Chapter XL: On Dropping Anchor 344 (3)

That man who looked us up and down so insolently when the great doors were opened in St. James' Square and who thought one's boots so comic. He too, and all his like, burn separately. So does that fellow with the wine that poured it out ungenerously, and clearly thought that we were in luck's way to get the bubbly stuff at all in any measure. He that conveyed his master's messages with a pomp that was instinct with scorn and he that drove you to the station, hardly deigning to reply to your timid sentences and knowing well your tremors and your abject ill-ease. Be comforted. He too burns.

It is the custom in Hell when this last batch of scoundrels, the horsey ones, come up in batches to be dealt with by the authorities thereof, for them first to be asked in awful tones how many pieces of silver they have taken from men below the rank of a squire, or whose income was less than a thousand pounds a year, and the truth on this they are compelled by Fate to declare, whereupon, before their tortures begin, they receive as many stripes as they took florins: nor is there any defect in the arrangement of divine justice in their regard, save that the money is not refunded to us.

Cooks, housemaids, poor little scullery-maids, under-gardeners, estate carpenters of all kinds, small stable lads, and in general all those humble Servants of the Rich who are debarred by their insolent superiors from approaching the guests and neither wound them with contemptuous looks, nor follow these up by brigandish demands for money, _these_ you will not see in this Pit of Fire. For them is reserved a high place in Paradise, only a little lower than that supreme and cloudy height of bliss wherein repose the happy souls of all who on this earth have been Journalists.

But Game-Keepers, more particularly those who make a distinction and will take nothing less than gold (nay _Paper_!), and Grooms of the Chamber, and all such, these suffer torments for ever and for ever. So has Immutable Justice decreed and thus is the offended majesty of man avenged.

And what, you will ask me perhaps at last, what of the dear old family servants, who are _so_ good, _so_ kind, _so_ attached to Master Arthur and to Lady Jane?

Ah!... Of these the infernal plight is such that I dare not set it down!

There is a special secret room in Hell where their villainous hypocrisy and that accursed mixture of yielding and of false independence wherewith they flattered and be-fooled their masters; their thefts, their bullying of beggarmen, have at last a full reward. Their eyes are no longer sly and cautious, lit with the pretence of affection, nor are they here rewarded with good fires and an excess of food, and perquisites and pensions. But they sit hearthless, jibbering with cold, and they stare broken at the prospect of a dark Eternity. And now and then one or another, an aged serving-man or a white-haired housekeeper, will wring their hands and say: "Oh, that I had once, only once, shown in my mortal life some momentary gleam of honour, independence, or dignity! Oh, that I had but once stood up in my freedom and spoken to the Rich as I should! Then it would have been remembered for me and I should now have been spared this place--but it is too late!"

For there is no repentance known among the Servants of the Rich, nor any exception to their vileness; they are hated by men when they live, and when they die they must for all eternity consort with demons.

XIII

THE JOKE

There are two kinds of jokes, those jokes that are funny because they are true, and those jokes that would be funny anyhow. Think it out and you will find that that is a great truth. Now the joke I have here for the delectation of the broken-hearted is of the first sort. It is funny because it is true. It is about a man whom I really saw and really knew and touched, and on occasions treated ill. He was. The sunlight played upon his form. Perhaps he may still flounder under the light of the sun, and not yet have gone down into that kingdom whose kings are less happy than the poorest hind upon the upper fields.

It was at College that I knew him and I retained my acquaintance with him--Oh, I retained it in a loving and cherishing manner--until he was grown to young manhood. I would keep it still did Fate permit me so to do, for he was a treasure. I have never met anything so complete for the purposes of laughter, though I am told there are many such in the society which bred his oafish form.

He was a noble in his own country, which was somewhere in the pine-forests of the Germanies, and his views of social rank were far, far too simple for the silent subtlety of the English Rich. In his poor turnip of a mind he ordered all men thus:

First, reigning sovereigns and their families.

Secondly, mediatized people.

Third, Princes.

Fourth, Dukes.

Fifth, Nobles.

Then came a little gap, and after that little gap The Others.

Most of us in our College were The Others. But he, as I have said, was a noble in his distant land.

He had not long been among the young Englishmen when he discovered that a difficult tangle of titles ran hither and thither among them like random briars through an undergrowth. There were Honourables, and there were Lords, and Heaven knows what, and there were two Sirs, and altogether it puzzled him.

He couldn't understand why a man should be called Mr. Jinks, and his brother Lord Blefauscu, and then if a man could be called Lord Blefauscu while his father Lord Brobdignag was alive, how was it that quite a Fresher should be called Sir Howkey--no--he was Sir John Howkey: and when the Devil did one put in the Christian name and when didn't one, and why should one, and what was the order of precedence among all these?

I think that last point puzzled him more than the rest, for in his own far distant land in the pine-woods, where peasants uglier than sin grovelled over the potato crop and called him "Baron," there were no such devilish contraptions, but black was black and white was white. Here in this hypocritical England, to which his father had sent him as an exile, everything was so wrapped up in deceiving masks! There was the Captain of the Eleven, or the President of the Boat Club. By the time he had mastered that there might be great men not only without the actual title (he had long ago despaired of that), but without so much as cousinship to one, he would stumble upon a fellow with nothing whatsoever to distinguish him, not even the High Jump, and yet "in" with the highest. It tortured him I can tell you! After he had sat upon several Fourth Year men (he himself a Fresher), from an error as to their rank, after he had been duly thrown into the water, blackened as to his face with blacking, sentenced to death in a court-martial and duly shot with a blank cartridge (an unpleasant thing by the way looking down a barrel); after he had had his boots, of which there were seven pair, packed with earth, and in each one a large geranium planted; after all these things had happened to him in his pursuit of an Anglo-German understanding, he approached a lanky, pot-bellied youth whom he had discovered with certitude to be the cousin of a Duke, and begged him secretly to befriend him in a certain matter, which was this:

The Baron out of the Germanies proposed to give a dinner to no less than thirty people and he begged the pot-bellied youth in all secrecy to collect for him an assembly worthy of his rank and to give him privately not only their names but their actual precedence according to which he would arrange them at the table upon his right and upon his left.

But what did the pot-bellied youth do? Why he went out and finding all his friends one after the other he said:

"You know Sausage?"

"Yes," said they, for all the University knew Sausage.

"Well, he is going to give a dinner," said the pot-bellied one, who was also slow of speech, "and you have to come, but I'm going to say you are the Duke of Rochester" (or whatever title he might have chosen). And so speaking, and so giving the date and place he would go on to the next. Then, when he had collected not thirty but sixty of all his friends and acquaintances, he sought out the noble Teuton again and told him that he could not possibly ask only thirty men without lifelong jealousies and hatreds, so sixty were coming, and the Teuton with some hesitation (for he was fond of money) agreed.

Never shall I forget the day when those sixty were ushered solemnly into a large Reception Room in the Hotel, blameless youths of varying aspect, most of them quite sober--since it was but 7 o'clock--presented one by one to the host of the evening, each with his title and style.

To those whom he recognized as equals the Aristocrat spoke with charming simplicity. Those who were somewhat his inferiors (the lords by courtesy and the simple baronets) he put immediately at their ease; and even the Honourables saw at a glance that he was a man of the world, for he said a few kind words to each. As for a man with no handle to his name, there was not one of the sixty so low, except a Mr. Poopsibah of whom the gatherer of that feast whispered to the host that he could not but ask him because, though only a second cousin, he was the heir to the Marquis of Quirk--hence his Norman name.

It was a bewilderment to the Baron, for he might have to meet the man later in life as the Marquis of Quirk, whereas for the moment he was only Mr. Poopsibah, but anyhow he was put at the bottom of the table--and that was how the trouble began.

In my time--I am talking of the nineties--young men drank wine: it was before the Bishop of London had noted the Great Change. And Mr. Poopsibah and his neighbour--Lord Henry Job--were quite early in the Feast occupied in a playful contest which ended in Mr. Poopsibah's losing his end seat and going to grass. He rose, not unruffled, with a burst collar, and glared a little uncertainly over the assembled wealth and lineage of the evening. Lord Benin (the son of our great General Lord Ashantee of Benin--his real name was Mitcham, God Rest His Soul) addressed to the unreal Poopsibah an epithet then fashionable, now almost forgotten, but always unprintable. Mr. Poopsibah, forgetting what nobility imposes, immediately hurled at him an as yet half-emptied bottle of Champagne.

Then it was that the bewildered Baron learnt for the last time--and for that matter for the first time--to what the Island Race can rise when it really lets itself go.

I remember (I was a nephew if I remember right) above the din and confusion of light (for candles also were thrown) loud appeals as in a tone of command, and then as in a tone of supplication, both in the unmistakable accents of the Cousins overseas, and I even remember what I may call the Great Sacrilege of that evening when Lord Gogmagog seizing our host affectionately round the neck, and pressing the back of his head with his large and red left hand, attempted to grind his face into the tablecloth, after a fashion wholly unknown to the haughty lords of the Teufelwald.

During the march homewards--an adventure enlightened with a sharp skirmish and two losses at the hands of the police--I know not what passed through the mind of the youth who had hitherto kept so careful a distinction between blood and blood: whether like Hannibal he swore eternal hatred to the English, or whether in his patient German mind he noted it all down as a piece of historical evidence to be used in his diplomatic career, we shall not be told. I think in the main he was simply bewildered: bewildered to madness.

Of the many other things we made him do before Eights Week I have no space to tell: How he asked us what was the fashionable sport and how we told him Polo and made him buy a Polo pony sixteen hands high, with huge great bones and a broken nose, explaining to him that it was stamina and not appearance that the bluff Englishman loved in a horse. How we made him wear his arms embroidered upon his handkerchief (producing several for a pattern and taking the thing as a commonplace by sly allusion for many preparatory days). How we told him that it was the custom to call every Sunday afternoon for half an hour upon the wife of every married Don of one's College: How we challenged him to the Great College feat of throwing himself into the river at midnight: How finally we persuaded him that the ancient custom of the University demanded the presentation to one's Tutor at the end of term of an elaborate thesis one hundred pages long upon some subject of Theology: How he was carefully warned that surprise was the essence of this charming tradition and not a word of it must be breathed to the august recipient of the favour: How he sucked in the knowledge that the more curious and strange the matter the higher would be his place in the schools, and how the poor fool elaborately wasted what God gives such men for brains in the construction of a damning refutation against the Monophysites: How his tutor, a humble little nervous fool, thought he was having his leg pulled--all these things I have no space to tell you now.

But he was rich! Doubtless by the custom of his country he is now in some great position plotting the ruin of Britannia and certainly she deserves it in his case. He was most unmercifully ragged.

XIV

THE SPY

One day as I was walking along the beach at Southsea, I saw a little man sitting upon a camp-stool and very carefully drawing the Old Round Stone Fort which stands in the middle of the shallow water, one of the four that so stand, and which looks from Southsea as though it were about half-way across to the Island.

I said to him: "Sir, why are you drawing that old Fort?"

He answered: "I am a German Spy, and the reason I draw that Fort is to provide information for my Government which may be useful to it in case of war with this country."

When the gentleman sitting upon the camp-stool, who was drawing the Old Round Stone Fort in the middle of the water, talked like this he annoyed me very much.

"You merely waste your time," said I. "These Forts were put up nearly sixty years ago, and they are quite useless."

"I know nothing about that," said the little man--he had hair like hemp and prominent weak blue eyes of a glazed sort, and altogether he struck me as a fool of no insignificant calibre--"I know nothing about that. I obey orders. I was told to draw this Fort, and that I am now doing."

"You do not draw well," said I, "but that is neither here nor there. I mean that what you draw is not beautiful. What I really want to know is why in thunder you were told to draw that round stone barrel, for which no one in Europe would give a five-pound note."

"I have nothing to do with all that," said the little man again, still industriously drawing. "I was told to draw that Fort, and that Fort I draw." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.

"Can you not tell me for whom you are drawing it?" said I at last.

"Yes," said he, "with great pleasure. I am drawing it for his King-like and Kaiser-like Majesty By the Grace of God and the Authority of the Holy See, William, King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke of Romshall, Count Hohenzollern and of the Great German Empire, Emperor."

With that he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.

"I do assure you most solemnly," said I again, "that you can be of no use whatever to your master in this matter. There are no guns upon that ridiculous thing; it has even been turned into a hotel."

But the little man paid no attention to what I said. He went on obeying orders. He had often heard that this was the strength of his race.

"How could there conceivably be any guns on it?" said I imploringly. "Do think what you are at! Do look at the range between you and Ryde! Do consider what modern gunnery is! Do wake up, do!"

But the little man with hair like hemp said again: "I know nothing about all that. I am a lieutenant in the High Spy Corps, and I have been told to draw this Fort and I must draw it." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.

Then gloom settled upon my spirit, for I thought that civilization was in peril if men such as he really existed and really went on in this fashion.

However, I went back into Southsea, into the town, and there I bought a chart. Then I struck off ranges upon the chart and marked them in pencil, and I also marked the Fairway through Spithead into Portsmouth Harbour. Then I came back to the little man, and I said: "Do look at this!"

He looked at it very patiently and carefully, but at the end of so looking at it he said: "I do not understand these things. I do not belong to the High Map-making Corps; I belong to the Spy Corps, and I have orders to draw this Fort." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.

Then, seeing I could not persuade him, I went into a neighbouring church which is dedicated to the Patron of Spies, to wit, St. Judas, and I prayed for this man. I prayed thus:

"Oh, St. Judas! Soften the flinty heart of this Spy, and turn him, by your powerful intercession, from his present perfectly useless occupation of drawing the Old Round Stone Fort to something a little more worthy of his distinguished mission and the gallant profession he adorns."

When I had prayed thus diligently for half an hour something within me told me that it was useless, and when I got back to the seashore I found out what the trouble was. Prayers went off my little man like water off a cabbage-leaf. My little man with hair like hemp was a No-Goddite, for he so explained to me in a conversation we had upon the Four Last Things.

"I have done my drawing," he said at the end of this conversation (and he said it in a tone of great satisfaction). "Now I shall go back to Germany."

"No," said I, "you shall do nothing of the kind. I will have you tried first in a court, and you shall be sent to prison for being a Spy."

"Very well," said he, and he came with me to the court.

The Magistrate tried him, and did what they call in the newspapers "looking very grave," that is, he looked silly and worried. At last he determined not to put the Spy in prison because there was not sufficient proof that he was a Spy.

"Although," he added, "I have little doubt but that you have been prying into the most important military secrets of the country."

After that I took the Spy out of court again and gave him some dinner, and that night he went back home to Germany with his drawing of the Old Round Stone Fort.

It is certainly an extraordinary way of doing business, but that is their look-out. _They_ think they are efficient, and _we_ think they are efficient, and when two people of opposite interests are agreed on such a matter it is not for third parties to complain.

XV

THE YOUNG PEOPLE

One of my amusements, a mournful one I admit, upon these fine spring days, is to watch in the streets of London the young people, and to wonder if they are what I was at their age.

There is an element in human life which the philosophers have neglected, and which I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name has been coined for it. But I am not at a loss to describe it. It is that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere change in perspective, or in point of view. It is that change which makes Death so recognisable and too near; achievement necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. It is more than that. It is a sort of seeing things from that far side of them, which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years, but which is now palpable and part of the senses: known. All who have passed a certain age know what I mean.

This change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth; and it is best to trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the young.

There I see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough, and walking a little too stiffly down Cockspur Street. Does he think himself immortal, I wonder, as I did? Does the thought of oblivion appal him as it did me? That he continually suffers in his dignity, that he thinks the passers-by all watch him, and that he is in terror of any singularity in dress or gesture, I can well believe, for that is common to all youth. But does he also, as did I and those of my time, purpose great things which are quite unattainable, and think the summit of success in any art to be the natural wage of living?

Then other things occur to me. Do these young people suffer or enjoy all our old illusions? Do they think the country invincible? Do they vaguely distinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the former from whom they spring are provided with their well-being by some natural and fatal process, like the recurrence of day and night? Are they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do? I wonder!--Possibly they are. I have not seen one of them wearing a billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the street. And is life divided for them to-day as it was then, into three periods: their childhood; their much more important years at a public school (which last fill up most of their consciousness); their new untried occupation?

And do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? I think they must, judging by their eyes. I think they too believe that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in any trade is best recognised and best paid; that labour is a happy business; and that women are of two kinds: the young who go about to please them, the old to whom they are indifferent.

Do they drink? I suppose so. They do not show it yet. Do they gamble? I conceive they do. Are their nerves still sound? Of that there can be no doubt! See them hop on and off the motor 'buses and cross the streets!

And what of their attitude towards the labels? Do they take, as I did, every man much talked of for a great man? Are they diffident when they meet such men? And do they feel themselves to be in the presence of gods? I should much like to put myself into the mind of one of them and to see if, to that generation the simplest of all social lies is Gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a Prime Minister, a Versifier, an Ambassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes up in the Press, to be some very superhuman person. And doubtless also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or much-be-printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all the rest of England in a ruck below.

Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment? We used all to be so bewildered! Things did not fit in with the very simple and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the State. The motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation will come the discovery that of _these_ men and of _such_ material the Great are made; and will the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came to their elders?

I must believe that young man walking down Cockspur Street thinks that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of unlimited means and command the world. Further, I must believe that the young man walking down Cockspur Street (he has got to Northumberland Avenue by now), lives in a static world. For him things are immovable. There are the old: fathers and mothers and uncles; the very old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death. All the children (he thinks) will be always children, and all the lovely women always young. And loyalty and generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul, and as yet unbetrayed.

Well, if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young people, quite half the world is happy. Not one of that happy half remembers the Lion of Northumberland House, or the little streets there were behind the Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple Bar, or what Coutts's used to be like, or Simpson's, or Soho as yet uninvaded by the great and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the young can pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works.

And for them, all the new things--houses which are veils of mud on stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels--are the things that always were and always will be.

A year to them is twenty years of ours. The summer for them is games and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse; time is slow and stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal, but will not be; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing.

Or am I all wrong? Is the world so rapidly changing that the Young also are caught with the obsession of change? Why, then, not even half the world is happy.

XVI

ETHANDUNE

In the parish of East Knoyle, in the county of Wiltshire, and towards the western side of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse covered, abrupt, and somewhat over 700 feet above the sea in height. From the summit of it a man can look westward, northward, and eastward over a great rising roll of countryside.

To the west, upon the sky-line of a level range of hills, not high, runs that long wood called Selwood and there makes an horizon. To the north the cultivated uplands merge into high open down: bare turf of the chalk, which closes the view for miles against the sky, and is the watershed between the Northern and the Southern Avon. Eastward that chalk land falls into the valley which holds Salisbury.

From this high knoll a man perceives the two days' march which Alfred made with his levies when he summoned the men of three Shires to fight with him against the Danes; he overthrew them at Ethandune.

The struggle of which these two days were the crisis was of more moment to the history of Britain and of Europe than any other which has imperilled the survival of either between the Roman time and our own.

That generation in which the stuff of society had worn most threadbare, and in which its continued life (individually the living memory of the Empire and informed by the Faith) was most in peril, was not the generation which saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that which witnessed the breaking of the Mahommedan tide in the eighth, when the Christians carried it through near Poitiers, between the River Vienne and the Chain, the upland south of Chatellerault. The gravest moment of peril was for that generation whose grandfathers could remember the order of Charlemagne, and which fought its way desperately through the perils of the later ninth century.

Then it was, during the great Scandinavian harry of the North and West, that Europe might have gone down. Its monastic establishment was shaken; its relics of central government were perishing of themselves; letters had sunk to nothing and building had already about it something nearly savage, when the swirl of the pirates came up all its rivers. And though legend had taken the place of true history, and though the memories of our race were confused almost to dreaming, we were conscious of our past and of our inheritance, and seemed to feel that now we had come to a narrow bridge which might or might not be crossed: a bridge already nearly ruined.

If that bridge were not crossed there would be no future for Christendom.

Southern Britain and Northern Gaul received the challenge, met it, were victorious, and so permitted the survival of all the things we know. At Ethandune and before Paris the double business was decided. Of these twin victories the first was accomplished in this island. Alfred is its hero, and its site is that chalk upland, above the Vale of Trowbridge, near which the second of the two white horses is carved: the hills above Eddington and Bratton upon the Westbury road.

The Easter of 878 had seen no King in England. Alfred was hiding with some small band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip against the Severn sea. It was one of those eclipses which time and again in the history of Christian warfare have just preceded the actions by which Christendom has re-arisen. In Whitsun week Alfred reappeared.

There is a place at the southern terminal of the great wood, Selwood, which bears a Celtic affix, and is called "Penselwood," "the head of the forest," and near it there stood (not to within living memory, but nearly so) a shire-stone called Egbert's Stone; there Wiltshire, Somerset, and Dorset meet. It is just eastward of the gap by which men come by the south round Selwood into the open country. There the levies, that is the lords of Somerset and of Wiltshire and their followers, come also riding from Hampshire, met the King. But many had fled over sea from fear of the Pagans.

"And seeing the King, as was meet, come to life again as it were after such tribulations, and receiving him, they were filled with an immense joy, and there the camp was pitched."

Next day the host set out eastward to try its last adventure with the barbarians who had ruined half the West.

Day was just breaking when the levies set forth and made for the uplands and for the water partings. Not by mere and the marshes of the valley, but by the great camp of White Sheet and the higher land beyond it, the line of marching and mounted men followed the King across the open turf of the chalk to where three Hundreds meet, and where the gathering of the people for justice and the courts of the Counts had been held before the disasters of that time had broken up the land.

It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for a tree which marked the junction of the Hundreds. No more than three hundred years ago this tree still stood and bore the name of the Iley Oak. The place of that day's camp stands up above the water of Deveril, and is upon the continuation of that Roman road from Sarum to the Mendips and to the sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccountably upon its issue from the great Ridge wood. The army had marched ten miles, and there the second camp was pitched.

With the next dawn the advance upon the Danes was made.

The whole of that way (which should be famous in every household in this country) is now deserted and unknown. The host passed over the high rolling land of the Downs from summit to summit until--from that central crest which stands above and to the east of Westbury--they saw before them, directly northward and a mile away, the ring of earthwork which is called to-day "Bratton Castle." Upon the slope between the great host of the pirates came out to battle. It was there from those naked heights that overlook the great plain of the Northern Avon, that the fate of England was decided.

The end of that day's march and action was the pressing of the Pagans back behind their earthworks, and the men who had saved our great society sat down before the ringed embankment watching all the gates of it, killing all the stragglers that had failed to reach that protection and rounding up the stray horses and the cattle of the Pagans.

That siege endured for fourteen days. At the end of it the Northmen treatied, conquered "by hunger, by cold, and by fear." Alfred took hostages "as many as he willed." Guthrum, their King, accepted our baptism, and Britain took that upward road which Gaul seven years later was to follow when the same anarchy was broken by Eudes under the walls of Paris.

All this great affair we have doubtfully followed to-day in no more than some three hundred words of Latin, come down doubtfully over a thousand years. But the thing happened where and as I have said. It should be as memorable as those great battles in which the victories of the Republic established our exalted but perilous modern day.

XVII

THE DEATH OF ROBERT THE STRONG

Up in the higher valley of the River Sarthe, which runs between low knolls through easy meadow-land, and is a place of cattle and of pasture, interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher land to the crossings of the river. It was in the year 866. The older servants in the chief men's retinue could remember Charlemagne.

Two leaders rode before the troop. They were two great owners of land, and each possessed of commissions from the Imperial authority. The one had come up hastily northwards from Poitiers, the other had marched westward to join him, coming from the Beauce, with his command. Each was a _Comes_, a Lord Administrator of a countryside and its capital, and had power to levy free men. Their retainers also were many. About them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them, before the footmen, were four squadrons of mounted followers.

The force had already marched far that morning. It was winding in line down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside, and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages, but they could see no sign of their quarry. They were hunting the pirates. The scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken camp till lately, till mid-morning; but in the last miles of their marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the rare peasantry were confused.

They found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at the place where it left the hills for the water meadows, and here they recovered the trace of their prey. A wounded man, his right arm bound roughly with sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which rose into the still summer air just beyond a screen of wood in its neighbourhood. He had seen the straggling line of the Northern men an hour before, hurrying over the Down and coming towards that farm.

Of the two leaders the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse the less easily, and whose handling of the rein was brutally strong, rode up and questioned and requestioned the peasant. Could he guess the numbers? It might be two hundred; it was not three. How long had they been in the countryside? Four days, at least. It was four days ago that they had tried to get into the monastery, near the new castle, and had been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. What damage had they done? He could not tell. The reports were few that he had heard. His cousin from up the valley complained that three oxen had been driven from his fields by night. They had stolen a chain of silver from St. Giles without respect for the shrine. They had done much more--how much he did not know. Had they left any dead? Yes, three, whom he had helped to bury. They had been killed outside the monastery wall. One of his fields was of the monastery benefice, and he had been summoned to dig the graves.

The lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly eyes, and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from Poitiers. That equal was armoured, but the lord who had spoken to the peasant, full of body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of neck, tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather coat, strung with rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for him some miles before, and it hung loose upon the saddle hook. He had taken off, also, the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point. He preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair and to risk its action than to be weighed upon longer by that iron. And this though at any moment the turn of a spinney might bring them upon some group of the barbarians.

Upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the expectation of the armed men was fixed. His repute had gone through all the North of Gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and in throwing. He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted no lineage, but vague stories went about--that his father was from the Germanies; that his father was from the Paris land; that it was his mother who had brought him to court; that he was a noble with a mystery that forbade him to speak of his birth; that he was a slave whom the Emperor had enfranchised and to whom he had given favour; that he was a farmer's son; a yeoman.

On these things he had never spoken. No one had met men or women of his blood. But ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of the empire, adding, also, one village to another in his possession, from the first which he had obtained no man knew how; purchasing land with the profits of office after office. He had been _Comes_ of Tours, _Comes_ of Auxerre, _Comes_ of Nevers. He had the commission for all the military work between Loire and Seine. There were songs about him, and myths and tales of his great strength, for it was at this that the populace most wondered.

So this man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little force, seeking for the pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. Two hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone bridge unbroken. Immediately beyond a group of huts and houses, wood and stone, and a heavy, low, round-arched bulk of a church marked the goal of the pirates--and there they were! They had seen the imperial levy the moment that it left the trees, and they were running--tall, lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with battle-axe or short spear. They were making for cover in the houses of the village.

Immediately the two leaders called the marshallers of their levies, gave orders that the foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once the water was passed, formed into two bodies of horse and galloped across the few fields into the streets of the place.

Just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church there, the last of the marauders (retarded under the weight of some burden he would save) was caught and pinned by a short spear thrown. He fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods of his own in the northland. But all his comrades were fast in the building, and there was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the doors. Then, within a moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit, just missing one of the marshals. The Comes of Poitiers shouted for wood to burn the defence of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were pressed. Faggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. Even as this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at short range from within the church-tower.

The first of the foot-men had come up, and some half-dozen picked for marksmanship were attempting to thread with their whistling arrows the slits in the thick walls whence the bolts of the Vikings came. One such opening was caught by a lucky aim. For some moments its fire ceased, then came another arrow from it. It struck the Comes of Poitiers and he went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. Next, with a second shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a panic. No servant dared stab it, but a marshal did.

Robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. He was in a fury, mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door blow upon blow, having in his hand a stone so huge that even at such a moment they marvelled at him.

Unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, Robert the Strong thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge broke, and he heard a salute of laughter from his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted, straining, a great beam which lay there, and trundled it like a battering-ram against the second hinge. But, just as the shock came, an arrow from the tower caught him also. It struck where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down. Even as he fell, the great door gave, and the men of the imperial levy, fighting their way in, broke upon the massed pirates that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword.

Four men tended the leader, one man holding his head upon his knee, the three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be tended. But his body was no longer convulsed; the motions of the arms had ceased; and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the thick blood hardly followed it. He was dead.

The name of this village and this church was Brissarthe; and the man who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose, was the first father of all the Capetians, the French kings.

From this man sprang Eudes, who defended Paris from the Sea-Rovers: Hugh Capet and Philip Augustus and Louis the Saint and Philip the Fair; and so through century after century to the kings that rode through Italy, to Henri IV, to Louis XIV in the splendour of his wars, and to that last unfortunate who lost the Tuileries on August 10th, 1793. His line survives to-day, for its eldest heir is the man whom the Basques would follow. His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he claims the crown of Spain.

XVIII

THE CROOKED STREETS

Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets, I wonder, which are my delight, and hurt no man living?

Every day the wealthier nations are pulling down one or another in their capitals and their great towns: they do not know why they do it; neither do I.

It ought to be enough, surely, to drive the great broad ways which commerce needs and which are the life-channels of a modern city, without destroying all the history and all the humanity in between: the islands of the past. For, note you, the Crooked Streets are packed with human experience and reflect in a lively manner all the chances and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men. One marks a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient stream, a third the track some animal took to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of years ago; another is the line of an old defence, another shows where a rich man's garden stopped long before the first ancestor one's family can trace was born; a garden now all houses, and its owner who took delight in it turned to be a printed name.

Leave men alone in their cities, pester them not with the futilities of great governments, nor with the fads of too powerful men, and they will build you Crooked Streets of their very nature as moles throw up the little mounds or bees construct their combs. There is no ancient city but glories, or has gloried, in a whole foison and multitude of Crooked Streets. There is none, however wasted and swept by power which, if you leave it alone to natural things, will not breed Crooked Streets in less than a hundred years and keep them for a thousand more.

I know a dead city called Timgad, which the sand or the barbarians of the Atlas overwhelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies between the desert and the Algerian fields, high up upon a mountain-side. Its columns stand. Even its fountains are apparent, though their waterways are choked. It has a great forum or market-place, all flagged and even, and the ruined walls of its houses mark its emplacement on every side. All its streets are straight, set out with a line, and by this you may judge how a Roman town lay when the last order of Rome sank into darkness.

Well, take any other town which has not thus been mummified and preserved but has lived through the intervening time, and you will find that man, active, curious, intense, in all the fruitful centuries of Christian time has endowed them with Crooked Streets, which kind of streets are the most native to Christian men. So it is with Arles, so it is with Nîmes, so it is with old Rome itself, and so it is with the City of London, on which by a special Providence the curse of the Straight Street has never fallen, so that it is to this day a labyrinth of little lanes. It was intended after the Great Fire to set it all out in order with "piazzas" and boulevards and the rest--but the English temper was too strong for any such nonsense, and the streets and the courts took to the natural lines which suit us best.

The Renaissance indeed everywhere began this plague of vistas and of avenues. It was determined three centuries ago to rebuild Paris as regular as a chessboard, and nothing but money saved the town--or rather the lack of money. You may to this day see in a square called the "Place des Vosges" what was intended. But when they had driven their Straight Street two hundred yards or so the exchequer ran dry, and thus was old Paris saved. But in the last seventy years they have hurt it badly again. I have no quarrel with what is regal and magnificent, with splendid ways of a hundred feet or more, with great avenues and lines of palaces; but why should they pull down my nest beyond the river--Straw Street and Rat Street and all those winding belts round the little Church of St. Julien the Poor, where they say that Dante studied and where Danton in the madness of his grief dug up his dead love from the earth on his returning from the wars.

Crooked Streets will never tire a man, and each will have its character, and each will have a soul of its own. To proceed from one to another is like travelling in a multitude or mixing with a number of friends. In a town of Crooked Streets it is natural that one should be the Moneylenders' Street and another that of the Burglars, and a third that of the Politicians, and so forth through all the trades and professions.

Then also, how much better are not the beauties of a town seen from Crooked Streets! Consider those old Dutch towns where you suddenly come round a corner upon great stretches of salt water, or those towns of Central France which from one street and then another show you the Gothic in a hundred ways.

It is as it should be when you have the back of Chartres Cathedral towering up above you from between and above two houses gabled and almost meeting. It is what the builders meant when one comes out from such fissures into the great Place, the parvis of the cathedral, like a sailor from a river into the sea. Not that certain buildings were not made particularly for wide approaches and splendid roads, but that these, when they are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon was wise enough when he designed that there should lead all up beyond the Tiber to St. Peter's a vast imperial way. But the modern nondescript horde, which has made Rome its prey, is very ill advised to drive those new Straight Streets foolishly, emptily, with mean façades of plaster and great gaps that will not fill.

You will have noted in your travels how the Crooked Streets gather names to themselves which are as individual as they, and which are bound up with them as our names are with all our own human reality and humour. Thus I bear in mind certain streets of the town where I served as a soldier. There was the Street of the Three Little Heaps of Wheat, the Street of the Trumpeting Moor, the Street of the False Heart, and an exceedingly pleasant street called "Who Grumbles at It?" and another short one called "The Street of the Devil in His Haste," and many others.

From time to time those modern town councillors from whom Heaven has wisely withdrawn all immoderate sums of money, and who therefore have not the power to take away my Crooked Streets and put Straight ones in their places, change old names to new ones. Every such change indicates some snobbery of the time: some little battle exaggerated to be a great thing; some public fellow or other, in Parliament or what not; some fad of the learned or of the important in their day.

Once I remember seeing in an obscure corner a twist of dear old houses built before George III was king, and on the corner of this row was painted "Kipling Street: late Nelson Street."

Upon another occasion I went to a little Norman market town up among the hills, where one of the smaller squares was called "The Place of the Three Mad Nuns," and when I got there after so many years and was beginning to renew my youth I was struck all of a heap to see a great enamelled blue and white affair upon the walls. They had renamed the triangle. They had called it "The Place Victor Hugo"!