Chapter VII: Part II: Some Contemporaries (3)

The family to which Blanche belonged was a big one, but most of them were abroad: there was, however, Harold, in an accountant's office in Hunmouth, who went to music halls twice a week and wore cuffs, and a younger brother, who went to the village school and wore corduroys, but Blanche was the only one that mattered--Blanche with her profligate golden hair and blue eyes, Blanche of the cheap Birmingham jewellery, Blanche, who inspired respect from no one except Fondie, who addressed her as "Miss," or "Miss Blanche" in all circumstances, "as naturally as he would take up his gravy on the knife-blade, without, for a moment, contemplating any other way."

We are shown Blanche in all her nakedness, from her earliest days, when "I wish I had a sovereign for every time that Blanche rode in the hat-rack in defiance of the notice that this was provided for light luggage only," until the day when the verdict on her body goes forth, "Found Drowned." She would have assignations in the belfry while Harold folded cigarettes during the Litany and pared his nails for the coming week and read _The Confessions of a Lady's Maid_ and _Secrets of Matrimony_ with his head down, as if he had had a stroke, whilst his father preached from Samuel and Kings.

"The Creator that conceived and executed Blanche, and equipped her with that amphitheatre of teeth and those scintillating eyes, must have been a tyro at his trade if he really expected sobriety and worship of them; or else a jocund God of Mirth, who loved laughter and human happiness."

Her father had even occasion to take for his text one day: "My daughter hath a devil" ... and she certainly was a thorn in his flesh. He made periodic attempts to put his house in order and his foot down, but within three days of new regulations he would have to give up his attempt at discipline and go back to his hens and tool-shed and the nutrition of the vicarage pig, while Blanche locked herself in her bedroom and learnt the mysteries of life from books that she stole from her brother and _Sunday Sacred Pennyworths_, where "the advertisements were even more absorbing than the literary matter and contributed liberally to her education."

This picture of the sordid, poverty-stricken vicarage life would make us weep were it not for the light relief afforded by the villagers, in such gorgeous scenes as that in which Fondie swarms the bees:

"'Thee wants ti gan up fierce-like, same as Bless says, an' sing a bit as thoo gans, an' swear when thoo gets ti top, an' mek bees think thoo's as good as them.'"

When he has finished collecting them he looks less like a victim of bees than of overstudy.

Meanwhile Blanche goes from conquest to conquest among her boys (always excepting Fondie) and makes with him a new friend in Lancelot Griffith D'Arcy Mersham. Fondie becomes more and more proficient in his trade of wheelwright and in his passion for music: "Music stirred him, he knew not how or why; books, too, haunted him with the desire to read them--and beauty, whether of Blanche, or of a bird, of sunset or moonrise, of stars or blossoms, troubled him with a sweet sickness, a pining of the soul to be something other and something better than he was." Blanche fails to make much headway with the aristocratic Lancelot, who prefers the society of Fondie and helps him to throw off much of his vernacular so that he becomes more or less bilingual. In the church, or elsewhere, he spoke of "harmonium" and "home" and "Hunmouth," and said, "I am, sir," and "Were you, sir?": whereas in public he systematically dropped one "h" in every three out of consideration for his hearers' feelings, and said, "I misdoot" and "I'se fit ti think" and "nobbut" and "jealous" as before.

Blanche rises to the height of a bicycle, which gave her scope to extend the range of her acquaintances, but we don't hear much of these. Her fatal day is that of the Mersham Flower Show, to which she went "in a pale lavender print frock and a large straw hat trimmed with shasta daisies and blue cornflowers, spinning a creamy sunshade over her shoulder with a white-cotton-gloved hand." For it was here that she met for the first time Leonard D'Alroy, who was afterwards to prove her undoing. Mr Booth is lavish in his details of this show, and surely no flower show has ever been so admirably described: he misses nothing from the swing-boats to the sports with their inevitable clamour of unfairness on the part of the judges. "'Steeny would very like a' been first nobbut he only went ti choch a bit reglarer, and sung i' choir.'" We take leave of Blanche on this occasion by watching her fade away in the dusk with her arms about the neck of a boy on a bicycle, shouting "Oo-li-oo!" to all other defeated admirers. From that day the young squire was seen riding down the streets of Whivvle "with his hat at the back of his head" at very frequent intervals. In October he vanished to be "larned high books at Oxford," and by mid-November we see Blanche changed. This was not the Blanche of "Don't cares" and "Aren't frighteneds." This was another Blanche born of the fierce crucible of the cares and fears she had once so recklessly defied--Time had chosen this month to take a stern revenge at last. She goes to call on the carrier's wife and faints: her condition is discovered.

"Not that she had ever looked for marriage, or thought of it. No word of marriage had ever passed between them: no word of love even. Their attachment had been but physical; their affection only make-believe--to colour fact, and suffuse reality with romance. Only that insatiable appetite for life had really led her wrong; that passion for physical vitality; the same fierce desire to do something with her body, to put it to some purpose, that Deacon Smeddy and others of the pious experienced in regard to the soul; not merely to possess it, but to be sensible of its possession and quicken it into an ardent instrument of life."

The carrier's wife takes her home and her father is acquainted with the truth about his daughter in these words: "'I'se jealous Blanche is like to be a mother, sir.'" The Vicar then calls on the opulent Rector of Mersham, who stoutly denies that his nephew could possibly be to blame.

"You ought to have kept your daughter safe at home, Bellwood. Why, good gracious, a dog-fancier could have taught you better wisdom in the matter than you seem to have shown."

Meanwhile Fondie hears and fells a man who jests about Blanche's delinquency.

"There are those who affirm that Fondie grew into a man from this hour." Leonard D'Alroy doesn't answer Blanche's letters and her last hope is wrested from her. She meets Fondie, who tells her at last what he has always felt for her:

"I've never had but one feeling for you, miss, since day I was old enough to have any. You know now what that feeling is, without one having to name it, in case it isn't to your approval.... I should be prouder wi' you, Miss Blanche--than any other man in England is wi' all pride he can muster."

But she won't let him make that great sacrifice for her: she goes off and drowns herself.

"Who knows, Blanche, save you whose icy lips retain the secret safely locked behind them--who knows but that Destiny led you well and wisely, and that her cruel hand was kindest after all? For now you can never grow old: age can haunt you with no terrors.... Death? Upon your pillow you have lain dead and dreamless many an hour: by the sedgy margin of the muddy pond itself, often on summer afternoons have you laid your face upon your arms, turned from the unbearable brightness of the sun and sky, and tasted a few brief minutes of irresistible, sweet death. And of the darkness never were you yet afraid.... God's hand, be sure, is gentler than a child's: there is no thunder on God's lips, nor dreadful lightnings in His eyes. If Fondie were God you would not fear him. Fear God, then, less, nor think God's infinite mercy will suffer to be put to shame by the finite compassion of a wheelwright's son."

And we leave Fondie as ever thinking upon whatsoever things are true, honest, just, lovely and of good report. Fondie has a soul for his inheritance, a soul that was swiftly, wholesomely alive.

Mr Booth has written other books than these two, but they represent him at his best in the vein of rich comedy and in the vein of real tragedy.

That they are worth reading ought to be obvious even from the extracts alone that I have quoted ... they leave one with a feeling that here is a rare artist with a finely developed sympathy and sensitive soul, capable of appreciating and loving all manner of men, sunny-tempered, magnanimous, one who glorifies all such things as are of good report. We read Mr Booth because he makes us love him, and not all authors, not all good authors even, are lovable.

IX

FORD MADOX HUEFFER

We read Mr F. M. Hueffer's work because it shows a versatility that is quite out of the common in modern authors.

He is successful with _vers libre_ (which is decidedly uncommon) and even with rhymed _vers libre_ (which is more uncommon still).

"_Vers libre_," he says, "is the only medium in which I can convey more intimate moods. _Vers libre_ is a very jolly medium in which to write and to read, if it be read conversationally and quietly."

"What is love of one's land?...
I don't know very well.
It is something that sleeps
For a year--for a day--
For a month--something that keeps
Very hidden and quiet and still
And then takes
The quiet heart like a wave,
The quiet brain like a spell,
The quiet will
Like a tornado; and that shakes
The whole of the soul."

His poem _On Heaven_, which he afterwards wished to suppress as being "too sloppy," contains these lines:

"Nor does God need to be a very great magician
To give to each man after his heart,
Who knows very well what each man has in his heart:
To let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,
If that is your idea of Heaven: if you will, in the South of France;
If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the
night;
Where you will, how you will;
Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall:
He would be a very little God if He could not do all this,
And he is still
The great God of all."

But it is not as a poet, a taste of whose quality I have just given you, that he would be judged.

It is as the novelist who wrote two of the most interesting novels of our time, _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ and _The Good Soldier_.

The former is the best historical romance that I have ever read.

Mr Sorrell, a mining engineer who had taken up publishing, is travelling up from Plymouth to London when the train goes off the line and he wakes up to find himself living in the fourteenth century possessed of a twentieth-century brain and filled with twentieth-century ideas. He is in possession of a sacred talisman which all the people he meets want to deprive him of: incidentally the fact that he has it causes everyone to treat him with great respect.

With every regard for detail even to language Mr Hueffer builds up a picture for us of life in 1326 in a Hampshire castle:

"A great many sounds of trumpets came from the castle below to proclaim that supper was about to be set on the boards. The sun was just down below the hills, for at that harvest time of the year, when all men and women were wont to be in the fields helping to get in the oat crop and the last of the hay, supper, which was usually at four, was not partaken of till after sunset.

"It was not really dark, but blue shadows had fallen over the long valley of the Wiley, mists were arising amongst the heavy foliage of the trees. The castle of Tamworth, farther down the valley, showed enormous and purple, as if it blocked up all the passage way, and the houses of the little town of Wishford, which was beyond the bridge, being visible from that high place, showed their white mud sides all pink in the light reflected from the sky. From the top of the Portmanmote Hall, the gilded effigy of the Dragon of Wiley turned slowly in the capricious air of the evening, sending forth now a stream of light, and again being obscured. The cavalcade of the Lady Dionissia had reached the foot of the green knoll, and her trumpeter blew a turn of notes to demand admission to the castle of Coucy."

We are given every detail of the lives of these mediæval people right down to the odours that pervaded the court.

We see Mr Sorrell sitting down to a first course at dinner of fourteen dishes, eating a piece of dark-looking meat, both salt and sweet and tasting of nutmeg and cinnamon, having the consistency of soft jelly. He finds even his wines spiced with cloves.

The first dish of the first course was a compound of the tongues of rabbits, hedgehogs, deer, geese and wild boars, the breasts of partridges and the livers of pheasants. It contained, moreover, forcemeat balls made of honey, cinnamon and flour boiled in wine, and the same was made of honey, nutmegs, cloves, garlic and mint. Next he had to taste a panade of herring boiled in white wine, covered with a sweet sauce compounded out of cherries, which seemed to Mr Sorrel to be a mixture of strawberry jam and oysters.

"The pages carried away the plates and emptied them into a great tub with two handles which served for the broken meat of the poor waiting outside the castle gates. This was done to the sound of trumpets. And whilst the second course was being brought, a man came in with a bear that danced in a sort of horseshoe formed by the two tables along the wall and the small table on the dais. This man had with him a girl who danced upon her hands with her feet in the air."

Conversation ran on exploits in the Holy Land, strange happenings in the Adriatic and miracles, amid a din of knives, teeth, crying out for more wine, more ale, more metheglin, so that Mr Sorrell could neither hear others nor make himself heard. When he complained orders were given and a man armed with a long stick like a hop-pole began running down the tables striking people on the heads and hands, "upsetting drinking vessels and sending platters of meat skimming on to the rushes, where they were devoured by the many and large dogs that lay beneath all the tables."

In the next part of the book we are shown the young knight of Egerton with his leman, a fifteen-year-old girl who sulked because she had no velvet gloves set with stones, no hawk from Norway, no white horse of her own with trappings of silver, no monkey, or collars of pearls, or a weekly allowance of five pounds of sugar. She had to pour hot water over her capricious master as he sat in his bath and bear with all his queer tantrums.

"In the room in which she had to live the walls were all of bare stone and the young knight was accustomed to lock her in there for days at a time, so that she knew every stone and every patch of damp.... The bed was of walnut wood gone black and very huge, so that it would hold four persons: the hutch at its foot was of a rough oak gone grey." The young knight in the midst of his ablutions suddenly notices spots of rain upon his armour and leaps out of his bath on to his page. "His mantle, blazing red and white and clasped at the neck with a buckle of gleaming beaten gold weighing three ounces, whirled out all round him; the water dripped from his wet and hairy limbs that, white beneath the scarlet and all knotted and distorted, fell like the sails of a windmill about the page's ears."

Gertrude the leman taunts him and he rounds on her, and yet he could not "raise his hand against this insulting atomy, he, who had been famed for having in ten years seven of the most beautiful lemans in Christendom. There had been Isabelle de Joie, with hair like corn; Constance de Verigonde, with teeth like pearls; Bearea la Belle, with breasts like mother-of-pearl; Bice de Carnas, with arms like alabaster; and Jeune la Ciboriee, whose breath was sweeter than the odour of pinks...."

We are even shown the Queen Mother and the little King.

"The Queen was a fat matron, with a cunning, determined face. Her eyes were small, brown, and keen. Her dress was of purple velvet, all of one piece, and sewn with thick gold thread that glinted in the seams. About her waist she had a rope of amber beads that was twisted before her and fell in two ropes at her feet. The King was all in scarlet, a boy of fourteen. Upon his yellow hair was a small circlet of gold; round his knees were two garters of solid gold links; the ends, passing through the buckles, fell down to the top of his shoes that were very long and gilded."

In the next part of the book we see Mr Sorrell riding in the narrow streets of Salisbury. "The houses were all very low; they were all built of mud and they were all raggedly thatched, house-leeks growing from many roofs, and on others great tufts of flags. The houses were set down at all angles to the road. Sometimes it was very narrow, so that they could hardly pass, ... and the geese fled shrieking at their approach. Sometimes it was so broad that ... the great pigs would continue to wallow undisturbed in the pools of mud.... He observed noise, dirt, nauseous smells, and great crowds of importunate and ugly people. They were nearly all in ragged clothes of a grey home-spun. Some had capes, some hoods with long tails like funnels; most of the men had leather belts; most of the women went bare-legged, and were very dirty ... most of the children ... were crooked, distorted, or bore upon their faces pock-marks of a hideous kind."

Nearer the cathedral were houses of stone, bales of cloth set out to attract customers, men weaving at looms, and great joints of meat upon hooks, in huge cellars below. Over these cellars were suspended signs of gilded suns, boys painted green and brown, swans and unicorns. Men emerged from the cellars in green jerkins or red surcoats furred with white lamb's-wool. Having accompanied Mr Sorrell to the door of the cathedral, his hostess, Lady Dionissia, went back to the town to buy some juice of fir-trees "said to be sovereign for hardening and strengthening the hands of warriors." Meanwhile Mr Sorrell entered the new, brilliantly coloured building, the interior roof of which was grass-green, picked out with bright golden images of angels, queens and grinning fiends. Everybody round was talking loudly, some drinking, most of them selling cherries and eggs; the monks were painting, the chapter clergy whispered and laughed, for it was blood-letting day. Mr Sorrell performs his mission with the Dean, which is to secure the Church's sanction for the Lady Dionissia to divorce her husband (the young knight of Egerton) and marry him: this is an inimitably humorous piece of satirical writing on bribery and corruption in the Church.

"'It is neither decent nor in order to desire to marry a lady who is already married,' said the Dean.

"'I desire to do it,' Mr Sorrell said, 'with the sanction of the church.'

"'That, of course,' the Dean said seriously, 'is another matter.'"

Mr Sorrell finds himself slipping all too easily into his new life and suffers periodic twinges of conscience.

"'Surely it is pleasant,'" he says to his paramour on the return ride of this visit to Salisbury, "'but I cannot see that it is well, and pleasantness is not the whole of life ... are there not such things as duties, ambitions, and responsibilities?'

"'I do not know what these things are,' answered the Lady Dionissia. 'In the spring the moles come out of the woods and the little birds sing, and we walk in the gardens and take what pleasure we can. And then comes the winter, and shuts us up in our castles so that it is not so pleasant; but with jongleurs and ballad-singers we pass the time as well as we may.'

"'It is just that that is so fatal,' Mr Sorrell said. 'It is just that that I am slipping into. You dress me up in these scarlet clothes, and I take a pleasure in it; you ride a-hawking, and it seems to me the whole end of life when your tassel strikes down a heron or a daw....'

"'When I first set eyes on you,'" she replies a little later, "'I knew that I loved you, and what more is there to ask or to say?... Gentle friend, is it a new thing that a great knight, putting upon himself the garb of a minstrel, and accompanied by a page or two and a few men of arms to give him sufficient state and respect, should journey through the world and sing of the high things of love, or of great adventures in arms?... We should travel through the great forests and along the broad streams and over the endless plains.'

"The breath from her lips was sweet, like the breath of cows that have come out of the clover fields: closer and closer they drew to each other.

"'Before you came,' she said, 'there was nothing in the whole world----'

"'There was no sweetness in the world before I came here to you,' he answered.... 'I have come down to you through centuries; all the men of my past are like a few phantoms--there is only you in all the world.'

"With a great rustling there came from the wood a wild sow, but they did not hear it.... There stole in Mr Sorrell's nostrils a penetrating perfume. An immense dread swept down on him, the dumb agony of a nightmare. He seemed unable to move ... agony was in his heart, on his lips that would not speak, in his throat whose muscles would not act. The perfume overwhelmed him, suffocating, warm, sweet in the throat, sinister and filling him with a mad foreboding. It was the odour of chloroform. He screamed out loud; great beads of sweat burst out on his forehead.

"He stretched out his hand like a madman and clutched at her dress.

"'Are you there?' he asked, and she answered:

"'I am here, beloved of my heart,' and he lifted his face towards hers which was slightly cold with dew and the night.

"'It is so well with me,' she whispered: but Mr Sorrell was full of fears."

The cleverness of that touch of the chloroform at that particular stage in the story is amazing. I know nothing quite like that chapter in all fiction.

We are then swept back at once to a pageant of colour where the ladies hold a tourney and Mr Sorrell is knighted by Sir Ygorac of Fordingbridge as Sir Guilhelm de Winterburne de St Martin. The Lady Dionissia fights in the lists against the Lady Blanche, first with spears and then with axes, which fight the Lady Dionissia, of course, wins. She then goes with Mr Sorrell to his new castle and her husband returns and kills the new knight of Winterburne ... and Mr Sorrell wakes up, wakes up to intolerable agony in a hospital.

Two months afterwards he goes back to Salisbury to retrace the steps and rides all over the country-side in search of----"A girl shot past them going very fast. She had a face of conspicuous fairness, a dress of light blue print, a white linen coif that hid all her hair.

"'My God!' Sir William said suddenly. [He is now Sir William Sorrell.] 'Did you see? Who was that? In God's name who was that?'

"'Why,' young Lee-Egerton said, 'that was Nurse Morane. The one who nursed you till the first time they trepanned you. She broke down the day before they trepanned you the second time. My mother says she couldn't stand the excitement, because she was in love with you."

Sir William galloped off down the road and up the hill towards a cluster of old and falling buildings.... "It was so old that you could hardly recognise it for a house, and so forlorn that you shivered when you passed it ... the living-room into which Sir William went was large, long and low. It was quite empty ... a door ... opened gently. There appeared a girl in a blue dress.

"'You are Sir William Sorrell,' she said. 'I am Dionissia Morane.... I was born in this room....'

"'What does it all mean?' he asked.

"'I can't tell,' she answered. 'Do you know, after they trepanned you for the first time you said suddenly, "Es tu là?" and reached out your hand to me, and I took your hand ... and I kept saying to myself, "It is very well with me," which is what the country people about here say when they are glad.'"

Sir William builds a replica of the fourteenth-century castle and Dionissia ruminates on the future.

"'In the summer it will be very pleasant: the birds will sing, and we shall walk in the gardens. And in the winter we shall go into our little castle, and we shall sit by our fire, and our friends will come and we shall pass the time in talking and devising. And all around us there will be the oceans of time and the ages of space----'

"'I've heard that before,' he said.

"'Yes, certainly you've heard all that before,' she answered. 'It's nothing new; it's the oldest wisdom or the oldest folly. You will find it in Chaucer ... you will find it in the Bible, because there's nothing else really to say.... It's the only thing that's worth saying in life.'"

Quite another vein is struck in _The Good Soldier_, which is essentially a modern novel. It is a story of betrayals. The man who tells the story finds that his wife is the mistress of his friend, the good soldier.

"I can't believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks."

Edward Ashburnham, the man in the case, "was the cleanest-looking sort of chap: an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords in Hampshire."

There is practically no conversation; the whole novel is a monologue, a going forward or a harking back to unravel intricate motives and to lay bare the souls of men and women.

Florence, the wife of the narrator, had apparently always been a harlot at heart, but had successfully hoodwinked him for years. Leonora, the betrayed wife of the good soldier, adored her husband with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea.

Florence one day had laid one finger on Captain Ashburnham's wrist. "I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day.... In Ashburnham's face I knew that there was absolute panic.... 'I can't stand this,' said Leonora, with a most extraordinary passion. 'I must get out of this.' I was horribly frightened.... 'Don't you see,' she said, 'don't you see what's going on?... Don't you see that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them?' Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there." But he sees nothing. In Florence he thought he had a wife and an unattained mistress--and in the retaining of her in the world (she pretended to have serious heart trouble) he had his occupation, career and ambition.

Ashburnham had begun his intrigues by being arrested for kissing a servant girl in a train. He left servants alone after that and ran amok with girls of his own class. There was Mrs Maidan, who died--of heart trouble, at twenty-three. Florence had come upon Leonora boxing Mrs Maidan's ears.... There had been an affair with a harpy mistress of a Russian Grand Duke, who exacted a twenty-thousand-pound pearl tiara from Edward as the price of her favours for a week. It was not that he was a promiscuous libertine: he was a sentimentalist.

We find it hard to realise all through this rambling discourse that until Edward and the last girl concerned and Florence were all dead the narrator had not the shadow of a suspicion that there was anything wrong. "I suppose that during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward.... You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband.... It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven.... I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness ... she cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife?... Once she said to Florence in the early morning: 'You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it, thank you.... Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to each other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the pair of you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is.'"

Mrs Maidan had died on the 4th of August 1904 and then nothing happened until the 4th of August 1913. It was on the 4th of August 1901 that the narrator had married Florence, who had then hinted that she did not want much physical passion from her husband. She elaborated rules so that she should never be caught. "I must never enter her room without knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its doom." Her first lover, Jimmy, she discarded for Edward as soon as he appeared on the scene. It was because she was afraid that her husband would murder her that she took such precautions.

"Well, there you have the position ... the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears ... and the blackmailing lover ... and then ... Edward Ashburnham, who was worth having." But within three years he was sick of Florence and would willingly have let the husband see what his wife was like, but Leonora threatened to wreak appalling vengeance if any inkling of the truth filtered through. The worst vengeance would have been to refuse herself ever to see him again ... but the husband discovers the truth about his wife from a stranger in an hotel.

"'Do you know who that is?' asked the stranger of me as Florence burst past. 'The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man at five o'clock in the morning....'

"A long time afterwards I ... went up to Florence's room. She had not locked the door--for the first night of our married life. She was lying ... on her bed. She had a little phial ... in her right hand. That was on the 4th of August 1913.

"Florence had found that Edward for the first time in his life was really finally in love with a young girl called Nancy Rufford.

"For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He travels over no more horizons ... that was the case with Edward and the poor girl."

Anyway that was the end of Florence. "You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the end of Florence. From that day to this I have never given her another thought ... she just went completely out of existence, like yesterday's paper.... It was as if an immensely heavy knapsack had fallen off my shoulders. I was in love with Nancy Rufford--I who was forty-five and she twenty-two, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient."

Edward then began to drink heavily, owing to his frustrated passion for her: she looked on him as an uncle and he could not make love to her and it was killing him.

The chronicler at this stage goes over his tracks as he often does to give us the earlier history of Leonora and Edward, who had come together in an extraordinary state of innocence. He had admired her for her truthfulness, her cleanness of mind, the clean-run-ness of her limbs, the fairness of her skin, the gold of her hair, her religion, her sense of duty. But she failed to have for him a touch of magnetism, while in her admiration for his qualities soon became love of the deepest description. "There could not have been a happier girl for five or six years." They never had any children: they did not even know how they were produced for some years after their marriage. He came to regard her as physically and mentally cold: she wished for the child that never came. Meanwhile after the episode of the servant girl Edward could not have a mistress without falling violently in love with her; but the Spanish dancer cured him of that. The passion that he had for her arose "like fire in dry corn" ... and from the moment of his unfaithfulness with her Leonora never acted the part of wife to him, though there were moments when she was within a hair of yielding to her physical passion for him. She had the vague, passionate idea that when Edward had exhausted a number of other types of women he must turn to her.... Florence knocked all that on the head.

The cleverest and most interesting thing in the book is the masterly way in which the narrator manages to convey to us all the points of view of everybody concerned--Leonora's, Edward's, Florence's and his own.

Never till the moment when Florence began to gain ascendency over Edward did Leonora despair of getting him back. But when she saw Florence lay her hand upon Edward's wrist she knew that that touching of hands gave that woman an irrevocable claim--to be seduced. And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. But she said nothing to Florence's husband. She had to give Edward to understand "that if ever I came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair." And then Florence had died, and the girl Nancy with whom the narrator is in love becomes the object of Edward's fiercest passion: his love for her threatened to kill him and she knew ... and she offered him herself and he could not accept the offer of her virtue and they sent her back to her father in India.

"'You can't let that man,' said Leonora, 'go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him.'

"'I knew you would come to that,' answered Nancy very slowly. 'But we are not worth it--Edward and I.'"

And because she wouldn't Edward killed himself and Nancy went mad: they sent the narrator out to bring Nancy home.

"She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from where I am now writing.... I should marry Nancy if her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service.... Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people--like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords--broken, tumultuous, agonised, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies?... I can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham--and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did."

We read novels like _The Good Soldier_ and _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ for their freshness and honesty of outlook. They follow no stereotyped form of writing; they lay bare character in an unusual manner; they demand intelligent reading and an appreciation of the quietly subtle. They give a picture of life which is devoid of sentimentality, true to experience and courageously uncoloured. Most of all they give the impression of being written by a careful and highly gifted artist.

Mr Hueffer is a master of English prose style.

X

_THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE_

Most people have read G. K. Chesterton's prose, many people have read the drinking songs in _The Flying Inn_, some people have read his collected Poems, and a few, only too few, have read the work by which he will probably be remembered when all the rest of his work is dead. _The Ballad of the White Horse_ was first published in 1911 and is, as might be expected, a vindication of Christianity. "I say, as do all Christian men, that it is a divine purpose that rules, and not Fate," he quotes as his motto. He dedicates the poem to his wife because of "the sign that hangs about your neck":

"Therefore I bring these rhymes to you,
Who brought the cross to me."

Before we have read five pages we realise that here is at last a ballad which is not a spurious imitation. It rings clear, clean and true. We see Alfred beaten to his knees by "a sea-folk blinder than the sea," almost broken-hearted, beseeching the Virgin Mary for a sign.

"'Mother of God,' the wanderer said,
'I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing....

But for this earth most pitiful,
This little land I know,
If that which is for ever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
Seeing the stranger go?

When our last bow is broken, Queen,
And our last javelin cast,
Under some sad, green evening sky,
Holding a ruined cross on high,
Under warm westland grass to lie,
Shall we come home at last?'"

And she answers:

"'I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?'"

Stirred by this message, Alfred sets out yet again to stir zeal in his chiefs for the causeless cause.

"Up across windy wastes and up
Went Alfred over the shaws,
Shaken of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause....

The King went gathering Christian men,
As wheat out of the husk;
Eldred, the Franklin by the sea,
And Mark, the man from Italy,
And Colan of the Sacred Tree,
From the old tribe on Usk."

We are first given a picture of Eldred's farm fallen awry, "Like an old cripple's bones," with its purple thistles bursting up between the kitchen stones. But Eldred, the red-faced, bulky tun is sick of fighting.

"'Come not to me, King Alfred,
Save always for the ale....
Your scalds still thunder and prophesy
That crown that never comes;
Friend, I will watch the certain things,
Swine, and slow moons like silver rings,
And the ripening of the plums.'"

Alfred merely repeats the message of the Virgin Mary, tells him where to meet him and goes away certain of his help. He next goes to Mark's farm, the low, white house in the southland, inhabited by the bronzed man with a bird's beak and a bird's bright eye.

"His fruit trees stood like soldiers
Drilled in a straight line,
His strange, stiff olives did not fail,
And all the kings of the earth drank ale,
But he drank wine."

Alfred gives his message and the Roman answers:

"'Guthrum sits strong on either bank
And you must press his lines
Inwards, and eastward drive him down;
I doubt if you shall take the crown
Till you have taken London town.
For me, I have the vines.'"

But Alfred is certain of his help too and goes on to the lost land of boulders and broken men, where dwells Colan of Caerleon:

"Last of a race in ruin--
He spoke the speech of the Gaels;
His kin were in holy Ireland,
Or up in the crags of Wales....

He made the sign of the cross of God,
He knew the Roman prayer,
But he had unreason in his heart
Because of the gods that were....

Gods of unbearable beauty
That broke the hearts of men."

He ridicules Alfred until he hears the warning:

" ... that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher."

Then he tosses his black mane on high and cries:

"'And if the sea and sky be foes,
We will tame the sea and sky.'"

And so Alfred is sure too of his help.

Alfred is then taken by the Danes as he is playing on his harp to the camp of Guthrum and there is made to sing and play again:

"And leaving all later hates unsaid,
He sang of some old British raid
On the wild west march of yore.

He sang of war in the warm wet shires,
Where rain nor fruitage fails,
Where England of the motley states
Deepens like a garden to the gates
In the purple walls of Wales."

He sang until Harold, Guthrum's nephew, snatched the harp from him and began in his turn to sing of ships and the sea and material delights:

"'Great wine like blood from Burgundy,
Cloaks like the clouds from Tyre,
And marble like solid moonlight,
And gold like frozen fire.'"

Elf the minstrel then took the instrument:

"And as he stirred the strings of the harp
To notes but four or five,
The heart of each man moved in him
Like a babe buried alive."

He sang of Balder beautiful, whom the heavens could not save ... and finishes with these two peerlessly beautiful verses:

"'There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.

The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.'"

Earl Ogier of the Stone and Sling next took the harp and sang in praise of "Fury, that does not fail":

"'There lives one moment for a man
When the door at his shoulder shakes,
When the taut rope parts under the pull,
And the barest branch is beautiful
One moment, while it breaks....

And you that sit by the fire are young,
And true loves wait for you;
But the King and I grow old, grow old,
And hate alone is true.'"

Guthrum in his turn takes the great harp wearily and sings of death:

"'For this is a heavy matter,
And the truth is cold to tell;
Do we not know, have we not heard,
The soul is like a lost bird,
The body a broken shell....

Strong are the Roman roses,
Or the free flowers of the heath,
But every flower, like a flower of the sea,
Smelleth with the salt of death.

And the heart of the locked battle
Is the happiest place for men....
Death blazes bright above the cup,
And clear above the crown;
But in that dream of battle
We seem to tread it down.

Wherefore I am a great king,
And waste the world in vain,
Because man hath not other power,
Save that in dealing death for dower,
He may forget it for an hour
To remember it again.'"

And then Alfred seizes it again and triumphantly, scornfully, sings his pæan in praise of his own creed:

"'But though I lie on the floor of the world,
With the seven sins for rods,
I would rather fall with Adam
Than rise with all your gods.

What have the strong gods given?
Where have the glad gods led?
When Guthrum sits on a hero's throne
And asks if he is dead?...

... Though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare on the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride....

Our monks go robed in rain and snow,
But the heart of flame therein,
But you go clothed in feasts and flames,
When all is ice within; ...

Ere the sad gods that made your gods
Saw their sad sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,
That you have left to darken and fail,
Was cut out of the grass.

Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.'"

Alfred then goes away and is struck by the woman in the forest for letting her cakes blacken.

"'He that hath failed in a little thing
Hath a sign upon the brow;
And the Earls of the Great Army
Have no such seal to show....

... I am the first king known of heaven
That has been struck like a slave.'"

He takes the blow as a good omen:

"'For he that is struck for an ill servant
Should be a kind lord.'"

He collects his followers and they go roaring over the Roman wall and fall upon the Danes at Ethandune. In the first phase we see Alfred's men waking to the realisation of the high folly of the fight and despair clawing at their hearts.

"For the Saxon Franklin sorrowed
For the things that had been fair,
For the dear dead women, crimson clad,
And the great feasts and the friends he had;
But the Celtic prince's soul was sad
For the things that never were."

Alfred asks for his people's prayers and the Roman Mark proudly says:

"'Lift not my head from bloody ground,
Bear not my body home,
For all the earth is Roman earth
And I shall die in Rome.'"

Harold then comes forward in gay colours smoking with oil and musk, and taunts the ragged Colan with the rusty sword: he takes his bow and shoots an arrow at Colan, who sprang aside and whirled his sword round his head and let it sweep out of his hand on to Harold's head. The Dane fell dead and Alfred gave his own sword to Colan and himself seized a rude axe from a hind hard by and turned to the fray.

In Book VI., "The Slaying of the Chiefs," we are first shown Eldred breaking the sea of spears "As a tall ship breaks the sea."

"But while he moved like a massacre
He murmured as in sleep,
And his words were all of low hedges
And little fields and sheep.

Even as he strode like a pestilence,
That strides from Rhine to Rome,
He thought how tall his beans might be
If ever he went home."

But in the end the sword broke in his hand and he falls to the seventh "faerie blade" of Elf the minstrel.

"Six spears thrust upon Eldred
Were splintered while he laughed;
One spear thrust into Eldred,
Three feet of blade and shaft."

But he was soon avenged by Mark:

"Right on the Roman shield and sword
Did spear of the Rhine maids run;
But the shield shifted never,
The sword rang down to sever,
The great Rhine sang for ever,
And the songs of Elf were done."

Ogier in his turn avenges Elf:

"But hate in the buried Ogier
Was strong as pain in hell,
With bare brute hand from the inside
He burst the shield of brass and hide,
And a death-stroke to the Roman's side
Sent suddenly and well.

Then the great statue on the shield
Looked his last look around
With level and imperial eye;
And Mark, the man from Italy,
Fell in the sea of agony,
And died without a sound."

The Danes in their triumph sing:

"'No more shall the brown men of the south
Move like the ants in lines,
To quiet men with olives
Or madden men with vines.'

There was that in the wild men back of him [Ogier],
There was that in his own wild song,
A dizzy throbbing, a drunkard smoke,
That dazed to death all Wessex folk,
And swept their spears along.

Vainly the sword of Colan
And the axe of Alfred plied--
The Danes poured in like brainless plague,
And knew not when they died.

Prince Colan slew a score of them,
And was stricken to his knee;
King Alfred slew a score and seven
And was borne back on a tree."

The King was beaten, blind, at bay, and we are taken on to Book VII., "The Last Change," where Alfred is compared to a small child building one tower in vain, piling up small stones to make a town, and evermore the stones fall down and he piles them up again.

"And this was the might of Alfred,
At the ending of the way;
That of such smiters, wise or wild,
He was least distant from the child,
Piling the stones all day.

For Eldred fought like a frank hunter
That killeth and goeth home;
And Mark had fought because all arms
Rang like the name of Rome.

And Colan fought with a double mind,
Moody and madly gay;
But Alfred fought as gravely
As a good child at play.

He saw wheels break and work run back
And all things as they were;
And his heart was orbed like victory
And simple like despair.

Therefore is Mark forgotten,
That was wise with his tongue and brave;
And the cairn over Colan crumbled,
And the cross on Eldred's grave.

Their great souls went on a wind away,
And they have not tale or tomb;
And Alfred born in Wantage
Rules England till the doom.

Because in the forest of all fears
Like a strange fresh gust from sea,
Struck him that ancient innocence
That is more than mastery."

And so Alfred began his life once more and took his ivory horn unslung and smiled, but not in scorn:

"'Endeth the Battle of Ethandune
With the blowing of a horn.'"

He collects his remnants and incites them to a last desperate effort:

"'To grow old cowed in a conquered land,
With the sun itself discrowned,
To see trees crouch and cattle slink--
Death is a better ale to drink,
And by high Death on the fell brink,
That flagon shall go round.' ...

And the King held up the horn and said:
'See ye my father's horn,
That Egbert blew in his empery,
Once, when he rode out commonly,
Twice when he rode for venery,
And thrice on the battle-morn.'"

So

" ... the last charge went blindly,
And all too lost for fear:
The Danes closed round, a roaring ring,
And twenty clubs rose o'er the King,
Four Danes hewed at him, halloing,
And Ogier of the Stone and Sling
Drove at him with a spear."

But the Danes were careless, and Alfred split Ogier to the spine: the tide miraculously turned and the Danes gave way and retreated clamouring, disorderly:

"For dire was Alfred in his hour
The pale scribe witnesseth,
More mighty in defeat was he
Than all men else in victory,
And behind, his men came murderously,
Dry-throated, drinking death."

So at last the sign of the cross was put on Guthrum and

"Far out to the winding river
The blood ran down for days,
When we put the cross on Guthrum
In the parting of the ways."

And in the last book, "The Scouring of the White Horse," we see Alfred at peace again.