LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS 
 
 T5AAC FOOT COLLECTION 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
A NUMBER 
 OF THINGS 
 
 BY DIXON SCOTT 
 
 "The world is so full of a number of things 
 Pm sure we should all be as happy as kings" 
 
 V 
 
 "... Then there are the essays. But 
 I find that these aren't to be done by 
 doggedness. One gets them red-hot: 
 they have to be hammered out in a 
 fury: that's their quality and claim." 
 Extract from a letter of Dixon Scott's. 
 
 T. N. FOULIS 
 LONDON & EDINBURGH 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS 
 
This work is published by 
 
 T. N. FOULIS 
 
 LONDON : 91 Great Russell Street, W.C. 
 
 EDINBURGH: 15 Frederick Street 
 
 BOSTON : 15 Beaconsfield Street 
 
 (Lt Roy Phillips, Agent) 
 
 And may also be ordered through the following 
 
 agencies, where the work may be examined 
 
 AUSTRALASIA : Heywoods Buildings, 
 
 Manchester Street, Christchurch 
 
 (C. J. Hicks) 
 
 CAPE COLONY : Markhams Buildings, Adderley 
 Street, Cape Town 
 
 (G. R. Mellor) 
 
 TORONTO : 25 Richmond Street West 
 (Oxford University Press) 
 
 First Edition published November 
 nineteen hundred and seventeen 
 
 Printed in Scotland by 
 R. & R. CLARK, LTD., Edinburgh 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ONE of the many books of Dixon Scott's that 
 were to be written when he came back after the 
 war was a book of essays. 'I've been systematis- 
 ing it lately and finishing some of the sketches 
 for it,' he wrote in the spring of 1913. In the 
 same letter he says, 'There are nature things 
 in it such as "The Winds," there are one or two 
 motor things, and there is "The Cloud" '(which 
 here appears as "The Shadow"). 
 
 Very little of the work was ever done, but 
 the motto, from Stevenson's Child's Garden 
 of Verses which I have put on the first page 
 and from which the title is taken, was chosen 
 by him for that other book. 
 
 Dixon Scott never came back from the war 
 he died of dysentery on a hospital ship at 
 Gallipoli on October 23rd, 1915 and this 
 book of his essays is not his book as he would 
 have made it. But his friends are all of one 
 mind, that it is well worth while getting together 
 the few essays that are left in a pocket volume 
 such as he himself always carried in his knap 
 sack when he went out in search of adventure 
 by the Mysterious Road or lost himself on the 
 lonely heights of the Lake District. 
 
 During the last few years of his life almost 
 the whole of Dixon Scott's work was in the form 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 of literary criticism. Much of the best of it is 
 to be found in his book Men of Letters, pub 
 lished a year ago by Messrs. Hodder & Stough- 
 ton. The earliest essays in the present book go 
 back almost to the beginning of his career as a 
 writer, and all of them belong to the six years 
 I9o6 r i9ii. "The Winds," "The Shadow," 
 and "An Apology for Hawthorn," appeared in 
 The Manchester Guardian \ "Winter, that 
 Rough Nurse," and "Motoring by Night," in 
 Country Life. "A Real River" has not, so far 
 as I can gather, been printed before. The 
 others all came out in The Liverpool Courier. 
 The work of selection was entrusted to me, 
 and the responsibility for the result is mine, 
 but I should like to say that his other friends 
 perhaps I need not mention them by name 
 have all given me their most cordial support 
 and assistance and, I hope I may add, their 
 approval. 
 
 BERTRAM SMITH 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE MYSTERIOUS ROAD page I 
 
 II. THE SHADOW 13 
 
 III. AN APOLOGY FOR HAW 
 
 THORN 21 
 
 IV. ASS! 31 
 V. MOTORING AT NIGHT 39 
 
 VI. WHITE MAGIC 51 
 
 VII. SILVER AND GOLD 57 
 
 VIII. THE DOODLE DOO 63 
 
 IX. A REAL RIVER 71 
 
 X. THE WINDS 85 
 
 XI. A WHITE CHRISTMAS 93 
 
 XII. DAWN ON BIDSTON HILL 105 
 
 XIII. THE GLAMOUR OF THE 
 
 TOWN 115 
 
 XIV. WINTER, THAT ROUGH 
 
 NURSE 129 
 
 XV. A FRAGMENT 141 
 
 XVI. A JUMP THROUGH JUNE 149 
 
 XVII. A WORD FOR THE WAITS 161 
 
 XVIII. THE OCTOBER RETRO 
 SPECT 167 
 XIX. THE VOICE OF THE 
 
 STORM 175 
 
 XX. THE LUSITANIA SEP 
 TEMBER 9TH, 1907 187 
 
I THE 
 
 MYSTERIOUS ROAD 
 
THE MYSTERIOUS ROAD 
 
 I 
 
 T sprang suddenly out, white and precipit- Like a splendid 
 ate, from before the skinless face of that cal1 
 
 raw northern hill upon which one looks 
 from the Castle above Llangollen; and it fled 
 away, in strong, level flight, towards the graci 
 ous foothills in the west. It streamed across the 
 highlands before me like a thin white flame; 
 and the sense of its speed, of its directness, of 
 its intent pursuit of some remote, magnificent 
 quest rang across the valley like a splendid call. 
 It fired the imagination and sent it beating hun 
 grily out into the unknown. It filled the mind 
 with the mystery of strange places; it stirred the 
 heart like music. It was a visible impetuous 
 song, that long white road; it was a noble irre 
 sistible saga. It flashed in white pursuit from 
 east to west, sounding an onset, entreating vol 
 unteers. 
 
 A little golden valley, set with one white 
 farm, cupped the empty air that lay between . . 
 A few moments of grey scree, a mild interval of 
 sward, and then, by the side of that lonely house, 
 I surrendered myself to the Road. Its goal was 
 now my goal. Its far mysterious purpose was 
 equally my own. 
 
 And now there ensued for a space that rare 
 exaltation of the blood which all those know, 
 and only those know, who have taken an un- 
 
 3 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The song known way in the light of a clean spring morn- 
 
 " ; Celtic 
 singer 
 
 of the Celtic ing My Road had all t he right road qualities. 
 
 It was lonely, it was broad, it was white, it was 
 crisp underfoot. It commanded a sweet far pro 
 spect. And great grey buttresses of naked rock 
 rose endlessly up on its right hand, and lifted 
 the sight to the noiseless tumult of the clouds. 
 Here and there, on the face of these crags, a 
 black clot of yew leaped out against the grey, 
 in a kind of velvet-footed passion; always, as 
 I stepped, sweet airs from the moorlands above 
 eagerly saluted me; and the way, for all its level- 
 ness, was thus made tonic with the sense of 
 high places. The blood burned with impulses, 
 and my mind ran back to the great song of the 
 old Celtic singer that somebody had chanted 
 for me, not many nights before, in a lost little 
 cottage in a fold of purple hills. And as I 
 marched along I turned it, for easier mouthing, 
 into a kind of rough-shod English verse: 
 
 I am Over-Lord of the Hills and the High Places, 
 And it is the chosen breath of the mountains that I seize 
 
 and change into words. 
 My bed is as near to the Stars as my labouring Minister, 
 
 the Earth, can lift me up, 
 And my thoughts move as far above the Stars as my eager 
 
 Heart can carry them. 
 
 I am Over-Lord of the Hills and the High Places. 
 The Streams make their Songs among the Clouds 
 But I I am higher than the Streams. 
 
THE MYSTERIOUS ROAD 
 
 The Eagle brings forth its brood on the dizzy pinnacles A House of 
 But I I look down upon its nesting-place; the utmost 
 
 And the Songs that I rear are swifter in flight than the graciousness 
 
 arrogant brood of the Eagle, 
 And the sound of my Songs is more piercingly sweet than 
 
 the sound of the Songs of the Streams. 
 
 And thus pleasantly engaged, whittling, so 
 to say, a blunt substitute for the old, keen-tipped 
 arrow, and fitting it, too, to a rude bow of 
 melody of my own devising, I came round 
 a great curve to the northward and so within 
 sight of a House of the utmost graciousness 
 and beauty. 
 
 Now with regard to this House there is a 
 curious experience which I might relate but will 
 not partly because it would take overlong, 
 partly because it may one day itself make an 
 article, and partly because you would no doubt 
 consider it a foolishness. Which, not imposs 
 ibly, it was. So I will simply say that the House 
 lay there like a ripe fruit among the rich branches 
 of the hills and woods; that the scented surf of 
 an orchard broke soundlessly upon its walls; 
 that there were golden meadows all about it, and 
 a stream moving across them to the sound of 
 music; that the music of the stream and the 
 endless tumult of the birds appeared to form 
 part of the building. It seemed fitted to form 
 an emblem for all that in the way of earthly 
 
 5 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The solitary happiness men most ardently desire; and as 
 r though it had been in fact a sentinel, a guardian 
 of choice passages, the road I followed, instantly 
 after passing it, seemed to shake itself more than 
 ever free from the touch of common interests. 
 Pressing northwards now, running ever more 
 deeply into the hills, it drew the limits of the 
 valley ever more privately about it. It drew the 
 wooded heights on the left so closely towards it 
 that, as they flung back their streaming manes of 
 larch and fir, and stormed magnificently up the 
 steep ascent of the sky, one listened to catch 
 their quick and passionate breathing. On the 
 right, those grave grey heights, curving in one 
 company, still moved in a long procession of 
 stupendous buttresses and groins. The inter 
 space was filled with a heavy silence that the 
 voices of the river and the birds served only to 
 complete, to fence inviolately about. There was 
 no sun, but one scarcely missed it; for the 
 meadows by the riverside filled the quietness 
 with gold. 
 
 And it was here, in the midst of this growing 
 intensity and unanimity, that I met the solitary 
 traveller I was to meet that day. 
 
 He was riding, and as though towards the 
 House I had but lately left, and his horse was 
 black and magnificent. He, too, was of good 
 6 
 
THE MYSTERIOUS ROAD 
 
 presence, with eyes of a fine zeal and courage. I To the World's 
 saluted him and he drew rein. I asked him where 
 the Road would lead me to. 
 
 And in that rapt and lonely place, beneath 
 the gravely marching heights, this black horse 
 man, leaning intently forward in his saddle, said : 
 
 * It will lead you to the World's End.' 
 
 And having said that he shook his horse into 
 a trot, and straightway disappeared among the 
 trees. 
 
 But here, unhappily for effectiveness, un 
 happily for mystery, unhappily for romance and 
 all the other great things that make life worth 
 living and journeys worth going and articles 
 worth writing and reading, here I must stop to 
 explain, lest you should be inclined to accuse 
 me of mere invention, that what the man spoke 
 was no wild phantasy but a piece of sober topo 
 graphical fact. The Road did indeed lead to 
 the 'World's End.' Take out your ordnance map 
 for North Wales and go northward a little from 
 Llangollen and there you will see it for your 
 selves, that astounding epithet, planked boldly 
 down among ' Lead Mines' and ' Slate Quarries' 
 and the like the name given to a cul-de-sac 
 among the hills, to a little cauldron at the end 
 of a blind valley from which there is no egress 
 save by rarely-used pathways among the rocks. 
 
 7 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The measure . . , But for me, who possessed no map of any 
 applntnfen't sort, the thing remained white magic. Had this 
 strange Horseman said ' The Hollow Land,' 
 or 'El Dorado,' or 'The Golden Age ' he could 
 scarcely have thrilled me more. ' The World's 
 End' it was like a tag from some old mad fairy 
 tale. It was like a scrap of sheer Morris. It was 
 a scrap of sheer Morris. Would there be a Well 
 at the World's End, I wondered. 
 
 And it fitted, of course, precisely to the tune 
 of the hour and the place. The queer, guarded 
 silence of the valley became a due preparatory 
 ritual, an overture, cleansing and solemnising. 
 The Road's own air of speed and momentous- 
 ness, this was now explained. The meaning of 
 its strength and remoteness its width, so great 
 that six horses might gallop abreast and never 
 a brier flaw their coats and yet so empty and 
 untrodden was now made manifest. The 
 presence of that great company of grey enig 
 matic rocks seemed now appropriate. This was 
 indeed no common road. It led to the World's 
 End. It led to signs and wonders. 
 
 The manner and measure of my disappoint 
 ment those will know who have traversed that 
 road themselves. I came in due course indeed 
 to a lonely house that seemed to promise some 
 what of romance; a lonely house lying inscrut- 
 8 
 
THE MYSTERIOUS ROAD 
 
 ably beside a lonely garden with a dim wood Golden swarms 
 behind. Antique quarterings of black oak were of P rimroses 
 crossed upon its breast, and these, and its white 
 ness, and the silence, and the empty grave of 
 the garden, made it look like a waiting corpse. 
 And yet I was willing to believe that at any in 
 stant the sightless windows might quiver into 
 life, that the old door might swing wonder 
 fully ajar, that one might pass out into the 
 breathless quiet who would bring the day its due 
 accomplishment. . . . But, although I waited 
 for a while, none appeared, and I left the black 
 trees looking sternly down upon the unfinished 
 ceremony. 
 
 And after that I came to a place where vast 
 constellations of primroses, twinkling galaxies 
 of primroses, ropes and dripping branches and 
 golden swarms of primroses, flashed exultantly 
 upon a vermeil firmament. Flung down superb 
 ly on a steeply sloping meadow, they rolled and 
 poured and span to the verge of the stream 
 an impetuous golden tributary. I sat in the 
 midst of them by the water's edge and (follow 
 ing in this the terms of an old recipe) plucked 
 a few of a certain size and succulence. These, 
 as I ate my lunch there, made a kind of salad, 
 vastly refreshing to the palate. In the cold 
 purity of the water, too, there lay a faint sweet- 
 
 9 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The place of ness, like the far-away song of a robin in a clear 
 winter's dawn. . . . But, although these things 
 were very pleasant, cold water and primroses 
 scarcely seemed to fulfil the Road's brave pro 
 mises. 
 
 And after that I was received into a swart 
 fir-wood. It was full of a dumb passion a re 
 morse that could find no tears seemed to live 
 in the heart of it a tragic unrest tragically 
 compelled to immobility. . . . But it was no 
 dumb passion that I sought; it was rather some 
 clear dispassionate utterance that would serve 
 to make all passions articulate for ever. 
 
 And after that I came to the place of rocks 
 which forms the uttermost limits of the valley. 
 Some of the rocks were livid, some were grey, 
 and some, in the bed of the stream, were of the 
 colour of ancient bloodstains. Thevoiceof the 
 stream echoed through all this place in a con 
 tinuous and proud lament. I sat there for a 
 space, and noted how that voice never varied 
 its utterance, and yet how, in spite of that, it 
 was now like the clamour of armed men, and 
 now like a human cry just passing into speech, 
 and nowlike two voices speaking together, the 
 one pleadingly, the other mockingly. . . . And 
 I noticed, too, how strangely easy it was to en 
 vision in their finest detail all the things that 
 10 
 
THE MYSTERIOUS ROAD 
 
 these noises summoned to the imagination: the A story 
 faces of the speakers, the aspect of the plumed * 
 horsemen. . . . But these were thoughts of the 
 kind that come by any stream-side. It was not 
 needful to journey to the World's End to re 
 ceive them. . . . 
 
 And so, in the end, I was obliged to own 
 myself defeated, to leave the place unsatisfied. 
 It was an unanswered enigma I told myself as I 
 climbed up the rocky pathway that led to the 
 upper world; it was an unfinished phase, a bro 
 ken song, an arrow turned in mid-flight. It was 
 a story without an ending, it was a portrait with 
 the face left blank. It was life itself. 
 
 I came out at last upon the edge of the vast 
 spaces of moorland up above. The heather rose 
 and fell inimitably; great winds strode splen 
 didly from sky to sky; and at the touch of those 
 lordly gales and the sight of those surging pros 
 pects all the doubts and hopes and tremors of 
 the valley below fell away like a coil of dreams. 
 ... All the youth of the world was in that noble 
 air. The strength and clarity as of an endless 
 dawn burned in the light that filled the proud, 
 free spaciousness. I tasted once more, in my 
 measure, that exaltation of high places of which 
 my old Poet had sung. To speak solemnly of 
 the World's End now, to think with any desire 
 
 ii 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The of it and its dim, strange wells, became an utter 
 Beginning fooii.^^^ For here, mother-naked among the 
 sweet immortal elements, terrible and magnifi 
 cent with promises and possibilities, there lay 
 outstretched before me the Beginning. 
 
II THE SHADOW 
 
THE SHADOW 
 
 WHEN I heard, the other morning, One of those 
 that D.'sdoctors had condemned lean - astri , n - 
 gent people 
 him to a desperate operation, I 
 
 hurried round through the rain to his cottage at 
 the end of the village, fumbling hopelessly as I 
 wentfor some apt commiserative formula. For 
 D. (who writes) is one of those lean, strained, 
 astringent people whom even pleasure seemsto 
 harass. 'There's a cloud to every silver lining,' 
 I once heard him say. What could one now say 
 to such a man that would serve to lighten the 
 darkness of this quite implacable cloud? I found 
 him in his little bookroom staring out at the 
 storm. An omen, I thought miserably; and led 
 off non-committally. 'Feel?' he cried in re 
 sponse, twirling round; 'why, I'm having the 
 timeofmylife! You've heard, of course? They 
 find they must knife me next week. And they 
 tell me it's ticklish a toss-up. And so but 
 there's the sun again! I mustn't miss that. 
 Come along!' 
 
 We stepped out onto his little scrap of lawn, 
 with its scrubby borders and its shabby-genteel 
 mound of rhododendrons in the middle. Up 
 turning his face so that the sunlight rained full 
 upon it, 'Lord ! That's good, ' he said; and seem 
 ed, with his half-opened lips and half-closed 
 eyes, actually to drain the warmth down. 'Feel? 
 
 15 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The full flavour Well, I fancy I feel rather like a worried man of 
 of things affairs wno nas ta k en a w hole day's holiday in 
 
 order to draw up his will. Tremendously leis 
 ured, you know, in the first place. Tremendous 
 ly undistracted. Not since I was breeched, I 
 suppose, have I enjoyed such freedom from 
 freedom. For everything's fixed, you see; there's 
 no choice. And so there's no pestering problem 
 none of those lacerating alternatives which 
 tear you to pieces when you're at liberty to 
 choose. The sheltered snugness of the narrow 
 road! Ah!' 
 
 He drew out his pipe and a little gleaming 
 filler, and sent the cartridge lovingly home. 
 'And then the holiday is such a Holy Day. 
 Your will-maker goes pottering about among his 
 possessions his old sticks of furniture and 
 so on, and somehow the least little bit of a 
 thing becomes queerly solemnified beatified 
 by the big Presences he can't help calling up. 
 It's pretty much that way with me. You simply 
 can't treat things casually when you're seeing 
 them for perhaps the lasttime. Positively when 
 I light this old pipe I feel a sort of acolyte kind 
 ling a censer. And, I say! That's the way to 
 get the full flavour of things ! Flowers and food 
 and all. You'll remember the irascible way I 
 used to regard grub? As well, as something 
 16 
 
THE SHADOW 
 
 "grubby," an earthly interruption a kind of The exotic 
 concession. But now! They want more beef on 
 my bones before they butcher me, and so I've fowl 
 got to feed heftily. But every mouthfuPs a joy ! 
 I breakfast with a sort of solemn glee. I want 
 to write odes to eggs-and-bacon. Genuinely! 
 Not theoretical stuff that turns a beefsteak into 
 a thing of beauty or makes a ham sandwich a fit 
 subject for a sonnet. I want the sonnet to be 
 about the sandwich. I want to celebrate the 
 beauty of the beef's own flavour. And why not? 
 It's not a bit more physical than the poetised 
 perfume of flowers. 
 
 ' Not that I don't get more out of flowers, too,' 
 he went on. 'Just look here! These rhododen 
 drons! Bourgeois I used to think 'em stodgy 
 and stuffy. But lounging here yesterday, in this 
 new mood of tranquil intensity, I discovered 
 they were really indescribably subtle and shy. 
 Like frail clusters of lilies, those white ones. As 
 recondite and exquisite as orchids, these com 
 monplace mauves. Vulgar? Obvious? Why, 
 violets are brazen hussies to 'em. And that's 
 typical. That's the kind of discovery I'm mak 
 ing all day long finding treasures I've been 
 too busy to see before. Hens, now. Do you 
 know, I never realised till now the exotic splen 
 dour of a barn-door fowl! Or the beauty of a 
 c 17 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 An echo of old bantam gemmy and fine as a brooch. Cows, 
 1 too. Have you ever cast an unpreoccupied 
 glance at a Hereford? It's a staggering experi 
 ence ! That wild flourish of horn the white 
 mask beneath, like the painted face of a clown, 
 the body all patterned and painted the 
 whole radiant thing uprising in the midst of the 
 meadow from which it draws its life! And then, 
 whilst you watch it, it moves. Moves ! A piece 
 of the landscape come alive ! Talk about men 
 as trees walking. . . . 
 
 'And even here, you know, in this bit of a 
 back garden, I can't get away from the suggest- 
 iveness the emphasis of things. Why, this 
 patch isforalltheworld like a witches' cauldron. 
 You go about with a hoe. You poke and you 
 stir. And then pouf ! out rushes the maddest 
 riot colours and odours and queer, uncanny 
 shapes. Pink foam of poppies. And crimson 
 bubbles of roses. And over there, I solemnly 
 assure you, gobbets of juicy red flesh! Fact! 
 Things my little niece Margot calls "stlaw- 
 bellies.'" 
 
 He laughed, but his laugh wound up with a 
 little protesting cry an echo of his old exas 
 peration. 'And folk won't see it. We go gather 
 ing fresh loot, and forget the things we have. I 
 want to tell people that. IVous sommes tous con- 
 18 
 
THE SHADOW 
 
 damnts the only difference is that I've been " Uncon- 
 lucky enough to realise it! And I want to tell 
 folks. I want to get 'em all to draw up their wills! 
 If only I had more time that's my solitary 
 sorrow. I want to write a book about those things 
 about buttercups and cows and ham sand 
 wiches. I want to write a book called "Uncon- 
 sidered Trifles?" 
 
 That was plainly my mark, and I notched it 
 as neatly as I could. ' " Unconsidered Trifles" ' 
 I said, ''will be the jolliest book you've ever done. 
 It will be one of the notable books of the year!' 
 
Ill AN APOLOGY 
 FOR HAWTHORN 
 
AN APOLOGY 
 
 IT certainly needs an advocate. Our coun- its cool 
 try diarists, indeed, good-natured critics, P unctualit y 
 are just now doing their best to sing its 
 praises prettily; but professional honour, if 
 nothing else, forces them to add at least one 
 word about its cool unpunctuality. Nor can 
 we quite decently debit the comet with this 
 particular lapse. For it was long before he came 
 to muddle up the march-past of the seasons 
 that the hawthorn hedges began to lag behind, 
 and the may-blossom, like a blast grown-up, to 
 drop the pretty custom of keeping its own birth 
 day. Not for many years now, even if they too 
 had not grown too staid for suchlike frolics, 
 have our mid-England villagers been granted 
 enough bloom to make a buttonhole for one 
 May queen, let alone wreaths for half a hun 
 dred. This year, for instance, the month was 
 well past its meridian before a faint sprinkle of 
 ivory pellets, like the relics of a late shower of 
 hail, appeared on our Midland hedges; and it 
 was not till the other morning, beneath a sun 
 that seem ed to have desperately borrowed some 
 thing of the generosity of June, that the little 
 spheres thawed into stars, melting and filling 
 the crannies with drifts of fragrant snow. But 
 though it has got above birthdays the hawthorn 
 has not reached the pitch of robbing children 
 
 23 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 As a kind of of their posies in order to save adult toes from 
 broad, green frost _ bite later Qn j t has been a near thing) 
 
 though the nearest one remembers. Already 
 it has touched the rim of a rival's territory. Let 
 it lag still longer next year, and the English 
 lanes will watch a staggering sight the wild 
 roses of June and the may-blossom warring to 
 gether for mastery, with the honeysuckle climb 
 ing convulsively all about. A battle of flowers 
 indeed! 
 
 'There is but one variety of common haw 
 thorn,' say the text-books stiffly; but to travel 
 through England this week, from south to north, 
 is to learn that that is but another of those prim, 
 starched, scientific statements which are far too 
 goody-goody to be true. Actually there are as 
 many kinds of may-blossom as there are var 
 ieties of soil. That is a pleasant fancy, and a 
 not too fallacious, which figures our English 
 summer as a kind of broad, green tide, sweep 
 ing swiftly from south to north, up the broad 
 beaches of fallow and field; and in such a pict 
 ure the blossom plays the part of surf-a scented 
 spume bursting up at every obstructing hedge. 
 Just as various as foam itself are these dancing 
 breakers of bloom. Piquantly enough, all the 
 rebellious variety is the direct result of profound 
 docility. There is, first of all, the tractability 
 24 
 
AN APOLOGY 
 
 of the plant itself that pleasant pliability of Adopting the 
 temper which has won it a practical monopoly of local accent 
 the great task of carving up England in slices, 
 clipping the country into manageable portions. 
 This task alone, no matter how conducted, 
 would plainly make variety inevitable; for since 
 its performer is compelled to pass in turn 
 through every type of landscape, every type of 
 landscape can be used in turn to flash new 
 meanings on the blossoms sprayed before it. 
 But the hawthorn, as it happens, does its work 
 in quite a special way, and so secures a still 
 wider range of effects. For it not only rims a 
 dukedom and a cabbage patch with equal alac 
 rity; it also displays a queer capacity for taking 
 colour from its environment adopting the loc 
 al accent and falling into step with the local 
 features. 
 
 Down among the parklands of the South, 
 for instance, where opulence affects a paunchy 
 trimness the hedgerows seem positively to meet 
 the efforts of the clipper half-way, cheerily as 
 sisting his operations with the shears, until at 
 length they lie across the fat feather-beds of 
 fields like so many plump green bolsters. A 
 little further north, again, you enter a ruder 
 belt whose poverty leaves little time for trim 
 ming, and there you find it not only grasping 
 
 25 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 By dint of the situation just as briskly, twisting and twin- 
 1 lty ing unprompted into businesslike outworks and 
 defences, but also summing up exactly the 
 slightly shaggy, homespun scene. Set it on a 
 sweep of lawn, again, and your hawthorn will 
 grow as elegant anddebonnair as any rose tree; 
 but transplant it to a northern fell, and you 
 will see the strangest transformation. It grows 
 hunchbacked and sinister, crouches and con 
 tracts, stiffens its sinews and breaks out into a 
 dark and dwarfish muscularity. And it is by 
 dint of docility once more that all these vari 
 ations are perfectly repeated by the blossom 
 itself. For they follow the stem obediently; 
 each little bunch of bloom, too, is upraised to 
 an equal height; and bya singular arrangement 
 (which even the text-books dwell upon) no 
 floweret in that bunch is permitted to rise a- 
 bove his fellows. As a result there are none of 
 those independent gushes and flights which 
 make, say, a wild cherry garnished so vastly 
 different from a wild cherry nature; there are 
 none of the trailing digressions of wistaria or 
 laburnum. Again, since the bush itself, as old 
 Thomas Lyte, Esq., was unscientific enough to 
 see, sometimes 'groweth lowe and crooked' 
 and sometimes ' waxeth high as a Perrie or Pear- 
 tree ', so too the flowers are sometimes like trans- 
 26 
 
AN APOLOGY 
 
 verse silver seams, silting into horizontal cran- One strikes a 
 nies and clefts, and are sometimes tall white subtler stram 
 wands and nodding plumes, like the radiant 
 rods and sceptres of some regal cavalcade. It 
 is about the poor man's plot, agreeably enough, 
 that you get the full gamut displayed. For there 
 the pliant stems try all sorts of arboreal tricks, 
 looping, drooping, leaping, climbing capricious 
 ly, or shooting suddenly up like a host of sal 
 uting swords; and there, too, the flower, follow 
 ing all this freakishness unfalteringly, tosses off 
 a dazzling troop of permutations crescents, 
 crosses and crosiers, plumes, levelled lances 
 until you would swear that old Proteus himself 
 had wound the wreathed thorn. 
 
 These are obvious phases familiar to all. 
 Here and there, though, one strikes a subtler 
 strain that revelation, for instance, among 
 the complacent parklands of what looks like a 
 vein of sly humour. Its task, down there, is to 
 translate the countryside into terms of may. It 
 does it by decking it with bunchy little buttons 
 of bloom, little vaguely vulgar rosettes. And the 
 effect is almost as disquieting as one of those 
 half-concealed smiles which sometimes show 
 us, at table, that they also watch who only stand 
 and wait. Out on the fells, again, its ingenuity 
 scores a singular triumph, as any Cumberland 
 
 27 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Versatility with hillside can show you at this minute. Nothing 
 6 more menacing can be imagined than one of 
 those twisted trees thrusting its arms about in a 
 dwarfish ecstasy, and decked from head to foot 
 with filmy scarves. It seems as though it ought 
 to be amusing a skinny gnome posturing in 
 a ballet. But, in fact, it is incredibly macabre. 
 Performed before a purple background of storm 
 and straining peaks on the upper slopes of 
 Wansfell, say, with Scafell and the Pikes in the 
 distance, it makes a picture packed with men 
 ace. 
 
 And this capacity for fitting in equally well 
 with scenes of prettiness and terror is it not, 
 after all, rather perfectly typical of the plant 
 which is not only may-blossom but also the old 
 albespine? Sir John Mandeville may not, in 
 deed, be the least mendacious of recorders; but 
 something unregenerateinus, thirsting for such 
 clashing contrasts, makes us unanxious to cross- 
 question him too cruelly when he tells us that it 
 was ' a Crowne ' of these very thorns that the Jews 
 'sett on His Head so faste and so sore that the 
 Bloode ran down in many places of his Visafe.' 
 Here is versatility with a vengeance ! first a 
 property in the world's most towering episode, 
 and then a milkmaid's wreath on a giggling vil 
 lage green. Nor is even this the end. For other 
 28 
 
AN APOLOGY 
 
 legends tell us that it was a thorn from this tragic Mighty 
 crown, planted at Glastonbury by Joseph of vagan 
 Arimathea, which burst miraculously into blos 
 som on one memorable Christmas day. These 
 be mighty vagaries ! They surely excuse its lat 
 ter-day indifference to dates. It could once, it 
 seems, celebrate some birthdays very notably. 
 Let us overlook, then, this year anyhow, its cool 
 disregard for its own. 
 
IV 
 
 ASS! 
 
ASS! 
 
 PRODUCT, in the first instance, of the The flowers of 
 empty sand-plains of the East, the don- the Iocalflocks 
 key, by a strange twist of fortune, has 
 now become indigenous to the extravagantly 
 populous sand-plains of our British seaboard; 
 and there was therefore a double congruity in 
 the background provided by the New Brighton 
 shore for the charming little asinine ceremony 
 enacted there the other afternoon. It was the 
 occasion of the annual donkey competition, and 
 the flowers of the local flocks, drawn up in a long 
 decorous line, submitted themselves to the j udg- 
 ment of a famous expert, and endeavoured, by 
 the engagingly simple process of standing still 
 and looking supremely happy and contented, to 
 exercise the gift of Midas to an extent denied 
 them in their laborious everyday. In brief, a 
 donkey show. Now that, on the face of it, is the 
 kind of event that would seem to promise a good 
 deal in the way of entertainment. The mere 
 words, a donkey show, seem to carry all sorts of 
 farcical and hilarious suggestions; and it might 
 easily be supposed that the whole thing was spec 
 ifically dedicated to the rather peculiar Comic 
 Spirit of our islands. Asamatter of fact, no sup 
 position could be more completely irrelevant. 
 A 'high seriousness,' a deep and deeply impres 
 sive solemnity that was the dominant note 
 D 33 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Adeeply of the entire affair. The famous expert, walking 
 reverential s n ent i yround the exhibits, walking the exhibits 
 silently round, pinchingand punching and pat 
 ting with an air of the supremest gravity; his 
 satellites, with their frequent annotations, their 
 portentous gestures; the donkeys themselves, 
 so inexpressibly sedate; their attendants, too, 
 acknowledging the significance of the event, not 
 only by exchanging their accustomed vocifer- 
 ousness for a rigid taciturnity, but also by their 
 assumption of the raiment peculiar to the South 
 Lancashire Tripper; these, with the circle of 
 mutely engrossed spectators, combined to give 
 the celebration a deeply reverential air. No cas 
 ual stranger, approaching from a distance, could 
 have dreamed that the centre of this dignified 
 and sober ritual was that object of ridicule and 
 abuse, that subject of limitless contemptuous 
 laughter, the common moke. For the common 
 moke, by the engagingly simple process of look 
 ing supremely well-fed and contented, had done 
 something much more important than abstract 
 ing a few prizes from the hands of the humane. 
 It had succeeded as well in destroying a time- 
 honoured jest, in robbing humanity of their 
 right to laugh at it. 
 
 That fact, of course, contains the ingredients 
 of a very pretty parable; and even to those of 
 
 34 
 
ASS! 
 
 us for whom parables have lost something of A target for 
 their charm, it cannot fail to seem provocative 
 of one rather interesting question. Why, after 
 all, has the donkey become a target for so much 
 derision? Why should its name become a syno 
 nym for the absurd? Were its resemblance to 
 the horse a little closer, it might be possible to 
 offerthatfact as a solution; for therewill always 
 (and very properly) remain a large share of de 
 risive laughter for the bad copy, the weak imit 
 ation, the distorted echo. But the donkey, with 
 its long and scrupulous ancestry, can never be 
 mistaken for a cheap edition of the horse; its 
 physical qualities are independent and unique. 
 Nor, as those New Brighton animals very clearly 
 manifested, are those unique and independent 
 qualities of a type to make men laugh. Their 
 sleek slimness, their 'Quakerish elegance,' the 
 delicate colours of their coats . . . here a delic 
 ate dove-grey, there an exquisite mouse ... their 
 neat heads, and the lithe efficiency of their tails; 
 they are qualities, all of them, which it is impos 
 sible to regard other than with admiration. 
 There is, of course, the question of intelligence; 
 and here, it must be admitted, we find ourselves 
 on rather delicate ground. We might refer, in 
 deed, to the sensitiveness of eye and foot that 
 has carried us so securely among the mountain 
 
 35 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Explanation of paths of Sicily and Spain; but we prefer to re- 
 y member that there are other animals of a vastly 
 greater stupidity who have never been laughed 
 at in the whole course of their career. There 
 is the cow, for instance. We have never heard 
 any particular hilarity on the topic of cows. Or, 
 again, there is the sheep; the sheep which Lamb, 
 that model of tenderness and humanity, once 
 accused of being profoundly 'silly.' We have 
 never noticed anybody holding their shaking 
 sides when confronted by a sheep. 
 
 No, if we desire an explanation of the mystery 
 we must push a little farther afield and (as so 
 often happens in such cases) a little nearer home. 
 So proceeding, we will probably discover it in 
 the fact that the mirth-provoking donkey of 
 tradition is not, strictly speaking, a donkey at all. 
 The very cheapness which induced the Travel 
 ler in the Cevennes to confer immortality upon 
 Modestine has struck a mortal blow at myriads 
 of less fortunate Modestines both before and 
 since; for it is cheapness, and not familiarity, 
 that is the mother of contempt, and contempt 
 brings with it tyranny and ill-usage, maltreat 
 ment in a hundred infinitely disastrous forms. 
 Thus, in the course of years, the real donkey 
 was slowly done to death, and there was left in 
 its place the merest spectre, one of those dis- 
 
 36 
 
ASS! 
 
 torted echoes for which, as we have seen, a tor- The real 
 rent of derisive laughter is always waiting. So 
 that it is not because the animal is a donkey that 
 we have laughed at it. With a fine, unconscious 
 justice, we have laughed at it because it is not 
 a donkey. When, as at New Brighton, the real 
 donkey reappears, our gibes are frozen, and we 
 fall into a profound and reverent admiration. 
 For every perfection means the death of a jest; 
 an increase of happiness here means a decrease 
 of merriment there; and our laughter more often 
 than not, is a dreadful accusation, the signal of 
 the discovery of something abortive, something 
 undeveloped and incomplete. Wherefrom, 
 again, by those who care for such things, a very 
 human and thought-provoking moral might 
 easily be deduced. 
 
V MOTORING 
 AT NIGHT 
 
MOTORING AT NIGHT 
 
 OF motoring after nightfall there are 
 manifestly two main kinds. On die 
 one hand, there is motoring by moon 
 light; on the other, there b motoring on nights 
 of cloud or of undisputed stars. For my own 
 part, I much prefer the latter. The risk is per 
 haps slightly greater. But if you are content 
 with a tattful fifteen miles an hour, and if your 
 car glares at the world through a pair of fierce 
 acetylene eyes, you can really pick your way 
 about a world that has been wonderfully drained 
 of all traffic with almost as much composure as 
 though you were on the Brighton Road at broad 
 noon. But you must have those piercing head 
 lights, for it is on them that your pleasure wfll 
 depend as well as your mere safety. Without 
 Item you would remain in the frmfliar region 
 of the footmen. With them you instantly leap 
 into a kingdom no mere pedestrian ever pene 
 trated. Everything those basilisk eyes rest up 
 on is suddenly painted white; wherever they 
 peer a frozen shape congeals out of the void; 
 and the result is that you seem to enter the 
 night by another gateway and scud through an 
 unexplored series of riocturnal corridors, You 
 y have slept with Stevenson 4 & Jdfe MJe, 
 you may have spent a lifetime studying the 
 moods of the darkness afoot; but you will find 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A spectral you are surveying a wholly unknown land when 
 gang-plank y ou ^g^g stillness for the first time in a car. 
 The transformation begins with the very 
 road. The vaguely glimmering track, along 
 which the pedestrian softly fumbles, suddenly 
 stiffens out into a harsh, blanched beam a 
 spectral gang-plank thrust out into the empti 
 ness. The motorist's road is never mere dead 
 macadam; by daylight, for instance, it leaps 
 towards him like a twitching tide, a white lasso 
 uncoiling as it comes. But at night its direction 
 is reversed. It moves with you, seems a part of 
 your machine ; you seem to make it as you go. 
 It is a desperate bridge across the blackness, 
 and the moment one length is completed you 
 leap along it trusting to the invisible workmen 
 at your prow to add another chalky length in 
 time. And sometimes it seems as though they 
 had failed to keep pace. The plank breaks off 
 abruptly. You race to the ragged end of it 
 hang poised on the verge of the pit. And then 
 just as you begin dreadfully to dip, the shaft 
 leaps out once more, catches you neatly, and 
 the convulsive improvisations recommence. 
 The car has simply topped a little rise. As it 
 gained the summit the lights, still canting up 
 wards, searched the empty sky and left the 
 down-grade unillumined. That was all. And 
 4* 
 
MOTORING AT NIGHT 
 
 yet, though the consequent sudden snapping in the centre 
 short of your visible track is probably the most 
 familiar of the night-motorist's sensations, it is 
 odd how long it takes to get quite habituated 
 to it, and how deep an effect that little thrill 
 has on the mood in which you drive. 
 
 And when you have got accustomed to it 
 there are any number of other thrills to take its 
 place. You run for a time between hedgerows 
 and every dim bush seems to burst into a 
 piece of branching coral; you might be sitting 
 in a submarine. The hedges are followed by 
 trees, by a long drawn avenue, the boughs meet 
 ing overhead; and now, with the light from 
 your lamps shattering against a complete arc 
 of obstacles, your plank across space is sudden 
 ly converted into a snow-white tunnel boring 
 through it. Of all that exists outside that fro 
 zen circle you are as unaware as a traveller in 
 a London tube. Straight trunks and spreading 
 branches become as unthinkable to you as the 
 overhead traffic is to him. You live in a circu 
 lar world, in the centre of a leprous wreath. 
 Oaks, elms, and beeches all part with their ident 
 ity and submit to be woven into this haunting 
 hoop as white as a hoop of hawthorn. It al 
 ways seems the same wreath. It quivers and 
 fluctuates, making a weak rustle as it shivers; 
 
 43 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 As fantastic as but it never falls back. With nothing to meas 
 ure your pace by, all sense of motion disappears. 
 You seem to sit in a kind of numb trance with 
 nothing but the drone of your engine and the 
 whisper of this mesmeric arch. Perhaps you are 
 not altogether unrelieved when it is wrenched 
 aside and tossed behind, and you are out on 
 your naked gang-plank once more with the 
 stars tumbling and twirling overhead. 
 
 But before you finally desert the woodlands 
 there is one other experience that must on no 
 account be missed. The place of places for it, 
 in England, is the New Forest that strange 
 double kingdom where you can plunge beneath 
 the bright skin of the earth and dart to and fro 
 in the dim quiet as though wandering about a 
 vast sea-floor. By daylight it is odd enough, but 
 in the darkness it is as fantastic as a fairy-tale. 
 High above your head you can hear the night 
 wind churning the green surf ; but all about 
 you is nothing but an ivory stillness, the hushed 
 white coral and continuous chalky caves. Steal 
 ing down these corridors you detect low arch 
 ways cut in the fretted walls. They are the en 
 trances to the narrower rides that dip still more 
 deeply into the secret places of the woods. 
 Shutting down your speed to a crawl, you slip 
 through one of these wickets. It fulfils its pro- 
 44 
 
MOTORING AT NIGHT 
 
 mise. For now, in this narrower way, the trees The sense 
 
 of sheer 
 enchantment 
 
 and branches crowd closely about you, and ofsheel 
 
 albescent shapes leap up in your very path. 
 Blanched limbs twist and vanish. There is a 
 constant coming and going, a peeping and with 
 drawing. The stillness seems full of a spectral 
 tumult and stir. And to this there is added a 
 queer trooping and flashing of colours, tense, 
 feverish colours, like those one sees in a dream. 
 The acetylene glare at this close range conjures 
 the strangest effects. Primroses come out sharp 
 and bright, like flowers made of precious stones 
 or enamels. Lichen has a snakish lustre. The 
 fallen leaves are as bright as blood. You creep 
 along this crimson trail, and the jewels are thrust 
 at you out of the emptiness. You come to a 
 glade, and the shapes withdraw. You stop your 
 engine; there are sighs and rumours; it seems 
 as though something had but that instant es 
 caped. The eyes of the car rove round the walls 
 of the glade, and wherever they peer great 
 arches, white as marble, are silently born in 
 the blackness. And sometimes, perhaps, they 
 alight on a little rabbit transfixed by the stare; 
 and the sight of this pale, still ghost of some 
 thing you have always figured as specially nim 
 ble and warm and soft seems perfectly to com 
 plete the sense of sheer enchantment. 
 
 45 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The wayward Motoring by moonlight is very different. You 
 night odours trayd more swi f t i y _ t hough I doubt whether 
 you travel so far. You never quite reach the 
 border-line that divides the familiar from the 
 phantasmal. There is none of those blanched 
 abrupt births. The world is wider a less par 
 tial lamp than yours expounds the pale beauty 
 of the fields and spreads a moth-coloured car 
 pet beneath the feet of the night. And as a re 
 sult of the consequent release, the slackening 
 of the optical tension, the other senses, I have 
 noticed, acquire a new freshness and freedom. 
 One grows peculiarly conscious, for example, 
 of all the wayward night odours that slip out 
 into the silver air at the summons of the dew. 
 The best type of country for moonlight work 
 is open landscape with low ridges sustaining the 
 roads, like some of the hill-spines near the Cots- 
 wolds, or those lean ribs and promontories that 
 creep through the levels of the Midland hunting 
 shires. This make of ground is good for many 
 reasons but chiefly because it gives you a 
 pleasure impossible among actual mountains, 
 or in densely- wooded country, or in land of un 
 relieved flatness; the singular pleasure, namely, 
 of surveying a vast expanse of silent country 
 when it lies below you dead asleep. The moon 
 is like a lanthorn held above the face of the 
 
MOTORING AT NIGHT 
 
 sleeper; and by its light you can see, far and Cut off corn- 
 near, the little hamlets cuddling unconsciously 
 round their brooding spires; and a town or two, earth 
 maybe, and unsuspected farms in sly recesses, 
 seeming now to show a light, and now to hide 
 it; and the soft, small thread of brightness, 
 quivering through the stillness, which is the 
 midnight mail to the North. There is something 
 strangely moving in the spectacle. It is as 
 though you had caught the country unawares 
 and had found it much simpler and more 
 innocent than you knew. And it is a realisation 
 reserved for the motorist. Some part of it may 
 be gained by the pedestrian, but not the best of 
 it. He cannot taste the very essence of the 
 situation that sense of almost god-like detach 
 ment. He cannot swoop easily from point to 
 point, with the calm surveillance of a bird. He 
 is part of the landscape, bound up with its 
 dreams; and we all know how the cold moon- 
 stuff seems actually to clog the limbs of the 
 walker as though it were really a web. It is an 
 odd fact, too, that the very noise of one's car 
 helps to complete the effect of aloofness. Foot 
 steps bruise the face of the night, clumsily soil 
 ing the silence. But the drumming of your en 
 gine simply serves to cut you off the more com 
 pletely from the dreaming earth. You seem to 
 
 47 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A place of light sway suspended in a net of sound, 
 and laughter Your ride {s over _ you head once more for 
 
 home but even now your car has yet another 
 secret to disclose. It is, perhaps, the most 
 precious of all. For to race through the silver 
 silence towards the upcast glow of a city is to 
 perceive, as one has never done before, the true 
 relation of that distant congeries to the empty 
 spaces all about. The townsman's modern pas 
 sion for the country is a splendid and a whole 
 some thing; but perhaps it warps certain deeper 
 ideals, blurring the town's true purport, printing 
 it on the mind as a sad and smoky stain. There 
 is nothing like a night-ride home in a car to re 
 form that strained conception. The distant glow 
 seems the glow of a hearth; it is as a place of 
 light and laughter and companionship, as a snug 
 refuge from the aching fields, that the city is 
 once more imaged in the mind. 
 
 No other manner of approach, unless by ship 
 from the outer darkness of the sea, can give you 
 nowadays this reassuring and inestimable thrill. 
 The pedestrian may see the glow from afar 
 but the straggling suburbs spoil his vision long 
 before he gains the city's heart; and to travel 
 by train is to be flung into the centre without 
 having been once aware of that hospitable 
 beacon and sign. It sounds odd, no doubt, but 
 48 
 
MOTORING AT NIGHT 
 
 it is certainly true, that it is only in a swift As the traveller 
 modern car that one can regain the old mediae- 
 val temper, and see the town once more as the 
 traveller in old days would see it a kind of 
 courageous citadel, a gallant outpost, the ap 
 pointed rallying-place for beauty and romance. 
 
VI WHITE MAGIC 
 
WHITE MAGIC 
 
 A INGLE night of south-west wind swept A veil of 
 away all that exquisite fabric of silver 
 which had clung to the earth, like a veil 
 of reluctant moonlight, in spite of the red-faced 
 anger of the suns of Saturday and Sunday; and 
 it was upon shrubberies no longer carved out 
 of white marble, upon branches and leaves no 
 longer like fretted chalcedony, that we looked 
 out yesterday morning through our unfrosted 
 windows. But although the hoar itself had dis 
 appeared, it has not been without its effect. 
 Boughs may be black once more and rhodo 
 dendron leaves a shabby, shiny green; but we 
 see them now (or ought to do) with a far alerter 
 eye. The pleasant old child fancy which figured 
 Jack Frost as a delicate artist, pencilling our 
 panes with silver seaweed and fantastic grottoes 
 of fern, is capable of a much wider and deeper 
 application. For it is the true artist's business 
 not only to hang a curtain of delightful fancies 
 between us and the outer world, but also to show 
 us that world more clearly than ever before 
 revealing its true beauty, disclosing its real ro 
 mance, pointing out the graces we had grown 
 too dull and habituated to remark for ourselves. 
 And that, very exactly, is what the unusually 
 assiduous efforts of the frost offered to do for 
 us the other day. Its silver, unlike the silver of 
 
 53 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The beauty mere snow, never transforms shapes or alters 
 outlines; it simply makes them apparent. Trac- 
 things ing the m with a pre-Raphaelite exactitude, alter 
 ing nothing, it shows us, with an insistent vera 
 city, the delicate shapes of the leaves, the slim 
 curves of the grass blades, the wonderful pat 
 terns in the woven hedge, the exquisitely con 
 tinuous flow of the line that runs through beech 
 trunk to branch, through branch to twig, and 
 through twig to the clear whorls and spirals of 
 the last elusive tendrils; and we realise, with a 
 shock of delight, the amazing beauty of these 
 common, unregarded things. The purity of the 
 colour seems to rinse the senses, much as the 
 cold air bathes and invigorates the mind. We 
 see the world afresh ; and we find it very good. 
 The very lines of the rooftops, sharply recalled 
 to our eyes by this argent enamel, have a new 
 significance and charm : they cut cleanly across 
 the sky, they rise and fall in a fair variety, and 
 here and there the slim bunches of the chimney- 
 stacks make a pleasant emphasis. Nothing, we 
 begin to realise, is too common or unclean for 
 beauty, if only we had eyes to see. 
 
 And the effect of that realisation still lingers 
 even when the picture itself has vanished. Con 
 sciously, or unconsciously, we begin to grow per 
 ceptive. The memory of the vision remains, and 
 54 
 
WHITE MAGIC 
 
 the alertness which it brought loiters with it. The Suiting 
 hawthorn boughs that were plaited silver yester- ^ pendulum 
 day are plaited ebony to-day; but the beauti 
 ful intricacy of their pattern is no less wonder 
 ful for that ; and the delicate lines up-thrown 
 by the birch-tree at the garden foot are not 
 to be disregarded because its sharp whiteness 
 has changed to a glimmering pearl-grey. It were 
 an act of folly to receive the reversal otherwise; 
 for to learn to accept it thus heartily is surely to 
 acquire one of the most profitable of earthly 
 tricks. It is to make the pleasure of the moment 
 that has passed a servant to the pleasure of the 
 moment that is here; and that is clearly to re- 
 apply one of the oldest and soundest of life's 
 lessons. Periodicity rules all things: tides and 
 seasons and tempers, the pangs of maternity 
 and the prosperities of nations. Let us, then, 
 acquire the habit of suiting ourselves to the pen 
 dulum. Lashed to the huge See-saw of circumst 
 ance now flung high and now low now tast 
 ing the clear airs of winter and now the colour 
 ed heats of summer the wise man is certainly 
 he who knows how to win savour from the con 
 trasts. He will enjoy the day the more deeply 
 because of the passion with which he loves the 
 night; he will live for the moment with all the 
 abandon of a savage and yet be storing up rich 
 
 55 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Because of mad treasure for the morrow. He will make his joy 
 
 y in life the more constant and serene because of 
 
 the mad inconstancy of his pleasures. He will 
 
 find an abiding glamour in the thaw because 
 
 he wishes the frost might last for ever. 
 
VII SILVER 
 GOLD 
 
E 
 
 SILVER AND GOLD 
 
 VERY really honourable suburban gar- in spite of 
 den is briskand heartsome just now with 
 
 splashes, and loops, and circlets of fine 
 gold the gold of that king-cup-coloured flow 
 er which the wise Ruskin so solemnly rebuked 
 Wendell Holmes for calling 'the spendthrift 
 crocus.' 'The crocus is not a spendthrift, 'point 
 ed out the great man, 'it is a hardy plant.' Hardi 
 hood and prodigality then are they so incom 
 patible? One fancies not; the argument, one im 
 agines, would not be over-difficult to confute; 
 certain spendthrifts of the human sort, at any 
 rate but there! Why hound a quarry of so 
 obvious a tameness? Ill-judged or well, Pathetic 
 Fallacy or no Pathetic Fallacy, the adjective re 
 mains proving its pertinence by its pertinac 
 ity. And, in spite of Ruskin, it is always with a 
 fine air of thriftlessness that these sunny, saffron- 
 coated prodigals come strutting through the 
 close-fisted shrubberies of March. They swing 
 up the niggard borders, they surround the frugal 
 lawns, they march about the miserly, reluctant 
 beds always with the same consistent reck 
 lessness. And with it all, of course (it is their ir 
 resistible quality), they never stoop to impud 
 ence. Despite their bold defiance of the conven 
 tions, they are something better than your mere 
 Bohemian. Their improprieties are done decor- 
 
 59 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A very proper ously; their prodigalities are never dissolute, 
 marriage They outspace Spring, they fling their largesse 
 in Winter's very face; but their audacity is always 
 douce and kenspeckle, they are never too hot 
 footed to be trim. Neatly aligned, well-groomed 
 and orderly, they are, of all prodigals, surely the 
 most circumspect and sober. 
 
 So much the quainter, of course, appears, on 
 that account, their alliance with that shrinking 
 epitome of wild wood-gracefulness, the snow 
 drop. The crocus is respectably audacious 
 bold, but bourgeois; and he mates a frighten 
 ed nymph! And yet it is a very proper marriage, 
 as complementary as their colours gold and 
 silver; or as their symbols the sun and the 
 moon. Between them they make up the perfect 
 round, the full, fair sequence of garden qualities. 
 For the perfect garden should have room for all 
 the crocus elements the qualities of symmetry 
 and bright composure and a generous massing 
 of rich and heartsome colours; but it must not 
 be wholly content with these. It must include 
 as well the frailer snowdrop qualities the 
 qualities of wild grace and moon-dawn frailty. 
 ' I wish it were to be framed as much as may be 
 to a natural wildness,' said the good Bacon. 
 * Trees I would have none in it, but some thickets 
 made only of sweetbriar and honeysuckle, and 
 60 
 
SILVER AND GOLD 
 
 some wild vine amongst; and the ground set Polish each 
 with violets, strawberries, and primroses; for 
 these are sweet, and prosper in the shade; and 
 these to be in the heath here and there, not in 
 anyorder.' In that corner, too, would growthe 
 snowdrops; and for that corner, for the inclusion 
 of that space of desirable disorder, in all our 
 gardens, the snowdrop's appearance just now 
 may be regarded as a kind of delicate appeal. 
 And since, as Bacon says, 'God Almighty first 
 planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest 
 of human pleasures; it is the greatest refresh 
 ment to the spirits of man; without which build 
 ings and palaces are but gross handiworks' 
 since all this still remains admirably true, let the 
 silver and gold scattered so lavishly about our 
 gardens at the moment symbolise one other 
 thing as well. Let them be symbols of the lavish 
 assiduity with which we townsfolk, through the 
 coming year, will polish each his link in the long 
 gold and silver chain of gardens, which unites 
 us, here in the smoke-drift, with the clean world 
 of Nature lying outside the walls. 
 
VIII THE 
 
 DOODLE DOO 
 
I 
 
 THE DOODLE DOO 
 
 N a very little book which has just been pub- A problem 
 
 leaden anc 
 inveterate 
 
 lishedan anonymous thinker tackles a very leaden and 
 
 big problem one of the most leaden and 
 inveterate, indeed, of all the problems that go 
 to make up the burden of the mystery of things: 
 the problem that crouches hideously on every 
 pillow in the world, that fouls every dawn with 
 its presence, that robs sleep of half its virtue, and 
 makes midnight festivals, be they never so in 
 nocent, mere hollow mockeries and gawds. We 
 refer, of course, to the problem of Getting Up. 
 We all have to get up; we all have to get up 
 every day; and it is to a renewed consideration 
 of that appalling and inevitable diurnal agony 
 that the writer of this little book invites his 
 readers. Invites them, too, in the most uncom 
 promising fashion. Witness his rich title, The 
 Early Bird: a title whose deep allusiveness not 
 the most phlegmatic of readers will be able to 
 resist. Witness, again, the piece of poignant 
 symbolism appended to the title, which makes 
 his dolorous subject-matter superlatively plain: 
 a striking and convincing representation of a 
 Crowing Cock. Could any more fitting or im 
 pressive emblem have beenutilisedPMr.Barrie, 
 that fine mystic and philosopher, knew its puis 
 sance when he used it with such grim effect in 
 his great symbolical tragedy of Peter Pan. He 
 
 F 6 5 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Because the desired, the reader will recollect, to crush that 
 farmer does defiant and blood-boltered miscreant Hook be 
 neath the weight of some intolerable doom, and 
 he could think of no more powerful engine than 
 the dreadful long-drawn cry of the Doodle Doo. 
 But while it is with imaginations of this high 
 order that our author's title-page inclines us to 
 associate him, the book that follows ranks him, 
 as a philosopher, on a vastly inferior level. For 
 he is one of those self-mortifying fanatics who 
 believe that to tighten bonds is to lighten bur 
 dens, that to intensify the agony is to minimise 
 the hurt, that the solution of this great Problem 
 of Getting Up is to get up earlier! Turning 
 the pages with a fluttering eagerness, hoping 
 against hope that here at last may be some way 
 of escape from the diurnal agony, what does the 
 reader descry? He descries, written again and 
 again in flaring majuscules, the astounding 
 phrase, 'Rise In Summer At Five, In Winter At 
 Six.' In the name of Morpheus, what phantasy 
 is this? Why should we scourge ourselves thus 
 gratuitously? Because, responds the author 
 proudly, because the farmer does. But we we 
 are not Farmers; we are civilians merchants, 
 chemists, numismatists, office-boys; why should 
 we fling aside the resources of our hardly-won 
 civilisation the 8. 30 express, the swift electric 
 66 
 
THE DOODLE DOO 
 
 car in order to vie with some thrice miserable We have him 
 bucolics? Because the sparrows twitter and the on the hlp 
 starlings pipe at five o'clock in summer, urges 
 our friend. Are we, then, to be hounded into 
 flagellation by a lot of gibbering birds? But it 
 is better for your health, he runs on. Tis a re 
 tort that smacks of foolishness. Since when was 
 health to be captured by curtailing sleep? What 
 has become of all our 'Nature's sweet restorer' 
 beliefs? But you must make the sleep up the 
 night before, he protests; and there, we think, 
 we have him on the hip. 
 
 For why should one deliberately squander a 
 couple of hours of fireside domesticity, of earnest 
 study, of friendly intercourse, of patronage of the 
 English Drama, for the sake of strolling emptily 
 about an un warmed garden, or crouching drear 
 ily over an ash-filled grate, an hour and a half 
 before breakfast announces the true beginning 
 of the day? There are only two possible answers. 
 Of these, one is 'Ovanitas,O mores.' It is pro 
 bably sheer vanity, colossal and detestable ego 
 ism, that induces you, Mr. Anonymous Self- 
 Mortifier, to make that aimless pilgrimage a- 
 mong a lot of unintelligent sparrows. You hope, 
 secretly, that your neighbour's blind may sud 
 denly run up, that your neighbour may be con 
 sumed with admiration for your extraordinary 
 
 67 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 You would energy. The night before, no doubt, when you 
 were stealing stodgily to bed, he was busy among 
 his friends, play ing his due, sociable part, pursu 
 ing some course of study, benefiting the world 
 by writing articles on Doodle Doos. You 
 shirked these things; you stole hoggishly to bed; 
 and now, since you have failed to achieve a legiti 
 mate distinction, you hope to become adven 
 titiously distinctive. You would steal a march 
 on your fellows; and that, a march without a 
 goal. And if you protest that you have a goal 
 you simply take refuge in the other answer, the 
 deplorable argument which the vulgar believe 
 they finely enforce when they say that 'the early 
 bird catches the worm. ' It is an argument whose 
 essential baseness is easily disclosed. For the 
 man who goes out into the world with that mot 
 to in his head, goes out with the deliberate in 
 tention of shirking his first duty as a worker. 
 He goes out determined not to make something, 
 but to take something. He is not going to create, 
 he is going to appropriate. He is not going to 
 rely on a just reward for his own personal capa 
 cities; he is going to get up before Justice is a- 
 wakened, and while the world's back is turned 
 to him, and steal, not only a march, but every 
 thing unguarded that his march may lead him 
 to. He is a tramp; and all tramps are lazy. And 
 68 
 
THE DOODLE DOO 
 
 the markand measure of his secretand essential His essential 
 laziness is the fact that he gets up a stealthy hour laziness 
 and a half before his fellows. 
 
IX A REAL RIVER 
 
rives 
 
 A REAL RIVER 
 
 THERE is often aricher poetry in single A 'river' is 
 words than in all the elaborate verses !l a1 L which 
 they are built into; and to remember 
 that a ' river ; is that which rives is to catch a 
 thrill and a vision that grant the heart a purer 
 medicine than all the songs about brooks in our 
 tongue. Born, as it has chanced, with scarcely 
 an exception, within the windings of lush, inac 
 tive streams, our poets have taught us a tradi 
 tion which it would be well if some new Dray ton 
 could destroy. From Spenser's toPatmore's the 
 streams that glide through English verse, pro 
 ducing pretty metaphors that turn to thoughts 
 when plucked, have been copied, every one, 
 from the curves of Thames or Avon, Cam or 
 Isis, or from the sleek and drowsy reaches of the 
 Ouse; and it is by their slow lapse accordingly 
 that all our conceptions have been moulded, it 
 is of them that we inevitably think when we see 
 the bright word ' river ' written down. For us 
 the perfect river is a blend of Tennyson's 
 ' Brook ' and Bablockhithe. It is a place of 
 backwaters and slow bubbles and dim weirs. It 
 laps and it laves; it prattles and purls; it makes 
 sweet music on the enamelled stones. It is the 
 drone in the hive, a silver hem to the landscape: 
 a charming adjunct, nothing more, to the genu 
 ine machinery of nature. In essence an over- 
 
 73 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Older than the flow, a mere drowsy residue, it seems to mark the 
 mountains sm ii m g e nd o f nature's efforts. It is an arcad;an 
 interlude, a space of leisure and mirage, the 
 slumbrous seventh day among the elements. 
 Nothing endures here but reflections, purpose 
 comes to a sweet pause. Every river is a lovelier 
 
 Lethe 
 
 Now this is not only wrong it is ruinously 
 wrong. It may seem a slight thing, a mere matter 
 of sentiment yet to think of our rivers in this 
 way is to rob ourselves of some singular services 
 and to twist and distort, at its very taproot, that 
 broad conception of the countryside, of its log 
 ical structure and its strong continuous life, 
 which it ought to be every man's first business 
 to acquire. Far from being a tame attendant on 
 the hills, winding where they magnificently al 
 low, the river is their controller and creator, 
 carving them out of the dead plain; and instead 
 of being unstable it is the most stubborn and 
 enduring of all .the forces of the earth. Peel 
 back the skin of culture that has altered every 
 other feature of England, turning her moors into 
 fat meadowland and painting her marches with 
 the gold of corn : cut deeper than history itself: 
 and you will still find these ineradicable grooves. 
 They make a pattern that has proved imper 
 vious to change. Older than the mountains 
 74 
 
A REAL RIVER 
 
 which they mirror, less capricious than the very Real girders of 
 outline of our coasts, these flimsy and elusive t 
 veins are the real girders of the country, the sil 
 ver skeleton round which the rest is built. The 
 fields that seem to nourish them so tolerantly are 
 in reality but the great green leaves that cling 
 and pass and change on the branches of this 
 unchanging tree. Your loiterer is the real lord 
 of the land: it dominates, administers, divides. 
 View it coldly, scientifically, and you see it at 
 once as the arrowy focus and determination of 
 the scattered forces of the sky, the blade of the 
 wandering storms and tempests : a kind of liquid 
 lightning. These it applies, as neatly as a sculp 
 tor working marble, to the clefts and fissures 
 where the running strokes will tell, unprisoning 
 the buried dumb design. So that to listen to 
 what the poets call its ' prattle ' is actually to 
 hear the chisels of heaven playing ringingly on 
 the fabric of the earth. ... A good thought for 
 the mind to contain. 
 
 But before the mind can possess it, before we 
 can rightly realise all it stands for and entails, 
 something more sensible than science is needed, 
 something more moving than words : we need 
 the ardour of the actual event. And it is just 
 here, if a Scotsman may say so without discour 
 tesy, that your sumptuous English rivers seem 
 
 75 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Thames is too to fail. They are august, they are opulent ; they 
 10ng ~short ^ ave mac ^ e history, they divide counties, they 
 reflect brave towns ; and when at length they 
 meet the sea, among your fleets and flags and 
 watching cities, they swing forward, down your 
 estuaries as though to music, magnificent as 
 some high festival. But it is not its opulence 
 nor its spacious tides that tell of a river's true 
 powers ; and you might trace the full course of 
 the Thames, from that hushed crystal cradle 
 away up in the Cotswolds down to its grave 
 apotheosis by the Nore, and yet learn almost 
 nothing of the special river-wisdom we speak of 
 now. Thames is too long, for one thing too 
 short, for another. Too short, because it does 
 not begin far enough back, because it is swad 
 dled at its very birth deep among the meadows 
 we ought to see it weaving, its strength disguised 
 by the robes its strength has won ; too long, 
 because a ten-day march is too much for the 
 memory: one loses links: one infallibly misses, 
 for example, what is certainly the supreme sen 
 sation of its course the recognition that the 
 smooth mellow vale (five miles wide, ten miles 
 long, six hundred feet deep) through which you 
 wander between Wallingford and Reading, is 
 purely the river's work, a slow slice drawn down 
 through the chalk, changing the first featureless 
 
A REAL RIVER 
 
 plateau into the various f a gades which you see, Something 
 actually calling up, like a cardinal a congreg- 
 ation, the billows of the Chilterns on your left 
 hand, the rising ridges of the Berkshire Downs 
 on your right No; what is needed is some 
 thing both abrupter and completer: a river that 
 leaps through its octave in a little score of miles: 
 a river, that is, pouring through a land so primit 
 ive and yet so progressive that the shaggy hills 
 of its birth, untouched since the prime, are with 
 in an easy day's march of a suave sea-board set 
 with cities, with civilisation at ease among ripe 
 plains. 
 
 And so far as I know there is only one corner 
 of the island where this special kind of curt com 
 pleteness can be found; and that is the dour, 
 indomitable region that stretches north from 
 Solway a land (the birthplace of Carlyle) that 
 is as lean and forthright as the Lutheran race it 
 breeds breaking at once into wild moor, sof 
 tening at a touch into sweetness, as averse to 
 dissimulation as its sons: a land where every fea 
 ture still preserves its prime intention, and where 
 rivers rive indeed. 
 
 And it is with one of the rivers of that land, 
 and of a river that I know most strangely well, 
 that we are here concerned. 
 
 You begin, then, on the bare breast of Queens- 
 
 77 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Out of obscure berry, a land of matted heather and cold moor, 
 pockets m toe wnere nothing greets the first cry of the young 
 stream but the desperate sough of the wind 
 among the bents. Out of obscure pockets in the 
 soil, out of secret crevices and springs, the little 
 stream, the new power, summons sweet re 
 sources; its voice soon rises to a brisk com 
 mand a blithe tune that puts new heart into 
 the listener, that instils the day with a design. 
 The path down which the voice flies, ringing 
 like an elvish slogan, glitters like a live thing 
 through the heather, and becomes at once the 
 native centre of the scene. And even as it runs 
 it deepens and adorns it, fledges it with fern and 
 moss, makes the rut a glen and there in an 
 instant, bright with rowan-berry crimson and 
 glad green, you come upon your first tree. A 
 tree? It is a banner in the waste, a symbol of 
 success, the ensign of the silver power that you 
 are going to see conquering and civilising the 
 waste; and beneath it, for a further sign, lies the 
 first deep pool. No common pool, this honey- 
 coloured marvel. Carved like a chalice, it pre 
 sents you with a miracle: nothing less than the 
 life of the river re-embodied its silver turned 
 to solid scales, its brightness into watching eyes 
 its very fluency made physical: life strangely 
 generated here on the dead moor: not less won- 
 78 
 
A REAL RIVER 
 
 derful than manna: your first trout. Thencefor- The first phase 
 ward,life multiplies apace. Likeameshof silver com P leted 
 cords flung across the aimless foot-hills the new 
 burn and its flashing helpers tug the chaos into 
 shape. System appears. The glen becomes a 
 valley, the valley widens to a vale. The heavy 
 hills circle humbly about and are ordered anew. 
 Until at length, lured by the growing gracious- 
 ness, the first adventurous farm-house appears 
 and there is the first phase completed. 
 
 The second stage is simpler. Gathering all 
 these new-made miracles about it these pools 
 of living fish, these trees of scarlet fruit, these 
 houses full of actual men and women the river 
 begins to multiply and expand them, crashing 
 out a rising chorus as it works. The spare patches 
 of grass become fields, trees file over the hill-tops 
 and encamp in defensive clusters huddled as 
 though still conscious of something vaguely 
 hostile in the air; and around the softer slopes 
 new farms keep coming quietly, drawn by the 
 spell of running water. It is one of the common 
 est of Lowland sights in reality, of course: just an 
 upland dale thinly sprinkled with silent sheep- 
 farms and beleaguered by the sombre moor; but 
 to see it in this way, called into existence, out 
 of the emptiness, by the voice of a stream, is to 
 comprehend its character anew, realise it as a 
 
 79 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The beginning living thing, part of a great process, with a free- 
 
 hold in Time as wel1 as s p ace - 
 
 The beginning of the third phase, I always 
 think, is exactly marked by the first bridge. A 
 river's first bridge must always, I suppose, be 
 definitive: it means the first road, for one thing, 
 an entry into another age; and certainly to look 
 up-stream and down-stream from this bridge is 
 to look into two different epochs. This third 
 space, to my mind, is the loveliest of all, the 
 most hallowed and secret: it is a queer, aching 
 pleasure to me to recall the enchantments it pre 
 ludes. The moment it is sealed by the shadow 
 of this brig, my burn drops dumb. At the same 
 second the banks break into cry. It was the land 
 that was mute before, the river that laboured and 
 rang. Now it is the river that broods darkly and 
 the land that flutters and thrills. Never was there 
 such a place for birdsong as the next two bowery 
 miles of water-meadowland: never such a para 
 dise for mavises and merles, for linnets and lav 
 erocks and yorlings green and gold. Kneaded 
 and doctored so diligently, silted and renewed, 
 the soil is as rich as red cream, and life seems 
 to ooze out of it almost monstrously, escaping 
 at a touch. It bursts up in the brittle bubbles of 
 flowers and the heavy draped fantasy of trees: 
 it has a tropical richness, almost uncanny: wher- 
 80 
 
A REAL RIVER 
 
 ever you turn something moves. You approach Eden before 
 a heap of grey stones in the grass; and one of Adam 
 them goes lolloping away. You watch a sudden 
 wind stripping old leaves from a tree; and one 
 of them halts in mid-flight, sways?easily back, 
 perches and breaks into song. To walk there 
 alone, in the untrammelled exuberance, with the 
 royal oaks and beeches parading and surround 
 ing you with tier on tier of watching forms, is to 
 feel as though the soil, so pampered and protect 
 ed, had at length passed beyond the ordered li 
 mits of earth's energy, and acquired forbidden 
 powers. It is the absence of all human interven 
 tion, no doubt, that induces this sense of the un 
 authorised. Here is ripeness with no reapers; a 
 parkwithoutahouse: nature, abandoned to her 
 own beauty, surging up beyond the outlets com 
 monly cut by axe and scythe. It is Eden before 
 Adam. 
 
 But nature's hour is at hand. Slowly, as you 
 press more deeply onward, along the banks of 
 the watchful brooding stream, you become a- 
 ware, subconsciously at first, of the gradual 
 growth of anewsound in themidst of the voices 
 all about you, as though, one by one, their flut- 
 ings and their carollings were being sucked into 
 a simple central drumming drone. And even as 
 this rising chord comes home to you, thrum- 
 G 81 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The long fifth ming through the air an urgent bass, over the 
 phase p ea k O f the hill, as if in answer to the summons, 
 a white road whips and flashes, cleaves a slant 
 ing gash downward through the trees, makes 
 straight for the source of the sound. With that, 
 youtoo,roundingalast bend, come within sight 
 of the invader. There, among its weirs and 
 sluices, crouching greyly by the water's edge, 
 old Adamson's saw-mill stands, sounding what 
 is indeed a summons to surrender. This vast 
 hum is the voice of the stream, giving tongue 
 triumphantly at last. It has conjured the earth 
 and cozened it, prevailed on it to heap up forests 
 and flowers; and now, bringing man to its aid, 
 it leads an attack on the riches, hews the woods 
 down and hacks them into beams. That white 
 road is an arm stretched from civilisation and 
 the south. And into its grasp the river flings its 
 plunder, working undisguised, with a furious 
 eagerness, among its wheels, to provide man 
 with palisades and buttresses and roof-trees and 
 all the apparatus of concerted life. 
 
 Thenceforward there is no concealment,and 
 through the long fifth phase which the drone of 
 the mill-wheel heralds (as though it held an 
 eternal echo of the traffic of the far-off towns it 
 serves) the roads hurry back and forth, the brid 
 ges leap, the buildings of the world proceed a- 
 82 
 
A REAL RIVER 
 
 pace. I would I had space to speak with fulness You have be- 
 of the details of this last resounding phase. To 
 see it pass with swiftness is to feel, beyond for 
 getting, that the branching river is indeed a silver 
 stem, visibly breaking into flower. You look 
 back to the dark hills whence you have come; 
 you mark the clustered towns that now, towards 
 evening, begin to blossom into gold all down the 
 plain. You compare the numb dead moor with 
 this glittering result, this Igdrasil, this silver tree, 
 laden with living gold; and it may well seem to 
 you, in your exultation, that you have beheld 
 all history unfolding, that you have been watch 
 ing the flowering of a world. Nor, indeed, is it 
 wholly an illusion. Immune from mortality, ex 
 empt from the corruption of the clay, these paths 
 of shining water, the chosen footways for the 
 elements, do play the part of bridges suspended 
 out of reach of Time. Time floods past them 
 and changes the earth, but they remain through 
 it all undisturbed. They are the solitary stable 
 footholds in a melting world; and from them, 
 as from a lofty lattice, we can look divinely down, 
 and watch the land swing through its phases, 
 from the prime. 
 
X THE WINDS 
 
THE WINDS 
 
 THE winds are up once more it is the The hour of 
 houroftheirultimateexhortation. Out P ur S ation 
 of the desert places of the sky they 
 come, fierce with ecstasy, rebuking the body of 
 an earth too prone to splendour, preaching de 
 privation and the scourge. Plumes are broken 
 and cloaks of colour rent. Standing on a little 
 hill this morning, I saw an indolent, proud land 
 scape, perhaps the softest in England, suddenly 
 stripped by the invisible hands, and the new 
 nakedness flogged across and across by lank 
 grey ropes of rain. It is the hour of purgation, 
 of penance and the nimble conscience of the 
 earth, the mind of man, may not escape the 
 shriving. It sees the logic of the flesh every 
 where challenged and the symbols of success 
 discomfited. Fat fruits, whose colour seemed 
 a kind of holiness, whose succulence cosseted 
 the eye, feeding it with a sense of finality, are 
 suddenly turned into groping aspirants fum 
 bling for salvation in the mire. The barren 
 jewels on the hedgerows too, the sterile rubies 
 and beryls and jet, are twisted from their places 
 and tossed into the mud to breed. The last is 
 made first, the fruit becomes seed. It is these 
 bitter days of autumn, not the amiable hours 
 of spring, that form the true seed-time of the 
 world. These destroying winds are really ere- 
 
 87 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The account- ators, sowing while they seem to slay. 
 
 We misjudge the winds. We do not under 
 stand them. They follow a code too unsubstan 
 tial for our sight. We call them, for exam pie, cap 
 ricious, whereas their movements have anaugust 
 equity and precision which make the stolid see 
 saw of the tides seem cumbrous and approx 
 imate. They are the accountants of the air, their 
 purpose is pure justice, they rectify disparities, 
 and cease. Again, we call them noisy, whereas, of 
 all the elements, the winds alone are dumb. Fire 
 mutters and croons, water has its numberless 
 dialects, the earth has as many cries as colours, 
 from the rustle of a leaf to an earthquake's 
 clang. But the winds are magnificently mute. 
 In their own kingdom, scouring the fields of 
 space, they plunge and countermarch and range 
 in the midst of an immaculate hush. That im 
 petuous peace that exultant onset and whirl 
 unstained by the tiniest sound is a thing that 
 the imagination, with its passion for purities, 
 contemplates with a curious joy. But it is a joy 
 that the body can never hope to share. It may 
 climb high, leave the earth behind, reduce its 
 foothold to the merest crumb of crag, but it 
 carries the blight in its tissues, and the senses 
 destroy the stillness they so much desire. Noise 
 is an infirmity of the flesh. It is when the winds 
 88 
 
THE WINDS 
 
 break upon the beaches of the world that the The signal for 
 
 aunive 
 outcry 
 
 cry goes up. The entrance of this strange fig- auniven 
 
 ure, finger on lip, is the signal for a universal 
 outcry. The earth-bound elements give tongue 
 like jealous hounds watching the serene upris 
 ing of some great white bird. It is the body 
 breaking into speech at the burning touch of 
 the spirit. 
 
 For man, too, responds, and lifts up his voice 
 at the advent. His speech (which is but woven 
 wind) is full of tributes to the tyrant; and he 
 may never speak of that 'spirit,' nor pray for 
 inspiration, without ceremoniously saluting this 
 silent emperor of sound. The poet who said 
 
 I had walked on at the wind's will; 
 
 I sat now, for the wind was still, 
 
 might have been speaking in the name of Poet 
 ry herself, for there is nothing like a tempest 
 for filling the sails of the imagination. It is the 
 begetter of song as well as its supporting spirit, 
 and after coursing through the veins of verse, 
 uplifting the light, intricate branches, it often 
 flames out frankly in actual emblem and imag 
 ery blossom and fruit as well as sap and seed. 
 A hundred poets beside Herrick have seen it 
 as a solvent of Space, a bridge between lover 
 and beloved; a hundred more, beside Shelley, 
 conceived it as 'the trumpet of a prophecy' 
 
 89 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Thewindshave summoning the walls of Time to surrender. 
 * And indeed it has ended by becoming some 
 what strangely like both these. Interwoven 
 with so many symbols, pouring through the 
 world's imagination so continuously, it has now 
 become a kind of whispering gallery through 
 the years; and to put the mind's ear to it atten 
 tively is to become aware of the strangest chorus 
 rumours of old wars, flute-notes and laments, 
 wrecks, judgments and rejoicings. Unlike the 
 sea, whose character varies with its coasts, and 
 unlike the fire and the clay, which we have 
 moulded and tamed into new creatures, the 
 winds have never altered; they will stalk through 
 the shining cities of the future just as they 
 strode above the morasses of the prime, and 
 shaggy fears as well as an exultant confidence 
 are shaken from their wings as they pass. 
 Their code, which we have not yet grasped, 
 and their strength, which we may never measure, 
 have always placed them outside the knowledge 
 able forces and given them an enduring kinship 
 with the incomprehensible and divine. 
 
 Many others beside the dreamers know and 
 acknowledge their compelling power. Upon 
 the lips of most of us the winds lay the same 
 sweet torture for expression. Something awak 
 ens at the touch, and stirs and cries, and stretch- 
 go 
 
THE WINDS 
 
 es out weak hands as the invisible robes sweep A bank cashier 
 by. I once knew a bank cashier a small, sleek 
 man with meagre eyes and a complacent chin. 
 His voice was fleshy, youth was dead in him, and 
 he had gained no wisdom gained nothing save 
 a little dingy prudence. Yet the wind was too 
 strong even for him. I found him, one wild Nov 
 ember night, wandering bareheaded round the 
 railings of a city park. Behind the barriers, in 
 the darkness, you could hear the trees straining 
 androaring round the knees of the wind,as wild 
 beasts do when their keeper moves among them. 
 And my friend confessed to me shamefacedly, 
 lest I should suspect him of some worse weak 
 ness, that it was this elemental music that 
 brought him out of doors. Iknowawomantoo,a 
 farmer's wife in Cumberland childless, prim, 
 economical, who cannot rest within walls 
 when the winds are abroad on the hills. They 
 might be young lovers wandering passionately 
 there, entreating her to join them. For years 
 now, when the winds are up, she has laid her 
 knitting aside, wrapped herself in a shawl, and 
 gone out to meet them, to submit her body to 
 their mad embraces. She too goes where there 
 are trees partly, I think,to make the wind more 
 tangible, a fellow-inmate, to rob it of some of its 
 terrifying godlike greatness. There is certainly 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The winds are something in the communion that nurtures her 
 e profoundly. She returns enhanced and sweeten 
 ed. Her husband amused at first, then angry, 
 then contemptuous now accepts the habit 
 stolidly, with a kind of pathetic patience. He is 
 sometimes the first to move, setting his pipe 
 aside, fetching her plaid shawl from its peg, and 
 helping her on with it impassively. He watches 
 her go out into the blind tumult, and then turns 
 back to the fire to smoke solemnly until she re 
 turns. He is a good fellow. 
 
 She will be going out to-night, and so will that 
 bank cashier. The winds are up once more, and 
 on bare hillsides and in the hooded hearts of 
 cities there will be the same furtive going and 
 coming, the same dark human stir and unrest. 
 Old barriers go down before the onrush, long- 
 parted emotions draw suddenly together again, 
 whilst aboriginal fears dimly invade the sub 
 urbs. Yes, the winds are the great accountants; 
 they rectify and adjust. They dissolve the trim 
 partitions and pluck us out of Space and 
 Time. They break, but they beget. They flagel 
 late and heal. They humiliate and exalt. 
 
XI A WHITE 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
A WHITE CHRISTMAS 
 
 I AM one of those who give their almanac Of harmony 
 a more grave regard than is common, 
 following its precepts with some serious- day 
 ness, striving always to create a kind of har 
 mony between the deed and the day ; for I 
 believe that the poorest human happenings 
 take on a new significance when we bring them 
 into accord with the greater happenings, the 
 more magnificent processions, of the Times 
 and Seasons. There are unmeasured forces at 
 work in the midst of us, and the moon, I know, 
 orders the tides of our dreams, both waking 
 and sleeping, as profoundly as she orders the 
 far less wonderful tides of the outer seas. I 
 could desire that our share in the great organism 
 might become deliberate and formal. I could 
 desire each notable day of the year to bring its 
 especial human ritual. And so, just as I hope 
 to spend my May mornings in one particular 
 manner, my midsummer days in another; just 
 as I think no New Year's dawn should pass 
 without being watched from some especial 
 hill-top; so, too, 1 like to usher in the time of 
 Christmas with some experience of frost and 
 snow arousing the old memories to a finer 
 wakefulness by the use of the elements which 
 have been so long regarded as their natural 
 symbols granting the old celebration a new 
 
 95 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 in the wake solemnity and glee. 
 
 That is whv > Or that is P artl 7 wh Y> l d this 
 
 piece of writing in the wake of a splendid snow 
 storm. A moment since and I was in the furious 
 heart of it, and now it is moving, a grey and sil 
 ent presence, along the face of the crags that 
 curve towards the south and the sea. I am sit 
 ting on the highest piece of human masonry in 
 Lancashire, on the Cairn that marks the summit 
 of Coniston Old Man, and all about me the great 
 peaks heave up, scribbling their fierce, white 
 messages across a sky as tender and stainless as 
 a sky of spring. The sunlight is calm and simple, 
 and beneath it the great austerity of the earth 
 consents to show vague hints of opal-red and 
 opal-blue fugitive, virginal colours that flicker 
 and elude, but still remain. It is a strange Eng 
 land, this that I look down upon an England 
 how much more magnificent, how much more 
 terrible, and yet how much less menacing than 
 the black and roaring England I left behind me 
 at Tithebarn Street so brief a while ago. 
 
 Not that I found frost and snow immediately. 
 Between the blackness and the whiteness there 
 spread a space of time when a grey mist forbade 
 the sky and changed the valleys and the woods 
 and the hills to a series of intimate chambers, 
 no larger than a boudoir, through which one 
 
A WHITE CHRISTMAS 
 
 passed in a great unbroken loneliness. Nor was Where the 
 this (as you may think) wholly displeasing to me, 
 for at the back of my desertion of the town there 
 lay one other reason than that longing for a 
 Christmas hung with some of the whiteness of 
 old days. I had tired of talk and of the coteries, 
 I had grown sick of books and writing, the busy 
 and various town seemed suddenly impossible, 
 and the thought had come to me that, j ust at this 
 thin moment of the year the deserted valleys 
 and the withered fells, the empty woods and the 
 gaunt voices of the black December streams 
 might be as a curtain that has worn transpar 
 ent, and that the things we are all, consciously 
 or unconsciously, searching for among the hills 
 and fields of summer might at last be really dis 
 coverable now that the draperies and rich dis 
 guises of summer had been flung away. It is 
 always, I reminded myself, it is always where 
 there is nakedness and emptiness that the final 
 truths are told. And so these isolating walls of 
 mist, severing me so finally from the friendly 
 modes of men, were far from being unwelcome. 
 Now, I thought as I penetrated farther and 
 farther into that endless labyrinth of deserted 
 rooms now, if ever, the great secrets which 
 external Nature seems always on the point of 
 revealing will be at last laid bare. Everything, 
 H 97 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Atonic trans- indeed, within the brief circle of visible things 
 formation o f w hj c h i formed the centre did appear to take 
 on a new value, a deeper momentousness. The 
 grass-blades wove themselves to form a kind of 
 rubric; the black and writhen stems of the 
 heather seemed to build up into great hiero 
 glyphs, entreating solution; the little balls of 
 moisture on reed and stem were as the beads of 
 a mystical rosary. And the things on the edge 
 of that charmed circle, the things neither truly 
 seen nor wholly blotted out they, too, suffered 
 a tonic transformation. They, too, loomed with 
 a splendid portentousness. Looming thus one 
 day, a great mass of rock took on, as I watched 
 it, the fearsome aspect of some shaggy, slime- 
 born beast. I could trace the huge ear case, the 
 blunt snout and the nostrils, the vast and threat 
 ening horns; and as I traced these things the 
 .whole great bulk lurched into a horrible vital 
 ity. It began to move. For a moment my head 
 swam and the whole hillside seemed to share 
 this dreadful resurrection; and then the beast 
 passed into the circle of things seen, and I be 
 held, with a great stound of thankfulness, my 
 monster retransformed into a sheep. 
 
 To such purely physical circumstances as 
 these are to be attributed, too, I suppose, the 
 convictions of impending environments that 
 
A WHITE CHRISTMAS 
 
 would no w and then sweep irresistibly upon me. On the 
 And yet at times it seemed to me that some- 
 thing but the moment before had actually ap 
 peared and beckoned and passed on, and I 
 seemed to catch the echo of a whisper that had 
 just sighed through the labyrinth ; and it seemed 
 to me that although I could no longer describe 
 the presence, nor even rightly remember it, yet 
 some secret part of me had seen and had re 
 membered and had understood as well the 
 message my ears had been too slow and sullen 
 to receive. And at times, too, it seemed to me 
 that I fell stupidly back on the very brink of 
 knowledge, that I let the cup leave my lips be 
 fore the draught was tasted, my fingers being 
 too weak to support the burthen. One morning 
 there is that I especially remember. I had been 
 standing for a period on that scrap of sudden 
 rockface which cries a harsh salute from amongst 
 the grave regiments of trees which march down 
 the lower slopes of Wansfell a spot plebeian 
 enough for the most part, and spread, in the 
 summer, with a pleasant mixture of orange-peel 
 and trippers. But on the morning of which I 
 speak it seemed to have assumed the dignity 
 and sanctity of a shrine : it seemed to hold it 
 self in readiness for some tremendous celebra 
 tion. I stood on the very lip of the crag, and 
 
 99 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A monstrous it was as though I stood at the bow of a richly 
 S groanhig frighted ship plunging heavily forward into the 
 unknown. The mist, densely packed, hemmed 
 me resolutely in, reducing my foothold to the 
 merest shred, filling me with the sense of il 
 limitable plains of empty air. And as I stood 
 there confronting I knew not what, overhanging 
 (as it seemed) nothing but a dreadful void, there 
 arose, out of the very belly of the fog, a strange, 
 heart-shaking clamour. ... It was as though 
 some great hand were beating slowly on a door 
 of the bigness of a mountain-side; and when the 
 beating ceased,and the door (as it would appear) 
 had swung wide before that gigantic summons, 
 there issued forth a monstrous sound as of 
 groaning a sound more dreadful and dis 
 heartening than any I had known. And with 
 that a great terror laid its hand upon me, and I 
 fled; nor was it long time before I found myself 
 back on the main body of the mountain with the 
 reassuring quiet of the trees about me. . . . You 
 are at liberty to laugh; doubtless, as I have said, 
 the thing is easily explicable, for mist (I am told) 
 possesses strange acoustic properties, and can 
 change and distort a sound as completely as it 
 changed and distorted the aspect of the beast I 
 have spoken of above; but none the less, not 
 one of the fifty theories I contrived that day 
 100 
 
A WHITE CHRISTMAS 
 
 could persuade me from the belief that I had The more 
 sprung, not only from the verge of the cliff, but conclusions 
 also from the brink of some great disclosure. 
 And since all things are true that we believe to 
 be true, I have set down the adventure as it 
 happened. 
 
 Other happenings I have witnessed, of an 
 equal depth of mystery, among these passion 
 ate and lonely Yuletide hills : but they are, for 
 the most part, both too personal and too extra- 
 verbal for relation here. Instead, I prefer to set 
 out certain of the more reasonable conclusions 
 at which I have been forced to arrive. I have 
 learned, for one thing, that the great renaiss 
 ance allotted by us townfolk to the Spring has 
 already begun its progress through the woods 
 and coppices : that the buds are already warm 
 and ardent, that the thrill of the Vita Nuova 
 is already published abroad. I have learned too 
 that, even on the meagrestdays, and even in the 
 wildest places, there is nothing of that fierce 
 emptiness, that desperate negation and bitter 
 ness, as of utter death, which we of the cities 
 figure apprehensively as we glance, with a shud 
 der in the winter time, outside our protecting 
 walls. I have learned, on the contrary, that 
 there is, in all the woods and down all the val 
 leys, a beauty almost voluptuous. It is not of 
 
 101 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Night upon the the woods be-snowed that I now speak: for 
 Sreat pea!ks t ^ ie ^ r a ^ most unbearable loveliness is a thing 
 that may be properly celebrated only in song ; 
 it is of the sun-warmed woods, when the snow 
 slips away from the stems and the twigs, and 
 leaves them moist and clean. They rise up then, 
 the slim hazels, like an outburst of saluting 
 swords; so that one halts to catch the cheer 
 that follows their swirl; and they burn then, 
 the grave-boled beeches, with a luminous green 
 fire; and they cover the ground then, the oak- 
 leaves and the beech-leaves, like the splintered 
 fabric of some splendid sunset; and every where 
 the mosses and the lichens and the fungi brush 
 in their perfect complements: their staccato 
 ecstasies of green. Autumn, by comparison, 
 seems loose and slipshod, summer redundant 
 almost to vulgarity. Spring alone can rival this 
 elegance of hue, this acute nimbleness of colour. 
 One other thing I have learned, and that is 
 the great unexpected friendliness which fills the 
 snow-bound uplands after dusk. Last night I 
 spent wholly upon the great white peaks, whose 
 tense leaping against the silken sky is the chief 
 fact in the world which surrounds me as I write. 
 For the most part I spent it afoot, drinking in, 
 with a great gusto, the tonic and spacious luc- 
 ency. A rich plenitude of stars burned so ard- 
 102 
 
A WHITE CHRISTMAS 
 
 ently that they seemed to threaten the snow I slept with 
 with thaw; but the snow caught their light and contentment 
 held it, changing it to a luminous fabric that 
 hung over the whole keen landscape like a sil 
 ver phosphorescence. It was all very benevol 
 ent and tranquil, full of sweetness and sooth 
 ing, and for a while, wrapped in my great-coat, I 
 slept with a deep contentment. When I awoke 
 the stars still splashed and quivered, and from 
 the share of the heeling Plough a splendid fur 
 row still sprang like a spume of gems. But it 
 was already morning, for, when I passed over 
 the brow of the hill, there, in the valley below 
 me, I beheld the ochre lights of a farm. 
 
 It was as I swung through the last fell gate 
 that I came upon the farmer himself, bearing a 
 great lanthorn. In the grave tones of men who 
 speak in the midst of nocturnal silences, we gave 
 and took our salutations. The snow muttered be 
 neath our feet as we moved across the yard, the 
 hinges sobbed as the heavy byre-door swung 
 open, the soft light of the lanthorn washed 
 broadly up and down as the farmer passed with 
 in. The warm smell of the beasts rose up grate 
 fully; there was a coming and going of deep 
 contented sounds the equable breathing, the 
 rustle of the fodder, the stirring of hooves. And 
 as I stood there by the door-post marking 
 
 103 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The Mass of these immemorial details, and marking, too, the 
 
 the Christ 
 
 of the landscape: it seemed to me that at last 
 my pilgrimage had received its final confirma 
 tion. For in that instant something that had 
 long lain dormant in my blood stirred into life, 
 and neither habit nor convention ruled me any 
 more, and the Mass of the Christ became a 
 deep and splendid actuality. 
 
XII DAWN 
 
 ON BIDSTON HILL 
 
DAWN ON BIDSTON HILL 
 
 T 
 
 HE coffee I had from the Stall was strong Between five 
 
 , _ . , ^ .. .., and six of the 
 
 and of good savour; so that it was with- morn i ng 
 out overmuch depression that I began 
 
 to outstep even the long last mile of the houses 
 that march forever, silent and disconcerting as 
 figures in a dream, from Birkenhead towards 
 the Hill. Indeed, as I advanced, I began to dis 
 cover a certain Tightness in their companion 
 ship. Wan and meagre beneath the sorrowful 
 moon, their silence was still the silence of in 
 tent listeners. It was full of solemnity, it braced 
 and prepared me for my vigil. And as the light 
 of the moon caught the windows, each in turn, 
 it seemed as though my passing roused succes 
 sive sleepers to a lit and watchful sympathy. 
 
 So, between five and six of the morning, I 
 came out upon the Hoylake road at the point 
 where it sways slightly northward before accep 
 ting the actual shadow of the Hill. The air had 
 a smack of the soil, and, beneath that, a vague 
 subtaste, sweet and pleasant to the palate, which 
 I knew but could not name. Trees built up 
 against the sky, and the white glimmer of the 
 road was very different from the sly reflections 
 of the lam plit pavements. I drew a deep breath. 
 Out of the darkness on my right came the far 
 away crowing of a cock, faint but precise, like 
 a signal; and immediately thereafter a delicate 
 
 107 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 For omens and rain began to whisper across the fields. The 
 s whisper rose to a mutter, and as it rose the sub- 
 taste in the air grew stronger. I recognised it 
 then, not without a thrill. It was the perfume 
 of rain-soaked heather. 
 
 That wild, familiar odour that glimpse too, 
 of the softly-curving road disappearing among 
 those dark trees brought back to me out of 
 the past, with a grateful freshness, this and that 
 pleasant and pitiful happening. So that it was 
 in a cloud of memories that I began, beneath 
 the moist light of a moon besieged by land-far 
 ing clouds, to move up the slope of the Hill it 
 self. One fingers one's memories, I think, as one 
 might finger the beads of a rosary less for their 
 own sake than as counters, as a guide through 
 the visionary states which they evoke. But it 
 was not of retrospect, nor even for the dreams 
 that retrospect has the power to awaken, that I 
 had come to the Hill. It was for prospect, rather, 
 for auguries, for omens and signals of the future. 
 Out of the quiet hour that would precede the 
 dawn of the New Year, and out of the very mode 
 of the dawn itself, I hoped to gather something 
 of guidance in the days that the dawn would 
 prelude. And so, lest I should forget my pur 
 pose in a coil of dreams, there leaped out upon 
 me, when I reached the summit, a sight that 
 108 
 
DAWN ON BIDSTON HILL 
 
 smote the beads I conjured with utterly out of The three silent 
 mind. presences 
 
 For as I turned and looked back over the way 
 I had come, I discovered that the streets and 
 the silent ways that had seemed so dark and 
 desolate, were in reality boiling and bubbling 
 with essential light. Those dim lamps among 
 the stricken houses, which had seemed so piti 
 ful, seemed now, massed and marshalled by the 
 distance, to present a front of almost intolerable 
 magnificence. Like half a hemisphere of fallen 
 stars, they seemed to make the lowlands all 
 their own. 
 
 To the bravery of that spectacle the loneli 
 ness of my own station contributed, doubtless, 
 not a little; and yet I did not find that loneli 
 ness in the least diminished by the presence 
 beneath me of those wide fields of flame. Rarely, 
 indeed, had I felt more utterly alone. There were 
 no stars; the moon, yielding at last to the clouds, 
 had left the sky hopeless and forlorn, and the 
 three silent presences on the hilltop the Pha 
 ros, the Windmill, the domed Observatory 
 served only to increase the sense of isolation. 
 For one was full of the tragedy that comes to all 
 ruined and deserted things; and one belonged 
 rather to the secret stars than to the world: and 
 one spoke only to some nameless watcher, 
 
 109 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The colours leagues away in the unfathomable night, beat- 
 
 in g U P throu g h the outer dark - These things, 
 as I turned them over in my mind, brought me 
 still more nearly into touch with immensities. 
 I was utterly alone. 
 
 The dawn, when it came, was strangely, in 
 appropriately, conventual and naive. It began 
 just before the clock struck seven, in a little 
 white flurry of cloud, like a virginal bed, that 
 hung precisely above the Bidston Water-tower; 
 and it was there, for an hour, that the brightest 
 stain of colour was to be found. Thence it 
 passed northward and westward toward the sea, 
 always sedately, always unfolding a pale-green 
 riband as it moved. The colours were the 
 colours that cool waters have when they creep 
 quietly through dew-grey meadow-lands. 
 
 Beneath this innocent brightness, the lights 
 that had seemed in the dark so many tense and 
 clear-cut aspirants grew dissolute and sullen. 
 Obscene fumes were about them as they lay, 
 dull relics of the night, like embers in a dying 
 grate. Like dying embers, too, they now began, 
 one after one, to suffer their extinction. 
 
 And as they died away the city that had held 
 them, passed, in their company, entirely out of 
 vision. I looked down and beheld nothing but 
 a dull fabric of mist and fume. It lay like a por- 
 110 
 
DAWN ON BIDSTON HILL 
 
 tentous mantle, it seemed big with incalculable The consum- 
 births, but it made no least confession of the 
 presence of humanity. The sense of the city's 
 nearness, so vividly with me through the night, 
 now faded utterly away. It was the west that 
 held me now, where the deliberate verge of the 
 Flintshire heights rose up in the fine first lu- 
 cency. They showed red-grey over the white 
 mists that made a noiseless tumult above the 
 Dee. On the hither side the fields were taking 
 on their special hues : bronze, pale-green, purple, 
 apple-red. Among them the reassuring farms 
 grew plain and plainer, and over them began 
 to waver a vague tissue woven of innumerable 
 sounds. The comfortable tower of Oxton 
 Church announced itself. The great houses 
 below the wood grew brisk and habitable with 
 pleasant morning noises. But north and east, 
 as often as I turned to it, the city still main 
 tained its disturbing muteness and dread in 
 visibility. 
 
 It would be, I think, about the actual mo 
 ment of the sunrise, that she made at last the 
 movement for which I waited. The appearance 
 of the sun itself, the real consummation of the 
 virginal procession of peaceful colours, was, in 
 deed, accomplished secretly, but a sudden wind 
 from the sea, stronger than the steadfast winds 
 
 in 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 This great city of the night, seemed to break upon these dull, 
 disquieting wrappings of fume and cloud. They 
 stirred and moved, there was thinning and dis 
 parting, the veil grew more transparent, and I 
 saw our seaward-facing city, not indeed as we so 
 often see it, a great incontinent flood of houses 
 and pinnacles and spires, but rather as a vast 
 concordant Being, thrilling with organic life, 
 warm with unanimous desires. There was no 
 detail visible, and to blend and harmonise be 
 came the whole duty of the vapours in the air. 
 Of the mental and emotional effect of those 
 labours I do not know how I can most aptly 
 speak. Perhaps, if I say that I gained, at that 
 moment, a far deeper understanding of the Civic 
 Idea than I had ever been persuaded to before, 
 I shall convey something of the nature of that 
 high, irresistible appeal. I saw this great city 
 of ours in a new and unforgettable fashion. She 
 became a vital Personality. Suffused by the 
 vague rose of the morning, surrounded by these 
 enfolding mists, she seemed deeply and intim 
 ately feminine. She became something that 
 one would work for, march for, suffer for a 
 wonderful Presence gazing steadfastly across 
 theseas, towhom this newdawn, and the dawns 
 it captained, were but as an obedient army to be 
 used for her own far ends. . . . 
 112 
 
DAWN ON BIDSTON HILL 
 
 The robins were awake in the woods as I The voice of a 
 plunged down again, and they and the birch- mansin s in s 
 trees made a silver noise that echoed far and 
 wide. A rich smell rose from the moist under 
 growth, the wind stung my face and brought 
 me the ardour of the sea. And across the fields, 
 clear and certain in the morning air, came the 
 voice of a man singing. 
 
XIII THE 
 
 GLAMOUR OF 
 
 THE TOWN 
 
GLAMOUR OF THE TOWN 
 
 IT cannot be disputed that there exists a A widespread 
 widespread and (so far as can be ascer- notion 
 tained) entirely undisputed notion that 
 the modern city is essentially a thing of ugli 
 ness. You will find any number of folk bubbling 
 over with eagerness to anathematise it for crud 
 ity, ill-taste, or forthright hideousness; but you 
 will find not one anxious to defend it from 
 such charges, or prepared to proclaim, on the 
 contrary, its dignity, its charm, its surprising and 
 many-featured beauty. The very man who grows 
 regularly rhapsodical before the school-girlish 
 pink and blue of the average sunset will fling 
 mud (if not literally then by letter to The Times) 
 at the more than sunset blaze of colour of the 
 average street hoarding. No easels are planted 
 before the intricate splendours of our Liver 
 pool tramway termini: no enthusiast gloats over 
 the stupendous purple banners that depend 
 from our Vauxhall chimneys; nor, if our memory 
 serves us well, have we ever been troubled by 
 wild-eyed tourists demanding the precise spot 
 whence the Bold Street panorama, or the lace- 
 work of the dock-office scaffolding, may most 
 effectively be viewed. And although innumer 
 able poems have celebrated the remote cres- 
 
 117 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The tradition cent of the moon, we are aware of none that 
 is baseless ta ^ es f or theme our own St. George's Crescent, 
 where the enchanting diffidence of the young 
 moon's curves is mingled unprecedently with 
 the same human uproar that resounds through 
 out the old mediaeval legend. No. Artist and 
 aesthete avoid the town with a conspicuous 
 shudder; whilst your common mortal moves 
 amid the unspeakable pageant of its streets with 
 an incredible air of completest apathy. 
 
 Now, it would be an interesting and extreme 
 ly simple business to explain the source and the 
 strength of this tradition to show how far it 
 is the outcome of our national mode of thought, 
 how it was vitalised by Wordsworth, and bound 
 with so much irrelevant mortality by Ruskin. 
 But in this matter, as in so many others, there 
 is something infinitely more important than 
 mere retrospect. It is infinitely more important, 
 for example, to understand that the tradition is 
 baseless; and it is infinitely more important to 
 understand that if it were as well-founded and 
 deeply-rooted as it appears to be, then the ex 
 istence of the modern city would be a mere affair 
 of moments, and it would proceed to capture 
 a sufficient beauty by the simple but expensive 
 process of growing ruinous and mossgrownand 
 dismantled. For it is written among the least 
 118 
 
GLAMOUR OF THE TOWN 
 
 dubitable of the laws of life that where there is Masterpieces 
 no beauty there can be no love. And where 
 there is no love there is no loyalty. And dis 
 loyalty is death. If we could implacably believe, 
 for a single instant, that this affair of streets and 
 spires and lacerated walls was essentially and 
 entirely hideous, then that unimaginable mo 
 ment would suffice to destroy the world-wide 
 energies of which those spiry streets are the 
 ganglion and vital nucleus. For in the sentence 
 which the modern world is laboriously inscrib 
 ing the modern city plays the part of verb; and 
 to believe it dissonant and unmusical is to fall 
 victim to a black-hearted and wholly intoler 
 able pessimism. 
 
 But, of course, as a matter of fact, no such 
 belief exists. Under cover of that outward 
 apathy there thrives, often unrealised, always 
 unconfessed, a very real delight in the master 
 pieces of sheer physical beauty which our cities 
 are constantly building up. Our attitude, often 
 enough, is that of the nameless poet who saw 
 that the London streets were more beautiful 
 than refined gold, and who veiled his passion 
 with a mercenary metaphor. We talk of the 
 glamour of the town, of the town's utility, of 
 its streets being 'paved with gold,' but it is the 
 beauty of the town that these phrases in reality 
 
 119 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 His daily represent. And all that is required to make this 
 delightself-consciousand explicit is a little self- 
 analysis on the part of the individual. Secure 
 that, and our dream of easels in Whitechapel, 
 of poets brooding over the stern magnificence 
 of Bootle,the whimsical uplands of Wavertree, 
 will become a vivid and exhilarating fact. 
 
 And upon the individual the effect of such 
 realisation would be not a little valuable. We 
 can figure such an one, making upon the mor- 
 rowof his discovery his daily descent upon the 
 town. He would pass from his suburban train 
 (not forgetting, we maybe sure, the epical value 
 of that) through the pleasant twilight of the Ex 
 change Station archways, and so into Tithe- 
 barn Street. And Tithebarn Street, floored 
 with the frail shimmer of recent rain, roofed 
 with an unemphatic sky, and set about with its 
 fantastic groups of buildings, he would find an 
 extremely satisfactory sort of place. To the left 
 his eye would catch the blaze of colour that 
 stands for the Moorfields hoarding, its minor 
 incongruities, touched by distance and blended 
 into a few fierce master-tones of orange and 
 vermilion; to the right he would note the ex 
 quisite diminution of the line of cabs drooping 
 in ebon splendour down the hill. And above 
 and beyond he would catch a glimpse of the 
 
 I2O 
 
GLAMOUR OF THE TOWN 
 
 suffused brightness that betrays the presence Tasting these 
 of the river. 
 
 And so, tasting these pleasures like a con- 
 noisseur,lolling them delicately upon his tongue 
 he would spring into Exchange Street East, 
 and alter his outlook in a single stride. Too 
 brief for perceptible convergence, the walls that 
 would flank his vision crush their varied incid 
 ents into a rich fantasy of machicolation and 
 abutment, and over this the early light would 
 drip and foam, sparkling on the pediments, 
 leaping across the pools of damask shade. His 
 glance would adventure into the deep spaces 
 of the Exchange, cross-hatched with sunlight. 
 And fronting him, drawn massively across the 
 morning, he would mark the purple barrier of 
 buildings which rises above the swift bright tre 
 mor of the Dale Street traffic, and whose em 
 phatic verge breaks, amidst a few slim spears, 
 into a coruscation of sculptured stone, stamp 
 ing a changeless emblem upon a changeful sky. 
 
 II 
 
 Liverpool has her artists. Some are known 
 and great; others are unknown and greater. In 
 the atelier, the South Castle Street atelier, of 
 one of the latter a young man whose name 
 has already begun to have a meaning for the 
 
 121 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 ' The Liver- elect there hangs a little ebony-framed pastel 
 m Canal ^ w ^^ cn ^ ^ were widely known, and its motive 
 and meaning rightly understood, would make 
 this article entirely superfluous. It records a 
 scene of extraordinary loveliness: and it is 
 named, 'The Liverpool and Leeds Canal.' A 
 stretch of sombre water, lost in a tangle of ware 
 house ends and aimless walls; a low bridge bear 
 ing a few scattered lights; an uncertain group 
 of barges underneath. That is all. But it suf 
 ficed our artist. The astounding clarity of his 
 vision, the absolute impartiality of his appetite 
 for beauty, enabled him to apprehend and ap 
 preciate with utmost exactitude the decorative 
 significance of a subject that had theretofore 
 been contemptuously disregarded; and by the 
 dexterity of his meticulous hand, the brilliance 
 of his technique, he was able to transcribe the 
 scene with unswerving veracity. By conse 
 quence, his picture teaches, far more eloquently 
 and impressively than any mere pen can hope 
 to do, the lesson of our city's beauty, of the 
 charms so lavishly displayed, and so consist 
 ently, so incredibly ignored. But unfortunate 
 ly that little luminous masterpiece is hidden 
 for the nonce under a highly-efficient bushel. 
 Still more unfortunately, none of its maker's 
 more famous confreres appear to have the 
 
 122 
 
GLAMOUR OF THE TOWN 
 
 capacity or the courage to put forward similar The beauty of 
 announcements. And it is left accordingly to lver P c 
 us who have our city's cause at heart to bungle 
 as best we may with colourless and unconvinc 
 ing words. 
 
 But there is one feature of that picture which 
 calls for particular reference. Its bridge and 
 shadowed waters, it should be noted, are not 
 beautiful because they are like a bridge and 
 shadowed waters in the country; they are beauti 
 ful because they are like a bridge and shadowed 
 waters in the town. The lights which scatter a 
 kind of resonant radiance above the arch are 
 not beautiful because they are like stars, or like 
 a sunset; they are beautiful because they are 
 like street-lamps, because they possess all the 
 pictorial effectiveness that belongs to street- 
 lamps. And if the beauty of Liverpool is to be 
 thoroughly appreciated, if such a haphazard 
 journey as that between Exchange Station and 
 the Town Hall is to become the exhilarating 
 experience which we have shown it might so 
 easily be made, then this fact of the independ 
 ence and entire individuality of that beauty 
 must be thoroughly realised. 
 
 There are some disciples of Richard Jeffer- 
 ies and so forth who insist that any picturesque 
 qualities the city may possess are lucky accid- 
 
 123 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Nature, they ents due to the adventurous inroads of what 
 Say> herS the y cal1 Nature. Nature, they say, asserts her 
 self even in the streets, and tries to save your 
 artificial affair of bricks and mortar from a blank 
 hideousness. What these people mean by Na 
 ture is, presumably, external nature, the nature 
 of daisies and buttercups, fields and hedgerows; 
 for the modem city is, of course, as much a 
 piece of nature as a field of corn, and chimney 
 pots and mushroomSjNewBrightonTowerand 
 the aurora borealis are all equally genuine out 
 crops of the great elemental universal forces. 
 
 They mean, then, these people, that it is to 
 the influence of external nature that any pic- 
 turesqueness in Liverpool is due; and we mean 
 that it is due to nothing at all of the sort. That 
 picturesqueness, never accidental, always in 
 evitable and profound, is due to no fortuitous 
 resemblance to the pictures outside the walls. 
 The great flanks of the warehouses in Back 
 Goree are not beautiful because if you stare at 
 them persistently enough, and flog your imagin 
 ation fiercely enough, they begin to reveal a 
 likeness to miniature precipices. They are 
 beautiful because they are full of quaint pas 
 sages of colour, because they catch the light in 
 curiously effective ways, because their outline 
 strikes against the welter of buildings beyond 
 124 
 
GLAMOUR OF THE TOWN 
 
 with a lusty precision. The Princes Road Themagnani- 
 Boulevardsarenot beautiful because they carry 
 reminiscences of woodland paths, but because 
 by some unprecedented magic their union of 
 leafage and grey pavement and ringing hoofs 
 evokes an atmosphere whimsical, unique, em 
 inently modern. And, indeed, so far are we from 
 thinking that the beauty of the town is due to 
 the efforts of ambassadors from the alien en 
 campment without, that we would assert on the 
 contrary that these ambassadors gain much of 
 their dignity from the magnanimous efforts of 
 the town. 
 
 We have noticed, for instance, during these 
 recent days of unflawed midsummer skies, that 
 in Dale Street and Castle Street, and there 
 abouts, the stony forest of chimney -stems, 
 spires, gables, peaked roofs, and so forth, reach 
 ing upwards like so many lean, aspiring fingers, 
 have clutched these skies and woven them with 
 amazing cunning into novel and delectable 
 flourishes ribands of pure colour, fringed en 
 signs of colour, streams and fountains of colour, 
 infinitely more pleasing and significant than 
 the featureless waste of blue, which in the open 
 country carries with it on even the brightest 
 day the sense of hopelessness that haunts all 
 over-serious, over-consistent effort. And the 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Her moment colour of those alert streamers seemed to be- 
 ofsupremest CQme more yita j and i ntense> j t see med as 
 
 loveliness 
 
 though some process of compression were giv 
 ing one the quintessential juices of the sky. 
 And it proved a tonic of the finest sort. 
 
 And we have noticed again, all through the 
 spring and summer, how lonely trees have won 
 a new potency from their environment. There 
 is one that stands at a certain spot in Scotland 
 Road, an anaemic trembler that would be in 
 continently crushed out of life by its brethren 
 of the open countryside. But Liverpool has 
 adopted and ennobled it. Behind it burns a 
 torrent of red- brown wall, and about its ineffec 
 tive base is scattered a multi-coloured riot of 
 battered paper. Against the bronze of the back- 
 grpund the wan leaves pick out with an effect 
 more than Japanese in delicacy, and those rags 
 and tags of paper, with their carnival sugges 
 tions, complete the impression of something 
 Eastern and exotic. 
 
 Such instances could be multiplied indefin 
 itely, but there is one aspect of our city which 
 places the principle beyond dispute. For it is 
 when she thrusts external nature completely 
 out of sight that Liverpool attains her moment 
 of supremest loveliness. With the sun dead, 
 and the moon and stars invisible, the sky, a 
 126 
 
GLAMOUR OF THE TOWN 
 
 half-remembered legend, she assumes by one Arrangements 
 swift, grave gesture an utterly indescribable 
 magnificence. She is lighted from end to end stars 
 by her own terrene flames. In the long straight 
 avenues, such as Stanley Road, you get the most 
 exquisite arrangements of delicately-dwindling 
 stars; the little heights Brownlow Hill and 
 London Road, for instance fling high into the 
 air long garlands and castanets of fire; palpitat 
 ing cascades mark the busier ways and conflu 
 ences; and down by the Stage, past the great 
 platform where the tramcars intricately wheel, 
 you can watch the lights spraying into all man 
 ner of patterns against the curtains of the night, 
 here burning in tranquil companies, there etch 
 ing in solitary points a whimsical design of 
 pallid gold. 
 
 We began with one picture, let us finish with 
 another. It hangs, this one, where all may see 
 it. Every constant visitor to our Art Gallery is 
 sooner or later confronted by it. And yet it is 
 appraised by no critics, in no catalogues re 
 corded. It is framed by the pillars that flank 
 the gallery entrance. On the right the great 
 bulk of St. George's Hall looms above a sea of 
 pavement flecked with lamplight, blurred and 
 marbled with pedestrians. The round moon- 
 green arc lights hang like curious fruits. The 
 
 127 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Entirely windows of the hotel cut heavy orange slots. A 
 1 vast sign sends intermittent waves of scarlet 
 surging into the heart of the fog of light that 
 rises from below. Nearer, the Wellington Col 
 umn beams up, vaguely ominous, into the purple 
 deeps that slash it to half its daylight length. 
 And beyond, and beyond again, the lights trail 
 and leap and linger, and the figures multiply 
 and disperse, and the distance melts into a 
 warm tumultuous calm. 
 
 Yes, it is a fine picture, more vital, more 
 vivid, more passionate than any within. And 
 it hangs there for the most part entirely dis 
 regarded. 
 
XIV WINTER, 
 
 THAT ROUGH 
 
 NURSE 
 
WINTER, ROUGH NURSE 
 
 BUILT out of the golden dlbris of his The country 
 August holidays, your townsman's con- ^onapslbie 
 ception of the country is a queer, col- structure 
 lapsible structure, run up hastily at the approach 
 of May, fully furnished and equipped by mid- 
 July, but coming down again, in rust and ruin, 
 among the equinoctial rains. It begins with the 
 buds; it ends with the last melancholy leaf; for 
 the rest greyness and rheum. A fall of snow, 
 indeed, because it masks the true features of the 
 earth, tricking it out like a monster pierrot,may 
 renew his interest for a moment. But when 
 February's dykes are filled with rain, he toasts 
 his toes complacently in Tooting and thinks 
 witha shudder of the land lying lean and wretch 
 ed a naked corpse if not an actual skeleton. 
 Beneath his study window the little square of 
 garden which makes a kind of mirror for the 
 seasons, and into which they do try to peer as 
 they pass, shows nothing but apathy and gloom. 
 And he takes that woebegone picture for a true 
 portrait of the outside world. 
 
 Dismal hallucination! The year never hiber 
 nates, March is never a dead March, and I some 
 times think that the land seems nevermore liv 
 ing and alert than when it lies most leafless. 
 There is a sense, and a very simple and true 
 one, in which the end of autumn islike the open- 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The earth is ing of a great bronze door, and the scattering 
 stripped of the last leayes the withdrawal of a baffling 
 
 curtain. For now, as at no other time, the strong 
 drama of the actual earth, the supple play of the 
 muscles of the soil, is revealed to the human 
 spectator. He sees the organic relation of hill 
 to valley, the way the watersheds are welded 
 together, and can watch the cunning dovetail 
 ing of uplifts and divides, the collaborations be 
 tween woodlands and streams. The earth is cer 
 tainly stripped but as an athlete is stripped for 
 a race, a strong man for a struggle. It is not in 
 the least like the denudation of poverty. Fold 
 afterfold,the clogging coverlets of damask and 
 maroon have been heaved aside; and now the 
 living creature, all rippling muscle and mighty 
 limb, bends purposefully before you at its task. 
 Itisagreat sight, I always think restorative 
 as well as stirring. The eye re-discovers, for ex 
 ample, the true meaning and movement of the 
 roads. In the green smother of July they lay 
 half-buried, shining but capriciously, incompre 
 hensibly, disconnected hieroglyphs. But now 
 the scattered curves link up, quick and conse 
 quent, from horizon to horizon; and to stand on 
 the tiniest eminence is to see them forging 
 through the land waves as logically and intently 
 as an army on the march. They tack delicately 
 132 
 
WINTER, ROUGH NURSE 
 
 to and fro among the billows; and you see, as The stark 
 plainly as the men who planned them saw, the 
 problems they have to face, the distant mark 
 they fight for, the exhaustless series of canny or 
 audacious strokes by which they win their end. 
 Similarly with the elder ducts: the water-courses, 
 brooks, and rivers. If the high-roads, linking 
 Temple Bar with Torquay, are the tingling 
 nerves of the great body, the streams may stand 
 for its veins. And winter, like a subtle demon 
 strator, displays them by a double process, ex 
 posing them with one stroke, neatly paring a way 
 the tissues that obscured them, and then, by a 
 second, dilating them, swelling them with rains. 
 Treated thus, the gleaming mesh springs into 
 sight as surprisingly as though the landscape 
 had been suddenly slipped beneath a powerful 
 lens. The refreshing fibres gleam in unsuspected 
 places. The mysterious richness of a certain 
 meadow, that used to shine out erratically on 
 the general shield, a cryptic blazon, is at length 
 logically explained. 
 
 It is this general rationalisation of the view, 
 no doubt, that makes the wintry landscape seem 
 so friendly. Certainly, at any rate, there is 
 nothing in the least steely or repellent in this 
 display of the stark machinery of the land, its 
 undressed ligaments and thews. The earth is 
 
 133 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Treated like seen to be a reasonable earth, neither blind, nor 
 Royal children brutishj nor incomprehensible. In the very 
 kindness of summer there is something a little 
 casual and contemptuous. We wander for ever 
 among ambuscades and curtains. We are treat 
 ed like Royal children kept in a noble nursery, 
 fobbed off with pretty colours and rich toys, but 
 never admitted to the council chamber. But 
 now, in winter, Nature treats you like an equal. 
 You are taken into her confidence; find with a 
 reassuring thrill that you can follow her plans; 
 discover, in a word, the kinship between your 
 body and the original clay. The unmistakable 
 stamina of the structure, too, is a kind of solace. 
 Far more than the sleepy snugness of July, this 
 unpartitioned prospect speaks of power and 
 purpose. With all the unessential barriers de 
 leted, and even theartificial subdivisions of the 
 hedgerows half-erased, there is a general merg 
 ing and co-ordination. 'Views' melt into one 
 massive surface, the deep rhythm of the land 
 shakes itself clear of localities, its noble contin 
 uity is declared. We see the country as a pour 
 ing tide of plateaus, declivities, plains, necked 
 with towns and cities a tide that sweeps on 
 uninterruptedly until it breaks at length upon 
 the borders of the actual sea. England lives. 
 
 These are the larger, more panoramic, issues. 
 134 
 
WINTER, ROUGH NURSE 
 
 But they invade and vivify all the details. The The voice of a 
 little sounds of the season, as well as its wide sin s lethrush 
 views, display the same sweet reasonableness. 
 Our poets, pacing their hearthrugs, bewail the 
 lack of bird-song. But those who really know 
 the winter are aware that the very fewness of 
 the voices gives those that remain not only a 
 heightened value, but also an augmented mean 
 ing. They gain intention as well as intensity; so 
 that the voice of a single thrush, ringing out 
 through a February evening, will seem not only 
 to fill a whole valley almost intolerably full of 
 sweetness, but to shine out, on the grey back 
 ground of the surrounding stillness, with an al 
 most legible significance. Instead of the dear, 
 indistinguishable babel of the summer-time we 
 are granted the unentangled lyric of one visible, 
 traceable bird. The music is no longer a rav 
 elled rain of notes from secret sources. There, 
 undisguised, clear, on the clean, bare boughs 
 is the soft courageous throat, visibly throbbing. 
 And the branches themselves display a lovely 
 logic which their midsummer splendour wholly 
 hides. Delicately discriminated on a dove-grey 
 sky, every detail in a double sense distinguished, 
 they are found to follow a perfect pattern, reti 
 cent as an Eastern print, yet as intricate as 
 Western lace. They spire upwards like foun- 
 
 135 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A single oak tains, shredding into finer spray as they ascend, 
 e but maintaining one consonant curve from base 
 to outermost twig. Like fountains, too, they 
 seem (as at no other time) to be spontaneous 
 expressionsof earth's energy jetting up through 
 the crust of soil. On the costly landscapes 
 which the townsman knows, the trees are strewn 
 like surface decorations, great green and golden 
 flowers, detachable as flowers worn by a woman. 
 But now, reduced to their elements, they are 
 seen to sustain and complete the long lilt of the 
 land. Thus, dark among the dark tillage, a sin 
 gle oak tree will bring the whole scene to a 
 point, as with a conclusive gesture. And in the 
 mass, clamping the hill-tops or mustered in the 
 plains, thebanded timber, as resolute as jutting 
 rock, seems as much a part of the fundamental 
 framework as rock itself. Yet it is not the earth's 
 nakedness alone that leads to this effect of 
 eagerness and intimacy. That would be a very 
 incomplete notation of the season's charms 
 which failed to take account of the special aerial 
 drama of the time the constant stir and re 
 lease of soft colour, ceaselessly flowing and fad 
 ing, filling the February skies with a delicate 
 fever. Here, once more, our urbane misconcep 
 tions are remarkable, for we always speak of the 
 shortening of the days as though it were a dis- 
 
 136 
 
WINTER, ROUGH NURSE 
 
 mal decapitation. Whereas, in reality, of course, Almost 
 their brevity is the result of analmost passionate concentraUon 
 concentration, a quickening of the revolution 
 of the hours, every episode in the play being 
 speeded-up in order to make it fit the shrunken 
 stage. From the first faint silvery overture of 
 the dawn to the deep finale of the sunset, the 
 tempo of the day is heightened; and each phase 
 stumbles on the heels of its precursor with an 
 effect of blushing confusion. It is noon before 
 the sun has cast aside the special colours of 
 the early morning, and already, so hotfoot is 
 the pace, he must begin to assume the livery 
 of evening. No hibernation here! To begin the 
 day's walk beneath the first twilight and main 
 tain it until the stars begin to bud again is to 
 feel that one has rather finely fulfilled the true 
 round and tenor of the day. One need be no 
 distressing athlete to achieve it now. The petals 
 of the dawn have barely withered before the 
 clouds are clustering together again to construct 
 the last crimson rose. 
 
 Familiar enough, to such a happy walker, 
 the effect of all this celestial excitement on the 
 empty fields below. In the shelter of the copses 
 and on the grey grass of the pastures, the pure, 
 pale colours, light as plum-bloom, melt and 
 shift like the colours in an opal. The interfusion 
 
 137 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 An interfusion of early and late light suggests an interfusion 
 of the seasons of the seasons _ t h e softly streaming sunlight 
 of the autumn thrilled with the fresh passion 
 of the spring. Very beautiful are the days (we 
 have had many of them lately) the days of 
 violetand misty gold, when September, secretly 
 returning, meets May in the midst of the wood 
 lands, the broken bands of sunlight streaming 
 about her as she runs. Very beautiful, too, and 
 equally a monopoly of winter's, the days when 
 the earth, mist-suffused, appears as frail as por 
 celain, no more substantial than the silken air, 
 and one seems to move in the midst of exquis 
 ite crisis. Just a word, or a touch, you feel, 
 would complete the spell or spoil it dissolve 
 the thin veil completely or set it tossing together 
 in self-protective folds. And there are other 
 days, not dissimilar, known even in the sub 
 urbs, when the horizons draw softly together, 
 and the contrast between the elusive mist and 
 the sharp outlines of the trees and houses cre 
 ates a queer impression of unreality and invests 
 the simplest object with a strange significance. 
 It is, perhaps, an old lane, or some reeds beside 
 a pool, or a twisted scrap of thorn but it stands 
 out with a sudden poignancy, heavy with a 
 wordless beauty. We may have passed it a 
 thousand times before; but we see it now as 
 
 138 
 
WINTER, ROUGH NURSE 
 
 though it had been but that instant created. The true tide 
 And aswiththecountry, so too with the coun- j!" 8 country 
 try-folk the same new candour and cordiality. 
 Wandering through the winter with a knapsack, 
 I came last week to a certain little mid-England 
 market-town (why conceal its name ? it was 
 Stratford-on-Avon) known to me hitherto, as 
 to most others, in its professional midsummer 
 character of 'literary Mecca 'and so forth. And 
 now, for the first time, I find it living its own 
 life, playing an organic part in the life of the 
 county and the country, serving the surround 
 ing villages, the villages of the Vale of the Red 
 Horse, exactly as it did in Shakespeare's time, 
 and revealing its own character, concealed amid 
 the self-conscious flurry of the tourist months, 
 in all manner of intimate, artless ways. . . . And 
 this deep change in Stratford's attitude is typi 
 cal of the change that passes all over England. 
 All the summer through, nowadays, the best 
 of our countryside, from Kent to Cumberland, 
 from Devon to Durham, is converted into a kind 
 of brightly coloured channel through which the 
 stream of holiday-makers continuously pours. 
 But at the end of autumn, as at the shutting of 
 a dam, the artificial flow is checked and the true 
 tide of the country life resumes its immemorial 
 course. There is no fantasy in this; the human 
 
 139 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Hard weather change is really extraordinarily profound. In- 
 stead of landladies and apartments you find 
 farmers' wives and homesteads; instead of being 
 regarded as a tourist you are welcomed as a 
 friend. As at the end of a ball, there is a general 
 unmasking; and even the spectator finds him 
 self discarding some well-worn sentiments. The 
 footlights are lowered, you catch the players 
 in mufti, and you discover that the people you 
 had looked on as at players in an idyll are 
 familiar men and women. The countryman is 
 found to be a finer thing a fellow-countryman. 
 Perhaps, too, hard weather makes soft hearts, 
 and the cold a warmer welcome. Certainly, at 
 any rate, et ego in Arcadia is just a sickly-sweet 
 midsummer sigh. Now, wherever you go, you 
 will find somethingmore enduring than an idyll; 
 for every road you follow will lead you, before 
 nightfall, to the door of a human home. 
 
XV A FRAGMENT 
 
A FRAGMENT 
 
 THE year's at the spring and day's at the Why not have 
 morn, and writing's a bore. Flush the real thing? 
 from the verge of the bed of dragon's- 
 blood wallflowers that burn beneath the window 
 where I write (the velvet vagueness of their 
 petals bedimmed now by a double bloom de- 
 liciously dusked by the dew), a silvery lawn, 
 still in shadow, slides and slants to a river's 
 brim, to a pool this minute pierced by the sun; 
 and up on the other side, singing exultantly, as 
 though rising refreshed from the cool, coppice 
 climbs above coppice, up to the heath above, 
 con fronting dawn's arrows as they rise receiv 
 ing and weaving them, shattering and scatter 
 ing them, tossing them down the slope through 
 the stems and the moss in tumbling torrents 
 of butter-bright primroses. And I want to be 
 splashing in that river, I want to be mounting 
 that hillside : I'm sick of pens and paper and 
 tame type. Give me leave, and I'd bring you 
 back, I'm convinced, a much jollier tale of ad 
 ventures than any I can squeeze out of books. 
 A book is but a mirror, and criticism mirrors 
 that again; your position is worse than the Lady 
 of Shalott's. Why not have the real thing the 
 bright world, direct sunlight the live tug and 
 entreaty of the fact. 
 
 But of course we can't mustn't. This has 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The best book got to be a literary causerie, and it must be 
 written now, this minute, or it will never catch 
 the post; and so I must just miss the best bath 
 ing hour not of the day alone, but positively 
 of the whole year and sit watching the sun 
 light slowly leaving my pool and creeping up 
 the lawn, eating the shadows as it crawls, till 
 the wallflowers doff their outer veil of dew. But 
 I'm not going to be done altogether. I've a 
 plan for getting back at old Literature. If I must 
 write about books it shall be about books that 
 betray her, booksthat foster an impatience with 
 reading and make you long to fling letters aside. 
 Gross treason but I'm mutinous ; blame the 
 sap and the sun. And there's another vindic 
 ation as you shall see. 
 
 For I'm far from sure that the greatest merit 
 of literature at any time (and the ultimate test 
 of its worth) isn't just its power to provide its 
 own antidote to foster a disaffection for itself. 
 The best book is the one that makes you feel 
 that reality is better; it's the second-rate stuff 
 that turns us into students. It is poor fiction, 
 for in stance, that makes incessant novel readers : 
 with its pages coloured so feverishly and its 
 values all faked it fills us up with such false ideas 
 of picturesqueness that the everyday world, 
 when we raise our eyes from the book, seems 
 144 
 
A FRAGMENT 
 
 unbearably lifeless and drab ; we snatch up an- How to walk 
 other cheap novel to hide it. But the great books, 
 of any sort, prose, poetry, fiction, so freshen the 
 reader's sight, teach him to see so intelligently, 
 that reality when he looks up flashes out irre 
 sistibly; good novels make more novels almost 
 needless. They make life itself your romance. 
 They are just a preface to the spreading serial 
 of the days. That is a thing to remember, at 
 all times of the year; that the test of good litera 
 ture is its power to make you turn your back on 
 it. That it is only bad books that breed book 
 worms. 
 
 Not many people have learned how to walk; 
 and very very few of those have been writers. 
 Indeed (and here I get a chance for another 
 dig at Letters) it is an art whose acquisition 
 has been hindered most of all by the books of 
 appreciation written round it. Walking has been 
 written to death. Most of us have been lamed 
 by sharp pens. By Stevenson's pen,byHazlitt's, 
 by Borrow's. They have made it a department 
 of literary culture. First 'VirginibusPuerisque' 
 then probably 'La vengro' then a nice new 
 knapsack. The latter being purchased not to 
 enable us to escape from books, but to help us 
 to clamber inside them. When you buckled 
 L 145 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Excessively on your first rucksack you were really, at heart, 
 immensely tr y m g to bind yourselves into your copy of * Vir- 
 picturesque ginibus' and an alert ear would have caught 
 the creak of buckram as you strode and per 
 ceived that you stepped in time to a certain 
 literary tempo. ' Give me the clear blue sky over 
 my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a 
 winding road before me, and a three hour? march 
 to dinner* you remember? Again, yet more 
 insidious: 'If the evening be fine and warm, there 
 is nothing better in life than to lounge before the 
 inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet 
 of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick 
 fishes.' Honestly, now did you never strike 
 precisely that attitude, out of admiration for 
 R. L. S., and feel, as you did so, excessively 
 superior, immensely picturesque, and virtuous? 
 Of course you did. So did everybody. So did I. 
 All the same, it wasn't the real thing and 
 though the real thing may result from it, though 
 the ring of your boot-heels on the genuine road 
 may drown the pretty prose rhythm that set 
 them marching, it is a way of commencing that 
 incurs many dangers dangers, some of them, 
 that endure. One is the way it leaves you trying, 
 instinctively, to make everything you meet 
 match the essay, and rejecting the details that 
 won't. You look out hungrily for a bridge with 
 146 
 
A FRAGMENT 
 
 a parapet, and probably pick your inn because An open mind 
 it is near one; instead of remembering that the 1! 
 really romantic thing would be to find a bridge 
 without a parapet, or an inn of an utterly new 
 kind. And you do this especially (and especially 
 is it dangerous) in the case of the details called 
 people. Nature, after all, often is picturesque in 
 the good old traditional way and to see beauty 
 only in the objects hallowed by Hazlitt would 
 still keep you fairly well stocked with real pleas 
 ures: 'blue skies, winding road s, and green turf ' 
 being always pretty freely supplied. But human 
 nature is less docile. And to go picking and 
 choosing for Petulengros and Pickwicks would 
 leave you happy only in the hands of humbugs 
 and hypocrites. The Open Road is a very fine 
 thing, but an open mind is better; and the cult 
 of the first, as often practised at present, pro 
 duces a terrible lack of the secon d . For you have 
 got to remember that the romantic thing is the 
 real thing, and that if it looks dull it is only the 
 fault of your eyesight. And you have got to re 
 member, too^that the reallest things of all are 
 exactly those that have never yet been written 
 about. The village that offered you a spick-and- 
 span picture-palace instead of the parapeted 
 bridge of your dreams ought to have delighted 
 you, not reduced you to disgust. It ought to have 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Something reminded you of the fact that you were seeing 
 something R. L. S. never saw, that you had out 
 stripped old Hazlitt at last; and the realisation 
 ought to have made you understand that were 
 Hazlitt you he'd have seen the picturesqueness 
 of the picture-house. He'd have seen all it stood 
 for, and realised the romance of it : he'd have 
 made a note on the spot for an essay on the new 
 power that drags at a given moment half the cot 
 tagers of England into a vast system of darkened 
 halls and there feeds their minds with fresh-cut 
 slices of the outer world pieces of Africa, slabs 
 of the East, certified chunks of the Poles. The 
 mere words 'Pathe Freres' would have set his 
 pen spinning happily: he would have spoken 
 of Paris playing the part of monstrous reflector 
 and throwing beams from the antipodes into the 
 
 blinking eyes of Berkshire clowns And years 
 
 afterwards when kinemas had given place to 
 something still queerer, young aspirants, read 
 ing his eulogy, would buckle on their rucksacks 
 and go solemnly, sentimentally, rapturously in 
 search of villages with picturedromes and no 
 parapets. 
 
XVI A JUMP 
 
 THROUGH JUNE 
 
A JUMP THROUGH JUNE 
 
 T was one of those dank afternoons which The really 
 
 I 
 
 momentous 
 
 dismally denied that May had come, and suggestlon 
 
 our hostess was a person with a. noble 
 passion for fresh air. We clung convulsively 
 to her fireside accordingly, and made remarks 
 about the Comet. There was a poet among us, 
 and he was very much to the point; so much to 
 the point, indeed, so apt and opulent in im 
 precation, that the right to reproduce his phras 
 es had better be strictly reserved. It was highly 
 agreeable to listen to him; but it was left to our 
 hostess herself to make the really momentous 
 suggestion: 
 
 'Well, after all,' she said, 'why need we sit 
 shivering here?' 
 
 Three full-grown males on the instant made 
 an intense dash towards the windows. But they 
 had misapprehended her. 
 
 'Why need we sit shivering here? It's true 
 that just here, in Liverpool, it is March in every 
 thing but name. But it's also true that farther 
 south in all but name it's July. Summer hasn't 
 swum the Mersey yet, but it long ago crossed 
 the Channel. It's fairly in the land you know 
 flowing up the fields of England like a great 
 green-and-golden tide. Well! Why shouldn't we 
 run down the beach to meet it? Why don't we 
 scramble out of these miserable immovable ba- 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Plump into the thing-vans these cold and clammy northern 
 e suburbs and get a kind of anticipatory dip? 
 Time and tide wait for no man; but there's no 
 earthly reason why men should wait for tides. . . .' 
 So she ran on irresistibly. ' Let us dive plump 
 into the future' that was how she summed the 
 notion up. And so, the very next morning that 
 ever was, a picked crew of us stood on the sum 
 mit of Oxton Hill looking down at the milk- 
 white roadway that goes whipping to and fro, 
 like the flicked white thong of a whip, among the 
 mist-grey meadows below. Beside us sobbing 
 excitedly crouched like a cat for the spring, 
 loomed the great black engine that was going 
 to juggle with time and sling us slam into July. 
 The clock of St. Saviour's cried seven. We 
 climbed aboard; a lever clucked; the sobs sim 
 mered up to a croon, the croon to a roar; and 
 the great machine stormed growling along the 
 ridge of the hill like a huge beast nosing for a 
 trail. It found it found, that is to say, the little 
 sally-port of Holme Lane took the descent in 
 one sickly-sweet swoop; and there, in a second, 
 we were skimming round the curves of the white 
 double S, scudding past the little inn that dots 
 it, leaping straight for the transverse wall of 
 trees. And then, with a gulp, we had veered to 
 the left, and the wood was a wind-blown scarf, 
 
A JUMP THROUGH JUNE 
 
 and the Wirral was pouring past us in a torrent The time 
 of undulant fields. Away to the right, about the machine 
 whale-backed Burton Woods, the silver-grey 
 sands of the Dee shimmered up like a delicate 
 dawn. They broke into full vision, a shining 
 shield. And away beyond them, crest over crest, 
 surging like combers, the purple hills of Wales 
 came on in a galloping tide. The black beast 
 beneath us gave tongue triumphantly, and its 
 voice went clanging through the country ahead 
 like a courier beating out an empty road. That 
 road ran south. We were driving straight for 
 summer at forty odd miles an hour. 
 
 Now though the time machine (as by this you 
 have guessed) was thus nothing more than a 
 motor-car, all romance needn't therefore ooze 
 out of this record and leave it flabby and stale. 
 For our run (as you will see) did really demon 
 strate that you can play off space against time 
 that a well-directed car can make the love 
 liest mess of mere mechanic almanacs and such 
 things. And it did more. For though it seems 
 a hackneyed thing enough, to mount a motor 
 car is still to plunge into sensations so bizarre 
 and strange that no one yet has had the pluck 
 to attempt their tabulation. For our writers, 
 when they would speak of them, still use the 
 antique terms through love or lethargy they 
 
 153 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Measuring plunge their pens into the ink-wells first devised 
 
 ten. miiebeh to fit the needs of wayfarers like Hazlitt they 
 of forest write of motoring, I mean, as though it were but 
 a sort of speeded-up walking tour, a kind of pre 
 cipitate pedestrianism. They babble sweetly of 
 woodbine and bird-song, running brooks, and 
 the life of the fields. A canting convention! 
 The boom of the pace-born wind, for one thing, 
 bars out all bird-song as though by brazen doors. 
 And that exchange is typical. It is no longer by 
 the meek, familiar code of foot-travellers that 
 the motorist measures his progress and adjusts 
 his days. It is by measuring rods like a ten- 
 mile belt of forest, by landmarks like a solid 
 mountain mass, by those large essential rhythms 
 of soil and race which seem to the pedestrian 
 as unchanging and far-reaching as the skies. 
 
 And by the skies themselves, too! For, co 
 incident with these, there inevitably troop into 
 the outlook of the motorist (of the motorist, at 
 any rate, who is weak or wise enough to reject 
 the earthier joys of driving) sign-posts and bea- 
 consmore majestic still, cairns and monuments 
 even more tremendous than those titanic mile 
 stones made of woods and hills. I refer, of 
 course, to the features of the skyscape, to the 
 snowy cliffs and canyons, the rivers and ravines 
 up there. For it is a fact that motoring makes 
 154 
 
A JUMP THROUGH JUNE 
 
 you more familiar with these celestial signs than You thread the 
 
 any other form of earthly progress yet contrived. l 
 
 Ontrainboard you are roofed in jealously. The 
 
 sky is both squashed and bisected. Your eye 
 
 is held down to earth and a dizzy swirl of detail. 
 
 But as you lounge at your ease in a car you are 
 
 granted the freedom of the heavens. Lean back 
 
 and look up, and you instantly seem to soar. 
 
 You leap from height to height. You thread the 
 
 thunders. You surge sublimely through those 
 
 seas of blue. Those white and purple clouds 
 
 become your pacemakers. You notch your 
 
 progress on those ivory towers. 
 
 And since that day was above everything a 
 day of clouds, it was far less of the Wirral that 
 we thought than of those radiant giants, trailing 
 league-long robes, who paced about the blue 
 floors overhead. 
 
 And so, when the walls of Chester suddenly 
 shot up on either hand, hemming us in, they 
 brought that sense of almost stifling stillness 
 and strangeness which comes when the quay 
 walls of a foreign port suddenly shut off the 
 space and freshness of the outer sea. Shrugging 
 its peaked shoulders, raising its queer eyebrows, 
 the old quaint architecture about us seemed 
 to crowd and point and peer. We tacked and 
 twisted, sliding at quarter-speed; and the long- 
 
 155 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A sudden rout drawn drone of the wind died suddenly down 
 odours t t ^ ie m ultitudinous murmur and plash of little 
 voices. 
 
 And when at last we shook clear of it and 
 broke out through the southern wall into the 
 fresh sea of fields beyond, it was really as though 
 the place had actually been a kind of port, an 
 outpost. Its wall might have been the magic 
 wall that severs north from south, winter from 
 spring. For the sun, hitherto hustled and chiv 
 ied rudely enough, by those rollicking giants 
 of cloud, had now managed, with the wind's aid, 
 to shake itself fairly free; and at its touch, as by 
 a trick of magic, the wide earth shone and was 
 changed. It seemed to ripen visibly like a mon 
 ster plum. And this sense of succulence was 
 heightened by a sudden rout of fruity odours 
 which came rushing up out of the soil. The 
 sun's escape from bondage had freed other pri 
 soners too; and up from the secret recesses of 
 the soil they came pouring out pell-mell. There 
 were shaggy wild scents from deepwoods, cool, 
 silken sallies from orchards, the strong, ringing 
 savour of pines, dim odours of reeds, the raw 
 smell of newly-turned tilth. To breathe that air 
 became as genuine a joy as munching juicy 
 apples. 
 
 For we got all these perfumes, remember, 
 156 
 
A JUMP THROUGH JUNE 
 
 not at all as the pedestrian does, in a solemn The 
 succession of slabs, but in pulsing cascades and a P idndof ^^ 
 crescendos in positive arpeggios of perfume, magic clock 
 It may sound foolish or fantastic, but a swift 
 car, on such a morning, becomes a kind of bow, 
 bounding and zipping across these strings of 
 various scent. And the tune it draws from them 
 teaches the body a new sort of sensual dance. 
 For each unexampled pleasure (and here's more 
 romance for you) does miraculously raise some 
 old null nerve from the dead does aid at the 
 birth of some blind sense, some embryo dim 
 corner of the brain. 
 
 Well, so we sped a brace of miles every 
 three minutes. The speedometer at my feet (its 
 pointer creeping coyly past thirty, hovering de 
 murely at forty, absent-mindedly straying past 
 the fifties) was a kind of magic clock ticking off, 
 before their time, the hours of the unborn year. 
 Climbing the hill beyond Gresford, the shining 
 Cheshire plain slid back from us in peacock- 
 coloured coils of blue andgreen; and we seemed 
 to be visibly sloughing the last relics of the old 
 year. And when we swooped down on that little 
 Corot-come-alive at Ellesmere you would have 
 sworn we had at last attained the secret hid 
 ing place of June so much bluer than May's 
 were the waters there, so richly woven the tall 
 
 '57 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 An eighteenth- tapestries of green. 
 
 picture -^ ut our macn inist was not the person to be 
 taken in by tapestries. He wore the frown of a 
 man well pleased; his eyes searched the road 
 ahead; the dial at his feet cast off all disguise 
 and clung brazenly to sixty. The land began to 
 break up and billow as the sea does when it feels 
 the deep water swell. We slid through the wood 
 cutters' country climbed a long ridge 
 sighted the Wrekin dropped, drumming, 
 down into a dale snarled out of that got the 
 Wrekin again and then, with a rush, were in 
 Shropshire. 
 
 And Shropshire was kind. First, she assailed 
 us with primroses. Next, she tried volleys of 
 violets. And when our monster drove doggedly 
 on, indifferent to these dainty admonitions, she 
 sent Sabrina herself, most tranquil, least hur 
 ried, of rivers, to pace beside us demurely, de 
 precating our pace by her peace. We slowed 
 down at that, accepted her serene guidance. 
 And she brought us at length to a town of en 
 chantment, where whole solid centuries, to say 
 nothing of hours, seemed to scale off the earth 
 like a rind, leaving it oddly simple and mellow 
 and sweet. We ran into a street like a street in 
 an eighteenth -century picture; passed out of 
 that into another as Elizabethan as stomachers 
 158 
 
A JUMP THROUGH JUNE 
 
 andruffs. And there, some what dazed, thinking The name of 
 we'd gone far enough, been magic'd enough for thls wme 
 one day, we climbed rather dizzily down. 
 
 Now those who know Shrewsbury, as they 
 call that magic town on the Severn, know that 
 its elderly architecture, in spite of its charm, is 
 no more than a kind of elegant rim to a sort of 
 central cup a windless deep hollow, a Garden 
 of Proserpine, where the river wanders drowsily 
 and then falls fast asleep. Brimming with golden 
 warmth, bird-notes rising and breaking like 
 bubbles, that cup seemed a chalice yesterday, 
 filled with wine. 'And if the name of this wine 
 isn't Summer,' said the poet, as he sipped it 
 with solemn glee, 'may I never drink another 
 jorum of your genuine July.' 
 
XVII A WORD 
 FOR THE WAITS 
 
A WORD FOR THE WAITS 
 
 FINELY disregarding both their primal Their little 
 raison tfetre and the present manner of hour 
 their reception, certain of our local ca- 
 rollers have a habit of generously distributing 
 their efforts beginning early, rising to their 
 apogee on Christmas Eve, and then gradually 
 fading away, with an effect of reluctant dimin 
 ution, until the New Year convinces even the 
 most enthusiastic, in even the most forbearing 
 suburb, that at last their little hour is ended, 
 and their brief annual publicity quite over. We 
 do not condemn this show of enthusiasm, for 
 we realise that a carol without snow is as an egg 
 without salt: and if (as happened this year) our 
 Christmas Eve prove snowless, why, then, let 
 the white nights of the 26\het seq. re-echo to 
 the old-fashioned singing. How bewilderingly 
 the snow can upset our chronology and blot 
 out the rather cynical Christmastide of sophis 
 ticated modernity we all (even the most prosaic 
 of us) realised with something of a thrill as the 
 blinds ran up yesterday morning. Grant the 
 snow, then, an additional prerogative, and let 
 it be the power to justify the nocturnal presence 
 in our post-Christmas suburbs of those patient 
 enthusiasts whose efforts are always to be en 
 couraged if the modern Yule is to retain the 
 full fruity flavour of the Yules of older and 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 ' The Waits more robustious years. 
 Academy ' WQ ^ Q not deprecate the enthusiasm then; 
 
 but we cannot forbear a suggestion that there are 
 other methods, too, in which that enthusiasm 
 might properly express itself. For, to be quite 
 frank, the carol-singer of to-day sustains his 
 highly picturesque role with no more than a 
 partial measure of success. There is really no 
 reason in the world why this should be so. There 
 is indeed no reason why the possibilities of the 
 craft should so far outrun its performances. And 
 so one is tempted to applaud the suggestion that 
 some specific mode of training might be advan 
 tageously introduced. ' The School for Waits,' 
 or 'The Waits Academy,' or (less pleasingly) 
 * The Guild of Midnight Carollers ' some such 
 body, far less essentially inapposite than Mr. 
 Freer's Academy for Actors, might accomplish 
 a deal of really admirable work. For one thing, it 
 might serve to create a modern school of carol- 
 writers, a thing greatly to be desired and practi 
 cally non-existent. For anotheritwould certain 
 ly reintroduce to the light of day (or to the dark 
 night) the numberless entirely beautiful old 
 Songs of Nowell, which now merely lie, in a 
 dull insensate sort of way, on a few ' unturned ' 
 pages in the anonymous section of our antho 
 logies. And in those two ways alone the move- 
 164 
 
A WORD FOR THE WAITS 
 
 ment would destroy the chiefest blemish of the Deplorably 
 
 r, limited and 
 
 hackneyed 
 
 The blemish, of course, is the deplorably 
 limited and hackneyed nature of its repertoire 
 a blemish which is far from being softened by 
 the fact that certain of the most popular pieces 
 in that repertoire are largely made up of in 
 genious repetitions. There is, for example, that 
 old favourite, whose first stanza is briefly com 
 posed of these two lines : 
 
 Christ was born in Bethlehem, 
 
 And in a manger laid. 
 
 Now, in the actual rendering, as everybody 
 knows, these two lines, A and B, are repeated 
 thus: A, A, A, B, B, B, A, B; and however 
 deeply he may be inclined to reverence the pious 
 naivete' and wholesome innocence of such a 
 quaint device, there is little doubt that when the 
 listener has had each one of the innumerable 
 verses of the carol so treated, and has heard the 
 whole carol repeated in various directions by 
 half-a-dozen different choirs, all within one hour, 
 there is little doubt, we think, that the reverence 
 of the listener will in some measure have depart 
 ed, and that his opinion of Waits in general, and 
 of this carol in particular, will be regrettably un- 
 Christmaslike. A little variety, a little energetic 
 research and refurbishing, and such unwished- 
 
 165 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Best of all for consummations might easily be avoided 
 s as easily avoided as the equally unChristmaslike 
 hymns which many of the singers seem impelled 
 by their extremity to serve up. Let them repeat 
 instead the delightful ' Cherry Tree Carol,' or 
 'TheHoly Well,' or'The Three Kings'or'The 
 Rose,' each one as beautiful as its heartsome 
 name, and each one brimming over with the 
 right old reverential joyousness. Let them 
 learn, in especial, and sing so that no listener 
 may ever again forget it, that best of all carols, 
 1 1 sing of a Mayden,' with its 
 
 He came all so still, 
 
 Ther His moder was, 
 As dew in Aprille 
 
 That falleth on the gras. 
 He came all so still 
 
 To His moder's bower, 
 As dew in Aprille 
 
 That falleth on the flower. 
 He came all so still, 
 
 Ther His moder lay, 
 As dew in Aprille 
 
 That falleth on the spray. 
 
 So doing they will find that condemnable iter 
 ations will become as needless, Sankey and 
 Moody as inappropriate, as the string-strains of 
 the wandering Teutons who are already offering 
 us a dreadful substitute. 
 166 
 
XVIII THE OCTO 
 BER RETROSPECT 
 
OCTOBER RETROSPECT 
 
 TO those who are fortunate enough, or The month's 
 fanatical enough, to be learned in the 
 lore of the seasons, October, no doubt, 
 presents herself as the owner of quite a num 
 ber of significant monopolies; swallow-flights, 
 for instance, and free desserts ; hips and haws, 
 again, and ash-tree corals, and yellow birch- 
 tree sequins, fragrant plough-parallels, with 
 streets of wiry stubble melting rhythmically 
 before them ; a certain new gravity in the sun 
 light, too, and decorous, reassuring dawns ; and 
 always, of course, like the wide-marged lyrics 
 of some modern decadent, the slender autum 
 nal bird-calls, imperative because so few, etch 
 ing a fine pattern in the grey tranquillities. 
 These, we understand, are the elements to 
 make up the traditional symbol of October; 
 but it is to a vastly different alphabet that the 
 mere townsman turns when he desires to copy 
 out the month's especial signature. 
 
 To one accustomed to make his dial of the 
 seasons out of much more carnal things than 
 Marvell's 'Flowers and herbs,' October is chiefly 
 momentous as a kind of dress-parade, a minia 
 ture resurrection and reunion. His summer, 
 and especially the later weeks of it, has been a 
 long series of cleavages and disruptions, of lug 
 gage-laden departures and dislocated bonds, of 
 
 169 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Was it worth all manner of uncertainties and incomplete- 
 ur while ? nesses. The advent of October ends all this, for 
 it brings the holidays to a formal close. The 
 ranks fill up again, the pulse of the machine be 
 gins to throb with a fierce, familiar regularity, 
 there is a general effect of the town getting back 
 into its stride. It is essentially a month of trans 
 ition, and, like all such buffer periods, it presents 
 an admirable opportunity for retrospect, for 
 quiet reconsideration and appraisement. A 
 thousand and one things thrust themselves for 
 ward for revision, but of them all none is more 
 proximate or domineering few, perhaps, more 
 important than the great question of Holi 
 days. That wild, disturbing holiday fever from 
 which we are just recovering, how far was it 
 essential, how far helpful or wise ? Was all the 
 hysterical scurrying hither and thither entirely 
 needful? Was it, after all, really worth our while? 
 Signs are not wanting, indeed, to show that 
 the answers to these questions are not so inevit 
 able as the questions themselves. The holiday, 
 it would seem the old-fashioned state of con 
 centrated recreation is beginning to fall under 
 suspicion. We are beginning to doubt its digest 
 ibility, beginning to wonder whether the sudden 
 dislocatory spell of dogged laziness or extrava 
 gant athleticism is really the most efficacious 
 170 
 
OCTOBER RETROSPECT 
 
 method of saucing the year's work. There is, for WeekEnder 
 example, the highly significant welcome which 
 has been accorded to that peculiarly modern in 
 vention, the Week End. The Week Ender is a 
 man who shares Dan Leno's distaste for 'lump 
 butter on Friday and dry bread all the rest of the 
 week.' He prefers his butter spread, his recre 
 ation equally distributed; and he is prepared, ac 
 cordingly, to sacrifice his three weeks, or to make 
 them a frank, not necessarily wholesome,luxury, 
 and to try instead a mild, continuous blend of 
 work and play, of creation and recreation. That 
 is the Week Ender, and at the moment he mul 
 tiplies apace. He voices very articulately the 
 growing disaffection for the anarchic paroxysms 
 of July-September, and he proposes, too, a meas 
 ured substitute which modernity seems rather 
 inclined to adopt. For if the essential superiority 
 of the contrivance is as great as the superficial, it 
 will very speedily be put within the range of those 
 to whom it is at present a mere impossible dream. 
 But there is reason for supposing that the 
 essential superiority is not so great as the superfi 
 cial. There is reason for believing that the Week 
 End lacks one of the most important, prob 
 ably the most important, of the qualities which 
 every really regenerative holiday must possess. 
 And the curious thing is that the lack is quite 
 
 171 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 An extremely deliberate, that it prides itself enormously upon 
 Sh0 affa* theabsenceoftheinvaluable quality. The Week 
 Ender has discovered that the July-Septem 
 ber transport is, in the quite literal sense of the 
 word, an extremely shocking affair; and the 
 prime aim of his invention is the reduction of 
 that shock by the obvious process of distrib 
 ution. It is a perfectly obvious process, and a 
 perfectly successful, and therefore an entirely 
 disastrous one. For it is precisely because they 
 are shocking that our holidays are holy. It is 
 precisely that galvanic property which constit 
 utes their most sacred possession. A holiday 
 must always snatch us, with an absolute com 
 pleteness, out of the ruts of routine, must al 
 ways souse us in a sort of electric bath of ex 
 traordinary experiences. Besides this func 
 tion, the other functions of the holiday the 
 medicinal effects of fresh air, the aesthetic stim 
 ulus provided by the sight of exquisite land 
 scapes, the intellectual nourishment provided 
 by the assorted information the traveller cannot 
 escape pale into comparative insignificance. 
 Aholiday must, first and foremost, be shocking; 
 that is the great principle with which our ex 
 amination of the equable Week End arrange 
 ment has provided us. For it is only by forget 
 ting that we can remember; it is only by rejec- 
 172 
 
OCTOBER RETROSPECT 
 
 tion that we accept; it is only by making a series The right 
 of splendid departures that we are able to re- h 
 tain our little pied-a-terre. To live our lives to 
 the fullest extent we must at intervals fling them 
 utterly aside. That, the right holiday, with its 
 air of meaningless delirium, does certainly en 
 able us to do. It makes us inhabitants of a new 
 world, and so grants us permission to look back 
 upon the old with an invaluable air of supreme 
 impartiality. 
 
XIX THE VOICE 
 OF THE STORM 
 
VOICE OF THE STORM 
 
 I WAS alone in the room no longer. Vivid, Fateful outer 
 incessant, unescapable, the voice of the apper 
 storm, the sense of rigorous and fateful 
 outer happenings, had penetrated even here. 
 It took possession. It dominated the fire 
 giving it a new zest, a new ardency of colour. 
 It dominated the book-shelves giving them 
 a strange air of inertia and futility. The window 
 vibrated like a drum; and outside, beyond the 
 quiet, sunlight-lacquered lawn, a group of trees 
 gestured insistently, bowing themselves in fer 
 vent salutations, eagerly pointing, against the 
 exultant sky,to some superb, unseen procession. 
 . . . To make blue-black scribble on dirty white 
 paper seemed suddenly a rather pallid, a rather 
 anaemic, sort of ploy. Book reviewing became 
 a sheer irrelevance. And when I pushed open 
 the window to look where the lean trees beck 
 oned, the matter finally settled itself. For it is 
 manifestly impossible to work in a room that 
 looks like a particularly untidy paper-chase. 
 
 Outside, the same sense of a splendid, all- 
 dominating power pervaded everything. It was 
 in the hoarse roof-top tumult that throbbed and 
 rose, and pitched into fierce screamings, and 
 fell and rose again. It was in the wind-stung, 
 blood-bright faces of the passers-by: in their 
 eyes, too alert and clean; and in their tense 
 N 177 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The great grey and vital carriage. It was in the writhen branches 
 r and the racing debris of the suburbs; and all 
 across the city it spelled itself out, dramatically 
 enough, on placard after placard in the 'Pier 
 Destroyed' and the 'Township Flooded' and 
 the 'Liners Ashore,' that groaned in black or 
 squealed in yellow, or raged in crimson beneath 
 every newsman's shop. Vivid, incessant, un- 
 escapable, the voice of the storm, the sense of 
 rigorous and fateful outer happenings, had 
 penetrated even here, into the snug bield of the 
 quaint little gullies and canyons which we are 
 in the habit of calling streets. 
 
 The river, the great grey river to which we 
 owe so much the sedate old pedlar that 
 trudges, day in, day out, so dutifully to and fro 
 before our doors it, too, had heard the hot, 
 rejuvenating Cry. The antique hack no more, 
 it ruffled it now with a fine insouciance, footing 
 astounding galliards among the craft, gay be 
 yond belief with plumes and epaulettes of foam. 
 To sight that foam, indeed, was to drink through 
 the eyes a silver elixir of youth. Woven into 
 elaborate patternings, sword-keen and intense, 
 beneath the clean spring sun, it flashed like the 
 meshes to catch the endless net, a net that strove 
 to catch the spirit of the storm a net that 
 leaped and strained and broke as its captive 
 178 
 
VOICE OF THE STORM 
 
 plucked it hither and thither and so escaped To enter a new 
 a net that conjoined as it broke, and turned wor 
 its tatters into fresh ingenuities of pattern, and 
 was tossed abroad, league after league, as lightly 
 as a scheme of silken lace. And upon this sway 
 ing silver mesh the golden reflections of the sun 
 glittered and burned great roses of flame that 
 budded and bloomed and climbed about a 
 league-wide silver lattice. 
 
 All this was virile and heartening enough, 
 but it was no more than the merest prelude to 
 the laughing chaos of excitement that ran and 
 leaped and sang triumphant along the farther 
 shore. The shore, indeed, from Wallasey on 
 ward had shrunk to the merest footway a 
 riband -narrow breathing-space between the 
 yellow smoke of the dunes and the white smoke 
 of the tide. And as one forced one's way be 
 tween these tossing elements, pressing against 
 the passionate body of the wind, one seemed 
 to pass out of touch with all static and unyield 
 ing things, one seemed to enter a new world 
 where a spirit of splendid mirth made all things 
 passionately mobile, a world of mad impulses 
 and exhaustless energies, of tumultuous prodig 
 alities and indiscretions. The golden hills upon 
 the left, spouting their slender flames of whirl 
 ing sand, rose and fell against the sky of burn- 
 
 179 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The old fierce ing blue in a long flourish of eager curves and 
 
 Huntsman > A solitary coyey of 
 
 clouds (one almost caught the whirr of their 
 flight) scurrying ardently down-wind brought 
 the far sky itself into league with the general 
 commotion. One was wrapped in hubbub as 
 in a flapping cloak. And on the right the tum 
 ultuary waters, a miracle of molten rock 
 fluctuant, many-veined, precious beyond assay 
 with silver ore boiled and curved and tow 
 ered and slashed and sprang in the old, un 
 changing, unprecedented fashion. And out of 
 the depths of this maelstrom, dripping with pur 
 ple and bronze, clattered and trooped a wild 
 pageantry of noises. The clangour of great batt 
 les came from it, and voices that were almost hu 
 man; songs that broke down in laughter, and 
 laughter that ended in sobs. And over all the 
 voice of the old fierce Huntsman crashed and 
 soared exultantly; and the mad white hounds 
 leaped up beneath his thonging, baying hoarsely 
 as they sprang, hurling themselves wildly to 
 wards the shore. 
 
 The tumult had no term. Glutted by the glad 
 frenzy of it all, the eye and the ear seemed to 
 share the universal madness. A sublime dizzi 
 ness overtook me, a vertigo of the senses, a div 
 ine intoxication. Fatigue, hunger, the dull pro- 
 180 
 
VOICE OF THE STORM 
 
 cesses of the body, were all forgotten; the body The heart 
 itself became no more than a vague negligible 
 glow a twig that was whirled aside unnoticed 
 as the imagination took its flight. The imagin 
 ation leaned upon the storm, lusting to attain 
 the secret of all this ecstasy, the end of this mad 
 quest, striving to effect the supreme Identific 
 ation. For at the core of all this vast triumph 
 there surely lay some message, and in the naked 
 abandon of the body that message might well 
 lie unconcealed. Here was the time, here was the 
 place, to scan the hidden arcana of the world, 
 to touch the heart of the mystery of things; and 
 so the spirit battled with the elements and hung 
 incumbent upon the wind, and achieved that 
 ecstasy of unappeased desire which is the true 
 content. For it is not with satiety that we are 
 satisfied; it is always in the sight of far inaccess 
 ible vistas and unattainable ideals that the soul 
 finds its final happiness. And so the voices that 
 called and called were heard without under 
 standing; and the rich inviolate scrolls that wave 
 after wave unfolded were scored with hiero 
 glyphics that could not be interpreted; and yet 
 the spirit suffered no dismay. Careening upon 
 the gale, it fought for impossible visions and 
 found a splendid exultation in defeat. . . . 
 And meanwhile, on the other side of the 
 
 181 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Men were dunes, men were coolly playing golf, 
 playing golf climbing to the lip of the smoking rampart, 
 I found them in the midst of it if, indeed, so 
 veneer-like an occupation can be said to have a 
 midstJ Within a hand's-breadth of that awful per 
 turbation, placid, in an artificial lee, they ambled 
 and rambled, and patted and putted and tapped. 
 . . . And, glancing up stream from my station, I 
 caught a glimpse, too, of the queer dispassionate 
 world of smoke and offices and streets, where, 
 beyond a doubt, great herds of humans were 
 browsing equably on figures, or trooping phleg- 
 matically down dull labyrinths of ledgers add 
 ing, subtracting, trotting here and there. . . . The 
 white hounds plunged ungovernably upon their 
 quest, the fingers of the wind swept the sunshine, 
 plucking great torrents of music from the golden 
 strings; and, pitching her voice to that mad min 
 strelsy, leaping upon her great earth-bed, in un 
 imaginable throes, the great body of Nature 
 screamed and sang unceasingly in the heroic 
 pride and agony of travail. . . . 
 
 And meanwhile, as I say, the golf went satis 
 factorily forward, and the men in the musty 
 home-made twilight did their tots and cross-tots 
 
 with commendable rapidity It all seemed 
 
 amazingly, impudently incongruous. As incon 
 gruous as the little daisy-chains of song that the 
 182 
 
VOICE OF THE STORM 
 
 giggling larks sought to tie about the neck of the A lordly clash 
 gale. As incongruous as the quiet companies of of colour P ^ 
 mild spring flowers that one found offering up 
 their white prayers, singing their purple hymns, 
 among the cathedral coppices at Leasowe. As 
 incongruous as the exceedingly efficient lunch 
 one found it, just then, absurdly judicious to 
 consume. 
 
 From Leasowe the way was an isthmus of 
 grey stone a narrow river of granite that separ 
 ated two hostile kingdoms a passage of neutral 
 prose dividing the sullen, sodden epic of the 
 land (school of Southey) from the lyrical blaze 
 and fervour of the sea. As the afternoon drew 
 on and the isthmus rose farther and farther out 
 of the waters, there was added to the commo 
 tion of form and sound that had marked the 
 morning, a third commotion a lordly clash 
 and interplay of colour. A mobile, many-colour 
 ed floor a vast garden of tossing flowers so 
 the sea now spread beneath the sun. 
 
 And presently it grew to evening, and all this 
 illimitable glory of strange blooms, strewn from 
 horizon to horizon beneath the feet of the 
 triumphant procession of the winds, grew still 
 more passionate. The petals were tinged with 
 scarlet, grew tropical and exotic, showed here 
 and there a stain as of new-spilled blood. There 
 
 183 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 The emblem of was terror in the sight; it carried with it a hint 
 LUty of sacrifice, of cruelty behind the exultation, of 
 death as the sole avenue to the heart of all the 
 mystery. But the threat rang out unheeded, for 
 there, supreme on the horizon's verge, the ridges 
 of the old Welsh hills running about its base 
 like thorns, flamed the great flower of evening, 
 that Secret Rose, the consummation of the day 
 which is the emblem of all beauty and all wis 
 dom. And towards this, as towards some sub 
 lime ideal, the end and the explanation of the 
 day's long miracles, the grey prose tract strove 
 to make its human way. Only to be foiled by the 
 gravel spaces of the Dee, only to accept another 
 splendid disappointment as it paced southwards 
 and watched,beyond the purple impassable,the 
 ineffable petals fall proudly and solemnly apart. 
 And now it was night, a night of lusty stars 
 and a moon of rare acuteness. The wind had 
 ebbed a little, and a little swerved, but its abate 
 ment seemed in nowise to reduce the clangour, 
 for in the dark, so dedicate to silence, all noises 
 have a threefold value. There, in the outer dark, 
 the melee still crashed on superbly, and the 
 white hounds leaped and bayed, and the voice 
 of the Huntsman still rang imperiously forth. 
 It rose up, that elemental music, and filled the 
 deep black spaces between star and star; it made 
 184 
 
VOICE OF THE STORM 
 
 the stars themselves no more than the spear- As though a 
 points of some vast invisible host; it changed the 
 moon to a shining emblem on some stupendous 
 banner. And as I stood on the naked beach and 
 strove to pierce the blackness, it was as though 
 a great army poured past me through the night, 
 still shouting its splendid unfathomable chor 
 uses, still pressing endlessly forward on its high, 
 incommunicable quest. 
 
XX THE LUSIT- 
 ANIA SEPTEM 
 BER pTH, 1907 
 
THE LUSITANIA 
 
 TO look down Water Street from the A monstrous 
 Town Hall any time Saturday forenoon 
 was to contemplate a Liverpool queerly towers 
 changed and shrunken. For all that vast curtain 
 of clear sky which commonly gives the slope a 
 fine air of loftiness and finality, as though it 
 were the ultimate road in the world, had been 
 strangely torn away, and in its place there loom 
 ed tremendously a monstrous series of leaning 
 scarlet towers four huge columns that over 
 whelmed the traffic and the buildings,andmade 
 even the lattice- work of the Overhead seem a 
 mere unimportant stain. And they repeated 
 themselves, these four gigantic shapes, where- 
 ever one chanced to turn. They were reflected 
 in the shops, in the photographs and pictures 
 displayed there; they were on the postcards that 
 were thrust under one's nose at every other 
 step; they were mirrored in the magazines that 
 strewed the pavements. TheJLusi'taniasind the 
 Lusitanids funnels were a kind of public obses 
 sion. Not Water Street alone, but really the 
 whole of Liverpool seemed to have been reduc 
 ed to a mere avenue to that grove of stupend 
 ous pillars. 
 
 And down at the Landing-stage, too, that 
 same discourteous dwarfing was continued. 
 The towers themselves, indeed, became, down 
 
 189 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 it was there, the mere accessories, the barely propor- 
 different t j onate accessories of the swollen mass that 
 suddenly upheld them the truculent heap of 
 black and white that overshadowed the meek 
 tide and made the spires and chimneys of Birk- 
 enhead behind look uncommonly pale and 
 watery. It was the sort of morning that seems to 
 weaken all visible things, making them look as 
 though they were on the brink of fading listless 
 ly away altogether: the river was slack and life 
 less, the sky was a dull grey, the shores were 
 tepid and monotonous. And that surly mass in 
 mid-stream was the solitary thing within sight 
 that refused to share the general enervation. 
 It bluntly defied it all, dominating the day and 
 the dull sky, the river and the grey shore : with 
 its high-piled decks muffled up about its funnels, 
 it had an irresistible air of having turned its 
 coat-collar truculently up; and the rake of 
 those funnels and of its masts, instead of suggest 
 ing speed and speed's pliability, simply gave it 
 an additional effect of doggedness, as though 
 its ears were thrust savagely back. It glowered 
 there in midstream, bullying the shipping by 
 its sheer impassivity, its four leaning towers 
 slogging out four crimson wounds upon the sky. 
 It was different yes, that was the great fact: 
 it wasn't simply a larger edition of the boats that 
 190 
 
THE LUSITANIA 
 
 were browsing and dipping in such odd corners A long black 
 of the river as it left unmolested. There was the P recl P lce 
 Lucania, for instance curved, sharpened, flex 
 ible poised and ductile on the water nerv 
 ous almost the sense of speed in every line of 
 her. Well, it was impossible to think thatthe Lu- 
 cania belonged to the same type of effort as the 
 Lusitania. The Lucania justified the femininity 
 we ascribe to ships in general ; but to think of 
 referring to the Lusitania as 'her ' was clearly 
 ludicrous: the Lusitania was obviously 'It,' or, 
 with an effort, perhaps, * Him.' Nor did that sen 
 sation vanish if you took one of the ferry boats 
 that ventured within a respectful distance of 
 Him and then shrank away again. Black hull 
 and white deck-work, alluring and decorative 
 enough in the Lucanids case, became, when 
 swollen in this fashion, positively grim and 
 threatening: the monster offered no amenities, 
 made no exterior effort to charm. It had the as 
 surance of a piece of nature. It was simply a long 
 black precipice rising stolidly out of the water. 
 When next I saw those leaning towers they 
 were all askew at the end of Chapel Street, and 
 Chapel Street and St. Nicholas' Church and the 
 whole of Liverpool seemed to be getting twisted 
 away from them. And the sensation of the mov 
 ing city had evidently roused the city's inhabit- 
 
 191 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Other ants, for they were pouring down towards the 
 
 river > black floods of them > in thick eddies and 
 rapids of humanity. 'You'd 'ardly believe it,' 
 they were saying, * but there's a bloomin' tele 
 phone in every room,' and ' It's a palace,' they 
 were saying, c it's a perfect palace,' and ' Four 
 hundred quid a sweet, if YOU please,' and' I back 
 the Loositaynia anyhow.' And down at the 
 stage we formed a huge, patient phalanx, a long 
 black and white mass which looked, from the 
 river, like nothing in the world so much as a 
 black, wintry hedge blown through and through 
 with rags and tags of paper. Rumours came to 
 hand of other phalanxes drawn up, league be 
 yond league, all along the grey dock walls, of 
 other thousands covering the sands at New 
 Brighton. 
 
 And within the enclosure itself the impres 
 sion of Liverpool bei ng there in force was no less 
 persistent. It was a public function. The trains 
 began to arrive from London; the crowd grew 
 denser; began to assume that cosmopolitan 
 complexion which is Liverpool's native hue. 
 There were splendid autocratic males who 
 looked like noblemen, and were probably com 
 mercial travellers; there were frowsy plebeians 
 who looked like commercial travellers and were 
 probably noblemen; there was a recognisable 
 192 
 
THE LUSITANIA 
 
 millionaire or so; there were eager American The most 
 women, heavily be-tulled, carrying precious 
 boxes labelled ' Maison Louise ' ; there were 
 their men-folk with clean, tired faces and pre 
 posterous hats ; there were their self-possessed 
 youngsters with amazing spirits and accents. 
 In a word, the usual vivid excited gathering, but 
 with all its characteristics emphasised ; larger 
 than usual, vastly more excited. But the thing 
 that excited them was not, as on other occasions, 
 the fact that the last stage of the journey, orthe 
 first stage of the journey, had now almost begun. 
 It was not because Europe was beginning to re 
 cede and America wonderfully to approach. 
 The thing that thrilled them, that filled their 
 imagination, was the fact that they were taking 
 part in a piece of history; that they were about 
 to embark on the swiftest and most voluptuous 
 voyage ever attempted by mankind. TheZ5//- 
 ania blocked out all thoughts of Europe and 
 America as easily as, towering prodigiously 
 above us, she shut out of sight all but the merest 
 glimpse of river and sky. 
 
 Beneath that long-drawn cliff of ebony there, 
 the concentrated glitter went almost hysteric 
 ally on ; the escalade of tiny, enviable figures 
 continued; the luggage jumped, hovered, 
 swung, and disappeared. In the brief corner of 
 o 193 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 Crammed and the sky it permitted us to see, a soft flood of 
 bU sheer gold cloud came blowing across the sunset, gently 
 cancelling the gold. The grey passed into violet. 
 An occasional bugle flourished somewhere be 
 hind the ramparts overhead; the endless stream 
 of figures crossed and vanished ; all along the 
 Parade behind, the silent phalanxes of watchers 
 waited patiently. The violet began to deepen 
 into night. Lights quivered and flared. The 
 precipice became a black horizon studded rhy 
 thmically with course above course of stars. The 
 battlements above it were sumptuous golden 
 terraces, heaped up into gloom. The night 
 deepened, the escalade continued, thetransfor- 
 mationof the sullen shape went on. It lost all its 
 sullenness, it became wholly resplendent and 
 alluring, it seemed a mountain-side crammed 
 andburstingwith sheer gold. And up across the 
 bridges and beneath the lights the little figures 
 still kept hurrying, passing astonishingly out of 
 sight through the sides of the fabulous glitter 
 ing hill. 
 
 So it continued until nine o'clock. At nine, 
 or a little before, a tremendous aerial tumult 
 announced the beginning of the end. Hitherto, 
 save for those rare bugle-flourishes,the sh ip itself 
 had remained magnificently dumb, but now it 
 began to forge its own thunders and hurl them 
 194 
 
THE LUSITANIA 
 
 about the night. It translated all its mass and it had begun 
 truculence into terms of sound, and the ears to move 
 grew dizzy before the bulk of it. When it ceased, 
 the little noises all about flowed curiously in 
 again, like waters meeting behind a stormy wake; 
 and then, in a few moments, the great voice 
 came shuddering and trampling back again, 
 speaking out of the belly of a white cloud that 
 gleamed from the sound's space, up amongst 
 the dark. After that, silence. Then an outburst 
 of effort about the gangways. And then silence 
 once more. . . . 
 
 It had begun to move. Slowly, imperturb- 
 ably, surrounded by that dramatic stillness, 
 the sheet of precipitous gold, with its niches 
 and gleaming caverns and myriad figures, drew 
 solemnly away from us. A quiet ditch of water 
 lay between,' the ditch broadened to a lane, the 
 lane grew rich and tremulous with reflections, 
 returned the reflections to the sleek, black sides. 
 The lane became a river, the vast shape fell with 
 in the compass of the eye, the high-piled terraces 
 and the countless stars took on at last the aspect 
 of a ship, flaming and fabulous, an argosy self- 
 confessed. 
 
 It hung there for an instant, silent and proud, 
 whilst the cheers of the multitude went up, and 
 then, soundless still, it began to move through 
 
A NUMBER OF THINGS 
 
 A splendid the night. The waters all about it took fire from 
 6 gods * ts &l r y> surrounded it with a moving base of 
 light. The rhythmical stars of its hull quivered 
 in their courses, range surmounting range. The 
 triple terraces above them held their packed 
 radiance against the sky. High over all, its mast 
 head lights swam like four wild planets. 
 
 So it journeyed into the darkness, blazing 
 and tremendous, a portent that the sight clung 
 to and the imagination followed hungrily. One 
 figured it passing before the eyes of those mar 
 shalled watchers at Seaforth and New Brighton, 
 before the quiet lights of Blundellsands, out 
 past the Crosby Lightship. . . . And so, at last, 
 into the great gulfs of empty night, where there 
 were no watchers any more, where it would 
 seem like a splendid chalice of the gods, blaz 
 ing with jewels, brimming with golden wine. . . . 
 And meanwhile Liverpool, having thrust her 
 monster into the hands of the Unknown, turned 
 easily about and sought other and milder in 
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