Chapter IV: The Good Man and Cupid 256 (3)

That advertisement came from an organ of the legitimate Stage. Obviously. In a less classic and more intimate music-hall paper, which I bought at the same time, I found the charming announcement of the birth of a son to a North of England Valentine Vox. After stating the event--“The wife of ‘Baddow’ (ventriloquist) of a son”--it went on thus:--“Both doing well. Baddow takes this opportunity of thanking the managers and agents who so kindly transferred, altered, and rearranged dates, so that I played places near and was able to stay in Liverpool for this event.” There is something very engaging in the _naïveté_, pride and pleasure of that statement. It contains so much of the warm-heartedness of the variety-stage, where money and sympathy equally come easily and go easily. Baddow’s suppression of his Christian name, or even initial, I like: his satisfaction in having reached a position where both are negligible, together with the suspicion that he is aware that the advertisement would be of less value if the star style were tampered with. I like also his complacency as a parent of some importance. And then there is in it too the new evidence of the kindliness of those in power, all working together to keep the properly anxious ventriloquist near at home; and finally the really adorable transition, indicating real emotion, from the somewhat stilted if imposing third person to the familiar first.

The good, affectionate Baddow! I hope mother and son are still doing well, and that the son will grow up to be a comfort to his parents, and as a ventriloquist not unworthy of his father (though never surpassing him), and a delight to audiences.

The Deer-Park

After too many years I found myself last week once again in the first deer-park I ever saw; and the change was only in me. The same beautiful creatures were there, of the dappled variety, feeding in little groups, standing motionless as a stranger approached, and moving across the open or amid the trees of the avenue with the silent, timid curiousness of their kind. The sun was golden through cracks in the heavy clouds, and the deer’s soft dapplings shone in its light, while when they moved in any number they twinkled, glittered, almost smouldered.

Now and then an old stag, with antlers so broad and branching that they seemed not his at all, but a borrowed head-dress assumed almost as if for a charade, would pass with dignity and extreme deliberation from one group to another; now and then a fawn would trot up to its mother on legs of such slender delicacy that their serviceableness for anything but the most exquisite decoration seemed impossible; and twice there were royal battles between young stags, whose horns met in a terrifying clash and clatter like spears on shields.

These contests were interesting not only for the attack and counter-attack, but for the conduct of the older stags, two of which at once approached very slowly, but full of purpose, to act as referees, and, if necessary, to interfere. It was precisely the same in each engagement, although they were half a mile apart. The second was the more exciting, for once or twice the referee had to break in, and once with a furious rush one of the fighters charged his opponent clean into the river, down a steep bank, and then jumped in after him and continued the battle. All this we saw as we sat under one of the lime-trees in the beautiful avenue, and I remembered, as I sat there, that just such sounds as these--the rattling of antlers in concussion--we had been accustomed to hear years and years ago when we were children and lodged in a cottage by the park gates. Certainly I had not heard it since, but gradually it grew more and more familiar, rising to the surface of consciousness after this so long submersion.

What the life of a park deer is I have no notion, nor was there anyone to ask; but since that is thirty-five years ago at the least, it is improbable that any of these lovely creatures, so rare and dainty and fragile as to be almost unreal, are the same that used to thrill us at that distant day; yet I repeat there was no visible change whatever, save in me. Everything else was the same--the footpaths; the lime avenue; the oak deer-fence, still often in need of repair; the large house, once so awe-inspiring and now so ugly; the church by the Scotch firs; the red sand of the road; the curious house with the bas-relief of a hog on a plate of Sussex iron near the church--but most of all the deer, just as fairylike, just as thrilling, as ever, and moving exactly in their old mysterious ways. I was glad I had seen so few deer since, and none dappled. I will not see these again for some time, just to keep that emotion of surprise and delight green and sweet.

Considering how many deer-parks England has--though far from enough--it is remarkable that the sight of deer should be such an epoch in the life of the ordinary person. Yet the very word deer-park gives me a quickening of the pulse, and, I hope, always will. I came away wondering what Jamrach or Cross would want for a pair; but I have lost the wish for them. They should be kept more extraordinary than that. They must remain an event. I am even sorry for villagers who live near deer-parks; while having so much, they miss so much.

The other creature from romance that I group with the deer as making a red-letter day for a child, and indeed for some of us who are older, is the peacock. Now and then, but how rarely, there would be an excursion to some great mansion. The passage from room to room amid gilt furniture and ancestral portraits was an excitement, no doubt; but the most memorable sight of all was the blue breast of the peacock on the terrace-wall, caught through one of the diamond panes. Until I moved to London and contracted the Kew Gardens Sunday habit, I suppose that I had not seen ten peacocks in my life, and now again I see them ordinarily not once a year; but a little while ago I visited a poet who lives in an old house in the very heart of the country, and there I found many peacocks. They walked proudly and affectedly about the garden, they sat on the walls and on the roofs of the out-buildings, they screamed at each other and spread their tails. The complete skin of one that had died burned blue in the hall.

I expressed the usual commonplace as to their destructiveness of flowers.

“To me,” said the poet, “they _are_ flowers. One cannot have both, so I have peacocks.”

From this, my first and latest deer-park, which has but a handful of cottages near it, we walked to the market town, a mile and a half away, and there I sought in vain for the little toy and sweet shop where all those years ago my first bow and arrow was bought. I know just where it stood, but new and imposing premises occupy its place. The bow was given me by one of those bachelor visitors who have it in their power at extraordinarily small cost to glorify the existence of small boys and emparadise the world. It is among the deeper tragedies that one can never receive one’s first bow and arrow again.

The Rarities

I have been staying in the remote country with an aristocrat, by which, of course, I mean not a man with two motor-cars, or a man with illustrious quarterings, but one through whose garden runs a trout-stream. I used to think that the possession of a cedar alone conferred aristocracy, and I still think that in some measure it does; but a stream with trout in it...! Moreover, this friend of mine has a cedar too.

It is odd how late in life one does some of the most desirable things. Here am I, who, ever since I can remember, have been longing to be idle with a book in a chair beside running water; yet not till last week did I find the conditions perfect. The sun was hot, yet not too hot; the book did not matter, yet was not despicable, and once a peacock butterfly settled upon the open page, and this justified in an instant the existence of author, publisher, paper-maker, printer, binder, and book-seller; the air was filled not only with the pretty whispering burble of the current, but also with the plashing of a fountain in its marble basin and the steady descent of water through a sluice; sweet scents came and went with the gentle breeze, and one had but to lift the eyes to see phloxes and dahlias in all their rich glory. And once--but that is too wonderful an experience to be mentioned without more ceremony.

Just as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so is one man’s commonplace another’s phenomenon. To an Englishman, for example, in Dieppe it is nothing to read that a swallow-tailed butterfly has been seen in England, because on the cliffs between Dieppe and Le Puy swallow-tails are as prevalent as garden-whites with us. But what a thrill for the English schoolboy with his net to see one in his native meadows! Again, it is nothing to a gamekeeper to watch a family of foxes at play in the early morning; but it would be an unforgettable spectacle to a town dweller. And I daresay that there are readers of these lines in Norfolk who are as accustomed to the sight of kingfishers as I who live far from water am to that of rooks; but to me kingfishers have appeared so seldom that they are like angels’ visits and mark the years. I remember one on the Rother, near Midhurst, in 1884; another near Abingdon in 1889; another at Burford Bridge in 1890; and a fourth in the valley between Rievaulx and Helmsley in 1894. That is my total--four kingfishers in quite a long and not indolent life, which includes at least two separate weeks on the Avon devoted to the search for this bird--not the frequented Avon either, but the Avon’s quieter parts such as one finds near the Combertons and about Harington Weir.

At least that was my total until last week. But now I must add a fifth, for as I was sitting by this little stream, thinking of nothing, quietly ruminative and happily receptive, suddenly a jewel darted through the air, and, burning bright against the sombre depths of a yew, disappeared again. Almost before I had realized its presence my fifth kingfisher was gone; but the day was made perfect by the flash.

And had I sat on I might have had even greater luck, for a fortnight ago, while my friend was standing motionless on his bridge, an otter climbed out of the water close by and strolled along the bank, bright-eyed and inquisitive. Luck is the only word; and, as I once wrote elsewhere, it is a kind of luck which goes entirely by favour of the gods. I have it not. The only otter I ever saw was at the Zoo; and incidentally I might add that the otter is the only animal in the Zoo for which (with the exception of the mice) one does not feel sorry. He seems so content; and has so much of his “native pewter” (so to speak) to revel in; and is so continuously and rapturously alive, making the best of both worlds--water and land. Whenever I look at him--and he is three or four strong just now--I again realize that one of the most satisfactory memories I can indulge is that on the single occasion on which I joined an otter hunt nothing was killed.

It was seventeen years ago. The pack had come all the way to Sussex from Wales, accompanied by an indefatigable owner, who illustrated, curiously, pathetically, almost tragically, the hold that the chase can exert upon an English gentleman. For he was a ruin: he was paralyzed below the waist, and had the use only of one arm; but strapped securely on a tried and faithful pony, he was able to direct and follow the hunt. It was a strange sight: the old placid pony tugging at the lush grass, while its crippled rider, in the grip of the passion of pursuit, yelled like a demon. Hour after hour this stricken centaur patrolled the banks and urged on his hounds with shouts and cries pouring from his twisted lips. Not an otter-haunted stream in England but knew him! I often think of him and wonder.

Dipping the other day in that most agreeable of recent autobiographies, _The Reminiscences of Albert Pell_, I opened once again at his story of Sir John Lawes’ otters, and, re-reading it, I felt more than ever relieved that that one otter-hunt of my youth ended without bloodshed. “An otter,” wrote Mr. Pell, who knew most things about English woodlands and streams, “is a delightfully amusing pet, and extremely inquisitive. When indoor he pries into every room, upstairs and downstairs, but has, as a famous sportswoman says, a bad habit of getting up early in the morning, having a bath, if there is one in the room handy, then going up a chimney and returning to get into bed with his mistress. My friend Sir John Lawes, as great a man in sport as in science, had a pair of these animals at Rothamsted. They retired by day to a small pool in the park. It was his custom at one time to drive some miles to the railway-station at St. Albans, taking the train there for London. On his return he never failed to bring back a basket of fresh fish for the otters. As the carriage entered the park on the way back to the Hall the creatures, unmoved by any other traffic, recognized the paces of their master’s horses, and coming out of their retreat in haste across the grass, ran ahead of the carriage, jumping up like dogs at the horses’ noses till they reached the Hall, when, the basket being emptied before them, they hurried back with their present. Sir John took them up with him to his forest in Scotland, where the pair enjoyed the forest as much as he did, taking themselves off in the evening on fishing excursions in wild Highland waters, to return without fail before daylight. A wretch of a gillie killed the female, whereupon the disconsolate mate became irregular in his habits, staying out at first for one night, then for two or three, then a week, and finally never came back at all; probably lured away by the enchantments of some wild jade with whom he set up poaching and housekeeping.”

Is not that a charming story? I think the picture of the two creatures frisking ahead of the horses (like porpoises around the prow of a vessel) one of the most joyous it would be possible to conceive.

The sight of otters and kingfishers, alert and glancing, in their native haunts confers distinction; but there is a far more remarkable uniquity even than that; and I recently possessed it. What do you say to a Sunday morning walk in Sussex and coming upon the dead body of a badger lying just in the mouth of its burrow? On the strength of such an adventure I claim to be for the moment a creature enormously apart and loftily pinnacled. That we had badgers within half a mile, we knew. Mus Penfold often sees traces of them, although never has a living one met his sight; and last year, I regret to say, a party of stupid men with eight dogs were allowed by the farmer to dig out two of the young badgers and kill them. I did not watch them at their vile work, but I saw their _débris_ afterwards, and counted the bottles.

How this badger died we shall never know; but there he lay, just like a comfortable sleeping bear: in fact curiously like that little Malayan “Gypsy” whom I found at the Zoo and whom you will find elsewhere in this book. His head, black and yellow, was between his long-clawed paws quite naturally. But he was dead enough, and his skin is now in the house as a bloodless trophy and a proof that England is not yet wholly tamed.

The Owl

To return to the kingfisher and the epoch in one’s life made by the rare appearance of that glancing jewel, although this house is in owlish country, and we hear owls from dusk to dawn, yet the sight of one is hardly less rare and memorable. The effect is, of course, totally different. A kingfisher entrances, thrills; one sees it and glows. But the owl cuts deeper; one feels that one is in the presence of a thing not necessarily of evil but of mystery and darkness. That is to say, an owl at night. In broad day there can be nothing sinister about him, as I happen to know as well as any one.

On this matter I have a true story to tell, which, however, I shall quarrel with no one for disbelieving. One Sunday morning in the early summer a few years ago I was walking in a little pine-wood on a Kentish common. Suddenly, at half-past eleven, I was conscious that I was not alone, and lifting my eyes I saw on a bush close by a young owl. He was looking directly at me with such a stare in his deep orange orbs as only an owl can compass--steady, incurious, implacable. I stopped and stared at him, and thought first of the strangeness of the encounter and then of a humorous poem by an American publisher (Why don’t English publishers write humorous poems?) which I had learnt at school, beginning “Who stuffed that white owl?” This owl, it is true, was not white, but a beautiful arrangement in soft browns; yet he remained as motionless as that other, save that every now and then a shutter, timed to about three seconds exposure, covered his ’wildered lenses and retired again into the machinery of his head.

Seeing how young he was, and thinking it better that he should be looked after than left to the attentions of the Sunday afternoon villagers (who can be very deadly), I determined to take him home. I therefore opened a handkerchief, advanced slowly upon him, and spreading it over him carried him tenderly away. He made no resistance whatever. I was the first human being he had seen and might as easily have been friend as foe.

So far the story makes no great call on credulity. But the remarkable part is to come. I gave the owl to the boys at a neighbouring cottage, who had kept one before and understood feeding and so on, and it was arranged that when he was a little older he should be released. Very well. The next Sunday came and on that morning these boys also abstained from church and walked through this little pine-wood on the common, and at exactly the same time, and in what I take to be exactly the same place, they also found a young owl and captured it. (“You see this wet, you see this dry.”) That’s a very odd circumstance, isn’t it, and worthy of a place in any collection of coincidences?

Now, if I did not believe truth to be the only really interesting thing in the world, I should go on to state that when on the third Sunday I went to the little pine-wood again I found a third owl; but that is not so. Since then, indeed, except of course at the Zoo--where they have all kinds, although no longer any of those fascinating little creatures from some distant land who live in holes in the ground--I had never seen another owl near enough to observe it with any minuteness until the other evening in Sussex. Then, while it was still half light, a large barn-owl emerged from a clump of trees beside the road and flew before us and over us, as we drove along, for two hundred yards, finally disappearing among some ricks. It made no sound whatever; fish swimming in a clear stream are not less audible. Its light underpart gleamed softly like a lamp in a fog, and, like that, seemed almost to diffuse radiance.

This silence is very wonderful and soothing. I would prescribe the spectacle of the flight of owls at twilight for any disordered mind. But he would be a bold physician who recommended for any weak nerves the angry, screaming owls that sweep round this house in the middle of the night, especially when the weather is rough. Then they are ominous indeed.

Our owls live in the belfry, and though I have stood again and again in the gloaming, watching, I have seen them only once. On that occasion there had been some disagreement in the fields, for two of them came back in full flight together, one pursuing and one pursued, uttering terrible cries. I saw them black against the sky for a moment, disordered and beating, and then they disappeared into the masonry as silently and effectually as water into sand. No wonder, I thought, as I stumbled away among the graves, that some rustic minds think them not birds at all, but disembodied spirits.

The difference between these witches of the night returning from their quarrel and that soft glimmering ghost that had flown down the road was wide enough; but how much wider the gulf between those predatory termagants and the poor lost soul in the Kentish pine-wood. Even in his mild countenance, however, one could easily discern the makings of a bogey. To wake up in the small hours and find oneself beneath the scrutiny of such eyes in such a countenance would be enough for many of us.

What owls really are like, we shall, I suppose, never know: whether they are wise as legend would have them, or merely look so; whether they are truly sinister or only weird and carnivorous. These things we shall probably never know, but there is a lady in Hampshire who recently came nearer the secret than any one else has done. Her letter describing her experience was printed in the “Evening Standard” in the summer of 1910. The immediate neighbourhood of her house, she explained, was once a favourite hunting-ground of owls, but latterly they had steadily decreased, until to hear one had become something of a rarity. This she much regretted. When, therefore, one night she was awakened by an owl’s cry she sprang up and ran to the window in pleasure, and while there it amused her to answer it, mimicry of owls being a hobby of hers. But this time she mimicked better than she knew, for instantly out of the blackness came a crowd of owls to her window, angry and threatening and uttering strange sounds. She had, it seems, stumbled on something in the owl tongue of very serious import. Isn’t that interesting? She may have called out some deadly insult. She may have hit on a rally, a summons to arms. Whatever it was, it made her for the moment almost one of this mysterious, uncanny, nocturnal race. Her cry, in short, opened the door on a new world, vastly more enthralling in interest and strange possibilities than aviation or any of our modern inventions can make this. But it instantly shut again.

The Unusual Morning

One is liable day by day to a great many different kinds of surprises; but few persons can have known two in the same morning quite so unusual and diverse....

I was sitting in my room, writing, when a new and mysterious sound caught the ear. It came apparently from the heart of the wall, near the chimney, and was such a sound as in the dead of night would lay an icy hand on the heart. Since it was broad day I had courage and stood by the fireplace waiting. It grew louder and louder, nearer and nearer, and at last culminated in a scurry and clatter in the fireplace itself, from which there emerged a robust, testy, and exceedingly embarrassed starling. After looking round in dismay, he blundered across the room and settled on the highest row of books, where, secure in his altitude, he stared at me and collected his wits. I, too, collected mine and realized that my destiny was, as ever, prosaic. For I thought instantly of an American poet on the one hand, and on the other an English lady, a friend of mine, both of whom under similar conditions achieved romance. For when a bird visited Edgar Allan Poe in his study it was a raven, dark not alone with the sable hue of night but with mystery and fate, and when my friend awoke not long since in her room in a beautiful Wiltshire manor-house, what did she see brooding musically on the frame of an Old Master that hung on the opposite wall but a dove--emblem of peace and sweetness and everything that is fortunate?

How different my luck! A starling.... Of all the fowls of the air, would one not close one’s house to a starling first and foremost? Yet the only visitor from that so near yet so strange world of birds that ever came to me was this, the least poetical, least attractive.

That was the first surprise. For the understanding of the second, which occurred only an hour later, I must explain that this house is on a road which, almost immediately the gate is passed, ceases gradually to be a road at all, first declining to a cart-track, and then dwindling to nothing but a footpath or bridle-path up a South Down of extreme steepness. This means that when, as sometimes happens, a motor-car rushes past, we smile in our beards and await with stoicism and amusement the groanings and shrieks of agony that indicate that a mistake has been made and that a reluctant vehicle is being turned by an angry chauffeur in a space far too narrow for it. On the morning of which I write a car rushed by in the usual way, but as it did not at once return I assumed that the party were not uninstructed, but had come here by intent for a picnic, as has once or twice happened--lobsters’ claws and other alien and sophisticated _débris_ having been found on the turf; and so thinking I forgot them. An hour later, hearing the engine throb in the accustomed manner, I knew that the picnic was over, and again forgot them.

A moment after, however, I was called out into the garden by a series of shouts and whistles, to discover that the car had come to a stop for the very sufficient reason that it was on fire. A motor-car at any time is still--to me--a strange object, but to find one in full blaze close to the gate is really a shock. You must have seen it to appreciate it. There it stood, enveloped in flames, while leaning against the wall, with his head cooling at the bricks, was its dejected owner. “What a calamity! What a calamity!” was all that he could say, as he surveyed first the burning wheels, and then his blackened hands, and then me. “There’s nothing to be done, nothing,” he added.

But I did not wait; at least it was worth the effort of saving, and we brought water in every variety of vessel and hurled it over the conflagration. Here we were wrong, for by watering flaming petrol one simply increases the area of the fire. Having learnt this, we bent all our strength to getting the car a little farther along the road, away from the seat of danger, then hurling the water over it once more. This done, it was soon extinguished, and the owner and driver had an opportunity to explain.

“Such a thing has never happened to me before,” he said. “All these years and no accident. I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best. Nothing of the kind has ever happened to me before.”

Meanwhile he had been joined by his friends, two cool and collected ladies, who, all unconscious of the catastrophe, had been engaged in the least incendiary of pastimes--photographing the church--and they added their persuasions to our invitation to him to come in and consume restoratives.

Misfortune handled him curiously. No, he said, he would not drink, would not eat, did not want to wash, hated the idea of resting. And all the while, as he was thus affirming and surveying his blistered hands, he was approaching nearer to the table in the garden on which refreshments had been placed. Vowing he would never sit, he sat; declining the decanter with increased vehemence, he tilted it into his glass; abjuring cake, he conveyed a piece to his mouth. He then refused to drink any more, and was actually reaching out for the decanter as he spoke. Finally, he said that he had not the least desire to smoke, and took a cigarette. This was the last of his apostasies, for to the blackness of his hands he adhered. And all the while, at intervals, he was assuring us that, long as he had driven a car, he had never previously had an accident in his life. Never! “I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best.... Nothing of the kind ever happened to me before....”

That is the story. They were soon gone; the car, a scorched ruin, was pushed into a neighbouring shed to await the repairers; and nothing remained of the incident save a black place in the road and a waste patch where grass had been. Life resumed its routine.

But why, when he came to give me his card, should I discover that he now lived in a house in which, as a child, some of my happiest hours were spent? No need for that added touch of coincidence. Why? He might as easily have inhabited every other house in the world. Here you have the prodigality of chance.

The Embarrassed Eliminators

We were talking about Lamb.

Some one suddenly asked: “Supposing that by some incredible chance all the Essays except one were to be demolished, which one would you keep?”

This kind of question is always interesting, no matter to what author’s work or to what picture gallery it is applied. But for the best resulting literary talk it must be applied to Shakespeare, Dickens or Elia.

“Why, of course,” at once said H., whose pleasant habit it is to rush in with a final opinion on everything at a moment’s notice, with no shame whatever in changing it immediately afterwards, “there’s no doubt about it at all--Mrs. Battle. Absolutely impossible to give up Mrs. Battle. Or, wait a minute, I’d forgotten Bo-Bo,--‘The Dissertation on Roast Pig,’ you know. Either Mrs. Battle or that.”

The man who had propounded the question laughed. “I saw that second string coming,” he said. “That’s what every one wants: one _or_ another. But the whole point of the thing is that one essay and one only is to remain: everything else goes by the board. Now? Let’s leave H. to wrestle it out with himself. What do _you_ say, James?”

“It’s too difficult,” said James. “I was going to say ‘The Old Actors’ until I remembered several others. But I’m not sure that that is not my choice. It stands alone in literature: it is Lamb inimitable. His literary descendants have done their best and worst with most of his methods, but here, where knowledge of the world, knowledge of the stage, love of mankind, gusto, humour, style and imaginative understanding unite, the mimics, the assiduous apes, are left behind. Miles. Yes, I vote for ‘The Old Actors.’”

“But, my dear James,” said L., “think a moment. Remember James Elia in ‘My Relations’; remember Cousin Bridget in ‘Mackery End.’ You are prepared deliberately to have these forever blotted out of your consciousness? Because, as I understand it, that is what the question means: utter elimination.”

James groaned. “It’s too serious,” he said. “It’s not to be thought of really. It reminds me of terrible nights at school when I lay awake trying to understand eternity--complete negation--until I turned giddy with the immensity of dark nothingness.”

Our host laughed. “You were very positive just now,” he said. “But have you forgotten a wistful little trifle called ‘Old China?’”

“Or, more on your own lines,” said W., who hates actors and acting, “the ‘South-Sea House’ or the ‘Old Benchers’? I will grant you the perfection--there is no other word--of the full-lengths of Dicky Suett and Bannister and Bensley’s Malvolio. There is nothing like it--you are quite right. Not even Hazlitt comes near it. One can see oneself with a great effort doing something passably Hazlittian in dramatic criticism, if one were put to it; but Lamb, Lamb reconstructs life and dignifies and enriches it as he does so. That essay in my opinion is the justification of footlights, grease-paint and all the tawdry business. And yet,”--W.’s face glowed with his eloquence, as it always does sooner or later every evening--“and yet if I were restricted to one Elia essay--dreadful thought!--it would not be ‘The Old Actors’ that I should choose, but--I can’t help it--‘Captain Jackson.’ I know there are far more beautiful things in Elia; deeper, sweeter, rarer. But the Captain and I are such old friends that it comes to this, I couldn’t now do without him.”

“Of course,” cried H. “I had forgotten. You remind me of something I simply must keep--the Elliston.” He snatched the “Essays” from our host’s hands and read the following passage, while we all laughed--a double laughter--overtly with him, and covertly at him, for if there is one man living who might be the hero to-day of a similar story, it is H. himself, who has a capriciousness, an impulsiveness, a forgetfulness, and a grandiosity that are Ellistonian or nothing.

“‘Those who knew Elliston,’” he read, “‘will know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sorts of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner. “I too never eat but one thing at dinner,”--was his reply--then after a pause--“reckoning fish as nothing.” The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savoury esculents which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.’”

“Well,” said our host, reclaiming the book, “my vote if I had one would be for ‘Mackery End in Hertfordshire’; and I make the declaration quite calmly, knowing that we are all safe to retain what we will. James will of course disagree with the choice; but then you see I am a sentimentalist, and when Lamb writes about his sister and his childhood I am lost. And ‘Mackery End’ delights me in two ways, for it not only has the wonderful picture of Bridget Elia in it, but we see Lamb also on one of his rapturous walks in his own county. I never see a field of wheat without recalling his phrase of Hertfordshire as ‘that fine corn country.’”

“All very well,” said James, “but if you talk like this how are you going to let ‘Dream Children’ go?”

“Ah, yes,” sighed our host, “‘Dream Children’--of course! How could I let that go? No, it’s too difficult.”

“What about this?” said the grave incisive voice of K., who had not yet spoken, and he began to read:--

“In proportion as the years both lessen, and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away ‘like a weaver’s shuttle.’ Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.’

“Who is going to foreswear that passage?” K. asked sternly, fixing his eyes on us as if we were one and all guilty of damnable heresy.

We all sighed.

K. searched the book again, and again began to read:--

“‘In sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool--as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables--not guessing at the involved wisdom--I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbor: I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and--prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors--I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a _tendre_, for those five thoughtless virgins.’

“Who is going to turn his back for ever on that passage? No,” K. went on, “it won’t do. It is not possible to name one essay and one only. But I have an amendment to propose. Instead of being permitted to retain only one essay, why should we not be allowed a series of passages equal in length to the longest essay--say ‘The Old Actors’? Then we should not be quite so hopeless. That, for example, would enable one to keep the page on Bensley’s Malvolio, the description of Bridget Elia, a portion of the ‘Mrs. Battle,’ Ralph Bigod, a portion of ‘Captain Jackson,’ the passages I have read, and--what I personally should insist upon including, earlier almost than anything--the Fallacies on rising with the Lark and retiring with the Lamb.”

“Well,” said the suggester of the original problem, “it’s a compromise and therefore no fun. But you may play with it if you like. The sweepingness of the first question was of course its merit. James is the only one of you with the courage really to make a choice.”

“Oh, no,” said our host. “I chose one and one only instantly--‘Old China.’”

“Nonsense!” said James; “you chose ‘Mackery End.’”

“There you are,” said K. “That shows.”

“Well, I refuse to be deprived of ‘Old China’ anyway,” said our host, “even if I named ‘Mackery End.’ How could one live without ‘Old China’? Our discussion reminds me,” he added, “of a very pretty poem--a kind of poem that is no longer written. It is by an American who came nearer Lamb in humour and ‘the tact of humanity’ than perhaps any writer--the Autocrat. Let me read it to you.”

He reached for a volume and read as follows:--

Oh for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh, a bright-haired boy,
Than reign, a gray-beard king.

Off with the spoils of wrinkled age!
Away with Learning’s crown!
Tear out Life’s Wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!

One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!

* * * * *

My listening angel heard the prayer,
And, calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair
Thy hasty wish hath sped.

“But is there nothing in thy track,
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”

“Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take--my--precious--wife!”

The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
_The man would be a boy again_,
_And be a husband too!_

“And is there nothing yet unsaid,
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years.”

“Why, yes;” for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
“I could not bear to leave them all--
I’ll take--my--girl--and--boys.”

The smiling angel dropped his pen,--
“Why, this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”

* * * * *

And so I laughed,--my laughter woke
The household with its noise,--
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the grey-haired boys.

--“We,” said our host, as he closed the book and laid it aside, “are like that: we would eliminate most of Elia and have our Elia too.”

“Yes,” said W. “Exactly. We want them all and we value them the more as we grow older and they grow truer and better. For that is Lamb’s way. He sat down--often in his employers’ time--to amuse the readers of a new magazine and earn a few of those extra guineas which made it possible to write ‘Old China,’ and behold he was shedding radiance on almost every fact of life, no matter how spiritually recondite or remote from his own practical experience. No one can rise from Elia without being deepened and enriched; and no one having read Elia can ever say either off-hand or after a year’s thought which one essay he would retain to the loss of all the others.”

B. hitherto had been a silent listener. Here he spoke, and, as so often, said the final thing. “Yes,” he said, “it is vain (but good sport) to take any one of the essays and argue that it is the best. Just as the best thing in a garden is not any particular flower but the scent of all the flowers that are there, so the best of Lamb is not any single essay but the fragrance of them all. It is for this that those gentle paths have been trodden by so much good company.

“Yes,” he added meditatively. “‘The scent of Elia’s garden’! That is the best essay, if you like, and ‘Charles (and Mary) Lamb’ its title.”

A Friend of the Town

Londoners know much, but not all. A few secrets are still to be learned only in the provinces, and one of them is the true value of the bookstall man. In London a bookstall man is a machine; you throw pennies at him and in return he throws papers at you. Now and then he asks you to buy something that you don’t want or recommends the new sevenpenny; but for the most part he treats you as a stranger, if not as a foe, and expects for himself treatment no better.

But in the country....

Make your home in a small country town and see how long you can manage without becoming friendly with the bookstall man. For in the country he is a power. There is no longer any casual flinging of pennies; there is the weather to discuss, and a remark to drop on the headlines in the contents bill. “Another all-night sitting,” you say, from the security given by eight good hours in bed: “ah well, if people like to be Members of Parliament, let them!” Then you both laugh. Or, “What’s this?--another new Peer? Well, it will be your turn soon,” you say, and then you both laugh again. But there is something more important than persiflage and gossip--there is the new novel to choose from the circulating library. For in the country the bookstall man is also the librarian and adviser; he not only sells papers but he controls the reading of the neighbourhood. His advice is sound. His instinct dictates wisely. “Jacobs’s latest,” he says, “is splendid. I read it on Sunday.” Not, of course, that he has any need to read a story to know that it is splendid; that would be too mechanical. He knows because he possesses the sixth sense with which successful handlers of books are gifted. “What’s new?” he replies, “well, here’s something good. Take that. You can’t go wrong.” Or, when in a dissuading mood (and nowadays librarians have to dissuade as much as recommend, poor doomed varmints), “That one? Oh! I don’t think she would like that. That’s a little bit--well, it’s strong, that’s what it is. I don’t recommend that. But here’s a charming story by the author of “Milk and Water....” And so forth.

What some simple country people would do without their bookstall man I can’t imagine. Take Peter, for instance. Peter was the friend of three old ladies who lived in a southern seaport--a sleepy forgotten town with quiet, narrow, Georgian streets and vast stretches of mud in its harbour which the evening sun turned to gold. These three old ladies--sisters and unmarried--lived together in a tiny red brick house where their several personalities dovetailed perfectly, different as they were. One was the practical managing sister, one was the humorous commentator, and one was the kindly dreamer. All were generous and philanthropic; indeed their benefactions of thought and deed were the principal business of their placid lives, while the principal recreation was reading. And herein lay the value of Peter, the bookstall man, for it was through his library that all their books came to them. He too divined the character of the books that he circulated by the mere process of touch; and he was rarely wrong. He knew to a grain exactly what was to be found in every book he recommended or did not recommend to these old ladies. In so far as his recommendations went, Peter was always right; and probably his dissuasions were rightly based too, although that of course we shall never know, since his advice was duly taken.

But it is no light matter, is it, to pick out suitable stories for three old-fashioned old ladies with very decided views as to what is fitting and nice, and what not, when the books (and here is the real difficulty) were to be read aloud? For this meant of course that the three personalities had to be taken into consideration. Each book had to please, or at any rate not offend, an old lady who was of a practical managing turn, and an old lady who was herself a bit of a quiz (as all good novelists must be), and an old lady who had Utopian dreams.

Peter, you see, must have been rather remarkable. “No,” he would say, “I don’t think Miss Dorcas would like that ... the gambling passages.... I’d recommend this if it weren’t for Miss Kate. But she’d never like the divorce proceedings....” And so on.

Reading aloud was to these old ladies a kind of ritual. They looked forward to it all day, and then as each chapter was finished they discussed it and approved or disapproved. When it comes to analyzing the pleasures of life, the privilege of approving and disapproving in conversation must be ranked very high, and reading aloud makes it so very harmless an amusement, since no tale-bearing is involved. This they did, and not only during the reading but at meals too, and often they would come down to breakfast after a rather wakeful night with new theories as to the conduct of hero or heroine. Happy Peter, to set so much gentle machinery in motion!

Of course, he was not able always to satisfy their programme. Sometimes for weeks and weeks together no new books (not only fiction, of course: memoirs and travels they were very fond of) would be published; but when he really struck gold how happy they all were. I remember that I found them once--it was thirteen years ago--in a state of joyful excitement over one of Peter’s most inspired suggestions--Miss Jewett’s “Country of the Pointed Firs.” Never could three old ladies of simple tastes and warm hearts have been more delighted with a printed page. I wished Peter could have seen them.

Is he still acting as friend to that little town, I wonder. He was so capable that probably he has been promoted to a wider sphere. For that is what happens to these friends of the small town: they are raised to positions of more importance and better salaries, and the chances are that the old personal intimacy goes altogether. They may, for example, be elevated to the place of manager at, say, London Bridge. Then is all their kindliness and thoughtfulness over: they become machines: very targets for pennies and half-pennies all day long, with no time for the humaner intercourse.

Well, the price of getting on has always been heavy; but here it is paid not only by the friend but by the small town too. It is hard when nice old ladies are also penalized.

Gypsy

It is a shocking thing, after ringing the bell to inquire after a friend, to be told that she is dead.

That recently happened to me. I rang the bell and waited on the step. The door was at last opened by a man in livery, or at any rate uniform, who knew me. I made to enter, remarking “How is Delia?” “Delia?” he said. “Delia is dead.”

Here was a blow! I had been thinking of Delia all the way to Regent’s Park, seeing again in anticipation her sad and yearning eyes, her pathetic, dumb face, her auburn locks, feeling her confiding hand in mine.

“Dead!” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “pneumonia. But Annie’s here if you’d like to see her. And Jerry too.”

“Of course,” I said, and followed him to their abode; stopping in the kitchen on the way for some grapes and milk.

Delia was an ourang-outang; Annie is a chimpanzee. Delia was a red woman--“Sweet Auburn, loveliest sample of the Plain!” one murmured as one looked at her; Annie is a brunette. Annie sits all day in her little basement home, with Jerry, and now and then receives privileged visitors, such as His Majesty, whose hat--just as if it were mine--she seized and hurled to the other end of the room, and the young Princes and Princesses, and Fellows of the Society and their friends. Annie is “that mischievous,” but Jerry is thoughtful and low-pulsed. Annie will snatch whatever you have that pleases her and rush to the ceiling with it; Jerry sits quite still and looks at you with bright eyes filled with ten thousand sorrows.

Annie has some of Delia’s charm; but oh, how much more had Delia! Annie also spreads her arms for an embrace and is curious about clothes; but Delia--no, there will never be another Delia.

It was while wandering at random regretting Delia that I came upon Gypsy.

Now, Gypsy also is not Delia; but Gypsy’s companionableness and merriment and candour go far to soften the loss. A Zoo with both Delia and Gypsy in it would be almost too fortunate--shall I put it like that? I found her in the Small Cats’ House, that abode of bright eyes and stealthy quicknesses, and, surely, she is out of place. For her fellow-creatures in the surrounding cages are subtle and swift, predatory and untrustworthy, while she is the most transparently harmless, blundering, foolish, faithful thing you could conceive, without a movement that is not clumsy or a thought that is not obvious.

She was eating chocolate when I found her, seated firmly on the floor and picking the silver paper off with her teeth as skilfully as a child. Having finished the chocolate and satisfied herself (no rapid business) that there was no more, she turned to another visitor for entertainment and seized his walking-stick. Whether she recognized a compatriot--for it was a Malacca cane, and she is a Malayan bear from the same district--or whether all walking-sticks present equal attractions, I do not know; but she fondled this one with the utmost tenderness, shouldered it, hugged it, nursed it, bit it, and did her best to poke out her insignificant but very capable eyes with it.

Then she rose to her full but trumpery height and flung her arms round my leg.