Methuen's Shillin g Novels I The Mighty Atom Marie Corelli 3 Jane Marie Corelli 3 Boy Marie Corelli 4 Spanish Gold G. A. Birmingham 5 The Search Party G. A. liirmingham 6 Teresa of Watling Street Arnold Bennett 7 Anna of the Five Towns Arnold Bennett 8 Fire in Stubble Baroness Orczy 9 The Unofficial Honeymoon DolfWyllarde ID The Botor Chaperon C. N and A. M. Williamson 1 1 Lady Betty across the Water C. N and A. U. Williamson | 12 The Demon C. N and A. M. Williamson 13 The Woman with the Fan Robert Hichens 14 Barbary Sheep Robert Hichens 15 The Guarded Flame W. B. Maxwell 16 Hill Rise W. B. Maxwell 17 Joseph Frank Danby 18 Round the Red Lamp Sir A. Conan Doyle 19 Under the Red Robe Stanley Weyman 20 Light Freights W. W. Jacobs 21 The Gate of the Desert John Oxenham 22 The Long Road John Oxenhara 23 The Missing Delora E. Phillips Oppenheim 24 Mirage E. Temple Thurston 69 The Chink in the Armour Mrs. Belloc Lowndes 70 The Dulie's Motto J. H. McCarthy 71 The Gates of Wrath Arnold Bennett 72 Short Cruises W. W. Jacobs 73 The Pathway of the Pioneer DolfWyllarde 74 The Bad Times G. A. Birmingham 75 The Street Called Straight Basil King 79 Peter and Jane S. Macnaughtan 8 1 The Card Arnold Bennett 82 The Anglo-Indians Alice Perrin 84 The Sea Lady H. G. Wells 86 The Wild Olive Basil King 87 Lalage's Lovers G. A. Birmingham 89 The Heart of the Ancient Wood C. G. D. Roberts 90 A Change In the Cabinet Hilaire Belloc 92 White Fang Jack London 97 A Nine Days' Wonder R. AT rrr,l-»r 98 Chronicles of a German Town Author of • Marcia inGeTmVnv' II 99 The Coil of Carne John Oxenham 100 The Mess Deck W. F. Shannon 102 The Beloved Enemy E. Maria Albanesi 103 The Quest of the Golden Rose John Oxenham 104 A Counsel of Perfection Lucas Malet 105 The Wallet of Kai Lung Ernest Braniah 106 The Wedding Day C. N. and A. M. Williamson 107 The Lantern Bearers Mr^_ Alfred Sidgwick 108 The Adventures of Dr. Whitty G. A. Birmingham 109 The Sea Captain H. C. Bailey B. M. Croker 1 10 The Babes in the Wood 1 1 1 The Remington Sentence W. Pett Ridge W. Clark Russell 112 My Danish Sweetheart Methuen's Shillin g Library- 36 De ProfundJs Oscar Wilde 37 Lord Arthur Savlle'a Crime Oscar Wilde 3S Selected Poems Oscar Wilde 39 An Ideal Husband Oscar Wilde 40 Intentions Oscar Wilde 41 Lady Windermere's Fan Oscar Wilde 42 Charmides and otlier Poems Oscar Wilde 43 Harvest Home E. V. Lucas 44 A Little of Bverything E. V. Lucas 45 Vailima Letters Robert Louis Stevenson 46 Hills and t>ie Sea H. Belloc 47 The Blue Bird Maurice Maeterlinck 48 Mary Magdalene Maurice Maeterlinck 49 Under Five Reigns Lady Dorothy Nevill so Charles Dickens G. K. Chesterton 51 Man and the Universe Sir Oliver Lodge *S2 The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson Graham Balfour 53 Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son George Horace Lorimer *54 The Life of John Raskin W. G. Collingwood 55 The Parish Clerk P. H. Ditchfield 56 The Condition of England C. F. G. Masterman 57 Sevastopol and other Stories Leo Tolstoy 58 The Lore of the Honey = Bee Tickner Edwardes 59 Tennyson A. C. Benson *6o From Midshipman to Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood 62 John Boyes, King of the Wa-Klkuyu John Boyes 63 Oscar Wilde Arthur Ransome 64 The Vicar of Morwenstow S. Baring-Gould 6s Old Country Life S. Baring-Gould 66 Thomas Henry Huxley P. Chalmers Mitchell *67 Chitral Sir G. S. Robertson 68 Two Admirals Admiral John Moresby 76 Home Life in France M. Betham-Edwards 77 Selected Prose Oscar Wilde 78 The Best of Lamb E. V. Lucas 80 Selected Letters Robert Louis Stevenson 83 Reason and Belief Sir Oliver Lodge 8s The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde 88 The Tower of London Richard Davey 91 Social Evils and their Remedy Leo Tolstoy 93 The Substance of Faith Sir Oliver Lodge 94 All Things Considered G. K. Chesterton 95 The Mirror of the Sea Joseph Conrad 96 A Picked Company Hilaire Belloc 101 A Book of Famous Wits Walter Jerrold * Sliubtly Ahrldg sd. MetluKMi & Co., Lid. ^6 Kssex St reet, London, W.C. A PICKED COMPANY BEING A SELECTION FROM THE WRITINGS OF H. BELLOG SECOND EDITION METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.G. LONDON First Published , , . July 8th, 1Q13 Second Edition . . . November IQIJ PREFACE THIS volume, which has been compiled from seventeen of Mr. Belloc's books, may be claimed to be representative of his many-sided genius. The selection has been made by Mr. E. V, Lucas. The omission of any passage from The Path to Rome is due to copyright difficulties, while the author himself prefers that his poems should remain in his volume, Verses, 1910. Thanks are due to Mr. Eveleigh Nash for permission to use extracts from The Eye- Witness and Cautionary Tales for Children, to Messrs. Duckworth & Co. for quotations from Esto Perpeii/a, Caliban^s Guide to Letters, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Alore Beasts for Worse Children, to Mr. Edward Arnold for the letters G and O from A Moral Alphabet and to Messrs. Thomas Nelson tS: Sons for an extract from The Four Alen. CONTENTS ESSAYS ON THE PLEASURE OF TAKING UP ONE's PEN THE PLEASANT PLACE . ON INNS .... ON THE HOTEL AT PALMA AND A PROPOSED GUIDE BOOK .... THE ONION-EATER THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH . THE YOUNG PEOPLE ON A HERMIT WHOM I KNEW . THE OLD THINGS MR. THE DUKE : THE MAN OF MALPLAQUET ON THE SOURCES OF RIVERS THE EYE-OPENERS THE LITTLE OLD MAN . A CROSSING OF THE HILLS ON A GREAT WIND ON A WINGED HORSE AND THE EXILE WHO RODE HIM .... ON REST . , , , 9 24 30 35 40 46 50 57 63 68 72 n 82 88 92 99 A PICKED COMPANY HISTORY THE LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE MR BARR'S ANNOYANCE THE BARRICADE TRAVEL PYRENEAN HOSTELRIES THE LITTLE SHIPS FICTION LORD BENTHORPE THE OBLIQUE METHOD THE SHORT LYRIC PAGB 163 167 171 182 NONSENSE FOR CHILDREN PROEM ..... . 195 THE YAK .... . 196 THE PYTHON .... . 197 G . . . . . . 198 . . . . . . 199 GODOLPHIN HORNE . 200 CONCLUSION ON COMING TO AN END " HE DOES NOT DIE " . ♦ 202 207 A PICKED COMPANY ESSAYS ON THE PLEASURE OF TAKING UP ONE'S PEN^ AMONG the sadder and smaller pleasures of this world I count this pleasure : the pleasure of taking up one's pen. It has been said by very many people that there is a tangible pleasure in the mere act of wi-iting : in choosmg and arranging words. It has been denied by many. It is affirmed and denied in the life of Doctor Johnson, and for my part I would say that it is very true in some rare moods and wholly false in most others. However, of writing and the pleasure in it I am not writing here (with pleasure), but of the pleasure of taking up one's pen, which is quite another matter. Note what the action means. You are alone. Even if the room is crowded (as was the smoking- room in the G.W.R. Hotel, at Paddington, only the other day, when I wrote my " Statistical Abstract of Christendom "), even if the room is crowded, you must have made yourself alone to be able to write at all. You must have built up some kind of wall and isolated your mind. You are alone, then ; and that is the beginning. If you consider at what pains men are to be alone : how they climb mountains, enter prisons, profess monastic vows, put on eccentric daily habits, and ^ From On Nothing. 10 A PICKED COMPANY seclude themselves in the garrets of a great town, you will see that this moment of taking up the pen is not least happy in the fact that then, by a mere association of ideas, the writer is alone. So much for that. Now not only are you alone, but you are going to " create." When people say " create " they flatter them- selves. No man can create anything. I knew a man once who drew a horse on a bit of paper to amuse the company and covered it all over with many parallel streaks as he drew. When he had done this, an aged priest (present upon that occasion) said, " You are pleased to draw a zebra." When the priest said this the man began to curse and to swear, and to protest that he had never seen or heard of a zebra. He said it was all done out of his own head, and he called heaven to witness, and his patron saint (for he was of the Old English Territorial Catholic Families — his patron saint was iEthelstan), and the salvation of his immortal soul he also staked, that he was as innocent of zebras as the babe unborn. But there ! He per- suaded no one, and the priest scored. It was most evident that the Territorial was crammed fuU of zebraical knowledge. All this, then, is a digression, and it must be ad- mitted that there is no such thing as a man's " creat- ing." But anyhow, when you take up your pen you do something devilish pleasing : there is a prospect before you. You are going to develop a germ : I don't know what it is, and I promise you I won't call it creation— but possibly a god is creating through you, and at least you are making believe at creation. Anyhow, it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you know that when you have done, something will be added to the world, and little destroyed. For what will you have destroyed or wasted ? A certain amount of white paper at a farthing a square yard (and I am not certain it is not pleasanter all diversi- fied and variegated with black wriggles) — a certain amount of ink meant to be spread and dried : made for ON TAKING UP ONE'S PEN ii no other purpose. A certain infinitesimal amount of quill — torn from the silly goose for no purpose what- soever but to minister to the high needs of Man. Here you cry " Affectation ! Affectation ! How do I know that the fellow writes with a quill ? A most unlikely habit ! " To that I answer you are right. Less assertion, please, and more humility. I will tell you frankly with what I am writing. I am writing with a Waterman's Ideal Fountain Pen. The nib is of pure gold, as was the throne of Charlemagne, in the " Song of Roland." That throne (I need hardly tell you) was borne into Spain across the cold and awful passes of the P}Tenees by no less than a hundred and twenty mules, and all the Western world adored it, and trembled before it when it was set up at every halt under pine trees, on the upland grasses. For he sat upon it, dreadful and com- manding : there weighed upon him two centuries of age ; his brows were level with justice and experi- ence, and his beard was so tangled and full that he was called " bramble-bearded Charlemagne." You have read how, when he stretched out his hand at evening, the sun stood still till he had found the body of Roland ? No ? You must read about these things. Well then, the pen is of pure gold, a pen that runs straight away like a wiUing horse, or a jolly little ship ; indeed, it is a pen so excellent that it reminds me of my subject : the pleasure of taking up one's pen. God bless you, pen ! When I was a boy, and they told me work was honourable, useful, cleanly, sanitary, wholesome, and necessary to the mind of man, I paid no more attention to them than if they had told me that public men were usually honest, or that pigs could fly. It seemed to me that they were merely saying silly things they had been told to say. Nor do I doubt to this day that those who told me these things at school were but preaching a dull and careless round. But now I know that the things they 12 A PICKED COMPANY told me were true. God bless you, pen of work, pen of drudgery, pen of letters, pen of posings, pen rabid, pen ridiculous, pen glorified. Pray, little pen, be worthy of the love I bear you, and consider how noble I shall make you some day, when you shall live in a glass case with a crowd of tourists round you every day from ten to four ; pen of justice, pen of the saeva indignatio, pen of majesty and of light. I will write with you some day a considerable poem ; it is a com- pact between you and me. If I cannot make one of my own, then I will write out some other man's ; but you, pen, come what may, shall write out a good poem before you die, if it is only the Allegro. The pleasure of taking up one's pen has also this, peculiar among all pleasures, that you have the freedom to lay it down when you will. Not so with love. Not so with victory. Not so with glory. Had I begun the other way round, I would have called this Work " The Pleasure of laying down one's Pen." But I began it where I began it, and I am going on to end it just where it is going to end. What other occupation, avocation, dissertation, or intellectual recreation can you cease at will ? Not bridge — you go on playing to win. Not public speaking — they ring a bell. Not mere converse — you have to answer everything the other insufficient person says. Not life, for it is wrong to kill one- self ; and as for the natural end of living, that does not come by one's choice ; on the contrary, it is the most capricious of all accidents. But the pen you lay down when you will. At any moment : without remorse, without anxiety, without dishonour, you are free to do this dignified and final thing (I am just going to do it). . . . You lay it down. THE PLEASANT PLACE' A GENTLEMAN of my acquaintance came to me the other day for sjinpathy. . . . But first I must describe him : He is a man of careful, not neat, dress : I would call it sober rather than neat. He is always clean- shaven and his scanty hair is kept short-cut. He is occupied in letters ; he is, to put it bluntly, a litera- toor ; none the less he is possessed of scholarship and is a minor authority upon English pottery. He is a very good writer of verse ; he is not exactly a poet, but still, his verse is remarkable. Two of his pieces have been publicly praised by political peers and at least half a dozen of them have been praised in private by the ladies of that world. He is a man fifty-four years of age, and, if I may say so without betraying him, a little disappointed. He came to me, I say, for S3mipathy. I was sitting in my study watching the pouring rain falling upon the already soaked and drenched and drowned clay lands of my county. The leafless trees (which are in our part of a low but thick sort) were standing against a dead grey sky with a sort of ghost of movement in it, when he came in, opened his umbrcUa carefully so that it might not drip, and left it in the stone-floored passage — which is, to be accurate, six hundred years old — ^kicked off his galoshes and begged my hospi- tality ; also (let me say it for the third time) my sympathy. * From This and That. 13 14 A PICKED COMPANY He said he had suffered greatly and that he desired to tell me the whole tale, I was very willing and his tale was this : It seems that my friend (according to his account) found himself recently in a country of a very delightful character. This country lay up and heavenly upon a sort of table-land. One went up a road which led con- tinually higher and higher through the ravines of the mountains, until, passing through a natural gate of rock, one saw before one a wide plain bounded upon the further side by the highest crests of the range. Through this upland plain ran a broad and noble river whose reaches he could see in glimpses for miles, and upon the further banks of it, in a direction opposite that which the gate of rock regarded, was a very delightful city. The walls of this city were old in their texture, venerable and majestic in their lines. Within their circumference could be discerned sacred buildings of a similar antiquity, but also modern and con- venient houses of a kind which my friend had not come across before, but which were evidently suited to the genial, sunlit chmate, as also to the habits of leisured men. Their roofs were flat, covered in places by awnings, in other places by tiled verandahs, and these roofs were often disposed in the form of little gardens. Trees were numerous in the city and showed their tops above the lower buildings, while the lines of their foliage indicated the direction of the streets. My friend was passing down the road which led to this plain — and as it descended it took on an ampler and more majestic character — when he came upon a traveller who appeared to be walking in the direction of the town. This traveller asked him courteously in the English tongue whether he were bound for the city. My friend was constrained to reply that he could not pre- tend to any definite plan, but certainly the prospect THE PLEASANT PLACE 15 all round him was so pleasant and the aspect of the to\\Ti so inviting, that he would rather visit the capital of this delightful land at once than linger in its outskirts. "Come with me, then," said the Traveller, "and, if I may make so bold upon so short an acquaintance, accept my hospitality. I have a good house upon the wall of the town and my rank among the citizens of it is that of a merchant ; — I am glad to say a pros- perous one." He spoke without affectation and with so much kindness, that my friend was ravished to discover such a companion, and they proceeded in leisurely company over the few miles that separated them from their goal. The road was now paved in every part with small square slabs, quite smooth and apparently con- stnicted of some sort of marble. Upon either side there ran canahzed in the shining stone a httle stream of perfectly clear water. From time to time they would pass a lovely shrine or statue which the country people had adorned with garlands. As they approached the city they discovered a noble bridge in the manner, my friend believed, of the Italian Renaissance, with strong elliptical arches and built, like all the rest of the way, of marble, while the balustrade upon either side of it was so disposed in short symmetrical columns as to be particularly grateful to the eye. Over this bridge there went to and fro a great concourse of people, all smiling, eager, happy and busy, largely acquainted, apparently, each with the others, nodding, exchanging news, and in a word forming a most blessed company. As they entered the city my friend's companion, who had talked of many things upon their way and had seemed to unite the most perfect courtesy and modesty with the widest knowledge, asked him whether there was any food or drink to which he was particularly attached. " For," said he, "I make a point whenever I enter- i6 A PICKED COMPANY tain a guest — and that," he put in with a laugh, "is, I am glad to say, a thing that happens frequently — I make a point, I say, of asking him what he really prefers. It makes such a difference ! " My friend began his reply with those conventional phrases to which we are all accustomed, " That he would be only too happy to take whatever was set before him," " That the prospect of his hospitality was a sufficient guarantee of his satisfaction," and so forth : but his host would take no denial. " No, no ! " said he. "Do please say just what you prefer ! It is so easy to arrange — if you only knew ! . . . Come, I know the place better than you," he added, smiling again ; " you have no conception of its resources. Pray tell me quite simply before we leave this street " — for they were now in a street of sumptuous and well-appointed shops — "exactly what shall be commissioned." Moved by I know not what freedom of expression, and expansive in a degree which he had never yet known, my friend smiled back and said : " Well, to tell you the truth, some such meal as this would appeal to me : First two dozen green-bearded oysters of the Arcachon kind, opened upon the deep shell with all their juices preserved, and each exquisitely cleaned. These set upon pounded ice and served in that sort of dish which is contrived for each oyster to repose in its own little recess with a sort of side arrangement for the reception of the empty shells." His host nodded gravely, as one who takes in all that is said to him. " Next," said my friend, in an enthusiastic manner, " real and good Russian caviare, cold but not frozen, and so touched with lemon — only just so touched — as to be perfect. With this I think a little of the wine called Barsac should be drunk, and that cooled to about thirty-eight degrees — (Fahrenheit). After this a True Bouillon, and by a True Bouillon," said my friend with earnestness, " I mean a Bouillon that has long simmered in the pot and has been properly THE PLEASANT PLACE 17 skimmed, and has been seasoned not only with the customary herbs but also with a suspicion of carrot and of onion, and a mere breath of tarragon." " Right ! " said his host. " Right ! " nodding with real appreciation. " And next," said my friend, halting in the street to continue his list, " I think there should be eggs." "Right," said his host once more approvingly; " and shsdl we say " " No," interrupted my friend eagerly, " let me speak. Eggs sur-le-plat, frizzled to the exact degree." " Just what I was about to suggest," answered his delighted entertainer ; " and black pepper, I hope, ground large upon them in fresh granules from a proper wooden mill." " Yes ! Yes ! " said my friend, now lyric, " and with sea salt in large crystals." On saying which both of them fell into a sort of ecstasy which my friend broke by adding : " Something quite light to follow . . . preferably a sugar-cured Ham braised in white wine. Then, I think, spinach, not with the ham, but after it ; and that spinach cooked perfectly dry. We will conclude with some of the cheese called Brie. And for wine during all these latter courses we will drink the wine of Chinon : Chinon GriUe. What they call," he added slyly, " the Fausse maigre ; for it is a wine thin at sight but full in the drinking of it." " Good ! Excellent ! " said his host, clapping his hands together once with a gesture of finality. " And then after the lot you shall have coffee." " Yes, coffee roasted during the meal and ground immediately before its concoction. And for hqueur ..." My friend was suddenly taken with a little doubt. " I dare not ask," said he, " for the liqueur called Aquebus ? Once only did I taste it. A monk gave it me on Christmas Eve four years ago and I think it is not known 1 " " Oh, ask for it by all means I " said his host. i8 A PICKED COMPANY " Why, we know it and lf)ve it in this place as though it were a member of the family ! " My friend could hardly believe his ears on hearing such things, and said nothing of cigars. But to his astonishment his host, putting his left hand on my friend's shoulder, looked him full in the face and said : " And now shall / tell you about cigars ? " " I confess they were in my mind," said my friend. "Why then," said his host, with an expression of profound happiness, " there is a cigar in this town jWhich is full of flavour, black in colour, which does not bite the tongue, and which none the less satisfies whatever tobacco does satisfy in man. When you smoke it you really dream." "Why," said my friend humbly, "very well then, let us mention these cigars as the completion of our little feast." " Little feast indeed ! " said his host, " why, it is but a most humble meal. Anyhow, I am glad to have had from you a proper schedule of your pleasures of the table. In time to come, when we know each other better, we will arrange other large and really satisfactory meals ; but this will do very well for our initiatory lunch, as it were." And he laughed merrily. " But have I not given you great trouble ? " said my friend. " How little you will easily perceive," said his companion, " for in this town we have but to order and all is at once promptly and intelligently done." With that he turned into a small office, where a com- missary at once took down his order. " And now," said he emerging, " let us be home." They went together down the turning of a couple of broad streets lined with great private palaces and public temples until they came to a garden which had no boundaries to it, but which was open, and appar- ently the property of the city. But the people who wandered here were at once so few, so discreet and so courteous, my friend could not discover whether they were (as their salutes seemed to indicate) the THE PLEASANT PLACE 19 dependents of his host, or merely acquaintances who recognized him upon their way. This garden, as they proceeded, became more private and more domestic ; it led by narrowing paths through high, diversified trees, until, beyond the screen of a great beech hedge, he saw the house . . . and it was all that a house should be ! Its clear, well-set stone walls were in such perfect harmony with the climate and with the sky, its roof garden from which a child was greeting them upon their approach, so unexpected and so suitable, itSi arched open gallery was of so august a sort, and yet the domestic ornaments of its colonnade so familiar, that nothing could be conceived more appropriate for the residence of man. The mere passage into this home out of the warm morning dayhght into the inner domestic cool, was a benediction, and in the courtyard which they thus entered a lazy fountain leaped and babbled to itself in a manner that filled the heart with ease. " I do not know," said his host in a gentle whisper as they crossed the courtyard, " whether it is your custom to bathe before the morning meal or in the middle of the afternoon ? " " Why, sir," said my friend, " if I may tell the whole truth, I have no custom in the matter ; but perhaps the middle of the afternoon would suit me best." " By all means," said his host in a satisfied tone. " And I think you have chosen wisely, for the meal you have ordered will very shortly be prepared. But, for your refreshment at least, one of my friends shall put you in order, cool your hands and forehead, see to your face and hair, put comfortable sandals upon your feet and give you a change of raiment." All of this was done. My friend's host did well to call the servant who attended upon his guest a " friend," for there was in this man's manner no trace of servility or of dependence, and yet an eager willing- 20 A PICKED COMPANY ness for service coupled with a perfect reticence which was admirable to behold and feel. When my friend had been thus refreshed he was conducted to a most exceptional little room. Four pictures were set in the walls of it, mosaics, they seemed — but he did not examine their medium closely. The room itself in its perfect lightness and harmony, with its view out through a large round arch upon the countryside beyond the walls (the old turrets of which made a framework for the view), exactly prepared him for the meal that was prepared. While the oysters (delightful things !) were enter- ing upon their tray and were being put upon the table, the host, taking my friend aside with an exquisite gesture of courteous privacy, led him through the window-arch on to a balcony without, and said, as they gazed upon the wall and the plain and the mountains beyond (and what a sight they were ! ) : " There is one thing, my dear sir, that I should like to say to you before you eat , „ , it is rather a delicate matter. . . You will not mind my being perfectly frank ? " " Speak on, speak on," said my friend, who by this time would have confided any interests whatsoever into the hands of such a host. " Well," said that host, continuing a little care- fully, "it is this : as you can see we are very careful in this city to make men as happy as may be. We are happy ourselves, and we love to confer happiness upon others, strangers and travellers who honour us with their presence, But we find — I am very sorry to say we find , , , that is, we find from time to time that their complete happiness, no matter with what we may provide them, is dashed by certain forms of anxiety, the chief of which is anxiety with regard to their future receipts of money." My friend started. " Nay, said his host hastily, " do not misundei- THE PLEASANT PLACE 21 stand me. I do not mean that preoccupations of business are alone so alarming. What I mean is that sometimes, yes, and I may say often (horrible as it seems to us !), our guests are in an active preoccupa- tion about the petty business of finance. Some few have debts, it seems, in the wretched society from which they come, and of which, frankly, I know nothing. Others, though not indebted, feel insecure about the future. Others, though wealthy, are oppressed by their responsibilities. Now," he con- tinued firmly, " I must tell you once and for aU that we have a custom here upon which we take no denial : no denial whatsoever. Every man who enters this city, who honours us by entering this city, is made free of that sort of nonsense, thank God ! " And as he said this, my friend's host breathed a great sigh of relief. " It would be intolerable to us to think," he continued, " that our welcome and dear companions were suffering from such a tawdry thing as money- worry in our presence. So the matter is plainly this : whether you like it or whether you do not, the sum of ten thousand pounds is already set down to your credit in the pubUc bank of the city ; whether you use it or not is your business ; if you do not it is our custom to melt down an equivalent sum of gold and to cast it into the depths of the river, for we have of this metal an unfailing supply, and I confess we do not find it easy to understand the exaggerated value which other men place upon it." " I do not know that I shall have occasion to use so magnificent a custom," said my friend, with an extraordinary relief in his heart, " but I certainly thank you very kindly for its intention, and I shall not hesitate to use any sum that may be necessary for my continuing the great happiness which this city appears to afford." " You have spoken well," said his host, seizing both his hands, " and your franlmess compels me to another confession : we have at our disposal a means of discovering exactly how any one of our guests may 22 A PICKED COMPANY stand : the responsibilities of the rich, the indebted- ness of the embarrassed, the anxiety of those whose future may be precarious. May I tell you without discourtesy, that your own case is known to me and to two trustees, who are pubhc officials — absolutely reliable — and whom, for that matter, you will not meet." My friend must have looked incredulous, but his host continued firmly: "It is so; we have settled your whole matter, I am glad to say, on terms that settle all your liabilities and leave a further fifty thousand pounds to your credit in the pubhc bank. But the size of the sum is in this city really of no importance. You may demand whatever you will, and enjoy, I hope, a complete security during your habitation here. And that habitation, both the Town Council and the National Government beg you, through me, to extend to the whole of your hfe." " Imagine," said my friend, " how I felt. . . . The oysters were now upon the table, and before them, ready for consumption, the caviare. The Barsac in its original bottle, cooled (need I say !) to exactly thirty-eight degrees, stood ready . . ." At this point he stopped and gazed into the fire. " But, my dear fellow," said I, " if you are coming to me for sympathy and simply succeed in making me hungry and cross ..." " No," said my friend with a sob, " you don't understand 1 " And he continued to gaze at the fire. " Well, go on," said I angrily. " There isn't any on," he said ; " I woke ! " We both looked into the fire together for perhaps three minutes before I spoke and said : " Will you have some wine ? " " No thank you," he answered sadly, " not that wine." Then he got up uneasily and moved for his umbrella and his galoshes, and the passage and the THE PLEASANT PLACE 23 door. I thought he muttered, " You might have helped me." " How could I help you ? " I said savagely. "Well," he sighed, " I thought you could. ... It was a bitter disappointment. Good night ! " And he went out again into the rain and over the clay. ON INNS' HERE am I sitting in an Inn, having gloomily believed not half an hour ago that Inns were doomed with all other good things, but now more hopeful and catching avenues of escape through the encircling decay. For though certainly that very subtle and final expression of a good nation's life, the Inn, is in peril, yet possibly it may survive This Inn which surrounds me as I write (the law forbids me to tell its name) is of the noblest in South England, and it is in South England that the chief Inns of the world still stand. In the hall of it, as you come in, are barrels of cider standing upon chairs. The woman that keeps this Inn is real and kind. She receives you so that you are glad to enter the house. She takes pleasure in her life. What was her beauty her daughter now inherits, and she serves at the bar. Her son is strong and carries up the luggage. The whole place is a paradise, and as one enters the hall one stands hesitating whether to enjoy its full, yet remaining delight, or to consider the peril of death that hangs to-day over all good things. Consider, you wanderers (that is all men, whatso- ever, for not one of you can rest), what an Inn is, and See if it should not rightly raise both great fears and great affection An Inn is of the nation that made it. If you desire a proof that the unity of Christendom is not to be * From This and That. 24 ON INNS 25 achieved save through a dozen varying nations, each of a hundred varying counties and provinces and these each of several countrysides — the Inns will furnish you with that proof. If any foolish man pretend in your presence that the brotherhood of men should make a decent man cosmopolitan, reprove his error by the example of an Inn. If anyone is so vile as to maintain in your presence that one's country should not be loved and loyally defended, confound so horrid a fool by the very vigorous picture of an Inn, And if he impudently says that some damned Babylon or other is better than an Inn, look up his ancestry. For the truth is that Inns (may God preserve them, and of the few remaining breed, in spite of peril, a host of new Inns for our sons). Inns, Inns are the mirror and at the same time the flower of a people. The savour of men met in kindliness and in a homely way for years and years comes to inhabit all their panels (Inns are panelled) and lends incense to their fires. (Inns have not radiators, but fires.) But this good quintessence and distillation of comradeship varies from countryside to countryside and more from province to province, and more still from race to race and from realm to realm ; just as speech differs and music and all other excellent fruits of Europe. Thus there is an Inn at Tout-de-suite-Tardets which the Basques made for themselves and offer to those who visit their delightful streams. A river flows under its balcony, tinkling along a sheer stone wall, and before it, high against the sunset, is a wood called Tiger Wood, clothing a rocky peak called the Peak of Eagles. Now no one could have built that Inn, nor endowed it with its admirable spirit, save the cleanly but in- comprehensible Basques. There is no such Inn in the Bearnese country, nor any among the Gascons. In Falaise the Normans very slowly and by a mellow process of some thousand j-ears have en- 26 A PICKED COMPANY gendered an Inn. This Inn, I think, is so good that you will with difficulty compare it with any better thing. It is as quiet as a tree on a summer night, and cooks cray-fish in an admirable way. Yet could not these Normans have built that Basque Inn ; and a man that would merge one in the other and so drown both is an outlaw and to be treated as such. But these Inns of South England (such as still stand !) — what can be said in proper praise of them which shall give their smell and colour and their souls ? There is nothing like them in Europe, nor anything to set above them in all the world. It is within their walls and at their boards that one knows what South England once did in the world and why. If it is gone it is gone. All things die at last. But if it is gone — why, no lover of it need remain to drag his time out in mourning it. If South England is dead it is better to die upon its grave. Whether it dies in our time or no you may test by the test of its Inns. If they may not weather the chaos, if they fail to round the point that menaces our religion and our very food, our humour and our prime affections — why, then. South England has gone too. If, if (I hardly dare to write such a challenge), if the Inns hold out a little time longer — why, then. South England wiU have turned the corner and Europe can breathe again. Never mind her extravagances, her follies or her sins. Next time you see her from a hill, pray for South England. For if she dies, you die. And as a symptom of her malady (some would say of her death-throes) carefully watch her Inns. Of the enemies of Inns, as of rich men, dull men, blind men, weak-stomached men and men false to themselves, I do not speak : but of their effect. Why such blighting men are nowadays so powerful and why God has given them a brief moment of pride it is not for us to know. It is hidden among the secret things of this life. But that they are powerful all men, lovers of Inns, that is, lovers of right living, ON INNS 27 know well enough and bitterly deplore. The effect of their power concerns us. It is like a wasting of our own flesh, a whitening of our own blood. Thus there is the destruction of an Inn by gluttony of an evil sort — though to say so sounds absurd, for one would imagine that gluttony should be proper to Inns. And so it is, when it is your true gluttony of old, the gluttony of our fathers made famous in Enghsh letters by the song which begins : I am not a glutton But I do like pie. But evil gluttony, which may also be called the gluttony of devils, is another matter. It flies to liquor as to a drug ; it is ashamed of itself ; it swallows a glass behind a screen and hides. There is no com- panionship with it. It is an abomination, and this abomination has the power to destroy a Christian Inn and to substitute for it, first a gin palace, and then, in reaction against that, the very horrible house where they sell only tea and coffee and bubbly waters that bite and sting, both in the mouth and in the stomach. These places are hotbeds of despair, and suicides have passed their last hours on earth con- suming slops therein alone. Thus, again, a sad enemy of Inns is luxury. The rich wiU have their special habitations in a town so cut off from ordinary human beings that no Inn may be built in their neighbourhood. In which connexion I greatly praise that little colony of the rich which is settled on the western side of Berkeley Square, in Lansdowne House, and all around the eastern parts of Charles Street, for they have per- mitted to be estabhshed in their midst the " Running Footman," and this will count in the scale when their detestable vices are weighed upon the Day of Judg- ment, upon which day, you must know, vices are not put into the scale gently and carefully, so as to give you fair measure, but are banged down with enormous force by strong and maleficent demons. 28 A PICKED COMPANY Then, again, a very subtle enemy of Inns is poverty, when it is pushed to inhuman limits, and you will note especially in the dreadful great towns of the North, more than one ancient house which was once honourable and where Mr. Pickwick might very well have stayed, now turned ramshackle and dilapidated and abandoned, slattern, draggle-tail, a blotch, until the yet beastlier reformers come and pull it down to make an open space wherein the stunted children may play. Thus, again, you will have the pulling down of an Inn and the setting up of an Hotel built of iron and mud, or ferro-concrete. This is murder. Let me not be misunderstood. Many an honest Inn calls itself an hotel. I have no quarrel with that, nor has any traveller I think. It is a title. Some few blighted and accursed hotels call themselves " Inns " — a foul snobbism, a nasty trick of words pretending to create realities. No, it is when the thing is really done, not when the name is changed, that murder calls out to God for vengeance. I knew an Inn in South England, when I was a boy, that stood on the fringe of a larch wood, upon a great high road. Here when the springtime came and I went off to see the world I used to meet with carters and with travelling men, also keepers and men who bred horses and sold them, and sometimes with sailors padding the hoof between port and port. These men would tell me a thousand things. The larch trees were pleasant in their new colour ; the woods alive with birds and the great high road was, in those days, deserted : for high bicycles were very rare, low bicycles were not invented, the rich went by train in those days ; only carts and caravans and men with horses used the leisurely surface of the way. Now that good Inn has gone. I was in it some five years ago, marvelling that it had changed so little, though motor things and money-changers went howl- ing by in a stream and though there were now no ON INNS 29 poachers or gipsies or forest men to speak to, when a too smart young man came in with two assistants and they began measuring, calculating, two-foot -ruling and jotting. This was the plot. Next came the deed. For in another year, when the spring burst and I passed by, what should I see in the place of my Inn, my Inn of youth, my Inn of memories, my Inn of trees, but a damnable stack of iron, with men fitting a thin shell of bricks to it like a skin . Next year the monster was alive and made. The old name (call it the Jolly) was flaunting on a vulgar signboard swing in cast-iron tracing to imitate forged work. The sheel of bricks was cast with sham-white as for half timber-work. The sham-white was patterned with sham-timbers of baltic deal, stained dark, with pins of wood stuck in : like Cheshire, not like home. Wrong lattice insulted the windows — and inside there were three bars. At the door stood an Evil Spirit, and within every room, upstairs and down, other devils, his servants, resided. It is no light thing that such things should be done and that we cannot prevent them. From the towns all Inns have been driven : from the villages most. No conscious efforts, no Bond Street nastiness of false conservation, will save the beloved roofs. Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England. ON THE HOTEL AT PALMA AND A PROPOSED GUIDE-BOOK^ THE hotel at Palma is like the Savoy, but the cooking is a great deal better. It is large and new ; its decorations are in the modern style with twiddly lines. Its luxury is greater than that of its London competitor. It has an eager, willing porter and a delightful landlord. You do what you like in it and there are books to read. One of these books was an English guide-book. I read it. It was full of lies, so gross and palpable that I told my host how abominably it traduced his country, and advised him first to beat the book well and then to burn it over a slow fire. It said that the people were superstitious — it is false. They have no taboo about days ; they play about on Sundays. They have no taboo about drinks ; they drink what they feel inclined (which is wine) when they feel inclined (which is when they are thirsty). They have no taboo book, Bible or Koran, no damned psychical rubbish, no damned " folk- lore," no triply damned mumbo-jumbo of social ranks ; kind, really good, simple-minded dukes would have a devil of a time in Palma. Avoid it, my dears, keep away. If anything, the people of Palma have not quite enough superstition. They play there for love, money, and amusement. No taboo (talking of love) about love. ^ From On Something. 30 ON THE HOTEL AT PALMA 31 The book said they were poor. Their populace is three or four times as rich as ours. They own their own excellent houses and their own land ; no one but has all the meat and fruit and vegetables and wine he wants, and usually draught animals and musical instruments as well. In fact, the book told the most frightful lies and was a worthy companion to other guide-books. It moved me to plan a guide-book of my own, in which the truth should be told about all the places I know. It should be called " Guide to Northumberland, Sussex, Chel- sea, the French frontier, South Holland, the Solent, Lombardy, the North Sea, and Rome, with a chapter on part of Cheshire and some remarks on the United States of America." In this book the fault would lie in its too great scrappiness, but the merit in its exactitude. Thus I would inform the reader that the best time to sleep in Siena is from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, and that the best place to sleep is the north side of St Domenic's ugly brick church there. Again, I would tell him that the man who keeps the "Turk's Head " at Valogne, in Normandy, was only outwardly and professedly an Atheist, but really and inwardly a Papist. I would tell him that it sometimes snowed in Lombardy in June, for I have seen it — and that any fool can cross the Alps bhndfold, and that the sea is usually calm, not rough, and that the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and that Lourdes, contrary to the general opinion, does work miracles, for I have seen them. I would also tell him of the place at Toulouse where the harper plays to you during dinner, and of the grubby little inn at Terneuzen on the Scheldt, where they charge you just anything they please for any- thing ; five shillings for a bit of bread, or half a crown for a napkin. All these things, and hundreds of others of the same kind, would I put in my book, and at the end should 32 A PICKED COMPANY be a list of all the hotels in Europe where, at the date of publication, the landlord was nice, for it is the character of the landlords which makes all the differ- ence — and that changes as do all human things. There you could see first, like a sort of Primate of Hotels, the Railway Hotel at York. Then the inn at La Bruyere in the Landes, then the " Swan " at Pet- worth, with its mild ale, then the " White Hart " of Storrington, then the rest of them, all the six or seven hundred of them, from the " Elephant " of Chateau Thierry to the "Feathers" of Ludlow — a truly noble remainder of what once was England ; the " Feathers " of Ludlow, where the beds are of honest wood with curtains to them, and where a man may drink half the night with the citizens to the success of their engines and the putting out of all fires. For there are in West England three little inns in three little towns, all in a line, and all beginning with an L— Ledbury, Ludlow, and Leominster, aU with "Feathers," all with orchards round, and I cannot tell which is the best. Then my guide-book will go on to talk about harbours ; it will prove how almost every harbour was impossible to make in a little boat ; but it would describe the difficulties of each so that a man in a little boat might possibly make them. It would describe the rush of the tide outside Margate and the still more dangerous rush outside Shoreham, and the absurd bar at Littlehampton that strikes out of the sea, and the place to lie at in Newhaven, and how not to stick upon the Platters outside Harwich ; and the very tortuous entry to Poole, and the long channel into Christchurch past Hengistbury Head ; and the enormous tides of Soutli Wales ; and why you often have to beach at Britonferry, and the lerril)le diffi- culty of mooring in Great Yarmouth ; and the sad changes of Little Yarmouth, and the single black buoy at Calais, which is much too far out to be of any use ; and how to wait for the tide in the Swin. And also what no book has ever yet given, an exact direc- ON THE HOTEL AT PALMA 33 tion of the way in which one may roll into Oifoid Haven, on the top of a spring tide if one has luck, and how, if one has no luck, one sticks on the gravel and is pounded to pieces. Then my guide-book would go on to tell of the way in which to make men pleasant to you according to their climate and country ; of how you must not hurry the people of Aragon, and how it is your duty to bargain with the people of Catalonia ; and how it is impossible to eat at Daroca ; and how careful one must be with gloomy men who keep inns at the very top of glens, especially if they are silent, under Cheviot. And how one must not talk rehgion when one has got over the Scotch border, with some re- marks about Jedburgh, and the terrible things that happened to a man there who would talk religion although he had been plainly warned. Then my guide-book would go on to tell how one should climb ordinary mountains, and why one should avoid feats ; and how to lose a guide which is a very valuable art, for when you have lost your guide you need not pay him. My book wiU also have a note (for it is hardly worth a chapter) on the proper method of frightening sheep dogs when they attempt to kill you with their teeth upon the everlasting hills. This my good and new guide-book (oh, how it blossoms in my head as I write !) would further describe what trains go to what places, and in what way the boredom of them can best be overcome, and which expresses really go fast ; and I should have a footnote describing those lines of steamers on which one can travel for nothing if one puts a sulliciently bold face upon the matter. My guide-book would have directions for the pacifying of Arabs, a trick which I learnt from a past master, a little way east of Batna in the year 1905. I will also explain how one can tell time by the stars and by the shadow of the sun ; upon what sort of food one can last longest and how best to carry it, and what rites propitiate, if they are solemnized in a due 34 A PICKED COMPANY order, the half-malicious fairies which haunt men when they are lost in lonely valleys, right up under the high peaks of the world. And my book should have a whole chapter devoted to Ulysses. For you must know that one day I came into Nar- bonne where I had never been before, and I saw written up in large letters upon a big, ugly house : ULYSSES, LODGING FOR MAN AND BEAST. So I went in and saw the master, who had a round bullet head and cropped hair, and I said to him : " What ! Are you landed, then, after all your journeys ? And do I find you at last, you of whom I have read so much and seen so little ? " But with an oath he refused me lodging. This tale is true, as would be every other tale in my book. What a fine book it will be ! THE ONION-EATER* THERE is a hill not far from my home whence it is possible to see northward and southward such a stretch of land as is not to be seen from any emi- nence among those I know in Western Europe. South- ward the sea-plain and the sea standing up in a belt of light against the sky, and northward all the weald. From this summit the eye is disturbed by no great cities of the modem sort, but a dozen at least of those small market towns which are the delight of South England hold the view from point to point, from the pale blue downs of the island over, eastward, to the Kentish hiUs. A very long way off, and near the sea-line, the high faint spire of that cathedral which was once the mother of all my county goes up without weight into the air and gathers round it the delicate and distant outlines of the landscape — as, indeed, its builders meant that it should do. In such a spot, on such a high watch-tower of England, I met, three days ago, a man. I had been riding my kind and honourable horse for two hours, broken, indeed, by a long rest in a deserted bam. I had been his companion, I say, for two hours, and had told him a hundred interesting things — to which he had answered nothing at all — when I took him along a path that neither of us yet had trod. I had not, I know ; he had not (I think), for he went snort- * From HiUs and the Sea, 35 36 A PICKED COMPANY ing and doubtfully. This path broke up from the kennels near Waltham, and made for the High Wood between Cumber and No Man's Land. It went over dead leaves and quite lonely to the thick of the forest ; there it died out into a vaguer and a vaguer trail. At last it ceased altogether, and for half an hour or so I pushed carefully, always climbing upwards, through the branches, and picked my way along the bramble- shoots, until at last I came out upon that open space of which I have spoken, and which I have known since my childhood. As I came out of the wood the south-west wind met me, full of the Atlantic, and it seemed to me to blow from Paradise. I remembered, as I halted and so gazed north and south to the weald below me, and then again to the sea, the story of that Sultan who publicly proclaimed that he had possessed all power on earth, and had numbered on a tablet with his own hand each of his happy days, and had found them, when he came to die, to be seventeen. I knew what that heathen had meant, and I looked into my heart as I remembered the story, but I came back from the examination satisfied, for "so far," I said to myself, "this day is among my number, and the light is falling. I will count it for one." It was then that I saw before me, going easily and slowly across the downs, the figure of a man. He was powerful, full of health and easy ; his clothes were rags ; his face was open and bronzed. I came at once off my horse to speak with him, and, holding my horse by the bridle, I led it forward till we met. Then I asked him whither he was going, and whether, as I knew these open hills by heart, I could not help him on his way. He answered me that he was in no need of help, for he was bound nowhere, but that he had come up off the high road on to the hills in order to get his pleasure and also to see what there was on the other side. He said to me also, with evident enjoyment (and in the accent of a lettered man), "This is indeed a day to be alive 1 " THE ONION-EATER 37 I saw that I had here some chance of an adventure, since it is not every day that one meets upon a lonely down a man of culture, in rags and happy. I there- fore took the bridle right off my horse and let him nibble, and I sat down on the bank of the Roman road holding the leather of the bridle in my hand, and wip- ing the bit with plucked grass. The stranger sat down beside me, and drew from his pocket a piece of bread and a large onion. We then talked of those things which should chiefly occupy mankind : I mean, of happiness and of the destiny of the soul. Upon these matters I found him to be exact, thoughtful and just. First, then, I said to him : " I also have been full of gladness all this day, and, what is more, as I came up the hill from Waltham I was inspired to verse, and wrote it inside my mind, completing a passage I had been working at for two years, upon joy. But it was easy for me to be happy, since I was on a horse and warm and well fed ; yet even for me such days are capricious. I have known but few in my life. They are each of them distinct and clear, so rare are they, and (what is more) so different ai'e they in their very quality from all other days." " You are right," he said, " in this last phrase of yours. . . . They are indeed quite other from all the common days of our lives. But you were wrong, I think, in saying that your horse and clothes and good feeding and the rest had to do with these curious intervals of content. Wealth makes the run of our days somewhat more easy, poverty makes them more hard — or very hard. But no poverty has ever yet brought of itself despair into the soul — the men who kill themselves are neither rich nor poor. Still less has wealth ever purchased those peculiar hours. I also am filled with their spirit to-day, and God knows," said he, cutting his onion in two, so that it gave out a strong savour, " God knows I can purchase nothing." " Then tell me," I said, " whence do you believe 38 A PICKED COMPANY these moments come ? And will you give me half your onion ? " " With pleasure," he rephed, " for no man can eat a whole onion ; and as for that other matter, why I think the door of heaven is ajar from time to time, and that light shines out upon us for a moment between its opening and closing." He said this in a merry, sober manner ; his black eyes sparkled, and his large beard was blown about a little by the wind. Then he added : " If a man is a slave to the rich in the great cities (the most miserable of mankind), yet these days come to him. To the vicious wealthy and privileged men, whose faces are stamped hard with degradation, these days come ; they come to you, you say, working (I suppose) in anxiety like most of men. They come to me who neither work nor am anxious so long as South England may freely import onions." " I believe you are right," I said. " And I especi- ally commend you for eating onions ; they contain all health ; they induce sleep ; they may be called the apples of content, or, again, the companion fruits of mankind." " I have always said," he answered gravely, " that when the couple of them left Eden they hid and took away with them an onion. I am moved in my soul to have known a man who reveres and loves them in the due measure, for such men are rare." Then he asked, with evident anxiety : " Is there no inn about here where a man like me wiU be taken in?" " Yes," I told him. " Down under the Combe at Duncton is a very good inn. Have you money to pay ? Will you take some of my money ? " " I will take all you can possibly afford me," he answered in a cheerful, manly fashion. I counted out my money and found I had on me but three shillings and sevenpence. " Here is three shillings and sevenpence," I said. " Thank you, indeed," he answered, taking the THE ONION-EATER 39 coins and wrapping them in a little rag (for he had no pockets, but only holes). " I wish," I said with regret, " we might meet and taJk more often of many things. So much do we agree, and men like you and me are often lonely." He shrugged his shoulders and put his head on one side, quizzing at me with his eyes. Then he shook his head decidedly, and said : " No, no — it is certain that we shall never meet again." And thanking me with great fervour, but briefly, he went largely and strongly down the escarpment of the Combe to Duncton and the weald ; and I shall never see him again till the Great Day. . . . THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH ' LTPON that shore of Europe which looks out to- J wards no further shore, I came once by accident upon a certain man. The day had been warm and almost calm, but a little breeze from the south-east had all day long given life to the sea. The seas had run very small and brilliant, yet without violence, before the wind, and had broken upon the granite cliffs to leeward, not in spouts of foam, but in a white, even line that was thin, and from which one heard no sound of surge. Moreover, as I was running dead north along the coast, the noise about the bows was very shght and pleasant. The regular and gentle wind came upon the quarter without change, and the heel of the boat was steady. No calm came with the late sunset ; the breeze still held, and so till nearly midnight I could hold a course and hardly feel the pulling of the helm. Meanwhile the arch of the sunset endured, for I was far to the northward, and all those colours which belong to June above the Arctic Sea shone and changed in the slow progress of that arch as it advanced before me and mingled at last with the dawn. Throughout the hours of that journey I could see clearly the seams of the deck forward, the texture of the canvas and the natural hues of the woodwork and Ihc rigging, the glint of the brasswork, and even the ^ From Hills and the Sea. 40 THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 41 letters painted round the little capstan-head, so con- tinually did the light endure. The silence which properly belongs to darkness, and which accompanies the sleep of birds upon the sea, appeared to be the more intense because of such a continuance of the light, and what with a long vigil and new water, it was as though I had passed the edge of all known maps and had crossed the boundary of new land. In such a mood I saw before me the dark band of a stone jetty running some miles off from the shore into the sea, and at the end of it a fixed beacon whose gleam showed against the translucent sky (and its broken reflection in the pale sea) as a candle shows when one pulls the cuitains of one's room and lets in the beginnings of the day. For this point I ran, and as I turned it I discovered a little harbour quite silent under the growing hght ; there was not a man upon its wharves, and there was no smoke rising from its slate roofs. It was absolutely still. The boat swung easily round in the calm water, the pier-head slipped by, the screen of the pier- head beacon suddenly cut off its glare, and she went slowly with no air in her canvas towards the patch of darkness under the quay. There, as I did not know the place, I would not pick up moorings which another man might own and need, but as my boat still crept along with what was left of her way I let go the little anchor, for it was within an hour of low tide, and I was sure of water. When I had done this she soon tugged at the chain and I slackened all the halyards. I put the cover on the mainsail, and as I did so, looking aft, I noted the high mountain-side behind the town standing clear in the dawn. I turned eastward to receive it. The light still lifted, and though I had not slept I could not but stay up and watch the glory growing over heaven. It was just then, when I had stowed every- thing away, that I heard to the right of me the croon- ing of a man. A few moments before I should not have seen him 42 A PICKED COMPANY under the darkness of the sea-wall, but the light was so largely advanced (it was nearly two o'clock) that I now clearly made out both his craft and him. She was sturdy and high, and I should think of slight draught. She was of great beam. She carried but one sail, and that was brown. He had it loose, with the peak dipped ready for hoisting, and he him- self was busy at some work upon the floor, stowing and fitting his bundles, and as he worked he crooned gently to himself. It was then that I hailed him, but in a low voice, so much did the silence of that place impress itself upon all living beings who were strange to it. He looked up and told me that he had not seen me come in nor heard the rattling of the chain. I asked him what he would do so early, whether he was off fishing at that hour or whether he was taking parcels down the coast for hire or goods to sell at some other port. He answered me that he was doing none of those things. " What cruise, then, are you about to take ? " I said. " I am off," he answered in a low and happy voice, " to find what is beyond the sea." " And to what shore," said I, " do you mean to sail ? " He answered : " 1 am out upon this sea northward to where they say there is no further shore." As he spoke he looked towards that horizon which now stood quite clean and clear between the pier- heads : his eyes were full of the broad daylight, and he breathed the rising wind as though it were a promise of new life and of unexpected things. I asked him then what his security was and had he formed a plan, and why he was setting out from this small place, unless, perhaps, it was his home, of which he might be tired. " No," he answered, and smiled ; " this is not my home ; and I have come to it as you may have come to it, for the first time ; and, like you, I came in after the whole place slept ; but as I neared I noticed THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 43 certain shore marks and signs which had been given me, and then I knew that I had come to the starting- place of a long voyage." " Of what voyage ? " I asked. He answered : "This is that harbour in the north of which a Breton priest once told me that I should reach it, and when I had moored in it and laid my stores on board in order, I should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose." Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low : " This voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known is forgotten, except those things which, as we knew them, reminded us of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without faihng. It is in some country beyond this sea, and it has a harbour like this harbour, only set towards the south, as this is towards the north ; but like this harbour it looks out over an im- known sea, and like this harbom^ it enjoys a perpetual hght. Of what the happy people in this country are, or of how they speak, no one has told me, but they will receive me weU, for I am of one kind with them- selves. But as to how I shall know this harbour, I can tell you : there is a range of hills, broken by a valley through which one sees a further and higher range, and steering for this hollow in the hills one sees a tower out to sea upon a rock, and high up inland a white quarry on a hill-top ; and these two in line are the leading marks by which one gets clear into the mouth of the river, and so to the wharves of the town. And there," he ended, " I shall come off the sea for ever, and everyone will call me by my name." The sun was now near the horizon, but not yet risen, and for a little time he said nothing to me nor I to him, for he was at work sweating up the halyard and setting the peak. He let go the mooring knot also, but he held the end of the rope in his hand and 44 A PICKED COMPANY paid it out, standing and looking upward, as the sail slowly filled and his craft drifted towards me. He pressed the tiller with his knee to keep her full. I now knew by his eyes and voice that he was from the west, and I could not see him leave me without asking him from what place he came that he should set out for such another place. So I asked him : " Are you from Ireland, or from Brittany, or from the Islands ? " He answered me : "I am from none of these, but from Cornwall." And as he answered me thus shortly he still watched the sail and still pressed the tiUer with his knee, and still paid out the mooring rope without turning round. " You cannot make the harbour," I said to him. " It is not of this world." Just at that moment the breeze caught the peak of his jolly brown sail ; he dropped the tail of the rope ; it slipped and splashed into the harbom* slime. His large boat heeled, shot up, just missed my cable ; and then he let her go free, and she ran clear away. As she ran he looked over his shoulder and laughed most cheerily ; he greeted me with his eyes, and he waved his hand to me in the morning light. He held her well. A clean wake ran behind her. He put her straight for the harbour-mouth and passed the pier-heads and took the sea outside. Whether in honest truth he was a fisherman out for fishes who chose to fence with me, or whether in that cruise of his he landed up in a Norwegian bay, or thought better of it in Orkney, or went through the sea and through death to the place he desired, I have never known. I watched him holding on, and certainly he kept a course. The sun rose, the town awoke, but I would not cease from watching him. His sail still showed a smaller and a smaller point upon the sea ; he did not waver. For an hour I caught it and lost it, and caught it again, as it dwindled ; for half another hour THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH 45 I could not swear to it in the blaze. Before I had wearied it was gone. Oh ! my companions, both you to whom I dedicate this book and you who have accompanied me over other hiUs and across other waters or before the guns in Burgundy, or you others who were with me when I seemed alone — that ulterior shore was the place we were seeking in every cruise and march and the place we thought at last to see. We, too, had in mind that Town of which this man spoke to me in the Scottish harbour before he sailed out northward to find what he could find. But I did not follow him, for even if I had followed him I should not have found the Town. THE YOUNG PEOPLE^ ONE of my amusements, a mournful one I admit, upon these fine spring days, is to watch in the streets of London the young people, and to wonder if they ai^e what I was at their age. There is an element in human hfe which the philos- ophers have neglected, and which I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name has been coined for it. But I am not at a loss to describe it. It is that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere change in perspective, or in point of view. It is that change which makes Death so recognizable and too near ; achievement necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. It is more than that. It is a sort of seeing things from that far side of them, which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years, but which is now pal- pable and part of the senses : known. All who have passed a certain age know what I mean. This change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth ; and it is best to trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the young. There I see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough, and walking a little too stiffly down Cockspur Street. Does he think himself immortal, I wonder, as I did ? Does the thought of oblivion appal him as it did me ? That he continually suffers in his dignity, that he thinks the passers-by all watch him, *From This and That. 46 THE YOUNG PEOPLE 47 cind that he is in terror of any singularity in dress or gesture, I can well believe, for that is common to all youth. But does he also, as did I and those of my time, purpose great things which are quite unattain- able, and think the summit of success in any art to be the natural wage of living ? Then other things occur to me. Do these young people suffer or enjoy all our old illusions ? Do they think the country invincible ? Do they vaguely dis- tinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the former from whom they spring are provided with their well-being by some natural and fatal process, like the recurrence of day and night ? Are they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do ? I wonder ! — Possibly they are. I have not seen one of them wearing a billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the street. And is life divided for them to-day as it was then, into three periods : their childhood ; their much more impor- tant years at a public school (which last fill up most of their consciousness) ; their new untried occupation ? And do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? I think they must, judging by their eyes. I think they too believe that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in any trade is best recognized and best paid ; that labour is a happy business ; and that women are of two kinds : the young who go about to please them, the old to whom they are indifferent. Do they drink ? I suppose so. They do not show it yet. Do they gamble ? I conceive they do. Are their nerves still sound ? Of that there can be no doubt ! See them hop on and off the motor buses and cross the streets ! And what of their attitude towai^ds the labels ? Do they take, as I did, every man much talked of for a great man ? Are they diffident when they meet such men ? And do they feel themselves to be in the presence of gods ? I should much like to put myself into the mind of one of them, and to see if to that 48 A PICKED COMPANY generation the simplest of all social lies is gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a Prime Minister, a Versifier, an Ambassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes up in the Press, to be some very superhuman person. And doubtless also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or much-be- printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all the rest of England in a ruck below. Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment ? We used aU to be so bewildered ! Things did not fit in with the very simple and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the State. The motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation will come the discovery that of these men and of such material the Great are made ; and will the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came to their elders ? I must believe that young man walking down Cockspur Street thinks that aU great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of im- limited means and command the world. Fmiher, I must believe that the young man walking down Cockspur Street (he had got to Northumberland Avenue by now) lives in a static world. For him things are immovable. There are the old : fathers and mothers and uncles ; the very old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death. All the children (he thinks) will be always children, and all the lovely women always young. And loyalty and generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul, and as yet unbetrayed. Well, if they are aU like that, or even most of them, the young people, quite half the world is happy. THE YOUNG PEOPLE 49 Not one of that happy half remembers the Lion of Northumberland House, or the httle streets there were behind the Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple Bar, or what Coutts's used to be like, or Simpson's, or Soho as yet uninvaded by the great and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the young can pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works. And for them, all the new things — houses which are veils of mud on stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels — are the things that always were and always will be. A year to them is twenty years of ours. The summer for them is games and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse ; time is slow and stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal, but will not be ; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing. Or am I all wrong ? Is the world so rapidly chang- ing that the Young also are caught with the obsession of change ? Why, then, not even half the world is happy. ON A HERMIT WHOM I KNEW^ IN a valley of the Apennines, a little before it was day, I went down by the side of a torrent wondering where I should find repose ; for it was now some hours since I had given up all hope of discovering a place for proper human rest and for the passing of the night, but at least I hoped to light upon a dry bed of sand under some overhanging rock, or possibly of pine needles beneath closely woven trees, where one might get sleep until the rising of the sun. As I still trudged, half expectant and half careless, a man came up behind me, walking quickly as do mountain men : for throughout the world (I cannot tell why) I have noticed that the men of the mountains walk quickly and in a sprightly manner, arching the foot, and with a light and general gait as though the hiUs were waves and as though they were in thought springing upon the crests of them. This is true of all mountaineers. They are but few. This man, I say, came up behind me and asked me whether I were going towards a certain town of which he gave me the name, but as I had not so much as heard of this town I told him I knew nothing of it. I had no map, lor there was no good map of that district, and a bad map is worse than none. I knew the names of no towns except the large towns on the coast. So I said to him : " I cannot tell anything about this town, I am not making towards it. But I desire to reach the sea ^ From Oil Nothing, 50 ON A HERMIT WHOM I KNEW 51 coast, which I know to be many hours away, and I had hoped to sleep overnight under some roof or at least in some cavern, and to start with the early morning ; but here I am, at the end of the night, without repose and wondering whether I can go on," He answered me : " It is four hours to the sea coast, but before you reach it you will find a lane branching to the right, and if you wiU go up it (for it climbs the hill) you will find a hermitage. Now by the time you are there the hermit will be risen." " Will he be at his prayers ? " said I. " He says no prayers to my knowledge," said my companion lightly ; " for he is not a hermit of that kind. Hermits are many and prayers are few. But you will iind him bustling about, and he is a very hospitable man. Now as it so happens that the road to the sea coast bends here round along the foot of the hills, you will, in his company, perceive the port below you and the populace and the high road, and yet you will be saving a good hour in distance of time, and will have ample rest before reaching your vessel, if it is a vessel indeed that you intend to take." When he had said these things I thanked him and gave him a bit of sausage and went along my way, for as he had walked faster than me before our meeting and while I was still in the dumps, so now I walked faster than him, having received good news. All happened just as he had described. The dawn broke behind me over the noble but sedate peaks of the Apennines ; it first defined the heights against the growing colours of the sun, it next produced a general warmth and geniality in the air about me ; it last dis- played the downward opening of the valley, and, very far off, a plain that sloped towards the sea. Invigorated by the new presence of the day I went forward more rapidly, and came at last to a place where a sculptured panel made out of marble, very clever and modern, and representing a mystery, marked the division between two ways ; and I took 52 A PICKED COMPANY the lane to my right as my companion of the night houi-s had advised me. For perhaps a mile or a little more the lane rose continually between rough walls intercepted by high backs of thorn, with here and there a vineyard, and as it rose one had between the branches of the wall ghmpses of an ever-growing sea : for, as one rose, the sea became a broader and a broader belt, and the very distant islands, which at first had been but little clouds along the horizon, stood out and became parts of the landscape, and, as it were, framed all the bay. Then at last, when I had come to the height of the hiU, to where it turned a corner and ran level along the escarpment of the cliffs that dominated the sea plain, I saw below me a considerable stretch of country, between the fall of the ground and the dis- tant shore, and under the daylight which was now full and clear one could perceive that all this plain was packed with an intense cultivation, with houses, happiness and men. Far off, a little to the northward, lay the mass of a town ; and stretching out into the Mediterranean with a gesture of command and of desire were the new arms of the harbour. To see such things filled me with a complete con- tent. I laiow not whether it be the effect of long vigil, or whether it be the effect of contrast between the darkness and the light, but certainly to come out of a lonely night spent on the mountains, down with the sunlight into the civilization of the plain, is, for any man that cares to undergo the suffering and the consolation, as good as any experience that life affords. Hardly had I so conceived the view before me when I became aware, upon my right, of a sort of cavern, or rather a little and carefully minded shrine, from which a gieeting proceeded, I turned round and saw there a man of no great age and yet of a venerable appearance. He was perhaps fifty-five years old, or possibly a little less, but he had let his giey-wliite hair grow longish and his beard was ON A HERMIT WHOM I KNEW 53 very ample and fine. It was he that had addressed me. He sat dressed in a long gown in a modern and rather luxurious chair at a low long table of chestnut wood, on which he had placed a few books, which I saw were in several languages and two of them not only in English, but having upon them the mark of an English circulating library which did business in the great town at our feet. There was also upon the table a breakfast ready of white bread and honey, a large brown coffee-pot, two white cups, and some goat's milk in a bowl of silver. This meal he asked me to share. " It is my custom," he said, " when I see a traveller coming up my mountain road to get out a cup and plate for him, or, if it is midday, a glass. At evening, however, no one ever comes." " Why not ? " said I. " Because," he answered, "this lane goes but a few yards further round the edge of the chff, and there it ends in a precipice ; the little platform where we are is all but the end of the way. Indeed, I chose it upon that account, seeing, when I first came here, that from its height and isolation it was well fitted for my retreat." I asked him how long ago that was, and he said nearly twenty years. For all that time, he added, he had lived there, going down into the plain but once or twice in a season and having for his rare companions those who brought him food and the peasants on such days as they toiled up to work at their plots towards the summit ; also, from time to time, a chance traveller like myself. But these, he said, made but poor companions, for they were usually such as had missed their way at the turning and arrived at that high place of his out of breath and angry. I assured him that this was not my case, for a man had told me in the night how to find his hermitage and I had come of set purpose to see him. At this he smiled. We were now seated together at table eating and talk- ing so, when I asked him whether he had a reputation 54 A PICKED COMPANY for sanctity and whether the people brought him food. He answered with a httle hesitation that he had a reputation, he thought, for necromancy rather than an5/^hing else, and that upon this accoimt it was not always easy to persuade a messenger to bring him the books in French and English which he ordered from below, though these were innocent enough, being, as a rule, novels written by women or academicians, records of travel, the classics of the eighteenth century, or the biographies of aged statesmen. As for food, the people of the place did indeed bring it to him, but not, as in an idyll, for courtesy ; contrariwise, they de- manded heavy payment, and his chief difficulty was with bread ; for stale bread was intolerable to him. In the matter of religion he would not say that he had none, but rather that he had several religions ; only at this season of the year, when everything was fresh, pleasant and entertaining, he did not make use of any of them, but laid them all aside. As this last saying of his had no meaning for me I tm'ned to another matter and said to him : " In any solitude contemplation is the chief busi- ness of the soul. How, then, do you, who say you practise no rites, fill up your loneliness here ? " In answer to this question he became more ani- mated, spoke with a sort of laugh in his voice, and seemed as though he were young again and as though my question had aroused a whole lifetime of good memories. " My contemplation," he said, not without large gestures, " is this wide and prosperous plain below : the great city with its harbours and ceaseless traffic of ships, the roads, the houses building, the fields yielding every year to husbandry, the perpetual activities of men. I watch my kind and I glory in them, too far off to be disturbed by the friction of individuals, yet near enough to have a daily com- panionship in the spectacle of so much life. The mornings, when they are all at labour, I am inspired ON A HERMIT WHOM I KNEW 55 by their energy ; in the noons and afternoons I feel a part of their patient and vigorous endurance ; and when the sun broadens near the rim of the sea at evening, and all work ceases, I am filled with their repose. The lights along the harbour front in the twihght and on into the darlcness remind me of them when I can no longer see their crowds and movements, and so does the music which they love to play in their recreation after the fatigues of the day, and the distant songs which they sing far into the night. " I was about thirty yeai^s of age, and had seen (in a career of diplomacy) many places and men ; I had a fortune quite insufficient for a life among my equals. My youth had been, therefore, anxious, humiliated, and worn when, upon a feverish and unhappy holiday taken from the capital of this state, I came by accident to the cave and platform which you see. It was one of those days in which the air exliales revelation, and I clearly saw that happiness inhabited the mountain corner. I determined to remain for ever in so rare a companionship, and from that day she has never abandoned me. For a little while I kept a touch with the world by purchasing those newspapers in which I was reported shot by brigands or devoured by wild beasts, but the amusement soon wearied me, and now I have forgotten the very names of my companions." We were silent then until I said : " But some day you will die here all alone." " And why not ? " he answered calmly. " It will be a nuisance for those who find me, but I shall be indifferent altogether." " That is blasphemy," says I. " So says the priest of St. Anthony," he immediately replied — but whether as a reproach, an argument, or a mere commentary I could not discover. In a little while he advised me to go down to the plain before the heat should incommode my journey. 56 A PICKED COMPANY I left him, therefore, reading a book of Jane Austen's, and I have never seen him since. Of the many strange men I have met in my travels he was one of the most strange and not the least fortunate. Every word I have written about him is true. THE OLD THINGS^ THOSE who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter, about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel the pleasure of history ; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were, a great memory of things — hke a human memory, but stretched over a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness. It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How good it is when j'ou come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is not known enough to Englishman (for it is one of the most beautiful things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury Tower, framed between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey buildings in your eye of the mind — a great mass of similar stone with solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster. All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel is very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied to it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more fascinating and more fuU of meaning. This interest * From First and Last. 57 58 A PICKED COMPANY is the interest in such things as he behind recorded history, and have survived into our own times. For underneath the general hfe of Europe, with its splendid epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusad- ing, discovering, furnishing the springs of the Renais- sance, and flowering at last materially into this stupendous knowledge of to-day, the knowledge of all the Arts, the power to construct and to do — under- neath all that is the foundation on which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs ; and that stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents. Recorded history for this island and for Northern France and for the Rhine Valley is a matter of two thousand years ; for the Western Mediterranean of three ; but the things of which I speak are to be reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie only nor even chiefly in things that have disappeared. It is indeed a great pleasure to rummage in the earth and find polished stones wrought by men who came so many centuries before us, and of whose blood we certainly are ; and it is a great pleasure to find, or to guess that we find, under Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving that Canterbury has been there from all time ; and that the apparently defenceless Valley City was once chosen as an impregnable site, when the water meadows of the Stour were impassable as marsh, or with difficulty passable as a shallow lagoon. And it is delightful to stand on the earthwork a few miles west and to say to oneself (as one can say with a fair certitude), " Here was the British camp defending the south-east ; here the tenth legion charged." All these are pleasant, but more pleasant, I think, to foUow the thing where it actually survives. Consider the track-ways, for instance. How rich is England in these ! No other part of Europe wiU afford the traveller so permanent and so fascinat- ing a problem. Elsewhere Rome hardened and THE OLD THINGS 59 straightened every barbaric trail until the original line and level disappeared ; but in this distant pro- vince of Britain she could only afford just so much energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery ; and ail over England you can go, if you choose, foot by foot, along the ancient roads that were made by the men of your blood before they had heard of brick or of stone or of iron or of wi'itten laws. I wonder that more men do not set out to follow, let us say, the Fosse-Way. There it runs right across Western England from the south-west to the north- east in a line direct yet sinuous, characters which are the very essence of a savage trail. It is a modern road for many miles, and you are tramping, let us say, along the Cotswold on a hard metalled modern English highway, with milestones and notices from the County Council telling you that the culverts will not bear a steam-engine, if so be you were to travel on one. Then suddenly this road comes up against a cross- road and apparently ceases, making what map draughtsmen call a " T " ; but right in the same line you see a gate, and beyond it a farm lane, and so you foUow. You come to a spinney where a ride has been cut through by the woodreeve, and it is all in the same line. The Fosse-Way turns into a little path, but you are stiU on it ; it curves over a marshy brook valley, picking out the fii-m land, and as you go you see old stones put there heaven knows how many (or how few) generations ago — or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition remains, and the country folk strengthen their wet lands as they have strengthened them all these thousands of years ; you climb up out of that depression, you get you over a stile, and there you are again upon a lane. You follow that lane, and once more it stops dead. This time there is a field before you. No right of way, no trace of a path, nothing but grass rounded into those parallel ridges which mark the modern decay of the corn lands and pasture — alas ! — taking the place of ploughing. Now your pleasure comes in casting about for the trail ; 6o A PICKED COMPANY you look back along the line of the Way ; you look forward in the same line tiU you find some indication, a boundary between two parishes, perhaps upon your map, or two or three quarries set together, or some other sign, and very soon you have picked up the line again. So you go on mile after mile, and as you tread that line you have in the horizons that you see, in the very nature and feel of the soil beneath your feet, in the skies of England above you, the ancient purpose and soul of this Kingdom. Up this same line went the Clans marching when they were called northward to the host ; and up this went slow, creaking waggons with the lead of the Mendips or the tin of Cornwall or the gold of Wales. And it is stiU there ; it is stiU used from place to place as a high road, it still lives in modern England. There are some of its peers, as for instance the Ermine Street, far more continuous, and affording problems more rarely ; others like the ridgeway of the Berk- shire Downs, which Rome hardly touched, and of which the last two thousand years has, therefore, made hardly anything ; you may spend a delightful day piecing out exactly where it crossed the Thames, making your guess at it, and wondering as you sit there by Streatley Vicarage whether those islands did not form a natural weir below which lay the ford. The roads are the most obvious things. There are many more ; for instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. I remember once being told of a record in a manor, which held of the Church and which lay upon the southern slope of the Downs, that so much was entered for " straw from the Lowlands " : then, years afterwards, when I had to thatch a Bethlehem in an orchard underneath tall elms — a pleasant place to write in, with the noise of THE OLD THINGS 6i bees in the air — the man who came to thatch said to me : " We must have straw from the Lowlands ; this upland straw is no good for thatching." Im- mediately when I heard him say this there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to me that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to do, Cross-Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the drift of the snow, for there was no other guide to one's direction in such weather. And I remember another man in a little boat in the North Sea, as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and telling me how if one caught the tide all the way up to Long Nose and then went round it on the end of the flood, one caught a new tide up London river, and so made two tides in one day. He spoke with the same pleasure that siUy men show when they talk about an accumulation of money. Pie felt wealthy and proud from the knowledge, for by this knowledge he had two tides in one day. Now knowledge of this sort is older than ten thousand years ; and so is the know- ledge of how birds fly, and of how they call, and of how the weather changes with the moon. Very many things a man might add to the list that I am making. Dew-pans are older than the language or the religion ; and the finding of water with a stick ; and the catching of that smooth animal, the mole ; and the building of flints into mortar, which if one does it in the old way (as you may see at Pevensey) the work lasts for ever, but if you do it in any new way it does not last ten years ; then there is the knowledge of planting during the crescent part of the month, but not before the new moon shows ; and there is the influence of the moon on cider, and to a less extent upon the brewing of ale ; and talking of ale, the knowledge of how ale should be drawn from the brev/ing just when a man can see his face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew. And there is the knowledge of how to bank rivers, wliich is called 62 A PICKED COMPANY " throwing the rives " in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name ; and how to bank them so that they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these things and a thousand others. All are immemorial. MR. THE DUKE: THE MAN OF MALPLAQUET^ ON the field of Malplaquet, that battlefield, I met a man. He was pointed out to me as a man who drove travellers to Bavai. His name was Mr. The Duke, and he was very poor. If he comes across these lines (which is exceedingly unlikely) I offer him my apologies. Anyhow, I can write about him freely, for he is not rich, and, what is more, the laws of his country permit the telling of the truth about our fellow-men, even when they are rich. Mr. The Duke was of some years, and his colour was that of cedar wood. I met him in his farmyard, and I said to him : " Is it you, sir, that drives travellers to Bavai ? " " No," said he. Accustomed by many years of travel to this type of response, I continued : " How much do j'ou charge ? " "Two francs fifty," said he. " I will give you three francs," I said, and when I had said this he shook his head and rephed : " You fall at an evil moment ; I was about to milk the cows." Having said this he went to harness the horse. When the horse was harnessed to his httle cart (it was an extremely small horse, full of little bones and ^From Firsl and Last. 63 64 A PICKED COMPANY white in colour, with one eye stronger than the other) he gave it to his Httle daughter to hold, and himself sat down to table, proposing a meal. " It is but humble fare," he said, " for we are poor." This sounded familiar to me ; I had both read and heard it before. The meal was of bread and butter, pasty and beer, for Malplaquet is a country of beer and not of wine. As he sat at the table the old man pointed out to me that contraband across the Belgian frontier, which is close by, was no longer profitable. " The Fraud," he said, "is no longer a living for anyone." Upon that frontier contraband is called " The Fraud " ; it holds an honourable place as a career. "The Fraud," he continued, " has gone long ago ; it has burst. It is no longer to be pm-sued. There is not even any duty upon apples. . . . But there is a duty upon pears. Had I a son I would not put him into The Fraud. . . . Sometimes there is just a chance here and there. . . . One can pick up an occasion. But take it all in all " (and here he wagged his head solemnly), "there is nothing in it any more." I said that I had no experience of contraband pro- fessionally, but that I knew a very honest man who lived by it in the country of Andorra, and that accord- ing to my morals a man had a perfect right to run the risk and take his chance, for there was no contract between him and the power he was trying to get round. This announcement pleased the old gentle- man, but it did not grip his mind. He was of your practical sort. He was almost a Pragmatist. Abstractions wearied him. He put no faith in the reality of ideas. I think he was a nominalist like Abelard : and whatever excuse you may make for him, Abelard was a Nominalist right enough, for it was the intellectual thing to be at the time, though St. Bernard utterly confuted him in arguments of enormous length and incalculable boredom. The old man, then, I say, would have nothing to do MR. THE DUKE 65 with first principles, and he reasserted his position that, in the concrete, in the existent world, The Fraud no longer paid. This said for the sixth or seventh time, he drank some brandy to put heart into him and climbed up into his little cart, I by his side. He hit the white horse with a stick, making at the same time an extra- ordinary shrill noise with his mouth, hke a siren, and the horse began to slop and sludge very dolefully towards Bavai. "This horse," said Mr. The Duke, "is a wonder- fully good horse. He goes like the wind. He is of Arab extraction, and comes from Africa." With these words he gave the horse another huge blow with his stick, and once more emitted his pierc- ing cry. The horse went neither faster nor slower than before, and seemed very indifferent to the whole performance. " He is from Africa," said ]\Ir. The Duke again meditatively. " Do you know Africa ? " Africa with the French populace means Algiers. I answered that I knew it, and that in particular I knew the road southward from Constantine. At this he looked very pleased, and said : " I was a soldier in Africa. I deserted seven times." To this I made no answer. I did not know how he wanted me to take it, so I waited until he should speak again, which he soon did, and said : " The last time I deserted I was free for a year and a half. I used to conduct beasts ; that was my trade. When they caught me I was to have been shot. I was saved by the tears of a woman ! " Having said this the old man pulled out a very small pipe and filled it with exceedingly black tobacco. He lit it, and then he began talking again rather more excitedly. " It is a terrible thing and an imhappy thing none the less," he went on, " that a man should be taken out to be shot and should be saved by the tears of a 66 A PICKED COMPANY woman." Then he added, " Of what use are wars ? How foohsh it is that men should kill each other! If there were a war I would not fight. Would you ? " I said I thought I would ; but whether I should like to or not would depend upon the war. He was eager to contradict and to tell me that war was wrong and stupid. Having behind him the logical training of fifteen Christian centuries, he was in no way muddle-headed upon the matter. He saw very well that his doctrine meant that it was wrong to have a country, and wrong to love it, and that patriotism was all bosh, and that no ideal was worth physical pain or trouble. To such conclusions had he come at the end of his life. The white horse meanwhile slouched ; Bavai grew somewhat nearer as we sat in silence after his last sentence. He was turning many things over in his mind. He veered off to political economy. " When the rich man at the Manufactory here, the place where they sell phosphates for the land, when he stands beer to all the workmen and to the country- side, I always say, ' Fools ! All this will be put on to the cost of the phosphates ; they will cost you more ! ' " Mr. The Duke did not accept John Stuart Mill's proposition upon the cost of production nor the general theories of Ricardo upon which Mill's propositions were based. In his opinion rent was a factor in the cost of production, for he told me that butter had gone up because the price of land was rising near the towns. In what he next said I found out that he was not a CoUectivist, for he said a man should own enough to live upon, but he said that this was im- possible if rich people were allowed to live. I asked him what the politics of the countryside were and how people voted. He said : " The politicians trick the people. They are a heap of worthlessness." I asked him if he voted, and he said "Yes." He MR. THE DUKE 67 said there was only one way to vote, but I did not understand what this meant. Had time served I should have asked him further questions — upon the nature of the soul, its ultimate fate, the origin of man and his destiny, whether mortal or immortal ; the proper constitution of the State, the choice of the legislator, the prince, and the magistrate ; the function of art, whetJier it is sub- sidiary or primary in human life ; the family ; marri- age. Upon the State he had already informed me, and also upon the institution of property, and upon liis view of armies. Upon all those other things he would equally have given me a clear reply, for he was a man that knew his own mind, and that is more than most people can say. But we were now in Bavai, and I had no time to discover more. We drank together before we parted, and I was very pleased to see the honest look in his face. \Yith. more leisure and born to greater oppor- tunities he would have been talked about, this Man of Malplaquet. He had come to his odd conclusions as the funny people do in Scandinavia and in Russia, and among the rich intellectuals and usurers in London and Berlin ; but he was a jollier man than they are, for he could diive a horse and lie about it, and he could also milk a cow. As we parted he used a phrase that wounded me, and which I had only heard once before in my life. He said : " We shall never see each other again ! " Another man had once said this thing to me before. This man was a farmer in the Northumbrian hills, who walked with me a little way in the days when I was going over Carter Fell to find the Scots people, many, many years ago. He also said : " We shall never meet again ! " ON THE SOURCES OF RIVERS^ THERE are certain customs in man the perma- nence of which gives infinite pleasure. When the mood of the schools is against them these customs lie in wait beneath the floors of society, but they never die, and when a decay in pedantry or in despotism or in any other evil and inhuman influence permits them to reappear they reappear. One of these customs is the religious attachment of man to isolated high places, peaks, and single striking hills. On these he must build shrines, and though he is a little furtive about it nowadays, yet the instinct is there, strong as ever. I have not often come to the top of a high hill with another man but I have seen him put a few stones together when he got there, or, if he had not the moral courage so to satisfy his soul, he would never fail on such an occasion to say some- thing ritual and quasi-religious, even if it were only about the view ; and another instinct of the same sort is the worship of the sources of rivers. The Iconoclast and the people whose pride it is that their senses are dead will see in a river nothing more than so much moisture gathered in a narrow place and falling as the mystery of gi^avitation inclines it. Their mood is the mood of that gentleman who despaired and wrote : A cloud's a lot of vapour, The sky's a lot of air, And the sea's a lot of water That happens to be there. ^ From First and Last. 68 ON THE SOURCES OF RIVERS 69 You cannot get further down than that. When you have got as far down as that all is over. Luckily God still keeps His mysteries going for you, and you can't get rid, even in that mood, of the certitude that you yourself exist and that things outside of you are outside of you. But when you get into that modern mood you do lose the personality of everything else, and you forget the sanctity of river heads. You have lost a great deal when you have forgotten that, and it behoves you to recover what you have lost as quickly as possible, which is to be done in this way : Visit the source of some famous stream and think about it. There was a Scotsman once who discovered the sources of the Nile, to the lasting advantage of mankind and the permanent glory of his native land. He thought the source of the Nile looked rather like the sources of the Till or the Tweed or some such river of Thule. He has been ridiculed for saying this, but he was mystically very right. The source of the greatest of rivers, since it was sacred to him, reminded him of the sacred things of his home. When I consider the sources of rivers which I have seen, there is not one, I think, which I do not remember to have had about it an influence of awe. Not only because one could in imaginings see the kingdoms of the cities which it was to visit and the way in which it would bind them all together in one province and one story, but also simply because it was an origin. The sources of the Rhone are famous : the Rhone comes out of a glacier through a sort of ice cave, and if it were not for an enormous hotel quite four-square it would be as lonely a place as there is in Europe, and as remarkable a beginning for a great river as could anywhere be found. Nor, when you come to think of it, does any European river have such varied fortunes as the Rhone. It feeds such different religions and looks on such diverse landscapes. It makes Geneva and it makes Avignon ; it changes in colour and in the nature of its going as it goes. It sees new products appearing continually on its journey 70 A PICKED COMPANY until it comes to olives, and it flows past the beginning of human cities, when it reflects the huddle of old Aries. The sources of the Garonne are well known. The Garonne rises by itself in a valley from which there is no issue, like the fabled valleys shut in by hills on every side. And if it were anything but the Garonne it would not be able to escape : it would lie imprisoned there for ever. Being the Garonne, it tunnels a way for itself right under the High Pyrenees and comes out again on the French side. There are some that doubt this, but then there are people who would doubt anything. The sources of the River Arun are not so famous as these two last, and it is a good thing, for they are to be found in one of the loneliest places within an hour of London that any man can imagine, and if you were put down there upon a windy day you would think yourself upon the moors. There is nothing whatso- ever near you at the beginnings of the little sacred stream. Thames had a source once which was very famous. The water came out plainly at a fountain under a bleak wood just west of the Fosse Way, under which it ran by a culvert, a culvert at least as old as the Romans. But when about a hundred years ago people began to improve the world in those parts, they put up a pumping station and they pumped Thames dry — since which time its gods have deserted the river. The sources of the Ribble are in a lonely place up in a corner of the hills where everything has strange shapes and where the rocks make one think of trolls. The great frozen Whernside stands up above it, and Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa ; and a little way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, or words to that effect. The little River Ribble rises under such ON THE SOURCES OF RIVERS 71 enormous guardianship. It rises quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the hillside, and too few people know it. The other river that flows east while the Kibble flows west is the River Ayr. It rises in a curious way, for it imitates the Garonne, and finding itself blocked by limestone burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which it has no more trouble. The River Severn, the River Wye, and a third un- important river, or at least important only for its beauty (and who would insist on that ?) rise all close together on the skirts of Plinlimmon, and the smallest of them has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge of Llygnant, which looks like, and perhaps is, the deepest cleft in this island, or, at any rate, the most unexpected. And a fourth source on the mountain, a tarn below its summit, is the source of Rheidol, which has a short but adventurous life like Achilles. There is one source in Europe that is properly dealt with, and where the rehgion due to the sources of rivers has free play, and this is the source of the Seine. It comes out upon the northern side of the hills which the French call the Hills of Gold, in a country of pasturage and forest, very high up above the world and thinly peopled. The River Seine appears there in a sort of miraculous manner, pouring out of a grotto, and over this grotto the Parisians have built a votive statue ; and there is yet another of the hundred thousand things that nobody knows. THE EYE-OPENERS^ WITHOUT any doubt whatsoever, the one characteristic of the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many : now we live in towns : and posterity will be astounded at us 1 It isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by printer's ink — that would be bad enough ; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind, printer's ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things that are there ; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not travelled, "Travel ! " one wonders whether, after all, if he does travel, he will see the things before his eyes ? If he does, he will find a new world ; and there is more to be discovered in this fashion to-day than ever there was. I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores has sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New York or Mel- bourne, would write in quite a short letter what he really felt. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have read before they started, just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century village believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote conveyed a high initiative, making and un- making the policy of the State ; or just as people, hearing that the birth-rate of France is low, travel in that country and say they can see no children — * From First and Last. 72 THE EYE-OPENERS 73 though they would hardly say it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth-rate is lower still. What travel does in the way of pleasure (the pro- viding of new and fresh sensations, and the expansion of experience), that it ought to do in the way of know- ledge. It ought to and it does, with the wise, pro- vide a complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance, of Barbary — the lions do not live in deserts ; they live in woods. The peasants of Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in char- acter ; Barbary is full to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings — they are not striking — but of great Roman monuments : they are altogether the most important things in the place. Barbary is not hot, as a whole : most of Barbary is extremely cold between November and March. The inhabitants of Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what civilization can give them, such as cr^me de menihe, rifles, good waterworks, maps, and rail- ways : only they would like to have these things without the bother of strict laws and of the police, and so forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you find out all this new truth. Now it took the French forty years and more before each of these plain facts (and I have only cited half a dozen out of as many hundred) got into their letters and their print : they have not yet got into the letters and the print of other nations. But an honest man travelling in Barbary on his own account would pick up every one of these truths in two or three days, except the one about the lions ; to pick up that truth you must go to the very edge of the country, for the lion is a shy beast and withdraws from men. The wise man who really wants to see things as they are and to understand them, does not say : " Here I am on the burning soil of Africa." He says : " Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train twelve hours late " — as it was (with me in it) near Setif in January 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at 74 A PICKED COMPANY his plough outside Batna : "Observe yon Semite ! " He says : " That man's face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner." He does not say : " See those wild sons of the desert ! How they must hate the new artificial world around them ! " Contrariwise, he says : " See those four Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the cafe ! See, they have ordered more liqueurs ! " He does not say : " How strange and terrible a thing the railway must be to them ! " He says : " I wish I was rich enough to travel first, for the natives pouring in and out of this third-class carriage, jabbering like monkeys, and treading on my feet, disturb my tranquillity. Some hundreds must have got in and out during the last fifty miles ! " In other words, the wise man has permitted eye- openers to rain upon him their full, beneficent, and sacramental influence. And if a man in travelhng will always maintain his mind ready for what he really sees and hears, he will become a whole nest of Colum- buses discovering a perfectly interminable series of new worlds. A man can only talk of what he himself knows. Let me give further examples. I had always heard until I visited the Pyrenees how French civilization (especi- ally in the matter of roads, motors, and things like that) went up to the " Spanish " frontier and then stopped dead. It doesn't. The change is at the Aragonese frontier. On the Basque third of the frontier the people are just as active and fond of wealth, and of scraping of stone and of cleanliness, and of drawing straight lines, to the north as to the south of it. They are all one people, as industrious, as thrifty, and as prosperous as the Scots. So are the Catalans one people, and you get much the same sort of advantages and disadvantages (apart from the effect of government) with the Catalans to the north as with the Catalans to the south of the border. So with religion. I had thought to find the Spanish THE EYE-OPENERS 75 churches crowded. I found just the contrary. It was the French churches that were crowded, not the Spanish ; and the difference between the truth — what one really sees and hears — and the printed legend happens to be very subtly illustrated in tliis case of rehgion. The French have inherited (and are by this time used to, and have, perhaps grown fond of ) a big rehgious debate. Those who side with the national religion and tradition emphasize their opinion in every possible way — so do their opponents. You pick up two newspapers from Toulouse, for in- stance, and it is quite on the cards that the leading article of each will be a disquisition upon the philos- ophy of rehgion, the one, the Depedic of Toulouse, militantly, and often insolently atheist ; the other as militantly Catholic. You don't get that in Pamplona, and you don't get it in Saragossa. What you get there is a profound dishke of being interfered with, ancient and lazy customs, wealth retained by the chapters, the monas- teries, and the colleges, and with all this a curious, all-pervading indifference. One might end this little train of thought by con- sidering a converse test of what the eye-opener is in travel ; and that test is to talk to foreigners when they first come to England and see how they tend to dis- cover in England what they have read of at home instead of what they really see. There have been very few fogs in London of late, but your foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along its main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression : it is hke a garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just pubhshed by a French traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a desert ; he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the Commons and an aristocratic one in the House of Lords, though he shall have heard but four speeches 76 A PICKED COMPANY in each, and though every one of the eight speeches shall have been delivered by members of one family group closely intermarried, wealthy, titled, and perhaps (who knows ?) of some lineage as well. The moral is that one should tell the truth to one- self, and look out for it outside one. It is quite as novel and as entertaining as the discovery of the North Pole — or, in case that has come off (as some believe), the discovery of the South Pole. THE LITTLE OLD MAN^ IT was in the year 1888 (" O noctes coenasque deiun ! " — a tag) that, upon one of the southern hills of England, I came quite unexpectedly across a little old man who sat upon a bench that was there and looked out to sea. Now you will ask me why a bench was there, since benches are not commonly found upon the high slopes of our southern hills, of which the poet has well said, the writer has well written, and the singer has well sung : — The Southern Hills and the South Sea They blow such gladness into me That when I get to Burton Sands And smell the smell of the home lands, My heart is all renewed, and fills With the Southern Sea and the South Hills. True, benches are not common there. I know of but one, all the way from the meeting place of England, which is upon Salisbury Plain, to that detestable suburb of Eastbourne by Beachy Head. Nay, even that one of which I speak has disappeared. For an honest man being weary of labour and yet desiring firewood one day took it away, and the stumps only now remain at the edge of a wood, a little to the south of No Man's Land. Well, at any rate, upon this bench there sat in the year 1888 a little old man, and he was looking out to ^ From On Everything. 77 78 A PICKED COMPANY sea ; for from this place the English Channel spreads out in a vast band 600 feet below one, and the shore perhaps five miles away ; it looks broader than any sea in the world, broader than the Mediterranean from the hills of Alba Longa, and broader than the Irish Sea from the summit of the Welsh Mountains : though why this is so I cannot tell. The little old man treated my coming as though it was an expected thing, and before I had spoken to him long assured me that this view gave him complete content. " I could sit here," he said, " and look at the Channel and consider the nature of this land for ever and for ever." Now though words like this meant nothing in so early a year as the year 1888, yet I was willing to pursue them because there was, in the eyes of the little old man, a look of such wisdom, kindness, and cunning as seemed to me a marriage between those things native to the earth and those things which are divine. I mean, that he seemed to me to have all that the good animals have, which wander about in the brushwood and are happy all their lives, and also all that we have, of whom it has been well said that of every thing which runs or creeps upon earth, man is the fullest of sorrow. For this little old man seemed to have (at least such was my fantastic thought in that early year) a complete acquiescence in the soil and the air that had bred him, and yet something common to mankind and a full fore- knowledge of death. His face was of the sort which you will only see in England, being quizzical and vivacious, a little pinched together, and the hair on his head was a close mass of grey curls. His eyes were as bright as are harbour lights when they are first lit towards the closing of our winter evenings : they shone upon the daylight. His mouth was firm, but even in repose it permanently, though very slightly, smiled. I asked him why he took such pleasure in the view. He said it was because everything he saw was part of his own country, and that just as some holy men said THE LITTLE OLD MAN 79 that to be united with God, our Author, was the end and summit of man's effort, so to him who was not very holy, to mix, and have communion, with his own sky and earth was the one banquet that he loiew : he also told me (which cheered me greatly) that alone of all the appetites this large affection for one's own land does not gi^ow less with age, but rather increases and occupies the soul. He then made me a dis- course as old men will, which ran somewhat thus : — " Each thing differs from all others, and the more you know, the more you desire or worship one thing, the more does that stand separate : and this is a mystery, for in spite of so much individuality all things are one. , . . How greatly out of all the world stands out this object of my adoration and of my content L You will not find the like of it in all the world ! It is England, and in the love of it I forget all enmities and all despairs." He then bade me look at a number of little things around, and see how particular they were : the way in which the homes of Englishmen hid themselves, and how, although a great town lay somewhat to our right not half a march away, there was all about us silence, self-possession, and repose. He bade me also note the wind-blown thorns, and the yew-trees, bent over from centuries of the south-west wind, and the short, sweet grass of the Downs, unfilled and unen- closed, and the long waves of woods which rich men had stolen and owned, and which yet in a way were property for us all. " There is more than one," said I in anger, " who so little understands his land that he will fence the woods about and prevent the people from coming and going : making a show of them, like some dirty town- bred fellow who thinks that the Downs and the woods are his villa garden, bought with gold. The little old man wagged his crooked forefinger in front of his face and looked exceedingly knowing with his bright eyes, and said : " Time will tame all that ! Not they can digest the county, but the county them. 8o A PICKED COMPANY Their palings shall be burnt upon cottage hearths, and their sons shall go back to be lackeys as their fathers were. But this landscape shall always remain." Then he bade me note the tides and the many harbours ; and how there was an inner and an outer tide, and the great change between neaps and springs, and how there were no great rivers, but every harbour stood right upon the sea, and how for the knowledge of each of these harbours even the life of a man was too short. There was no other country, he said, which was thus held and embraced by the mastery of the Atlantic tide. For the patient Dutch have their towns inland upon broad rivers and ships sail up to quays between houses or between green fields ; and the Spaniards and the French (he said) are, for half their nature and tradition, taught by a tideless sea, but we all around have the tide everywhere, and with the tide there comes to character salt and variety, adventure, peril, and change. " But this," I said, " is truer of the Irish." He answered : " Yes, but I am talking of my own soil." Then when he had been silent for a little while he began talking of the roads, which fitted into the folds of the hills, and of the low, long window panes of men's homes, of the deep thatch which covered them, and of that savour of fullness and inheritance which lay fruitfully over all the land. It gave him the pleasure to talk of these things which it gives men who know particular wines to talk of those wines, or men who have enjoyed some great risk together to talk together of their dangers overcome. It gave him the same pleasure to talk of England and of his corner of England that it gives some vener- able people sometimes to talk of those whom they have loved in youth, or that it gives the true poets to mouth the lines of their immortal peers. It was a satisfaction to hear him say the things he said, be- cause one knew that as he said them his soul was filled. THE LITTLE OLD MAN 8i He spoke also of horses and of the birds native to our Downs, but not of pheasants, which he hated and would not speak to me about at cdl. He spoke of dogs, and told me how the dogs of one countryside were the fruits of it, just as its climate and its con- tours were ; notably the spaniel, which was designed or bred by the mighty power of Amberley Wildbrook, which breeds all watery things. He showed me how the plover went with the waste flats of Arun and of Adur and of Ouse, and he showed me why the sheep were white and why they bunched together in a herd. " Because," he said, " the chalk pits and the clouds behind the Down are wide patches of white ; so must the sheep be also." For a little he would have told me that the very names of places, nay, the religion itself, were grown right out of the sacred earth which was our Mother. These truths and many more I should have learned from him, these extravagances and some few others I should have whimsically heard, had I not (since I was young) attempted argument and said to him : " But all these things change, and what we love so much is, after all, only what we have known in our short time, and it is our souls within that lend divinity to any place, for, save within the soul, all is subject to time." He shook his head determinedly and like one who knows. He did assure me that in a subtle mastering manner the land that bore us made us ourselves, and was the major and the dominant power which moulded, as with firm hands, the clay of our being and which designed and gave us, and continued in us, all the form in which we are. " You cannot tell this," I said, " and neither can I ; it is all guesswork to the brevity of man." " You are wrong," he answered quietly. " I have watched these things for quite three thousand years." And before I had time to gasp at that word he bad disappeared. A CROSSING OF THE HILLS ^ WHEN it was nearly noon my companion said to me : " By what sign or track do you propose to cross the mountains ? " For the mountains here seem higher than any of the highest clouds : the valley beneath them is broad and full of fields : beyond, a long day off, stands in a huge white wall the Sierra del Cadi. Yet we must cross these hills if ever we were to see the secluded and little-known Andorrans. For the Andorrans live in a sort of cup fenced in on every side by the Pyrenees ; it was on this account that my companion asked me how I would cross over to their land and by what sign I should find my way. When I had thought a little I answered : " By none. I propose to go right up at them, and over unless I find some accident by which I am debarred." " Why, then," said he, " let us strike up at once, walking steeply until we come into a new country." This advice was good, and so, though we had no longer any path, and though a mist fell upon us, we began walking upwards, and it was like going up a moor in the West Riding, except that it went on and on and on, hour after hour, and was so steep that now and then one had to use one's hands. The mist was all around us ; it made a complete silence, and it drifted in the oddest way, making wisps of vapour quite close to our faces. Nor had we any * From On Everything. 82 A CROSSING OF THE HILLS 83 guide except the steepness of the hill. For it is a rule when you are caught in a storm or mist upon the hills, if you are going up, to go the steepest way, and though in such a fog this often took us over a knoll which we had to descend again, yet on the whole it proved a very good rule. It was perhaps the middle of the after- noon, we had been climbing some five hours, we had ascended some six thousand or seven thousand feet, when to our vast astonishment we stumbled upon a sort of road. It must here be explained why we were astonished. The way we had come led nowhere ; there were no houses and no men. The Andorrans whom we were about to visit have no communication northward with the outer world except a thin wire leading over the hills, by which those who wish to telephone to them can do so ; and of all places in Europe, Andorra is the place out of which men least desire to get and to which men least desire to go. It is like that place beyond Death of which people say that it gives com- plete satisfaction and from which certainly no one makes any effort to escape, and yet to which no one is very anxious to go. When, therefore, we came to this road, beginning suddenly half way up a bare mountain and appearing unexplained through the mist, we were astonished. It was embanked and entrenched and levelled as would be any great French military road near the frontier fortresses. There was a little runnel running underneath the road, conveying a mountain stream ; it was arched with great care, and the arch was made of good hewn stone well smoothed. But when we came right on to this road we found something more astonishing still : we found that it was but the simulacrum or ghost of a road. It was not metalled ; it was but the plan or trace or idea of a road. No horses had ever trod its soft earth, no wheels had ever made a rut in it. It had not been used at all. Grass covered it. The explanation of this astonishing sight we did not receive until we had spoken in their 84 A PICKED COMPANY own tongue the next day to the imperturbable Andorrans. It was as though a school of engineers had been turned on here for fun, to practise the designing of a road in a place where land was valueless, upon the very summit of the world. We two men, however, reasoned thus (and reasoned rightly as it turned out) : " The tall and silent Andorrans in a fit of energy must have begun this road, though later in another fit they abandoned it. Therefore it will lead towards their country." And as we were very tired of walking up a steep which had now lasted for so many hours, we deter- mined to follow the large zigzags of this unknown and magic half-road, and so we did. It was the oddest sensation in the world walking in the mist a mile and more above the habitations of men, upon unmetalled, common earth which yet had the exact shape of pavements, cuttings, and embank- ments upon either side, with no sort of clue as to where it led or as to why men began to make it, and still less of an argument as to why they had ceased. It went up and up in great long turns and z's upon the face of the mountain, until at last it grew less steep ; the mist grew colder, and after a long fiat I thought the Jand began to fall a little, and I said to my companion : " We are over the watershed, and beneath us, miles beneath us, are the Andorrans." When by the continuance of the fall of the land we were certain of this we took off our hats, in spite of the fog which still hung around us very wet and very cold and quite silent, and expected any moment a revelation. We were not disappointed. Indeed, this attitude of the mind is never disappointed. Without a moment's warning the air all round us turned quite briglil and warm, a strong gust blew through the A CROSSING OF THE HILLS 85 whirling vapour, and we saw through the veil of it the image of the sun. In a moment his full disc and warmth was on us. The clouds were torn up above us ; the air was immediately quite clear, and we saw before us, stamped suddenly upon the sight, a hundred miles of the Pyrenees. They say that everything is in the mind. If that be true, then he and I saw in that moment a country which was never yet on earth, for it was a country which our minds had not yet conceived to be possible, and it was as new as though we had seen it after the disembodiment of the soul. The evening sun from over Spain shone warm and low, and every conceivable colour of the purples and the browns filled up the mountain tangle, so that the marvel appeai'ed as though it had been painted care- fully in a minute way by a man's hand ; but the colours were filled with light, and so to fill colour with light is what art can never do. The main range ran out upon either side, and the foot-hills in long series of peaks and ridges fell beneath it, until, beyond, in what might have been sky or might have been earth, was the haze of the plains of Ebro. " It is no wonder," said I to my companion, " that the Andorrans jealousl}^ preserve their land and have refused to complete this road." When I had said that we went down the mountain- side. The lower our steps fell the more we found the wealth and the happiness of men. At last walls and ploughed land appeared. The fields grew deep, the trees more sturdy, and under the shelter of peaks, with which we had just been acquainted, but which after an hour or so of descent seemed hopelessly above us, ran rivers which were already tamed and put to a use. One could see mills standing upon them. So we went down and down. There is no rejuvenescence like this entry into Andorra, and there is no other experience of the same sort, not even the finding of spring land after a month 86 A PICKED COMPANY of winter sea : that vision of brilliant fields coming down to meet one after the endless grey waste of the sea. It was, I tell you again, a country completely new, and it might have been of another world, much better than our own. So we came at last to the level of the valley, and the first thing we saw was a pig, and the second was a child, and the third was a woman. The pig ran at us : for he was lean. The child at first smiled at us because we were human beings, and then, divining that we were fiends who had violated his sacred home began to cry. The woman drove the pig from us and took in the child, and in great loneliness and very sad to be so received we went until we should find men and citizens, and these^ we found of our own size, upstanding and very dignified, and recognized them at once to be of the wealthy and reserved Andorrans. It was clear by their faces that the lingua franca was well known to them, so I said to the first in this universal tongue : " Sir, what is the name of this village ? " And he rephed : " It is Saldeu." But this he said in his own language, which is somewhat more difficult to understand than the lingua franca. " I take it, therefore," said I, " that I am in the famous country of Andorra." To which he replied : " You are not many miles from the very town itself : you approach Andorra 'the Old.'" The meaning of this I did not at first exactly under- stand, but as we went on, the sun having now set, I said to my companion: "Were not those epithets right which we attached to the Andorrans in our fancy before we attempted these enormous hills ? Were we not right to call them the smiling and the tall Andorrans ? " " You are right," he answered to me, thinking care- fully over every word that he said. " To call them A CROSSING OF THE HILLS 87 the secluded and the honourable Andorrans is to describe them in a few words." We then continued our way down the darkening valley, whistling little English songs. ON A GREAT WIND^ IT is an old dispute among men, or rather a dispute as old as mankind, whether Will be a cause of things or no ; nor is there anything novel in these moderns who affirm that Will is nothing to the matter, save their ignorant belief that their alhrmation is new. The intelligent process whereby I know that Will not seems but is, and can alone be truly and ultimately a cause, is fed with stuff and strengthens sacrament- ally as it were, whenever I meet, and am made the companion of, a great wind. It is not that this lively creature of God is indeed perfected with a soul ; tfiis it would be superstition to believe. It has no more a person than any other of its material feUows, but in its vagary of way, in the largeness of its apparent freedom, in its rush of purpose, it seems to mirror the action of mighty spirit. When a great wind comes roaring over the eastern flats towards the North Sea, driving over the Fens and the Wringland, it is like something of this island that must go out and wrestle with the water, or play with it in a game or a battle ; and when, upon the western shores, the clouds come bowling up from the horizon, messengers, outriders, or comrades of a gale, it is something of the sea determined to possess the land. The rising and falling of such power, its hesita- tions, its renewed violence, its fatigue and final repose — all these arch symbols of a mind ; but more than * From rirst and Last. ON A GREAT WIND 89 all the rest, its exultation ! It is the shouting and the hurrahing of the wind that suits a man. Note you, we have not many friends. The older we grow and the better we can sift mankind, the fewer friends we count, although man lives by friendship. But a great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good-fellowship ; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. If there is cruelty in the sea, and terror in high places, and malice lurking in profound darkness, there is no one of these qualities in the wind, but only power. Here is strength too full for such negations as cruelty, as malice, or as fear ; and that strength in a solemn manner proves and tests health in our own souls. For with terror (of the sort I mean — terror of the abyss or panic at remembered pain, and in general, a losing grip of the succours of the mind), and with malice, and with cruelty, and with all the forms of that evil which lies in wait for men, there is the savour of disease. It is an error to think of such things as power set up in equality against justice and right living. We were not made for them, but rather for influences large and soundly poised ; we are not sub- ject to them but to other powers that can always enhven and relieve. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as thovigh he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are dsLys of innumer- able sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them ; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit 90 A PICKED COMPANY of which men in companionship are at their noblest. It is pretended sometimes (less often perhaps now than a dozen years ago) that certain ancient pursuits congenial to man will be lost to him under his new necessities ; thus men sometimes talk foolishly of horses being no longer ridden, houses no longer built of wholesome wood and stone, but of metal ; meat no more roasted, but only baked ; and even of stomachs grown too weak for wine. There is a fashion of say- ing these things, and much other nastiness. Such talk is (thank God !) mere foUy ; for man will always at last tend to his end, which is happiness, and he will remember again to do all those things which serve that end. So it is with the uses of the wind, and especially the using of the wind with sails. No man has known the wind by any of its names who has not sailed his own boat and felt life in the tiller. Then it is that a man has most to do with the wind, plays with it, coaxes or refuses it, is wary of it all along ; yields when he must yield, but comes up and pits himself again against its violence ; trains it, harnesses it, calls it if it fails him, denounces it if it will try to be too strong, and in every manner con- ceivable handles this glorious pla57mate. As for those who say that men did but use the wind as an instrument for crossing the sea, and that sails were mere machines to them, either they have never sailed or they were quite unworthy of sailing. It is not an accident that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into their creation, and they expressed him very well ; his cunning, and his mastery, and his adventurous heart. For the wind is in nothing more capitally our friend than in this, that it has been, since men were men, their ally in the seeking of the unknown and in their divine thirst for travel which, in its several aspects — pilgrimage, conquest, discovery, and, in general, ON A GREAT WIND 91 enlargement — is one prime way whereby man fills himself with being, I love to think of those Norwegian men who set out eagerly before the north-east wind when it came down from their mountains in the month of March like a god of great stature to impel them to the west. They pushed their Long Keels out upon the rollers, grind- ing the shingle of the beach at the fjord-head. They ran down the calm narrows, they breasted and they met the open sea. Then for days and days they drove under this master of theirs and high friend, having the wind for a sort of captain, and looking always out to the sea line to find what they could find. It was the springtime ; and men feel the spring upon the sea even more surely than they feel it upon the land. They were men whose eyes, pale with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable good sight which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change and that comes after the long emptiness of sea days like a vision after the sameness of our common lives. To them the land they so discovered was wholly new. We have no cause to regret the youth of the world, if indeed the world were ever young. When we imagine in our cities that the wind no longer calls us to such things, it is only our reading that blinds us, and the picture of satiety which our reading breeds is wholly false. Any man to-day may go out and take his pleasure with the wind upon the high seas. He also wiU make his landfalls to-day, or in a thousand years ; and the sight is always the same, and the appetite for such discoveries is wholly satisfied even though he be only sailing, as I have sailed, over seas that he has known from childhood, and come upon an island far away, mapped and well known, and visited for the hundredth time. ON A WINGED HORSE AND THE EXILE WHO RODE HIM^ IT so happened that one day I was riding my horse Monster in the Berkshire Hills right up above that White Horse which was dug they say by this man and by that man, but no one knows by whom ; for I was seeing England, a delightful pastime, but a some- what anxious one if one is riding a horse. For if one is alone one can sleep where one chooses and walk at one's ease, and eat what God sends one and spend what one has ; but when one is responsible for any other being (especially a horse) there come in a thousand farradiddles, for of an3Athing that walks on earth, man (not woman — I use the word in the restricted sense) is the freest and the most unhappy. Well, then, I was riding my horse and exploring the island of England, going eastward of a summer after- noon, and I had so ridden along the ridge of the hills for some miles when I came, as chance would have it, upon a very extraordinary being. He was a man like myself, but his horse, which was grazing by his side, and from time to time snorting in a proud manner, was quite unlike my own. This horse had all the strength of the horses of Normandy, all the lightness, grace, and subtlety of the horses of Barbary, all the conscious value of the horses that race for rich men, all the humour of old horses that have seen the world and will be disturbed by nothing, ^ From On Nothing. 92 ON A WINGED HORSE 93 and all the valour of young horses who have their troubles before them, and race round in paddocks attempting to defeat the passing trains. I say all these things were in the horse, and expressed by various movements of his body, but the list of these qualities is but a hint of the way in which he bore him- self ; for it was quite clearly apparent as I came nearer and nearer that the horse before me was very different (as perhaps was the man) from the beings that inhabit this island. While he was different in all qualities that I have mentioned — or rather in their combination — he also differed physically from most horses that we know, in this, that from his sides and clapt along them in repose was growing a pair of very fine sedate and noble wings. So habited, with such an expression and with such gestures of his limbs, he browsed upon the grass of Berkshire, which, if you except the grass of Sussex and the grass perhaps of Hampshire, is the sweetest grass in the world. I speak of the chalk grass ; as for the grass of the valleys, I would not eat it in a salad, let alone give it to a beast. The man who was the companion rather than the master of this charming animal sat upon a lump of turf singing gently to himself and looking over the plain of Central England, the plain of the Upper Thames, which men may see from these hiUs. He looked at it with a mixture of curiosity, of memory, and of desire which was very interesting but also a little pathetic to watch. And as he looked at it he went on crooning his little song until he saw me, when with great courtesy he ceased and asked me in the English language whether I did not desire companion- ship. I answered him that certainly I did, though not more than was commonly the case with mc, for I told him that I had had companionship in several towns and inns during the past few days, and that I had had but a few hours' bout of silence and of loneliness. " Which period," I added, " is not more than 94 A PICKED COMPANY sufficient for a man of my years, though I confess that in early youth I should have found it intolerable." When I had said this he nodded gravely, and I in my turn began to wonder of what age he might be, for his eyes and his whole manner were young, but there was a certain knowledge and gravity in his expression and in the posture of his body which in another might have betrayed middle age. He wore no hat, but a great quantity of his own hair, which was blown about by the light summer wind upon these heights. As he did not reply to me, I asked him a further question, and said : "I see you are gazing upon the plain. Have you interests or memories in that view ? I ask you with- out compunction so delicate a question because it is as open to you to lie as it was to me when I lied to them only yesterday morning, a little beyond Wayland's Cave, telling them that I had come to make sure of the spot where St. George conquered the Dragon, though, in truth, I had come for no such purpose, and telling them that my name was so-and-so, whereas it was nothing of the kind." He brightened up at this and said : " You are quite right in telling me that I am free to lie if I choose, and I would be very happy to lie to you if there were any purpose in so doing, but there is none. I gaze upon this plain with the memories that are common to all men when they gaze upon a landscape in which they have had a part in the years recently gone by. That is, the plain fills me with a sort of longing, and yet I cannot say that the plain has treated me unjustly. I have no complaint against it. God bless the plain ! " After thinking a few moments, he added : " I am fond of Wantage ; Wallingford has done me no harm ; Oxford gave me many companions ; I was not drowned at Dorchester beyond the Little Hills ; and the best of men gave me a true farewell in Faringdon yonder. Moreover, Cumnor is my friend. Never- theless, I like to indulge in a sort of sadness when I look over this plain." ON A WINGED HORSE 95 I then asked him whither he would go next. He answered : " My horse flies, and I am therefore not bound to any particular track or goal, especially in these light airs of summer when all the heaven is open to me." As he said this I looked at his mount and noticed that when he shook his skin, as horses will do in the hot weather to rid themselves of flies, he also passed a little tremor through his wings, which were large and goose-grey, and, spreading gently under that effort, seemed to give him coolness. " You have," said I, " a remarkable horse." At this word he brightened up as men do when something is spoken of that interests them nearly, and he answered : " Indeed, I have ! and I am very glad you like him. There is no such other horse to my knowledge in England, though I have heard that some still linger in Ireland and in France, and that a few foals of the breed have been dropped of late years in Italy, but I have not seen them." "How did you come by this horse? " said I; "if it is not trespassing upon your courtesy to ask you so delicate a question." " Not at aU ; not at all," he answered. " This kind of horse runs wild upon the heaths of morning and can be caught only by Exiles : and I am one. . . . Moreover, if you had come three or four years later than you have I should have been able to give you an answer in rhyme, but I am sorry to say that a pesti- lent stricture of the imagination, or rather, of the positive faculty, so constrains me that I have not yet finished the poem I have been writing with regard to the discovery and service of this beast." " I have a great sympathy with you," I answered, " I have been at the ballade of Val-ci-Dunes since the year 1897 and I have not yet completed "Well, then," he said, " you will be patient with me when I tell you that I have but three verses com- 96 A PICKED COMPANY pleted." Whereupon without further invitation he sang in a loud and clear voice the following verse : " It's ten years ago to-day you turned me out of doors To cut my feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores And I thought about the all in all. ..." " The ' all in all,' " I said, " is weak." He was immensely pleased with this, and, standing up, seized me by the hand. " I know you now," he said, " for a man who does indeed write verse. I have done everything I could with those three syllables, and by the grace of heaven I shall get them right in time. Anyhow, they are the stop-gap of the moment, and with your leave I shall reserve them, for I do not wish to put words like ' tumty turn ' into the middle of my verse." I bowed to him and he proceeded : " And I thought about the all in all, and more than I could tell ; But I caught a horse to ride upon and rode him very well. He had flame behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side — A nd I ride ; and I ride ! " " Of how many verses do you intend this metrical composition to be ? " said I, with great interest. " I have sketched out thirteen," said he firmly, " but I confess that the next ten are so embryonic in this year 1907 that I cannot sing them in public." He hesitated a moment, then added : " They have many fine single lines, but there is as yet no com- position or unity about them." And as he recited the words " composition " and " unity " he waved his hand about like a man sketching a cartoon. " Give me, then," said I, " at any rate the last two." For I had rapidly calculated how many would remain of his scheme. He was indeed pleased to be so challenged, and con- tinued to sing : ON A WINGED HORSE 97 "And once atop of Lambourne Down, towards the hill of Clere, I saw the host of heaven in rank and Michael with his spear And Ttirpin, out of Gascovy, and Charlemagne the lord, And Roland of the Marches with his hand upon his sword For fear he should have need of it ; — and forty more beside I And I ride : and I ride I For yoii that took the all in all ..." " That again is weak," I murmured. " You are quite right," he said gravely, ^' I will rub it out." Then he went on : " For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three : A loud Voice for siv.ging, and keen Eyes to see, Andaspouting Well of Joy within that never yet was dried ! And I ride ! ' ' He sang this last in so fierce and so exultant a manner that I was impressed more than I cared to say, but not more than I cared to show. As for him, he cared little whether I was impressed or not ; he was exalted and detached from the world. There were no stirrups upon the beast. He vaulted upon it, and said as he did so : " You have put me into the mood, and I must get away ! " And though the words were abrupt, he did speak them with such a grace that I will always remember them ! He then touched the flanks of his horse with his heels (on which there were no spurs) and at once, beating the air powerfully twice or thrice with its wings, it spurned the turf of Berkshire and made out southward and upward into the sunlit air, a pleasing and a glorious sight. In a very little while they had dwindled to a point of light and were soon mixed with the sky. But I went on more lonely along the crest of the hills, very human, riding my horse Monster, a mortal horse — I had almost written a human horse. My mind was full of silence. 98 A PICKED COMPANY Some of those to whom I have related this adventure criticize it by the method of questions and of cross- examination proving that it could not have happened precisely where it did ; showing that I left the vale so late in the afternoon that I could not have found this man and his mount at the hour I say I did, and making all manner of comments upon the exact way in which the feathers (which they say are those of a bird) grew out of the hide of the horse, and so forth. There are no witnesses of the matter, and I go lonely, for many people will not believe, and those who do beheve believe too much. ON REST* THERE was a priest once who preached a sermon to the text of " Abba, Father." On that text one might preach anjrthing, but the matter that he chose was " Rest." He was not yet in middle age, and those who heard him were not yet even young. They could not understand at all the moment of his ardent speech, and even the older men, seeing him to be but in the central part of life, wondered that he should speak so. His eyes were illuminated by the vision of something distant ; his heart was not ill at ease, but, as it were, fixedly expectant, and he preached from his little pulpit in that little chapel of the Downs, with rising and deeper powers of the voice, so that he shook the air ; yet all this energy was but the praise or the demand for the surcease of energy, and all this sound was but the demand for silence. It is a thing, I say, incomprehensible to the young, but gradually comprehended as the years go droning by, that in all things (and in proportion to the intensity of the life of each) there comes this appetite for dis- solution and for repose : I do not mean that repose beyond which further effort is demanded, but some- thing final and supreme. This priest, a year or so after he had appealed with his sermon before that little country audience in the emptiness of the Downs, died. He had that which he desired, Rest. But what is it ? What is the nature of this thing ? * From On Everything. 99 100 A PICKED COMPANY Note you how great soldiers, when their long cam- paigns are done, are indifferent to further wars, and look largely upon the nature of fighting men, their ob- jects, their failures, their victories, their rallying, their momentary cheers. Not that they grow indifferent to that great trade which is the chief business of a State, the defence or the extension of the common weal ; but that after so much expense of all the senses our God gave them, a sort of charity and justice fills their minds. I have often remarked how men who had most lost and won, even in arms, would turn the leisured part of their lives to the study of the details of struggle, and seemed equally content to be describing the noble fortunes of an army, whether it were upon the crest of advancing victory, or in the agony of a surrender. This was because the writers had found Rest. And throughout the history of Letters — of Civilization, and of contemporary friends, one may say that in proportion to the largeness of their action is this largeness and security of vision at the end. Now, note another thing : that, when we speak of an end, by that very word we mean two things. For first we mean the cessation of Form, and perhaps of Idea ; but also we mean a goal, or object, to which the Form and the Idea perpetually tended, without which they would have had neither meaning nor existence, and in which they were at last fulfilled. Aristotle could give no summing up but this to all his philosophy, that there was a nature, not only of all, but of each, and that the end determined what that nature might be ; wliich is also what we Christians mean when we say that God made the world ; and great Rabelais, when his great books were ending, could but conclude that all things tended to their end. Tennyson also, before he died, having written for so many years a poetry which one must be excused in believing considerable, felt, as how many have felt it, the thrumming of the ebb tide when the sea calls back the feudal allegiance of the rivers. I know it upon ON REST loi Arun bar. The flood, when the sea heaves up and pours itself into the inland channels, bears itself creatively, and is like the nianhood of a man — first tentative, then gathering itself for action, then sweep- ing suddenly at the charge. It carries with it the wind from the open horizon, it determines suddenly, it spurs, and sweeps, and is victorious ; the current races ; the harbour is immediately full. But the ebb tide is of another kind. With a long, slow power, whose motive is at once downward steadily towards its authority and its obedience and desire, it pushes as with shoulders, home ; and for many hours the stream goes darkly, swiftly, and steadily. It is intent, direct, and level. It is a thing for evenings, and it is under an evening when there is little wind, that you may best observe the symbol thus presented by material things. For everything in nature has in it something sacramental, teaching the soul of man ; and nothing more possesses that high quality than the motion of a river when it meets the sea. The water at last hangs dully, the work is done ; and those who have permitted the lesson to instruct their minds are aware of consummation. Men living in cities have often wondered how it was that the men in the open who knew horses and the earth or ships and the salt water risk so much — and for what reward ? It is an error in the very question they ask, rather than in the logical puzzle they approach, which falsifies their wonder. There is no reward. To die in battle, to break one's neck at a hedge, to sink or to be swamped are not rewards. But action demands an end ; there is a fruit to things ; and everything we do (here at least, and within the bonds of time) may not exceed the little limits of a nature which it neither made nor acquired for itself, but was granted. Some say that old men fear death. It is the theme of the debased and the vulgar. It is not true. Those who have imperfectly served are ready enough ) those who have served more perfectly are glad — as 102 A PICKED COMPANY though there stood before them a natural transition and a condition of their being. So it says in a book " all good endings are but shining transitions." And, again, there is a sonnet which says : We will not whisper : we have found the place Of silence and the ancient halls of sleep And that which breathes alone throughout the deep The end and the beginning ; and the face Between the level brows of whose blind eyes Lie plenary contentment, full surcease Of violence, and the ultimate great peace Wherein we lose our human lullabies. Look up and tell the immeasurable height Between the vault of the world and your dear head ; That's Death, my little sister, and the Night That was our Mother beckons us to bed : Where large oblivion in her house is laid For us tired children now our games are played. Indeed, one might quote the poets (who are the teachers of mankind) indefinitely in this regard. They are all agreed. What did Sleep and Death to the body of Sarpedon ? They took it home. And every one who dies in all the Epics is better for the dying. Some complain of it afterwards I will admit ; but they are hard to please. Roland took it as the end of battle ; and there was a Scandinavian fellow caught on the north-east coast, I think, who in dying thanked God for all the joy he had had in his life — as you may have heard before. And St. Anthony of Assisi (not of Padua) said, " Welcome, little sister Death ! " as was his way. And one who stands right up above most men who write or speak said it was the only port after the tide-streams and bar-handling of this journey. So it is ; let us be off to the hills. The silence and the immensity that inhabit them are the simulacra of such things. HISTORY THE LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE^ THOSE who were to destroy the new society of the French, to rescue or to avenge the Queen, were now once more at hand and now ahuost arrived. Their way to Paris lay open but for two last perilous and endangered defences ; to the right the lines of Weissembourg, to the left Maubeuge. There are two avenues of approach westward into the heart of Gaul and two only. The great marches of the French eastward, which are the recurrent flood- tides of European history, pour up by every channel, cross the Alps at every pass, utilize the narrow gate of Belfort, the narrower gate of the Rhone, the gorge of the Meuse, the Cerdagne, the Somport, Roncesvalles. But in the ebb, when the outer peoples of Europe attempt invasion, two large ways alone satisfy that necessity at once for concentration and for a wide front which is essential to any attack upon a people permanently warlike.- These two ways pass, the one ^ From Marie Antoinette. * These words " concentration " and " a wide front " may seem self-contradictory. I mean by concentration a massed invasion, if you are to succeed against a military people ; and by " a wide front " the necessity for attacking such a people in several places at once, if you are to succeed. For a force marching by a single narrow gate (such as is the valley of the Meuse) is in peril of destruction if its opponents are used to war. 103 104 A PICKED COMPANY between the Vosges and the Ardennes, the other between the Ardennes and the sea. By the first of these have come hosts from Attila's to those of 1870 ; by the second, hosts from the Httle war-band of Clovis to the Alhes of 1815. Both avenues were involved in this balancing moment of '93 : the first, the passage by Lorraine, was still blocked by the defence of May- ence and the lines of Weissembourg ^ ; the second, the passage by the Low Countries, was all but won. Of the string of fortresses defending that passage, Mau- beuge was now almost the last, would soon be the very last, to stand. It was not upon Mayence and the lines of Weissem- bourg (though these to soldiers seemed of equal im- portance), it was upon the bare plains of the north that Paris strained its eyes in these perilous hot days — the long flat frontier of Hainault and of Flanders — and it is here that the reader must look for his background to the last agony of the Queen. The line of defence, stretched like a chain across that long flat frontier, was breaking down, had almost disappeared. Point after point upon the line had gone ; it held now by one point remaining, and the ruin of that was imminent : the Republicans were attentive, in a fever for the final crash, when the last pin-point upon which the defence was stretched should give way and the weight of the invaders should pour unresisted upon Paris. When that march began there would be nothing for those who had challenged the world but " to cover their faces and to die." Of what character is that north-eastern frontier of France and what in military terms was the nature of the blow which was about to fall ? It is a frontier drawn irregularly due south-east for a hundred miles, from the sea to the difficult highlands of Ardennes and the waste Fagne Land, As it runs 1 The lines of Weissembourg did not, of course, physically block the entry ; they lay on the flank of it : but until the army behind them could be dislodged it made impossible an advance by that way into Lorraine. LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 105 thus irregularly, it cuts arbitrarily through a belt of population which is one in creed, speech, and tradi- tion : there is therefore no moral obstacle present to the crossing of it, and to this moral facihty of passage is added the material facility that no evident gates or narrows constrain an invading army to particular entries. From the dead flat of the sea-coast the country rises slowly into little easy hills and slopes of some confusion, but not till that frontier reaches and abuts against the Ardennes does any obstacle mark it. It is traversed by a score of main roads suitable for a parallel advance, all excellent in surface and in bridges and other artifice ; it is thickly set with towns and villages to afford repose and supply. Lastly, it is the nearest point of attack to Paris. Once forced, ten days' rapid marching from that frontier brings the invader to the capital, and there is nothing between. Such advantages — which, it is said, tempt unstable brains in Berlin to-day — have rendered this line, when- ever some powerful enemy held its farther side, of supreme defensive importance to the French. Until the formation of the Belgian State it had been for centuries — from the battle of Bouvines at least — the front of national defence ; here the tradition of the seventeenth century and the genius of Vauban and his successors had established a network of strongholds, which formed the barrier now so nearly destroyed in this summer of '93. These fortresses ran along that frontier closely interdependent, every one a support to its neighbours, forming a narrowing wedge of strongholds, from where Dunkirk upon the sea was supported by Gravclines to where the whole system came to a point in the last fortress and camp of Maubeuge, close up against the impassable Ardennes. Maubeuge was the pivot of that door. Upon Mau- beuge the last effort of the invaders would be made. The rolhng up of the defending line of strongholds would proceed until Maubeuge alone should be left to io6 A PICKED COMPANY menace the advance of the invasion. Maubeuge once fallen, all the Revolution also fell. So much has been written to explain the failure of the Allies and the ultimate triumph of France in that struggle, that this prime truth — ^^the all-importance of Maubeuge— clear enough to the people of the time, has grown obscured.^ The long debates of the Allies, the policy of the Cabinet in London, the diversion upon Dunkirk, all these and many other matters are given a weight far beyond their due in the military problem of '93. The road from the base of the Allies to their objective in Paris lay right through the quad- rilateral of fortresses, Mons, Conde, Valenciennes, Maubeuge. Mons was theirs ; Conde, Valenciennes and Maubeuge blocked their advance at its outset. A deflection to the left was rendered impossible by the Ardennes. A deflection to the right, possible enough, added, for every degree of such deflection, an added peril to the communication of the advance, laying the flank of the communications open to attack from whatever French garrison might have been left un- captured. All these garrisons must be accounted for before Coburg could march on Paris. Mons, as I have said, was in Austrian hands and in Austrian territory ; Conde, nay, Valenciennes, might fall successively to the invader ; but so long as Maubeuge remained untaken the march upon Paris was blocked. There were not wanting at that moment critics who demanded an immediate march on the capital, especi- ally as the summer waxed, as the peril of the Queen increased, and as the immobility of the Allies gave time for the martial law of the Terror to do its work, and to raise its swarms of recruits from all the country- ^ The great authority of Jomini laid the foundation of this misconception, one which the reader might (perhaps errone- ously) find implied in Mr. Fortcscue's admirable account of this campaign ; but the truth is that it is impossible to accumulate detail — as a military historian is bound to do — especially where long cordons are opposed to each other, without danger of losing sight of the vital points of the line. LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 107 sides : these critics were in error ; Coburg at the head of the Austrian army was right. Poor as was the quality of the French troops opposed to him, and anarchic as was tlicir constantly changing command, to have left a place of refuge whither they could con- centrate and whence they could operate in a body upon his lengthening communications, as he pressed on to Paris through hostile country, would have been mad cavalry work, not generalship. Maubeuge with its entrenched camp, Maubeuge open to continual rein- forcement from all the French country that lay south and west of it, was essential to his final advance. That Maubeuge stood untaken transformed the war, and, in spite of every disturbing factor in the complex problem, it should be a fixed datum in history that the resistance of Maubeuge and the consequent charge at Wattignies decided '93 as surely as the German artillery at St. Privat decided 1870. Maubeuge was the hinge of all the campaign. Coburg, as the summer heightened, set out to pocket one by one the supports of that last position : he easily succeeded. In Paris a vague sense of doom filled all the leaders, but a fever of violent struggle as well. . . . The Queen in her prison saw once again (and shuddered at it) the dark face of Drouet and heard his threatening voice. All France had risen. There was civil war in the west and in the north. A Norman woman had murdered Marat. Mayence was strictly held all round about with the men of Marseilles raging with- in ; and as for the Barrier of Fortresses to the north, Coburg now held them in the hollow of his hand. A fortnight after the Dauphin had been taken from the Queen, the fortress of Conde fell ; it had fallen from lack of food. The Council of Maubeuge heard that news. Valenciennes would come next along the line — then, they ! They wrote to the Committee of io8 A PICKED COMPANY Public Safety a letter, which may still be read in the archives of the town, demanding provisions. None came. It is difficult to conceive the welter of the time : distracted orders flying here and there along the hundred miles of cordon that stretched from Ardennes to the channel : orders contradictory, unobeyed, or, if obeyed, fatal. Commands shifted and reshifted ; civihans from the Parliament carrying the power of life and death and muddhng half they did ; levies caught up at random, bewildered, surrendering, deserting ; recruits too numerous for the army to digest ; a lack of all things. No provisions entered Maubeuge. July dragged on, and Maubeuge could hear down the west wind the ceaseless booming of the guns round Valenciennes. Upon 26th July, Dubay, the Repre- sentative on mission for the Parliament, sent to and established in Maubeuge, heard an unusual silence. As the day drew on a dread rose in him. The guns round Valenciennes no longer boomed. Only rare shots from this point and from that were heard : perhaps it was the weather deceived him. But all next day the same damnable silence hung over the west. On the 30th he wrote to the Parliament : " We hear no firing from Valenciennes — but we are confident they cannot have surrendered." They had surrendered. So Valenciennes was gone 1 . . . Cond5 was gone. . . . Maubeuge alone remained, with the little outpost of Le Quesnoy to delay a moment its necessary investment and sure doom. The officer in command of Maubeuge awaited his orders. They came from Paris in two days. Their rhetoric was of a different kind from that in which Ministers who are gentlemen of breeding address the General Officers of their own society to-day. The Committee of Public Safety had written thus : " Valenciennes has fallen : you answer on your head for Maubeuge." LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 109 Far off in Germany, where that other second avenue of invasion was in dispute, the French in Maj^cnce had surrendered. So July ended, and immediately, upon the ist of August, the defiant decree was thrown at Europe that the Queen herself should be tried. So closely did that decision mix with the military moment that it was almost a military thing, and at half-past two on the morning of the 2nd the order reached her : she in turn was to go down the way so many had begun to tread. She showed no movement of the body or of the mind. Night had already brought her too many terrors. The two women were awakened. The decree of the Convention which ordered the transference of the Queen to the Conciergerie for her trial was read. She answered not a word, but dressed herself and made a little package of her clothes ; she embraced her daughter gently, and bade her regard IMadame Eliza- beth as her second mother ; then stood for a moment or two in the arms of that sister-in-law who answered her in whispers. She turned to go and did not look backward, but as she went out to get into the carriage which was to carry her across to the City, she struck her head violently against the low lintel of the door. They asked her if she was hurt, and she answered in the first and only words that she addressed to her captors that nothing more on earth could give her pain. The carriage travelled rapidly through the deserted streets of the night, the clattering of the mounted guard on either side of it. It was her one brief glimpse of the world between a prison and a prison. As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, there reached her those noises of a City which never cease, and which to prisoners in transition (to our gagged prison victims to-day as thej^ cross London from one Hell to another) are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of other men's living. These noises were the more alive and the more perpetual in this horrid August dark of '93 because a last agony was now risen no A PICKED COMPANY high upon the Revolution ; the news had been of defeats, of cities fallen, of Valenciennes itself sur- rendered : so that the next news might be the last. All night long men sat up in the wine-shops quarrel- ling on it ; even as her gaolers drove her by, she saw lights in dirty ground-floor windows and she heard from time to time snatches of marching songs. It was the invasion. II The Queen descended from her carriage. She was weak but erect. The close heat of the night and her sleeplessness and her fatigue had caused great beads of sweat to stand upon her forehead. Up river along the quays there had already showed, as she crossed the bridge on to the Island of the Cit6, a faint glimmer of dawn, but here in the courtyard of the prison all was still thick night. The gates of the Conciergerie opened rapidly and shut behind her. Her gaolers led the way down a long, low, and dark corridor, stiflingly close and warm, lit here and there with smoky candles. She heard the murmur of voices, and saw at the end of the passage a group of the police and of magistrates at the door of the little room that was to be her cell. She entered through the throng, saw the official papers signed at the miser- able little table, and heard the formal delivery of her person to the authorities of the prison ; then they left her, and in their place came in a kindly woman, the wife of the porter, and with her a j'oung girl, whose name she heard was Rosalie. The Queen sat down on the straw-bottomed chair and glanced round by the light of the candle beside her. It was a little low room, quite bare : damp walls, the paper of which, stamped with the royal fleur de lys, hung mildewed, rose from a yet damper floor of brick set herringbone-wise ; a small camp-bed covered with the finest linen alone relieved it, and a screen, some four feet high, between her and the door afforded LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE i ii some little shelter. Above her a smdl barred window gave upon the paving of the prison yard, for the cell was half underground. Here Custine — who had lost the North and was to be executed for the fall of Valen- ciennes — had been confined till his removal but a few hours before to make way for the Queen. Here is now the canteen of the prison. It was very late. The new day was quite broad and full, showing the extreme paleness of her face and her weary eyes. She stood upon a little stuff-covered hassock, hung her watch upon a nail, and began to undress, to sleep if she might sleep for a few hours. A servant of the turnkey's, the girl called Rosalie, timidly offered her help : the Queen put her gently aside, saying : " Since I have no maid, I have learnt to do all myself." They blew their candles out and left her to repose. On the fourth day, the 6th of August, they came again and took from her further things which a prisoner might not enjoy ; among them that little watch of hers in gold. She gave it to them. It was the little watch which she had worn when she had come in as a child to Compiigne on her way to the great marriage and to the throne. It was the last of her ornaments. A routine began and lasted unbroken almost tiU August ended. In that little low cell, more than half underground, dimly lit by the barred window that stood level with the flags outside, day succeeded day without insult, but without relief, and here at last her strait captivity began what the Temple hitherto could never do. Her spirit did not fail, but her body began to weaken, and in her attitude and gesture there had entered the appearance of despair. . . . Outside the Committee wondered whether their daring might not bear fruit, and whether, to save the Queen, the frontier might not be relieved. But no offer came from the Kings, and the hostage of the Republicans remained useless on their anxious hands. ... In Brussels Fersen heard and went wild, talked folly of an immediate march on Paris, cursed Coburg and all iia A PICKED COMPANY rules of war ; but Coburg was not to be moved — he knew his trade, and still prepared the sieges. She had no privacy. All day long a corporal of police and his man sat on guard in a corner of the room. All night her door, in spite of its two great bolts, was guarded. For the rest her wants were served. She asked for a special water from the neighbourhood of what had been Versailles, and she obtained it. They hired books for her. They per- mitted her good food and the daily expense upon it of a very wealthy woman.^ The porter's wife and the maid were very tender to her. They put flowers on her small oak table and they marketed at her desire. Her other service wounded her ; first an old woman who was useless, the tm^nkey's mother ; next a young virago, Havel by name, whose rudeness disturbed her. They would let her have no steel — not even the needles with which she was knitting for her little son, nor a knife to cut her food ; but more than all there sank into her the intolerable monotony, the fixed doubt, the utter isolation which made the place a tomb. The smallest incident moved her. She would watch her gaolers at their picquet and note the game, she would listen to distant music, she would greet with a dreadful reminiscence of her own the porter's little son, and cry over him a little and speak of the Dauphin — but this last scene was so vivid that at last they dared no longer bring the child. She kept for con- solation all this while, hidden in her bosom, a little yellow glove of her boy's, and in it a miniature of him and a lock of his hair. Meanwhile Maubeuge : — On the day which had seen the Queen enter the Conciergerie the Commander of Maubeuge issued the first warning of danger. The aged, the women and the children were invited to leave the shelter of the fortress and betake themselves to the open country. ^ What would come to a pound a day in our money, and at our scale of living — for the uncooked food alone. LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 113 That order was but partially obeyed — and still no provisions reached the town. Now that strong Valenciennes had fallen, the Allies had their business so thoroughly in hand that some debate arose among them whether the main garrison of Maubeuge should be assailed at once or whether the little outlying posts should be picked up first : the large and the small were equally certain to capitulate : there was ample leisure to choose. Coburg was for the main attack on Maubeuge — but he was not keen — the wretched little force at Cambrai would do to begin with — or even the handful in Le Quesnoy. It was simply a question of the order in which they should be plucked. The young Duke of York, acting as he was bidden to act from Westminster, proposed to divert some forty thousand men to the capture of Dunkirk ; for it must be remembered that all this war was a war of Conquest, that the frontier towns taken were to com- pensate the Allies after the Revolution had been destroyed, and that Dunkirk was historically a bastion of importance to England, and that all the advance was to end in the annexation of French land. This march upon Dunkirk has been condemned by most historians because it failed : had it succeeded none could have praised it too highly. Politically it was just in conception (for it gave Britain some balancing advantage against the Austrians their allies), and as a military project it was neither rash nor ill-planned. The force left with Coburg was ample for his task, and nothing could be easier than for the Austrian army alone to reduce (as it did reduce) the worthless garrisons opposed to it, while the English commander was doing English work upon the right .^ ^ Even as it was, and in spite of his failure before Dunkirk, the Duke of York had plenty of time to bring back his remnant and help Coburg after that failure, and to have joined him in front of Maubeuge before the French attempted the relief of that town. The English commander could easily have been present at Wattignies, and would probably or certainly have 114 A PICKED COMPANY The combined forces spent the close of the week after Valenciennes had fallen in driving off such of the French as were still in the open under Kilmain. A few days later forty-seven battalions, of whom a full seventh were English and Irish men, marched off under York for Dunkirk, while Coburg at his ease sat down before the little town of Le Ouesnoy, the last fortified support of Maubeuge upon the west. Upon the same day he brushed the French out of the wood of Mormal, the last natural obstacle which could pro- tect Maubeuge when Le Quesnoy should have fallen. It was the 17th of August — but already in Paris there had passed one of the chief accidents of History : an accident from which were to flow all the tactics of the Great War, ultimately the successes of Napoleon, and immediately the salvation of the Revolution : Lazare Carnot had been admitted to the Committee of Public Safety. In Paris the Queen endured that August : and, isolated from the world, she did not know what chances of war might imperil her through the fury of a defeated nation or might save her by the failure of the Terror and its martial law. As she thus waited alone and in silence the pressure upon the Republic grew. Lyons had risen when Marat died. Vendee was not defeated : before the month ended the English were in Toulon. As the hot days followed each other in their awful sameness she still declined : her loss of blood never ceased, her vigour dwindled. A doctor of great position, the surgeon Souberbielle,^ visited the cell prevented that miracle. But no one foresaw the miracle. Coburg did not ask York to come till the 7th of October. York did not march till the loth, and even tlien he thouglit he had the leisure to waste a week in covering forty miles ! ^ lie was famous for his operations for the stone, sat upon the Jury that condemned the Oueen, was summoned for his art to 'U'estminster Hospital, wondered in old age why the Restoration would not give his European fame a salaried post : thought it might be a fear of his infirmities of age : LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 115 and denounced its dampness for a danger : nothing was done. She lived on, knowing nothing of the world beyond and above those dirty walls, but vaguely she hoped or imagined an exchange and to be reunited with her children — to survive this unreal time and to find herself abroad again with living men. No change or interruption touched the long watch of her soul until, when she had already passed three weeks and more in nothingness, that inspector of police who had already befriended her in the Temple, Michonis, entered ; and a certain companion, spare and wild- eyed, was with him. It was a Wednesday — the last Wednesday in August ; the month had yet three days to run. These two men who so visited her were in league to help her, and fantastic fortune had put an official of the city at her disposal for escape. The whole scene was rapid — she had barely time to understand the prodigious opportunity. She noticed in the hand of Michonis's companion a bunch of pinks — perhaps she half recognized his face (indeed, he had fought in defence of the palace), she failed to take the flowers and he let them fall behind the stove — and the while Michonis was covering all by some official question or other. It was not a minute's work and they were gone : but in the flowers, when, after her bewilderment, she sought them, she found a note. Its contents offered her safety. Michonis (it ran), trusted as an official, would produce an order to transfer her person to some other prison ; in the pass- age he would permit her to fly. The note asked for a reply. She had no pen or pencil, but she found a plan for answering, for she took a pin and pricked out painfully danced high and vigorously before the committee of medical patronage to prove, at ninety, his unimpaired vivacity, vas refused any pubhc salary, and died — some years later — a still active but disappointed man, "fearing that his politics had had some secret effect in prejudicing the royal family against him." ii6 A PICKED COMPANY these words on a slip of paper : " I am watched ; I neither write nor speak ; I count on you ; I will come." The policeman of her guard — not the corporal — had been bought. "He took the pricked slip of paper from her and gave it to the porter's wife, her friend. Next day Michonis called for it, knew that the Queen was ready, laid all his plans, and on the Monday, by night, appeared at the door of the Conciergerie with his official order for the removal of the Queen, But even in these few hours there had been time for treason. The policeman had revealed the message to the authorities. The faces Michonis saw at the gate of the prison by the sentry's lamp when he came up that Monday night were not those he expected or knew. His plot was already in the hands of the Government and he was lost. Within, the Queen waited in an agony of silence for the sound of her deliverers ; the hours of the morning drew on and the summer dawn of the Tuesday broadened ; no steps had sounded on the stones of the passage ; everything had failed. Her deliverer suffered. She herself was closely examined and transferred to another cell where she must wait under more rigid compulsion for the end. No other human fortune ' came to Marie Antoinette from that day until, seven weeks later, she died. West and a little north of Maubeuge, but twenty miles away, the watchers a month and more before had heard the ceaseless guns round Valenciennes. Then had come the silence of the surrender. Now they heard much nearer, west and a little to the south, the loud fury of a new and neighbouring bombard- ment as the shot poured into Lc Quesnoy. Soon, as they knew, those gans would be trained on their own walls. Little Lc Quesnoy was the last of the line l>ut one, and they, in Maubeuge, the last of all. The * 1 reject the story of her Communion. LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 117 Monday, the first Monday in September, the Tuesday, the Wednesday, the Thursday, the Friday, all that week the garrison of Maubeuge listened to the endless sound which never faltered by day or by night, and they still wondered how long it might endure : there were but 6000 in the little place and their doom was so certain that their endurance seemed quite vain. Sunday and the guns never paused or weakened ; the second Monday came and they still raged — but on the ninth day when the marvel seemed to have grown permanent, on the Tuesday (it was the day that the Queen was thrust into her second and more rigorous imprisonment) again — as with Valen- ciennes — the ominous silence came : Le Quesnoy was treating, and Maubeuge now made ready for its end. The free troops to the south and east (two poor divisions) moved doubtfully towards the entrenched camp of the fortress — knowing well that they must in a few days be contained : there was no food : there were not even muskets for them all. Around them by detachments the French forces were being eaten up. The little garrison of Cambrai had marched out to relieve its neighbour — 6000 men, three-quarters of the infantry regulars, three squadrons, and a battery of guns. The Hungarians rode through that battery before it could unlimber, refused to accept surrender, broke the line and hacked and killed until a remnant got off at a run under the guns of Bouchain. Declaye, their general, survived : he was in Paris within forty-eight hours, tried within another forty-eight, and on the morrow beheaded. For a fortnight these contemptuous successes on the fringe of Coburg's army continued, and the main force meanwhile was gathering supplies, calling in detach- ments, organizing train, and making all ready for the last and decisive blow that should shatter Maubeuge. In Maubeuge they hurriedly and confusedly prepared : such grain as they could gather from neighbouring farms were seized, many of " the useless and the sus- pect " were expelled, the able-bodied civilians were ii8 A PICKED COMPANY set to dig, to entrench, and to complain, and over all this work was a man worthy of the place and the occasion, for, on a high morning, the 15th of September, but a day or two after the surrender of Le Quesnoy, there had galloped into Maubeuge a representative of the Parliament well chosen by the Terror to super- intend such an issue : he rode straight in the long stirrups of the cavalry with harsh, eccentric, and powerful clean face ; a young man, dark and short and square : it was Drouet. The two divisions hung nervously, the one east, the other west of the fortress, making a show to dispute the passage of the river against forces three times their own in number and indefinitely their superiors in training and every quality of arms : on the 28th ^ of September, at dawn, Coburg crossed where he chose both above and below the town ; of the French divisions one was swept, the other hunted, into the fortress — before noon the thing was done, and the French force — happy to have escaped with but a partial panic — ^was blocked and held. With the next day the strain began, for the Austrians drove the surrounding peasantry within the walls and in the same hour burnt the stores accumulated outside. On the third day the first of the horses within Mau- beuge was killed for food. Drouet, for all his high heart, doubted if the Republic could deliver them and knew the sudden extremity of the town. He imagined a bold thing. On the 2nd of October, the fourth day of the siege, he took a hundred dragoons — men of his own old arm — and set out across the Austrian lines by night : he designed a long ride to the Mouse itself and the send- ing of immediate news to the Committee of the hunger of Maubeuge : he feared lest those civilians in Paris should imagine that a week, ten days, a fortnight were all one to the beleaguered town, and lest they should frame their plan of relief upon the false hope of a long ^ Not, as Jomini says, the 29th. LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 119 siege. So he rode out — and the enemy heard the hoof -beats and caught him. They put that dark man in chains ; they caged him also and made him a show. In Brussels, Fersen, with a dreadful curiosity, went to peep at his face behind the iron bars : in Paris the woman whose chance of flight he had destroyed at Varennes sat and awaited her judges. Three days passed in Maubeuge and all the meat, salted and fresh, was sequestrated. The manuscripts in the monastery were torn up for cartridges : every- thing was needed. On the next day, the 6th of October, all hay and straw were commandeered. On the next, the 7th, a census of the food remaining showed, for over 30,000 adult men and all the women and children besides, barely 400 head, and of these more than three-quarters were small sheep in poor condition. Upon the loth such little grain as the town contained was seized by the Com- mandant. The next day the whole population was upon half rations and the townsmen were struggling with the soldiery. Upon the morrow again, the 12th, counsel was taken of the desperate need to advise the Government that the place was all but gone, and it was designed that by night such as might volunteer should bear the news or perish in crossing the lines. That evening, the evening of the 12th, after dark, Marie Antoinette was led out from her cell for that preliminary Interrogation which, in French procedure, precedes the public trial. They led her from her little cell, through the narrow passages, into a great empty hall. Two candles, the only lights in that echoing darkness, stood upon the table. She was in a deep ignorance of her position and of Europe. The silence of the room corresponded to the silence within her : its darkness to the complete loneli- ness of her heart. She did not know what were the fortunes of the French army, what advance, if any, had been made by their enemies — whom she stiU 120 A PICKED COMPANY regarded as her rescuers. She knew nothing of the last desperate risk upon the frontier which the Re- public ran ; she knew nothing of the steps by which she had been brought to this position, the demand in Parhament for her execution as the news from the front got worse and worse : the summoning of the Court : the formation of the Bench that was to try her. Least of all did she know that the extreme mad group whom Hebert led had gone to her little sickly son suggesting to him (probably believing what they suggested) nameless corruptions from her hand : to these they believed he had been witness, nay, himself a victim ; she did not know that to these horrors that group had caused the child's trembling signature to be affixed. . . . He had sat there swinging his legs in the air from the high chair in which they had placed him to question him : he had answered " Yes " to all they suggested ... he was her little son 1 She, im- prisoned far off from him, knew nothing of that hellish moment. She was utterly deserted. She saw nothing but the dark empty room and the two pale candles that shone upon the faces of the men who were soon to try her : they marked in relief the aquiline face of the chief judge Herman. The other faces were in darkness. Certain questions privately put to her were few and simple, a mere preliminary to the trial ; she answered them as simply in her own favour. Her dress was dark and poor. She sat between two policemen upon a bench in the vast black void of the unfurnished hall and answered, and, when she had answered, signed. She answered conventionally that she wished the country well, that she had never wished it ill ; she signed (as they told her to sign) under the title of the " widow of Capet." They named two barristers to defend her, Chauveau Lagarde and Trongon Ducour- dray, and she was led back to her cell and to her silence. Next day, the 13th, these lawyers were in- formed, and came to consult with her. LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 121 Upon the 13th, by night, twelve dragoons volun- teered to take news out of Maubeuge, a sergeant lead- ing them. They swam the Sambre and got clean away. They rode all night ; they rode by morning into Philippeville and begged that three cannon shots might be fired, for that was the signal by which Mau- beuge was to know that they had brought news of the hard straits of the city beyond the Austrian lines. They rode on without sleep to Givet, and there at last they heard that an army was on the march, straight for the relief of the siege. Carnot had gathered that army, bringing in the scattered and broken detachments from the right and the left, concentrating them upon Avesnes, until at last he had there to his hand 45,000 men. Carnot was there in Avesnes, and we have records of the ragged army, some of them fresh from defeats, most of them worthless, pouring in. There were those who had one shoe, there were those who had none ; they were armed in varying fashion ; they were wholly under-gunned. The boys straggled, marched, or drooped in, the gayer of them roaring marching songs, but the greater part disconsolate. With such material, in one way or another, Carnot designed to conquer. Maubeuge had been upon half rations since the beginning of the week, it might ask for terms in any hour, and between him and it stretched the long high line of wood wherein Coburg lay entrenched impregnably. The nominal command of the hosts so gathered was in the hands of Jourdan, a travelling draper who had volunteered in the American War, whom the Com- mittee of Public Safety had discovered, once more a draper, and to whom it had given first the army of the Ardennes, then this high post before Maubeuge. He was a man of simple round features and of easy mind ; he had but just been set at the head of the Army of the North : left to himself he would have lost it — and his head. But the true commander was not Jourdan, 123 A PICKED COMPANY it was Carnot. Carnot came to represent only the force of the Parliament of which he was a member and the force of the Committee of Public Safety of which he was the brain ; but once on the field he exceeded both these capacities and became, what he had always been, a soldier. His big and ugly, bulg- ing forehead with its lean v/isp of black hair hid the best brain and overhung the best eye for tactics of all those that preceded and prepared the final effect of Napoleon's armies. The great Carnot in Avesnes that night stood like a wrestler erect and ready, his arms free, his hands un- clenched, balancing to clutch the invader and to try the throw. He, with that inward vision of his, saw the whole plan of the struggle from south to north, and overlooked the territory of the French people as a mountain bird overlooks the plain. He knew the moment. He knew it not as a vague, intense, political fear, nor even as a thesis for the learned arms and for the staff, but as a visible and a real world : he saw the mountains and the rivers, the white threads of roads radiating from Paris to all the points of peril, of rebellion or of disaster ; he saw the armies in column upon them, the massed fronts, the guns. He saw the royal flag over Toulon and the English fleet in harbour there, he saw the Bush and the Marsh of Vendee still unconquered, he saw the resistance of Lyons (for he had no news of its surrender) ; above all he saw those two doors against which the invader leaned, which were now pushed so far ajar and which at any moment might burst open — ^the lines of Weissem- bourg ; and here, right to his hand, the entrench- ments that covered the last siege of the northern frontier. He saw reeling and nearly falling the body of the Republic that was his religion, and he saw that all the future, death or life, lay in Maubeuge. The Sunday night fell over Paris and over those long Flemish hills. The morrow was to see the beginning of two things : the trial of the Queen LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 123 and the opening of a battle which was to decide the fate of the French people. Ill Monday, the 14th of October : — The fate of the Queen and of the Republic had each come to a final and critical issue when the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris and over the pastures of the frontier. There the army lay to arms in the valley, with Coburg entrenched upon the ridge above them, and beyond him the last famine of Maubeuge : from dawn the French lines could hear, half-a-day's march to the northward, the regular boom of the bombardment. But Carnot was now come. In Paris, when it was broad day, the chief Court above the prison was prepared. The populace had crammed the side galleries of the great room and were forming a further throng, stand- ing in the space between the doors and the bar. The five Judges, Herman the chief, filed on to the Bench ; a little below them and on their right a jury of fifteen men were empanelled. It was on the courage, the conviction or the fanaticism of these that the result would turn. They presented, as they sat there awaiting the prisoner, a little model of the violent egalitarian mood which had now for a year and more driven the mihtary fury of the Republic. Among them would be seen the refined and somewhat degraded face of a noble who had sat in the earlier Parliaments and who had drifted as Orleans had drifted — but further than had Orleans. There also were the unmistakable eyes of precision which were those of an optician, a maker of instruments. There were, resting on the rail of the box, the firm hands of a great surgeon (Souberbielle). A few of the common people were mingled with these ; 124 A PICKED COMPANY contractors also, prosperous men, and master- carpenters. There was a hatter there, and a barber, a man who had made vioHns, and another who painted pictures for the rich. Of such elements was the body comprised which had now to determine so much in the history of Europe. Above them a presiding figure, Herman the judge, with his dark aquiline face, con- trolled them all. They looked all of them towards the door that led from the cells below, where two warders came upward through it, leading between them the Queen. She also as she entered saw new things. The silence and the darkness of her long imprisonment fell from her : the noise of the streets came in from the windows before her ; she heard the rumour and she saw the movement of the populace which — save for that brief midnight drive two months ago — had been quite cut off from her since last she had shrunk from the mob on the evening when she had heard the gate of the Temple bolted behind her carriage. After that hush which had been so dreadfully divided by evil upon evil, she came out suddenly into the sound of the city and into the general air. In that interval the names of months and of days, the mutual salutations of men, religion and the very habit of life had changed. In that interval also the nation had passed from the shock of arms to unimagined crimes, to a most un- stable victory, to a vision of defeat and perhaps of annihilation. France was astrain upon the edge of a final deliverance or of a final and irretrievable dis- aster. Its last fortress was all but fallen, all its resources were called out, all its men were under arms, over the fate of the frontier hung a dreadful still silence. In the very crisis of this final doubt and terror the Queen stood arraigned. The women lowered their knitting-needles and kept them still. The little knot of Commissioners sitting with Counsel for the State, the angry boys in the crowd who could remember wounds or the death of comrades, stretched forward to catch sight of her as she came up LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 125 the stairs between her guards : they were eager to note if there had been any change. She had preserved her carriage, which all who knew her had regarded since her childhood as the chief expression of her soul. She still moved with solemnity and with that exaggerated but unflinching poise of the head which, in the surroundings of Versailles, had seemed to some so queenly, to others so affected, which here, in her last hours, seemed to all, as she still preserved it, so defiant. For the rest she was not the same. Her glance seemed dull and full of weariness ; the constant loss of blood which she had suffered during those many weeks spent below ground had paled her so that the artificial, painted red of her cheeks was awful in that grey morning and her still ample hair was ashen and touched with white, save where some traces of its old auburn could be perhaps distinguished. She was in black. A little scarf of lace was laid with exactitude about her shoulders and her breast, and on her head she wore a great cap which a woman who loved her, the same who had served her in her cell, put on her as she went to her passion. The pure white of this ornament hung in great strings of lawn on either side, and round it and beneath it she had wound the crape of her widowhood. So dressed, and so standing at the bar, so watched in silence by so many eyes, she heard once more the new sound which yesterday she had first leanied to hate : the hard and nasal voice of Herman. He asked her formally her name. She answered in a voice which was no longer strong, but which was still clear and well heard in that complete silence : " Marie Antoinette of Austria, some thirty-eight years old, widow to Louis Capet the King of France." To the second formal question on the place of her first arrest, that : " It was in the place where the sittings of the Nationd Assembly were held." The clerk, a man of no great learning, wrote his 126 A PICKED COMPANY heading: "The 23rd day of the first month of the fourth year of Freedom," and when he had done this he noted her rephes, and Herman's short questions also : his bidding to the jury that they must be firm, to the prisoner that she must be attentive. Into the clerk's writing there crept, as there will into that of poor men, certain grievous errors of grammar which in an earlier (and a later) time would not have appeared in the record of the meanest Court trying a tramp for hunger ; but it was the Revolution and they were trying a Queen, so everything was strange ; and this clerk called himself Fabricius, which had a noble sound — but it was not his name. This clerk read the list of witnesses and the indict- ment out loud. When these formalities were over they brought a chair. The Queen sat down by leave of the Court and the trial began. She saw rising upon her right a new figure of a kind which she had not known in all her life up to the day when the door of the prison had shut her out from the noise and change of the world. It was a figure of the Terror, Fouquier Tinville. His eyes were steadfast, the skin of his face was brown, hard and strong ; he was a hired politician covered with the politician's outer mask of firmness. Within he was fuU of the politician's hesitation and nervous inconstancy. A genuine poverty and a politician's hunger for a salary had been satisfied by the post of Public Prosecutor. He earned that salary with zeal and with little discernment, and therefore, when the time came, he also was condemned to die. It was he now in this forenoon who opened against the Queen. His voice was harsh and mechanical : his speech was long, dull and violent : rhetorical with that scenic and cardboard rhetoric which is the official common- place of all tribunals. The Widow Capet was a Messa- lina ; she was a leech ; she was a Merovingian Tyrant ; she was a Medicis. She had held relations with the " Man called King " of Bohemia and LAST DAYS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 127 Hungary ; she had urged Capet on to all his crimes. She had sent millions to aid her family in their war against the French people. She had woven the horrid plot of the loth of August, which nothing but incredible valour had defeated. She was the main enemy which the new and angry Freedom for which he spoke had had to meet and to conquer. Apart from its wearisome declamation the accusa- tion was true ; save that — through no fault of her own, poor woman ! — she had not aided the foreign cause with gold, all the story was evident and publicly known. She sat as near this orator as is a nurse to a bedside. She heard him with her suffering and dis- dainful face quite fixed and unmoved, save at one point : the mention of her son. Fouquier Tin\dlle was sane : he saw the crass absurdity of Hebert's horrors, he barely touched upon them very hurriedly (and as the rapid and confused words escaped him, her lips twitched with pain), but even as he did so he knew he had given the defence a hold. It is held on principle in French Courts that an im- partial presentation of the truth cannot be obtained unless witnesses are heard in a chance sequence, not divided into friends and foes as with us, but each (such is the theory) telling what he believes to be the truth. Even in these political trials of the Terror (which were rather Courts-Martial or condemnations than trials) the rule was observed, and when Fouquier sat down the file of witnesses began. The parade was futile. For plain political facts known to the whole world no list of witnesses were needed, nor could their evidence be of the least avail. ]\Ioreovcr, that evidence was lacking. The witnesses defiled one after the other, each vaguer than the last, to prove (and failing to prove) things that were commonplaces to all Europe. Lr ng past midday the empty procession continued through the drc