of it, appears a thing
meant by Nature to bridge over her own hiatus,
and I set out with a clear conscience for the
Almshouse or The Laurels. The latter I reserve
for the drier days, since the reception of shooting-
boots fresh from the lanes is a pang which tries the
courtesy of the dear ladies severely ; the Warden's
ragged old Turkey carpet, and the muddy curb of
his fender feel my heels five times, I fear, for once
that I imperil the faded roses of Miss Louisa's
Axminster. The last time that I went to the
Lodge I found Molly Crofts in command of the
tea-table, and had to meet with the best face I
could put upon it the searching glance which fell
upon my hobnails as I came into the firelight.
Miss Molly pays a visit to the Almshouse two or
three times in the year : if the Warden believes
that he is giving her a needful change from being
mewed up in a Wiltshire manor-house, and Molly
knows that if she didn't rout her uncle out now
and then and put things straight for him, he
would be all mould and cobwebs, why, no one
need concern himself to disturb either belief.
The dismal close of day was sufficient warrant
for early drawing of curtains and stirring up of the
fire ; and it was pleasant to see the light come and
go on the books that cover the walls, on the black-
framed prints of Bishops and Heads, on the
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Warden's pipe-racks and littered papers, and, among
all the bachelor trappings and the paraphernalia of
learning, on the crinkled brown hair of Miss Molly
bending over the tea-things. One perceived after
a time, as men's way is, that it was a new set of
tea-things, and that there was a jug of narcissus
on the writing-table, and presently I observed that
there was a fine new woolly hearthrug, and that the
old capacious sofa was set at a new and convincing
angle to the fire. All this tended to a feeling of
not uncomfortable luxury, heightened by the
thought of muddy lanes, by the sound of the drip
from the trees outside in the dark and formless
night ; but when I said something in this sense, I
found Molly in a contrary humour and inclined to
disown her improvements. We were much too
luxurious ; why should we have all these things,
while there were people close by us who hardly
knew how to live ? She had been, I found, into
some of the cottages in Jubilee Row during the
afternoon, and had found the Gates and Oram
households without either bread or firing ; the
husbands had been out of work through half the
winter, and Mrs. Oram's ninth infant had the
croup. And on her way home Molly must have
met with a tramp whom I had come upon half-
way up the hill as I walked down to the village, a
ragged, half-starved creature with one foot out of
his boot, and his miserable pretence of a bunch of
laces in his rheumatic fingers : the man was a
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monument of wet and cold wretchedness, too
beaten to beg, save by mechanically presenting his
wares as we met in the road. And so Molly
frowns as she looks at the fire, and gives us our
tea as it were under protest, and compares the lots
of men, and is, I think, for the time very sincerely
sick at heart and angry.
It seemed that the Warden had met with the
tramp on his way home from his rounds, and had
walked with him from Ball's Cross to the Park.
" He was a wretched object to look at," he says ;
" but I came to the conclusion that on the whole
he was about as well off as I am, reckoning one
thing with another."
Molly looked worlds at her uncle ; but all she
said was
" And you did nothing for him ? "
" Not at all," he answered ; " I gave him six-
pence."
u Gave him sixpence ! " cries Molly, who has
stringent ideas of her own about charity and
"relief." " Of course he'll spend it on beer at the
first public-house he comes to ! "
"I'd have given it him for morphia, my dear,"
replied the Warden, " if I thought he'd have used
it. Suppose that he is in the Lion at Nyman's
Corner now, and has had his sixpennyworth, he
will be one of the happiest men in Sheringham
parish far happier than we are in thinking about
him."
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Molly taps the floor with her foot. " As if you
didn't know that I didn't mean happiness of that
sort!"
"But, my dear, if you begin to classify and
qualify happiness, as moral or otherwise, and so
forth, we shall get into all sorts of tangles.
Talking merely about comparative pleasure and
pain in people's lives, you will find, if you look
into things, that there is a curious balance or
equality; much more than most people imagine.
We aren't all organised alike, for one thing : that
poor devil doesn't feel the cold and wet as you
or I would after we'd done ten miles on the road
from Tisfield Workhouse. That's his gain, the
rougher fibre : and my loss is that I can't make
myself glorious with sixpennyworth of bad beer.
When we talk about all men being equal in the
sight of Heaven, I never can make out why we
tie the words down to one meaning out of about
half a dozen, as if there were not compensations
everywhere"
Molly only shakes her head, and has nothing to
say to such a shocking hypothesis. But the
Warden is launched on his subject, and turns to
me, as one already broken in to the theory, and
perhaps too little apt to shy at a paradox. It
was the question of the equality of human happi-
ness which first led him to look into the whole
matter of the compensatory hypothesis. He made
Molly fetch him Sir Thomas Browne's " Christian
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Morals " and La Rochefoucauld, and read us two
places
"There may be no such vast chasm or gulph
between disparities as common measures deter-
mine," and
"Quelque difference qui paroisse entre les for-
tunes, il y a neanmoins une certaine compensation
de biens et de maux qui les rend egales."
The texts were not unknown to me, and I once
showed the Warden a passage almost in the same
terms, but less peremptory, in my own La
Bruyere ; but like a wise man he prefers his own
quarrying. Everybody, he says, admits the exist-
ence of set-offs and drawbacks ; it is easy enough
to remember that a fine-natured man has keener
pleasures and deeper pains than a blunt-edged
one ; that learning and sorrow increase together ;
that children are hostages to fortune ; and all the
rest of the tags : but few people take the trouble
to observe the actual balancings of loss and gain
in historical characters, or among their own folk.
And nobody follows the admission to its logical
conclusion ; it would be too nearly an admission
of a governing intelligence for the schools in power
just now. If any one cares to follow out the
idea in other directions, he will find the balance
kept everywhere. Look, at the present time, at
the increase of the power of scientific observation,
coupled with the decay of connective reasoning.
We can afford to smile at the old men's facts ;
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but they would have made short work of our
logic. It is not a mere accidental change, but a
necessary connection of cause and effect ; exactly
as lenses gain in penetration, they lose in field
and in the power of keeping several planes in
focus.
I came in here with an instance in which I hold
the Warden's theory to be absolutely true ; the
disappearance of the arts before the advance of
the thing which nine people out of ten mean when
they talk about " science." We are really a little
too greedy, and want everything at once ; we
build, when we build seriously, with steel instead
of stone, but we would like to think our new
cathedrals as good as Salisbury ; we have invented
coal-tar dyes, but we grudge the fourteenth century
its coloured glass; we'll have our process-blocks,
and etch like Rembrandt too. The Warden ac-
cepts my little contribution to the theory, and
tacks it on to his own position about literature.
We have made applied mechanics the business of
the human soul ; and then we are puzzled to know
why we don't produce bigger poets than, let us
say ... eh ? That case is pretty obvious ; poets
are not like the stained-glass people ; we see the
scarcity all right, but we think it's only a tem-
porary accident. Who's the man who said the
reason why we had no great poets was because
we could do without them ? But to think of
" science," of all things, ignoring the fact that
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everything has to be paid for, to the last grain
and farthing ! The scientific people don't see yet
that you can't fill hollows without taking down
heights ; they actually talk about " levelling up "
and " levelling down " as if the two could be
separated. And the social economy folk are for
raising the conditions and enlarging the sphere and
increasing the comfort, as if they had anything
but the old world to draw on for supplies : they
might as well try to create matter !
Molly, who had retired behind the defence of
parish needlework, looks up at last from her
fairy-fine seam, and breaks in upon her uncle's
conclusion with
"Well, we don't burn witches now, nor behead
our enemies, or put them on the rack, anyhow.
And I won't believe we aren't happier than when
they did things like that ! "
"But I don't know, Molly," says the Warden,
" that they would have thought our blissful state
of things a good exchange for their own way of
doing things. I can't help thinking they'd have
found us horribly dull and lethargic ; they'd have
kicked at our red-tape, I'm sure. They wouldn't
have stood our placid oppressions and impersonal
frauds, and the tangles of interest we lose ourselves
in whenever we try to give a knock to the re-
sponsible folk. Take a thing like that open drain
at Tillman's Green, that goes on just the same as
ever, spite of all I've written and said about it:
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to begin with, they'd too strong stomachs to bother
about a bit of a smell, and if they had thought
about it, they would rather somebody should be
whacked or racked than let a whole parish be
poisoned half their lives. I wouldn't go into history
for comparisons, if I were you, Molly ; keep to our
own times, and think out what is to be said for and
against being rich and poor, for instance for being
Mrs. Sims-Bigg, suppose, or well Molly Crofts.
Think out the advantages of being young and
quite old. Put one's degenerate mouthful of teeth
against the pleasure of having them out under
gas ; or Mrs. Yarborough-Greenhalgh's At Homes
against the ties of civilised society ; try simple
set-offs and comparisons like that, Molly."
Any rejoinder that Molly might have intended
was prevented by the arrival of Harry Mansel,
late from a ride. His well-spattered leggings
received, I fancied, a less searching scrutiny than
had fallen to the lot of my boots, although the
lamp was brought in at his entry ; and he was
settled by the fire with a fresh brew of tea, and
crumpets all to himself. The conversation split
itself in two, in the way of congruity ; Molly had
to attend to the tea-things again, and the Warden
had to fetch for himself the books he wanted to
illustrate the great Theory in its dealings with the
philosophy of history. As the pursuit of Suetonius,
astray on the top shelves, was a matter of some
time, I was able to follow pretty well though the
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forms and syntax have naturally altered somewhat
from those of my own time the talk that went on
by the fireside. I take it as a very distinguished
testimonial that Harry Mansel allows my status as
a possible person. I have known him since he
was a very small boy indeed, and the under-
standing which we came to at our first acquaint-
ance has stood the shock since then of battles
and many seas, and the wearing of the world.
It is no small score for a middle-aged person to
have a boy in his first year at Winchester coming
over in the holidays to talk inexhaustibly of the
affairs of life, not translating or making self-
conscious allowances for the elderly outsider, but
treating him, one thinks, almost as an equal, with
the full vernacular and technics of the career ; it
is nothing less to have the boy, a Captain in a
Gurkha regiment, coming in on his leaves from the
Hills, as though neither time nor length of earth
could make any difference, to talk in the old
friendly way, not only unspoiled, but apparently
unchanged by the sights and hearings of his large
world. Harry was born at Meerut, and has all the
happy address which seems rarely to fail Indian
children ; in him the half-alien grace has stiffened
into a very pleasant sort of manhood. He has
still a good deal of an early simplicity ; he is not
too clever ; he has a touch of wholesome insularity,
a wise phlegm which keeps him unperturbed
amongst all outlandish distractions and lures. I
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heard Molly ask him how it felt getting back to
the Hills after England. Harry's last leave was
decidedly a full and a gay one, including slices of
the season in London and Dublin, with a Leve*e,
Goodwood, Henley, Cowes, and a fortnight on the
moors ; but I don't think that Molly who reads
Mr. Kipling and has learned in the school of our
latter-day empirics the proper relation of the part
and the whole I don't think she quite expected
him to answer that it was all right, only everything
there felt so petty and small after being at home.
I once asked him, after he had come home on one
of his long leaves, through China, Japan, and the
States, how the fair of other lands moved him ;
and he said that when he got home he felt like
taking off his hat to half the girls he saw in the
streets, and thanking them for looking so un-
utterably jolly. To stay-at-home folk like myself,
who spite of ourselves half believe the assertion of
knowing people that we can't understand anything
about our own country unless we go out of it, this
sort of testimonial should have an inspiriting
effect.
The Warden, though above measure a book-
man, has (thanks, perhaps, to the great Theory)
the saving sense to see that there are certain fine
qualities rarely to be found except in conjunction
with brains of the less adventurous type. He is
always ready to take Harry and his kind on their
own ground, and perhaps to fill up some of his
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own empty corners out of their collections. He
has told me that he used to meet, at College
breakfasts with the Master, a famous historian
who, if there chanced to be at table two or three
undergraduates of the normal intellectual stamp,
would keep his pearls to himself in absolute silence
through the meal. The thickest-headed lad there,
says the Warden, could have taught him some-
thing which might have made his great History
a little less of a frigid vacuum than it is. For
myself, I think a certain catholicity of personal
taste in acquaintance, the gift of being a " good
conductor " of sympathies, even a kind of universal
menstruum or solvent of human nature, is one of
the most desirable things. Few can be much
further from this ideal than myself, yet even I can
take pleasure in thinking of several people with
whom severally I "get on" very well, the inter-
action of whose antipathies, if they were to be
brought into immediate contact the resultant
extremes of temperature high or low I conjecture
with some solicitude. In few things is the
possession of a polygonal mind more profitable
than in this.
After a little, by way of counter-changing the
conversation, I left the Warden busy with his re-
captured Suetonius, and asked Molly to play
something for us. Harry opened the piano at
once, and the two conferred together for some
time at the music-stand as to what we should
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have. It mattered very little that they pitched
upon some airs from a musical comedy which they
had heard in London. Molly plays such things
with a good deal of spirit, and with Harry
whistling the air or humming the words here and
there, and I nodding my head to the kicking
rhythm of " Pst ! boys, you mustn't make a noise "
(or words to that effect), and remembering old, old
songs whose tunes were so very nearly the same
shuffling of the notes as this, the Warden was left
very much to himself and his cross-references.
But after a little I found I was not identifying
myself with the modern spirit quite so completely
as I had supposed ; the pass-words had been
changed more than I had thought since my day.
I went back to the history, in which the Warden,
pencil in hand, was ranging like a keen pointer
in clover, and took up the ends of the Theory
where I had left them ; but having at last traced
the reference which had dodged him through half
a dozen indexes, the Warden slammed down the
books and came to listen to the music. So I found
myself left between the two ; yet it was pleasant
enough to see through half-closed eyes the shaded
light, the serene hearth, the rows of books, the
sober company waiting to come in with their silent
colloquy when all this cheery jingle and chatter
was done. I think we all managed, in our several
ways, to forget the forlorn households in Jubilee
Row, and the soaked tramp on the road to the
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casual ward. It was only when I turned out into
the raw black night that the universal Theory
came back to mind, and I wondered whether it
would admit the possibility, in certain cases, of
deferred payment of balances, either with interest
or without.
VII
March 5.
THERE is, after all, nothing like the punctual
recurrence of minor duties for preventing the
formation of theories of life on too large a scale,
the building of inverted pyramids in space. While
the claim, six days out of seven, on the virgin fore-
noon is unquestionably Nym's walk, one is not
likely to have many dreams about whistling the
world to heel. Nym prefers the fields, with all their
chances of the hedgerow jungles, rat-holes in the
banks, rabbits lying out on the edge of the wood,
to the prosaic highroad ; and so at this season we
tramp round the swampy pastures and scramble
through the shaws, with such observation of the
signs of spring, and such chance reflections as our
devious wanderings and skirmishes amongst the
underwoods suggest or allow. To-day we found
a nook on the fringe of the copse we call Wopses-
boorne " Wapsbourne" is the literary form which
shut out the northerly wind and let in all the sun ;
and there we sat for half an hour, Nym content to
be still for once, with his nose on his paws, while
we thought our thoughts in the lull and warm air
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of the shelter. There was nothing in the fields to
suggest spring, except the dusky, almost blackish,
green of the new grass, with glittering points and
edges where the light struck : the larks sprang up
with a few hasty notes, and would not mount, but
drifted away aslant and dropped again in a few
moments. Several times one or two of them
hung almost over my head as I sat still, only a
few yards away, and I noticed their wings, seen
at full stretch with the sun shining through them ;
beautiful translucent vans that gave the idea, not
of separate feathers, but of stretched tissue, " bent "
like the canvas of a sail, pebble-coloured or pale
fawn-yellow shading to grey; and there came a
notion that here was a meaning for one of those
seeming-otiose words in Homer, which one would
so like to put the colour to ravu<rnrr/ooe the
sense of tautness, thinness, transparence, as of
a sail in sunlight. (The authorities, I found when
I looked up the word, allow at least such a loop-
hole for the conjecture as no self-respecting critic
would hesitate to use.)
In the midst of such ingenious recreations as
these, I suddenly caught the sound of the church
bell, a mere pulse of sound against the wind ; and
counting the strokes up to twelve and over, I knew
that it was "the knell going out," and, by our
careful country signal-code, learned that old Jack
Miles had died since last night. And then one
must needs be a little ashamed at one's easy-
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going etymologic diversions. Our workaday
life, with people we know dying round about us,
comes back and turns out peremptorily enough
such whims as what some one once thought about
birds* wings by the Ionian sea. And so that
matter flits away, skim-winged enough ; and the
burden of due gravity returns.
Of late Death has been busy amongst us, as
we say : surely a quaint turn, this, to the inevitable
personification! In a thinly peopled world like
ours, where we know thoroughly by face and
history almost every neighbour in the surround-
ing two square miles or so, death is a thing
intimate and observed in a way hardly to be
realised, I think, by a town-dweller. For the
most part we possess a remarkably stoical temper,
long become instinctive, a provision of Nature, as
we say, to enable us to get through our work duly,
in the absence of distractions found elsewhere. 1
was looking into Seneca's Epistles a short time
ago, and being struck by the curious effect of
nervous solicitude which those constant contemn-
ings of death produce a sort of " damme ! who's
afraid?" attitude I thought how vastly better
our country people have learned to manage it.
They seem to have destroyed the last touch of
terror by mere matter-of-factness, looking at the
event clear-eyed, bringing it down by homely
perception and more than a hint of the grotesque.
They talk about it without the smallest reserve or
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awe ; there is a deal of meaning in the consequence
of the corpse often far beyond anything the live
man attained to and in the circumstance of the
obsequies. What thoughts may come at the end
to the spirit whose flame burns clear to the last
flicker, no one tells ; but at the least the method
serves to keep a lifetime free from the disturbance
of that particular fear, down to the farthest step
which we can follow.
Last Sunday, a warm, still afternoon, that
brought the snowdrops fully out, and set the
blackbirds singing, half the parish was in the
churchyard to see the funeral of Dick Holman,
a solemnity which peculiarly satisfied the require-
ments of village interest. Dick had been a fresh-
faced lad, somewhat overgrown, perhaps, whom
we had scarcely missed from his work of road-
mending before we heard of blood-spitting and
"decline." Some sort of pathos touched the
public mind, I think : a vague sense of destinies
unaccomplished. Mary Bennett, with whom poor
Dick had but a month ago exchanged the pro-
bationary " walking-out " for a serious engagement,
was on the edge of the throng, in a sort of half-
mourning, apart from the universal blacks of the
family, unauthorised, but allowed by the popular
judgment ; tearful, but, in measure, with alleviating
consciousness of distinction such mercies there be
of consolation. For a time, no doubt, Mary will
make the pious pilgrimage to the churchyard,
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which is our people's treasured reason for a Sunday
afternoon stroll ; unostentatiously, a little apart
from the family, which she will, I conjecture, join
on the way home, and be asked in to tea with.
And presently there will be Sunday walkings-out
again in other directions; and so one more
experience added to the placid and common-
place understanding of a great fact.
Two days after Dick's burying, Rebecca Wick-
ham, sixty-nine, with a grown-up family, living in
all apparent peace and content with her old man
at Dudman's Cottages, is found head downwards
in ten feet of water in her own well. Some neigh-
bour early astir (Tuesday is market day) saw her
in her garden patch in the first of the dawn
" terrible cold morning it was, with a smart frost
on the ground ; he thought it was middling early
for ol* Mis' Wickham to be about, but it didn't
come into his mind again, not till he heard as how
she was missing." She must have pushed back
the slide of the well-lid herself ; as much as a man
could do, mostly. No one knows of any reasons ;
she had been pretty bad with the rheumatics, but
had not much else to complain of, by all accounts:
our cottage-folk have not yet found out that reason
of Seneca's for dying because of the tedium in
always doing the same things; the daily water-
fetching and potato-peeling don't seem to give
time for such fancies. And the old couple were
well-to-do, according to the standards of Dudman's
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Cottages. Strange, that the two daughters who
are out in service had been written to, to get them
to come home on the very day the mother was
drowned. One thing clear that she meant it ;
there was no occasion to draw from the well at
that hour, two pails from over-night standing full
in the washhouse. Between the discovery and
the inquest, I think the neighbourhood lives in
guesses at the motive and some sort of recon-
struction of the tragedy, as near the dramatic
conception, perhaps, as their minds ever reach
the sudden resolution ; the creeping down the
creaking stairs so as not to waken the old man ;
the barefoot stumble through the frozen twilight ;
the struggle with the rimy well-lid ; the moment's
pause on the green-slimed edge all these imagina-
tions react in a not unpleasing horror ; and once
again death's sting is soundly dunted on a solid
sense of the real.
And now, to fulfil the belief of the parish that
deaths go in threes, the sullen, surly bell tells us
that old Jack Miles is gone at last ; and some of
us will be saying it is a mercy; and some that
there's none to miss him ; and the prophets who
have buried him twenty times this year are finally
justified. Had he died in his prime, Jack might
have had a notable funeral, for thirty years ago he
was cock of the village, the parish bully, the
natural captain of the wilder spirits, famed beyond
the bounds as a man of his hands and one that
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never skulked from the provocations of the law.
His was a sounding youth. He fell in with a
gang of the navvies who made the first railway
through Sussex and did so much to educate the
natives in ways still to be traced. He was, when
still a boy, one of the famous band which sacked
the coverts of a neighbouring baronet, after send-
ing the head-keeper a written notice of the coming
foray. A born ftghter, he had a full share in the
battles which roused the Sunday calm of the
village green ; he remembered as one of the great
days of his life the opening of the new railway,
when the countryside came in thousands as to a
fair, to venture themselves on rides in open trucks,
given gratis to mark the day ; when the Bolney
cherry-orchards were stripped to heap the stalls
spread on both sides of the line ; when the after-
noon was given to the noble art, and there were
eighteen duly formed rings to be seen at one time
on the adjacent heath. After many a slip through
the fingers of keepers and constables both Petty
and High, Jack first found himself in jail for
smashing a fine new shop window the first size-
able plate glass ever seen in Sheringham Street
" twenty-five foot super all in one piece," he used
to say in after-days, with the chastened pride of a
purged offence, " and not a piece left as big as two
fingers." His middle age was stormy and full of
change ; a Herculean lifter of sacks of flour and
sticks of timber, a prodigious worker when the
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humour took him, he managed to live with a free
hand between his outbreaks and his occasional
puttings-away. He took a wife, and settled in a
lonely cottage at a lane's end, which appears as
" L corner " in the maps, but in the light of its
master's goings-on found a new meaning for the
customary aspirate of the spoken word. Not
at first a drinker above the ordinary, Jack soon
began to win fame for a heroic capacity for ale ;
the tale of quarts he could hold at a sitting, his
feats for a wager, when he would drink standing
on his head in the Dolphin, appal the degene-
rate modern hearer. In those days there was
sounder, if stronger liquor to be had than the
"brewer's beer," which like "baker's bread "is
still a name of scorn among the older men, and it
had its natural antidote in the huge labours of
haytime and harvest, the moonlight summer nights
through which Jack ranged the woods. He was
among his other trades a notable pig-killer ; and
whether the tramping the country from farm to
farm, together with the drouthy influence popularly
credited to dealings with the insides of pigs were
the cause ; or whether, as most believed, it was
that they broke the news of his wife's death to
him too sudden-like ; he fell swiftly to be the
merest drunkard in four or five parishes. He
ceased even from his spasmodic fits of work ; he
came before the magistrates for endless disorders
which were very leniently regarded by no small
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section of the community, and finally became a
hero when, expressing the popular mind, he broke
the constable's jaw with a brickbat when the
officer was carrying out the new-fangled regulation
which forbade the immemorial Guy Faux bonfire
in the middle of the street. When he reappeared
six months afterwards, there was seen an astonish-
ing change ; he took the pledge, and confounded
the wise folk by keeping it without a trip until the
zest of watching for a relapse was wholly staled.
For eleven years he was the prop and pride of the
local temperance platforms, an asset that figured
perennially in their accounts. He married again,
set up a pony and cart, and on that and his wife's
mangle lived in decent prosperity, reminiscent of
the old black times as from a safe haven, not
without his own satisfactions. It was a point with
him that howsoever many times he had read the
deep-cut " Go, and sin no more," which faces the
out-going prisoner above the gateway of the County
jail, he " never was a theft." He held a notable
position amongst the untried good, as one that
had come back from the Pit, and reported of it
much in the sense of the moralists' conjectures.
And then, with no perceptible cause, came back-
sliding sudden and complete ; the good years are
wiped out in a fortnight ; John Miles's name is
crossed off the temperance books, and the cause
reels under the loss of its standing instance. The
little carrier's business goes ; the pony and cart
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go ; the wife and her mangle presently get a
separation-order. For a couple of years old Jack
hangs about the Dolphin yard ; a sodden, tattered
old blackguard, the argument and pride of the
graceless haunters of the bar, as once of the ladies
of the Primitive Rechabites. For a time his head
keeps its natural force amidst the ruin. His
fighting instinct leads him to the village green as
of old ; if a degenerate race has sunk from the
prize-ring to half-day cricket matches, there are
still open-air religious exercises to be confounded
with ribald noises, and stump politicians of either
colour to be put out with interruptions of rough
humour, couched in dialect of histrionic breadth.
Five parsons and all their curates has the repro-
bate known ; and all that their labours (together
with the occasional shepherding of the Primitive
minister and the Strict Baptist "supplies") have
managed to instil seems to be a wavering doubt
that it may be true about hell-fire after all.
Old Jack's tremendous constitution holds out
through pleurisies and delirium tremens year by
year, against the muddy beer and flaming whisky.
He is tended by a great-niece, a prettyish, hectic
girl, who, with no pretence of affection, very nearly
kills herself in the work, and receives from the
village opinion a curiously mixed testimony, part
unwilling admiration for her sacrifice, part indig-
nation against the obstinate devotion to an office
" which she hadn't no call to do." And now the
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bell is going, and old John affords a morality to
all the thinking street ; and Lou, the great-niece,
will be allowing herself the well-earned reward of
choosing not unbecoming black at Mrs. Lewry the
dressmaker's ; and one finds one's self wondering
the only matter of doubt remaining about old Jack's
affairs, perhaps what will become of "Marker,"
the one-eyed lurcher to whom the dreadful old
rapscallion was all the world.
It does not need the knell thrice in a week to
make the world smack of mortality more than it
did once within no long memory. Without the
argument of the final instance, one sees more and
more easily the approaches and preparatories of
death, coming about us like some grey, quiet
lapping tide, reaching up here to sand and here to
stone, touching and marking, over-running, un-
covering, hiding again ; through all counter-motions
one feels the depth behind the lifting flow. To
change the figure, it is natural enough that as a
man grows older the blood should chill more and
more readily at the great cold of space which lies
beyond the frail partition of human needs and
daily works, of kindly air and daedal earth ; it is
perhaps inevitable with men who hold strongly
to the past, but have failed to link themselves
at all closely with the interests of the coming
generation. There are temperaments which lie
singularly open to this influence Charles Lamb's
" poor snakes " to whom the good world becomes
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more than they could wish the sign of life, whose
humours shrink at physical cold and dark, and
respond to the passing of a cloud or the lulling
of the wind in a way they would be troubled to
defend. To such natures the motion of the spring
is of course very significant ; it is the forward lift
of the waves, on which they let themselves go, to
hang on, like Ulysses on the Phaeacian crags, under
the backwash of the "fall." It is the annual
miracle which should tune up our religion ; yet it
has its own bitternesses. The contrast of the
immemorial process with our own decay is too
sharp at times ; it is the primrose and the night-
ingale which return, signs which shall stand un-
changed a thousand years after our last April at
the copse ; to lose our distinctions in the type
seems to be beyond our reach. One may, when
the humour takes, find a sort of calendar of loss
in the very movement of the spring ; on such a
day the anemones are over for the year ; to-morrow
the hawthorn scatters along the grass. But spite
of all such set-backs, the main purpose holds, the
vis vivida pervicit ; and the great argument from
beauty in the world stands for the time irre-
fragable.
One side of the little nook in the wood where
I sat was made by a shelf of sandstone rock, and
as the pulse of the knell came dully on the air
like a minute-gun, I found myself during my
meditations mechanically counting the stratum-
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lines in the stone, ticking off each stroke of the
bell against a fresh striation. And when the mind
cleared itself from a certain hazy lapse not far
from oblivion, I found myself in possession of a
very obvious, yet little used answer to some ugly
questionings upon the subject of Time. Here is
a man by the Ionian sea, who can amuse my
idle morning across twenty-five centuries with a
fancy about birds' wings ; well, but suppose that
at length the stretch of tradition fails, that all that
world is whelmed at last under seas of black
forgetfulness, when, as Seneca says, the profound
of Time shall be heaped over us, while here and
there a greater mind shall lift itself above the
flood, and long hold out against oblivion, though
doomed to sink at last into the universal silence.
Suppose the heroic ages no more than one of these
knife-edge layers, red or tawny, across the stone
by my shoulder ; Homer himself no more than a
fine shell-fossil beneath a hundred folds of the silt
of being ; do we not feel the strata already heavy
upon us ? feel the mortal cold of the innumerable
series of years ? To such fancies the knell, counting
the laying-down of the courses of the world, replies
with head-clearing, sober sense, and hints a way
out of our confused reckoning.
As the tolling bell, after its melancholy three
times three and its count of John Miles's years,
turned to a quicker stroke, " settling " to hang
silent in the belfry again, I got up from the little
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nook beneath the rock and turned homewards,
trying to make a balky memory give the right
words to the sense of that place in the Timaeus
one of those sayings which seem to make a strange
silence for themselves in the mind the place
which calls Time the mobile image of the Eternal,
created together with the heavens, with days and
nights, and months and years, and past and future,
the forms of Time which in our forgetfulness we
attribute to the eternal essence. And then, one
text linking on to another as it should, I remem-
bered pretty exactly that of Montaigne : " Dieu
qui par un seul maintenant emplit le toujours."
And last there came the rote-learned words : " A
thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday,"
which some of us Lou the niece, and perhaps two
or three old mates, sad rogues, sheepishly strange
in church will be saying on Sunday afternoon,
when the last of old Jack Miles's tale is told.
VIII
March 17.
To pass under the archway of the Almshouse
lodge is to make an effectual retreat from the
hubbub of the world. The echoing passage, with
its vaulted roof and iron-studded doors, is a sort
of ante-chamber to the house of peace ; three steps
across its worn flagstones take the worldling from
the noise and stir of the street, the business of
journeyings, marketings, politics, newspapers, to
the haven where time almost stands still, and
there is nothing to distract the day between the
morning and evening chapel bells. To pace round
the trim green square, to stop here and there for
a word with one of the grey-coated pensioners on
the benches under the rose-hung wall, to listen to
the old humours and histories is a " change " such
as is not to be found in many a thousand miles of
travel, as men travel nowadays, taking with them
the small remnant of accustomed things which they
will not find in their caravanserais and convoys.
Under the present dispensation the outer world
has hardly more entrance into the Warden's lodg-
ing than it has into the almsmen's quadrangle.
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Whether he is to be found in his study, or in the
Green Parlour, the Warden maintains unfailingly
the charmed circle against the spirit of the time.
What we call the Green Parlour is a yew hedge in
the garden, cunningly contrived by some old hancj
with curves and returns this way and that to catch
every chance of sun, and fence out every peevish
air : a shelter high and thick, proof against all but
the most villanous north-easter, and roofed against
showers at one end by the boughs of an undipped
yew. There are benches and a stone table, and a
sort of niche or aumbry cut in the live green, to
hold books or other refreshment. The Warden is
a great man for the open air, and, above all, dislikes
the superfetation of tobacco within walls. I believe,
too, that he has some theory about a like redun-
dancy in discussion indoors ; at any rate, he is to
be found in one or other of the nooks at the proper
angle of the hedge, on most mornings when it is
possible to smoke and read out-of-doors. I found
him the other day in two minds, whether to stay
in the sunny corner or shift for the first time this
year to the shady side. There was a cloudless
sun, but we had not had enough of him yet, and
I gave my vote for the southern bench. From
that vantage-point one looks across the Warden's
lawn with its steps and sundial to a low stone wall,
flourished with stonecrop and weeds, and over
the ranges of the almsmen's garden-plots to the
hayfields and hedges, the orchards and back
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gardens that fringe the village street. It is a
reposeful outlook ; the village life and works are
scarcely visible ; only here and there among the
trees the wood-fire smoke, a clothes-line fluttering
its pennons across a cabbage-patch, a figure moving
behind a gapped hedge, guessed at by glimpse of
shirt-sleeves or apron as Mas' Tingley or Em
Brazier. But to the accustomed eye there is parish
history to be read in every sign. The festooned
napery signifies the return of our friends the Sims-
Biggs from town ; the old grey pony out at grass
on a market-day tells us that Ben the higgler is
still laid fast by the rheumatics ; and if Em Brazier
likes to bring out her sewing to the bottom of her
mother's garden-strip, to pace up and down in the
sun and wind by the elder hedge, the observer
draws reasonable conclusions from the fact that
Tom Lelliot the cowman is cutting hay from the
rick just over the fence. The sun shines pleasantly
on Em's bare head and Tom's swarthy arms, and
if an occasional syllable of livelier dalliance reach
our ears in the Green Parlour, it seems, to my
taste, to fit tuneably enough to the key of the
hour. To the Warden these signs of life are
merely teasing details, if they contrive at all to
make themselves felt by his thinking part. He
thanks God he is not a parish priest ; this year of
duty taken at a pinch will suffice for his lifetime in
that kind of experience. The Vicar will be home
again in three months, and then he will leave the
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work among the cottages, which he was never
meant to do, and will get back to his books and
fulfil his proper ends. He looks grimly at the
prospect of the fold which he finds in such an
unlikely manner committed to his care, the
peaceful-seeming roofs, the orchard-boughs, the
comings and goings of the sunlit aureole on Em
Brazier's giddy head, drawing down his brows in a
penthouse frown, and clasping his great thin hands
across his knee with a nervous tension. I think I
can guess something of his frame of mind the
self-contempt for failure trying to work itself up
into a just wrath at the putting of the whole absurd
business into his unwilling hands. I know some-
thing of other estimates of his work ; I remember
the wish expressed a few weeks ago by old Mrs.
Francis, a representative of the more archaic ways
of thinking, that Mr. Blenkinsopp wouldn't come
back before his lungs was properly mended, as he
had no call to hurry home while we had Dr. Nowell
to look after us. Others have hinted a sense of
Providential compensations alleviating the Vicar's
regretted chest attack. I have put this point of
view before the locum tenens t but I do not propose
to renew the experiment.
Meanwhile, the morning's visiting resolutely
done, the Warden sweeps away the recollection
of all the infinite littles with a restless shift on
the bench, which shuts out of his view the house-
roofs and the garden-patches and all the visible
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signs of his flock and fold. He had a letter
yesterday, he tells me, from Blenkinsopp at Cape
Town, who by this time is heading for New Zealand,
and so may be said to be on the home stretch ;
three months more, and the temporary hireling
will have the parish off his shoulders, and will be
free to settle down again to collect materials for
the Philosophy of History on a new plan, the
great theory of Compensations or Moral Balance
of Power, whose decent carrying-out and burial in
his friends' libraries, with an Athenaum headstone,
he will have us believe, is the remaining object of
his life. No one, so far as I can discover, has ever
seen anything of the great work. Molly Crofts,
quoting a classic of her youth, says it's all his
fancy, that ; he never writes anything, you know.
It must at any rate be all in his head, to judge
from the way the theory comes in pat upon all
sorts of subjects which one can talk about. He
will just be able to hold out, he says, till the Vicar
is home again. It will be high time then for the
parish and himself to get back to their accustomed
ways. I say nothing : but there comes before
me the vision of an old-fashioned, gentlemanly
presence, a little over-gracious and courtly in
manner ; of a daily walk as of one whose religion
has lain chiefly in the avoiding of other people's
corns, and derives its strength to a considerable
extent from the recollection that there was a
bishop in his wife's family. The Vicar must have
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been handsome as a young man, and at times
even now such a cherubic expression lights his
face, at once infantine and paternal, that we forget
that recurrent bishop, and the quondam curate
who was also an Honourable, and the feminine
entourage which feeds the dim mythus of a strong
heroic prime in a manufacturing parish in the
North, a cure which, but for a change of Ministry,
ought to have brought the family a second bishop-
ric. His face should be comely enough with its
clear colour and shapely nose and white hair ;
but all is spoiled by a terrible mouth, slack, and
wide, and flat-lipped, of a type which seems almost
distinctive of elderly clerics of a certain school and
standing ; it must be formed, one thinks, by the
lifelong enunciation of platitudes, and a lack of
humour to turn up its corners. The Warden, with
his shaggy brows and hook nose is quaintly ugly ;
but the small thin-lipped mouth, mobile with
coming thought, twitching in momentary smiles,
lifted in sensitive disgust, redeems the rest. If
one wanted to find a " blind mouth " in the flesh,
I think that that flat-lipped, well-scraped type
would fit the case very nearly : perhaps the pattern
was known in Milton's day. And though the
Warden's tongue can be bitter, the cottage people
respond at once, as they rarely fail to do when
they get the chance, to live meaning and direct
reference to their personal level and scale. Already
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understandings to the return of the accustomed
shepherd and the renewal of the remembered
pabulum which some call spiritual, and to which
some give a Miltonic and simpler sense of the
word. This being so, it is perhaps only in the
natural order of things that the Warden should
be already fretting to hand back the responsi-
bilities and opportunities of the sole charge to
the absent priest. He was meant, he says, in
all things to be a spectator, a wallflower at the
cosmic rout ; any earlier motions towards joining
the dance have departed with gathering years. I
can understand his feeling, being myself one of
those who, whether at the solemnity of a sub-
scription-dance or in the stour of party warfare,
own a centrifugal tendency like that of straws in
a water-butt to the periphery. I am with him,
too, when he goes on to claim a proper function
for the onlooker, the man in the mean state,
immune from party contagions of the hour, free
from the curse of impatience which will have the
issue settled out of hand in its own sense. We
itch to form our great-grandsons' opinions for
them : we want our testaments to be of effect
without the deaths of the testators. A thousand
generations slipping on this side and that in a
fatal relativity only serve to make us the surer
of our own final capture of absolute truth. One
picks up, says the Warden, a half-crown monthly,
fresh and fine, smelling of printers' ink and of
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consequence, and finds the universe recast by a
dozen of ladies and gentlemen, most of whom afford
an instance of the inversion of the primary meanings
of language in the word " doubt." Well, says the
Warden, he puts it all away, mentally, on a top
shelf for twenty-five years, and takes it down
again, at some more searching spring-cleaning,
with black-grimed edges, smelling of dust and
of impotence. Were these scrambling lop-sided
theses in detestable machine-made English mere
flyblows of literature were they the oracles which
unsettled shaky souls, and encouraged the esprits
forts to have another shy at God ? Did these
writers the Dr. Macgurgles and Mrs. Alethea
K. Bangses persuade themselves for a minute
that this dead verbiage, that stinks before the year
is out, was speech that counts, the haud mortale
sonans, the fated body which clothes all vital
thought ? Did they really overlook the eternal
proportion between sound and sense ? Did they
never perceive the curious effect of their essays
taken in the mass, their collective value as a
symptom ? How was it that there never dawned
on them a guess of the tremendous solemnity
of the performance, the fatal unanimous lack
of humour, the provincialism, the mystery of
vulgarity ? All this made clear and plain, says
the Warden, "pulveris exigui jactu ; " think of ten
years' dust on the shelf, and the thing comes down
to its right proportions at once.
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I had listened to the Warden's deliverance, as
I have listened at other times, waiting till it
should come round to the inevitable master-
theory, more than half occupied, I think, with
the interlude going on by the hedge, where the
conference of Em and the cowman has certainly
cost the country half a seam and a good truss
out of the morning's work. Something else has
gone forward, no doubt ; compensations even here
which might be hitched into the Warden's scheme,
if he cared to look so near his own bounds. He
is away again amongst the trains of thought
suggested by those articles in the bottle-green
review, the ever-clearer fact that there is no
middle term in works of the human mind ; a thing
is either live or dead, it has a touch of Promethean
fire or it has not ; and if there is one clear fact
in a world of fog, it is the visible seal of
authenticity in the manner of a man's expres-
sion. Truth will not endure to be told in the
chap-tongue and vernacular of the mob: she
has her mysteries, her pass-words and signs,
a language of her own, out of which nothing
was ever yet said that mattered two days
together.
I could not resist bringing in here my favourite
notion of the working of that blessed sieve which
drops out all the infinite rubbish of letters, and
leaves us if we are willing to stop at the last hun-
dred years or so the absolute and unimpeachable
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good things sorted to our hands. The Warden
nods and accepts my little contribution for what
it is worth ; when the great new Philosophy of
History, built round the fundamental Law of
Compensation, shall see the light, such fragments
will be found ordered in their due station in
the pile. But we shall have to wait, for a
proper statement of natural laws such as these,
till the meanest tyranny of thought ever known
comes to an end, and an astoundingly simple a
posteriori system comes down with all the dead
weight heaped upon it. No chance of that in our
time ? Every chance ! says the Warden : the
thing has blown itself up too fast to stand ; it has
no roots under it, no struggles, no martyrs. . . .
The sense of humour is not really dead yet in the
world ; we shall wake up some day to see the
meaning of science hunting the trail backwards
and losing its power of reasoning in exact pro-
portion to its accumulation of facts. There's a
day of reckoning coming for the people with bald
heads and grey side-whiskers, and semi-evening
shirt-fronts, turn-down collars, and black bow
ties, who are called "thinkers" by way of dis-
tinction.
This strain was not altogether new to me ; and
I had been watching the almsmen in their garden-
plots, who when the Almshouse clock tolled the
dinner hour at its customary protesting interval
after the church chimes, knocked off their feeble
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work, and began to straggle towards the quad-
rangle. Some as they passed the end of the yew
hedge looked towards us vacantly, some with
more or less perfunctory salute, some one or two
with the ingenuous grin of heartfelt recognition.
I put it to the Warden that he had a body-guard,
at any rate, to keep the thinking race at their
distance. Ay, he says, and the best of them all
is old John Blaker, who never could read nor
write : and the next, Harding and Everest, who
have managed pretty well to forget their learning.
They are certainly a great defence ; but even they
can't keep people like Myram and Dempster out
of one's sunshine. Dempster is the schoolmaster,
whom the Warden observes with lifted nostril,
in a sort of fascinated horror, as one might
a curious and pestilent insect. Mr. Myram, our
chief employer of labour, has all the heartbreaking
virtues of his kind ; the little man is rotundly
prosperous, grossly well-meaning, a pillar of
Church and State, such as our blind Samson
of the polls already feels with twitching arms.
Suppose, the Warden says, that the people who
manage our country just now could be made to
look at Blaker and Dempster together, and com-
pare them impartially : he wonders whether even
their systems would not yield to the inference.
Perhaps not just yet, but they will come to sense
in time ; they are throwing over their eternal
principles much faster than they did twenty years
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ago. Some day they'll actually see that a man's
real value is not touched by the three R's or any-
thing else poured into him by Dempster and his
mates. They'll put the story of Theuth into their
Standard Readers presently, and will see that we
are only worth what we dig for ourselves out of
the stuff of life. And then, when the abominable
tyranny of the press and print is knocked out,
there will be wonderful times. In a thousand
years ? In a century ! The balance of things
is about made up, and the great year is nearly
due.
And there, the talk having reached a familiar
anchorage, I find it is time to be going home-
wards. From the square drifts the savour of the
old men's dinners : Em Brazier has taken her
sewing indoors, and the honest cowman is working
with uncommon energy to fill up his tale of trusses,
making the hay-knife flash in the sun as he digs
into the rick. The school-bell jangles from the
far end of the village, and Mr. Dempster is re-
suming his national function with the ladle and
the jar. The world is spinning still, and we must
needs renew our little vortices in its wake. But
as I mount the meadow-path for home, I look
back on the green quad of the Almshouse, saying
over to myself the Warden's Montaigne text over
his study fireplace: "J'essaye de soustraire ce
coing a la tempeste publique/comme je fais un
autre coing en mon dme;** and once more I
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commend the spectatorial attitude, the taste for
standing-out, setting one's back to the containing
wall of things, and giving one's eyes their chance,
at least, of seeing something of the course of
time.
IX
April 15.
IT is perhaps part of a backward-looking idio-
syncrasy that in dreams I so often return to old
neighbourhoods. I do not mean the re-enacting
of the past on the remembered scene, which I
suppose is one of the commonest shapes of dream-
ing ; but the wilful returning as an alien to revisit
the places of twenty, thirty years ago, the mind
quite conscious of the changes but at the same
time somehow forgetting the space between. In
waking hours it is almost a religion with me to
avoid the crossing of old paths and the opening
of closed doors ; but that odd half-brother self of
dreams has no such scruples. Most of all in these
visitations do I explore the gardens which I have
left behind me : very rarely a shadowy Idlehurst ;
sometimes the shore of Sandwell dimly figured
through the early mists ; oftenest the domain
abandoned in the middle years, when the lesion
of exile seldom quite heals. In almost every case
the garden sleeps In a rich air of content, and I
pace about the walks, mostly busy with one occu-
pation, the choosing of plants or roses ghosts of
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authentic possessions, most of these, but sometimes
the mere extravagance of fabulous plenty to be
transported to the new ground which exists, in
some serene confusion of ownership, together with
the old.
These imaginations sometimes hold on even into
the daylight musings, and the plan and lie of an
earlier domain at times almost blot out the material
beds and paths amongst which I walk. At its
own hours the recollection comes, making nothing
of the actual garden or the prospect beyond its
bounds. Nine times out of ten it is of a corner of
Surrey, half suburban in the sense the word still
bore some forty years ago ; of spaces of lawn
larger than the chain would have accounted them,
shadowed by a cedar, a pair of great elms, the
relics of older state, shut in from the highway dust
by a thicket of a hundred neighbour shrubberies
and orchards, and by some remainders of wild
wood a purplish mist of boughs, thickening down
the hillside in the spring suns, with here a pink
cloud of almond blossom, and here a gap of April
blue. The actual garden of the present hour is a
steeply falling patch half converted from kitchen
to flower quarters, fenced with a stubby quickset
hedge, beyond which lie a slope of meadows, the
river-valley, the spire and the tops of the village,
the wooded ridges of the Weald, and for horizon
the long grey wall of the Downs. To tell the
truth, the landscape overpowers the garden j it is
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only in the full height of summer that the sun-
flowers and hollyhocks and peas wall out some-
thing of the prospect, and give the plot a chance
of being considered on its own merits. At other
seasons the enclosure is too evidently a mere clear-
ing carved out of the wilderness, and held as an
outpost with constant watch and ward against the
recurrent forces, the ceaseless invasion of weeds
and wildings, of birds and beasts that claim their
free-warren of the old forest and something more.
In that warfare on my lonely height I sometimes
think with a rebellious sense of comparison of
other closes which I have known, safe shut in high
walls, down among the neighbourly ways of men,
where neither bramble nor dock, mole nor rabbit
profanes the ground. Still, it is something to
maintain one's post, spite of chaffinch and leather-
coat and brown mouse ; there is the long path
and the cross path and the middle path for one's
walks and meditations, with worts and flowers
doing reasonably well in the brown loam, and the
noble landscape broad-spread before one's eyes. It
should not be easy for a man to become morbidly
introspective with half the county in his view,
and the village sounds coming up on the wind to
suggest the busy concerns which thrive just below
the hill ; the war with the wild things keeps a
strenuous mind in use and prevents the obese
luxury known in securer places, where man is cor-
rupted with peach-houses and terraces and pleached
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arbours and vast gooseberries guarded under an
acre of netting. Here the furniture of the garden
does not encourage a fastidious temper ; there is
to say nothing of marbles or fountains hardly so
much as a box-edging or a yew-hedge: there is
no definite sign of antiquity, except the four tall
weather-scarred firs beside the house, and they
signify, if anything, the original heathy wildness
of the hillside. The house itself, low and irregular,
a patching of new on old, hiding its rough-cast
and tile under a cloak of greenery where the
conquering ivy grows year by year upon the roses
and honeysuckle, lends no state to the scene ; it
is little more than the hut for the sentinel who
keeps his rounds here season by season against the
restless besiegers and the still sap of time. There
is but one short length of wall in the whole garden
barely enough for a Noblesse and a Lamarque
and under it the cucumber frames, and the early
border face the south. Here is a fine place for
look-out and reflection in all seasons when we do
not hold the sun too cheap. Last week I spent
a whole morning in it, on one of those spring days
which we call, with perfectly right instinct, old-
fashioned no mere negative truce with dogged
east winds or seasonable hailstorms, but a blest
positive in light and warmth and colour, which
seemed almost too good to be true, and even went
near to out-facing a dozen of the days of old,
secure as they seemed in their prescription of
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memory. On that one day, cuckoo, nightingale,
and swallow came together, nearly a week before
their time : all growing things from the elm-buds
by the gate to the seed-leaves peeping in the
borders had come on with a sudden stride since
the night before. I had proposed sundry jobs of
repotting and pricking out, with the lights wide to
the mild air, but it soon came to sitting on the
edge of the frame, and considering.
There was enough to think about in the visible
world ; the cloud-shadows trailing up the hillsides,
while the woods gloomed to a massy purple or the
meadows flushed from green to gold, should have
been sufficient matter for a reasonable man. The
rim of the Downs, that quarter-inch strip of pale
violet air set over the strong painting of the middle
distance, inasmuch as we know it to mean the five
hundred feet of chalk hill, the steep grassy scarp of
the fortress-wall on whose outer face the Channel
breaks, dominates the whole picture. To-day the
horizon wears a soft purplish blue like a flower's ;
to-morrow if the present signs hold good it will
show a film of grey haze, the edge, to a sufficiently
keen eyesight, engrailed with a running ripple of
heat. In days when the air is dead still and clear
for coming rain, the Down seems to come close up
to the garden bounds, a dun-green bank, hard-
edged and massive, showing every plane in relief,
making out every gorse-tuft and chalkpit and
white track up the Beacon, and the dusty ploughed
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fields on its flanks. Add to these differences the
effects of storm, of snow, of sunset on the hills,
and a man might be content to take such a horizon
for his park-pale, even for his prison-wall, if it must
be. And if he should fret even at that limit, there
is the freedom of the sky, the " flammantia mcenia
mundi," which shut no one in ; there is the
inscrutable economy of the cloud-world, its mar-
shallings and goings to and fro upon the business
of the earth, its serene purposes and vast unity of
intent. There is a good deal to be said for the
man who of choice or necessity makes himself the
fixed pole of his sphere and lets the vault with its
vapours and meteors revolve about him.
On that old-fashioned April day I spoke of, the
clouds were drawing out of the south, tall-sided
argosies in lines and squadrons, here and there
one of the dark keels unloading her treasure in
drifting streaks upon the shining plain. Presently
one of the great galleons came driving over the
valley ; one moment her tops towered dazzlingly
in the blue overhead ; the next, the gloom and the
rattling shower were upon us. I took shelter
under the old yew behind the frame-ground ; and
while I waited for the sun, which I could guess at by
a whitening gleam across the rain, I rummaged over
some corners of recollection a confused store, safe
bind, yet anything but safe find which often
affords good hunting in idler intervals. I tried to
recover something of the frame of mind in which
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as a boy I used to receive the coming of spring.
I am inclined to think that to-day my pleasure in
the shows of the seasons is stronger than with most
middle-aged people, more direct and less associa-
tive ; at any rate, I spend a good deal more time
than most of my acquaintance in doing nothing in
the open air : yet the best of to-day's pleasure is
the merest shadow of the expectancy, the obse-
quious watching, the revel of the fulfilment of the
opening year, which I knew before I was twenty.
It seems wonderful, now, to think how little served
to kindle the fire ; some still noon, sweet with the
lilacs in a forecourt at Casehorton, or Sandwell
glittering through his weed-channels across
meadow-levels, was enough to put the fever into
the blood. One spring of all was the crowning
time; one that seems, as I look back from this
dispassionate distance, to have had no black days,
no wintry returns, to have been altogether made
up of such weather as this morning's hasty glory.
Such suns shone then, and leaves budded in such
heats and such bland airs as time can scarcely
afford twice in seventy years. It is, I think, a
special good fortune of mine that this annus
mirabilis is mixed in memory with the thought of
school-days. By some odd choice of the associative
power the holiday outbreaks, the day-long rambles
in Surrey roughs or chalk-hills, the fishing expedi-
tions by Sandwell, have lost a great part of the
magic impress, and rank with the ordinary good
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hours of other years ; the moments which still
hold the incommunicable light were spent in
morning school at Dr. Ransome's. The Doctor
himself, no doubt, had something to do with it.
There is no finer poetic justice in the world, and
not much neater science, than the schoolboy's gift
of sticking a fatal criticism perhaps no more than
a nickname with an irretrievable barb into the
one loose joint of the magisterial harness ; but I
remember no failing we could fasten on, unless it
were a disproportionate mending of quill pens, a
daily repair done with a relish of conscious art,
which began with sharpening the penknife on the
binding of the great Facciolati while the Doctor
read the morning Psalms to himself and we looked
up our Livy or Euripides. We had our encounters
now and then ; but the fundamental warfare of
pedagogy, with its occasional awkward truces, was
in our case inverted. We knew that our Doctor
was on our side ; we felt that he had not forgotten
what it is to be a boy, had not taken that draught
of Lethe without which, under the present con-
stitution of things, schoolmastering seems barely
possible. One understands now what at times
perplexed us then his sudden attention to a
venturesome rendering, after a bare patience
with the decent dictionary work. Spite of the
way almost like conjuring in which he got
meaning out of the seeming-nonsense chorus-lines,
there were times when he went back, as I judge, to
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his own first wrestlings, and we felt that at bottom
they were nonsense, after all. I remember, in an
odd way he had of making a sort of musing
excursus on our construes, as much to himself as
to us, his contempt for that place in the De Senectute
which disparages the desire to recall childhood and
youth in later age. In his own temper he had
kept the sense, at least, of the early secret ; this
rarest gift of memory was the lien between us, a
main part of the spell which fashioned those good
recollections at school. There was also something
in the place and the manner of it. The garden
was the schoolroom all through a time of seraphic
summer mornings, the work like some more virtu-
ous holiday. It made no little difference to the
digestion of our dialogue or our play that they
came to us with the association not of inked desks
and map-hung walls, but of waving fields and
shining skies, the page chequered by the sun
through the boughs stirred by the south wind, the
strophes tuned to the sound of bees about the
flower-plots. Something of the warmth and life of
those June mornings, when the Doctor heard us
under the oak that stood between the garden and
the hayfields, or in more burning hours in the
black shadow beneath the great cedar on the lawn,
went into our classics ; and something, at least,
remains. Wet days there were, doubtless, and
desperate aorists and iron-hearted rectangles to
balance the good hours; but their memory is
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general, sunk into the undistinguished ..sea, .pf,
young troubles; by a memorable grace -st is the-
serene days which emerge. When September
mornings left the rime too late for us by the oak
tree, the study was not so ill a prison-house.
Through the French windows the landscape was
there, the lawn, the leafless thickets waiting to
kindle again with the spring, making backgrounds
for Medea or Antigone in our work, for Knights of
the Table and Ladies of Shalott in my private
excursions from the text before us ; backgrounds
at times, perhaps, for visions of adventures yet to
come, conquering returns on some day of sur-
passing summer from scholarship-quests or deeds
of yet higher emprise. Most of our company, I
think, did not lack in such dreams the image of a
sovereign lady. I at least owed service to both
the princesses of the house, the dark and the
fair, who often afar and sometimes by chance
encounters in nearer presence shone upon our
workdays ; first, for a little, I was slave to flaxen-
haired Lyddy, the blue-eyed fairy of sudden
friendly smiles ; but soon, and deeply indeed, to
proud Letty, who held all the Doctor's boys as foes
of the house, a hateful stone-throwing, kitten-
teasing race, to be passed by with high-carried
head or warred down with terrific scorn of brave
brown eyes. And even without such alleviations
as these, the Doctor's study was in itself a friendly
place : the panelled walls with their black-framed
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Sir Joshua. mezzotints, the bookcases topped by
the Hom-er bust and the Theseus with his broken-
nosed inscrutable smile at our Attic efforts, the
long table, its bottom bar well worn by generations
of restless boot-heels, the rich atmosphere of the
Doctor's birdseye over all ; these made up a
cheerful spell only second to the garden-hours,
the light which flickered through the oak-boughs,
the warm south which twirled the pages, and
sang through the pipe of Pan with all the concert
of June.
Before I had got thus far in my reconstitution
of history, the shower was over and the sun ablaze
through the drip of the trees. I stood for another
five minutes under the yew to hear the blackbirds
break into song as the storm went by, thinking
how much of all the gloryings of those old springs
came out of the days that were then to be, kindled
by a sun yet below the hills. And since now for
so long a time all the best of April seems to link
itself with the days behind, I began to explore the
tract where the change befel, the break between
that forward and this backward-looking pleasure :
and I think I could have fixed the time of that
conversion or catastrophe, if the precision had
been desirable, within a matter of days. A black-
bird sang on such a morning as this thirty-some-
thing years ago, and the praise I gave him was
mainly for the promises he seemed to make me ;
to-day the gold-mouthed cheat does but pay me
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back my own treasure that I gave him when he
seemed to offer all the world worth the having.
There is a frame of mind which can take a sort
of sentimental pleasure in acknowledging a cheat
like this, which cultivates an actual distaste for
successes and gains. But it is one which may
easily lose the wholesome balance of things ; and
it is good to let the influences of the right April
days rout the mild-minded melancholy as they
very well know how. There is no waste; those
early transports were not meant only to tickle the
susceptibilities of leisurely middle age ; they
screwed up into accord certain strings, we will
suppose ; the instrument once in tune may be
laid aside for the present ; and when on spring
mornings the stirring of the new life reaches it
through windows seasonably wide, some sympa-
thetic vibration of keynote making response, may
give forth from the shelf where it lies, echoes of the
concert in the outer world.
103
X
April 22.
YESTERDAY the nightingales began to sing in
earnest. For a week past a scolding churr as one
crossed the end of a copse, a few low notes, a sotto
voce rehearsing of the cadences, when the keen
wind had dropped in a misty twilight ; the sight,
even, of the unmistakeable red-brown plumage
amongst hazel-boughs, told us that they were here.
But until a restless north-easter, with leaden sky
and a smoky haze across the valley, had tired out
its spite and shifted south-westerly, they, with all
the other wild things, waited and were still.
Yesterday the change came ; after a night of
blowing rain we woke to soft southern airs, and the
breathing warmth which draws all the sweetness
from the grass and mould. When the sun broke
out through slow-sailing clouds, the dripping woods
flushed with a moist heat which brought out the
bluebells and anemones almost under one's eyes.
The nightingales took their part in the outbreak
of pent-up song; but all day they were scarcely
to be heard for the hubbub of the tits and finches ;
and even at the vesper hymn the blackbirds and
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thrushes sang them down. It was only after dark,
in the first rich stillness of the night, all balm and
mildness and content, that they had their hour ;
there were seven or eight of them, perhaps, within
earshot, answering each other from copse to copse,
each in its wonted station, palm-clump or hazel-
alley, from which the song has pealed every
spring of the thirty or so within my memory of
this neighbourhood.
It has been a habit of mine ever since I was a
boy, to look out of window at the night, the last
thing before turning in, to see how the weather
shapes, where the wind sits, whether the stars are
right in their courses, before leaving the world to
go its own gate till morning. At my last look-out
yesterday the night was starry and clear ; Altair
in the Eagle hung just clear of the tall elm by the
garden gate ; and in the budding branches sang
the nightingale as it has sung on spring nights as
long as I have known the tree. I believe that, as
a fact, the numeric bird does come back to the
same bush and bough during its lifetime ; " Le
chantre rossignolet," as Ronsard says
"... vient loger
Tous les ans en ta ramee,"
and again
" Gentil rossignol passager
Qui t'es encor venu loger
Dedans ceste fraische ramee
Sur ta branchette accoustumee ..."
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but that does not greatly matter. The nightingale
is immortal ; it is nothing to the point to know
whether the bird that sang here last year fell a
prey to some grimalkin in Tangier or Fez ; the
fact stands that the song breaks from the tree
as punctually as Altair glitters over it. There is
much matter in this parallel of migration, sugges-
tions to be slackly followed out, as one leans with
one's elbows on the window-sill, breathing the
divine tenderness of the night, kept out of bed by
that poignant lullaby from the elm-boughs. If
the little brown bird and the star keep tryst thus,
what accord of cycle and epicycle may not be pre-
dicable in our own sphere ?
Listening to the rich variety of the song, the
long-drawn stealing fall, the marvellous liquid
shake, the force in the outburst of keen marteU
notes, familiar for forty springs, yet year to year
a still fresh wonder, I felt once more the impression
of the duration of life which rather than that of
its transience grows upon me as the seasons
add themselves. We hear more than enough, I
think, about vicissitude, the mutability of fortune,
and the like ; little or nothing concerning the
difficulty (as I see it) in believing that anything
of the setting and circumstance of our life can ever
change. In the matter of acquaintance and of
neighbourhood, my own strand of experience has
been broken off and knotted on again perhaps as
much as most men's ; but the trouble which I find
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is the keeping one's self awake to the truths of lapse
and loss under the lulling persuasiveness of those
immoveable common things that at once shut in
and sustain our being. I find this difficulty not
only in the punctuality of constellations and night-
ingales, but in the most trivial details of one's own
concerns. I sit in my accustomed place in church
for so many years, and the chisel-marks on the
pillar before me not learned by heart, as it may
be with some men, in slumbrous Sunday after-
noons of childhood, but known for a mere broken
length of later years seem to assert a fixity for
which their five centuries' clean-cut graving is only
a symbol. I make one of my rare visits to town ;
and, sauntering as my wont is along the line of
well-remembered daily walks, I find again at a
certain street corner the rich cosmetic atmosphere,
the breath of macassar which hung there half a
life ago, about the very shrine of barberdom. A
little farther on I stop in a narrow alley before
a printseller's window ; and lo ! there is the very
etching of Water Meadows, the reeds, the ragged
poplars, which used to draw me across the pave-
ment day by day, a kind of revelation to eyes
opening somewhat blinkingly on new aspects and
perspectives of the world. Even in humanity I
find a sort of stay or arrest of Time's hand, con-
trary to all the book-rules ; the proportion of my
acquaintance who " never look a day older " is
quite a large one. If I go to Oxford, there is
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always Kelly in the lodge red, Irish, military,
clean as a new banknote, enormously respectable :
there is the Dean, crossing the street, small,
shrivelled, with the historic shepherd's -plaid
trousers, and the top hat on the back of his head,
his soul browsing in the Anthology, the musing
eyes focussed now and then with an effort on such
outer phenomena as tramcars or bicycles. Neither
he nor Kelly shows a wrinkle the more ; and it is
a surprise which I never quite get rid of, that
neither Dean nor Porter sees in me the down-
chinned, raw-boned undergraduate of a mere
hundred terms or so since. The negative instances
which occur somehow fail to produce a propor-
tionate effect. Hicks the Bursar's once raven
beard is now nearly white ; but that is a mere
accident of matter : one is assured that Hicks's
lectures on political economy have suffered no
change. And the Master has certainly been dead
these three or four gaudies ; one reads the gilt
lettering, already a little tarnished, on his marble
in the ante-chapel, but with a mind that does not
fix itself on the subject. As I said, it seems that
in these matters it is only the positive phenomena
which have weight. I will not insist that this way
of looking at the world may not spring from a
congenital twist of the perceptions, and I will grant
that the ultimate catastrophe may be all the more
impressive for a lifelong obstination in the con-
trary sense ; but I honestly think that as a rule
1 08
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we allow too little for the effect of the security
bred in us by a view of life's continuity. I came
the other day on the chapter in Seneca which
moralises about the burning of Lugdunum, with all
its marshalling of the vicissitudes of existence,
like a schoolboy's essay. It would be some solace,
he says, for the briefness and feebleness of our days,
if things decayed as slowly as they are matured ;
as it is, increase is laboriously wrought out, but all
things haste towards extinction. It depends, per-
haps, very much upon the point of view. I once
found on a tree in an old orchard, clear and
strong, expanded to a sort of grotesque emphasis,
the initials which I hacked out in some couple of
minutes' playtime when I was at school. In the
same way, a single breath serves for half a dozen
words which sting the heart without pity after
fifty years' repentance. Of course, when the Stoic
goes on to reckon up exile and torture along with
sickness, war and shipwreck, as common chances
of life, we must admit he has an argument which
we have lost. Perhaps we do not generally give
all their due to those old Romans who so seldom
died in their beds : one may speculate, in passing,
what differences it might make in the public men
of our day if the dissolution of a ministry involved
that of its members, and if their ultimate pro-
bability were poison instead of peerages. But
Seneca's tale of wrecks, burnings, earthquakes,
floods he died, be it noted, some fourteen years
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before the catastrophe of Pompeii can hardly
have had much more weight in Italy in his day
than it would have in England now. It is the
very ratio of such discrimina rerum to the common
tenor of the world, which makes for that lulling
security of daily life. And perhaps to vent an
old spite of mine on the race of most compendious
liars which the world has ever seen it is the very
insistence of the common type of moralists on the
transience of things which is answerable for the
recoil towards too large a faith in their stability.
"Nil privatim, nil publice stabile est," says the
philosopher ; and we deliberately stiffen our trust
in Greenwich time, the Bank of England, and the
like fixities of the universe. In all things, says
the philosopher, we are to look before us and
excogitate not what usually happens, but what
may possibly come to pass. It is a precept whose
observance might save us a good deal of trouble ;
and as I turn away at last from the window, I con-
sider that before the circle is complete again this
time next year, Altair may have exploded upon
space, and the whole race of nightingales may
have died of broken heart. But that injunction
does not make sufficient allowance for the force of
common life, a lulling enchantment beyond any
that philosophy knows. It would be nearer the
mark to insist on the continuance of life about us
and our own transience amongst it; to think of
ourselves as held a moment in the vortex of the
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spinning orb, and then flung out at a tangent, as
alive this spring in every nerve to the pulse of the
white fire and the thrill of the voice in the dark,
in a few more Aprils taken away from the coming
together of the star and the bird. As I left the
window, there came something of a rebellion I
have felt before at such seeming disproportion of
sentiment, a pathos with something like a touch
of jealousy in it, a new meaning to "still wouldst
thou sing, and I have ears in vain " only to be
borne by the help of an old surmise that such
puttings-forth of beauty as these, the things which
at every turn we must look at and listen to and
leave with a helpless pang, are but the last vibra-
tion of the central light ; the belief, or the will to
believe, that all the good and fair things which our
life ever and again presents, half-shown and with-
drawn while scarcely grasped, all the broken
lights, the suspensions and discords are but slight
motions of the reality about us, felt as the world is
felt by the first momentary sallies of the child's
perception vague pictures, as in a dream, with
long interspaces of nothingness. There is a way
in which we may think of these intuitions as at
once fantasy and truth : a way figured by the
chance of a dream I had at nightingale-time last
year. In that last strange state, when the dream
.thins away like morning mist before the quicken-
ing warmth of life, and for a moment we hang
somewhere between two worlds, I thought I was
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in a rich Eastern garden, listening to the night-
ingale among blossomed thickets, and watching a
point of light which shone from the top of a vast,
shadowy building mosque or dome, divined rather
than seen amongst black groves of cedar. This
light had a pulsation in its flame, which seemed
to keep time with the throb of the pealing voice ;
connected with it (as I said to myself, with the
fantastic precision of words we sometimes find
in dreams), by some strange relation of a cycle
of rhythms. Then, as the slowly clearing mind
came awake and felt, so to say, for its bearings in
the world of sense again, the dark corners of the
room and the faintly glimmering square of the
window, there was the matter which the half-
quickened fancy had wrought upon : the star
hung glittering over the dark mass of the elm,
and the song pealing from its boughs had at once
broken and avouched the dream.
112
XI
May 12.
I TOOK the Warden with me lately in one of my
cross-country walks, seven miles by field-path and
wood, gate and stile, without a step on the high-
road. In the days of my youth I tramped the
highways to some purpose ; I have the Ordnance
map of more than one county, on which the red-
inked record of travelled roads makes a pretty
close network. But altered conditions of traffic
have turned me off the Macadam and into the
fields ; and thus late do I begin to discover the
full charm of the innumerable tracks and paths in
which a man can saunter and muse if he will,
unvexed by dust-clouds and the rules of the road.
I am already coming to regard the highway, when
I chance on it in my rambles, as " pays suspect "
much as do the wild things, stoat or rabbit, looking
cautiously up and down it, and scuttling across it
into the safe covert of the green depths on either
hand. The brooding quiet of some woodland
hollow is all the deeper for the noises which
faintly reach it from the London road, the howl
of flying gears, the hoarse quack as of some great
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The way I took led through a succession of
copses, some of which had been cleared this
spring of their underwood. The Warden was
for grumbling at the destruction ; and at first
sight the bald slopes of trodden ground, with
hardly a primrose to grace them, littered with
twigs, and rough with the hacked stubs, con-
trasted unhappily enough with the untouched
thicket, where the hyacinths clothed the ground
with living blue a sapphire with a greenish under-
play and the galaxies of the stellaria shone along
the banks. But, as I told the Warden, it is pre-
cisely to the rigid system of periodical clearing
that we owe the incomparable beauty of our
sylvan springs. Where a wood has been left to
itself for thirty years, the explorer, if he can force
his way through the thicket, will find the ground
bare and dead, all growth stifled by the green roof
overhead. But when the woodmen have lopped
the glades, and have thinned the larger timber
in places, even the first year there is a flush of
life that has lain dormant there, trails of ground-
ivy and spurges uncurling ; the second year the
primroses have lodged themselves all over the
cleared ground ; the third spring they are in their
glory ; and before the stubs of the underwood have
sprouted again to more than a spare covert, the
bluebells have run together from groups and
scatterings here and there to isles and continents
of heavenly colour. Just for the moment, when
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one finds the billhook levelling a favourite shaw
and opening the secret alleys to the common day
one grudges the change, and says something to
one's self of the lucum ligna kind ; but when one has
seen this harvest of the woods, the cycle of growth,
and clearance at work for the best part of a lifetime,
and observed the delight of Nature in clothing the
fresh ground, and all her degrees of changing
beauty till the copse stands thick and green again,
one recognises the woodman as no mean artist,
and feels how intimately human handiwork has
become part of the most characteristic English
landscape.
In Horse Wood we found John Board, a here-
ditary billman, and his mate busy among the
underwood, beside their rough-built shelter with
all their tackle about them stick-faggots, ether-
boughs, thatching-rods, cleft oak for wattles. The
fire under the kettle sent a drift of blue haze across
the clearing, and the two men were just ready to
knock off for dinner. Their life is astonishingly
simple and archaic, and one of the wholesomest in
the world ; dry-shod in dead leaves and fern while
the ploughman splashes along the drenched fur-
rows, snug by the stick fire in the lew hollow while
the snow-wind nips the shepherd on the down,
these " leather-legged chaps," the " clay and coppice
people," as Cobbett called them, are still, as they
were at the time of the " Rural Rides," most
favoured of all who live on the land. The billhook
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is almost the only tool they need ; a felling-axe
may be wanted for the larger saplings, and a draw-
knife for shaving the thatching-rods ; the wood
itself furnishes all the rest : chopping-blocks, levers,
wedges, bonds for the faggots, are all made as they
are wanted from the material everywhere lying at
hand ; the little " lodge " or shed for rough
weather is built of faggots and thatched with hoop-
shavings. Nothing is wasted ; the very chips and
litter make the fire over which the kettle sings,
hung on a handy hazel crook stuck into the
ground.
We sat a few minutes on a pile of faggots to
pass the time of day with John Board, a small,
shrivelled greybeard, keen-eyed, spry to the last
degree, tongue-free, the captain of all woodcutting
hereabouts. His mate, Luke Holman, a heavy-
shouldered giant, taciturn and impenetrable, tended
the fire with his back towards the conversation.
In the upper wood a number of sizeable oaks had
been " thrown and flawed," and the men had been
busy putting up the dried bark into bundles.
Chichester, or Horsham, it was going to, said old
John ; he didn't know which ; it was the same
man had the tanyard at both on 'em. How was
the bark selling ? Why, better than what it was a
year' two ago ; they seemed to reckon as they
couldn't do without it, after all. It wasn't any-
thing like what he could remember, but better
than what it was the last time they was throwing
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in Horse Wood ; then they didn't flaw anything
smaller than your wrist, but now you'd got to go
middling far up the spray.
The Warden asks if old John knows where the
leather goes to when it comes out of the tanyard?
Old John shakes his head : London, he 'spects
. . . mos' things goes to London now. And not
so long ago, the Warden asks, there were tanyards
in almost every village ? There was that, replies
the woodman : he could recollect them working at
Arn'ton and Shern'am up till 'sixty, pretty near.
" And you could know where your leather came
from then, and could know that it was leather ? "
asks the Warden again, looking meditatively at a
cracked boot-upper. Oh, ay, there wasn't much
of this here truck that rots as soon as ye starts
wearing of it ; 'twas all oak-bark then. And he
'spects people can get it now them as reckons to
have good stuff. The Warden nods reflectively :
" them as reckons to have good stuff," he murmurs
to himself, as a fruitful summary of the whole
matter. We left the woodmen to their refection,
earned as not many lunches are earned, taken in
serene leisure, after a rub on the corduroys of the
palms scored and blackened from the hazel bond,
in the snug lee of the faggot pile, with the boot-
heels stretched luxuriously into the hyacinth carpet,
with the sunlit woods misting drowsily through the
blue haze from the Sire. In the upper wood we
found havock to dismay at first sight even a man
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used to the woodland economy. A score of oaks
were down, the flayed trunks thrown pell-mell
among the trampled anemones, the lopped spray,
which was already in yellow leaf, withering in
shattered confusion all about. Some of the fallen
were but timber trees of the crowd, mere sixty-
foot masts, with a head of boughs at the top
fighting for light and air ; but there were two or
three on the edge of the wood with characters of
their own, that had been a sort of landmarks in
my walks, the pattern of whose ivy-trails and the
grey wrinklings of whose boles had printed them-
selves on my memory in a thousand conjunctions
of varying mood and weather. Worst of all, just
beyond the wood, there was a sudden gap that
struck the mind with something of the rebellious
grief proper to graver losses. The noble tree
which crowned the knoll beyond the wood, spread-
ing his boughs twenty yards into the cornfield on
the one side, and thrusting back the thicket as far
behind him, the honoured friend whose stately
strength I have stood to look at summer and
winter the mighty muscle of the bared limbs or
the dome of massy leafage whose outline the
perfect prime of age had brought to the full semi-
circle lies shattered and dinted into the clay
among the springing wheat. Every time I went
by him I used to make an inward salutation to
his absolute fulfilment of the function of a tree,
with a back-handed reference, perhaps, to some
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prevalent standards of human completeness. As
we stood by the great sawn butt, as high as a
man's shoulder, the Warden counted the rings
of the grain two hundred and eighty, if the axe
had not robbed him of some years at the edge
and made a rough calculation of the feet of timber
in the trunk. I found myself wondering what I
would give, over and above the price he will fetch
in the woodyard, to have him up and green once
more, and saying that it would be a long time
before I care to take my walk through Horse
Wood again.
As it happened, I found myself there only a
night or two afterwards, and sat for half an hour
on a bough of the fallen giant, with a score of his
fellows glimmering about me in the dusk on the
flower-strewn slope, and the clean raw smell of
the oak sap filling all the air. I had nodded and
roused myself once or twice, when all at once
I saw the souls of the trees, the Dryads, gathered
together in a company, coming down the wood-
men's path, sighing as they came with a thin echo
of their old tree-top music and pacing slowly
amongst their shattered boughs. They were
shepherded by Hermes, who bore a felling-axe
in place of his wand. At the brow where the
path drops steeply to the sallow-grown bottoms
of the wood, they met with Pan, who seemed to
complain of the wrong done to his realm and the
exile of his people. " That I have charge to bring
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them over Styx is true," I heard Hermes say;
"but shall there not be oaks in the under-world,
and souls to inhabit them sufficient for the wood-
lands of the blest ? Doth not Jove take thus at
their season the tree, and the hyacinths beneath
it, and the grass, so that there may be no lack
of shade there, nor of soft lying, nor of garlands
for those who rest ? These, and many another sort
of good things beside I convey from men's sight
into the darkness ; or how should they, when they
have been ferried over, find all that the poets told
them should be there? And so, fair son, let
me on with my flock."
With that he passed on, and when I rubbed
my eyes and looked after them, there was nothing
there but a wreath of mist rising from the hidden
turns of the brook, and no sound but the cry of
the plover from the fallow beyond the wood. I
left the lopped trunk and the litter of withering
leaves, pleasing myself with the fancy that some-
where the soul of the tree was budding freshly,
and the well-remembered shadow was falling
across the wood-violets and anemones in the light
of a fairer sky.
120
XII
June 24.
WHEN I called at Burntoak Farm last week for a
talk with Mrs. Ventom, I found her making tea for
Lady Anne in the kitchen. Such a conjunction of
feminine capability is a memorable thing, if a little
arduous, for the chance-comer to the feast. It is
rather as if an honest Boeotian, going to pay a call
at the Delphic shrine, had found the Sibyl enter-
taining her colleague of Cumae. Both the ladies
are most serenely and practicably wise in their
several ways, and I always maintain that Lady
Anne might, with great profit to her neighbours,
take over the whole law-business of this circuit,
while Mrs. Ventom's judgment should certainly
supersede the present form and matter of our
County Council. But, like some exceptional
voices, their gifts seem formed to mix their
high and low together in concert : they inspire
each other when they confer. If they would but
put their heads together about their country's
government, I protest that a week's specimen
of their management would be enough to sweep
away the tangle of impersonal enactment and
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impossible persons, and to upset the whole con-
catenation, from the calamitous Tom Gates with
his tipsy vote, up to the public-spirited gentlemen
who form the summit of the dear device. But
what hope is there of any such devolution, when
the inspiration of the Sibyls springs entirely from
the religion of minding the business that lies next
at hand?
Mrs. Ventom has not learned to concede the
modern whimsy of meals out-of-doors. A garden
is very well at proper times, she holds ; but it was
not made to eat in ; and if she abhors one manner
of eating, it is what she calls "tea in her lap." I
found the great kitchen, with its black oak ceiling
and stone floor, pleasantly cool and dark after the
glaring dust of Plash Lane in its summer guise.
The table, with its historic damask got-up as Mrs.
Ventom knows how, with its ample provision the
butter, the cream, the honey, the jams, the cakes,
all answering her inexorable standard of home-
made perfection was a lesson in forgotten arts.
Both door and windows stood wide, and through
them we looked out on the sunlit greenery of the
garden. Mrs. Ventom, as becomes the mistress of
three hundred acres, and a power in the parish, is
rather contemptuous towards the house-piece, the
twenty rods or so allotted to such mere luxuries as
gooseberries or shallots ; none the less, the green-
stuff flourishes beyond the ordinary, and the
flowers seemingly chance-set among the worts
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in the old way, a vast lavender bush, a rose
hollyhock, a tuft of white pinks fit into their
places and come into the picture in a fashion
missed by some more painful gardeners' designs.
Such graces as these are kept in their places by
sound utilities ; a midsummer hatch of white
Dorkings scratches about the pinks, and the
flagged path between the box borders and the
lavender is lined with rows of cream-pans, glitter-
ing dazzlingly in the afternoon sun.
My arrival only suspended for a minute or two
a discussion of intimate domestic affairs, as lively
and actual as only a couple of really strong-headed
women can make it ; and while I heard the counts
of the indictment against Hetty Dawes the kitchen-
maid, I compared, as I have done at other times,
the looks and ways of the two wise women, the
bailiff's widow and the earl's daughter, so curiously
alike through their differences, and thought what
an education the pair might afford to some simple
propounders of equality, in the science, hardly yet
conceived of, of levelling or fitting in. The perfect
understanding of positions and absolute ease in
them, the immunities of half a life's friendship,
the fine intuitions by which the lesser lady
derogated and the greater assumed, might have
taught a new category of ideas to all that painful
world which for ever scrambles and kicks to keep
its own head at the heaven-appointed altitude in
the scale of creation. In the matter of looks, the
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mistress of the farm, no doubt, carries it easily at
first sight She is one of those rare people whose
dressing seems an inevitable part of themselves,
and no mere appendage, as pleasantly characteristic
as the wholesome complexion or the springy gait ;
whether one view her in her dairying print and
apron, or in her church-going black silk, one pro-
nounces that nothing more is wanted, that the
alert, well-turned figure, the fine hands proof,
it seems, against the rasp of house-work the
smooth brown hair, the clear colour in the spare,
rather high-boned cheeks, could not possibly look
better in any sort of tire but the one that is on.
Whereas Lady Anne's old black mushroom hat,
her quaint home-made jacket, with its business-
like pockets, the darned gloves of her country
walks are an effectual disguise. She has grown
stouter of late years, and her face, seen in side-
view, with half-drooped eyelid and sunken chin,
sometimes looks a little heavy and inert: her
white hair is apt, in the ordinary course, to stray
rather disorderly. But one has only to listen to
her voice, to get a look from the light blue eyes, a
look for the most part one of serene appraisement,
but sometimes lit with an imperious fire, in order
to understand all that is told of the place she held
in London before she lost her son and withdrew
from the world at thirty. There is, I think, some
bond between her and Mrs. Ventom, which had
its beginning in that time ; they were together, I
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imagine, when the catastrophe happened, nearly
forty years ago, and out of the trouble grew one
of those understandings which are the closer and
more lasting for their being rarely or never
expressed in words.
The delinquency of Hetty Dawes was the
main strand of the talk on this occasion. There
was, indeed, a somewhat perfunctory attempt to
bring in on my behalf the weather and the
prospects of the gooseberry crop, but I have
managed to acquire with my acquaintance the
character of a general philosopher, who can see
his own affair in the greater part of other people's
subjects ; and presently, without much apology,
we came round to the little kitchen-maid again.
To outward view Hetty is almost pretty, ac-
cording to our not very exacting standard,
with the casual prettiness of colour and ways of
looking and smiling, which just carries off the
slack-knit frame and blunted features of the race.
As to her ghostly part, she is just one more of
those heartbreaking little nonentities which we
breed in such multitudinous uniformity. She
seems to have nothing about her so positive as
either vices or virtues, her mistress says ; it is
doubtful whether she has any innate motions at
all, except perhaps an instinctive power of dodging
work and a propensity, leisurely, but one that
arrives, towards amusement gratis. Three years'
drill at Burntoak having made her really useful
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at due range of tether, she gives notice, not
altogether unexpectedly. No, she has nothing
to complain of; she doesn't want to be recom-
mended to any one, thank you ; she has heard
of a place in Bayswater, and has written to the
lady. And she had only turned her hair up a
month before! They always go like that then:
there must be actually something in the operation
which affects the brain, Mrs. Ventom thinks,
meditating the drift of a long and strenuous
experience of scullery-maids.
" It wasn't always so, Lucy," says Lady Anne.
"You'll remember Jane Burtenshaw "
"Yes,and Polly Knight," replies thewidow; "they
were made differently, somehow, then. Jenny
couldn't read a line, and Polly could but write
her name. It's education that does it, my lady."
" Oh, Lucy ! " cries Lady Anne, with a grave
shake of the head, rallying to the conventions in
countercheck to Mrs. Ventom's more sweeping
iconoclasm.
"Well, what they call education, my lady. If
the schooling they get was made or meant for
country-folk, it would be another thing. You'll
remember the inspector last year, who wanted us
to plant roses on the north side of the schoolhouse,
and made all the children laugh with his question
about swedes. And there's poor Dempster who
went out naturalising and caught a cockchafer,
and wanted to argue against the whole school that
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it was something else. It's Londoners teaching
the children to be Londoners all through ; and
then they wonder why they want to leave the
country and go into the towns."
" But there's been a good deal of improvement
lately," says Lady Anne, still showing a gravity
which I suspect as slightly beyond the needs of
the case ; " they have actually been talking about
teaching field-work and house-work."
"And who's to do the teaching?" asks Mrs.
Ventom, smiling at some vision, perhaps, of certain
top-hatted visitors she knows, over their boots in
her ten-acre in January. " They don't even know
the outside of their own business yet, with all their
talk about the science of teaching ; pouring stuff
out of a spout is all they can think of. ... If
they'd ever had to fatten ducks, now," she goes on
meditatively, " they'd have learnt that there's some
hold more than others. But it's all straight out
of the books. They don't seem to reckon," con-
cludes Mrs. Ventom, with an analogy after her
wont, " that you can put a fire out with coal."
"But about Hetty," Lady Anne began again,
going back to an old prejudice of hers ; "we might
have found her a good place somewhere in the
country, Lucy. You say she has never been out of
Sheringham yet ; she's a mere child, and London's
a terrible place. Surely, if you'd used a little
authority "
Mrs. Ventom shook her head. "People must
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learn/' was all she would say ; " learn and find out
for themselves."
Just then Hetty herself came into sight, busy
about the milk-pans along the box hedge, and
both the judges turned to look at her, out in the
clear light of the garden, and I looked at the
judges. The two faces offered a curious contrast
of expression. Lady Anne's was solicitous and
very tender, as she watched the little busy head
with its new-learned vanity of flaxen top-knot;
Mrs. Ventom's meaning, as she repeated her
formula, " They've got to learn, my lady," was not
so easy to interpret; but I thought that I saw
underneath the hardness a deeper care even than
Lady Anne's, the tenderness which has learned not
to fight against the strangeness of the ways of life,
knows something of the cost lit cannot pay, the
things that must be let alone for ever.
The unconscious culprit finished her tidying
up by the box hedge, and the court went back
to the consideration of causes again. None of
us our memories being of about the same span,
and, I think, agreeing to a considerable extent
in a selective turn had any need to go beyond
the obvious post hoc of the schools. Once more
Mrs. Ventom fixes, with her own homely illustra-
tions, on the nerveless, slack-sinewed methods of
the educational hierarchy, the want of mother-wit
and grasp of the rude elements of life. They
have shut themselves up in a dead world of their
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own till, in matters of plain sense, they are stupider
than the dullest child they set up to teach. " I've
never come across a master yet/' she says, "nor
an inspector either, for that matter, who remem-
bered that what you put first into a box when
you're packing it, comes out last. But it makes
a difference, when you want to get at the things.
Not that there's anything in most of them, when
you do get them open."
And with that she began to tie her bonnet
strings the signal of dismissal and made ready
to see Lady Anne back to the highroad. I took
my way home round by Nyman's Corner, and
chancing on the outrush of the children coming
out of school, had opportunity to observe the
prevalence of pale faces and dull looks and
undeveloped frames a strange alteration, within
my recollection, from the sun-bleached heads, the
walnut complexions, the stout little anatomies,
checked by the very abundance of exercise in
light and air, but prompt to shoot up and
broaden at the due season, which were to be seen
before we had learned to imprison the forming-
age for the best part of the day within stuffy
walls, at best nurseries of dirt and sickness,
sometimes as Nyman's Corner taught us but last
summer deadly with bungled drains. We were
never, I judge, at any time a particularly well-
favoured race hereabouts ; yet the red cheeks and
clear eyes to be seen among the outliers of the
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farms, if not in the purlieus of the village, used
to carry it off pretty well. Nowadays the mis-
featured faces and shapeless heads get no help
from the blessed sun and wind ; our skins are
bleached, our legs are atrophied, our chests con-
tracted, in order that our souls may take the like-
ness just heavens! the likeness of the soul of
Dempster and his kind.
As I shook off the little crowd, and got out of
range of their cheerful noise and alack ! of their
appeal to another sense I overtook the Warden,
and walked with him as far as the head of the
street, propounding some of the doubts which I
had been entertaining, and finding him, in his
positive, unhesitating way, full of the same subject.
That aura which I had passed through had
evidently reached his nose ; there was at least one
uniform product of the system always to be had :
for the manufacture of froust trust the elementary
schools! Some day it would, of course, strike
people that education might include learning to
wash. I got the Warden to give me the text of a
place in Xenophon that was in my head, about
the occupations which compel people KaOijaOai KOL
(TKiaTpafaiaQai, to sit indoors and live out of the
sun ; and he reminded me of some more sound
remarks in the passage, how that people reared
under those conditions are not much use to their
friends, and make poor defenders of their country.
" And we shan't mend that," says the Warden,
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" by having a drill-sergeant for them once a week.
Oh, the imbecile wiseacres of authorities, who just
begin to have a glimmering that the body counts
for something, and talk about school-dinners !
We shall have to get back to Plato, and make
Asklepios a politician, before we can give the
poor little wretches a chance."
I quoted some of Mrs. Ventom's dicta about the
personnel of the system. " Ay," says the Warden,
"the head that woman has! They've got the
wrong men everywhere. Take the committee ;
think of our good Sims-Bigg, and Billy Hicks the
educationalist ! And then all those bloodsuckers
in the departments don't you know the type ?
sweating Firsts in History like Chepmell and
Blagden and Poppleton with their annual increase
and pensions, and their seventy-pound houses at
Bromley or Muswell Hill damned souls from the
day they began to spell. One might get over
them, though, or put up with them ; it's the Heads
and the Parliament men that make one absolutely
hopeless : they must know better, one thinks. Old
Herder he comes to see me generally when he's
over from Bonn insists it's simply a plan of the
powerful to Helotise the lower orders for their own
ends ; and, on my word, it looks uncommonly like
it. Of course the Radicals would be sentimental
fools enough to play into the hands of the con-
spirators, thinking we're going to have the Millen-
nium that way. The fool or rogue dilemma comes
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in somehow. People like our Billy, and even like
Chepmell, perhaps really believe in themselves.
There's some hope of a man like Chepmell, who is
suddenly illuminated after twenty years in the
office, and discovers that it is a life and death
matter to interest the children in the land. Not
the slightest distrust of themselves for having been
wrong for half a lifetime ; they start gaily on the
new tack, more convinced of their infallibility than
ever. But the politicians ! well, you know where
I think their illumination comes from : ' darkness
visible,' eh?"
To all this I nodded my head and agreed, as I
hope a wise man may, feeling the satisfaction of
hearing some one else go further than one's own
proprieties would quite concede, and getting, like
Panurge with his page, one's cursing done by
proxy. When I bade the Warden good night at
the Almshouse gate, we were agreed that there could
be no beginning of real elementary education in
the country till the whole of the present ghastly
simulacrum was swept out of the way, and the
hands of Billy Hicks and Dempster and Chepmell
put to some less momentous business than shaping
the destiny of the race. As I climbed the hill
homewards I mused what sort of account little
Hetty Dawes would present against those busy
traffickers, in the great final clearing-house of debts
and credits, whose existence is one of the most
consolatory of my private and supplementary tenets,
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I was at Burntoak again yesterday afternoon,
and found that Hetty's term was up, and that she
was to leave by the next morning's carrier. On
my way through the village I had met Mrs. Sims-
Bigg, home for a few days from the whirl of the
season in town. There was no resisting or escap-
ing her ; town was such a change ; everybody
wanted a change ; / wanted a change, most
decidedly : the country was all right in August,
and for a Sunday now and then ; but really to
appreciate it, one must be back in Kensington
again. I must come up and rub the rust off a
bit ; a year in the country made people positively
mouldy. Under this sort of education I scuffled
along deprecatingly, as I have seen a small boy
reluctant, ear-led by domestic law ; and only when
the irresistible lady had gone, shrieking to me
through the noise of her carriage-wheels the
address of some Brompton lodgings, which I was
to engage at once, did I think of all the neat
remarks with which I should have defied her. I
carried on something of these reflections while I
sat in Mrs. Ventom's kitchen, and watched Hetty
Dawes rinse her cream-pans for the last time at
Burntoak. I thought of the gasping nights and
the garish mornings when nose and eyes take the
whirling dust and manure at the gusty corners, of
the burden of the omnibuses going by from light
to dark at the next turning, of the horizon of
chimney-pots and sooty spires : of all this matched
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against the hourly alteration of beauty which will
grow in these solitudes between this and Good-
wood. Who shall blame Hetty for her venture
into the unknown glories of Bayswater, if our
accomplished and informed Mrs. Sims-Bigg, an
instance of nice balance between intellect and
propriety, wilfully prefers Cromwell Road in May
to her own bluebell woods, the nightly crush to
the breathings of the dusk across the Sussex
lawns ?
Hetty has finished her day's labours in good
time : she has packed her box in a flutter of awful
joy, I conjecture, at the Paradise in view ; but as
I sit by the open door of the kitchen in the first of
the twilight, I see her go down the garden, and
gather a bunch of flowers to take with her
to-morrow, something of the country to have near
her when there will be no more mossy paths to
walk in between the daisy edging and the tall
striped tulips, in the air heavy with the smell of
the Brompton stocks and the syringa. Ah, Hetty,
the change is swift ! Before the country posy shall
have altogether faded in your little attic among
the chimney-pots, a spell will begin to work ; soon
after the dust-cart has received its relics, the
country will be dying out of your heart, never to
return, or perhaps, perhaps to return only as the
saddest of ghosts, which you would give the world
to forget. Before the plane trees in your square
shall have cast their sooty skins again you shall be
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Cockney from the sole of your shoes to the top-
most curl of your tousled locks ; but never shall
your small spirit, that leaves these meadows, God
knows, country-clean, cast off the smutch of the
smoke once taken. You will not turn back, out of
all the thousands that have gone that road. You
will forget the fields, the silent hillsides, the vast
calm of evening upon the garden where the stocks
and the syringa grew.
135
XIII
June 28.
IF there are days when an idle man feels con-
vincingly the reproach of his empty hands, and
knows that he is left in a backward eddy while the
main stream of the world's business goes by, there
are others which lull him with the notion of a
vaster process, the set of a master-current sweeping
alike intents and achievements, the active and the
folded hands towards the unguessed deeps. The
passive sentiment is naturally stronger as middle
age draws towards the outer mark ; as youth
recedes and our trace lengthens behind us, we
think it easier to produce the line of motion, and
to make some guess at points to be passed through
in the shorter tract that remains. For this reason,
among others, the past becomes a thing of more
and more consequence to our scheme of things as
the years shorten. In my own case, the hours
which seem to justify the otiose attitude are, for
the most part, touched with an indolent melancholy
of remembrance and an anticipatory emotion, a
sort of proleptic pathos only relevant if the line of
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motion already described may be understood as
producible beyond a given point.
The motions of the mind respond, I believe,
more readily to the influence of hours and weather
and seasons of the year than we generally conceive.
The days when I bask wholly conscience-clean in
the tide of pensive idleness are the first two or
three of summer warmth, vivid and pure after rain,
with their stores of sweet air and moisture un-
touched. After a cloudless week in June, the
earth is sunburned and staled, the sky smirched with
grey haze and close airs. When dry heat increases
day by day, when leaves wilt and cattle lie close in
the shade, and the landscape seems to endure,
waiting for the truce of the dusk ; then the delicate
spell is gone, time seems to drive on furiously,
and there is no place for dreams of august rhythms
which gather one's own dilatory paces into their
scheme. During those serene days of early
summer, I find in the light which glitters or sleeps
soft, in the stir or pause of leaves, even in the
coming and going of moist earthy smells from
flag-grown edges of the pond, an intention, an
expressive spirit connected with all the old June
days of this fashion which I can remember. In
my sessions under the beech-tree shade, my mind
retraces with a curious sagacity past hours of the
like light and weather, and presents in an astonish-
ingly vivid and actual setting the very motion of
thoughts which came some sunny noon twenty or
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thirty years ago. There seems to be no dis-
coverable method or sequence in the phantasma-
goria ; it may be that some hint from a drowsing
sense, a precise degree of contrast between grey-
green foliage and grey-blue sky, or that insistent
smell from the pond-flags stirs some particular
store of memory ; but in general there is no trace-
able reason in mechanics for the selection of
scenes. Why, to-day, should I see a line of tall,
ragged poplars, a composition whose awkward
regularity still vaguely irks the mind, beyond a
broad reach of shining river, with an eyot white
with meadow-sweet, and a boat drifting between
the sedge-beds of a side channel with lazily
dipping oars, its varnish flashing to the sun, the
red parasol in the stern an outrageous spot of
colour on the low greens of the river valley ? I
recall my solemn scorn of that irresponsible ark, as
I recall my envy of the mowers swinging in line
through the bronze green of the meadows beyond
the stream. Is it the smell of the hay now making
in the field below the garden which brings for the
next vision a meadow where I did work, both with
scythe and fork, and yet did not find any consider-
able peace of mind ? I see again, clearer than the
impressions of yesterday, the expanse of gold-
green under the overflowing sunlight, ridged with
the grey windrows, shut in by a line of dark elms,
and against their darkness the rose of a girl's face,
half the field away, watched with jealous devotion,
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with a boy's desperate caring that was torn by
every word and look of hers to the workers round
her. I remember the wind which took the hay
from the prong as it was shaken out, and stirred
the elms all the morning, murmuring a language
which it seemed one ought to understand ; the
lilac-grey of the eastern sky beyond the elms ; the
harsh honey of the elder hanging along the hedge,
at once luscious and austere, the smell which every
summer mingles with the hay to make the
strongest of all the spells which conjure through
the outward senses. That gust must have gone
by when I found myself at last close to the vision
of the wild-rose face, the arms raised to put back
the blown hair from the forehead, the smile which
lit deep in her eyes before it began to crease the
cheek and lift the corners of the mouth.
Of these recoveries of the past, the most vivid
have for their scene my first playgrounds of
Sandwell stream and Allington hills. Some
fifteen years from my first recollection of those
coasts had worked a heavy change upon the
face of the country ; the lavender-fields still
gave way to ghastly quarters of mean building ;
one by one the familiar woods or meadows
showed the fatal notice-board ; a new nation
swarmed in upon the barely finished streets
and staked-out estates. I had always a way of
making up eclectic backgrounds for my imagina-
tions, and for a time those Surrey hills and
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streams, with their relics of fast-vanishing pastoral
beauty, served me well enough as scenery for my
experiments in letters and arts. For two or three
years I lived in a make-believe world of my own,
materialised in copy-book epics and countless
drawings done out of one's own head, with a
terrible waste of fancy ; a world that was mediaeval
and Gothic, as many another lad's must have been
then, shaped under a medley of influences, Pre-
Raphaelite pictures and the later cycle of Arthurian
legend. Such things as the designs for the
Tennyson " Poems," by Rossetti and Millais, or a
Joan of Arc by Du Maurier, in the " Cornhill,"
stirred an enthusiasm which even yet prevents the
full judgment due to all modern antiques. After
a time my imaginative works in laborious pen-and-
ink were considered worthy of the discipline of
drawing from the cast and the draped model.
Studies in a life class in a dim and dusty little
cockpit off Newman Street, and more academic
lessons in the echoing emptiness of a national
workshop, served to show that the stuff I had
would not stand the shaping; and spite of the
complementary testimonials of two of my guides,
who told me severally that " I could draw, but had
no surface," and that " I had ideas, but couldn't
draw," I abandoned the labours of the Conte
crayon and the bread pellet, and went back to
Dr. Ransome. The time was not all lost j at the
Museum I learned at least the inexorable standard
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of the Theseus and the metopes; an ivory, or
fourteenth-century window-glass at Kensington
was matter for a week's imaginings. On my
homeward journey day by day I could idealise
the Green Park into lawns of Camelot, almost as
easily as in early morning walks I made the groves
of Nonsuch or the high-hedged fields by Morden
the scenery of visions crowded epic and vivid
fresco colour of the happy prime. Those were
the days of my service to Lystrenore, Princess of
the land of Arvall, after the last long thoughts
of Barbara des Vceux had died, and before those
hay-time visions of Letty Ransome had found
their power. They were not altogether unwhole-
some ; for, after all, spite of drawings done out of
one's head, and wastes of blank verse, one was
learning certain aspects of the world at a much
greater rate than one was putting off one's fancies
upon it. Yet the suburban-Arthurian world
presently needed a fresher air, which first blew in
a very timely manner from Cumberland dales.
The change from our cooped country to the
horizons of waste moor or jagged peaks, the fell
purple-dark under the streaming cloud, the yew-
hung steeps beneath the crag wall shimmering
grey and vaporous in the heat, was one summer's
piece of education ; and if I at once forsook the
Idylls for the Excursion, the conversion was
healthy at least in this, that it led to no
Derivative essays ; there was an end to any sort
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of imitative production, pictorial or epic, once
for all.
By a subtle and particular revenge of time, my
daylight visions of the past have more and more
to do with Oxford as the years go by. This
morning the Warden shows me a letter from
Molly Crofts, full of the doings of Commem, and
"the most brilliant Encaenia ever known;" and
presently I am away in the dead ends of Summer
Term thirty years ago, and find myself high up
in the gallery of the Sheldonian, close to one of
the upper windows, looking out on the steep
perspective of the street, over whose cobblestones
winds from Balliol an absurd little foreshortened
procession in scarlet and black. Over against
me one of the statues of the Clarendon Building
blocks the view, its joints and iron cramps and
hollow shadows keenly clear on the white stone
which glares dazzlingly against the opaque violet-
blue of the sky. Across the street is a front of
mouldered gables and mullions, and the confused
chimneys and roofs of the town ; and then, asleep
in the cloudless noon, the swell of blue hills, hills
without a name, with no landmark of Botley
poplars or Cumnor clump, a mere glimpse of
happy places in country silence and ease, a
prophecy of the untravelled world awaiting the
feet delivered from bondage. For at that time
the reverend walls were a prison-house ; I observed
bounds and ordinances with impatient exactitude,
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and kept the rulers at immitigable distance. I
had fallen into an interregnum between two minds,
a restless humour of discontent which fretted at
an imagination of time running to waste in sterile
humanities, and made me envy those brown-faced
mowers swinging through the meadows along
the tow-path. The attitude was perhaps partly
due to chances of upbringing, but not alto-
gether. There was something fundamental in
my careful solitude. I turned out not long since
an old Conington's JEneid of those days, with a
motto I had written on the fly-leaf Solus incedo
and through all the mewling coxcombry of it, I
have to acknowledge a touch of fate. There are
cases in which one recognises with mixed feelings
that one was right at twenty, after all.
So on that summer morning I turned from the
procession that drew towards the Twelve Caesars,
with a defiance light-hearted at the thought of
the last year of servitude already running out,
and lifted my eyes to the sleeping hills and all
that lay beyond.
And even at the moment I think the spirit of
the place began its counter-stroke, put forth a
hint of the power it held, a hardly felt touch of
the pang that was to come when all the blue hills
were travelled and despoiled, and we return to
look among the old walls for the grace which we
held so lightly, and yet was perhaps the best thing
we were to know.
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In all these reconstitutions of mine of shining
hayfields, of narrow streets in the sun, black-
shadowed under archways and crumbling porticoes,
of a slow-spinning eddy in the green water of a
summer flood, that comes round the edge of a
reed-bed, and parts the flags to show the dreaming
spires what defence is to be made against the
censure of those who shake solemn heads at such
necromancy, charge me with playing with shadows
while the solid hour demands my energies ?
Nothing to their purpose, I am afraid ; perhaps I
should do best to refuse to plead, or to counter-
charge as may be done with no great pains and
a good deal of effect with a reflection on the
qualities of those belauded activities. When once
the Warden took me up upon the matter of my
too pictorial or scenic idiosyncrasy of thinking,
I read him one or two places in Berkeley's
Alciphron, where the objects of sight are offered
as arbitrary signs, " by whose sensible intervention
the Author of Nature constantly explained! him-
self to the eyes of men : " and suggested that he
and a good many others might on their part
be giving a quite insufficient attention to the
language those signs should express, and might
be missing intimations which mere loiterers like
myself, following their bent of note-taking, or even
mere vacant reception, happened to light upon.
I would not exchange for fifty of the Warden's
Compensation Theories the instinct which at
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seeming random marked hours and places on the
way, and brings back the old Junes to outshine
the blue depths seen here beyond the beech-tree
shade, so persistently and exactly that at times I
am led to guess at some relation and meaning
beneath the careless-seeming choice.
145
XIV
July 3-
MY own hay grass being reduced to a minute
acreage almost a matter for the swap-hook and
wheelbarrow I am obliged to take my seasonable
pleasure in observing other men's fields. My
neighbour at the Folly Farm handles his forty
acres in the wholesale modern way ; but that still
leaves us the smell of the fresh-cut swathe and the
rising stack, and with a little shutting of the
eyes some of the early associations of haytime.
The mowing-machine, having finished in due course
the cutting of the smaller fields, the Alder-Legs,
Ox Pasture, and Tanner's Mead, jolts and lurches
into the Twelve Acre, the last and largest piece of
grass on the farm, meaning to lay in swathe by
nightfall, if no mishap betide, as much as once on
a time would have cost two good scythemen the
better part of a week. If anything is to hinder, it
will be some fault in the machine's anatomy, a
split pin jarred out, or a screw stripped ; there is
nothing in the weather, or in the " manners " of
the grass (as we say) to offer any delay. The
meadow shows the green-bronze of just-ripe
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herbage, the fine broken colour made by the red-
browns and greys of the seed-heads powdered over
the lush green bottom. The long slope is bright
with buttercup, Ragged-Robin, and rusty sorrel
gayer to the eye than to the moralising mind
and rolls in ceaseless waves like a sea under the
south-west breeze, breaking into foam along the
shore where the swaying ox-eyes and hemlock line
the hedge. The clouds are "high" enough and
" hard " enough to satisfy the country prognostic
of set-fair weather ; the sun rarely breaks through
their serried lines or the vault of fine-spun vapour
under which they sail, but fills the whole sky with
a diffused fire, too broad and bright for the eyes
without the shading hand, and pours an almost
shadowless daylight on the fields.
When I went into the meadow on my round of
the fields this morning, the mowing-machine, gay
from the works in blue and scarlet paint, the gold-
leaf still fresh on the lettering of its patents and
prize medals, was receiving the last touches with
the oiler and cotton-waste due to the new toy.
The driver gets up on the seat, the horses answer
the jerk of the reins and the " Git bahk / " with a
sedate half-turn, and the rattling engine plunges
into the grass. But before it can cut its first lane
down the slope, the way has been prepared for it
by an older tool. Just as the machine got under
weigh, old Abram Branch, who has cleared a
width for the horses all round the hedge-sides with
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the scythe, came up to the corner where I was
standing, and stood to watch his successor at
work. Small and bent and brown, hardly a day
older in all the years the parish has known him,
every haytime he appears from somewhere " along
up'ards " he rarely owns a more precise domicile
than that with his kettle and a few belongings in
a sack over one shoulder, and his treasured scythe,
its edge carefully guarded by its grooved and
warped hazel-rod, over the other, and resumes his
ancient trade. The glory of the scythe departed,
the skilled mower ceased hereabouts some twenty
years ago ; the great days of Herculean work and
commensurate beer are over. But there is still a
remnant left ; the old craft still holds, and will
perhaps continue to hold the lower place to which
it so quickly fell. There is always the strip to be
cleared for the machine's first sally ; there are
rough and uneven pieces where the rigid cutter
cannot go, to call for the more adaptable tool.
Old Branch, after he has mowed the avenue round
the twelve-acre, has the next field all to himself, a
narrow strip between two shaws, whose humpy
brows and wet hollows would capsize the machine
if it ventured upon them. " They got to come to
me, ye see," says Abram, as he knocks out his
pipe, and sets about sharpening his blade for the
thistles and rushes, looking a little wistfully,
perhaps, at the even depth of the grass with its
thick moist bottom, which is not for him. He
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watches the machine as it comes whirring down
the field, and as he moves off towards his own
province repeats with a jerk of the head towards
the supplanter : " Pieces where he can't go, they
wants the scythe to 'em ; and then, ye see, they
got to come to me?
I preferred to follow the craftsman to his waste
corner and watch the historic rather than the
present mode. There will be time and to spare
this next thirty years to observe the development
of mechanism ever reducing the human element in
labour to lower terms ; the motor-mower and the
electric elevator will presently demand attention in
ways not to be ignored ; but the chance of watching
the survival of a vanishing art, the height of an
accumulated tradition of skill, that may die with-
out an heir to-morrow, is by all arguments of good
economy a thing to be taken when it comes. I
perched myself on the heave-gate between the
two fields ; and there, under the crest of the slope
and away to the windward, the restless burr of the
link and pinion scarcely reached me ; what I heard
was the "sound to rout the brood of cares," the
crisp rustle and swish of the steel, an even pulse of
sound, after Nature's own pattern both in rhythm
and tone, in tune with the voices of winds and
waters ; and yet, with its pause and ictus, a thing
of art in its own way as complete and elaborate as
a hexameter. For the eye's pleasure there is the
balanced turn and sway of the body, the shifting of
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the light on the muscles of the sunburnt arms, the
easy grace of the man's knack, almost without
effort, it seems to the onlooker here at the barway
under the dog-rose hedge. But the grass is rank
and wiry, and every time that the swathe is
finished at the hedgeside, and sometimes before it
is half done, the scythe must be sharpened. There
is a trick in the handling of the rubber which is
not to be picked up in a day ; and the choice of
the stone, the matching of its grain and hardness
with the temper of the steel is a gift of experience.
Old Abram touches up his blade delicately, as if
he loved it. Its edge is worn down in a wavy line
to within an inch or so of the rib at the back ; it
is a very old blade, he says ; you can't get new
metal like that now. The handle of the scythe,
worm-eaten as all old hazel is apt to be, and
visibly "tender" at the head, is also a survival
from more painstaking days, its curves and angles
full and ample ; the new shafts which hang out-
side the country ironmongers' doors when haytime
comes round approach more and more to the
slovenly simplicity of the straight line. Knowledge
such as this, and some understanding of the varied
" hang " of the blade and its angle with the shaft,
according to the user's idiosyncrasy and the kind
of work it is meant to do, the several qualities of
rivetted and cast backs, the way to measure off the
places for the two " doles " or grips on the sneath,
any one might learn from Abram as he rests a
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minute between sharping-up and starting again on
the new swathe. But to know the beauty of the
tool one must learn to handle it, to master the way
in which the stroke runs, circling in the curve of
the blade, but dragged a little inwards at the
finish ; one must acquire the instinctive knack of
hitting off the distance between the edge and the
ground, according to the quality and state of the
grass, and the way to make the point and the heel
both do their proper work in the stroke. There is
a degree in even an amateur's skill when the
standing grass, rustling above its dew-drenched
bottom, calls to the mower much as the south-west
ripple across the stream calls to the fly-fisher, and
when the habit and mastery of the scythe are a
pleasure certainly comparable to that in the
control of the rod. There are not wanting mis-
haps to help out the parallel ; the hidden mole-hill
to bury the point of the blade in, the bit of stone
in the grass which tinkles along the steel and
takes off all the edge at a stroke are comparable to
the alder-twig, the knot on the flowering rush
which wait for the angler's backward cast. It is
the simplicity of the scythe, the product, perfected
and fixed, of the early wisdom of the world, and its
adaptableness to varying conditions, that make it
an artist's instrument. " He," says old Branch,
nodding towards the engine droning beyond the
hedge, " he's terrified by they emmet-heaps ; and
if he comes to a stump or a dick, he's done. Why,
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us mowers, we can cut right round a partridge-
nest, and never set her off." This, maybe, is a
flourish, fellow to the classic ploughman's boast
that he could draw his furrow straight enough to
put out a worm's eye ; but it contains a truth.
The next time that Abram mowed up to the
hedge, I put my coat on the gate, and took the
scythe from him for a turn across the field. I
found that the old knack, untried for a good many
years, still served me tolerably, and with Abram
watching me from the hedge, a little solicitous,
perhaps, for his favourite in alien hands, I made
fair practice, only once slicing the sod and leaving
two or three ragged-bitten tufts behind me. But
before I was halfway across the field, the unused
muscles were calling for caution, and after a few
more strokes, in a posture sufficiently upright to
have satisfied even Cobbett's requirements, when
he saw the old man mowing short grass at East
Everley, I handed the tool back to its owner, and
watched him go swinging, taking a swathe a foot
wider than mine, tirelessly across the field. I went
back to the gate again and put on my coat, think-
ing of several ways in which a training like Abram's,
with its resultant amazingly tough fibre at seventy
odd, might be serviceable to the country, a training
for which half-hours of slouching drill in the school
yard, or even fortnight volunteer camps are not a
complete substitute. And once more I conjectured
how long a scientific age will continue to think it
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can obtain its ideals without paying Fate a penny
for the accommodation.
The next time that Abram stopped to sharp-up,
he accompanied the clink of his whetstone with
more criticism of the machine, which had been
silent for some time, save for sounds of hammering
and a forcible discussion between the driver and
the man who had been sharpening the spare cutter
by the upper gate. "I call this ivork" says
Abram ; " makes a man o' ye, I reckon. But
sittin' all day like that chap over there, all of a
heap, on a seat that pretty nigh shakes the innards
out o' ye, and just sayin' ' Come up ! ' and ' Git
back' "
The aposiopesis is eloquent ; he slips back the
rubber into its sling, and bends to his swathe
again. What ought I to say to him, oh hierarchs
of progress, the next time that he works his way
to the hedge, wipes the sweat out of his eyes, and
stands a minute to take the stiffness out of his
back ? Shall I reprove his barbarous economics,
vindicate to him the gifts of science and the march
of mind, tell him that the old threat of TJ/JEVOC
dfififfttg is blessedly fulfilled in that jolted figure
perched on the racketing machine ? Or shall I
leave him in solitary enjoyment of his theory that
every tool has two ends, one working on the
matter, the other on the man ? I think I will be
indulgent to the myth which his faith implies, that
somewhere in the tract between the helpless first
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childhood of the world and its old age, a race of
grown men, capable of all heights and depths of
human grace and strength, understanding by
heaven-sent vision precisely how far labour may
be saved without losing the labourer, forged the
crooked scythe the old man wields so well.
154
XV
July s-
FULL summer, with keen sunlight and furnace-air
and grey-blue sky, has come all at once, without
prelude, as it seems to do in all these later years ;
and I am back again in the long mornings in my
old place under the cool dark of the beech tree,
reading the old books over, smelling the grass and
mould as they reek to the sun, and looking off now
and again to watch the swifts whirl across the sky,
the sheep in the meadow shift and pack themselves
into the shadow as it narrows along the elm-hung
hedge, or the clouds draw overhead, burning and
wasting as they go, through the dazzling loop-
holes of the leaves. Yesterday there were signs
of thunder working up out of the south-east, the
watching of whose growth became more of the
morning's work than my book. From the first
beginnings which I can remember, my temper has
always answered with an instinctive restlessness
to the tense atmosphere of brewing storm ; but
though the old anxiety does not seem to lose much
of its effect under lapse of time, I am able to find
a sort of repose in the vast unity of purpose, the
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tremendous strategy of the gathered power. I
had been reading Lucretius, and when the first low
roll of thunder settled any doubt there might be
as to the meaning of the grey sheeted vapour
barred with lean black streaks, I turned to those
theories of storms in the sixth book. To us who
know such a vast deal better, all those contrivances
of clouds butting against each other or shouldering
sidelong, and of the explosive winds pent within
them, seem sad stuff indeed ; and one takes refuge
in the poetry of the descriptions. To my fancy,
all Lucretius' science seems curiously offhand and
accidental ; it looks as if he had sat down, gnawed
his stylus, and evolved there and then the laboured
explanations which he had never thought of before,
or, where he copies Epicurus, had chosen haphazard
among his master's light-hearted alternatives.
The Warden, I believe, once contemplated a selec-
tion, which would leave out the whole of Memmius'
Mangnall, as he called it, and take only the in-
spired places. In the descriptive passages there
are, besides the general beauty of form and colour,
here and there fine particularities of detail, which
in Latin verse always, I think, strike us as a little
surprising. Their unexpectedness may be partly
due to schoolboy reminiscences of the ground-out
quantum of nonsense lines (was there ever a
greater literary crime than giving Virgil to the
average fourth-form boy ? ) ; but in the main it is
by force of contrast with the customary looseness
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and convention of the methods of description that
the rare instances of close direct portraiture tell as
they do. After "unda horrescit," "nox polum
occupat," and the like, Virgil's " ignea rima micans
percurrit " which is very near Turner's lightning,
and not the least like the toasting-forks and zig-
zags of popular art comes with a peculiar vivid-
ness of reality. Here in Lucretius that
" taetra nimborum nocte coorta
Impendent atrae formidinis or a superne"
and
" Aut ubi per magnos mentis cumulata videbis
Insuper esse aliis alia atque urguere superne
In stations locata sepultis undique ventis^"
and
" Devolet in terram liquidi color aureus ignis,"
are pieces of actual observation, as direct a seizure
of Nature as Wordsworth's, as workmanlike, even,
as Crabbe's. We did not exhaust all the matter,
after all, in the texts we learned at school.
After muttering for an hour along the southern
horizon, the thunder drew by on an easterly slant
of wind, and the rest of the day was all clear sun
and cool airs blowing from regions fresh-washed
by the distant storm. In the afternoon the
Warden came in, and we sat on the lawn and
talked philosophy and Latin verse, as we do now
and then, beginning this time from my morning's
place in Lucretius. Men who have " kept up their
classics " are not so common hereabouts that we
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often fail, when we get together under the beechen
shade or in the Warden's Green Parlour, secure
from the outer world, to drift upon the old subjects.
This is only when we are quite by ourselves ;
inasmuch as our friends of the neighbourhood, for
good reasons of their own, refuse to believe that
any one can be serious or quite honest in caring
for the things he was taught at school. There is
no harm in the arrangement ; before the outer
circle we discuss Betty Yarborough-Greenhalgh's
engagement, or our friend Sims-Bigg's new motor-
car with, I venture to think, quite a tolerable grace ;
and we retire at the proper conjunctions to our
private whims, to noster amor Libethrides, with
perhaps an added pleasure in the return. It is a
pleasure which runs, I fear, little chance of being
profaned by crowds in any time within our scope.
I came across a place in Ste. Beuve lately, where
he speaks of the impossibility of getting his
audience to listen to the classics, in the severer
sense : he will try what he can do with the older
Pliny. If that was so, there and then, where shall
we say that we stand to-day ?
The Warden grumbles at the small proportion
of high poetry in Lucretius "all smothered in
absolutely drivelling physiology : not one line in
fifty that could stand by itself" and so on, in his
usual forceful way. He maintains that there is
room and to spare for his manner of presenting
things in gross ; we have overdone the impartial
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and judicial attitude ; with our feeble means of
expression, a thoroughly one-sided statement is
often the only way to give the force of certain
qualities. He thinks it is a pity that our present
scientific hierarchs don't embody their discoveries
in verse. They haven't even the chance of eternal
poetry to buoy up their exploded theories two
thousand years hence. They, who are so ready
with the teaching of billions of years, won't look
at the lessons of a few centuries, results almost
under their very noses ; they seem to think that
somehow in the last fifty years or so we have got
beyond the relative state of knowledge, and that
since they learned to spell everything is positive.
Lucretius was just as cocksure ; but we have
something to forgive him for.
I have a long-kept theory of my own, that one
sure test of a writer's claim to be heard is his
possessing a perfectly individual and unmistakable
character and style. This works out, if any one
will take the trouble to try it conscientiously, with
curious consistency and far-reaching results. If
you will only have dealings with works whose
authors could not possibly have been some one
else, the amount of impersonal systems and histories
and criticism "expressed," as the reviewers say,
"in direct and lucid English," well ordered and
entirely common, with the man's soul and humour
only coming through by means of negatives and
uncomely lapses ; the amount, I say, of this
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" every-gentleman's-library " literature from which
you will be delivered is a very considerable thing.
In the classics, I take Lucretius to be a notable
instance of the theory ; because the personal ex-
pression seems to come and go pretty nearly in
alternation, accordingly as he draws deep-chested
breath in an exordium or illustration, or bites his
nails over the business of shoving hooked atoms
into unlikely places, or pretending it is all fair to
give his cosmos, ruining along the illimitable inane,
a little jog to make its parallel lines of motion
meet in a procreant clash. I produce this theory
of mine, not for the first time, perhaps ; the
Warden proceeds, as he has done before, to fit it
into a corner of a roomier scheme of his own. He
thinks that we can judge which philosophies and
systems are in main intent and meaning true, and
which are false from the bottom, by the test of
their indirectness of expression. All the great
true books are in oblique oration, by dialogue,
fable and myth, essays, letters, drama. Whenever
a man sits down to give us his cosmogony direct
and complete, ground-plan and section, with data
and appendices, his impersonal system and principia
well, he produces just " a standard work of refer-
ence." Plato and Aristotle are, of course, the two
types which will always divide the world ; and one
may sort out their followers at one's leisure.
You will find, says the Warden, that they hang
together, and show their relationship quite curiously,
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as a general thing; look, for instance, at Mon-
taigne's literary likings. Sometimes you may have
to read a man for just everything he didn't mean :
Lucretius, for instance, again. One may leave
alone all those miserable guesses about the size
of the sun, and simple oversights about penetra-
bility of matter, and so on ; and read " ^Eneadum
genetrix " for the fiftieth time, and never be tired
of it.
I tried back to my own theory of the patent-
mark of personal expression ; that it all depends
upon whether one looks at the world and life as a
thing per se, sufficiently absorbing in its own laws
and politics, or only as a symbol of something else,
one vast complex mythus, as Coleridge says. Of
course, if a man thinks he sees reflections of a
finer light, or hears a strange tongue, he'll want
to get something of the mythical into his work ;
to indicate, like a good sketcher, instead of trying
to realise like a mere copyist. Besides, there are
his own eyes to be thought of ; he has to look for
reflections, like Perseus with the Gorgon, not the
direct light.
The Warden acquiesced, with less qualification
than I am accustomed to, and our conference did
not go very much farther on that point. We know
each other well enough to divine instinctively a
seasonable silence ; and for half an hour, may be,
the Warden made pencil notes which, I imagine,
bore upon the great Theory, and I turned back to
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my Lucretius again. I soon fell into that desultory
state of apprehension in which one finds that a
sentence needs looking at twice, and gaps of irre-
levance lengthen down the page : I don't mean the
bodily dropping-off, rational enough on a summer
afternoon when the brain has been wholesomely
exercised after lunch, but a lighter and more
spiritual occultation, due in this case, I think, to
the surpassing goodness of the day, the pure
luxury of the air and light and garden-smells, and
shapes of trees and hills, and colours of the sky,
which fairly out-faced the crooked signs on the
paper and all their appeal. I gave it up at last,
observing that the Warden's pencil had lapsed,
and his notebook lay upon the grass; and so I
sat for a long while existing in the deep green
shadow, imbibing the far-off light on the woods,
and the rich vapours from grass and leaves and
earth, vastly idle, and flattering myself that for
once I was taking in, to my capacity, some little
part of the immensity of good things which
we are mostly too busy to receive, and storing
something to remain, I hope, for less liberal
days.
Yesterday was beyond question a day of the
year such a day as comes but once or twice in a
summer, and is not immeasurably removed from
those days of a lifetime which all men ought to
have down in their archives. Its beauty lay in
fine shades of difference, that will not go into
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words. If one speaks of a perfect tempering of
heat, light, wind : of vivid sky whose tender blue
is by itself a still-fresh pleasure ; of fields of
pearly vapour low down towards the horizon above
the violet bloom of the hills ; of trees, shapes of
massive sheen and hollow blackness ; of perfume
that suggests a hundred sweets of the fields or the
garden and goes before the nostril can for sure
discern bean-flower or mignonette or clover why,
that means nothing in the world to a man who
has not the key to it all, and the man who has
it will not thank you for telling him. It is all fine
and restrained and evanescent ; and you shall find
plenty of people proof against its spell. I fear
that most of the company that went from the
village yesterday on their annual excursion did
not think much of it. Mr. Myram so his wife
told me when I was down in the village this
morning took his top coat and umbrella with
him when he started at 5 a.m. for the Crystal
Palace ; it looked unsettled-like, he reckoned ; but
he was inside the Palace all the day, listening to
the great Brass Band Contest. That was lovely,
he said ; sixty-nine bands a-playing the same
selection one after the other between eleven o'clock
and six ; that's what he calls music, and chance it,
he says. Beats him, how the judges could keep it
all in their heads, he says, but he 'spects they put
down every mistake, directly they makes it. ...
To-day the weather is settled enough, the shining
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grass is mown, the brassy heat chokes the sky
with haze ; the light is raw and glaring. Down in
the village, where the smell of the brickworks
tempers a suggestion of the effluent from the
sewage-field, and a pettish wind whirls an eddy of
dust and papers into one's eyes at the street
corners, walks Myram expansive in an eighteen-
penny Panama hat and a white waistcoat which
already bears the print of sweating thumbs.
" Ah ! " says Myram, and Myram's circle at the
eleven o'clock beer, " something like summer at
last, and hope it's going to last, too ! " The twist
is altogether in Myram's vein of humour. I came,
I confess, on the identical conceit in Sidney's
" Arcadia " the other day ; but somehow in
Myram's mouth it does not seem to be in the
right line of descent. Or is the fault mine, some
uncandid difference warping my judgment of the
contemporary wit ?
It would perhaps be well if I only differed from
our Alpheus in such matters of taste as wit and
the weather. We are sundered by a whole sphere
of subjects concerning which I clearly apprehend
that he is safe to get his way. He stands for
Progress, for Forward Policies, for the blessings of
Science, for Education, in a manner which I think
some better known professors of the faith might
study with advantage to us all. I admire, in the
primary sense of the word, a dozen distinctive
qualities which make him in type the master of
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the world a gift of dealing with figures which I
cannot sufficiently respect, a mind undisturbed by
the slightest sense of beauty or humour in life, by
the least consciousness of baffling incommensurable
things just outside our scale ; a serviceable integrity
which seems to preserve him conscience-clean in
the muddy walks of local government and expansive
trade. If his foot be fated to slide, it will be in
the dim gyres of municipal opportunity. There is
in the management of our little drains and paths a
riddle, a mystery of iniquity which confounds the
merely external critic. In the business there
seems to be a mesmeric force, sufficient not only
to charm aspiring units such as Myram, but to
make whole bodies of comparatively cultured
people, individually most amiable and upright
props of rural society, to become accomplices in
obscure obstruction and delay, impenetrable silences,
whiffs of ill breath suggesting buried crimes, the
dragging, leaden inertia of adjournment and the
slumbrous brain. I read in the county journal
week by week the proceedings of the various
bodies who keep house for us, and I measure the
worth of all their energies, their loans and Govern-
ment inquiries, their election fights and Rate-
payers' Defence Societies, their recriminating
committee meetings and letters to the papers, by
the undisturbed persistence of an open drain from
the cottages at Tillman's Green, whose stench has
made the highway hold its nose summer by
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summer for eighteen years of my recollection, and
seems to exist as a symbol of subtler taints in
the air.
I know very well that the future lies with friend
Myram and his kind. Indeed, I do not know
what defence I should make, if he took the trouble
to compare the fruits of his work and mine his
thriving days, his control of labour and handling
of the national life, his solid worth and standing,
his place in the world hacked out for himself:
against all this to set my imponderable self and
works were in all ways impertinent. In the village
polity which I sometimes forecast, such idlers as I
and the Warden after several well-meant chances
given us and incorrigibly made light of will be
extinguished for the good of a serious common-
weal ; and I doubt if either of us would under
those conditions care to appeal against the sentence.
We should have had our good and our evil things
in our own way ; we happened to have learned the
etymologic sense of the word " fastidious," we had
not the brave digestions of the Myram breed, and
we missed the charm of wearing dirty white waist-
coats and spats, and living in a terra-cotta villa
with cement lions at the steps, of relishing the
whiff from the main drain, and those spicy breezes
which blow in Board Rooms and Council Halls ;
we let slide the chance of leaving a thumb-mark
on the clay of the emerging race. Yet we had
our private gains ; we picked up and pocketed
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sundry gifts which the victorious faction trod under-
foot ; we kept better company, I venture to think ;
if we wasted our summer mornings on Lucretius
and his theories of the atmosphere, at least we did
it for fun ; and if under the crowning dispensation
which I foresee the Warden and I should be led
out to suffer together, I think we should have our
revenge upon the executive body as we have had
upon other incarnations of the kind in an im-
pulsive grin at the humour of it all, when we were
once outside the door.
And yet and yet one sometimes dreams one
might get one's own way, and hew the Philistines,
gently enough, without any world-shaking con-
vulsion, after all. There is no divine hedge about
the plan of government by a house divided against
itself; nothing but an odd and as yet barely
historical infatuation ; there is no saying what
solidity of national happiness we might not attain
if public men were by some humour of fortune to
compound their too lofty principles, and aim at
relative, commonplace, feasible good in their
experiments on the body of the state, instead of
agonising for positive perfection, the transcendental
glories of their platforms and their cries. Taste
only exists to change ; and one thinks that the
run of luck must presently alter, and the possible
combinations of change for the worse may be
exhausted even in our own time. I may yet
live to hear the Warden taking Alpheus and
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his mates in Lucretius, and Dempster reading
to his classes in Montaigne, and even find myself
a personage in the new-based republic, having
my say in the nicer, airier, gayer world, without
even stirring from my post beneath the beech-
tree shade.
168
XVI
July 17.
THERE are summer days yesterday was one of
them when the world seems to kindle at the sun,
when clouds, grass, waving tree-tops, green fields
of wheat burn in the overflowing fire. A steady
wind fans the flame ; one feels the truth of the
Lucretian touch of the sun " feeding on the blue."
The roses haste to blow wide and fall, the straw-
berries colour hourly, and send their spice across
the garden ; the year is at the height, there
will be no richer day this twelvemonth. The
streaming plume of cloud that rises with imper-
ceptible motion from the south to the zenith is as
bright as vapours of earth can be : the leaves are
white fire where the light glances on them above,
and emerald where it strikes through ; the swallow
that sweeps across the lawn gleams blue on head
and shoulder ; everything glows, wastes, and con-
sumes ; and the expense of life is set before our
meditations as at no other time. I have tried to
make this impression of use and spending answer-
able for the regretful pang which sometimes comes
in times of happiest weather ; but that paradox is
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one which goes beyond our best guesses. The
attempt to analyse even so far as to suggest a
hypothesis was unwise ; it is a sufficiently vulgar
error to make our half-decipherable alphabet of
sensual forms the key of any enigma we may
conjecture to be hidden under its signs.
Yesterday was Sunday, and some such medi-
tations as these filled up a half-hour under the
beech before it was time to set off down the hill
to morning church, and another twenty minutes
in the churchyard, while I read the old headstones
and wondered once more what manner of men
were my acquaintances Timothee Lintot and
Cleophas Comber a hundred and seventy years
ago, listened to the changes of the bells, and
watched the swifts whirl across the dark of the
yews or balance high up in the blue. Whenever
the sense of the magnificence of human achieve-
ment is strong upon me, I like to go and look at
the motions of those soot-brown wings in their
miracle of controlled force. Every mode of their
movement, the quick oaring flight, rolling a little
from side to side, as a fine sculler may roll a little
in the exuberance of his mastery ; the climbing
flutter, light as down on an eddy of air ; the head-
long stoop ; the rush of the race from whose vehe-
ment swish one jerks back one's head instinctively,
a twentieth of a second too late, in man's ponderous
way, if the chances of collision had rested on the
human judgment. I take an extreme pleasure in
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watching any bodily feat thoroughly well done ;
the knack of even a second-rate batsman, the
poise and shoulder-swing of a finished skater, the
pause and lift of the mower, are all good things
to see ; and yet the hulking clumsiness of the best
of human attitude compared with the motions of
the beasts ! The prettiest high-jumper that ever
grazed the bar never came near the grace with
which Nym clears a bramble spray in his hedge-
bottom scrambles, tossing himself up and out from
a standing take-off every movement, from the
flip of the ears to the crook of the tail, one piece
of perfect rhythm. And, to come back to the
swifts, I think no candid person could look at their
career for five minutes without a touch of shame
for all our monstrous contrivances of speed, our
roaring, fuming, stinking machines, always ugly
and noisome in ratio to their power, by the side of
that silent economy of navigation, the enormous
proportionate power of the frail wings, the control
of steerage and arrest, the management of balance
and planes whose first principles our toy-science
still boggles at.
When the one-bell was near its last stroke, I left
the swifts to their skiey exercises, and turned into
the porch with the last stragglers of the congrega-
tion. Our church and its services afford, I think,
less excuse than a good many others for the losing
of the devotional in the critical faculty. There
are remnants of ancient beauty in the building
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which have survived the fury of two generations
of restorers ; but I sometimes imagine that we
might put in a plea in defence of modern short-
comings in public devotion, if we were to allege
all that we have lost in the way of encouragement,
compared with the possessions of our forefathers,
whose tabernacles were quick with fresh beauty, a
piece of life coming out of their own hearts and
heads. With the Warden in desk or pulpit we
are at least exercised in godliness, if not always
lifted up ; the rude mouldings of capital and pillar,
no rubbed-down template inanity of our own
mode, tell us at least of grace, and, we like to
think, of faith. We are not troubled here with
passing fashions of church furniture which I have
heard spoken of as "stately symbolism," and which
appear to one of the profane as strangely tawdry
selections from the catalogues of an entirely com-
mercial ecclesiastical decorator. But we cannot
escape from our east window, a tenth-rate specimen
of the vogue of forty years ago, depraving our
eyes week by week with its intolerable false
scarlets and blues ; nor yet from others of more
recent date, which wait the damnation of the next
generation, windows in a sort of Flemish Renais-
sance manner, with patches of unclean clarets and
bottle-greens on large spaces of white ground ;
trade antiques, both of the genres, with a definitely
irreligious influence in the direction either of
debauched sentiment or naughty temper. It is
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poor comfort to turn from these irritants, crude or
cultured, to the faint stains on the wall above
them, relics of pleated robe, of peacock-eyed wings,
of an aureole and a face mild and placid as we
could not conceive a face now ; shadows of paint-
ing of the fourteenth century which have survived
churchwardens' whitewash and the restorers from
the Cromwellians to our own time. In like manner
one sometimes escapes, in churches where they are
very musical, from Dr. Sesquialtera's last new
minor double-chant to sudden mercies of Battishill
or Purcell, heart's melody after tormented noise,
which takes hold of the drowsy urchins in the
choir and the flighty young women in the aisle,
and pulls them together all at once out of their
semitone flatness, and perhaps into finer intonation
of the understanding also. And through all such
frettings and reliefs clearer and clearer comes the
assurance that we have to do not with a matter of
good and bad, but of right and wrong, divided by
a hair's-breadth line whose position it much con-
cerns us to ascertain. Into some such digression
as this I have now and again been led, in yawning
hours, let us say, of the Vicar's less fruitful ex-
positions ; but yesterday, when in the pauses of
the Kyrie I heard the swifts shrilling round the
spire high up in the burning blue, my thoughts
wandered to the
" Happy birds that sing and fly
Round Thine altars ..."
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of our morning hymn; and a man with a tem-
perament as analytic as aquafortis may perhaps
be forgiven for wondering why the saints are
happier who sing out of tune in a close heat and
aroma of Sunday-best, under the gules and azure
of that murderous window. Perhaps it was in a
momentary nod of oblivion that the rude arches,
the dull warmth, the cry of the swifts turned to
shadowy vaulting crossed by dim-streaming rays
from a high rose-window, filled with the soaring
note of an angelic treble. My wandering was re-
buked by hearing old Tully's voice in the hymn,
giving the florid tenor with unmistakable fervour
of intent, and next by the sight of Molly Crofts
in the Warden's pew, seen a moment between a
pillar and the gay parterre of hats in that quarter,
her face as she sang instinct with something that
my reckoning had left out of account, a quality
missed by the analytic temper and the discursive
mind, perhaps a motion of the wisdom of which it
is said that she passeth and goeth through all
things by reason of her pureness.
After service I went on to the Almshouse, and
while I waited for the Warden in the lodge-entry,
I observed the congregation streaming dinner-wards
down the street. Overhead the swifts still glanced
and wheeled with their perfection of effortless
grace, and never an eye was raised to look at
them in all the company that crept along the
earth with clumsy labour, with feet that trotted
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or lurched or waddled or minced, but did not
show not one pair in a hundred that they had
ever approached the first rudiments of the art of
walking. And from the feet to the faces was no
better change. A bringing-up in Phidian ideals is
a two-sided gift to a man ; the failure of ordinary
human features from the worshipped example may
lie on the temper like a fretted wrong, and may
add a last sting to the sense of one's obligations
to " Progress." I think, from observations in other
parts of our islands, that the people of this county
are a singularly plain race ; but at best the nation
is far below the reasonable and practicable standard
of looks. Here as the churchgoers filed past the
archway of the lodge in the clear sunlight, I must
needs turn my spleen upon the safe and solid re-
sistance of general principles, as I saw the almost
universal deformity, the blunted and flattened and
twisted features, the signs of undeveloped nature,
the trace of diseases new and old, the fret and
burden of all shapes of unhappy soul. Downright
forceful ugliness, a thing of character and humour,
would be a relief from this reign of slackness, in-
sipidity, vacuous asymmetry. Such a little amend-
ment would often put all right ! I find myself at
times indulging a plastic instinct, saying that by
flattening such a nose a little, bringing forward
such a brow, patting out this hollow, pinching up
that mouth I could botch the clay of many a
hapless physiognomy into a practicable grace. It
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is partly due to the Greeks and partly perhaps to
an original list of humour that all my travels are
a quest of good faces ; roads and inns, market-
squares of country towns, cottage gardens, the
fleeting shoals of railway platforms or London
streets, in all I seek the beauty of the old descent.
The faces which I mark one or two in a day's
journey, perhaps have a certain common character
not easy to define ; youth and a large degree of
physical health are part of the spell, and I think
ingenuousness and wholesome mind, and perhaps
also a sort of pathetic expression, which for want
of any rational cause I am pleased to attribute to
the unconscious bearing about of a lost cause, the
burden of a proscribed race. For of all generations
of men we have set ourselves positively to deny
the power of beauty ; every device of our social
economy necessitously destroys it ; our very arts
not the toy-making of galleries and schools, but
the workaday technic which gives us our lamp-
posts and railway stations and shop-fronts are an
imbecile's outrage on the Muses. For the perfect-
ness of pleasure in natural scents and sounds, we
have the reign of stench and din ; most of us will
breathe the sulphur and soot of a railway terminus
without disgust, as they will breathe the summer
wind through a fir-wood without conscious pleasure,
and will find their thoughts as much disturbed by
the clanking and roaring as by the murmur of
the boughs and the sound of bees in the heather.
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We have our minds so constantly at the telescopic
or microscopic focus that we lose the power of
fixing them on the outward show of things at
common range. The schooling which our excellent
Dempster and his mates give to the rising race is
perhaps the most sustained and elaborate attempt
ever made to annul the senses, to put printed paper
between us and the light, to prevent us taking into
our own plain faces the least reflex of the beauty
about us. Suppose that the arts are really as dead
as they seem to be, and that we are right, not so
much in preferring our stained-glass windows to the
whitewashed fresco, or the crawling-alive hymns
to Merbecke or Purcell, as in lumping all together
in superior indifference : suppose that thus far we
are justifiable, being as a nation too poor to allow
ourselves any elegancies that cannot be hawked in
the streets of the world ; yet there are elementary
dangers in an incapacity to note the differences of
natural things, earth and sky and human faces
about us. We never look at the clouds, save in
some blundering attempt at forecast when we feel
the rain on our faces ; summer and winter hardly
touch us but by discomforts of temperature; we
rejoice in our thundering right line of motion with
its appalling waste of energy, blind to the lesson
of the birds' wings. If we but knew, we might
condone our own ugliness, perhaps in time
amend it, by observing the human beauty which
now and then escapes the common curse. We
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have definitely turned away from one of the first
lessons of the human curriculum, perhaps the
simplest and deepest of all ; and we are already
punished, blind and deaf in the appointed kind
and degree.
I had left the lodge, as the Warden was long
in coming, and turned into the garden ; and I was
running on thus to myself in a familiar strain,
when I saw Molly Crofts coming down the long
walk that leads from the Green Parlour between the
larkspurs and the phloxes. She had taken off the
buckler-broad hat which had kept in countenance
its fellows of the mode, and with them had made
the south aisle look like a flower-plot, and the sun
shone very agreeably on the smooth brow and the
crinkles of brown hair. She came on me at a
corner, from behind a tall clump of sweet peas,
and I had one of her gayest smiles, shining
delightfully in the eyes before the mouth could
begin to curve. Her look had something of
summer Sunday morning in it, and I think kept
still a little of the lifting up I had seen while we
sang our hymn in such various strains. We made
two or three turns up and down the walk together,
and by the time the Warden joined us, surplice on
arm, I had been able to remind myself of some
half-forgotten qualities in those antique standards
of mine, and to see how invincibly the great
argument shows by the light of certain eyes.
178
XVII
August 8.
THE most inveterate anchorite in country soli-
tudes ought to go up to London now and then ;
say, once a year. Until a just policy of decentra-
lisation shall have brought to his doors a share of
the good things at present stacked together in one
noisy and malodorous region, there are pictures
and music and worst of all people, not to be
seen or heard without an occasional pilgrimage.
But even without these reasons, a journey to town
is worth its cost for the mere pleasure of getting
back again. To know the full charm of the
country one must escape out of the baked streets
of August*or November's dun shroud, straight into
the breath of green fields or the mild sunlight
sleeping on the faded woods. The dull roar of
the traffic, the ceaseless tide of strange faces, the
pallid smoky light, the complex smells, the sense
of being swamped and lost in the press of life
conspire to produce an obsession lasting through
the sway and rumble of the sleepy afternoon train
by which one's flight is made. Only when one
descends at the little wayside station, where the
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nasturtiums in the flint-edged beds greet one
with a not unrecognised rusticity and the station-
master's salute implies congratulations on the
accomplishment of the adventure set out upon
under his auspices two whole days ago, does one
begin to resume one's individuality and the grate-
ful ease of self-respect. The sight of familiar faces
and the exchange of greetings in the accustomed
formula over cottage gates and at due corners of
the road go some way to break the dreary spell ;
but it is only when one turns, as the light begins
to fail a little, out of the highway into the field-
path, that the mind gets wholly clear of it. The
scent of grass in the first cool of the dew and the
sweet silence of the valley come in upon the heart
with sudden tenfold charm with the charm of
privacy and quiet after the insolent interferences
of town, of delicacy and fineness to a degree even
till now unsuspected, the dearer for the recollec-
tion of coarse confusion which it breathes away.
One's personality expands and reposed itself, no
more whirled like a half-drowned fly in some
gutter-eddy, but as one perched aloft among green
leaves that preens its feelers and opens its wings
to the pleasant air. A last countercharm remains
to complete the deliverance. Once the garden
gate closes behind the traveller and the orbis
terrarum possesses its proper centre again, every-
thing seems to have a new perfection, a claim and
lien not credibly ever to be run away from any
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more. The red pillars of the firs and their vaulted
darkness never looked so solemn, the spaces of
sky between them never so ethereally clear; the
hush of evening was never so divine as it is to the
wanderer who has won his way back to the upper
airs from that grim underworld of town.
From my last expedition to London I travelled
down with Mrs. Sims-Bigg, who is an old adversary
of mine in the matter of town versus country ; and
our talk during the journey served to clear and
define sundry musings which had infested my head
during the day, and to start some new ones which
for a while after continued to circle about the
ground of the old controversy. If I failed to
convert my enemy, as I seem to have failed on
other occasions, I had at least the satisfaction
of feeling the curious justness of my positions
all the more soundly settled for the concussion
of the fray.
The traditional cause between the country and
the town the " rure ego viventem, tu dicis in urbe
beatum " seems at length in the way of settle-
ment, judgment going against the country almost
by default. The contest, long waged with strangely
equal fortune, has come to an end almost abruptly ;
within living memory the town, the urban taste
and habit, has overrun and occupied the rural
territory : quicker even than the waste of brick
and mortar spreads across suburban fields, the
influence of the streets has flowed over the rustic
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mind and temper. Up to the time of our own
recollection, the two principles kept a sort of
balance, the rural simplicity and ruder strength,
constantly drawn into the centre, maintained in
mixture the best qualities of its proper force, and
had in the making of the best English character a
share insufficiently accounted of by most historians.
Now the tide ebbs : London has brimmed over and
run back over the old channels ; the farthest
sources of the earlier supply are swamped
" imis Stagna refusa vadis " by the universal
Cockney soul. A literary instance will here serve
better than anything else as it usually will to
illustrate the change : set such essential townsmen
as Pope, Addison, even Johnson beside our latest
Arcadian versifier or romancist of the soil, and
hear in the first the sonorous timbre of native
speech, the racy birth-note and vernacular thought
underlying and giving life to all the courtliness or
wit ; in the second, observe the thin dentals of
Cokayne all too clear beneath the disguise of
studied dialect and sentiment. We are all Lon-
doners now in our cradles, from Bow Bells to
Berwick ; and be sure the sister kingdoms have
their proper equivalents. The trouble which we
call the Rural Exodus is, of course, an actual
measure of the town's ascendency ; the decay of
farming, already reduced in the nation's eyes to
a make-believe industry, a mere appendage of
sporting interests ; the characteristics of rural
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government and education, a ramification of nerve-
less tentacles, possessing the chilly stringency of
an octopus, with an inaccessible heart somewhere
in Westminster or Whitehall ; all these things
witness the destroyed balance, the new conditions
of national life, the great experiment which is
being made without data, whose possibilities are
with one consent ignored.
To take one of these classes of evidence
obvious enough, perhaps, to incur the oblivion
now dealt to all primary and fundamental con-
cerns London and here, of course, London
stands for all towns of mass sufficient to exert that
fatal attraction can no more produce its own
muscle or intellect than it can its mutton or its
roses ; it must have its Smithfield for thews and
its Covent Garden for brains, into which year by
year pours the raw material for its manufacture.
Failing the punctual supply from without, the
country bone and blood to make policemen and
porters, navvies and nursemaids, London would in
a couple of months be stifled in its own decay.
And the case is the same with mental repair ; cut
off the supply of solid call it stolid, if you prefer
the word temperament, easy-breathed and of
steady nerves; leave London for a twelvemonth
to incubate its peculiar crasis ; and it would be
one Bedlam. As surely as its bread and its drink-
ing-water must come from green fields and clean
skies, the bodies and souls which it consumes
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must be produced in regions beyond the reach of
its contagion. And precisely as the tide of bricks
and mortar ousts the last pretences of corn-growing
in some half-rural suburb, so the spreading of the
city-spirit over the country strikes at the supply of
refective humanity. Corn and cattle we can fetch,
for the present, from green fields elsewhere even
beyond the Atlantic; do we contemplate a pro-
vision of the other commodity from the same
quarter ? As the matter stands, it appears to an
observer here in the wilderness, at least that our
imports of this sort, as seen about the Port of
London, are not of a type likely to repair our
losses satisfactorily ; but it would make no differ-
ence if the finest samples of mankind procurable
arrived regularly in Thames or Mersey. If our
isles cannot raise a population of a certain weight
and girth, a certain soundness and force of spirit,
the game is already up, and our destinies have
passed out of our own keeping. We in the
wilderness discover from our newspapers and re-
views that the people who live behind numbered
doors, whose view of the country's corn supply
does not, as a rule, go beyond the punctual baker's
cart, begin at length to see the risks, in certain
contingencies, of our not being self-supporting in
the matter of national provender. Coleridge's
warning in 1834, that in depending upon foreign
corn we forget we are " subjugating the necessaries
of life itself to the mere comforts and luxuries of
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society," is still in substance repeated ; but not
often his condemnation as false and pernicious the
" supposition that agriculture is not a positive good
to the nation, taken in and by itself as a mode of
existence for the people." If the Fates are patient
with us, we may yet learn in time that it is
ultimately not the corn raised by the man which
matters, but the man fashioned by raising the
corn. The simple fact that without the bodily
exercise of the soil and the sea a wholesome race
cannot be reared is, as far as any signs of practice
go, completely ignored.
Something in this sense, with the energy due to
a favourite topic, and with a good deal of hauling
the argument back into the right line from several
sorts of tangential wandering, I had propounded
to Mrs. Sims-Bigg, whose mental personality, if
not by itself very distinguished, as a type may be
said to touch the profound.
" ' Ignored,' indeed ! " she exclaims, with a
suggestion of temper due, perhaps, to her not
having had quite a fair share of the argument.
11 ' Ignored ! ' when we are all trying to find how
to keep the people on the land and prevent them
crowding into the towns in that dreadful way ! I
suppose you didn't read Lady Estridge-Sandys*
article in last week's Leaven? You ought to
have been at a meeting I went to last week in
Bossingham Gardens ; the speaking was admirable;
the Bishop most stimulating, and Miss Blathervvayt
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she works in Poplar, you know so suggestive
and helpful. ' Ignored ! ' "
I said that it was one of the curiosities of the
case that they were never tired of talking about
the country ; but that the country was waiting to
see something done.
And who were " they," might she inquire ?
" The Town, Madam, that has been pleased to
' take up ' the Country, and being almost entirely
ignorant of its wants and meanings, governs it,
thinks for it, paints it, writes about it "
Mrs. Sims-Bigg smiles rather provocatively.
"Ignorant of the country, are we? The best-
trained and most advanced intellects are not able
to grasp the ways of Little Pedlington, I suppose ? "
I answered that I thought they might, if they
ever came to try. At present London constructed
out of its inner consciousness one of the most
curious dummies ever made to stand for live fact.
The townsman's fundamental mistake in dealing
with country affairs is his assumption of in-
herent superiority. He has only to use his eyes :
training ? sympathy ? acquirement of dialects of
thought ? He smiles the suggestions aside ; what
are the alertness and acuteness of the street-bred
intellect worth, if they cannot dissect at a glance,
dull, slow-moving Hodge? And yet, if poor
Hodge, wriggling quite disrespectfully under the
forceps, should venture to question the value of
the results, it might be found that the investigator
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had left something out of the account protective
devices such as Nature teaches the wild things ; a
strange refraction of the lines of thought, produced
instantaneously between the two types of mind by
their different densities ; the exoteric forms of
speech and expression, reserved for the aliens ; the
seven-times-fenced-with-brass reserve.
"'Reserve?'" says the opponent, with an in-
tonation of reflective questioning. " Yes ; only
some people would call it hopeless stupidity, I
think."
I told her that was, of course, the ground-fallacy
of the whole position. If she would, just as an
experiment, try to see that there is more than one
scale of time, and that the straight line is not
always the shortest : and would be ready to wait
five or six years for the rustic nature to open
itself out, and would not mind being laughed at
meanwhile from behind the mask of what she
called stolidity with a few more such branches
of learning I should have hopes of her yet.
" Thank you very much ! And your yokels, of
course, see through us poor Cockneys as easily as
possible all the time ? "
I said I was quite sure of that. London views
and London ways have a quite fatal easiness for
Hodge. Our folk go up from the village very
tolerable Arcadians spite of all the education they
get, and come back in six months on a flying visit
full graduate and most complete Cockneys. But
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is it imaginable, except in rare conjunctions, that
a born and bred Londoner could in any length of
time learn the ways of the village and the life of
the fields ? The capacity which can " assimilate "
the significance of the Borough or Hackney in a
few weeks does not make much trouble of the
solitary citizens that it may find straying in its
fields.
And how long, Mrs. Sims-Bigg would like to
know, have I been in getting to know the ways
of this mysterious race? Well, I have lived
among them getting on for thirty years, summer
and winter, without many days' holiday; and I
only know one or two here and there yet ; for
the most part one can see something under the
surface, and guess at all sorts of puzzles, and learn
not to be very positive about anything, except
perhaps the sure and certain truth that there is
not much to be learned about the rustic in a full
house-party at Frogswell Place, or even in a series
of summer week-ends in the country. From this
point I took the war into the enemy's country,
and went on to enlarge upon instances of the
Town's amazing ignorance of us and our little
likes and dislikes the beneficent regulations
which apparently do not allow for any difference
between the conditions of existence in Lambeth
and on Lonewood Common ; the ghastly-laugh-
able educational mixture which is served out alike
to the small people in Rats' Rents, E,, and to our
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little Joskins at Trucker's Hatch. I tried to point
out the difference, as affecting character and the
humanities, between living amid the flux of un-
distinguishable millions and sojourning in a region
where every face is perfectly familiar, and where
every man's history is circumstantially known
by each of his thirty or forty neighbours in the
adjacent square mile of neglected fields. Was it
not possible that the very simplicity of the life in
the open air, the dealing with Nature and the
elements very much at first hand, had its own
gifts intuitions and faculties in which we admit
the ignoble savage to be our superior? Possible
also that the streets, their restrictions of daylight
and horizon, their ready-made provision, supplying
all needs by the process of "going round the
corner," took out of a man the qualities of
initiative and resource, left in a large measure the
machine-part behind ?
I had begun to make some impression on my
enemy's defences, as I judged by the perceptible
decline of her interest in the discussion, when we
came to the little wayside station, and I was able
to tell her that I saw the cinnamon liveries and
red wheels waiting behind the creeper-clad shanty
which calls itself a booking-office. When the bays
had gone by me in a cloud of dust, I struck into
the field-path and found at once the tenfold charm
of brooding quiet and such an impression of dear
reality as daylight brings to the whirling fantasies
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of dreams. I mused as I went upon the Mrs.
Sims-Biggs of the world, who know the country
just as tourists on the highroad know the scenery
about them woods, fields, roofs, village spires in
a general picturesque, a mere sliding background
to their travel never thinking how the prospect-
may strike the dwellers among those obscure field-
paths and lonely woods, the folk to whom every
tree is a landmark, every meadow and copse has a
name and character, every house a history. These
saunterers on the highway, flitting through their
week-end visits, their country-house summers ;
enjoying surface-pleasures of repose, of quaintness
such as more saliently contrasts with the things of
their habitude ; half-hearing a strange language of
thought, guessing at meanings by help of their
own book-knowledge and traditions : these very
people are, by Fortune's spite, the historians and
physiologists of the rural world. They have no
misgivings that there are obscure motions in the
rural system requiring half a lifetime for their
parallax ; they make no allowance for refractions
of vision and inconstant factors in calculation ;
they generalise and confound such detail as the
distinctions of class, as sharply cleft at the bottom
of the scale as anywhere in the region of their own
level ; they know nothing of the varying moral
atmospheres of village and village, of the under-
ground stirrings of political and social ideas acting
on a purified democracy ever since the time
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"Ex quo suffragia nulli
Vendimus . . ."
They are not concerned for the wiping out of
the archaic and the picturesque in far subtler
ways than by church-restorations and the growth
of "residential centres" for the grey flattening
and dulling of life coming on as quietly and com-
prehensively as a November twilight, for the
rubbing down of all salience of character and
marked degrees of good or evil into a blurred
mediocrity. They appear to think that country
dispositions have stood still somewhere about the
phase which Crabbe drew, in this connection not
giving enough credit to our own energies for the
effects they have succeeded in producing that
stupendous uniformity and inclusiveness of our
schooling, the abandonment of the old national
livelihood and its result in new and wholly experi-
mental conditions, the breeding of a race mongrel
between town and country, a state of intellectual
suspense and anarchy, the old inheritance lost and
the new maintenance still to seek.
I had got so far in one more arraignment of the
often sentenced offender when I met at the half-
way heave-gate my old neighbour Jethro Tully on
his way home to the Vachery, and found matter
pertinent to the pleas in his salutation, in the
complex meaning of the traditional deference and
respect of lifelong use, crossed by a hint of
Radical independence, in the veil of reserve rather
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sly than shy, lifted ever so little at one corner as
a concession to sixteen years' acquaintance, in
a fundamental good sense and native breeding
underlying all. We stood to talk a minute as our
custom is, and in his half-dozen scraps of gossip
the old man showed signs of a ripe wisdom in
matters, and a dry, somewhat censorious humour.
"Density? quoth Mrs. Sims-Bigg? Where is
density like that of the brains over-centralised in
some half-dozen square miles of foggy streets,
minds whose rectangular plan of life and brick-wall
horizon have dulled a whole province of perception,
whose alternations of stuffy chambers and muddy
pavements have plugged the finer senses as with
an eternal catarrh ? Oh tyrant London, blear-eyed
blunderer, coarse-thumbed handler of fine-spun
destinies with whose right twining the very life of
all that monstrous bulk is involved, learn before it
is too late to lighten the touch of those ponderous
fingers. Learn for your own sake that there are
qualities not to be found in your ganglion of the
national life, yet vital to the whole body, reserve,
caution, slow-seasoned grain and fibre, an absence
of " nerves ; " learn that the nursery-ground of
country solitude and silence is an essential pre-
paratory to your forcing-house. You would
understand, if you could but get the incantation
of the "central roar" out of your ears, that the
country is something more than a mere appendage
of town, a convenient sanatorium or playgroun4
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for street-folk, a rubbish-heap for your waste
humanity and bye-products of crime and insanity.
We in the wilderness have already more than
enough of your off-scourings ; now we hear of
workmen's colonies, of factories to be brought out
into the fields, to save the congestion of the centre.
It is all incredibly foolish : artisans' plantations
and cheap trains, boarded-out children, fortnights
in the country, deported manufactures all merely
cut the tree at the roots and foul the stream at the
source. If London cannot be made in itself a
habitable city, it may as well be asphyxiated at
once in its own exhalations as try to elude the
fates by pouring its filth into the one source of
saving health which at present keeps it alive.
The time will come, not a doubt of it, when the
preservation of the country, body and soul, will
quite suddenly appear to our governing orders as a
really imperative thing ; and then that precise
amount of energy will be spent in vain whose
square-root would at a certain conjunction have
comfortably secured the result. We shall recog-
nise the country as at least an equal in partnership
with the city ; there will be revolutions in methods
of education and local government, and we shall
see all manner of sumptuary laws and desperate
encouragements of agriculture. Finally, we shall
go forth in the guise of a Royal Commission to
discover the lost secret of national existence ; and
unless some rare chance is to divert our usual
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mode after much gathering and classifying of
information, we shall find that we are just too late ;
that the secret is buried somewhere in the unturned
London Clay ; and as we go back to town through
the waste fields we may perhaps catch an echo of
the rumour once heard in an older Boeotia
oXX* olv Qeobs
rovs TT)S a\o^ffijs ir6\os efcXe/Tretj/ \6yos.
"A whisper goes,
The gods forsake the city to her foes."
I 9 4
XVIII
September I.
COMING home yesterday morning from a visit
to old Tully at the Vachery, I found myself, as I
crossed the common at Beggar's Bush, engaged
once more in an attempt which I knew at heart
to be in vain, trying to make the familiar land-
scape yield up something of the inner beauty
which it can put forth at its own hours. The
day was clear and keen, with a somewhat garish
sun and quick-pacing cloud shadows ; all colour
was pale and a little opaque. The long line of the
Downs that lay like a grey vapour above the pale
brown purples of the ridged Weald ; the clump of
wind-bitten firs that tops the hill a landmark
that has taken its part in many an un forgotten
composition were alike otiose and inert All
endeavours to conjure the latent spirit by insisting
on this piece of colour or that sweep of wooded
valley only recoiled in a dull dissatisfaction ; and
in due time I came to acknowledge that it was
one of those days when a veil lies over the land-
scape or some hebetude dulls the eye ; or when,
as I have at times thought, there is some undivined
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collusion between the seer and the seen, and the
vision is at once withheld and foregone.
So for perhaps the hundredth time I gave up
the attempt, and told myself once more how
wholly vain is any purposed hunting for that finer
spiritual beauty of a scene. The very thought of
intent seems to shut sevenfold gates upon the
magic realm that lies so close upon our road.
Make your planned and deliberate expedition, a
day's trudge through the hills even a week in
spring, it may be, among Surrey commons and
green roads and come home with your indolent
recollection of things seen, commonplaces staled
by a hundred old walks; then, looking back by
chance from your doorstep you shall see perhaps
only a fast-fading streak of rosy cloud, the end of
a sunset which had left you cold, or a mass of
trees darkening against a rainy sky ; but at once
you feel the touch of authentic divinity, a power
to which your vacant perceptions answer instantly
and absolutely. All the day you were a con-
noisseur, a virtuoso, and Nature evaded you at
every turn ; at the close you forget the quest, and
she suddenly gives you a sign which in itself opens
your eyes to see, a revelation which as it comes
adds itself to the number of the unforgettable
things.
The day being, as I said, a dead one, I let my
humour have its analytic bent. Those deeper
manifestations have no discoverable law qr rule ;
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at most it can be said of them that the degree of
their power is connected with their suddenness and
their transience. There is no season or hour when
they may not be looked for; but perhaps there
are some sorts of weather in which they are less
likely to occur ; times of repose and settled face,
such as a sunless and windless November noon,
a cloudless drought, or even those days of rich
and sustained beauty, in the ordinary sense of the
word, which almost always come in June. They
are more frequent, no doubt, at the spring and the
close of the day than in its middle ; but they are
not dependent upon the more dramatic changes
of light and colour : they are to be found not only
in the sudden sunset-break which fires a mountain-
side and fills the valleys with smouldering crimson
mist, but in the quiet fall of a drenched autumnal
evening, when the grass lightens a little to the
slackening shower and a bar of greenish sky shines
between the stems of the black-glooming wood.
Even the dreariest of grey twilights may at the
last moment lift a corner of the veil to show a
mist-blurred star, a swarthy flush of afterglow,
enough to let the ambient mystery in upon the
spirit.
The more a man betakes himself to watching
and following the beauty of earth, the better he
knows that it is not a constant quantity, as many
seem to think, always at command the moment
he goes out-of-doors. Any one who has paid
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his due service to the Ilissus or the Melian
Aphrodite knows that even a statue has its
moods ; as to the appeal of a landscape under
the momentary changes of the season and the
hour, it is strange if we shall catch it twice in
altogether the same mode. The most we can
do is to wait, keeping a clear mind, seeing to it
that no internal distraction cloud or warp the
mirror's surface. Though all deliberate intent
most surely destroys its own ends, yet there are
preparatories which contribute to the result a
" wise passiveness ; " idleness, in its too little
understood virtuous side ; a temper of vacation
perhaps innate ; an eye not bent formally on its
object, but turned a little askance from it, finding
it as stars fading in the daybreak may be found
by looking a little beside them. There must be,
of course, a general faith in the coming and going
of divinity ; but no peering here and there for the
symbols. The matter in hand most go on, like
Nestor's sacrifice by the seashore; the quiet
morning hour proceed with its reverent common
forms of the rite ; the lads must be there, the ox,
the chieftain, the goldsmith with his tools ; and
then, unheralded among the rest, silently, the last
at the solemnity
3\0e 5' 'A07JV77
Ipwv a.VTi6wcra.
But yesterday was altogether one of the fast-
days, and I shut my door without having gained
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the least suggestion of any finer illumination be-
hind the common scene. Something of the trivial
hour seemed to infect the course of one's thoughts,
and once or twice the doubt came whether all this
care and observation of natural beauty is not, after
all, a morbid activity, a crasis of the over-wrought
modern mind. "You," said the ill-conditioned
fancy, " mewed up with your books and your
theories, palpitating at some one's review, or irri-
tated by some one else's new adjective, it is you
who breed these subtleties of vision and heats of
appreciation. To the great old men who put down
the foundations you pile your flimsy structures on,
the world was well enough, the sky was blue and
grass was green, sun and stars and seas and winds
had their uses ; at most the sunrise or the storm-
cloud got an epithet, a workmanlike label to serve
through twenty-four books of epic. It is only
now, when your neurotic multitudes, who never
once in their lives drew a full breath or stepped a
wholesome stride, it is only when the atrophied
creatures huddle together in interminable streets
that the sense of Nature-worship is born."
The peevish thought was not to be answered
off-hand. It is, after all, only the course of Nature
that people who walk a certain length of familiar
pavement day by day the year round, and see, if
they ever look up, a narrow strip of firmament,
hazy-hlue in a garish sunlight or orange-dun in
fog, should like to hear about green lanes and
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turquoise skies ; just as the converse holds good,
that ninety-nine of the folk whose ways lead,
summer and winter, through green lanes, and
whose roof from light to dusk is the open heaven,
quite largely fail to appreciate the beauties spread
about them. It is, perhaps, not too rude a pro-
position to say that the expatiation is in inverse
proportion to the knowledge. It seems as though
the difference in detail of scene-painting between
the moderns and the older men were connected
with the degree of intimacy with Nature possessed
by their several publics. The archaic colourist,
writing for his sunburnt, outdoor critics, set his
conventional mark on sea or sky oivom TTOI/TT^
or a<T7Troe alOrip ; it is left to the modern Acade-
mician to give us breathing the dusty smell of
the reading-room while the electric lights sicken
in the shrouding fog a sky " or sur or ; les nuages
d'un or clair et comme incandescent sur un fond
byzantin d'or mat et terni," or " la mer . . . d'une
certaine nuance bleu paon avec des reflets de mdtal
chaud." In face of such achievements as these, it
seems hardly doubtful that our seers and prophets
wheresoever their hearers may stand have dis-
covered whole new worlds in the notation of
natural beauty. Yet there are arguments in the
contrary sense which at least deserve a hearing.
We are, perhaps, too ready to impute to all other
ages our peculiar manner of putting all our strength
in the front rank, or, to use a comparison that is
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perhaps apter to the case, all our wares in the
window ; it rarely seems to occur to us that there
may be any limit to an author's reach other than
his power. It is at least possible that Homer's
sea had that monotonous wine-colour, instead of
peacock-blue and all the rest of the inexhaustible
palette, by a quite deliberate choice.
And the earlier fashion of summary notation has
evident virtues of its own ; it may be found to be
the only possible vehicle for the conveying of those
rarer manifestations of light and form, always swift
and evanescent in proportion to their force. In
the nice choosing of adjectives, the search for
synonyms and the projection of minute detail
there lies the risk that the impatient spirit elude
us, and we find the image we would record hang
as a dead weight of matter on our hands. A
single classic phrase an epithet, even may sug-
gest more than a page of laboured " word-painting"
can realize : the one is allusive, an indication, so
to say, between friends with a common stock of
quick-answering knowledge ; the other too often
seems but a careful and partly conscious endeavour
to convey the detail of a scene to minds which
cannot take a hint, nor fill in an outline from the
stores of their own memory. One line of the
classics may present, to the man who knows, a
sense of the thing meant, much in the same way,
and as absolutely, as the wet blur or solid blot of
Turner's latest power gives its sense, with a kind
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of shorthand which alone is quick enough for the
fading light or the flung-out curve. That qualify-
ing clause " to the man who knows," is perhaps the
key to the difference between the two methods.
The man who has the breath to take him up
mountain-sides, and the eyes, when the summit
is gained, to look behind him and below, does not
need a chapter to recall the vision when he has
come down to the plain again ; a line, a pregnant
word will be enough ; Pindar's
'Ap/caStos
Kal
or, to fetch a parallel from the other extreme of
the compass, Martial's
Et curvas nebula tegente valles
will afford him all he needs.
So far went my analysis, filling up, as such
exercises are surely meant to do, the dead spaces
wherein we know no gods ^aivovrai tvapyeie-
During the afternoon, given solidly to the garden,
there were intimations that the day and the
personal humour were both shaping towards better
things. About dusk, when the digging had been
fairly put through, I took a turn along the high-
road and dropped a little way down the first steep
pitch of Withypits Lane ; and there, with my
mind mainly running, I think, on the couch-grass
roots which I had been wrestling with, I came
upon, or there came upon me, in the dull close of
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the undistinguished day upon the landscape seen
a thousand times before, such a vision of inner
beauty as I had tried to evoke all through the
morning's walk. The scene was but the plan of
the hillside over against me, the steep fields that
drop to the brook in the bottom, the remembered
pattern of their hedges, their solitary oaks, the
long wood that crowns the ridge : in how many
evening walks had I seen it all under the last of
the sunset, darkening to a plane of dun-green
shade, utterly silent and without the least stirring
of life ? I had turned out of the lane, a few paces
across the grass to the familiar gateway, and as I
leaned on the grey lichen-shagged bar the senses
not immediately, but after a minute's looking
suddenly penetrate or are penetrated ; the world
is transformed to a visage it never showed before,
and will not show again. The smooth green fields,
the dark mass of the wood, the pale spaces of sky
and barred cloud reaching towards the north in a
moment put forth their hidden power. One can
but look and look, drawing quiet breath as though
uninitiate and unawares chancing upon some
temple - mystery ; the slack-ordered thoughts,
tangled a moment ago between a half-mechanic
recollection of something heard or read, and the
lazy aim that switched at the nettles in the hedge,
fall at once into a wide-eyed calm, the very spirit
of receptiveness, a lulling pleasure into which they
sink as into the depths of happy-dreaming sleep.
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Every part of the scene is wrought to a meaning
of serene good ; the hedged fields, the white cot-
tage that shows like a light on the dusky green of
the pastures, signify the grace of life in ordered
work and ease ; the mounded oaks stand like
towers of solemn strength ; the earth-haze above
the fallen sun, swarthy orange with the reek of
the dead day, cannot stain the immense clearness
of the western sky. Such things as these, the
approaches and degrees to the central light, come
back to the mind that tries to recall the vision
when it has passed : the supreme mythus divined
behind the symbol is beyond the speech even of
thought.
The lifted veil quickly falls again. The fire dies
out of the afterglow, the clouds fade from their
last pale purples to cold grey ; but spite of the
visible passing of the glory, the watcher surmises
of a shadow that rises within himself; the senses
tire, under the stretch of a greater effort of per-
ception than he had conceived of. The vision
passes ; but just before it goes, there comes a
motion of the will to grasp and hold the moment
as it falls away, a sudden pang of regret, irrational
and unaccountable, akin to that strong pathos
which sometimes comes in watching the highest
human beauty. It is easy to think of this as the
mere heart-ache for our own transitoriness set
against the changeless shows of earth ; but those
who have felt it think that goes deeper than any
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syllogism of our making, has a reference beyond
this frame of things.
When past any doubt the illumination is over,
there is perhaps a momentary endeavour to catch
the secret again, as one sometimes wishes to catch
the broken end of a dream. But the thought is
abandoned as it comes ; it is best to turn resolutely
away from the gate and leave the uninspired face
of the hillside, the mist rising along the brook, the
last glimmer of the west between the pillars of the
wood. Turn away up the lane again ; and while
you feel a sort of wonder at an ineffectiveness, a
sense of fault in all you see, in the dully reddening
ranges of eastern cloud, in the uncouth shapes of
trees, in the landscape where thwarted Nature and
the indolent works of men interact in a confused
meanness, let the mind go back along the trace of
the lost beauty, perhaps to find a consolation, per-
functory but not unserviceable for the darkened
way, in the fancy of some inheritance or right,
implied in that vain regret.
205
XIX
September 10.
IT is a weary business waiting for rain in a droughty
summer, watching morning after morning the cloud-
less blue, or worse, the illusory shows of breaking
weather and blessed showers in the windward,
which raise and dash our hopes from hour to hour.
There is a last worst state, when hope is tired,
or too wise to stir, when the harm is done, the
broccoli or the begonias past recovery, and the
ultimate downpour becomes a matter of compara-
tive indifference. It is not very good for the
temper to muse in this strain amid one's wilting
greenstuff and dusty seed-beds, while the very
privets and laurels hang limp leaves, and the lawn
is seared to a greyish brown. Walks across fields
and by wood paths are better than the accustomed
saunterings in one's own domain ; the whole
country is waste and sere, and the time is an
interregnum ; the stubbles are too hard for the
plough, the meadows are fed almost bare ; the
woods stand a dark and lifeless green and begin
to drop their leaves, shrivelled before they are,
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faded. It is not a much happier prospect than
the garden offers ; but at least one leaves one's
private responsibilities behind one at the gate.
I was out lately on one of these turns towards
the Vachery, and fell in with Mrs. Ventom on her
way home from market. The pony having cast
a shoe, she had walked and carried her butter
baskets all the way to Tisfield. The burden had
taken nothing out of the spring of her step or
the spare uprightness of her carriage ; but I think
it had contributed to a slight and quite permissible
roughness in her temper. An encounter in the
market with some one who, I judged, must have
been aTra/ooKaXoe, unblest with the finer instincts,
seemed to have ruffled her wonted calm. The
lady whose butter was notorious in all the parish,
whose whole experience came out of half a dozen
County Council lectures on dairying had in open
market expressed doubts as to the keeping quali-
ties of the Burntoak consignment, and had advised
Mrs. Ventom Mrs. Ventom to use more salt,
and take more care about the making up. " I had
it on my tongue to say something we should
both have been sorry for ; but there," says the
widow, "I thought of her mother, that I taught
to make butter long before she was thought of:
one of the old sort, before they'd been long enough
away from Nymans to forget what they'd been
themselves. Well-to-do people, the Luxfords
always were, of course ; but the grandfather just
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a tenant farmer. The old people were not the
sort to shake their pockets at you, though they
came into money twice, and had more than they
rightly knew what to do with. There's hundreds
more about like her now ; and 'tis only themselves
out of the whole country that don't know the
difference from the real old families. Some learn
it quicker than others ; there's the Miss Walcots,
now : their grandfather was miller at Westingham
when the Luxfords were at Nymans, but they're
the real thing right through leastways Miss
Fanny is: and Mrs. Sims-Bigg, she'd never be
what you'd call a lady, not if she lived to be a
hundred. And it's not so much what she said.
I've known people a good deal rougher with their
tongues, that you knew were all right the first
word they spoke. Look at Miss Enderby, now ;
she can be sharp enough, but you've only got
to hear her and Mrs. Sims-Bigg together. But
she can be sharp, too. She was up at Burntoak
last week, and she saw two texts that I'd put up
over the dresser; my niece had sent them me
' Cast thy burden/ and ' Though I walk through
the valley/ all in colours and gilt pretty, I
reckoned them and she said, ' I 'see you're like
other folk ; nailing up texts on the wall out of
the way, so's you shouldn't break your shins over
them/ But the sharpest thing I ever heard her
say was to the Vicar, when we'd been talking
about Tom Finch, that robbed his grandmother
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of her bit of savings, and his wife that used to
shut the children out at night, and pumped on
the little one when it was freezing. ' It's only
very cruel people,' she said, ' that don't believe
in Hell.' The Vicar coughed, and said something
about Christian charity. He'd been much too easy
with the Finches all along, some people thought ;
and Miss Mary looked at him as she knows how
to look, and said, ' I wasn't thinking of Tom Finch
and his wife, Mr. Blenkinsopp.' It's not so much
what's said," Mrs. Ventom radically concludes,
" it's the one that says it." I thought of Pamela
Andrews' view of the matter : " but they are ladies,
and ladies may say anything."
All this was unwontedly philosophic for the
mistress of the farm ; and we soon came down
to more solid ground. The drought is a sore
burden ; water has to be carried to the stock from
the brook half a mile away, and the house-supply
has given out. " There's damp enough under the
floors," says Mrs. Ventom ; " I couldn't keep a
carpet on the bricks in the kitchen, if I wanted
to : as I told the agent the last time I sent the
rent, the well's about the only dry place on the
property. And next week, for all we know, we
may have the floods out in the bottoms, and
buckets in the best bedroom to catch the wet
coming through the roof. We're always in trouble
one way or the other. Most people seem to think
trouble can only hurt you one way ; but," says
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the widow, with one of her material comparisons
from the works of Nature, " 'tis like boot-laces ;
it frets us if they're too tight, and it frets us pretty
nearly as much if they're too loose."
By this we had come to the path which cuts
the meadows towards Burntoak, and our ways
parted. I held the gate open for Mrs. Ventom
and her baskets, and received one of her magni-
ficent sweeping curtseys, baskets and all, that
majestic sinking and recovery which I should sup-
pose would make Mrs. Sims-Bigg's fortune at a
Drawing-Room the hereditary obeisance which
the widow maintains in a sort of jealous pride I
had almost said insolence in knowing her station ;
it is possible that it has for her a connection with
old fashions, greater than ours ; in some cases,
perhaps, it might express a lurking sarcasm. I
should like very much to have seen the curtsey
she gave Mrs. Sims-Bigg in Tisfield market after
that reflection on the Burntoak butter.
When I came to the Vachery I found Jethro
Tully thatching one of his own clover stacks. The
one decent thatcher in the parish was busy at
Naldretts fresh-healing the barn. Tully was not
going to have his job done by either of the
other two impostors who profess the craft. So, as
rain might come along any time, he reckoned as
how he'd got to do it himself. I sat on the stack-
yard rails and watched him finish off the job,
quick, thorough, neat-handed work, without waste
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or haste. Here was skilled labour, at any rate
the drawing out of the straw from the heap, the
laying of it straight with light, quick ringers, the
fastening of the bundle in the clam, or carrier,
the quantity exactly sufficient for the space to
be covered, judged after an instant's measurement
with the eye from below ; the unhesitating laying
on, combing down and binding in with the thatch-
ing-rods ; the finishing touches to the edges with
the shears; all this very pleasantly satisfied my
taste for seeing anything thoroughly well done.
When Tully had the whole thing to his mind, he
came over to where I was sitting, straightening him-
self very gingerly ; and leaning on the fence, began
to accuse the disjointed times which reduced him,
with twenty other things to look after, to thatch-
ing his own stacks. It was all depressingly per-
spicuous ; the old ones, that had learnt what work
meant, dropped off one by one, and the young
ones were never taught naun but school-learning,
and smoking cigarettes and sarcing their betters.
'Tis all made easy for 'em now; but he reckons
there's some things as is only to be learned by
hard work and taking pains. He used to walk
three miles to his work every day at his first
place, and that meant getting up at four, and back
after seven. He was put on to mow with the
men when he was seventeen ; and you got to keep
up with 'em somehow, and learn to sharp properly.
There isn't a boy in the school now, he 'spects,
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that could sharp a scythe or a hook, let alone
mow. They don't look to things ; 'tis all ready-
made and take-it-easy ; why ne'er he nor his
father afore him ever bought a scythe-sned ; they'd
look out for a likely piece of hazel when they
were in the woods, and then at the right time
they'd go and cut it for themselves. And choosing
a scythe-blade, now ; people didn't seem to see
no difference. Well, when he went to pick one,
he'd wait for a sunshiny day, and hold it up
'twixt him and the sun, so's the light fell on the
edge, and then, if it looked as blue as a hare-
bell, you could be pretty sure that was a good
one. So with knives; he'd often been asked to
choose 'em for people, when he was going into
Tisfield.
I thought of the thing defined as an infinite
capacity for taking pains, and wondered what
polar quality may be denoted by a nation's being
mainly concerned to avoid all sort of pains or
trouble whatsoever. Tully, I think, would have
no hesitation as to its results ; there is the con-
crete product before his eyes in the shape of his
grandson Herbert or Erb. Erb, at the age when
his grandfather was set to weed in the fields and
mind horses, began to exercise his mind with re-
creative beads and bits of stick under a Government
syllabus, and thereafter grew nine years in the
atmosphere of the school stove and the odour of
unscrubbed humanity, under the influence of the
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blackboard and its chalky duster, and so became
qualified to parse and do mental arithmetic and
sing sol-fa, until he is projected complete upon
the world, an under-sized, weedy cub, with small
show of manners or morals, with one gift of shirk-
ing laziness developed in his atrophied little brain.
He has been sent away to three or four good
places, and after a few weeks in each is back again
with his cigarette and his halfpenny paper on the
wall by the pond, the gathering-place for all the
tribe of skulkers, already something of a parish
care and nuisance. If he had had the learning
of him, says old Tully, he'd have made something
different of him. For my part, I doubt it. I
cannot picture to myself Erb turning out at five
o'clock, keeping up with the mowers, or learning
to choose a scythe : the creature that I know,
under-sized and ill-knit, bleached by indoor air
and soul-stunted by indoor thinking, with his
stick-up collars and fourpenny satin ties, his
cherished forelock, his language and his literature,
is of another birth, a changeling from the stock
of those old breakers of the glebe. He judge a
scythe-blade by the blue glimmer on the edge?
He can't even distinguish the tastes of the various
poisons in his cigarettes.
They won't work nowadays, says Tully ; not on
the land. They don't seem to mind dirty jobs,
or being in shops, and all that ; but what he calls
real pleasant work, they won't have naun of it.
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I remind him of a modern instance. Our neigh-
bours at Tisfield have after the usual preliminaries
of a newspaper warfare, party-committees, insinua-
tions and recriminations, a Local Government
Inquiry and a loan embarked upon an ambitious
scheme of drains. During the laying of the main
sewer they managed to asphyxiate one navvy in
the drain; and to blow another to tatters with a
dynamite cartridge. The applicants for the
vacancies thus created were ten deep ; but as
Tully says, for real pleasant work you can hardly
get a man to look at the job. He reckons It's
better for a man to be on the top of a stack than
down a sullage-pipe ; but there, you can't never
tell. Seems as if they were reg'lar frightened of
being out-o'-doors now.
I told him that people had lately proposed that
agriculture should be taught in country schools.
He smiled a little stiffly, as one smiles at the bad
jokes of one's friends ; and then I quoted the
opinion of a great doctor of educational science
which I had lately read, denouncing as reactionary
and obscurantist any attempt to specialise the
curriculum of elementary education before the age
of fourteen. I put it to Tully in less specialised
English than is usually affected by the people who
call themselves educationalists, and was pleased
to find that the objection which had occurred to
me was the first in his mind. "'Tis people like
that/' says Tully, "that are killing the country.
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I don't set out to know how any one can be such
a fool as to think ye can start to teach a boy
farming when he's fourteen, let alone filling his
head with everything else first that he won't never
want ; but there, if you tell me as the gentleman
said it, I suppose 'tis so ; but I do reckon people
like that ought to be shet up." Shutting-up, in
Tully's mouth, has not the mere colloquial sense
of suppression : it means Bedlam ; and when one
thinks a little on that excited defence of the
existing plan of extreme specialisation, by which
a boy is sedulously nursed into the desire of
a black coat and an office stool, and a taste
for halfpenny periodicals, and then, with this
precious birthright assured to him, is left to follow
the plough if he will, one is inclined to agree
with Tully's prescription, unless it may seem
under the imminent conditions simpler and more
economical to provide well-fenced strongholds for
one's self, and to leave the crazy world to run
at large.
There was a little silence, and then Tully's
justly balanced mind began to bring up from the
stores of memory some of the less favourable
aspects of the days of old. "Not but what," he
began, " I don't say as there's not improvements
some ways since I can remember, and since what
I've heard my father tell of. I 'spect it was a bit
rougher than what we should care for now. I
can rec'lect the girls doing the washing out in
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the yard in the winter, with their skirts froze hard
about their knees, and they wore short sleeves
then, and they'd sometimes chilblains right up to
their elbows ; and get two pounds a year for that.
And the boys got knocked about a bit, too.
Seemed they didn't think so much about things
then. I rec'lect when there was no ceiling to the
church roof, and the snow used to come right
through into the chancel ; the clerk he used to
sweep it off the seats before service. There was
none of these stoves then ; and Parson Short, I've
seen him blowing his fingers while they was sing-
ing the Psalms. It was rougher still in my father's
time, I 'spect. That was when the war was on,
and the French prisoners was kept at the old
Talbot ; old Jack Lelliot he'd often baked their
dinners for them, and sometimes they'd catch a
toad in the garden and put it in one of their pies.
The press-gang was going about then, and you
durstn't send a waggon to Lewes with two men,
for fear they'd take one of 'em ; if there was but
one with the horses, they couldn't take him, you
see. And highwaymen : the corn-market at Tis-
field used to be at six o'clock in the evening,
so's they could hear the price of corn in London ;
and sometimes when the farmers were going home,
they were set on. My grandfather was once
driving his trap from the market, betwixt Harvest
Hill and Pain's Bottom, and he saw three men
waiting to stop him : so he cut the horse, and
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sent one of 'em flying, and went through without
they touched him. And there's another thing
that's improved : about the tithe. They used to
take it in kind ; I used to know the last tithing-
man, when I was a boy: Freeman Blaker they
called him, and he lived in Sher'n'am, where the
post-office is built now. He'd come in harvest
time and stick a bough in every tenth sheaf, and
he'd have the tenth pig when there was a litter,
and every tenth day the whole of the milk. I
can tell you my father was pretty glad when the
Commutation came in, and it was all done away
with. People didn't take to the tithing ; and can
you blame them ? If they was harvesting beans,
or anything like that, they'd sometimes put the
tithe sheaves in a bit of a stack, like, in a wood,
and leave them there, and the poor people'd go
and help themselves, and you couldn't blame
them. And when the old tithe-barn that used
to stand next the church was burnt down, there
was nobody sorry, and some reckoned they knew
pretty well how it came to catch fire. I've heard
Parson Short say as how those that first gave the
tithe had brought the Church more curses than
they ever did good. Well, there's things like that
where there's great improvements ; but come to
look at the boys and the gells ay, and the men
and women too what they was then, and what
they set out to be now, and 'tis an improvement
all the other way."
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At this point we left the State to look after
itself, and turned to our private concerns the
neighbouring field of swedes starved for want of
rain, the wells drained of their last muddy residue,
the disjointed cycle of rain and fine. Before we
had finished, the horses came in from the fields,
and Tully had to go and see to their stabling. I
turned for home, thinking as I crossed the stale
dry fields and sapless woods of Tully's balances
of better and worse, of prices to pay for things
to have, of labour and wages, of the see-saw of
reacting extremes upon which we live, making it
our religion to drive each recoil more violent than
the last. I entertained a vision of our public men
doing their best to bring that vicious libration to
a stand, instead of using all their weight to make
the machine kick the beam for their party ends.
We shall have to overcome a number of old pre-
scriptions and prejudices first, no doubt, breach
several bulwarks and rape sundry Palladiums
of progress ; but surely there are already signs
of decay in some of those hedges of divinity,
and the change may be nearer than we con-
ceive.
I had taken a short cut through some pastures
which landed me in face of an old stake and wattle
fence ; the crumbling bank and half-rotten lattice
of stick and bramble made as awkward a barrier
as short cut ever led to. I scrambled over at last,
somehow; and as I stopped to clear myself of
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thorns and litter from the hedge, I said to myself,
with a parallel such as Mrs. Ventom would not
have disdained, that it might be ten times easier
to get over a stiff new fence than a rotten old one,
after all.
219
XX
September 18.
AN occasional invasion from the outer world serves
very comfortably to settle the cloistered mind in
its opinion of the goodness of its solitude. Thus
when lately on a mild autumnal afternoon the
Sims-Biggs and Mrs. Yarborough-Greenhalgh and
her daughters chanced to jump with one another
at teatime in one of their half-yearly calls at
Lonewood, and found the Warden and Mary
Enderby and Harry Mansel, who had come up
to fetch certain flower-seedlings for The Laurels,
my groves resounded for half an hour to a very
tolerable imitation of the shouting cross-fire which
in these last times passes for conversation. The
reign of peace was all the fuller when the tumult
came to an end, and I dare say one's wits were
all the better for an involuntary souse in a breaker
of that great tide on the shore of which I am wont
to bask and murmur my suave mari. The Warden,
my cousin, and Harry stayed on after the others
had gone, and we went down the garden to get the
columbines and pansy roots, and talked in our own
way. Mary, I thought, bore a little hardly on the
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young man, who was to carry the basket down to
the village for her, with glance-hits at his extreme
nicety of get-up, and his searching knowledge of
the proprieties of life. The youth took it all excel-
lently, with a show of ingenuous modesty ; but
I doubt if my cousin perceived a tinge of humour
in his gravity which meant that he quite under-
stood, and though playing feather-light, could
easily guard his head. Mary has been pleased
to consider him as seriously wanting in brains
and a danger to his country, ever since he failed
rather ostentatiously to respond to an attempt to
communicate something of her admiration for
Molly Crofts. She has told me that he was made
in a mould ; that there were some thousands of
boys exactly like him in the British Army ; and
I told her if that was so, to thank Heaven that the
country was not in such a bad way as some patriots
were pleased to think.
The Warden turned back with me when we had
seen Mary and her squire out at the field gate, and
we sat and smoked under the holly hedge till the
light began to fade. We ranged over a good deal
of country before coming round to the inevitable
master-theory. The Warden vented a little fume
which he had been obliged to keep to himself
when lately consulted by a committee of our
intellectual ladies on the choice of books for a
course of lectures and reading which exhilarates
the winter months in our region. They had, of
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course, made up their minds before they asked him,
he says, and were going to plunge into Marcus
Aurelius and Epictetus : of course, they never
heard of Antoninus, and they call it Epictetus ;
but that doesn't make any odds. There must
be something in stodge like that to attract the
average female mind. He thinks most probably
it's the want of humour. The real sense of
humour is the admission of the incalculable,
something elastic in the brain which will stand
the shock when two and two don't make four.
Of course, in a purely scientific age like ours, we
can't expect any admission of that sort. It's a
general plague : think of a sensible woman like
Lady Anne, or nice girls like Molly bothering
their heads about those two old fifth-raters or
their modern equivalents, and ignoring all the
real live stuff. He had talked to Molly about it :
but it was no good ; they'd got it all down in a
syllabus now, with lectures by some poor devil
who is trying to make a living at once out of his
First in History. "Molly said it was so stimu-
lating, and I told her it didn't sound intoxicating,
anyhow. They had been discussing Marcus's
views of immortality, and I told her he was one
of those people who can only think of infinity
in one direction, as if it didn't go both ways,
behind as well as in front ; and that we forget
that God is as much smaller than we are as
He is greater. I thought that would be a
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stimulus, but Molly thought she was shocked.
We are so serious now, that we can't imagine
where the fun comes in to anything, even about
ourselves. Our work is so strenuous and earnest
that we are always in the thick of it, and can
never stand back to get the general perspective.
Look at the way Montaigne always keeps the
scale of things, and can laugh at himself and
everything else when he likes. But then he'd
been in the world. He must have thought, some-
times, how his dealings with the Ligue, and the
Mairie, and affairs like the muster of the troops in
Bordeaux, would count towards getting a hearing
from the right kind of people in time to come.
We never get a philosopher now among the men
of action. What opportunities even a man like
Harry Mansel has with his Ghurkas in the Hills,
and back at home every other year or so ! It
makes one sick of one's theories, nursed up on
stale ground for fifty years together. There's a
boy that has lived ; two campaigns for his country
before he's twenty-seven, snubbed and starved
by the politicians till they want him every now
and then to clean up the messes they have made.
He's helping to shove the waggon, and we sit
inside and squabble about education and efficiency.
Brains? Aren't there kinds of brains, as well as
sizes ? Do you think we poky little people who
sit at home annotating the classics, and wasting
paper in offices, and lecturing to ladies on Epictetus,
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could manage a hill-tribe that was turning nasty ?
I don't say there aren't set-offs on the other side.
It's a pity Harry should have dropped his classics
altogether since he left Sandhurst ; but one can't
have everything. I suppose it's all our personal
freedom and high culture and precise thinking that
prevent us having any Montaignes now. But we
could do with one or two: the solemn strenuous
people are not much good even at lectures ; but
when it comes to the whole government of a
country being made of them, it is really rather
awful. It isn't always easy to make out the
compensatory advantages, when you get a fact
like that to think about."
We were once more in the neighbourhood of the
familiar solution, and the final stages of its develop-
ment lasted until I had seen the Warden out of the
lower gate, and had lost him at the turning of the
field-path into the road. The theory ran still in
my head for a little as I came back up the garden,
thinking of an old contrast which balanced Mon-
taigne against Plato : the Greek, with a divine
stillness about him, knowing spells of strange
power, shines with an anointing that eludes human
holds ; Montaigne is one of ourselves, goes down
into the pit with us, puts on him the dust of
mortality for the wrestler's sand. . . .
From a flight or two such as this I came down
to the still September evening, the just- risen moon,
near the full, hanging above the eastern woods,
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the autumn flowers in the dusking borders, and
the first smell of autumn leaves. My associative
recollection answered at once to that mixture of
impressions, and the shadowy rampart of the
Downs turned as I looked at it to Allington
Hills, the first horizon I knew beyond the bounds
of garden-hedges or nursery window-panes to
Allington Hills as I used to see them across my
first river of Sandwell stream. Both river and
hills were part of a magic country, lying within
a morning's walk of the common earth of lessons
and bedtime and rainy days indoors. Sandwell,
in his degree, and among civil streams, was surely
one of the noblest that ever flowed crystal clear,
neither fast nor slow, equable both in drought
and flood. Frost never bound him, for he had in
him some volcanic temper, so that in hard weather
his windings lay under a white veil of smoke ; and
no fieriest dog-star had power to abate him an inch
of his pride. Not for many a day did I discover
that he came to us through no old kingdoms and
far-off lands, not even through long valleys of our own
shire, but in his main artery sprang at once to full
span from the confluence of three rushing streams
welling up marvellously amongst the houses and
gardens of the village. The amplest of the three
heads was housed in a sort of temple, the eight-
sided red-brick well-house, always close-shut and
mysterious, full of the sound of invisible springs.
Another source came wavering into the light from
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under a low dark archway in a park wall, and ran
over yellow gravel alongside the highroad ; the
third I never traced to its spring, somewhere
among the cottage gardens in Church Lane. The
three main heads joined to make a broad shallow
pool in the middle of the village, and at the outflow
Sandwell began. Its silent stealth made it seem
unfathomable to my early fancy ; I must have
been twelve years old before its olive-green deeps
resolved themselves into a good mid-thigh in full
channel. In holiday time I used to fish the stream
with a good deal of application, but with an incur-
able and perfectly conscious unhandiness, and a
consistent ill-luck which may have had a share in the
making of a certain habit of acquiescence in failure,
hardly proper for that age, but immoveable. There
was a stretch called Dodgson's Piece, along one
side of Mill Green Lane, which was free-warren
and haunted in summer holidays by all the boys
who could contrive a hazel-rod and crooked pin.
There the trout were scarcely larger than minnows,
and of a marvellous activity ; but look over the
upper Town Bridge or the lower Meadow Bridge,
which marked the limits of the public water, and
there in the cool privacy of lawns and gardens,
under the very shadow of the arch, you saw the
waving tails of the three-pounders who knew their
station to an inch, and never showed a nose on
the plebeian side. For a year or two I flogged
the edges of the weed-beds with every sort of
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home-made tackle, and after a certain birthday
with a fine fly-rod out of the little barber's shop on
the Mill Green ; but I had learned my capacity,
and presently turned to less exacting arts. The
hills were my second pleasure ; in the less active
humours even dearer than Sandwell itself. Long
before I had ever got any nearer to them than the
river bank, they seemed to call me, stirring vague
longings as the frontier of another world, a magic
land where I fain would be. When at length I
came to climb the heathy swell and stand upon
the ridge, there away in the south, beyond the
long fir-woods that sank below me, over the broad
plain that stretched beyond, no nearer than they
had been before, rose again the blue hills far away.
Between the river and the hills lay the little town
that still called itself "The Village," roofs half
hidden among orchard boughs, old park elms, a
grove of broad cedars. Beyond the houses came
the open country, level hedgeless fields, softly blue
at the season with acres of flowering lavender. All
this realm lay towards the sun, away from the
region of ever thickening roads and houses, and
was on the edge of the real country ; it was kept
for Saturday walks and day-long rambles in the
boundless ease and peace of mind of the first weeks
of summer holidays ; journeys that were always
made, as it seems now, together with Barbara des
Vceux. Those were the days when the chance of
next-door houses made us fellow-prisoners at sums
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and French, and constant mates at playtime in the
back gardens or on Allington .Hills. Over Sand-
well by the Meadow Bridge a lane led, turning
presently into a cart-track through the fields that
were always rich with the smell of widths of
peppermint and always abloom, as they remain in
memory, with the soft violet under-heaven of the
lavender ; and next into a high-hedged blackberry
lane, winding and rising steeper and sandier till
heather and fern took the place of the brambles,
and all at once, over a bank of white pebbly sand
topped with flaming gorse, rose the dark stretches
of the glorious hill. Along the grassy clearings we
ran our courses, and sat to talk among the sandpits
and heathy brows, shut in from all but the warm
blue and the sailing clouds. And so for two years
the hills took on them their share of the spell,
born of a passion restless, shy, infinitely sweet,
with which my silent devotion to Barbara filled
every place where she and I had been together ;
but their true part in that conjunction I did not
learn until Bab had said good-bye and gone away.
Then, for two years more, as I looked day by day
towards the old horizon, a gap in the ridge beyond
the poplar clump showed me the way that she had
gone, the way by which, I dreamed brave dreams,
I should one day go to find her in the new world.
It was early autumn when she left us, and in
misting twilights all the levels below the hills were
full of the smell of the mint-stilling ; to this day a
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thought of the smell comes back with the moist
breathings of September dusk, and brings with it a
motion of the boyish grief. Two years I watched
the edge of my world, faithful utterly to Barbara
in some dim western shire, with such help as was
to be found in two or three little pencil-ruled
letters before the final silence. In due time the
barbed shaft was drawn out of the wound, not
without throes. It was a strange strife when I
first felt past all doubt the change working ; there
were strong vows to bind the slipping faith, exe-
crations of the baser self, sudden stealings-back of
the old tenderness, desperately sad and dear, before
that devotion wholly passed. It left its trace
behind, and even now, in September evenings when
the level mists thicken along the fields and the
smell of dead leaves hangs about the walks, I find
myself still looking away to far-off hills and think-
ing of all that Barbara taught me first, by Allington
Hills and Sandwell stream.
229
XXI
October 14.
As I crossed Hangman's Acre yesterday on my
way to the Vachery, I wondered if I had ever seen
a fouler day and a more desolate spot together.
Hangman's Acre is a plot that may well have a
curse on it low-lying, waterlogged ground of so
villanous heart that not even thistles will thrive
there ; it was once sown with oats by a new tenant,
and the four-inch straw still litters the stitches ;
the stunted oaks, the Dead Man's tree amongst
them, starve in the thin clay ; the hedges are run
wild, and broken at the fancy of any strays. There
are plenty of derelict fields in our region, but none
to touch this miserable piece ; and I sometimes
muse whether, in that Clearing House or Court of
Transcendental Equity, which I hope to see one
day at work, I could not claim damages for the
perpetual depressing influence of all these acres of
unutterably slack and slovenly farming amongst
which I take my walks. The wilderness is one
thing, the busy works of men another ; but this
confusion of thwarted Nature with human failure
is one of those things which shrivel the soul. In
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the middle of such thoughts as these there came the
sound of a right-and-left somewhere down in the
valley, answered instantly by the kok-kok of a
pheasant close by in the copse, and I made a note
for the six hundredth time of the quarter to
which my claim for transcendental damages must
be addressed. If the land were in poor case, the
weather matched it. In a general way I pour
healthy scorn on people who are afraid of country
ways and country wet. The man who shies at a
mile or two of muddy lane, whose dismayed mind
yearns instinctively towards his wonted cab-rank
when the pelting shower catches him in the open
plough, is a mere " product of civilisation," and is
all the better for an elemental wash. We, who
have to trudge our two or three miles of streaming
road to get a postal order or a bottle of physic, in
black winter nights when we must feel for the
hedge-bank as we go, with the north-easter gnaw-
ing the windward ear and pinching our finger-tips
in his vice, we know the inward heat, the long
thoughts that clear and shape themselves while
the body holds its mechanic pace along the solitary
way. We would not change those silent tramps
in the rain or the starry frosts for all the flare and
sociable hubbub of Oxford Street itself. And
then, what would April, what would the sweet of
June be, if they were not honestly bought and paid
for, earned and learned by the full reckoning of
the winter wild ?
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So much for all honest bad weather ; but there
is a sort that is vile beyond all treaty and the
sanctions of human fibre, and in these latitudes
largely due, as I think, to modern and artificial
states of the sky. There is often in an unadul-
terated north wind that which makes one under-
stand at once why the Devil is said to sit in lateribus
aquilonis ; but when a peculiar dun gloom, an
olive-hued, throat-catching fume, a sting in the
rain perhaps partly chemical, are added to the
miserable hour, the soul of the toughest rustic cries
out as agakist unfair play. There is war without
truce between man and Nature
" Pater ipse colendi
Haud facilem esse viam voluit ..."
grant that from the hardness of the world use
extunds various arts, and that our wits are profit-
ably sharpened by cares ; yet if there be a suspicion
of .added handicap, the transition from braced
energy to listless depression is one of the shortest
in life. All the Virgilian plagues, the blights and
weeds and birds and weather, one can face with a
stout courage ; but let a man begin to see behind
the primordial contest the new odds of legislative
interferences, municipal smoke-plagues, economic
weed-plagues and bird-plagues, and it may go near
to break his heart. Without this uncovenanted
advantage, storms and seasons buffet us in vain.
From the weather and the scene at their worst I
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was glad enough to get into the lee of the farm
buildings at the Vachery. After the raw wind
and the puddled furrows, the smell of the wood
smoke blown gustily about the yard and the dry
footing by the ricks lulled the temper with a
luxurious sense of refuge. The daylight, a wan
gloom at the best, had begun to thicken before I
reached the farm ; and when I knocked, the house
door was already barred for the night. After due
parley, almost drowned in the uproar made by the
dogs, I was admitted, and found the household
settled in for the night, the men drawn round the
kitchen fire while supper was making ready on the
long table in the middle of the room. It was a
patriarchal composition. Jethro Tully, the master,
sat in the inmost place in the chimney-corner, his
white beard and wrinkled face lit by the blazing
stick fire ; next him his two sons, strong-faced,
middle-aged men, grave and silent ; beyond them
the carter-boy and a little sickly grandson of
the house whispered and laughed together on the
farthest bench. The elder son's wife, a spare,
hard-featured woman with invincible eyes, and her
niece, a slight, fair-haired girl, moved to and fro
about the table in the flickering light. The two
terriers and the sheep-dog, their dutiful alarum
discharged, lay at length before the hearth, serenely
forgetful of rabbit-burrow or miry fold. The wind
rumbled in the chimney, and now and again sent
a blue haze of wood smoke across the room, to
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mix with the fine hungry smell from the great
black pot, whose lid chattered and steamed above
the crackling bavin. The room, though bare of all
but the first necessities, had a look of persuasive
comfort. The shining slabs of the oak table, with
its darned but well bleached cloth, the heavy
benches, the single armchair, the tall clock, the
gun slung over the chimney breast, the sheephook
and old green umbrella behind the door made one
reflect not quite contentedly on one's own ingenious
superfluity. The brick floor, the capacious hearth,
patient of muddy boots and paws, show one's
Persian apparatus of carpets and hangings in a
new light. The master of the house in his simple
state is the true aristocrat, deriving his descent
straight from a gentry far beyond our short-legged
pedigrees ; and before his patriarchal throne by
the hearth I an unclassed Ulysses, wandering at
a loose end for many a year among men and
matters behold in Mus* Tully not so much
Eumaeus as Alcinous himself.
I settled the small business I had come about ;
and my account for sundry tackle from the woods,
spray faggots, ether-boughs and thatching-rods
was audited and receipted by the scholar of the
house, little Alf the crippled grandson, the only
one there, I think, who would face the business of
writing his name. There was a little time left
before supper was ready to set on, so I sat with
my steaming boots on the hearthstone and led old
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Tully on to ancient history. As is generally the
case, he needed very little leading. I sometimes
compare his mind to one of our thick-standing
woods, which will return an echo as clearly as a
hillside or a house-wall. My due remark about
the roughness of the weather brought an answer
at once from his close-set memories. There had
not been such a wet winter since 'fifty-one ; but
that was worse, a good bit. There was hardly
any corn sown right through till the spring. He
was at Hoadly Hill then, and there they always
reckoned to get their corn in by Old Michaelmas ;
and they managed to, somehow; and after that,
when 'twas so wet, they kept on saying "Where
should we 'a been ? . . ." Terrible wet it was, day
after day ; they was wet through all day, some-
times, and no fire to dry themselves by ; took
their things off wet at night, and put 'em on wet
again in the morning. No, he doesn't reckon it
hurt them. I look across at the old man in the
firelight and grant by all our country standards
of well-favouredness that he does not seem the
worse for all that hardness. Something of the
lean face, the angular bent figure is perhaps due
to such experiences ; something too, I think, of a
look of refinement, a filing-out of grosser elements
and an expression almost spiritual, far too rare
among the present race.
Well, Tully is saying, other people of course
they got their corn in late all anyhow, most of it ;
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and it was rough right through the summer. That
made the price go up ; that and the Crimean War
afterwards. Terrible poor stuff, most of the flour
was that year, and wouldn't bake ; sometimes they'd
have to take it out of the oven with a spoon, and
sometimes it'd spew right out of the loaf, like.
Wheat was up to twenty-eight pounds a load in
the war; old Mus' Luxford, up at Nymans, he'd
kept his back to make more, and it come down to
fourteen pounds in one week. No, there was no
bad times, not hereabouts, as far as he could recol-
lect; things seemed to go on pretty much the
same as usual. He reckoned the men on the
farms weren't no worse off than what they were
now. You see, 'twas better farming then. He
goes on to enlarge, in a way I well know, on the
sins of the modern farmer : the uncleaned dicks,
the wet hungry land, the weeds. ... It was better,
time back ; but 'twas never very grand round about
here. No good land to be seen, they used to say,
from Grinstead steeple.
I told him I had been at Southover not long
before, and had seen the bullock-team going to
work, one of the few remaining in Sussex. He
remembered when they'd bullocks all about here
at Burstye and Nymans and High House ; some
were Sussex and some black Welsh. The bullocks
at Hoadly Hill wasn't shoed ; they was never on
the roads. He'd seen them shoe the Welsh at
Grinstead Fair ; held 'em down with a prong over
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their necks a funny job that was, too. They'd
two bulls at High House then : tremendous strong,
they was ; if a waggon stuck anywhere, and four
horses couldn't shift it, they'd put they bulls in,
and they'd fetch it out as easy! Why was they
given up? Well, some people said it was the
cattle-plague ; but there ! they'd sim'd to make
up their minds to have done with 'em, 'fore that
come, though they couldn't rightly say why. The
bullocks was better'n horses, some ways ; they
didn't snatch at their work, and they didn't make
such a mess of the ground with their hoofs when
'twas wet and bungey. Why didn't he have a
team himself now, ay ? He only shakes his head
at the question : there are difficulties, of course ;
the stoutest of us owes a sort of allegiance at
some certain interval to the spirit of the age.
One of the best qualities, as I think, in Tully's
histories is the way in which they grow out of
each other ; a single name or a date sets him off
on a fresh line of reminiscence ; but this tangential
habit needs at times to be held in check, or the
listener might never reach the end of any given
legend ; and it is sometimes well to be provided
with a decent pretext for breaking off the intermin-
able series. It is enough that the year of the
disappearance of the last yoke of bullocks from
Hoadly Hill happened to be the first of the
ministrations of Parson Short in Sheringham
parish ; we are at once in the middle of an account
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of the state of things which that notable reformer
found awaiting him in the early 'forties. I hear of
the manor pound, and the stocks, and of one
Andrews a sweep, who was the last man to be
put in them ; of the Petty Constables, chosen for a
year, of their insignia of staff and handcuffs ; of
old Finch the shoemaker, who held office when
the village was full of navvies working on the new
railway ; how there were fights behind the church
on Sunday mornings ; "and we boys, we'd slip out
as soon as we heard 'em at it ; and old Finch he'd
come to them when they was sitting on their
seconds' knee an old man, he was, and he knew
if he was rough on 'em he'd like as not get a black
eye himself and he used to wear big round glasses,
and he shoves them up on his forehead, and he says,
' Well, my men, when you've had enough,' he says,
1 we'd be very glad for you to leave off ; ' and some-
times they'd stop, and sometimes they wouldn't.
The navvies they was always fighting ; and that
set others on fighting too, and a deal of wickedness.
Well, when Mr. Short come, he soon stopped all
that on Sundays. You see, old Mr. Budd as was
before him, he'd let things go pretty much as they
liked, and he was often away in London or Brigh-
ton, and nobody to take the services. I've known
a body lie a day-two in the church, 'cause there
was no one to bury it. Well, Mr. Short, he
reckoned to make alterations ; and he had the
church cleaned right out, the dirt and the bats and
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the owls and all ; then he started the schoolin' ;
got a master and mistress to teach us ; up in the
long room at the Dolphin, that was. The only
school I rec'lect before that was up in the strong-
room over the church porch, and that wouldn't
hold more'n a dozen or so. And, you see, it
wasn't as if he was getting money out of the
living ; not above twenty pounds he didn't ; the
great tithes all belonged to old Mr. Tree ; they'd
been in his fam'ly ever so long, and he was in the
Queen's Bench, and he used to come down to the
place sometimes in the summer, and lived in the
old parsonage, what they calls Sheringham Court
now ; two or three weeks he'd be there, and always
an officer with him, and then he'd go back to the
Bench again. Wonderful what Mr. Short done
for the village, while he was here ; and if it hadn't
been that there was one or two against him, that
had no call to be, he'd have made it a different
place altogether. Who was that? Why, the
people that was at the Park then always a bad
fam'ly they was. They was agin' him from the
first. And Parson Short he spoke to 'em straight
about it all ; and so they was agin* him all along ;
and it seemed as how they was too strong for him,
and at last he had to go. It was but a little while
after he was gone that the old gentleman died in
his chair at dinner. I rec'lect the funeral ; I never
see the church so full, but not an eye that wasn't
dry in it. I went down into the vault while it was
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open ; there was four or five coffins there, with
coats of arms on 'em. There was none on his ;
more like a parish funeral, it was. When the Park
was sold, all the place went and had a look at it :
you see, they'd been regular afraid of the house
while the old man was there * Little Hell ' they
called it ; and the people went looking into all the
rooms, some of 'em half frightened, and some making
fun of it, and saying they saw a black man behind
the door, and such-like. Seemed as if everybody
was glad to think that party was gone for good
and all at last."
The pot-lid had been clacking to an unmistake-
able tune for some time, and the comings and
goings of Mrs. William betrayed anxiety about
the dishing-up : so when there was a great boil
over, and rushings and outcry of the women, I
seized the chance of the interruption to old Tully's
chronicle, and took my leave. The night looked
black and struck rawly after the glow of the
kitchen ; and it was a dreary three miles home,
with a restless wind roaming the desolate fields
like a presence, sounding far or near in a planta-
tion or high-timbered hedge, going by in a chilly
gust and leaving a dead pause. There was a
narrow rift of greenish sky in the west, and now
and then Venus glittered out through the folds of
cloud, to shine in the pools of the drenched cart-
track, and more than once so to save me a deeper
plunge. I thought, as I went, of Tully's histories,
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and tried to shape out something of the life of the
parish sixty years ago, a scene of ruder energies
and, I think, larger liberties than ours, a rougher,
heartier plan of living, a stronger-lined picturesque
of character, a much greater width of extremes.
No sign here, at least, of the hard times, the
tyranny and subservience which make such a
figure in Cobbett's " Rural Rides," and as certainly
nothing of the buttercup-and-daisy idylls of Miss
Mitford's " Village." I believe, for my part, that
Tully and his kind for he is only a fine example
of a considerable school are in the true mean
between the pitchy chiaroscuro of the one style
and the coloured-crayon touches of the other,
painters of " the real Picture of the Poor," of the
truth of country life as our grandfathers knew it.
Ruminating such comparisons as these, I found
myself at the field gate sooner than I had ex-
pected ; and when I came into the still warmth
of the study, lit by the hollow-fallen fire, my eye
fell on a certain eight volumes on a middle shelf,
and I told myself once more that Crabbe was the
man ; that, after all, there was never any one in
the world yet like him for the presentment per-
fectly, or dreadfully balanced, as you will of the
rustic soul.
241 R
XXII
December 12.
COMING home from the village on black winter
nights I can so far sympathise with the ordinary
townsman's dread of country solitude as to con-
ceive of possible grounds for his delusion. When
one turns out of the snug room at the Lodge or
The Laurels, passes the shop-windows shining on
the drenched pavements and takes the muddy road
for home, one has an inkling of the sensations of
those larger children who dread loneliness and the
dark. At the turning where the companionable
noises of the village are left behind, and where on
moonless nights the light of the outmost oil-lamp
fades on the shadowy hedges, I can imagine the
dismay of certain people who are not; good com-
pany for themselves, if they had to walk into that
wall of impenetrable darkness, and fare forth
solitary towards the silent house waiting them at
the end of two miles of uphill and wicked way.
I can conceive of the fact ; but the wonder of it
grows on me every time I make the journey. The
mere fitting of one's self into one's own angle ; the
taking possession of one's undivided monarchy ;
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the yawning welcome of Nym who knew his
master's step at the gate far too well to bark ; the
clink of Lucy's oven-door or hiss of pan ; what
load of naughty pride or frost of custom can make
a man slight the greeting of such things as these ?
Who rather would not find that the difficulty lay
in being
"Not too elate
With self-sufficing solitude"?
I read lately amongst those strange documents
of the human mind the correspondence columns of
certain Church newspapers, the plaint of a man
who professed a nightly horror at the thought that
when he had shut the door of his country parson-
age at 8 p.m., no one would knock at it till the
postman came next morning. To my cast of
vision that seems absolutely the position of a lost
soul. Heaven help him! Was there nothing
available to replace the birdseye and the clerical
shop of his colleague on his way home from the
Institute, the politics and sociology of his cheese-
monger churchwarden? Was he afraid of his
dreams? Did he know nothing of burrowing
back shut-eyed into one's memory and living with
mighty pleasant company, minds and faces worth
ten thousand of the tangible people he wants to
sit with him to scare away the bogey of vacancy ?
Didn't he putting on one side the translations
of the Fathers, and the Pastor in Parochia, the
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Preacher's Promptuary, the Liddon or Farrar of
his allegiance, and of course the correspondence
columns of his Church newspaper didn't he read?
Or did he belong to a library, and consume his
novel-of-the-week, his light and heavy magazines,
his epoch-making science, all to fend off the horror
of having nothing to do but think, stuffing the
aching void with the first mast or stubble that
came to his hand, using all that printed paper as
so much tobacco-leaf, burnt to steady the nerves,
to woo sleep ? Anyway, he never knew the
meaning of a book. They are not books, in the
finer sense, which come into the house in parcels,
chaotically incompatible, and after a week or two
depart without regret, a little looser in the binding,
a little more thumb-smudged ; their matter sucked
dry and thrown away, the orange-peel of literature.
Books are property, in the accurate sense of the
word, personal belongings with their own standing
and habitation on familiar shelves, to be found
without fumbling in the dark ; they have outward
characters of their own as well as inward, idiosyn-
crasies of form and bindings ; they have been in
your service, the greater part of them, thirty years,
let us say, and they will stay on your shelves as
long as you can need them, and a little longer.
In their matter, they reflect your taste and lean-
ings by their range and their limits ; they are all
sealed to you by ycur bold or whimsical autograph,
by the pencil ticks which mark a beauty in your
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particular genre, a handsome seconding of some
favourite heresy of your own, by the annotations
and parallel places which link them to their fellows
above and below. These I call books, the tried
friends whose leather coats begin to show a sympa-
thetic crack or two as your own case wears a little
the worse for the turning over of the world, whose
matter has gone to make part of your inward con-
texture ever since you began to go to school.
Of this sort are the rows of brown backs, with
here and there a chance vanity of second-hand
vellum or new livery of buckram, neat but not gaudy,
whose gilding catches a glint from the low fallen
fire when I come into the warm lull of my burrow
from frozen journeys ; such the good company
which puts out of mind the binding frost upon
the garden or the winter storm sweeping across
the lonely fields, and has power to fill most of the
corners of the empty house. I keep no unmanage-
able rout, needing step-ladders or catalogues. My
odd hundreds have multiplied by the relaxed
standards of age beyond the rigid limit of an
earlier choice ; but perhaps for some little time
past have approached their full number. I have
nearly all the old books ; and the new ones grow
ever less indispensable, more and more obnoxious
to the wise man's objection, "ils nous empechent
de lire les anciens." And by the old books I
mean the real ancients, the first fathers of the rest,
the backs in Leyden calf or Venetian vellum,
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which seem to inspire in most visitors to my
shelves either a puzzled shyness or an almost
personal animosity. I sometimes make a guess,
while I warp one of the brown folios over the log-
fire on a winter night, how many others in this
most leisured county may be busy with an author
of that standing : fifty, I make it, when I am in
a sociable mood ; when the pride of singularity
swells, I doubt of five. In either frame of mind, I
am happy in thinking how absolutely right is the
choice of the real classics. It is, after all, well to
begin at the beginning and know something of the
hard-wrought alphabet which all our later exercises
lazily shift and combine, perhaps with a consistently
decreasing power of seeing the symbols in their
true scope and force. And then, what a security
and an economy of energy in using the result of
Time's sieve ! There are few things in life which
so affect me with a comfortable wonder as the
absolute fixity, beyond any sort of appeal, of the
court of ultimate judgment in literature ; the con-
version of the weathercock opinion of contemporary
criticism, right by chance and wrong by instinct,
into the immovable security of the full orb of time,
is a cheerful miracle which might keep even a
weekly reviewer from despair. To my mind, there
is a natural barrier between us and the books of
our own age ; coeval literature is flesh of our flesh,
and it needs a generation or two to intervene and
attenuate the affinity in order to sanction the
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commerce. There are, of course, very obvious
rejoinders to be made to this position, rejoinders
invincible for those who translate the world into
their unhesitating terms of white and black, and
solicitous enough for those who seek the necessary
half-tone among the infinite greys. By this re-
striction a man lessens his chance of that purest
glory, the hailing of a rising genius under the
neglect or the hooting of the crowd ; of finding
the enthusiastic shilling which he gave for a paper-
covered set of undergraduate verses growing, after
twenty years' burial, into profuse guineas in a dis-
cerning world ; and he is, of course, open to the
charge of bondage to dead minds and the unfruit-
ful past. People like Mrs. Sims-Bigg, for instance,
prefer to choose for themselves : Mudie's list and
a pencil and their own will free as air, unfettered
by musty rules of dead old Greeks and Romans or
anybody else, thank you ! Yet, my dear Madam,
are you, after all, wholly unchained ? I seem to
recognise an almost nervous watching of the
literary modes, somewhat after the pattern of the
lynx-eyed solicitude to which you chiefly owe
your fame in your hats ; you want to know what
other people are reading; you make a note of
what the Duchess told the Under-Secretary to be
sure to get ; you prick your ears at the pealing
brass of the literary advertisements. If neither of
us is to be trusted to forage at first hand for him-
self, I would much rather, at my ease in a cool
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cave, sip a vintage sealed down two thousand
years ago than try ardent spirits six months in
bottle; I will carve for myself from my ice-pre-
served mammoth rather than take a tepid modicum
of meat chewed for me Eskimo-fashion by my
neighbours at the feast. Each must answer for
himself: to me the safer part seems to be not to
try to help Time with the momentary sling of his
winnowing-shovel, but to be content to grub in the
heap of corn that lies at his feet, secure from all
the winds of heaven. Therefore my book-case
contains as a basis, in all sorts of editions, from
the safe comment of Gronovius to the jaunty
graces of Gildersleeve, the Greeks and Latins
pretty complete. I read through them at a steady
plod, and when I reach the gate of horn in my
several journeys, I presently turn about and begin
again : and on the whole I get more pleasure from
the dead languages spite of the drag of an in-
veterate hobble in construing than from any
other sort of reading. This judgment, though it
amuses some of my acquaintance and seems to
irritate others in a surprising manner, is deliberate
and mature. There are those who are instinctive
classics at seven, and remain prize schoolboys at
seventy ; it is another matter to scrape through a
casual Pass under protest, and after certain experi-
mental excursions to settle down, unbothered by
accents and led by no specious lure of philology to
make the classics the main indoor business of one's
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days. That the Greeks and Latins wrote amaz-
ingly better than many modern novelists, and are
a great deal more amusing than most plays ; that
there may be more downright human interest and
colour in a historian two thousand years dead than
in yesterday's "word-painting" by special corre-
spondents, and more practicable politics in Plato
than in last night's debate: these claims one
deprecatingly advances from time to time to one's
more indulgent friends, and retires before their
smiles to the safe covert of singularity whereto no
one offers to follow.
Beginning at this foundation I build forward the
courses of my shelves pretty closely with the classics
in the larger significance of the word ; in the lower
tiers there are not many gaps ; but the nearer the
orders approach to the profusion of our own time,
the oftener comes the unexpected hiatus and the
more freely I take leave to dispense immortality
on my own terms. At the near edge of the past,
where the great judgment is spite of a deal of
current assertion not yet finally confirmed, I
indulge some very decided aversions. There is
less presumption in the position than might be
imagined : there can always be found some weighty
champion of one's dearest heresy, and one's offence
need rarely be anything more than the ranging of
one's self under one or other of two standards. If
I fail to prize a robustious poet whose rhymes
appear to me to fulfil the office of the pinches of
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gunpowder at the elbows of a cracker, and whose
general philosophy impresses me as a sort of view-
halloo of the Unseen, I join myself to another
bard who seems at least to own the Virgilian trick
of making his lines sing. The boundless capacity
of taste possessed by some people is a thing I
always admire ; there is not a product of the age
like our strenuous Mr. Dempster but can swallow
absolute incompatibles together ; whether he pos-
sesses a palate, I cannot say ; but his impartial
maw concocts at once thanks chiefly, I think, to
" University Extension " Mill and Ruskin, Shelley
and Herbert Spencer, Thackeray and " the greatest
living master of romance," without an apparent
qualm.
Catholic tastes like Dempster's would find the
gaps among my moderns too large to be forgiven.
I take my stand on a principle something like
Montaigne's "1'idde de ces riches ames du temps
passd me degouste de 1'autruy et de moy-mesme."
I am definitely for the ancients ; I am too lazy to
do my own sifting; I will have my Bavius, my
Trissotin, my Blackmore and Tickell already ruled
out for me by the unerring pen ; I will not be
troubled to identify their inevitable antitypes
among the swarming immortals of our own hour.
After all, though the gaps be wide, I have been
forced to admit not a few of the veriest moderns.
I like to think that I see in them authentic touches
of the true descent ; yet I would not insist upon
250
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their immortality on the strength of a predilection
of my own ; I would rather allow the chance of
my forecasts being wrong, as a set-off to my
impregnable judgment of the past.
The winnowing of Time, though it irrefragably
keeps the true corn and sends the chaff down the
wind to oblivion, yet sorts the grain into several
parcels ; and among the secondary men there
are some who seem to be in a manner cheated
with a somewhat unsubstantial honour, the mere
fame of fame. The difficulty of being generous
to the absolutely great and at the same time
just to the second order is enormous, perhaps
insuperable, and founded on dimensions beyond
our scope. For instance, it does not do to think
of Virgil and Lucan together. Lean a little to-
wards the lesser man, and it is quite possible to
find his force make the ^Eneid seem more than
a little shadowy and diffuse. Grant to the full
Joubert's objection that force is not energy ; that
there are authors who have " plus de muscles que
de talent ; " that force is a quality " qui n'est louable
que lorsqu'elle est ou cache'e ou vetue. Dans le
sens vulgaire Lucain en cut plus que Platon ; "
yet something sticks in the mind and avenges the
lower genius the recollection, perhaps of moods
when with Montaigne we preferred Lucan's "subti-
lite aigue et releve"e " to Virgil's " force meure et
constante." In our justice we are necessarily
ungenerous. Even without bearing in mind that
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Lucan died at twenty-six, a balanced critic will
judge that here the sum of praise is not a thing
that can be divided ; the greater poet must have
it all or none ; we have, so to say, to give the
lesser his meed while the other looks away. The
difficulty will afford a nice exercise for critics who
are untroubled by doubts as to the relation of the
part to the whole.
The lower room among the immortals has its
own compensations a proportionate safety from
the dull ass's hoof, from the annotating critic, from
" University Extension," and such summer fly-
blows. I sometimes imagine a calm corner of
the Elysian fields where walk the subordinate
immortals, masters in their own realm. There,
I fancy, are to be found Xenophon, Lucan,
Lucian, Catullus, Seneca, Butler, Berkeley, La
Bruyere, Donne, Gray, Crabbe, Hood a mixed
multitude, an election to outrage the seemly
sober critic, only defensible by the plea of a per-
sonal warp of humour. To this warp I would
allow a much larger room in the choice of books
than it usually receives. General taste in read-
ing is a phantasmal thing ; to have any profit
there must be the personal liking or disliking,
a nexus where the author may catch hold ;
"aliquid inter te intersit et librum." The im-
personal relation in which many people stand
towards their books seems to me to imply a tragic
waste of human effort. Unless a man has his
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personal friends and his enemies among his
authors, instinctively chosen by likeness or differ-
ence of humour, by contrary virtue or friendly
vice, by south sides or shady corners, by idio-
syncrasy of sweet or sour, all his application is a
dreary futility, mere waste of spelling-books at
school. Naturally this intimacy is more easily
admitted by the secondary men : and perhaps
we are, after all, apt to be rather too easily
familiar with the thrones and dominions ; it may
be better on the whole for a tenth-rate mind to
accost Shakespeare with less cheerful assurance
and to find his account with, let us say, Sterne or
Sheridan. The heroes of the Elysian suburb all
offer, to my thinking, some peculiar handle of
approach and converse, and are, I think, sub-
stitutes, sufficient on the whole, for the sociable
pipe and the friend who "drops in,' 1 perhaps
even for the company of some customary house-
hold gods. I say nothing here of the absolute
great, whose very names sound their own pre-
paratories of solemn music, who require some
offering of grave leisure and the purged ear.
For hours that are without question common, a
man will do well to keep a shelf or two of the
minor immortals.
I say " keep " : yet the other night when I took
down a little crook-backed Menander and saw on
the title-page above my own hand the brown
inscriptions: "Judocus Bol Lugd. Bat., 1652," and
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"Joshua Mercer, S.T.P. His Book, 1778," there
came to mind the truth that instead of our owning
them, it is we who are the temporary pensioners
of our books. The buyer of new editions and
virgin bindings obscures this truth from himself:
it is the old broken calf, the dog's-eared scribbled
pages which tell us that we are perhaps but the
twentieth guest at that table. Who was Joshua
Mercer, I wonder, who tried little pieces of metrical
Psalm-version between the scraps of Menander,
and announced with a nobly confident quill that
this was His Book f Can it be mine, too, I muse ?
Even in the present we begin to lose our pre-
carious seisin : as a man nears fifty, he comes to
know that he has read such and such a book for
the last time; others, both high and low, we shall
re-read perhaps to the last, but we have said good-
bye in the world of script, according to our turns
and humours, to Longinus, let us say, to " Clarissa,"
to Froissart, to La Rochefoucauld, to "Red-
gauntlet," to Borrow, to Hosea Biglow, to Charles
Kingsley to afford a hotch-potch wherein most
tastes may perhaps find something to their account.
It is well to bear this in mind, and to think some-
times of the reflux of the tide which has thrown
together here on the little shelf these spoils out of
the riches of the great sea. In the snug firelit room
on winter nights, when the grace or laughter of
the old text speaks in one's ear almost with human
intonation, it is good once in a way to remember
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the dust which gathers for a little time on the
unopened pages in the quiet empty house, until
the "dispersion of a gentleman's library" breaks
up the treasure and scatters the old and the new
to other shores.
255
XXIII
January 20.
THE troop of children that has trailed slowly
home from school, dropping detachments at
cottage gates and field stiles, finally scatters at
a corner where a finger-post offers the handsome
choice of direction, To London ; To Trucker's Hatch.
The main body, in charge of a biggish girl,
disappears among a group of estate cottages on
the highroad ; a little company of three strikes
up the narrow turning, and begins the last stage
of the seven miles a day to school and home
again. The lane is a rough one, and any one who
has stood in some wintry twilight to watch the
little regiment defile down the hollow between
high bramble-grown banks till the last of the
stragglers are swallowed up in the misty gloom
of a vague tree-hung bottom, may perhaps be set
on thinking about the two ends of that muddy
or dusty trudge, the long march and counter-
march day by day for some eight or nine mortal
years; and wondering what sort of provision
awaits the travellers at home, and also in that
other headquarters for whose requirements the
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whole mighty manoeuvre is at work. If the
explorer take the turning to Trucker's Hatch, he
will find that the lane soon becomes a green
track, and widens out into a long strip of ragged
common, a few acres of pasturage struggling with
gorse and fern ; a little farther on he will come
to two or three fenced fields, a black-timbered
thatched cottage leaning perilously over its potato-
patch, and a tumble-down little farmstead a
squat brick dwelling-house, an iron cart-shed, one
hayrick, a desolation of disused fowl-houses and
empty styes. This, common and houses together,
is Trucker's Hatch, with a population of nine
souls. Its school contingent is now but three
small girls ; it is three years since Willy Avery
from the farm and Joe Mace from the cottage
passed out of their Standards together, and there
are no lads at present at the Hatch to take their
places. Willy, best of boys, a model for attendance
and attention, devoured the learning fed to him
with the methodic regularity of a chaff-cutter ; he
won a scholarship and was sent to the grammar
school in the county town, and finally fitted him-
self for a clerkship in a suburban bank. Joe,
tormented with vast labour into a semblance of
reading and writing, is at length delivered by the
age-limit from the unwilling hands of authority,
and in a few months of blessed holiday forgets all
the lessons of his bondage. He forgets the fright-
ful presence of the sums which he used to chatter
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in his sleep, the frantically conned page which
flickered before his eyes ; he does not as yet forget
the impression of eight years' assiduous contempt
from the master, as for a sort of changeling in the
educational household, a creature of a lower order,
made the derision of the class and the especial foil
of his mate the conquering Willy. Even when the
thing called Nature-Study impressed itself on the
great motive intelligences of the sphere, and in
due season came down to the regions of Trucker's
Hatch, Joe did not get the chance that seemed to
be thrown in his way ; he, the silent stalker of
hedge-row mysteries, cunning in traps and snares,
learned in nests and eggs and wild flowers, got no
hearing at all from Mr. Dempster, enthusiastic in
the new subject, getting up the position of the pole-
star from a textbook, and after a half-holiday's
field expedition sending a brace of cockchafers
to the Warden for identification. Joe's hand,
which went up in a quite unwonted way when the
new lessons began, soon learned to keep its place ;
and the study of Nature is inculcated without any
difference to distinguish it from the rest of the
time-table. But all is done at last, and Joe is free
to live the life which, for as long as he can
remember, has been put before him as little better
than a beast's. The beasts that he knows are
always friendly, at least ; the big, mannerly,
sensible, honest farm-horses are far better com-
pany than the tyrant and his myrmidons the
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pupil- teachers. Joe would like most of all things
to be a carter-boy, and have horses to look after,
and learn to plough like his father. But as no one
seems to want a carter-boy, he is put to minding
the stock on the common, half a dozen poor cows
and a pony belonging to the farm. He idles the
day long about the gorse clumps and beds of
bracken, often alone from daylight to dark ; he
talks to Duchess or Soldier for company, cuts
patterns on hazel-sticks or plaits rushes, and fills
his hat with blackberries or nuts ; the events of
his life are the coming of the Wednesday grocer's
cart, the chasing of his charge out of a neighbour-
ing mangold field, and the stopping of the ever-
fresh gaps in the neglected hedge. This repair he
does to the utmost of his skill and materials, with
a sort of make-believe of man's work, driving his
stakes and wattling in the boughs with a touch of
ancestral skill. A week's downpour under the
shelter of an old sack sets him on building for
himself a little bower framed of hazel-rods, the
walls stuffed with fern, and the roof of grass and
rushes. He fashions a door to open on withy
hinges, and windows wherefrom to observe his
herds, and here he sits through dripping days,
making his toys or playing on an elder whistle
airs rude enough for Tityrus, till the gathering
dark tells him it is near the end of his day, and he
may call the cows together and drive them home.
He rarely takes the old road down to the village ;
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sometimes he is sent to do the Saturday marketing
and finds old school-mates serving behind the
counter of the general shop, or sauntering up from
the cricket field. At the general assembly of the
yearly Fair he meets others of his own time,
entered on various careers- one in the gardens at
the Park, one in a training-stable, others on leave
from the regiment or the ship. He envies none of
these their lot ; there is only one with whom he
would care to change places, George Prevett, the
cowman's lad at Frogswell, who had the same
desires as Joe, but has had his wish. George leads
the plough team, and goes to market with the
bullocks ; he does hedging in real earnest, with a
billhook and hedger's gloves of his own ; he helps
the thatcher on the ricks, and goes out, whistling
in solitary importance, with the old mare in the
cart to carry clover for the stock. He looks down,
it is to be feared, on the hapless cow-tender, and
the sting of his superiority goes home.
Sometimes on Saturday evenings of summer
weather there comes across the common a traveller
oddly out of keeping with the scene, whose black
coat and town boots have fared ill in the five miles
of dust between the railway and the Hatch. Willy
Avery, coming down to spend a Sunday with the
old people at the farm, nods and gives the familiar
" How's self ? " as he passes the ragged figure
perched on the accustomed gate, or stretched at
length beneath the shade of the gorse-bushes. At
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such moments of obvious comparison, how does
each view the other's destiny ? What does the
bank clerk at a pound a week think of the cow-
minder, counting slow hour after hour in all
weathers about the lonely common for his bare
keep ; and what does the creature of boundless
leisure in sun and wind say to the slave of rigid
rules, shut in at eternal sums till the level sun
strikes in over the wire blind, and dismisses him
to the streets and his stifling attic ? Willy reads
his newspaper, and perhaps by this time has
gathered that there is among thinking people a
reactionary tendency to consider him and his kind
not so purely the salt of the earth as Mr. Dempster
in school gave him to understand that they were.
Joe Mace reads nothing not even the literature
which lies at hand, the scraps of the county journal
which the grocer's cart drops, and the wind dis-
perses about the gorse on the common and with
no one to tell him of wonders, he may spend his
whole life after the present idyllic fashion, and
never know that any one has doubted the perfect-
ness of the method of reward and discouragement
under which he was reared. It will be an ironic
turn of fortune, not without precedent, perhaps, if
Willy should feel the set of opinion and, conscious
of round shoulders and pale blood, learn the easy
catchword about the land ; while Joe, tough-
framed, tanned and bleached by sun and weather,
idles about the waste acres, never to put his hand
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to the desired carter's whip, nor to have a bill-
hook and hedger's mittens of his own. For him
there will be no new fancies about the significance
of the symbol where the lane's end joins the high-
road : To London ; To Truckers Hatch.
The last time I was at the Hatch and had a
talk with Joe Mace, I left him at the door of his
wigwam, busy with a sundial which he was
fashioning out of a bit of slate and a hazel wand,
to tell him, within an hour or so, when it was
dinner-time. I came home the long round, by
Nymans and the Park gates, nursing a simmering
grudge against Dempster and his ways ; and when
I reached the Green, I found mine enemy talking
over his garden fence with the Warden. The
Doctor came on with me, and the schoolmaster
went back through his weedy and neglected
garden-patch to his fireside, his pipe, and his book
again. At the turn of the road I looked back and
made a summary note of the phrontisterion in its
elements : there stood the gaunt building, part
old cement and part raw red brick, built at the
lowest tender, its skimped utility joined with a
curious waste of semi-ecclesiastical ornament ; there
was the miry, dank playground, the perky school-
house with its slatternly blinds and neglected
garden ; and in a stuffy room my fancy saw the
long, ungainly figure of the master, his narrow
face bent over his book with the frown of strenuous
assimilation. He was reading, the Warden told
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me, a new monograph on Education and the Rural
Mind, improving himself, as he never ceases to
do, and removing himself one more step from the
barbarous void of yesterday. He had shown the
Warden the book, and had flourished a little upon
the new horizon opening before the benighted
dwellers in the fields ; there was something about
the " nobilaty of la'fbour," says the Warden (drop-
ping into a peculiarly horrible inflection which,
for an alien, he has caught pretty nearly), and
about " intere"stin' the children in the loife of the
fields and the 'edges." Excellent, said the Warden :
he supposed they might teach the boys to plough,
for instance ? " Nhaow," replies Dempster, swell-
ing with the pleasure of imparting a fundamental
truth. " Nhaow ; but we shall teach them to
mdik pleaows ! " "I didn't ask who was to use
them," said the Warden ; " he'd got as much as
his head could carry for one day. What do you
think of his idea of taking classes over one of the
farms, and giving them object-lessons ? "
I told him what I thought of the several
elements of the scheme : Dempster's qualifications
for the job, who was born in Hackney, whose soul
still inhabits the Seven Sisters' Road : the boys,
many of whom have lived on farms all their lives,
and have a finger-end knowledge of the things
which Dempster guesses at out of books : and old
Tully or Mrs. Ventom as a likely third factor in
the proposed invasion of growing crops and hedges.
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Yes, the Warden had thought of that side of it.
On the whole, he fancies we are somehow not
getting full value for our money and trouble in
the schools. Is Dempster a particularly bad
specimen, did I think ? I told him I had known
others not much better equipped for their trade.
There are, of course, worthy and amenable souls
here and there, chiefly, in my experience, to be
found in the smaller schools and lower classes ;
but in general there seems to be a common stamp
of a remarkably well-defined capacity and interest ;
a summary, coarse-fingered dealing with children's
minds ; a consuming zeal for " Progress " ; and an
unresting self-assertion, a prickly jealousy for the
status and profit of the profession. Dempster was
once discovered weeping, heart-broken under a
tree at a school-treat, because his wife had not
been asked to tea on the Vicarage lawn, but had
been left with the village mothers in the tent. He
loses no chance of arranging a date or writing a
letter on his own motion. He thinks London is
the world, and is never tired of telling the children,
with jeering comparisons, that they are a back-
ward and benighted race. He wreaks against
antiquity a spite which almost seems personal ;
all that is old and peaceable and slow is held up as
anachronous a crime against the new order, before
long, one infers, to be fitted with proper penalties.
On the whole, I don't think we are getting a
good return for our expenditure on the schools.
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Of course, the Warden says, we haven't made
the least attempt to get the right sort of men for
the work. " C'est 1'effet d'une haute ame et bien
forte, de savoir condescendre a ces allures pueriles
et les guider," he quotes. By the way, he hears
that in France they have quite taken up Montaigne
lately as an authority on education. He wonders
whether we shall ever find in England really able
men going into elementary school-teaching as
people go into mission and slum work, and that
sort of thing ? But about Dempster and his kind :
if we could get people to look at results for a
minute, and leave principles alone for a bit,
wouldn't there be some evidence as to the working
of the plan? Of course, it's safe to fly straight
in the face of any modern general proposition :
the common party-opposition always goes for
cavilling details ; no one thinks of questioning
the fundamental lie. I give the Warden my im-
pression of some twenty years' output of the
phrontisterion the dull mass of mechanic learn-
ing, forgotten in a few months after the discharge ;
the large proportion of feeble wits among the
scholars ; the half-dozen brilliant minds that have
won through the press, taken county scholarships
and attained positions as clerks, like Willy Avery ;
the spoiled rustics, cheated of their vocation, like
Joe Mace. There is enough to condemn the
system in the vicious circle of its ideal : it cannot
make men and women for the world, but turns
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the minds which show a little more promise than
the rest into yet more instruments of its own
machinery, pupil-teachers, certificated masters and
mistresses, initiated into the sacred mystery and
tradition of the status and interests of the teacher.
And in all the eternal squabble about the educa-
tional machinery, you will never hear the least
question raised about the quality of the learning
it supplies.
Of course not, the Warden agrees ; that would
be far too direct, and too near the realities of life.
We have civilised ourselves altogether out of our
hold on fundamentals and live fact, and we can
only fumble with derived and secondary relations.
It is mostly due, he thinks, to the way in which
just now all place and power has been secured
by the clever people, the capable business folk,
strong heads and thick fingers, who have shoved
the rare heart-thinkers, the real vivifying geniuses,
out of practical politics, if they have not got rid
of the breed altogether.
We came hereabouts in our discussion to the
Almshouse gate, and went our several ways. As
I came home by the field-path, I dreamed of
impossible conjunctions by which our Joe Maces,
on their drenched and lonely commons, and the
topmost powers of the department in their official
residences could be brought together without any
intermediate Dempster, and given a sight of each
other's minds. I think Joe would understand ;
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as to those public men, I have doubts. At least,
they would not care, any more than they do for
any other matter of vital need that is not exploit-
able to party ends. As they tug at head or feet
of the body politic to gain the ivapa j3,oorovra,
they have no time to think whether the soul be
not already gone out amid the uproar and bloody
dust. There is, of course, a reckoning for all this :
in the sudden cool and calm of that vestibule into
which every fighter steps at last, stands Tisiphone,
to deal with the strange breed of statesmen who
turned their hands against each other and fought
for fighting's sake, while they left untouched not
only the matters intractable save in a settled state
of internal peace, but the precise and fatal sum
of all the true necessities of a state.
XXIV
February 21.
I SOMETIMES amuse myself, when I have spare
time on my hands in the village, or when the
Warden is not at home, with usurping a place
among the old men on the southern bench in the
Almshouse quadrangle, and fancying myself a
pensioner with the rest, a fellow on the foundation,
finally berthed in that harbour of ancient peace.
The gate stands wide all day to invite the world-
ling; the dark archway of the lodge frames a
glimpse of lawns, of white pigeons on lichen-
covered tiles, of weathered buttresses and trefoil-
headed windows, keen and clear as images in a
camera obscura. Once within the quadrangle,
the wanderer finds that he has entered a new
world : the noises of the street die as in a vacuum ;
the sundial on the gable tells other hours than those
measured by the rumbling wheels and clattering
steps without. Here survives a quality which has
been expelled from prouder colleges, the secret
of repose which, so old masters tell us, once dwelt
in Oxford and Cambridge courts. Here are no
strident shouts, no twanglmg banjos, no blazer-
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clad groups to make discord with the reverend
walls. The bent figures of the gownsmen sunning
on the benches or pacing the walks, in academicals
of that subfusk hue dispensed with under some
easier statutes, give the last touch to the picture
of quietude. All is decent, ordered, easeful ; three
centuries' habit of repose seems to have grown
upon the very stones of the place. There are
times when a man may doubt if he could do better,
some day when the cares of his own small realm
shall lie heavy on his head, than put on the gown
and badge, and find ease in some such corner as
this " a place " (as Thomas Newcome of Grey
Friars) " for an old fellow when his career is over
to hang his sword up, to humble his soul, and
wait thankfully for the end " to obey the call
of morning and evening bells, to tend his garden -
patch, to feed the pigeons on the grass, to drowse
under the southern wall in the sun which almost
seems to stand still over the little haven of used
force and spent hopes. There are other hours when
the sanctuary appears too nearly as a hospital,
perhaps as a prison. The very plan of the narrow
cloister, the sheltered corners, implies weakness
and decay ; the iron-sparred windows and the
porter's punctual keys assert their meaning. A
few years' acquaintance with the inner economy
of the foundation will show a man something of
the real character of the bedesman's life ; he will
learn how much or how little of the outward
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peace of the house is reflected in the minds of the
fraternity ; how far he may expect to find among
the fast changing company any signs of a sense
of sodality, or of solemnity as at the last stage
of the journey, with the shadow seldom lifted very
far from the doors. It seems at times a school
to which the scholars have come too late. The
Warden seldom cares to talk of his dealings with
that indocile second childhood ; one can guess for
one's self something of jealousies and bickerings
in the narrow neighbourhood, of fallow grounds
wherein the roots of old naughtiness stir and shoot
in a late spring of sheltered leisure. But, the
Warden says, if he is sometimes ready to despair
over the old lessons still to learn by the last gleam
of day, there will be at times a scholar or two
from whom one knows one has almost everything
to learn, from whom one may learn, perhaps, to
mind one's duty in the way of hope.
I am sufficiently familiar in the house to know
something of the diverse characters of the inmates.
The gown by no means makes all equal under its
iron-grey folds. There is not much in common
between old Thomas Harding, the senior of the
house, a farm labourer in his ninetieth year, who,
with palsied head and knotted rheumatic hands
clasped over his crutch, dozes out the end of his
regular, ceaselessly laborious and useful days, and
George Everest, a little tradesman, corn-chandler
and wood-dealer, who has reached a harbour at
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length, after forty years of honestly incapable
struggles and failures, on whom the new-found
leisure sometimes hangs with maddening weight.
It would be hard, again, to find a wider difference
than that which lies between Eliphaz Puttick, a
decayed farmer, a man who has held his two
hundred acres, silent and morose, always brooding
over that incredible scurvy trick of fortune which
has brought him here, and John Blaker, the gnome-
like shrivelled little man, full of restless activity
and unsuppressible humour, needle-sharp beneath
an elaborate pose of short- wittedness, whose descent
to the almshouse from the position of odd man
and stable-help to Elihu Dean the carrier, is the
standing joke of one of the merriest lives that ever
breathed. Such broader differences between man
and man I can see for myself ; with the help of
the Warden's hints I can guess at variations in
individuals, according to time and chance. Some-
times the husk of decent habit falls off, and old
devilry awakes, in horrid travesty of young blood.
Reverend grey heads which nodded over their
chapel psalms in the morning, spend their exeats
in an ancient way, and at locking-up time alarm
the quadrangle with feeble war. In one, he with the
fine patriarchal head and the courteous manners, a
little too ready in ordinary with his texts, a little
too obviously on the side of law and order, the
smouldering of old vice flickers up under its ashes,
and the black histories of youth are mixed with
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the trick of mechanic piety. Sometimes one is
convinced that the sad old runagates are the sur-
vivors of a ruder, tougher race than ours.
At times when I sit on the bench and fancy
that I feel the gown about my shoulders, I put
aside the recollection of such shadows of the
cloister, and think rather of the visible peace and
order of the place ; of the trim plots which lie
behind the quad, where the pensioners stoop and
halt about their garden-rows ; of the Sunday
holiday, when in state of best blue gowns and
silver badges the old fellows act the host to
visitors from the village or the country round,
sons and daughters, grandchildren, old mates,
when the quad is alive with the movement of the
outer world and sounds with unaccustomed chil-
dren's treble ; of the picture of the chapel benches
at evensong, when the broken voices repeat the
Nunc Dimittis, and the quiet and the dusk deep-
ening on the familiar memorial stones touch per-
haps even the rudest minds with a finer influence,
with a sense of the " short remaining watch that
yet Our senses have to wake." There is a text
carved beneath the coat-of-arms over the inner
archway of the gate, the cause of many a puzzled
construe to strangers as they pass out under it.
But those who know something of the house and
its company may find an inner fitness of meaning
in the founder's paradox, Habenti dabitur et
abundabit.
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The last time that I took my place on the bench
and enrolled myself a visionary member of the
brotherhood was on a mild February day, the first
truce with winter, the unmistakeable turning point
of the year. The sunny afternoon had sent most
of the brethren into the village on their slow-
footed errands and marketings, and I had the
seat mainly to myself for an hour or more. The
sun was warm on the stone, shining through a
still misty air that softened at once light, colour,
and sound. The winter sleep was almost over;
one more spring was on the way, with the in-
extricable pleasures and interests of the living
season. The busy time on the land, the soul-
steadying routine which balances the world et
post malam segetem serendum est was almost
due, but not just yet. It was a day for licensed
idling, when a man might with a clear conscience
cross his hands behind his head, shut his eyes
and let the world go by, without the accusation
even of that vacant susurrus in his ears which as
a child I used to fancy was the audible pace of
time. There was just enough of actual sound in
the air, a mingling of the sparrows' chirp and the
ruffle of the pigeons' wings with a subdued medley
of the village noises, to stop that inward ear, and,
together with the mild light and warmth, to take
off the minor energies of apprehension and leave
the centred mind in majestic indolence. But at
our best we can never idle so serenely and whole-
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heartedly as the beasts do. The gnat on the ivy-
leaf near my head, stroking his forelegs together
in the bland sunlight ; the pigeons, making believe
again and again to settle on the tiles, but always
away in fresh circles high in the pale blue; the
midge that crawls across my hand, his tiny flat-
set wings diamond-bright as ever, but his venom,
it seems, harmless yet after the winter's chill ; the
tortoiseshell butterfly come out of his winter
quarters, one wing smutched of its colour down
to the grey anatomy, the other snipped by some
marauding beak, who opens and shuts his ragged
sails to the sun on the ivy berries : all these take
the present good with no ill-conditioned inquiry,
and give praise for the use of the hearth of the
universe in a way which is the simplest of all, and
yet usually the last to be achieved, if ever, in
human thanksgivings. I own my fellowship with
such poor pensioners as these while we come
abroad together to greet the broader light, con-
scious of the sunward-leaning sphere. We are
almsmen, as much as the grey-coat brethren here
who creep from their winter fires, their sick-beds
of customary bronchitis and rheumatics, into the
blessed warmth for one more term of the good
days. Even if my faith in the disablement of
the midge's bite were less active than it is, I
should let him range at his will over my knuckles ;
to-day we are too much in accord to think of
coming to blows.
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I believe that insufficient attention has on the
whole been given to certain sets of feelings proper
to the elderly stages of life. We too commonly
regard the characteristics of latter middle age as
only the leavings of youth, results of habit, bye-
products, if not mere detritus. Of course there
are virtues to be adjusted, early sentiments to be
rubbed down to serviceable bluntness by tumbling
in the world ; but we neglect the finenesses of
perception, the edges of analytic instinct which
only begin to get their final polish at about forty,
the solicitudes from which a man may look back
with a chill of wonder on the barbaric motions
of the simpler-minded, sounder-lunged years. Not
the least among these gifts of Time's attrition I
should place a change in our relation to the lower
lives, a hesitation, or something more, as to the
terms of our suzerainty, a livelier compunction in
the necessary laying of our clumsy hands on the
little existences which for ever keep getting in
our way. For myself, I find the sorrowful warfare
of the gardener wasps'-nests and mole-traps, and
slug-hunts on spring nights afford more than
enough to satisfy my sporting instincts. I have
come to a point where I fail to see the fun of
killing things. I preach nothing on this head to
others ; I can remember my own gunning days ;
I bear about with me the score of my miserable
little kills. Let Harry Mansel bombard the Sims-
Bigg pheasants three days a week, and even the
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Warden have his Saturday at Frogswell now and
then in the season ; for my choice, I have had
enough of death already ; I would rather patch up
and piece out shaky lives to last as many suns
as they may, and share with all sorts of creatures
the kindly almshouse benches and south corners
of the world. To-day I have my own way : here
we are all once more through the dark and cold,
facing the new year valiantly, midges and butter-
flies and pigeons on the sunny roofs, and old
gownsmen mending nicely from bouts of the time-
honoured complaints. Up in my own fir trees,
as the light begins to thicken towards roosting
time, the pheasants will be kok-kokking lustily,
safe for another nine months from the rattle of
the beaters' sticks and the glint on the guns where
the hazels thin towards the tail of the wood. I
do not love the bird ; he is a showy, noisy alien,
always discordant in English woodlands ; yet shall
the Frogswell coverts be free-warren before I clean
the rust from my old barrels again.
Here the Warden came into the quad from the
entry, and bending his shaggy brows to see who
was sitting in the sun under the wall, crossed the
grass and joined me on the bench. He also showed
in his own way something of the pleasant influences
of the time. He was relieved to have two or three
of the old men off the sick-list and managing for
themselves again. I found, too, that Molly Crofts
was coming early next month on one of those
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rejuvenating visits of hers. And there was a sub-
stratum of very decided satisfaction in his temper
concerning a review of his in last week's Orb, a
very irreverent review of a weighty modern philo-
sopher, which he had hardly fancied any editor
would print, and which had drawn the philosopher
like a shot. Under the mild breathings of the
hour, he was inclined to be patient with the heavy
thinker whom he really seemed to have upset very
much, and to be benignly contemptuous towards
the physiological people and their thumbings of
the awful complexity of life awful yet entrancing,
more and more every day we live, says the Warden.
He even seemed ready to suffer I would not say
gladly, but rather more equably than on other
occasions the Biblical critics with that modest
comparative title, fellows whose taste no one would
trust to meddle with a line in Euripides. For
once he shows signs of a mental spring-tide, and
feels the sphere of thought tilting towards the
light together with the daedal globe. We are
getting out of the frozen slush of "science" by
degrees, he thinks ; when we are tired of splitting
up the atom we may get back to the real mys-
teries such as humour, for instance, and the
thing we call vulgarity, or the real philosophy
of history.
Or beauty, I should have added ; every man has
his particular province in these neglected fields,
marked out for himself, if he will but look about
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him. At any rate I can agree with the Warden
that if we want work, there is boundless and almost
untouched matter ready to our hands.
The Warden presently went in to finish Alms-
house accounts for the audit ; and when the after-
noon began to decline, I left the bench and took
the footpath home. The sun sank to a cloudless
setting on the hills, and fired the land with a deep
afterglow. As I came in at the field gate the
light on the fir trunks was wine-red and rusty
crimson, and the dark masses of the boughs and
the brown garden plots loomed in majestic russets
and purples. A blackbird close to the house sud-
denly warbled a turn or two of the unforgotten
song, and a smell of live grass and coltsfoot-leaves
came on the air. It was one of the hours of
natural elation ; and when the glorying humour
takes us, it is good economy to make the most
of the chance. It is the minor key, after all, which
is easy and cheap and vulgar to go back to one
of the Warden's mysteries. In this genial twilight,
at the turn of the year, with the better days coming,
with life still unrolling the inexpressible interest
of all its depths and subtleties before us, it is not
very difficult to sound a major scale. The days
will come again, the days of aches and tempers,
proper and alien, of east winds temporal and
spiritual, of outward rubs and an ingrowing soul,
when the temptation to the sneaking underbred
minor chord will be sore. The thing to aim at
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is a workable temper, balanced between the ex-
tremes, a frame of mind which can keep its counsel
in the frozen time, and expand frankly at the
spring. One can wish for such a rational state,
in which a man can sit about in sunny almshouse
corners, and often forget the porter's keys ; can
make room for other people's views, allow the
Warden's theories or Harry Hansel's aims, or
sometimes see things as they should be in Molly
Crofts' eyes ; and can manage on his own account
to observe with a not unadvised content how life
burns away, as the ruddy glow kindles evening by
evening on the fir boughs overhead.
279
XXV
April 1 8.
" WE'RE going to Rivers Wood to-morrow, to get
primroses and have tea at the High Beeches ; the
Warden, and Molly, and Harry Mansel, Lady
Anne, and the Sims-Bigg girls, and perhaps the
Yarborough-Greenhalghs. Suppose you take a
holiday for once and come with us." Thus Mary
Enderby to me as we met during the morning
expatiation in the street, on a wonderful April
day, one of a memorable week, all sun and kindly
winds, with a soft dripping shower or two at the
nick of time to keep everything in tune, a spell of
weather which brought out the leaves and greened
the meadows all at once, and gave the shining
street a look of summer. The shops rig out their
sun-blinds, the cottage gardens are gay with tulips
and daffodils, the forenoon shopping hour is brave
with another early blossoming, the outbreak from
winter coats and hats. There is a roving spirit
in the air ; people who are content for the rest
of the year with the length of the village street,
feel an adventurous motion, and so we hear of
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long walks and primrose 'gatherings, and tea in
Rivers Wood.
There was the least sarcastic inflection in the
last part of my cousin's invitation. My observa-
tion, that I am almost the only person in the
neighbourhood who is not blessed with boundless
leisure, does not commend itself everywhere as it
deserves to do. Mary and some others of her sect
do not consider that, granted certain contentions
for the sake of argument, one's chains may be all
the tighter for having been riveted on by one's self.
Still, I thought that for once I might show her
that I could get out of bounds if I liked ; besides,
Rivers Wood is in a way my own preserves, and if
there was to be any junketing as near my borders
as that, I would as soon have a hand in it as not.
So I said I would try and arrange things, and if I
found I could manage it, I would be at the lower
heave-gate at three o'clock on the morrow always
provided that the weather was still fine. Mary,
who did not seem to take my acceptance to be so
conditional as I had made it, gave a half-glance at
the wrong quarter of the sky and said she was
sure it was set fair for another week at least ; and
so left me, and went on to the Almshouse to arrange
details of supply with Molly Crofts.
The morrow was fair enough, with a faint veil of
vapour across the sky, which meant the approaching
break up of the spell of delicate weather. I was
at the heave-gate early enough to have to wait a
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quarter of an hour for the last of the party Mary
Enderby and Molly Crofts. We rambled down
the long rides and took sundry turnings and split
up into groups, and some of us lost the way, and
there was calling and answering and reappear-
ances at corners of the wood-ways to form fresh
combinations of company ; and I think that most
of us responded tolerably to the spell of the after-
noon. A week of April drought brooding warm
on the wet hollows of the woodland, still stored full
of the winter's rain, had brought out the flowers in
a way only seen two or three times in a life. The
primroses strewed the slopes as though they had
been flung and shot in armfuls from fairy baskets,
or as though Flora's apron had slipped and let out
all her store together; where they stood a little
thinner there were drifts and clouds of wind-
flowers ; violets trailed over the steeper banks, and
the just-coming hyacinths threw a misty blue over
their beds of dusk-green leafage. The shadows of
the saplings lay faint and sharp across the grass of
the rides, and went on to lose themselves in mazes
of thin tracery among the dead leaves and twigs,
the ivy-trails and mosses of the thicket. The air
was warm and soft, stirring southerly enough to
bring out all the scents of the wood the wet earth
and moss, the keen sweetness of the budding
larches, above everything else, the infinity of
primroses.
Some had brought baskets for flower-picking,
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and fell to their business about the green shaw ;
the rest idled through its winding paths, up the
brows and down the gills, or sat and talked on
faggots or logs, all making their way sooner or
later towards the High Beeches, where I had in-
structed Mrs. Ventom to meet us with kettle and
crockery from Burntoak, and to have ready the
elements of tea. In this gradual progress towards
the rendezvous, at first the men and the women
sided off by themselves, Sussex fashion ; and
Harry Mansel and I and the Warden smoked a
pipe or two under a faggot-stack, and watched the
ladies at their flower-gathering, nymph-like, far off
along the shining slopes between the saplings.
Then, when the baskets were full, we all met and
paired off at the crossways in the middle of the
wood, and made towards the great clump of beeches
two and two. Lady Anne and the Warden led the
way, and were soon out of sight ; Mary Enderby
and I presently sat down on a dry bank, and let
the rest go by us Harry Mansel with the younger
Miss Sims-Bigg, and Molly Crofts and Mab
Yarborough-Greenhalgh arm-in-arm in a young
ladies' conference, altogether superior to the in-
sufficiency of cavaliers.
I dare say, if we had not fallen into that particular
sorting or shuffling of the party, both my cousin
and myself might have had something to say about
the agreeableness of the hour and the place ; but
when we are in company we seem to have the
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quality of extinguishing in each other the smallest
glimmering of sentiment of any kind, and we did
not audibly admire the view. It was a view which
certainly might have excused rhapsodies : beyond
the flower-strewn foreground a gap in the pale
emerald screen of the larch plantation gave sight
of the happy valley, the familiar fields and roofs, the
spire, the ridges of purple woods, and the Downs a
fess of hyacinthine vapour over it all. The southern
sky was meshed and threaded with a slowly
thickening and rising veil, foretelling the rain which
would come to-morrow to break up prosperously
the April drought. Overhead a blackbird sang,
so near us in the larch that we could see the
motion of his yellow bill as he trolled out his
richest warble, or listened a moment, head aslant,
to the other voices of the grove. From the fallow
on the edge of the plantation came the pipe of a
plover beating to and fro ; and a stock-dove bore
a drowsy burden to the rest somewhere deep in the
hollows of the wood.
As enthusiasm was barred by that reciprocal
self-denying ordinance of ours, my cousin and I
were silent, or talked of common things. We
even descended so far as into criticism of Gwen-
dolen Sims-Bigg's hat, its congruity with woodland
picnics, and whether or no it was to be thought
that Harry Mansel spent any fraction of the irre-
coverable hours on the ends of his moustache. It
occurred to me to ask if I was right in thinking
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that somehow or other Harry had fallen out of
Lady Anne's good graces to-day. I said nothing
about my observation that Mary herself had been
absolutely truculent to the young man when they
had come across each other ; for she had carried
her feud with him for half the summer at least.
My cousin's expressions are, as a rule, perspicuous
to a fault ; but her answer on this occasion was, to
my comprehension, irrelevant and even enigmatical.
All I could get from her was that Harry's leave was
up in another fortnight, and if people wouldbz fools,
they must go their own gate ; and she immediately
changed the subject, returning in a very critical
temper to Miss Sims-Bigg's hat and hair, and a
way I am told she has of looking arch out of the
corners of her eyes. We presently heard halloos
from the higher wood, summoning stragglers to tea,
and when we reached the High Beeches we found
the rest of the company gathered about the kettle
singing over a stick fire, tablecloths spread and
cups ranged, and baskets of Burntoak provision
lying among the anemones. Mrs. Ventom sur-
veyed her preparations with an air of tolerant
allowance for the eccentric folk, who with good
tea-tables of their own at home must take their
pleasure in this heathenish way, like so many
tramps. The tea was not the light-hearted affair
it should have been : there was a vague sense of
failure in the air; Lady Anne was perceptibly
holding a temper on the curb ; Molly Crofts did
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not seem to be herself ; Mary Enderby was almost
rude to Gwendolen Sims-Bigg, and Harry, on the
outskirts of the company, seemed to be the victim
of a solid gloom. Mrs. Ventom waited on us with
an air of philosophic detachment which suggested
that she, at any rate, if she liked, could have told
us what was the matter with the afternoon.
When tea was done, and we began to make our
way down towards the road again, I found my
cousin's humour had not by any means improved.
She thought if people must pair off two and two,
like Noah's animals, they might shuffle themselves
a little now and then. I took the compliment for
what it was worth, conceiving it to be aimed a
good way over my head. We could hear confused
voices here and there, in the wood-walks behind
us, of people who were evidently in no hurry to
get to the barway, and as Mary seemed more
inclined to listen to them than to me, I held my
tongue and let my thoughts descend to the general
from the particular. The young people, as far as
I could judge, had not been so ecstatically happier
than the elders in the charm of the spring day.
By all visible signs I had found my account with
the woods and the weather at a much better rate
than either Harry Mansel or Molly Crofts, let us
say. There is often a tragic touch in hours such
as these, a pang in the very pleasure, for something
going by, unseizable for mere plenty, like the
million primroses beyond the capacity of kerchief
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or basket ; but I doubt if that feeling would pre-
sent itself definitely enough to these girls and boys
to affect their natural gaiety. Perhaps it is by
virtue of our age that we seniors are able to make
the better bargain, and get more real glorying out
of the good days. After all, we have learnt to
take hold less greedily than once we did of the
things held out to us, and the ultimate refusal is
less poignant when it comes. Instead of trying to
fill our hands or our baskets from Time's flower
posies, we hear him say " Smell how good ! " and
with hands behind us put our noses with a fair
show of content to the bunch before it passes.
Perhaps a man's days have not run altogether
amiss if they make it practicable in an hour such
as this to feel the fundamental comedy running
through the whole play ; and if he have got beyond
joining in the choric figures, at least to beat time
to the trochaics from the back benches of the
theatre.
I was becoming a little tired of saying nothing,
and had begun to give utterance to some reflections
about substance and shadow, eating one's cake and
having it, when Mary got up from the tree-root we
had been sitting on, and said it was no good wait-
ing all day for people who had no idea of time,
and that we had better get on. We had not taken
two steps when we heard a laugh behind us, and
into the clearing at the end of the long ride came
Harry Mansel and Molly Crofts together. I
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caught a glimpse of Molly's face, and a momentary
impression of the two figures hand-in-hand as they
came down the path, and then my cousin seized
me "by the elbow and jerked me aside into the
turning of the ride by which we were standing. I
had followed her indication promptly enough, and
the hazels were perhaps sufficiently budded to
make a screen and hide us, if the two had had eyes
to look our way.
" Come on, and let us get out of this," said Mary,
in a whisper of the tensest energy. " They won't
want us bothering about here." So after standing
and holding our breath like conspirators behind
our covert, we presently made our way to the bar-
way by roundabout and unlikely paths. We found
that we were behind all the rest, and so walked
down to the village by ourselves. My cousin was
rather absent-minded, and quite uncivilly taciturn ;
but when we said good night at the head of the
street, while the twilight flushed a dull rose from
the afterglow, there was a look in her face such as
I remembered had shone on an evening like this a
year ago, a reflection, I think, of the light which
we had seen for a moment in Molly's eyes.
THE END
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