ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
Contents
I. THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT: FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
THE SECOND CABIN
EARLY IMPRESSION
STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS
STEERAGE TYPES
THE SICK MAN
THE STOWAWAYS
PERSONAL EXPIERENCE AND REVIEW
NEW YORK
II. COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
COCKERMOUTH
AN EVANGELIST
ANOTHER
LAST OF SMETHURST
III. AN AUTUMN EFFECT
IV. A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
V. FOREST NOTES -
ON THE PLAINS
IN THE SEASON
IDLE HOURS
A PLEASURE-PARTY
THE WOODS IN SPRING
MORALITY
VI. A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
VII. RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM
VIII. THE IDEAL HOUSE
IX. DAVOS IN WINTER
X. HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
XI. ALPINE DIVERSION
XII. THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS
XIII. ROADS
XIV. ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES
CHAPTER I - THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
THE SECOND CABIN
I FIRST encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in
Glasgow. Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but
looking askance on each other as on possible enemies. A few
Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea,
were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English
speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was soon
overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to
descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the
gloom among the passengers increased. Two of the women wept. Any
one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding
from the law. There was scarce a word interchanged, and no common
sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having touched
at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now announced
that our ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in mid-river, at
the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of bulwark, a
street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars, larger than
a church, and soon to be as populous as many an incorporated town in
the land to which she was to bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although anxious to see
the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage,
and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should
have a table at command. The advice was excellent; but to understand
the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the internal
disposition of the ship will first be necessary. In her very nose is
Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs. A little abaft, another
companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three
galleries, two running forward towards Steerage No. 1, and the third
aft towards the engines. The starboard forward gallery is the second
cabin. Away abaft the engines and below the officers' cabins, to
complete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third nest of
steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second cabin, to return, is thus a
modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin
partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle
of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they
converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new
experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in
chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip.
He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds
berths and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished. He
enjoys a distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say,
differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship according
as her head is to the east or west. In my own experience, the
principal difference between our table and that of the true steerage
passenger was the table itself, and the crockery plates from which we
ate. But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let me recapitulate
every advantage. At breakfast we had a choice between tea and coffee
for beverage; a choice not easy to make, the two were so surprisingly
alike. I found that I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake
after the tea, which is proof conclusive of some chemical disparity;
and even by the palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff in the
former from a flavour of boiling and dish-cloths in the second. As a
matter of fact, I have seen passengers, after many sips, still
doubting which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables at the
same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge,
which was common to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish,
and sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled
salt junk, and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the
steerage and the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our
potatoes were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days,
instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the
name of a plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some broken meat
from the saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form of spare
patties or rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-bones and
flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold. If these were not the
scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were all
too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily. These,
the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge which were
both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage; so that except
for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I might as well
have been in the steerage outright. Had they given me porridge again
in the evening, I should have been perfectly contented with the fare.
As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and water before
turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
sentiment. In the steerage there are males and females; in the
second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard
I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage of
discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned that I
was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the
crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same
quarter of the deck. Who could tell whether I housed on the port or
starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only there that
my superiority became practical; everywhere else I was incognito,
moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a swagger
to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat to
tea. Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at
home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and refresh
myself with a look of that brass plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six guineas is the
steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember
that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in
five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or
privately pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price
becomes almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe, food
comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of being still privately a
gentleman, may thus be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-
passengers in the second cabin had already made the passage by the
cheaper fare, and declared it was an experiment not to be repeated.
As I go on to tell about my steerage friends, the reader will
perceive that they were not alone in their opinion. Out of ten with
whom I was more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five
vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin; and all who had left
their wives behind them assured me they would go without the comfort
of their presence until they could afford to bring them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on
board. Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will and
character. Yet it had some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed
group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by
the name of 'Johnny,' in spite of his own protests, greatly diverted
us by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English, and became
on the strength of that an universal favourite - it takes so little
in this world of shipboard to create a popularity. There was,
besides, a Scots mason, known from his favourite dish as 'Irish
Stew,' three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman,
O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve a special word of
condemnation. One of them was Scots; the other claimed to be
American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was born in England;
and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and nurtured, but
ashamed to own his country. He had a sister on board, whom he
faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though she was not only
sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in
childhood. In appearance he was like an imbecile Henry the Third of
France. The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an ass, was not so dead
of heart; and I have only bracketed them together because they were
fast friends, and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at
the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married
couple, devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had
first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that
very afternoon he had carried her books home for her. I do not know
if this story will be plain to southern readers; but to me it recalls
many a school idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and nine
confronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for to
carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate attention and a
privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as
much old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her
husband, and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had
to take her own word that she was married; for it was sorely
contradicted by the testimony of her appearance. Nature seemed to
have sanctified her for the single state; even the colour of her hair
was incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should
be a man of saintly spirit and phantasmal bodily presence. She was
ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty
tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength of
her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow time
till she should reach New York. They had heard reports, her husband
and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between these two
cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had seized on this
occasion to put them to the proof. It was a good thing for the old
lady; for she passed much leisure time in studying the watch. Once,
when prostrated by sickness, she let it run down. It was inscribed
on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch
must never be turned backwards; and so it behoved her to lie in wait
for the exact moment ere she started it again. When she imagined
this was about due, she sought out one of the young second-cabin
Scotsmen, who was embarked on the same experiment as herself and had
hitherto been less neglectful. She was in quest of two o'clock; and
when she learned it was already seven on the shores of Clyde, she
lifted up her voice and cried 'Gravy!' I had not heard this innocent
expletive since I was a young child; and I suppose it must have been
the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our
fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones. It
would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he
mine, during the voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only
scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger
who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest. I
knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him. I thought him by
his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as
there is a LINGUA FRANCA of many tongues on the moles and in the
feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
among English-speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a twang in
a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes
learns to drop an H; a word of a dialect is picked up from another
band in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and
you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it was with Mr.
Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea; and yet he
was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an
inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean
voyages having sufficed to modify his speech into the common pattern.
By his own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. A
few years back, he had been married and after a fashion a rich man;
now the wife was dead and the money gone. But his was the nature
that looks forward, and goes on from one year to another and through
all the extremities of fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to
fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day following,
perched on a step-ladder and getting things to rights. He was always
hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, and lived in a
dream of patents. He had with him a patent medicine, for instance,
the composition of which he had bought years ago for five dollars
from an American pedlar, and sold the other day for a hundred pounds
(I think it was) to an English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil,
cured all maladies without exception; and I am bound to say that I
partook of it myself with good results. It is a character of the man
that he was not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but
wherever there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be
Jones with his bottle.
If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
character. Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting
our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be
called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in
conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances;
and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes
and discussed the day's experience. We were then like a couple of
anglers comparing a day's kill. But the fish we angled for were of a
metaphysical species, and we angled as often as not in one another's
baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each found there was
a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at
this double detection; but Jones, with a better civility, broke into
a peal of unaffected laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that
there was a pair of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough
Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe. The company was now
complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon
the decks. There were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a
few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and
one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to one small iron country
on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first
time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout
the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the
shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound
most dismally in my ear. There is nothing more agreeable to picture
and nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as conceived
at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young man, you fancy,
scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great
battle, to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant stories of
ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but
as episodes to this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of
individual heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which
subdued an empire stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked
a single cannon and was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in
emigration the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their
heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's
whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new empires are
domesticated to the service of man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly
of embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the less
I was tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were
below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a
few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young.
Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of
humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager
and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part
quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity,
elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people
who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character;
mild mirth and mild endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in
an impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or
Siberia, but found myself, like Marmion, 'in the lost battle, borne
down by the flying.'
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great
Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had
heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing
deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for
firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow
with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes,
and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me or
represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment,
and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle
as we please, we are not born economists. The individual is more
affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic accidents, and the
appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the
significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself
involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been
the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the
incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to
prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing
pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all
had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of
England. Yet it must not be supposed that these people exhibited
depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear
was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future,
and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to
sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready
laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks
scraping acquaintance after their fashion also. 'What do you call
your mither?' I heard one ask. 'Mawmaw,' was the reply, indicating,
I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale. When people pass
each other on the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact
is but slight, and the relation more like what we may imagine to be
the friendship of flies than that of men; it is so quickly joined, so
easily dissolved, so open in its communications and so devoid of
deeper human qualities. The children, I observed, were all in a
band, and as thick as thieves at a fair, while their elders were
still ceremoniously manoeuvring on the outskirts of acquaintance.
The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon as familiar as home to
these half-conscious little ones. It was odd to hear them,
throughout the voyage, employ shore words to designate portions of
the vessel. 'Go 'way doon to yon dyke,' I heard one say, probably
meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my mouth, watching them
climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship went swinging
through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of their
mothers, who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these
perilous feats. 'He'll maybe be a sailor,' I heard one remark;
'now's the time to learn.' I had been on the point of running
forward to interfere, but stood back at that, reproved. Very few in
the more delicate classes have the nerve to look upon the peril of
one dear to them; but the life of poorer folk, where necessity is so
much more immediate and imperious, braces even a mother to this
extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after all, it is better that the
lad should break his neck than that you should break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention
one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and
who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He
was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in
a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and
fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with
such grace and good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful
when he was in motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and
beating an accompaniment to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin
cup, was to meet a little triumph of the human species. Even when
his mother and the rest of his family lay sick and prostrate around
him, he sat upright in their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant
heartlessness of infancy.
Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few advances.
We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces
of information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new
world, or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we
condoled together over the food and the vileness of the steerage.
One or two had been so near famine that you may say they had run into
the ship with the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for
the best in the best of possible steamers. But the majority were
hugely contented. Coming as they did from a country in so low a
state as Great Britain, many of them from Glasgow, which commercially
speaking was as good as dead, and many having long been out of work,
I was surprised to find them so dainty in their notions. I myself
lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as
it was supplied to them, and found it, if not luxurious, at least
sufficient. But these working men were loud in their outcries. It
was not 'food for human beings,' it was 'only fit for pigs,' it was
'a disgrace.' Many of them lived almost entirely upon biscuit,
others on their own private supplies, and some paid extra for better
rations from the ship. This marvellously changed my notion of the
degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to hear him
grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime; but I was not
prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to
myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal
allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
question of the sincerity of his disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A
single night of the steerage had filled them with horror. I had
myself suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the lack
of air; and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined
to sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to
follow my example. I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so, and
I thought we should have been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up
my rug about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch.
That chimerical terror of good night-air, which makes men close their
windows, list their doors, and seal themselves up with their own
poisonous exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below.
One would think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in
England the most malarious districts are in the bedchambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
night so quietly to myself. The wind had hauled a little ahead on
the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter near
the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.
The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling
movement. The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels
occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber. From time to time a
heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to the obscure
borders of consciousness; or I heard, as it were through a veil, the
clear note of the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-cry,
'All's well!' I know nothing, whether for poetry or music, that can
surpass the effect of these two syllables in the darkness of a night
at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea
rose so high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the deck.
I have spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship's
company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the
accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent -
Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse, - the songs were
received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very
spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent, varied the
proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight
men of us together, to the music of the violin. The performers were
all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers in private
life; but as soon as they were arranged for the dance, they conducted
themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen
decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, the quadrille
was soon whistled down, and the dancers departed under a cloud.
Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen from another rank of society,
would have dared to make some fun for themselves and the spectators;
but the working man, when sober, takes an extreme and even melancholy
view of personal deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not more
careful of dignity. He dares not be comical; his fun must escape
from him unprepared, and above all, it must be unaccompanied by any
physical demonstration. I like his society under most circumstances,
but let me never again join with him in public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and
even the inclemencies of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night,
we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the
wind and rain. Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane
deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to
support the women in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we
were thus disposed, sang to our hearts' content. Some of the songs
were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the reverse.
Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, 'Around her splendid
form, I weaved the magic circle,' sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully
silly. 'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,' was in
some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which the chorus
was thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch mason,
entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general effect.
And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of the sincerity
with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with whom I
conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and
attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for
whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of
our situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that
took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each, 'The Anchor's
Weighed' was true for us. We were indeed 'Rocked on the bosom of the
stormy deep.' How many of us could say with the singer, 'I'm lonely
to-night, love, without you,' or, 'Go, some one, and tell them from
me, to write me a letter from home'! And when was there a more
appropriate moment for 'Auld Lang Syne' than now, when the land, the
friends, and the affections of that mingled but beloved time were
fading and fleeing behind us in the vessel's wake? It pointed
forward to the hour when these labours should be overpast, to the
return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded inn, when those
who had parted in the spring of youth should again drink a cup of
kindness in their age. Had not Burns contemplated emigration, I
scarce believe he would have found that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated
by sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two
of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath
was observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I heard an
old woman express her surprise that 'the ship didna gae doon,' as she
saw some one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang
Scottish psalms. Many went to service, and in true Scottish fashion
came back ill pleased with their divine. 'I didna think he was an
experienced preacher,' said one girl to me.
Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells,
although the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked
and blown away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out
thickly overhead. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across
this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the
summer woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water
with a roar, and shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled
with loud reports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-
scuppers and looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over my head,
vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous top-sails blotted, at
each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed as if all this
trouble were a thing of small account, and that just above the mast
reigned peace unbroken and eternal.
STEERAGE SCENES
Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort. Down
one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the
centre occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about
twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter's
bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more. The canteen, or
steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the other, a no less
attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter.
I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel,
and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells, when the
lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to roost.
It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard,
who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday
forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in
Strathspey time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an
audience of white-faced women. It was as much as he could do to
play, and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had
crawled from their bunks at the first experimental flourish, and
found better than medicine in the music. Some of the heaviest heads
began to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from some of
the palest eyes. Humanly speaking, it is a more important matter to
play the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works upon recondite
subjects. What could Mr. Darwin have done for these sick women? But
this fellow scraped away; and the world was positively a better place
for all who heard him. We have yet to understand the economical
value of these mere accomplishments. I told the fiddler he was a
happy man, carrying happiness about with him in his fiddle-case, and
he seemed alive to the fact.
'It is a privilege,' I said. He thought a while upon the word,
turning it over in his Scots head, and then answered with conviction,
'Yes, a privilege.'
That night I was summoned by 'Merrily danced the Quake's wife' into
the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5. This was, properly speaking,
but a strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern which swung
to and fro with the motion of the ship. Through the open slide-door
we had a glimpse of a grey night sea, with patches of phosphorescent
foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the horizon rising
and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind. In the centre the
companion ladder plunged down sheerly like an open pit. Below, on
the first landing, and lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses
danced, not more than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and
reels and hornpipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess
railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide and four long, which stood
for orchestra and seats of honour. In the one balcony, five
slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group. In the other
was posted Orpheus, his body, which was convulsively in motion,
forming an odd contrast to his somnolent, imperturbable Scots face.
His brother, a dark man with a vehement, interested countenance, who
made a god of the fiddler, sat by with open mouth, drinking in the
general admiration and throwing out remarks to kindle it.
'That's a bonny hornpipe now,' he would say, 'it's a great favourite
with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.' And he expounded
the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long, 'Hush!' with
uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's going to play
"Auld Robin Gray " on one string!' And throughout this excruciating
movement, - 'On one string, that's on one string!' he kept crying. I
would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the
hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus
introduced myself to the notice of the brother, who directed his talk
to me for some little while, keeping, I need hardly mention, true to
his topic, like the seamen to the star. 'He's grand of it,' he said
confidentially. 'His master was a music-hall man.' Indeed the
music-hall man had left his mark, for our fiddler was ignorant of
many of our best old airs; 'Logie o' Buchan,' for instance, he only
knew as a quick, jigging figure in a set of quadrilles, and had never
heard it called by name. Perhaps, after all, the brother was the
more interesting performer of the two. I have spoken with him
afterwards repeatedly, and found him always the same quick, fiery bit
of a man, not without brains; but he never showed to such advantage
as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public note. There is
nothing more becoming than a genuine admiration; and it shares this
with love, that it does not become contemptible although misplaced.
The dancing was but feebly carried on. The space was almost
impracticably small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of
bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence
and roughness of address. Most often, either the fiddle lifted up
its voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it and
snapping fingers on the landing. And such was the eagerness of the
brother to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such the
sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune would as often as
not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before the
dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles.
In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and more
numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round the top
of the companion; and the strange instinct of the race moved some of
the newcomers to close both the doors, so that the atmosphere grew
insupportable. It was a good place, as the saying is, to leave.
The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten at night heavy sprays
were flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion of
Steerage No. 1 had to be closed, and the door of communication
through the second cabin thrown open. Either from the convenience of
the opportunity, or because we had already a number of acquaintances
in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a late visit.
Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an isosceles triangle, the sides
opposite the equal angles bulging outward with the contour of the
ship. It is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece, four
bunks below and four above on either side. At night the place is lit
with two lanterns, one to each table. As the steamer beat on her way
among the rough billows, the light passed through violent phases of
change, and was thrown to and fro and up and down with startling
swiftness. You were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so thin a
glimmer could control and disperse such solid blackness. When Jones
and I entered we found a little company of our acquaintances seated
together at the triangular foremost table. A more forlorn party, in
more dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion
here in the ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often
overpoweringly loud. The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round
and round and tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it
struck a chill from its foetor.
From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the
sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus. In the midst, these five
friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in company.
Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and sensations.
One piped, in feeble tones, 'Oh why left I my hame?' which seemed a
pertinent question in the circumstances. Another, from the invisible
horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the upper-shelf, found
courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses of
the 'Death of Nelson'; and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus
breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and 'this day has done
his dooty' rise and fall and be taken up again in this dim inferno,
to an accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the
rattling spray-showers overhead.
All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had
interrupted the activity of their minds; and except to sing they were
tongue-tied. There was present, however, one tall, powerful fellow
of doubtful nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor altogether
Irish, but of surprising clearness of conviction on the highest
problems. He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday, because
of a general backwardness to indorse his definition of mind as 'a
living, thinking substance which cannot be felt, heard, or seen' -
nor, I presume, although he failed to mention it, smelt. Now he came
forward in a pause with another contribution to our culture.
'Just by way of change,' said he, 'I'll ask you a Scripture riddle.
There's profit in them too,' he added ungrammatically.
This was the riddle-
C and P
Did agree
To cut down C;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G;
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.
Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo! We were a
long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering
how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of
suspense and divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and
Pontius Pilate.
I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion
and the close air likewise hurried our departure. We had not been
gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the
five fell sick. We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the
sea kept contrary all night. I now made my bed upon the second cabin
floor, where, although I ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a
free current of air, more or less vitiated indeed, and running only
from steerage to steerage, but at least not stagnant; and from this
couch, as well as the usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the
hateful coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs of children, I
heard a man run wild with terror beseeching his friend for
encouragement. 'The ship 's going down!' he cried with a thrill of
agony. 'The ship's going down!' he repeated, now in a blank whisper,
now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might
reassure him, reason with him, joke at him - all was in vain, and the
old cry came back, 'The ship's going down!' There was something
panicky and catching in the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a
clear flash what an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an
emigrant ship. If this whole parishful of people came no more to
land, into how many houses would the newspaper carry woe, and what a
great part of the web of our corporate human life would be rent
across for ever!
The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed. The
wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great
dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam. The horizon was
dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly
on the long, heaving deck.
We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a
single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity,
puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same
order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were
always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as
more conspicuously well done than the former. We had a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when
the result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of
considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was
laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a
wager offered or taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in
the Corner, which we had rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and
four Corners, was my own favourite game; but there were many who
preferred another, the humour of which was to box a person's ears
until he found out who had cuffed him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of
weather, and in the highest possible spirits. We got in a cluster
like bees, sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-
houses. Stories and laughter went around. The children climbed
about the shrouds. White faces appeared for the first time, and
began to take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work
making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than
moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly, down sat the fiddler in
our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and ballads,
with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and throw in the
interest of human speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with
little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about
nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical
in social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one
person was as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this
episode. It was astonishing what insults these people managed to
convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our
faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and
incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too
well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they
were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would
depict the manners of the steerage. We were in truth very
innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow
of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which these
damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of
their squire. Not a word was said; only when they were gone Mackay
sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we were all
conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the course of our
enjoyment.
STEERAGE TYPES
We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like a
beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-feet
round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his
moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages
long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole,
no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and tatters, the man
twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and
I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers
with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind
of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill
days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of
bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought
necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say
anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was
entertainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him a half-
educated Irish Tigg.
Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his
antecedents. Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him
down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand
roubles, and whose father had now despatched him to America by way of
penance. Either tale might flourish in security; there was no
contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of
English. I got on with him lumberingly enough in broken German, and
learned from his own lips that he had been an apothecary. He carried
the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and remarked that
it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood out from among
the passengers with an air of startling strangeness. The first
natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the
features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the
eye both reassured and touched. It was large and very dark and soft,
with an expression of dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on
desperate circumstances and never looked on them without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. 'No, no,' he said, 'not
resolution.'
'The resolution to endure,' I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'ACH, JA,' with gusto,
like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions.
Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he
said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of
the steerage may have represented at least some shadow of the truth.
Once, and once only, he sang a song at our concerts; standing forth
without embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long
arms frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward. It was a
suitable piece of music, as deep as a cow's bellow and wild like the
White Sea. He was struck and charmed by the freedom and sociality of
our manners. At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to
him, but those with whom he would not care to speak; thus
unconsciously involving himself in the condemnation of his
countrymen. But Russia was soon to be changed; the ice of the Neva
was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new ideas, 'WIE EINE
FEINE VIOLINE,' were audible among the big empty drum notes of
Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival, though with
a somewhat indistinct and childish hope.
We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades. It
was the son who sang the 'Death of Nelson' under such contrarious
circumstances. He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he
could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and
piccolo in a professional string band. His repertory of songs was,
besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best to
the very worst within his reach. Nor did he seem to make the least
distinction between these extremes, but would cheerily follow up 'Tom
Bowling' with 'Around her splendid form.'
The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, could do
everything connected with tinwork from one end of the process to the
other, use almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture frames to
boot. 'I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,' said he, 'and
pictures on the wall. I have made enough money to be rolling in my
carriage. But, sir,' looking at me unsteadily with his bright rheumy
eyes, 'I was troubled with a drunken wife.' He took a hostile view
of matrimony in consequence. 'It's an old saying,' he remarked:
'God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em.'
I think he was justified by his experience. It was a dreary story.
He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the
clothes would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a
paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs.
'A bad job was as good as a good job for me,' he said; 'it all went
the same way.' Once the wife showed signs of amendment; she kept
steady for weeks on end; it was again worth while to labour and to do
one's best. The husband found a good situation some distance from
home, and, to make a little upon every hand, started the wife in a
cook-shop; the children were here and there, busy as mice; savings
began to grow together in the bank, and the golden age of hope had
returned again to that unhappy family. But one week my old
acquaintance, getting earlier through with his work, came home on the
Friday instead of the Saturday, and there was his wife to receive him
reeling drunk. He 'took and gave her a pair o' black eyes,' for
which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-shop door, gave up his
situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty, with the
workhouse at the end. As the children came to their full age they
fled the house, and established themselves in other countries; some
did well, some not so well; but the father remained at home alone
with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and varied
accomplishments depressed and negatived.
Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the chain,
and run from home like a schoolboy? I could not discover which; but
here at least he was out on the adventure, and still one of the
bravest and most youthful men on board.
'Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,' said he;
'but I can do a turn yet.'
And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to support
him?
'Oh yes,' he replied. 'But I'm never happy without a job on hand.
And I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything. You see no craze about
me.'
This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
drunken father. He was a capable man, with a good chance in life;
but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry,
and involved his sons along with him in ruin. Now they were on board
with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.
Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to
the most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could
have adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's
company. I was, one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman,
running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for
poetry and a genial sense of fun. I had asked him his hopes in
emigrating. They were like those of so many others, vague and
unfounded; times were bad at home; they were said to have a turn for
the better in the States; a man could get on anywhere, he thought.
That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if he could
get on in America, why could he not do the same in Scotland? But I
never had the courage to use that argument, though it was often on
the tip of my tongue, and instead I agreed with him heartily adding,
with reckless originality, 'If the man stuck to his work, and kept
away from drink.'
'Ah!' said he slowly, 'the drink! You see, that's just my trouble.'
He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the
same time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-ashamed,
half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be beaten. You
would have said he recognised a destiny to which he was born, and
accepted the consequences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, he was
at the same time fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with
him, the whole at an expense of six guineas.
As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three
great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and
foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me
the silliest means of cure. You cannot run away from a weakness; you
must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not
now, and where you stand? COELUM NON ANIMAM. Change Glenlivet for
Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good. A sea-voyage will
not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has
to be done before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only
fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign
lands, but in the heart itself.
Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible
than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul
tragically ship-wrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is
resorted to by way of anodyne. The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon
life with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and
nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to himself; and it
is because all has failed in his celestial enterprise that you now
behold him rolling in the garbage. Hence the comparative success of
the teetotal pledge; because to a man who had nothing it sets at
least a negative aim in life. Somewhat as prisoners beguile their
days by taming a spider, the reformed drunkard makes an interest out
of abstaining from intoxicating drinks, and may live for that
negation. There is something, at least, NOT TO BE DONE each day; and
a cold triumph awaits him every evening.
We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under
the name Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of
the intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small
Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying
the elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat marred by the
smallness of his eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average.
There were but few subjects on which he could not converse with
understanding and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with
gusto like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry,
quick, pertinent debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging
on his heels to launch and emphasise an argument. When he began a
discussion, he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the
subject to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An engineer
by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all
machines except the human machine. The latter he gave up with
ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. He had an
appetite for disconnected facts which I can only compare to the
savage taste for beads. What is called information was indeed a
passion with the man, and he not only delighted to receive it, but
could pay you back in kind.
With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer
young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and
but little hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of
his despair. 'The ship may go down for me,' he would say, 'now or
to-morrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope.' And again:
'I am sick of the whole damned performance.' He was, like the kind
little man, already quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle.
But Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the world; laid
the blame of his failure on corrupt masters and a corrupt State
policy; and after he had been one night overtaken and had played the
buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all
reference to his escapade. It was a treat to see him manage this:
the various jesters withered under his gaze, and you were forced to
recognise in him a certain steely force, and a gift of command which
might have ruled a senate.
In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in
the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you
meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of
childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He
believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had
been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor,
was his god and guide. One day he took me to task - novel cry to me
- upon the over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, were
more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing-
machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way
of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced
a mere fancy article. Mackay's notion of a book was HOPPUS'S
MEASURER. Now in my time I have possessed and even studied that
work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus's
is not the book that I should choose for my companion volume.
I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him own that he had
taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view,
insignificant; but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the
admission. It was in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure
ready-made and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and
butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the necessary
food and leisure before they start upon the search for pleasure; he
jibbed and ran away from such conclusions. The thing was different,
he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with
food. 'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom and the top.'
By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much interested in this
discussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and had to go
without his tea. He had enough sense and humour, indeed he had no
lack of either, to have chuckled over this himself in private; and
even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile.
Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen
him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor human
creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had
the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the
riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the
lust for intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed
to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of
corn and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the
people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it was
only in good books, or in the society of the good, that a man could
get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world from
him. 'Damn my conduct!' said he. 'I have given it up for a bad job.
My question is, "Can I drive a nail?"' And he plainly looked upon me
as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people's annual
bellyful of corn and steam-engines.
It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of
culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates
to a man the importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by
denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant
of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this overwhelming concern
about diet, and hence the bald view of existence professed by Mackay.
Had this been an English peasant the conclusion would be tenable.
But Mackay had most of the elements of a liberal education. He had
skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies. He had a thoughtful
hold of what he knew, which would be exceptional among bankers. He
had been brought up in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with
incongruous pride, the story of his own brother's deathbed ecstasies.
Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a
dead thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively
preference or shaping aim. And further, there seemed a tendency
among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely
opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and
that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and
perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that the Puritan school,
by divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and
setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity
and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?
Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an Irishman who
based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity
precisely upon these two qualities, that he was natural and happy.
He boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable
gaiety, and indefatigable goodwill. His clothes puzzled the
diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once a private coachman,
when they became eloquent and seemed a part of his biography. His
face contained the rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the
hawk's nose above accorded so ill with the pink baby's mouth below.
His spirit and his pride belonged, you might say, to the nose; while
it was the general shiftlessness expressed by the other that had
thrown him from situation to situation, and at length on board the
emigrant ship. Barney ate, so to speak, nothing from the galley; his
own tea, butter, and eggs supported him throughout the voyage; and
about mealtime you might often find him up to the elbows in amateur
cookery. His was the first voice heard singing among all the
passengers; he was the first who fell to dancing. From Loch Foyle to
Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken but there was
Barney in the midst.
You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts -
his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling
to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement - and to
have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest,
between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a
conclusion. He was not only a great favourite among ourselves, but
his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear
him over the rails of the hurricane-deck. He was somewhat pleased,
but not at all abashed, by this attention; and one night, in the
midst of his famous performance of 'Billy Keogh,' I saw him spin half
round in a pirouette and throw an audacious wink to an old gentleman
above.
This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.
He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the
passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his
innocent freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin
where politeness must be natural to walk without a fall. He was once
seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because they
supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic.
He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one
evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an
indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from
the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with
the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and
second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish
shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers of mind, which
rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his extreme opinions, was
especially distasteful to the Irishman. I have seen him slink off
with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy, while the other,
in his witty, ugly way, had been professing hostility to God, and an
extreme theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot. These
utterances hurt the little coachman's modesty like a bad word.
THE SICK MAN
One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-
arm and briskly up and down the deck. Six bells had rung; a head-
wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of
rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time
with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense
like a mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to
the rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was
impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly
in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We
asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange
accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the
stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice,
and had walked the deck against fatigue till he was overmastered and
had fallen where we found him.
Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to seek
the doctor. We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there came no
reply; nor could we find any one to guide us. It was no time for
delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up a ladder
and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed him as
politely as I could -
'I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in
the lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor.'
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat
harshly, 'Well, I can't leave the bridge, my man,' said he.
'No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,' I returned.
'Is it one of the crew?' he asked.
'I believe him to be a fireman,' I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or
from something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question
was immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice much
freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward and despatch him
in quest of the doctor, who would now be in the smoking-room over his
pipe.
One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down
our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a
night. Let me call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and I rattled down the
companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and perched
across the carpenters bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat,
bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank
twang in his speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair were
enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare say he was tired
with his day's work, and eminently comfortable at that moment; and
the truth is, I did not stop to consider his feelings, but told my
story in a breath.
'Steward,' said I, 'there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't
find the doctor.'
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is
the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth -
'That's none of my business,' said he. 'I don't care.'
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat. The thought
of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation. I
glanced at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like
assault and battery, every inch of him. But we had a better card
than violence.
'You will have to make it your business,' said I, 'for I am sent to
you by the officer on the bridge.'
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, but put out his
pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand
strolling. From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in
courtesy, as though he had repented his evil speech and were anxious
to leave a better impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and
two or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
suggestions. One proposed to give the patient water, which was
promptly negatived. Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed
to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the
streaming decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between us. It was
only by main force that we did so, and neither an easy nor an
agreeable duty; for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened
child, and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our control.
'O let me lie!' he pleaded. 'I'll no' get better anyway.' And then,
with a moan that went to my heart, 'O why did I come upon this
miserable journey?'
I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in
the close, tossing steerage: 'O why left I my hame?'
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
galley, where we could see a light. There he found a belated cook
scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he
sought to borrow. The scullion was backward. 'Was it one of the
crew?' he asked. And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had assured
him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his scouring and came
towards us at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from
his finger. The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly
man, thick-set, and grizzled with years; but the shifting and coarse
shadows concealed from us the expression and even the design of his
face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.
'IT'S ONLY A PASSENGER!' said he; and turning about, made, lantern
and all, for the galley.
'He's a man anyway,' cried Jones in indignation.
'Nobody said he was a woman,' said a gruff voice, which I recognised
for that of the bo's'un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now
the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the
hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him
not.
'No?' he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry aft
in person.
Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough
and examined our patient with the lantern. He made little of the
case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent
him forward to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had
now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such 'a fine
cheery body' should be sick; and these, claiming a sort of
possession, took him entirely under their own care. The drug had
probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was led along
plaintive and patient, but protesting. His heart recoiled at the
thought of the steerage. 'O let me lie down upon the bieldy side,'
he cried; 'O dinna take me down!' And again: 'O why did ever I come
upon this miserable voyage?' And yet once more, with a gasp and a
wailing prolongation of the fourth word: 'I had no CALL to come.'
But there he was; and by the doctor's orders and the kind force of
his two shipmates disappeared down the companion of Steerage No.1
into the den allotted him.
At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood, Jones
and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff,
cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a century upon
the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blond eyebrows, and
an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard. I had not
forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered also that he had helped
us about the lantern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones,
and being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off my steam.
'Well,' said I, 'I make you my compliments upon your steward,' and
furiously narrated what had happened.
'I've nothing to do with him,' replied the bo's'un. 'They're all
alike. They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon
the top of another.'
This was enough. A very little humanity went a long way with me
after the experience of the evening. A sympathy grew up at once
between the bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next
few days, I learned to appreciate him better. He was a remarkable
type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books. He had been
at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States ship,
'after the ALABAMA, and praying God we shouldn't find her.' He was a
high Tory and a high Englishman. No manufacturer could have held
opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes. 'The
workmen,' he said, 'think nothing of their country. They think of
nothing but themselves. They're damned greedy, selfish fellows.' He
would not hear of the decadence of England. 'They say they send us
beef from America,' he argued; 'but who pays for it? All the money
in the world's in England.' The Royal Navy was the best of possible
services, according to him. 'Anyway the officers are gentlemen,'
said he; 'and you can't get hazed to death by a damned non-
commissioned - as you can in the army.' Among nations, England was
the first; then came France. He respected the French navy and liked
the French people; and if he were forced to make a new choice in
life, 'by God, he would try Frenchmen!' For all his looks and rough,
cold manners, I observed that children were never frightened by him;
they divined him at once to be a friend; and one night when he had
chalked his hand and clothes, it was incongruous to hear this
formidable old salt chuckling over his boyish monkey trick.
In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. I was afraid I
should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the lantern;
and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or
Irish. He had certainly employed north-country words and elisions;
but the accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and
incongruous in my ear.
To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure
that required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration
tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the
squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming
themselves into their clothes in twilight of the bunks. You may
guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I
heard that the sick man was better and had gone on deck.
The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with
pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent;
and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash
down the decks. But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the
steerage. I found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward
of the saloon deck house. He was smaller than I had fancied, and
plain-looking; but his face was distinguished by strange and
fascinating eyes, limpid grey from a distance, but, when looked into,
full of changing colours and grains of gold. His manners were mild
and uncompromisingly plain; and I soon saw that, when once started,
he delighted to talk. His accent and language had been formed in the
most natural way, since he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter
of a century on the banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.
A fisherman in the season, he had fished the east coast from
Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, and the great boats,
which required extra hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next
spring, he worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the
wharves unloading vessels. In this comparatively humble way of life
he had gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable
house, his hayfield, and his garden. On this ship, where so many
accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on
a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.
Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the
steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a
ham and tea and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such counsels.
'I'm not afraid,' he had told his adviser; 'I'll get on for ten days.
I've not been a fisherman for nothing.' For it is no light matter,
as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps waist-deep with
herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-
shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an
anchorage where you dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter
with the wind that blows. The life of a North Sea fisher is one long
chapter of exposure and hard work and insufficient fare; and even if
he makes land at some bleak fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or
his boat has been unlucky and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance
and toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of bread. Yet
the steerage of the emigrant ship had been too vile for the endurance
of a man thus rudely trained. He had scarce eaten since he came on
board, until the day before, when his appetite was tempted by some
excellent pea-soup. We were all much of the same mind on board, and
beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too
well; only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps because he
was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal had resulted in
a cramp. He had determined to live henceforth on biscuit; and when,
two months later, he should return to England, to make the passage by
saloon. The second cabin, after due inquiry, he scouted as another
edition of the steerage.
He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. 'Ye see, I had no
call to be here,' said he; 'and I thought it was by with me last
night. I've a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had
no real call to leave them.' Speaking of the attentions he had
received from his shipmates generally, 'they were all so kind,' he
said, 'that there's none to mention.' And except in so far as I
might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to my services.
But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by
his story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the
habitual comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December
evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish
labourer trudging homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together,
and it was natural that we should fall into talk. He was covered
with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic
Cable was a secret contrivance of the masters the better to oppress
labouring mankind; and I confess I was astonished to learn that he
had nearly three hundred pounds in the bank. But this man had
travelled over most of the world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities
on some American railroad, with two dollars a shift and double pay on
Sunday and at night; whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted
Tyneside, and had made all that he possessed in that same accursed,
down-falling England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers,
millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country
of starvation.
Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and
hard times. Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost
in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held
strong opinions on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters,
and, when I led him on, of the men also. The masters had been
selfish and obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-headed.
He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had been
present, and the somewhat long discourse which he had there
pronounced, calling into question the wisdom and even the good faith
of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself through
flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided purse, he
had so little faith in either man or master, and so profound a terror
for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he could think
of no hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete political
subversion. Down must go Lords and Church and Army; and capital, by
some happy direction, must change hands from worse to better, or
England stood condemned. Such principles, he said, were growing
'like a seed.'
From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and
fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was
calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy
which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his
panacea, - to rend the old country from end to end, and from top to
bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the hand of
violence.
THE STOWAWAYS
On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our
companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure. He wore
tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain
smoking-cap. His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly
enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly
degeneration had already overtaken his features. The fine nose had
grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His
hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently
varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but
perfectly presentable. The lad who helped in the second cabin told
me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but
thought, 'by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite, that
he was some one from the saloon.'
I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air
and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good
family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But,
making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could
have heard hin, tell his own stories. They were so swingingly set
forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by
such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any
reproduction. There were tales of the P. and O. Company, where he
had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in former years he had
lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where he had served for a
period; and of a dozen other sides of life, each introducing some
vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the talk to himself that night,
we were all so glad to listen. The best talkers usually address
themselves to some particular society; there they are kings,
elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and yet be
ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong power of
style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have turned
any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric
talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of
which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds of
those who heard him. This, with a certain added colouring of
rhetoric and rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who
equally charmed the ears of duchesses and hostlers.
Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
in his narration. The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the
sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in
particular, one among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like
an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had
imagined. But then there came incidents more doubtful, which showed
an almost impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent
disregard for truth. And then there was the tale of his departure.
He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day, with a
companion, slipped up to London for a spree. I have a suspicion that
spree was meant to be a long one; but God disposes all things; and
one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom should he come across but
the very sergeant who had recruited him at first! What followed? He
himself indicated cavalierly that he had then resigned. Let us put
it so. But these resignations are sometimes very trying.
At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away
from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he was.
'That?' said Mackay. 'Why, that's one of the stowaways.'
'No man,' said the same authority, 'who has had anything to do with
the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.' I give the
statement as Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to
believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the
man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even
pass for a fair representation of the facts. We gentlemen of England
who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient ideas on
the subject. All the world over, people are stowing away in coal-
holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea, appearing
again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck. The career of these sea-
tramps partakes largely of the adventurous. They may be poisoned by
coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of concealment; or when
found they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus
to be carried to their promised land, the port of destination, and
alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started,
and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a
county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway
was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two,
and departed for a farther country than America.
When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray for:
that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his
forgiveness. After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels
himself as secure as if he had paid for his passage. It is not
altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more or less
efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and
every now and again find themselves better paid than by a whole
family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for instance, a packet was
saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and courage of a stowaway
engineer. As was no more than just, a handsome subscription rewarded
him for his success: but even without such exceptional good fortune,
as things stand in England and America, the stowaway will often make
a good profit out of his adventure. Four engineers stowed away last
summer on the same ship, the CIRCASSIA; and before two days after
their arrival each of the four had found a comfortable berth. This
was the most hopeful tale of emigration that I heard from first to
last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways.
My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next morning,
as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to find the
ex-Royal Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck
house. There was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more
than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown
with grains of beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes. Four
stowaways had been found aboard our ship before she left the Clyde,
but these two had alone escaped the ignominy of being put ashore.
Alick, my acquaintance of last night, was Scots by birth, and by
trade a practical engineer; the other was from Devonshire, and had
been to sea before the mast. Two people more unlike by training,
character, and habits it would be hard to imagine; yet here they were
together, scrubbing paint.
Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
opportunities in life. I have heard him end a story with these
words: 'That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses.'
Situation after situation failed him; then followed the depression of
trade, and for months he had hung round with other idlers, playing
marbles all day in the West Park, and going home at night to tell his
landlady how he had been seeking for a job. I believe this kind of
existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long
continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade,
let us call him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was continually
threatening to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one
Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown. Some months
afterwards, Alick met another old chum in Sauchiehall Street.
'By the bye, Alick,' said he, 'I met a gentleman in New York who was
asking for you.'
'Who was that?' asked Alick.
'The new second engineer on board the SO-AND-SO,' was the reply.
'Well, and who is he?'
'Brown, to be sure.'
For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
CIRCASSIA. If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought it
was high time to follow Brown's example. He spent his last day, as
he put it, 'reviewing the yeomanry,' and the next morning says he to
his landlady, 'Mrs. X., I'll not take porridge to-day, please; I'll
take some eggs.'
'Why, have you found a job?' she asked, delighted.
'Well, yes,' returned the perfidious Alick; 'I think I'll start to-
day.'
And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America. I am
afraid that landlady has seen the last of him.
It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a
vessel's departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No. 1,
flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from
the Broomielaw to Greenock. That night, the ship's yeoman pulled him
out by the heels and had him before the mate. Two other stowaways
had already been found and sent ashore; but by this time darkness had
fallen, they were out in the middle of the estuary, and the last
steamer had left them till the morning.
'Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,' said the mate, 'and
see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow.'
In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest, and breakfast;
and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was over and the
game up for good with that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out
an oath at him, with a 'What are you doing there?' and 'Do you call
that hiding, anyway?' There was need of no more; Alick was in
another bunk before the day was older. Shortly before the passengers
arrived, the ship was cursorily inspected. He heard the round come
down the companion and look into one pen after another, until they
came within two of the one in which he lay concealed. Into these
last two they did not enter, but merely glanced from without; and
Alick had no doubt that he was personally favoured in this escape.
It was the character of the man to attribute nothing to luck and but
little to kindness; whatever happened to him he had earned in his own
right amply; favours came to him from his singular attraction and
adroitness, and misfortunes he had always accepted with his eyes
open. Half an hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage
began to fill with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick's
troubles was at an end. He was soon making himself popular, smoking
other people's tobacco, and politely sharing their private stock
delicacies, and when night came he retired to his bunk beside the
others with composure.
Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and only
the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick appeared
on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact,
he was known to several on board, and even intimate with one of the
engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of such occasions for
the authorities to avow their information. Every one professed
surprise and anger on his appearance, and he was led prison before
the captain.
'What have you got to say for yourself?' inquired the captain.
'Not much,' said Alick; 'but when a man has been a long time out of a
job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances.'
'Are you willing to work?'
Alick swore he was burning to be useful.
'And what can you do?' asked the captain.
He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.
'I think you will be better at engineering?' suggested the officer,
with a shrewd look.
'No, sir,' says Alick simply. - 'There's few can beat me at a lie,'
was his engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.
'Have you been to sea?' again asked the captain.
'I've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more,' replied the
unabashed Alick.
'Well, we must try and find some work for you,' concluded the
officer.
And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily
scraping paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet. 'You
leave me alone,' was his deduction. 'When I get talking to a man, I
can get round him.'
The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian - it was noticeable
that neither of them told his name - had both been brought up and
seen the world in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner,
died and was closely followed by his mother. His sisters had taken,
I think, to dressmaking. He himself had returned from sea about a
year ago and gone to live with his brother, who kept the 'George
Hotel' - 'it was not quite a real hotel,' added the candid fellow -
'and had a hired man to mind the horses.' At first the Devonian was
very welcome; but as time went on his brother not unnaturally grew
cool towards him, and he began to find himself one too many at the
'George Hotel.' 'I don't think brothers care much for you,' he said,
as a general reflection upon life. Hurt at this change, nearly
penniless, and too proud to ask for more, he set off on foot and
walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey as he could.
He would have enlisted, but he was too small for the army and too old
for the navy; and thought himself fortunate at last to find a berth
on board a trading dandy. Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy
sprung a leak and went down; and though the crew were picked up and
brought ashore by fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but
the clothes upon their back. His next engagement was scarcely better
starred; for the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so
heartily during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the
entire crew deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.
Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian. He could find no
berth in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a steamer.
She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday: the Devonian had a
bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to provide
against the future, and set off along the quays to seek employment.
But he was now not only penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in
tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street Arab; and captains
will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in
all others, it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, reef,
and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it
is like a millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost heart at so
many refusals. He had not the impudence to beg; although, as he
said, 'when I had money of my own, I always gave it.' It was only on
Saturday morning, after three whole days of starvation, that he asked
a scone from a milkwoman, who added of her own accord a glass of
milk. He had now made up his mind to stow away, not from any desire
to see America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a place in the
forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He lived by begging,
always from milkwomen, and always scones and milk, and was not once
refused. It was vile wet weather, and he could never have been dry.
By night he walked the streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow Green,
and heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of
the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the
merits of the clergy. He had not much instruction; he could 'read
bills on the street,' but was 'main bad at writing'; yet these
theologians seem to have impressed him with a genuine sense of
amusement. Why he did not go to the Sailors' House I know not; I
presume there is in Glasgow one of these institutions, which are by
far the happiest and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity;
but I must stand to my author, as they say in old books, and relate
the story as I heard it. In the meantime, he had tried four times to
stow away in different vessels, and four times had been discovered
and handed back to starvation. The fifth time was lucky; and you may
judge if he were pleased to be aboard ship again, at his old work,
and with duff twice a week. He was, said Alick, 'a devil for the
duff.' Or if devil was not the word, it was one if anything
stronger.
The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable. The
Devonian was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the
first, pulled his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found
work for himself when there was none to show him. Alick, on the
other hand, was not only a skulker in the brain, but took a humorous
and fine gentlemanly view of the transaction. He would speak to me
by the hour in ostentatious idleness; and only if the bo's'un or a
mate came by, fell-to languidly for just the necessary time till they
were out of sight. 'I'm not breaking my heart with it,' he remarked.
Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
'Hullo,' said he, 'here's some real work coming - I'm off,' and he
was gone that moment. Again, calculating the six guinea passage-
money, and the probable duration of the passage, he remarked
pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day for this job, 'and
it's pretty dear to the company at that.' 'They are making nothing
by me,' was another of his observations; 'they're making something by
that fellow.' And he pointed to the Devonian, who was just then busy
to the eyes.
The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned to
despise him. His natural talents were of no use either to himself or
others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become
pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which was
certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or
neutralised by over-confidence. He lied in an aggressive, brazen
manner, like a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain of his
own cleverness that he could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes
after, of the very trick by which he had deceived you. 'Why, now I
have more money than when I came on board,' he said one night,
exhibiting a sixpence, 'and yet I stood myself a bottle of beer
before I went to bed yesterday. And as for tobacco, I have fifteen
sticks of it.' That was fairly successful indeed; yet a man of his
superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows? have
got the length of half a crown. A man who prides himself upon
persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above all
as to his own misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for dramatic
purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the world at
large.
Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick; for
at the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense of
humour that moved you to forgive him. It was more than half a jest
that he conducted his existence. 'Oh, man,' he said to me once with
unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, 'I would give
up anything for a lark.'
It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the best,
or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature. 'Mind
you,' he said suddenly, changing his tone, 'mind you that's a good
boy. He wouldn't tell you a lie. A lot of them think he is a scamp
because his clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he's as good as gold.'
To hear him, you become aware that Alick himself had a taste for
virtue. He thought his own idleness and the other's industry equally
becoming. He was no more anxious to insure his own reputation as a
liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his companion; and he seemed
unaware of what was incongruous in his attitude, and was plainly
sincere in both characters.
It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the
Devonian, for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder.
Busy as he was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching
officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might
slip off and smoke a pipe in safety. 'Tom,' he once said to him, for
that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, 'if you don't like
going to the galley, I'll go for you. You ain't used to this kind of
thing, you ain't. But I'm a sailor; and I can understand the
feelings of any fellow, I can.' Again, he was hard up, and casting
about for some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in this
respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered him the
half of one of his fifteen sticks. I think, for my part, he might
have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of them,
and not lived to regret his liberality. But the Devonian refused.
'No,' he said, 'you're a stowaway like me; I won't take it from you,
I'll take it from some one who's not down on his luck.'
It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the
influence of sex. If a woman passed near where he was working, his
eyes lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to
other thoughts. It was natural that he should exercise a fascination
proportionally strong upon women. He begged, you will remember, from
women only, and was never refused. Without wishing to explain away
the charity of those who helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have
owed a little to his handsome face, and to that quick, responsive
nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquently through all
disguises, and can stamp an impression in ten minutes' talk or an
exchange of glances. He was the more dangerous in that he was far
from bold, but seemed to woo in spite of himself, and with a soft and
pleading eye. Ragged as he was, and many a scarecrow is in that
respect more comfortably furnished, even on board he was not without
some curious admirers.
There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had
dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that defies
analysis. One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper
stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came
past, very neatly attired, as was her custom.
'Poor fellow,' she said, stopping, 'you haven't a vest.'
'No,' he said; 'I wish I 'ad.'
Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his
embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he
pulled out his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco.
'Do you want a match?' she asked. And before he had time to reply,
she ran off and presently returned with more than one.
That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is
concerned, of what I will make bold to call this love-affair. There
are many relations which go on to marriage and last during a
lifetime, in which less human feeling is engaged than in this scene
of five minutes at the stoke-hole.
Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but in
a larger sense of the word I have yet more to add. Jones had
discovered and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable
among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly
clad, to the verge, if not over the line, of disrespectability, with
a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your
fist; but her eyes, her whole expression, and her manner, even in
ordinary moments, told of a true womanly nature, capable of love,
anger, and devotion. She had a look, too, of refinement, like one
who might have been a better lady than most, had she been allowed the
opportunity. When alone she seemed preoccupied and sad; but she was
not often alone; there was usually by her side a heavy, dull, gross
man in rough clothes, chary of speech and gesture - not from caution,
but poverty of disposition; a man like a ditcher, unlovely and
uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and waited on with her eyes
as if he had been Amadis of Gaul. It was strange to see this hulking
fellow dog-sick, and this delicate, sad woman caring for him. He
seemed, from first to last, insensible of her caresses and
attentions, and she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The
Irish husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl
serving her Orson, were the two bits of human nature that most
appealed to me throughout the voyage.
On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and
soon a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her
bit of sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed
fingers. She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she
was on board with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom she
travelled was the father of a family, who had left wife and children
to be hers. The ship's officers discouraged the story, which may
therefore have been a story and no more; but it was believed in the
steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter many curious eyes from
that day forth.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean
combined both. 'Out of my country and myself I go,' sings the old
poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude
and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and
consideration. Part of the interest and a great deal of the
amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel situation in the
world.
I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute
success and verisimilitude. I was taken for a steerage passenger; no
one seemed surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing but
the brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once been a
gentleman. In a former book, describing a former journey, I
expressed some wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken for
a pedlar, and explained the accident by the difference of language
and manners between England and France. I must now take a humbler
view; for here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat roughly clad
to be sure, but with every advantage of speech and manner; and I am
bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything you please except
an educated gentleman. The sailors called me 'mate,' the officers
addressed me as 'my man,' my comrades accepted me without hesitation
for a person of their own character and experience, but with some
curious information. One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason;
several, and among these at least one of the seaman, judged me to be
a petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often set down for
a practical engineer that at last I had not the heart to deny it.
From all these guesses I drew one conclusion, which told against the
insight of my companions. They might be close observers in their own
way, and read the manners in the face; but it was plain that they did
not extend their observation to the hands.
To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch.
It is true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter,
there was no recognition in their eye, although I confess I sometimes
courted it in silence. All these, my inferiors and equals, took me,
like the transformed monarch in the story, for a mere common, human
man. They gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh about the eye
kept unrelaxed.
With the women this surprised me less, as I had already experimented
on the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of London simply
attired in a sleeve-waistcoat. The result was curious. I then
learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much
attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male creatures of
their own station; for, in my humble rig, each one who went by me
caused me a certain shock of surprise and a sense of something
wanting. In my normal circumstances, it appeared every young lady
must have paid me some tribute of a glance; and though I had often
not detected it when it was given, I was well aware of its absence
when it was withheld. My height seemed to decrease with every woman
who passed me, for she passed me like a dog. This is one of my
grounds for supposing that what are called the upper classes may
sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what are called the
lower; and I wish some one would continue my experiment, and find out
exactly at what stage of toilette a man becomes invisible to the
well-regulated female eye.
Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for,
even with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the
ladies for precisely the average man of the steerage. It was one
afternoon that I saw this demonstrated. A very plainly dressed woman
was taken ill on deck. I think I had the luck to be present at every
sudden seizure during all the passage; and on this occasion found
myself in the place of importance, supporting the sufferer. There
was not only a large crowd immediately around us, but a considerable
knot of saloon passengers leaning over our heads from the hurricane-
deck. One of these, an elderly managing woman, hailed me with
counsels. Of course I had to reply; and as the talk went on, I began
to discover that the whole group took me for the husband. I looked
upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled feelings; and I must
own she had not even the appearance of the poorest class of city
servant-maids, but looked more like a country wench who should have
been employed at a roadside inn. Now was the time for me to go and
study the brass plate.
To such of the officers as knew about me - the doctor, the purser,
and the stewards - I appeared in the light of a broad joke. The fact
that I spent the better part of my day in writing had gone abroad
over the ship and tickled them all prodigiously. Whenever they met
me they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity and breadth
of humorous intention. Their manner was well calculated to remind me
of my fallen fortunes. You may be sincerely amused by the amateur
literary efforts of a gentleman, but you scarce publish the feeling
to his face. 'Well!' they would say: 'still writing?' And the smile
would widen into a laugh. The purser came one day into the cabin,
and, touched to the heart by my misguided industry, offered me some
other kind of writing, 'for which,' he added pointedly, 'you will be
paid.' This was nothing else than to copy out the list of
passengers.
Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my choice
of roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor. I was
openly jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a considerable
knot would sometimes gather at the door to see my last dispositions
for the night. This was embarrassing, but I learned to support the
trial with equanimity.
Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly
and naturally upon my spirits. I accepted the consequences with
readiness, and found them far from difficult to bear. The steerage
conquered me; I conformed more and more to the type of the place, not
only in manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers and
cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for
small delicacies. Such was the result, as I fancy, of a diet of
bread and butter, soup and porridge. We think we have no sweet tooth
as long as we are full to the brim of molasses; but a man must have
sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself indifferent to
dainties. Every evening, for instance, I was more and more
preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it was delicate my
heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I was
proportionally downcast. The offer of a little jelly from a fellow-
passenger more provident than myself caused a marked elevation in my
spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end and back again for
an oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position. It seemed no disgrace
to he confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once I
found their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other
class. I do not mean that my friends could have sat down without
embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table of a duke. That
does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage.
Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow-
passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults,
but to have committed as few as possible. I know too well that my
tact is not the same as their tact, and that my habit of a different
society constituted, not only no qualification, but a positive
disability to move easily and becomingly in this. When Jones
complimented me - because I 'managed to behave very pleasantly' to my
fellow-passengers, was how he put it - I could follow the thought in
his mind, and knew his compliment to be such as we pay foreigners on
their proficiency in English. I dare say this praise was given me
immediately on the back of some unpardonable solecism, which had led
him to review my conduct as a whole. We are all ready to laugh at
the ploughman among lords; we should consider also the case of a lord
among the ploughmen. I have seen a lawyer in the house of a
Hebridean fisherman; and I know, but nothing will induce me to
disclose, which of these two was the better gentleman. Some of our
finest behaviour, though it looks well enough from the boxes, may
seem even brutal to the gallery. We boast too often manners that are
parochial rather than universal; that, like a country wine, will not
bear transportation for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the
kitchen. To be a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in
every relation and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which
a man must first be born, and then devote himself for life. And,
unhappily, the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind
of currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout
all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with slight
acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique. But
manners, like art, should be human and central.
Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a relation
of equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen. They were not rough,
nor hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly, differed kindly;
were helpful, gentle, patient, and placid. The type of manners was
plain, and even heavy; there was little to please the eye, but
nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at the
spring of behaviour than in many more ornate and delicate societies.
I say delicate, where I cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like
ironwork, without being delicate, like lace. There was here less
delicacy; the skin supported more callously the natural surface of
events, the mind received more bravely the crude facts of human
existence; but I do not think that there was less effective
refinement, less consideration for others, less polite suppression of
self. I speak of the best among my fellow-passengers; for in the
steerage, as well as in the saloon, there is a mixture. Those, then,
with whom I found myself in sympathy, and of whom I may therefore
hope to write with a greater measure of truth, were not only as good
in their manners, but endowed with very much the same natural
capacities, and about as wise in deduction, as the bankers and
barristers of what is called society. One and all were too much
interested in disconnected facts, and loved information for its own
sake with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes display the
same appetite as they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous
gossip of the newspaper. Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make
out, is often rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture. I
have myself palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him
re-peruse it for a continuance of minutes with an air at once
refreshed and solemn. Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but
though they may be eager listeners, they have rarely seemed to me
either willing or careful thinkers. Culture is not measured by the
greatness of the field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the
nicety with which we can perceive relations in that field, whether
great or small. Workmen, certainly those who were on board with me,
I found wanting in this quality or habit of the mind. They did not
perceive relations, but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought the
problem settled. Thus the cause of everything in England was the
form of government, and the cure for all evils was, by consequence, a
revolution. It is surprising how many of them said this, and that
none should have had a definite thought in his head as he said it.
Some hated the Church because they disagreed with it; some hated Lord
Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all hated the masters,
possibly with reason. But these failings were not at the root of the
matter; the true reasoning of their souls ran thus - I have not got
on; I ought to have got on; if there was a revolution I should get
on. How? They had no idea. Why? Because - because - well, look at
America!
To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you come
to that. At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one question in
modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes, and that is
the question of money; and but one political remedy, that the people
should grow wiser and better. My workmen fellow-passengers were as
impatient and dull of hearing on the second of these points as any
member of Parliament; but they had some glimmerings of the first.
They would not hear of improvement on their part, but wished the
world made over again in a crack, so that they might remain
improvident and idle and debauched, and yet enjoy the comfort and
respect that should accompany the opposite virtues; and it was in
this expectation, as far as I could see, that many of them were now
on their way to America. But on the point of money they saw clearly
enough that inland politics, so far as they were concerned, were
reducible to the question of annual income; a question which should
long ago have been settled by a revolution, they did not know how,
and which they were now about to settle for themselves, once more
they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic in a steamship of
considerable tonnage.
And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income
question is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided, if
there be no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by
a man's purse, but by his character that he is rich or poor. Barney
will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go
where they will, and wreck all the governments under heaven, they
will be poor until they die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
failing. It has to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in
consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
grace. The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his
childhood up. He excused himself for his defective education on the
ground that he had been overworked from first to last. Even now, he
said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a book. In
consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four
or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four,
and then principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he
passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or standing with his
back against a door. I have known men do hard literary work all
morning, and then undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of
relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at
least, like all the educated class, did so much homage to industry as
to persuade himself he was industrious. But the average mechanic
recognises his idleness with effrontery; he has even, as I am told,
organised it.
I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact. A
man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought
into hospital with broken bones. He was asked what was his trade,
and replied that he was a TAPPER. No one had ever heard of such a
thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they besought
an explanation. It appeared that when a party of slaters were
engaged upon a roof, they would now and then be taken with a fancy
for the public-house. Now a seamstress, for example, might slip away
from her work and no one be the wiser; but if these fellows
adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would cease, and thus the
neighbourhood be advertised of their defection. Hence the career of
the tapper. He has to do the tapping and keep up an industrious
bustle on the housetop during the absence of the slaters. When he
taps for only one or two the thing is child's-play, but when he has
to represent a whole troop, it is then that he earns his money in the
sweat of his brow. Then must he bound from spot to spot,
reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single personality, and
swell and hasten his blows., until he produce a perfect illusion for
the ear, and you would swear that a crowd of emulous masons were
continuing merrily to roof the house. It must be a strange sight
from an upper window.
I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
stories told by my companions. Skulking, shirking, malingering, were
all established tactics, it appeared. They could see no dishonesty
where a man who is paid for an bones work gives half an hour's
consistent idling in its place. Thus the tapper would refuse to
watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself a honest
man. It is not sufficiently recognised that our race detests to
work. If I thought that I should have to work every day of my life
as hard as I am working now, I should be tempted to give up the
struggle. And the workman early begins on his career of toil. He
has never had his fill of holidays in the past, and his prospect of
holidays in the future is both distant and uncertain. In the
circumstances, it would require a high degree of virtue not to snatch
alleviations for the moment.
There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good talking
of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working men.
Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information
will be given and received by word of mouth; and this tends to
produce good talkers, and, what is no less needful for conversation,
good listeners. They could all tell a story with effect. I am
sometimes tempted to think that the less literary class show always
better in narration; they have so much more patience with detail, are
so much less hurried to reach the points, and preserve so much juster
a proportion among the facts. At the same time their talk is dry;
they pursue a topic ploddingly, have not an agile fancy, do not throw
sudden lights from unexpected quarters, and when the talk is over
they often leave the matter where it was. They mark time instead of
marching. They think only to argue, not to reach new conclusions,
and use their reason rather as a weapon of offense than as a tool for
self-improvement. Hence the talk of some of the cleverest was
unprofitable in result, because there was no give and take; they
would grant you as little as possible for premise, and begin to
dispute under an oath to conquer or to die.
But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that of
a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of which
the workman's life is built lie nearer to necessity and nature. They
are more immediate to human life. An income calculated by the week
is a far more human thing than one calculated by the year, and a
small income, simply from its smallness, than a large one. I never
wearied listening to the details of a workman's economy, because
every item stood for some real pleasure. If he could afford pudding
twice a week, you know that twice a week the man ate with genuine
gusto and was physically happy; while if you learn that a rich man
has seven courses a day, ten to one the half of them remain untasted,
and the whole is but misspent money and a weariness to the flesh.
The difference between England and America to a working man was thus
most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger: 'In America,' said he,
'you get pies and puddings.' I do not hear enough, in economy books,
of pies and pudding. A man lives in and for the delicacies,
adornments, and accidental attributes of life, such as pudding to eat
and pleasant books and theatres to occupy his leisure. The bare
terms of existence would be rejected with contempt by all. If a man
feeds on bread and butter, soup and porridge, his appetite grows
wolfish after dainties. And the workman dwells in a borderland, and
is always within sight of those cheerless regions where life is more
difficult to sustain than worth sustaining. Every detail of our
existence, where it is worth while to cross the ocean after pie and
pudding, is made alive and enthralling by the presence of genuine
desire; but it is all one to me whether Croesus has a hundred or a
thousand thousands in the bank. There is more adventure in the life
of the working man who descends as a common solder into the battle of
life, than in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an office,
like Von Moltke, and only directs the manoeuvres by telegraph. Give
me to hear about the career of him who is in the thick of business;
to whom one change of market means empty belly, and another a copious
and savoury meal. This is not the philosophical, but the human side
of economics; it interests like a story; and the life all who are
thus situated partakes in a small way the charm of ROBINSON CRUSOE;
for every step is critical and human life is presented to you naked
and verging to its lowest terms.
NEW YORK
As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then somewhat
staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went the round.
You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You
must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till
you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military
precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake next
morning without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked
radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and
mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind.
I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of
fact. Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns of
the Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I reached
Pradelles the warning was explained - it was but the far-away rumour
and reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a century
old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the events. So I was
tempted to make light of these reports against America. But we had
on board with us a man whose evidence it would not do to put aside.
He had come near these perils in the body; he had visited a robber
inn. The public has an old and well-grounded favour for this class
of incident, and shall be gratified to the best of my power.
My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from New
York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair of
rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station, passed
the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight
struck. Then they applied themselves to find a lodging, and walked
the streets till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being
refused admittance, or themselves declining the terms. By two the
inspiration of their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary
and humble, and after a great circuit found themselves in the same
street where they had begun their search, and in front of a French
hotel where they had already sought accommodation. Seeing the house
still open, they returned to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in
an office by the door. He seemed to welcome them more warmly than
when they had first presented themselves, and the charge for the
night had somewhat unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter.
They thought him ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were
shown upstairs to the top of the house. There, in a small room, the
man in the white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.
It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences. The
door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was a
couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, and
the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes
see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of
art more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the
hope of finding something of this last description that M'Naughten's
comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly
disappointed. There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the
curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition,
through which they looked forth into the dark corridor. A person
standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow, or
even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed. M'Naughten and his comrade
stared at each other like Vasco's seamen, 'with a wild surmise'; and
then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran to the other frame and
roughly raised the curtain. There he stood, petrified; and
M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the wrist in terror.
They could see into another room, larger in size than that which they
occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in the dark. For
a second or so these five persons looked each other in the eyes, then
the curtain was dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made but one
bolt of it out of the room and downstairs. The man in the white cap
said nothing as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once
more in the open night that they gave up all notion of a bed, and
walked the streets of Boston till the morning.
No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired after
the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself
under the conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we
sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage
passengers must remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the
following morning; but we of the second cabin made our escape along
with the lords of the saloon; and by six o'clock Jones and I issued
into West Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open
baggage-wagon. It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on
the following night I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no
cessation of the downpour. The roadways were flooded; a loud
strident noise of falling water filled the air; the restaurants smelt
heavily of wet people and wet clothing.
It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money,
to be rattled along West Street to our destination: 'Reunion House,
No. 10 West Street, one minutes walk from Castle Garden; convenient
to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and
Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25
cents, lodging per night 25 cents; private rooms for families; no
charge for storage or baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all
persons; Michael Mitchell, Proprietor.' Reunion House was, I may go
the length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered through a long
bar-room, thence passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a
still smaller kitchen. The furniture was of the plainest; but the
bar was hung in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable
mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going
on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr.
Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situation. He was
offering to treat me, it appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper
proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to
treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at least take the cigar.
I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career on the
wrong foot. I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from
a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing to please if
you smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; 'westward
the march of empire holds its way'; the race is for the moment to the
young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know;
what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations.
Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to generations
the legacy of their accomplished work; China still endures, an old-
inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations; England has already
declined, since she has lost the States; and to these States,
therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown,
like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old land,
the minds of young men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful
period of their age. It will be hard for an American to understand
the spirit. But let him imagine a young man, who shall have grown up
in an old and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and taught to
distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a
family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep house together by
themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine
this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with
which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the American
Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it
had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted,
like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms
of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly
for himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff,
respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his life
according to the dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
country towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood
form the imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of
time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating details -
vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone
south in autumn, returning with the spring to find thousands camped
upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and near along populous
streets; forests that disappear like snow; countries larger than
Britain that are cleared and settled, one man running forth with his
household gods before another, while the bear and the Indian are yet
scarce aware of their approach; oil that gushes from the earth; gold
that is washed or quarried in the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and
all that bustle, courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic change
that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful,
and loquacious verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York
streets, spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of
Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have
looked inviting. We were a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones
and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to
welcome a compatriot. They had been six weeks in New York, and
neither of them had yet found a single job or earned a single
halfpenny. Up to the present they were exactly out of pocket by the
amount of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such a
dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at which
I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I should
dine like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a
restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking
passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I had told them I was willing
to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-
price houses, where I would not have eaten that night for the cost of
twenty dinners. I do not know if this were characteristic of New
York, or whether it was only Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and
discouraged enterprising suggestions. But at length, by our own
sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where there was a French
waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called French wine, and
French coffee to conclude the whole. I never entered into the
feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the 'private rooms for families' at Reunion
House. It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of
the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the
passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another
apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of
wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long. It will
be observed that this was almost exactly the disposition of the room
in M'Naughten's story. Jones had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the
floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and I, for my part, never
closed an eye.
At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men in
the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over
their toilettes. The sound of their voices as they talked was low
and like that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at last
begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened
unconscious eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself growing eerier
and eerier, for I dare say I was a little fevered by my restless
night, and hurried to dress and get downstairs.
You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and
resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There
were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet
soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-
glass and a pair of questionable combs. Another Scots lad was here,
scrubbing his face with a good will. He had been three months in New
York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a single
halfpenny. Up to the present, he also was exactly out of pocket by
the amount of the fare. I began to grow sick at heart for my fellow-
emigrants.
Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell. I had a
thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a
journey across the continent before me in the evening. It rained
with patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for a
while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under
this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside. I went
to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants, publishers,
booksellers, money-changers, and wherever I went a pool would gather
about my feet, and those who were careful of their floors would look
on with an unfriendly eye. Wherever I went, too, the same traits
struck me: the people were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly
kind. The money-changer cross-questioned me like a French
commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income, and my
destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and receiving my
answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he shook hands with me
up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a quarter of a mile in the
rain to get me books at a reduction. Again, in a very large
publishing and bookselling establishment, a man, who seemed to he the
manager, received me as I had certainly never before been received in
any human shop, indicated squarely that he put no faith in my
honesty, and refused to look up the names of books or give me the
slightest help or information, on the ground, like the steward, that
it was none of his business. I lost my temper at last, said I was a
stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; but I would
assure him, if he went to any bookseller in England, of more handsome
usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long shot,
it struck the gold. The manager passed at once from one extreme to
the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded me with
kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down
addresses, and came bareheaded into the rain to point me out a
restaurant, where I might lunch, nor even then did he seem to think
that he had done enough. These are (it is as well to be bold in
statement) the manners of America. It is this same opposition that
has most struck me in people of almost all classes and from east to
west. By the time a man had about strung me up to be the death of
him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would be just upon the
point of melting into confidence and serviceable attentions. Yet I
suspect, although I have met with the like in so many parts, that
this must be the character of some particular state or group of
states, for in America, and this again in all classes, you will find
some of the softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.
I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward the evening, that I
had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and
leave them behind for the benefit of New York city. No fire could
have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present
condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a
heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle
of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder if they are
dry by now. Mitchell hired a man to carry my baggage to the station,
which was hard by, accompanied me thither himself, and recommended me
to the particular attention of the officials. No one could have been
kinder. Those who are out of pocket may go safely to Reunion House,
where they will get decent meals and find an honest and obliging
landlord. I owed him this word of thanks, before I enter fairly on
the second and far less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.
CHAPTER II - COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK - A FRAGMENT - 1871
VERY much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient
unity may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what
he sees may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same
principle, I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to
intervene between any of my little journeyings and the attempt to
chronicle them. I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the
moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before; I
must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from all
chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to choose
out what is truly memorable by a process of natural selection; and I
piously believe that in this way I ensure the Survival of the
Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I am obliged to write
letters during the course of my little excursion, I so interfere with
the process that I can never again find out what is worthy of being
preserved, or what should be given in full length, what in torso, or
what merely in profile. This process of incubation may be
unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid that I have made
this mistake with the present journey. Like a bad daguerreotype,
great part of it has been entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about
the beginning and nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty
or sixty hours about the middle remain quite distinct and definite,
like a little patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one
spot on an old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand
of the cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called
upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out
of his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that
the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the first
two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the congregation how
he found himself situated: 'And now,' said he, 'let us just begin
where the rats have left off.' I must follow the divine's example,
and take up the thread of my discourse where it first distinctly
issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.
COCKERMOUTH
I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth,
and did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I
did so, it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening
sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an English
conformation of street, - as it were, an English atmosphere blew
against my face. There is nothing perhaps more puzzling (if one
thing in sociology can ever really be more unaccountable than
another) than the great gulf that is set between England and Scotland
- a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to traverse.
Here are two people almost identical in blood; pent up together on
one small island, so that their intercourse (one would have thought)
must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one cell of the
Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few years of
quarrelsome isolation - a mere forenoon's tiff, as one may call it,
in comparison with the great historical cycles - has so separated
their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor
steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's
men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the
trituration of another century or so the corners may disappear; but
in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new
country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at
Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the
change, and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back,
noting in a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were
the slopes of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the
demeanour and voices of the gossips round about me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one
and then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in
the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was
beginning to grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and
a mill - a great, gaunt promontory of building, - half on dry ground
and half arched over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders
and crept through between the landward extremity of the mill and a
little garden enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard
within its privet hedge. I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and
drew little etchings in fancy of a sanded parlour, and three-cornered
spittoons, and a society of parochial gossips seated within over
their churchwardens; but as I drew near, the board displayed its
superscription, and I could read the name of Smethurst, and the
designation of 'Canadian Felt Hat Manufacturers.' There was no more
hope of evening fellowship, and I could only stroll on by the river-
side, under the trees. The water was dappled with slanting sunshine,
and dusted all over with a little mist of flying insects. There were
some amorous ducks, also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had
seen a little farther down. But the road grew sad, and I grew weary;
and as I was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the
tie that had been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned
and went back to the inn, and supper, and my bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress
my intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to
Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by
that last and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to
introduce tradition and authority into the choice of a man's own
pleasures. I can excuse a person combating my religious or
philosophical heresies, because them I have deliberately accepted,
and am ready to justify by present argument. But I do not seek to
justify my pleasures. If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little
hot sunshine over lowland parks and woodlands to the war of the
elements round the summit of Mont Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of
mild tobacco, and the company of one or two chosen companions, to a
ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state
these preferences as facts, and do not seek to establish them as
principles. This is not the general rule, however, and accordingly
the waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to hear the
route that I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to
Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in
vain that I put up a little plea for the liberty of the subject; it
was in vain that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was
told that there was 'nothing to see there' - that weary, hackneyed,
old falsehood; and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really
concerned, I gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, and
agreed that I was to leave for Keswick by a train in the early
evening.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with 'nothing
to see'; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague
picture of the town and all its surroundings. I might have dodged
happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle and
in and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person
in a strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to
make set habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half
unconsciously up the same, road that I had gone the evening before.
When I came up to the hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing
in the garden gate. He was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and
several others had been put to await their turn one above the other
on his own head, so that he looked something like the typical Jew
old-clothes man. As I drew near, he came sidling out of the doorway
to accost me, with so curious an expression on his face that I
instinctively prepared myself to apologise for some unwitting
trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in this belief, for
it was whether or not he had seen me going up this way last night;
and after having answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm
for the rest of my indictment. But the good man's heart was full of
peace; and he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about
fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright
shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely
say how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats
aside to go along the water-side and show me where the large trout
commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much
disappointed, for my sake, that there were none visible just then.
Then he wandered off on to another tack, and stood a great while out
in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to make out
that he had known me before, or, if not me, some friend of mine,
merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel more friendly
and at our ease with one another. At last he made a little speech to
me, of which I wish I could recollect the very words, for they were
so simple and unaffected that they put all the best writing and
speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the sense, and
that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that he had little
things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to recall;
and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now died
out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and active.
Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river above
the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be able
to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great
pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who
will forgo present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience
for the sake of manufacturing 'a reminiscence' for himself; but there
was something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker
found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or
unselfish luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little
embarkation, and seen me safely shoved off into midstream, he ran
away back to his hats with the air of a man who had only just
recollected that he had anything to do.
I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very
nice punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting
moored to an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I
was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and
cherish its recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into
a duty. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and
came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the
man himself and his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and
sympathy, than anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure
embarkation. In order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little
ashamed of myself for having failed to enjoy his treat sufficiently,
I determined to continue up the river, and, at all prices, to find
some other way back into the town in time for dinner. As I went, I
was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a look into that man's
mind was like a retrospect over the smiling champaign of his past
life, and very different from the Sinai-gorges up which one looks for
a terrified moment into the dark souls of many good, many wise, and
many prudent men. I cannot be very grateful to such men for their
excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I find myself facing as
stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full of doubt,
difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard
enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that what
I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and
contentment.
ANOTHER
I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp. After I
had forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the
high road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the top
of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom. An
Irish beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side, came up
to ask for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little tragedy
of her life. Her own sister, she told me, had seduced her husband
from her after many years of married life, and the pair had fled,
leaving her destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. She
seemed quite hopeful and cheery, and, though she was unaffectedly
sorry for the loss of her husband's earnings, she made no pretence of
despair at the loss of his affection; some day she would meet the
fugitives, and the law would see her duly righted, and in the
meantime the smallest contribution was gratefully received. While
she was telling all this in the most matter-of-fact way, I had been
noticing the approach of a tall man, with a high white hat and
darkish clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid pace, and joined our
little group with a sort of half-salutation. Turning at once to the
woman, he asked her in a business-like way whether she had anything
to do, whether she were a Catholic or a Protestant, whether she could
read, and so forth; and then, after a few kind words and some
sweeties to the child, he despatched the mother with some tracts
about Biddy and the Priest, and the Orangeman's Bible. I was a
little amused at his abrupt manner, for he was still a young man, and
had somewhat the air of a navy officer; but he tackled me with great
solemnity. I could make fun of what he said, for I do not think it
was very wise; but the subject does not appear to me just now in a
jesting light, so I shall only say that he related to me his own
conversion, which had been effected (as is very often the case)
through the agency of a gig accident, and that, after having examined
me and diagnosed my case, he selected some suitable tracts from his
repertory, gave them to me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his
way.
LAST OF SMETHURST
That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick,
and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes.
This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually
putting his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they
saw HIM coming. At last, when the train was already in motion, there
was a commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear to our
carriage door. HE had arrived. In the hurry I could just see
Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my
companion's outstretched band, and hear him crying his farewells
after us as we slipped out of the station at an ever accelerating
pace. I said something about it being a close run, and the broad
man, already engaged in filling one of the pipes, assented, and went
on to tell me of his own stupidity in forgetting a necessary, and of
how his friend had good-naturedly gone down town at the last moment
to supply the omission. I mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst
already, and that he had been very polite to me; and we fell into a
discussion of the hatter's merits that lasted some time and left us
quite good friends at its conclusion. The topic was productive of
goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked about the season, and
agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick and sup
in company. As he had some business in the town which would occupy
him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time and go
down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised wonders.
The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a
place where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as
I went along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew
in gusts from the far end of the lake. The sky was covered with
flying scud; and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of
shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I
had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to
go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the
tedium. A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low
underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief
discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made, and
showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder. It was
as though they had sprung out of the ground. I accosted them very
politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to be told the
names of all manner of hills and woods and places that I did not wish
to know, and we stood together for a while and had an amusing little
talk. The wind, too, made himself of the party, brought the colour
into their faces, and gave them enough to do to repress their
drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to pirouette round
and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some specially strong gust
had got the advantage over her. They were just high enough up in the
social order not to be afraid to speak to a gentleman; and just low
enough to feel a little tremor, a nervous consciousness of wrong-
doing - of stolen waters, that gave a considerable zest to our most
innocent interview. They were as much discomposed and fluttered,
indeed, as if I had been a wicked baron proposing to elope with the
whole trio; but they showed no inclination to go away, and I had
managed to get them off hills and waterfalls and on to more promising
subjects, when a young man was descried coming along the path from
the direction of Keswick. Now whether he was the young man of one of
my friends, or the brother of one of them, or indeed the brother of
all, I do not know; but they incontinently said that they must be
going, and went away up the path with friendly salutations. I need
not say that I found the lake and the moonlight rather dull after
their departure, and speedily found my way back to potted herrings
and whisky-and-water in the commercial room with my late fellow-
traveller. In the smoking-room there was a tall dark man with a
moustache, in an ulster coat, who had got the best place and was
monopolising most of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came
round to me from both sides, that this was the manager of a London
theatre. The presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick,
and I must own that the manager showed himself equal to his position.
He had a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced poem after
poem, written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing
could be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant extracts,
except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the entertainment.
Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my appearance than
in most of the company, he singled me out to corroborate some
statements as to the depravity and vice of the aristocracy, and when
he went on to describe some gilded saloon experiences, I am proud to
say that he honoured my sagacity with one little covert wink before a
second time appealing to me for confirmation. The wink was not
thrown away; I went in up to the elbows with the manager, until I
think that some of the glory of that great man settled by reflection
upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second person in the
smoking-room as he was the first. For a young man, this was a
position of some distinction, I think you will admit. . . .
CHAPTER III - AN AUTUMN EFFECT - 1875
'Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous en
avons recue.' - M. ANDRE THEURIET, 'L'Automne dans les Bois,' Revue
des Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562.
A COUNTRY rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave
upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and
dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the quick
foot. Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we
see them for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and simply,
and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls,
before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before
the lights and shadows, shifting round towards nightfall, can show us
the other side of things, and belie what they showed us in the
morning. We expose our mind to the landscape (as we would expose the
prepared plate in the camera) for the moment only during which the
effect endures; and we are away before the effect can change. Hence
we shall have in our memories a long scroll of continuous wayside
pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment of the
season, the weather and the landscape, and certain to be unified more
and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes of thought.
So that we who have only looked at a country over our shoulder, so to
speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far more memorable
and articulate than a man who has lived there all his life from a
child upwards, and had his impression of to-day modified by that of
to-morrow, and belied by that of the day after, till at length the
stable characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him
behind the confusion of variable effect.
I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours:
that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack,
turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he
knows only by the vague report of others. Such an one has not
surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles, like
a man on a railway. He may change his mind at every finger-post,
and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the low
road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine, suffer himself
to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or
the broad road that lies open before him into the distance, and shows
him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops, or
a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify
his every whim and fancy, without a pang of reproving conscience, or
the least jostle to his self-respect. It is true, however, that most
men do not possess the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of
being able to live for the moment only; and as they begin to go
forward on their journey, they will find that they have made for
themselves new fetters. Slight projects they may have entertained
for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to them, they know not
why. They will be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I
spoke above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned one
village and not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable
power. And yet a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious
liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling on them
to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy
expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and lead them back
into the old paths. Once and again we have all made the experiment.
We know the end of it right well. And yet if we make it for the
hundredth time to-morrow: it will have the same charm as ever; our
heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as we leave the town
behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we have felt so often
before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for ever from our whole
past life, with all its sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go
forward as a new creature into a new world.
It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for
walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull,
heavy, and lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its
colour reacted on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed,
the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through with bright
autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the
solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and hill-top were
not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet and more grey as
they drew off into the distance. As they drew off into the distance,
also, the woods seemed to mass themselves together, and lie thin and
straight, like clouds, upon the limit of one's view. Not that this
massing was complete, or gave the idea of any extent of forest, for
every here and there the trees would break up and go down into a
valley in open order, or stand in long Indian file along the horizon,
tree after tree relieved, foolishly enough, against the sky. I say
foolishly enough, although I have seen the effect employed cleverly
in art, and such long line of single trees thrown out against the
customary sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain fantastic
effect that was not to be despised; but this was over water and level
land, where it did not jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills
and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look of being
painted, the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was
something so sketchy and merely impressional about these distant
single trees on the horizon that one was forced to think of it all as
of a clever French landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see
resemblance to art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred
times, 'How like a picture!' for once that we say, 'How like the
truth!' The forms in which we learn to think of landscape are forms
that we have got from painted canvas. Any man can see and understand
a picture; it is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the
confusion of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably
in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and
the distance I could see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful
carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as I went. Indeed,
during all the time I was in that country the larks did not desert
me. The air was alive with them from High Wycombe to Tring; and as,
day after day, their 'shrill delight' fell upon me out of the vacant
sky, they began to take such a prominence over other conditions, and
form so integral a part of my conception of the country, that I could
have baptized it 'The Country of Larks.' This, of course, might just
as well have been in early spring; but everything else was deeply
imbued with the sentiment of the later year. There was no stir of
insects in the grass. The sunshine was more golden, and gave less
heat than summer sunshine; and the shadows under the hedge were
somewhat blue and misty. It was only in autumn that you could have
seen the mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and the fallen
leaves that lay about the road, and covered the surface of wayside
pools so thickly that the sun was reflected only here and there from
little joints and pinholes in that brown coat of proof; or that your
ear would have been troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional
report of fowling-pieces from all directions and all degrees of
distance.
For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly
still. They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing
of the larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling
of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me
quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road.
This fellow-voyager proved to be no less a person than the parish
constable. It had occurred to me that in a district which was so
little populous and so well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence
might play hide-and-seek with the authorities for months; and this
idea was strengthened by the aspect of the portly constable as he
walked by my side with deliberate dignity and turned-out toes. But a
few minutes' converse set my heart at rest. These rural criminals
are very tame birds, it appeared. If my informant did not
immediately lay his hand on an offender, he was content to wait; some
evening after nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the
outlaw, weary of outlawry, would give himself quietly up to undergo
sentence, and resume his position in the life of the country-side.
Married men caused him no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by
the foot. Sooner or later they would come back to see their wives, a
peeping neighbour would pass the word, and my portly constable would
walk quietly over and take the bird sitting. And if there were a few
who had no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and preferred to
shift into another county when they fell into trouble, their
departure moved the placid constable in no degree. He was of
Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not stand in the Prince's
name, he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked God he was
rid of a knave. And surely the crime and the law were in admirable
keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic offender. The
officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the criminal came to
visit him, and the criminal coming - it was a fair match. One felt
as if this must have been the order in that delightful seaboard
Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in such sweet accents, and
the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty
shearers danced with nosegays in their bosoms, and chanted their
three songs apiece at the old shepherd's festival; and one could not
help picturing to oneself what havoc among good peoples purses, and
tribulation for benignant constables, might be worked here by the
arrival, over stile and footpath, of a new Autolycus.
Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and
struck across country. It was rather a revelation to pass from
between the hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a
great coming and going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in
every second field, lusty horses and stout country-folk a-ploughing.
The way I followed took me through many fields thus occupied, and
through many strips of plantation, and then over a little space of
smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with tall fir-trees and
clamorous with rooks making ready for the winter, and so back again
into the quiet road. I was now not far from the end of my day's
journey. A few hundred yards farther, and, passing through a gap in
the hedge, I began to go down hill through a pretty extensive tract
of young beeches. I was soon in shadow myself, but the afternoon sun
still coloured the upmost boughs of the wood, and made a fire over my
head in the autumnal foliage. A little faint vapour lay among the
slim tree-stems in the bottom of the hollow; and from farther up I
heard from time to time an outburst of gross laughter, as though
clowns were making merry in the bush. There was something about the
atmosphere that brought all sights and sounds home to one with a
singular purity, so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with
water. After I had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began
to remount the hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got
back again, from the head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I
saw in front of me a donkey tied to a tree. Now, I have a certain
liking for donkeys, principally, I believe, because of the delightful
things that Sterne has written of them. But this was not after the
pattern of the ass at Lyons. He was of a white colour, that seemed
to fit him rather for rare festal occasions than for constant
drudgery. Besides, he was very small, and of the daintiest portions
you can imagine in a donkey. And so, sure enough, you had only to
look at him to see he had never worked. There was something too
roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that of a schoolboy
or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling. It was plain
that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than they
had plodded with a freight through miry lanes. He was altogether a
fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and though he was just then
somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of the levity of
his disposition by impudently wagging his ears at me as I drew near.
I say he was somewhat solemnised just then; for, with the admirable
instinct of all men and animals under restraint, he had so wound and
wound the halter about the tree that he could go neither back nor
forwards, nor so much as put down his head to browse. There he
stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, part angry, part, I believe, amused.
He had not given up hope, and dully revolved the problem in his head,
giving ever and again another jerk at the few inches of free rope
that still remained unwound. A humorous sort of sympathy for the
creature took hold upon me. I went up, and, not without some trouble
on my part, and much distrust and resistance on the part of Neddy,
got him forced backwards until the whole length of the halter was set
loose, and he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to make him.
I was pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to a fellow-
creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see how
he was profiting by his freedom. The brute was looking after me; and
no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long white face into
the air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to bray
derisively. If ever any one person made a grimace at another, that
donkey made a grimace at me. The hardened ingratitude of his
behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his whole face as he
curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and began to bray, so
tickled me, and was so much in keeping with what I had imagined to
myself about his character, that I could not find it in my heart to
be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter. This seemed to
strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way of
rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I
began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned
to pursue my way. In so doing - it was like going suddenly into cold
water - I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid. She
was all in a flutter, the poor old dear! She had concluded beyond
question that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a
white donkey in the placid beech-woods. I was sure, by her face,
that she had already recommended her spirit most religiously to
Heaven, and prepared herself for the worst. And so, to reassure her,
I uncovered and besought her, after a very staid fashion, to put me
on my way to Great Missenden. Her voice trembled a little, to be
sure, but I think her mind was set at rest; and she told me, very
explicitly, to follow the path until I came to the end of the wood,
and then I should see the village below me in the bottom of the
valley. And, with mutual courtesies, the little old maid and I went
on our respective ways.
Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden was close at hand, as she had
said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms about
it. The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the afternoon
sunshine. The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled the
neighbouring fields and hung about the quaint street corners. A
little above, the church sits well back on its haunches against the
hillside - an attitude for a church, you know, that makes it look as
if it could be ever so much higher if it liked; and the trees grew
about it thickly, so as to make a density of shade in the churchyard.
A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many boards and posters
about threatening dire punishment against those who broke the church
windows or defaced the precinct, and offering rewards for the
apprehension of those who had done the like already. It was fair day
in Great Missenden. There were three stalls set up, SUB JOVE, for
the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and a great number of holiday
children thronged about the stalls and noisily invaded every corner
of the straggling village. They came round me by coveys, blowing
simultaneously upon penny trumpets as though they imagined I should
fall to pieces like the battlements of Jericho. I noticed one among
them who could make a wheel of himself like a London boy, and
seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-eminence upon the strength of the
accomplishment. By and by, however, the trumpets began to weary me,
and I went indoors, leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height.
Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. It was pitch-dark in
the village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for a
light here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open door.
Into one such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw within a
charming GENRE picture. In a room, all white wainscot and crimson
wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, empty darkness
in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a story, as
well as I could make out, to an attentive child upon her knee, while
an old woman sat placidly dozing over the fire. You may be sure I
was not behindhand with a story for myself - a good old story after
the manner of G. P. R. James and the village melodramas, with a
wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney, and a virtuous young
man with a genius for mechanics, who should love, and protect, and
ultimately marry the girl in the crimson room. Baudelaire has a few
dainty sentences on the fancies that we are inspired with when we
look through a window into other people's lives; and I think Dickens
has somewhere enlarged on the same text. The subject, at least, is
one that I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember, night after
night, at Brussels, watching a good family sup together, make merry,
and retire to rest; and night after night I waited to see the candles
lit, and the salad made, and the last salutations dutifully
exchanged, without any abatement of interest. Night after night I
found the scene rivet my attention and keep me awake in bed with all
manner of quaint imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the ARABIAN
NIGHTS hinges upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of
lifting other people's roofs, and going about behind the scenes of
life with the Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary
exercise, besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves and see
people living together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence,
as they will live when we are gone. If to-morrow the blow falls, and
the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none the less
tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their
salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill
in the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping
garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the
tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so
much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
hovered over by white butterflies. And now, look at the end of it!
She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense. And, indeed,
unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the
composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly
upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long and abstruse
calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare the
distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box of the
Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We tackled
the question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for
Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant
conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna in my
information. I did not know the circumference of the earth. The
landlord knew it, to be sure - plainly he had made the same
calculation twice and once before, - but he wanted confidence in his
own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a second
seemed to lose all interest in the result.
Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either
hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a
sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook
over the place. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was
shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful
convolutions. From the level to which I have now attained the fields
were exposed before me like a map, and I could see all that bustle of
autumn field-work which had been hid from me yesterday behind the
hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as I followed the
footpath. Wendover lay well down in the midst, with mountains of
foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to the northward,
variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of the fields, but
growing ever more and more indistinct, until it became a mere hurly-
burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and snatches of
slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over
the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and there with
blue, and with certain faint russets that looked as if they were
reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear
the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of
larks innumerable overhead, and, from a field where the shepherd was
marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All
these noises came to me very thin and distinct in the clear air.
There was a wonderful sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the
day and the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky
footholds cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover and, as far as I
could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of
beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung
down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying
flatly along the summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs
were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a
bush of heather. The prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red,
touched here and there with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce
advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart
of the wood; and as soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I
found myself in a dim green forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin
foliage. In places where the wood had itself for a background and
the trees were massed together thickly, the colour became intensified
and almost gem-like: a perfect fire green, that seemed none the less
green for a few specks of autumn gold. None of the trees were of any
considerable age or stature; but they grew well together, I have
said; and as the road turned and wound among them, they fell into
pleasant groupings and broke the light up pleasantly. Sometimes
there would be a colonnade of slim, straight tree-stems with the
light running down them as down the shafts of pillars, that looked as
if it ought to lead to something, and led only to a corner of sombre
and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be
thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along the top of it, so that
against a dark background it seemed almost luminous. There was a
great bush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket
than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops,
and the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the
undergrowth, had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness,
that put the imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the
russet carpeting of last year's leaves. The spirit of the place
seemed to be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its
breath to number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of the
open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon the
slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at
some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be
walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and
change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward, and
so shift my point of view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced
towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught
sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and
something like the tops of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard
it proved to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with the beech-
woods growing almost to the door of it. Just before me, however, as
I came upon the path, the trees drew back and let in a wide flood of
daylight on to a circular lawn. It was here that the noises had
their origin. More than a score of peacocks (there are altogether
thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, and a great
multitude that I could not number of more ordinary barn-door fowls,
were all feeding together on this little open lawn among the beeches.
They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and fro, and came hither
and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which the surface was
agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his head
along the ground after the scattered corn. The clucking, cooing
noise that had led me thither was formed by the blending together of
countless expressions of individual contentment into one collective
expression of contentment, or general grace during meat. Every now
and again a big peacock would separate himself from the mob and take
a stately turn or two about the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment
upon the rail, and there shrilly publish to the world his
satisfaction with himself and what he had to eat. It happened, for
my sins, that none of these admirable birds had anything beyond the
merest rudiment of a tail. Tails, it seemed, were out of season just
then. But they had their necks for all that; and by their necks
alone they do as much surpass all the other birds of our grey climate
as they fall in quality of song below the blackbird or the lark.
Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour
and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its
painted throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great
Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the
consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a
fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without
having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought
these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I
would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in
all the spring woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a
man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres of
stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands
and white roads, was like going three whole days' journey to the
southward, or a month back into the summer.
I was sorry to leave PEACOCK FARM - for so the place is called, after
the name of its splendid pensioners - and go forwards again in the
quiet woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches;
and as the day declined the colour faded out of the foliage; and
shadow, without form and void, took the place of all the fine tracery
of leaves and delicate gradations of living green that had before
accompanied my walk. I had been sorry to leave PEACOCK FARM, but I
was not sorry to find myself once more in the open road, under a pale
and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky, and put my best foot
foremost for the inn at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street
should go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen
with a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of
neighbours to join in his heresy. It would have somewhat the look of
an abortive watering-place, such as we may now see them here and
there along the coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely
quiet design of some of them, and the look of long habitation, of a
life that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth while to train
flowers about the windows, and otherwise shape the dwelling to the
humour of the inhabitant. The church, which might perhaps have
served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and pulled the
township into something like intelligible unity, stands some distance
off among great trees; but the inn (to take the public buildings in
order of importance) is in what I understand to be the principal
street: a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and three peaked
gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the eaves.
The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I
never saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted
parlour in which I spent the remainder of the evening. It was a
short oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built across one
of the angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle
was similarly truncated by a corner cupboard. The wainscot was
white, and there was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it
might have been imported by Walter Shandy before he retired, worn
almost through in some places, but in others making a good show of
blues and oranges, none the less harmonious for being somewhat faded.
The corner cupboard was agreeable in design; and there were just the
right things upon the shelves - decanters and tumblers, and blue
plates, and one red rose in a glass of water. The furniture was old-
fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down to the
ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. And you may fancy how
pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over by the light of a
brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of
perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror above the
chimney. As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept looking
round with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was
about me, and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish
pride in forming part of it. The book I read was about Italy in the
early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves of princes,
the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art; but it was
written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suited
the room infinitely more nearly than the matter; and the result was
that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or Lorenzo, or
Politian, than of the good Englishman who had written in that volume
what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure in his solemn
polysyllables.
I was not left without society. My landlord had a very pretty little
daughter, whom we shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the
time, I might be able to tell you something definite of her
appearance. But faces have a trick of growing more and more
spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of
them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in a
face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest painter's
touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it. And if it is
hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair pencils, you may think
how hopeless it must be to pursue after it with clumsy words. If I
say, for instance, that this look, which I remember as Lizzie, was
something wistful that seemed partly to come of slyness and in part
of simplicity, and that I am inclined to imagine it had something to
do with the daintiest suspicion of a cast in one of her large eyes, I
shall have said all that I can, and the reader will not be much
advanced towards comprehension. I had struck up an acquaintance with
this little damsel in the morning, and professed much interest in her
dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large one which was kept
locked away for great occasions. And so I had not been very long in
the parlour before the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie with two
dolls tucked clumsily under her arm. She was followed by her brother
John, a year or so younger than herself, not simply to play propriety
at our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation of his
sister's dolls. I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' dresses,
and, with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about their
age and character. I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my
sincerity, but it was evident that she was both bewildered and a
little contemptuous. Although she was ready herself to treat her
dolls as if they were alive, she seemed to think rather poorly of any
grown person who could fall heartily into the spirit of the fiction.
Sometimes she would look at me with gravity and a sort of
disquietude, as though she really feared I must be out of my wits.
Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly into the question of
their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily that I began to
feel almost embarrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I asked to be
allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no longer to
herself. Clambering down from the chair on which she sat perched to
show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of the room
and into the bar - it was just across the passage, - and I could hear
her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in sorrow
than in merriment, that THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR WANTED TO KISS
DOLLY. I fancy she was determined to save me from this humiliating
action, even in spite of myself, for she never gave me the desired
permission. She reminded me of an old dog I once knew, who would
never suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an exaggerated
sense of the dignity of that master's place and carriage.
After the young people were gone there was but one more incident ere
I went to bed. I heard a party of children go up and down the dark
street for a while, singing together sweetly. And the mystery of
this little incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely refrained
from asking who they were, and wherefore they went singing at so late
an hour. One can rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting with
some pleasant accident. I have a conviction that these children
would not have gone singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had
been the delightful place it was. At least, if I had been in the
customary public room of the modern hotel, with all its
disproportions and discomforts, my ears would have been dull, and
there would have been some ugly temper or other uppermost in my
spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs upon an unworthy
hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already.
The sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind
went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the
dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the church buttresses. Now
and again, also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut
among the grass - the dog would bark before the rectory door - or
there would come a clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind.
But in spite of these occasional interruptions - in spite, also, of
the continuous autumn twittering that filled the trees - the chief
impression somehow was one as of utter silence, insomuch that the
little greenish bell that peeped out of a window in the tower
disquieted me with a sense of some possible and more inharmonious
disturbance. The grass was wet, as if with a hoar frost that had
just been melted. I do not know that ever I saw a morning more
autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, I saw some flowers
set reverently before a recently erected tomb, and drawing near, was
almost startled to find they lay on the grave a man seventy-two years
old when he died. We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the
young, where love has been cut short untimely, and great
possibilities have been restrained by death. We strew them there in
token, that these possibilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be
realised, and the touch of our dead loves remain with us and guide us
to the end. And yet there was more significance, perhaps, and
perhaps a greater consolation, in this little nosegay on the grave of
one who had died old. We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of
death, and think so little of the enduring tragedy of some men's
lives, that we see more to lament for in a life cut off in the midst
of usefulness and love, than in one that miserably survives all love
and usefulness, and goes about the world the phantom of itself,
without hope, or joy, or any consolation. These flowers seemed not
so much the token of love that survived death, as of something yet
more beautiful - of love that had lived a man's life out to an end
with him, and been faithful and companionable, and not weary of
loving, throughout all these years.
The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods, as
I set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. The road lay for a
good distance along the side of the hills, with the great plain below
on one hand, and the beech-woods above on the other. The fields were
busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of
ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait
smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a
moment to take a draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and under
all the leafless hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour abroad,
and, as it were, a spirit of picnic. The horses smoked and the men
laboured and shouted and drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that
one had a strong effect of large, open-air existence. The fellow who
drove me was something of a humourist; and his conversation was all
in praise of an agricultural labourer's way of life. It was he who
called my attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could
not sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told
me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the
morning air, whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired this
provision of nature. He sang O FORTUNATOS AGRICOLAS! indeed, in
every possible key, and with many cunning inflections, till I began
to wonder what was the use of such people as Mr. Arch, and to sing
the same air myself in a more diffident manner.
Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station; for the two are
not very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of
old days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break
loose in the town and work mischief. I had a last walk, among russet
beeches as usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of
larks; I heard shots fired in the distance, and saw, as a new sign of
the fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a pack of fox-hounds.
And then the train came and carried me back to London.
CHAPTER IV - A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY - A FRAGMENT -
1876
AT the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire
of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick
side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft
with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of
wood. Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of
similar hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards the
sea it swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay-
window in a plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold
crags. This hill is known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more
shortly, Brown Carrick.
It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. The
wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea,
in quiet weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in
the air. An effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick
showed where the sun was trying to look through; but along the
horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so that there was no
distinction of sky and sea. Over the white shoulders of the
headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but a great
vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near the edge of the
cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void space.
The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out
barking as they smelt a passer-by upon the road. I met a fine old
fellow, who might have sat as the father in 'The Cottar's Saturday
Night,' and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving. And
a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping out
to gather cockles. His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was broken
up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered
in two colours, an incongruous pink and grey. He had a faint air of
being surprised - which, God knows, he might well be - that life had
gone so ill with him. The shape of his trousers was in itself a
jest, so strangely were they bagged and ravelled about his knees; and
his coat was all bedaubed with clay as tough he had lain in a rain-
dub during the New Year's festivity. I will own I was not sorry to
think he had had a merry New Year, and been young again for an
evening; but I was sorry to see the mark still there. One could not
expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or a great student
of respectability in dress; but there might have been a wife at home,
who had brushed out similar stains after fifty New Years, now become
old, or a round-armed daughter, who would wish to have him neat, were
it only out of self-respect and for the ploughman sweetheart when he
looks round at night. Plainly, there was nothing of this in his
life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on his old arms. He was
seventy-six, he told me; and nobody would give a day's work to a man
that age: they would think he couldn't do it. 'And, 'deed,' he went
on, with a sad little chuckle, ''deed, I doubt if I could.' He said
goodbye to me at a footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work.
It will make your heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping
in the snow.
He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure.
And so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble
of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road
leading downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close under the steep
hill: a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair,
much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses.
Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few
vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on
the beach to the tidemark. It was daubed on to the sills of the
ruin: it roosted in the crannies of the rock like white sea-birds;
even on outlying reefs there would be a little cock of snow, like a
toy lighthouse. Everything was grey and white in a cold and dolorous
sort of shepherd's plaid. In the profound silence, broken only by
the noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded twice; and I saw the
postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment at the end of the clachan
for letters.
It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought him.
The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me,
and though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me 'ben
the hoose' into the guest-room. This guest-room at Dunure was
painted in quite aesthetic fashion. There are rooms in the same
taste not a hundred miles from London, where persons of an extreme
sensibility meet together without embarrassment. It was all in a
fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of
colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt
the better feelings of the most exquisite purist. A cherry-red half
window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw
quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half-penny
china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. Even the
spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-
shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to
itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork,
but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and
Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful
housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a
labour of love. The patches came exclusively from people's raiment.
There was no colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; 'My
Johnny's grey breeks,' well polished over the oar on the boat's
thwart, entered largely into its composition. And the spoils of an
old black cloth coat, that had been many a Sunday to church, added
something (save the mark!) of preciousness to the material.
While I was at luncheon four carters came in - long-limbed, muscular
Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces. Four quarts of stout
were ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as
they drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words
the four quarts were finished - another round was proposed,
discussed, and negatived - and they were creaking out of the village
with their carts.
The ruins drew you towards them. You never saw any place more
desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near
at hand. Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled in.
The snow had drifted into the vaults. The clachan dabbled with snow,
the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the coves with
faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked from a loop-
hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows. If you had
been a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the afternoon,
you would have had a rare fit of remorse. How you would have heaped
up the fire and gnawed your fingers! I think it would have come to
homicide before the evening - if it were only for the pleasure of
seeing something red! And the masters of Dunure, it is to be
noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity. One of these vaults
where the snow had drifted was that 'black route' where 'Mr. Alane
Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery trials. On
the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr. Alan!), Gilbert,
Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook, his pantryman,
and another servant, bound the Poor Commendator 'betwix an iron
chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly roasted him until he signed
away his abbacy. it is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly period,
but not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes
it hard to sympathise quite seriously with the victim. And it is
consoling to remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy,
and, over and above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.
Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly aspect,
opened out. Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore, and
there was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made a
sort of shadowy etching over the snow. The road went down and up,
and past a blacksmith's cottage that made fine music in the valley.
Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart. They were all
drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I told
them it was; and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment.
One gentleman was so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart;
indeed, he was only saved by a companion, who either had not so fine
a sense of humour or had drunken less.
'The toune of Mayboll,' says the inimitable Abercrummie, 'stands upon
an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south.
It hath one principals street, with houses upon both sides, built of
freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles,
one at each end of this street. That on the east belongs to the Erle
of Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which belonged sometime to
the laird of Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is adorned
with a pyremide [conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it
raised from the top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a
fyne clock. There be four lanes which pass from the principall
street; one is called the Black Vennel, which is steep, declining to
the south-west, and leads to a lower street, which is far larger than
the high chiefe street, and it runs from the Kirkland to the Well
Trees, in which there have been many pretty buildings, belonging to
the severall gentry of the countrey, who were wont to resort thither
in winter, and divert themselves in converse together at their owne
houses. It was once the principall street of the town; but many of
these houses of the gentry having been decayed and ruined, it has
lost much of its ancient beautie. Just opposite to this vennel,
there is another that leads north-west, from the chiefe street to the
green, which is a pleasant plott of ground, enclosed round with an
earthen wall, wherein they were wont to play football, but now at the
Gowff and byasse-bowls. The houses of this towne, on both sides of
the street, have their several gardens belonging to them; and in the
lower street there be some pretty orchards, that yield store of good
fruit.' As Patterson says, this description is near enough even to-
day, and is mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound to add, of my
own experience, that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary. Prosperous
enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though the population
has increased, a roofless house every here and there seems to protest
the contrary. The women are more than well-favoured, and the men
fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and dissipated. As they
slouched at street corners, or stood about gossiping in the snow, it
seemed they would have been more at home in the slums of a large city
than here in a country place betwixt a village and a town. I heard a
great deal about drinking, and a great deal about religious revivals:
two things in which the Scottish character is emphatic and most
unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing
their time in explaining to a delighted audience the physics of the
Second Coming. It is not very likely any of us will be asked to
help. if we were, it is likely we should receive instructions for the
occasion, and that on more reliable authority. And so I can only
figure to myself a congregation truly curious in such flights of
theological fancy, as one of veteran and accomplished saints, who
have fought the good fight to an end and outlived all worldly
passion, and are to be regarded rather as a part of the Church
Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on earth. And yet I saw
some young fellows about the smoking-room who seemed, in the eyes of
one who cannot count himself strait-laced, in need of some more
practical sort of teaching. They seemed only eager to get drunk, and
to do so speedily. It was not much more than a week after the New
Year; and to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto
unspeakable was not altogether pleasing. Here is one snatch of talk,
for the accuracy of which I can vouch-
'Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?'
'We had that!'
'I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, I was awful bad on
Wednesday.'
'Ay, ye were gey bad.'
And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual
accents! They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort of
rational pride. Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are not
more boastful; a cock does not plume himself with a more unmingled
satisfaction as he paces forth among his harem; and yet these were
grown men, and by no means short of wit. It was hard to suppose they
were very eager about the Second Coming: it seemed as if some
elementary notions of temperance for the men and seemliness for the
women would have gone nearer the mark. And yet, as it seemed to me
typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is also typical of
much that is best. Some of the factories, which have taken the place
of weaving in the town's economy, were originally founded and are
still possessed by self-made men of the sterling, stout old breed -
fellows who made some little bit of an invention, borrowed some
little pocketful of capital, and then, step by step, in courage,
thrift and industry, fought their way upwards to an assured position.
Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious
to withhold: 'This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a
Frenchman, the 6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors of
the parish of Maiyboll.' The Castle deserves more notice. It is a
large and shapely tower, plain from the ground upwards, but with a
zone of ornamentation running about the top. In a general way this
adornment is perched on the very summit of the chimney-stacks; but
there is one corner more elaborate than the rest. A very heavy
string-course runs round the upper story, and just above this, facing
up the street, the tower carries a small oriel window, fluted and
corbelled and carved about with stone heads. It is so ornate it has
somewhat the air of a shrine. And it was, indeed, the casket of a
very precious jewel, for in the room to which it gives light lay, for
long years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of 'Johnnie Faa' -
she who, at the call of the gipsies' songs, 'came tripping down the
stair, and all her maids before her.' Some people say the ballad has
no basis in fact, and have written, I believe, unanswerable papers to
the proof. But in the face of all that, the very look of that high
oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter into all the
sorrows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of the long,
lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against the mullions,
and saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the children
at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray. We
conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her
some snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eyes
overflowed at the memory of the past. And even if the tale be not
true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in
the essence of all men and women: for all of us, some time or other,
hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour cast. Some
resist and sit resolutely by the fire. Most go and are brought back
again, like Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe of Waring, go and are
seen no more; only now and again, at springtime, when the gipsies'
song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we can catch their voices in
the glee.
By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the
day. Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon
battled the other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying
silver; the town came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables,
bestridden by smooth white roofs, and sprangled here and there with
lighted windows. At either end the snow stood high up in the
darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth and among the chimneys of the
Castle. As the moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the town
between the racing clouds, the white roofs leaped into relief over
the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their shadows over the white
roofs. In the town itself the lit face of the clock peered down the
street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's bell, and from behind
the red curtains of a public-house some one trolled out - a
compatriot of Burns, again! - 'The saut tear blin's my e'e.'
Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind. From the street
corners of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields.
The road underfoot was wet and heavy - part ice, part snow, part
water, and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 'A
fine thowe' (thaw). My way lay among rather bleak bills, and past
bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-
looking village of Kirkoswald. It has little claim to notice, save
that Burns came there to study surveying in the summer of 1777, and
there also, in the kirkyard, the original of Tam o' Shanter sleeps
his last sleep. It is worth noticing, however, that this was the
first place I thought 'Highland-looking.' Over the bill from
Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast. As I came down above
Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different from the day
before. The cold fogs were all blown away; and there was Ailsa
Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the Bass Rock;
and there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran, veined and
tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue land of
Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the top of
Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south. The sea was
bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down the
Firth, lay over at different angles in the wind. On Shanter they
were ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered
and whinnied as if the spring were in him.
The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-
hills and by wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here and there a
few cottages stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd
feature, not easy to describe in words: a triangular porch projected
from above the door, supported at the apex by a single upright post;
a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be hasped on
either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind was north or
south, the cotter could make himself a triangular bight of shelter
where to set his chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There is one
objection to this device; for, as the post stands in the middle of
the fairway, any one precipitately issuing from the cottage must run
his chance of a broken head. So far as I am aware, it is peculiar to
the little corner of country about Girvan. And that corner is
noticeable for more reasons: it is certainly one of the most
characteristic districts in Scotland, It has this movable porch by
way of architecture; it has, as we shall see, a sort of remnant of
provincial costume, and it has the handsomest population in the
Lowlands. . . .
CHAPTER V - FOREST NOTES 1875-6
ON THE PLAIN
PERHAPS the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of
the Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of
Fontainebleau. Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the
forest as if to sun themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees
stand together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tartan of a
myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend and
disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no
accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire
against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness
in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn and vast
towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as it were
into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking
behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his wife in
their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these people
stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time
against the golden sky.
These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present
times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the
peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in
Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people
now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his
wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is
they who have been their country's scapegoat for long ages; they who,
generation after generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and
another has garnered; and who have now entered into their reward, and
enjoy their good things in their turn. For the days are gone by when
the Seigneur ruled and profited. 'Le Seigneur,' says the old
formula, 'enferme ses manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la
terre. Tout est a lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans
l'eau, bete an buisson, l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au
loin roule.' Such was his old state of sovereignty, a local god
rather than a mere king. And now you may ask yourself where he is,
and look round for vestiges of my late lord, and in all the country-
side there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion. At
the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a
close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers
and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked
roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There is a glad
spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in flower,
and the creepers green about the broken balustrade: but no spring
shall revive the honour of the place. Old women of the people,
little, children of the people, saunter and gambol in the walled
court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat. Plough-horses, mighty
of limb, browse in the long stables. The dial-hand on the clock
waits for some better hour. Out on the plain, where hot sweat
trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and comes up
slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at his heart
when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold, which have
so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he and
his hollow-eyed children watched through the night with empty bellies
and cold feet. And perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the
forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along the sea-level of
the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no unsimilar place in his
affections.
If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's;
neither of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his
meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a
new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole department,
from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born
lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself,
and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform. For the first
offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of fifteen sols; and
should a man be taken more than once in fault, or circumstances
aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or
hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine
tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might see his
fellows dangle against the sky as he went to market.
And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more hares
and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to trample
it down. My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven
francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a
silken leash to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have been on a
pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the
Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a speciality of
the health of hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the game was turned and
the branch broken by our best piqueur. A rare day's hunting lies
before us. Wind a jolly flourish, sound the BIEN-ALLER with all your
lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat in hand, while the quarry and
hound and huntsman sweep across his field, and a year's sparing and
labouring is as though it had not been. If he can see the ruin with
a good enough grace, who knows but he may fall in favour with my
lord; who knows but his son may become the last and least among the
servants at his lordship's kennel - one of the two poor varlets who
get no wages and sleep at night among the hounds?
For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming
him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had
been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or
lay over-seas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the
watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the
sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pensions drawing nigh
across the plain, these good folk gat them up, with all their
household gods, into the wood, whence, from some high spur, their
timid scouts might overlook the coming and going of the marauders,
and see the harvest ridden down, and church and cottage go up to
heaven all night in flame. It was but an unhomely refuge that the
woods afforded, where they must abide all change of weather and keep
house with wolves and vipers. Often there was none left alive, when
they returned, to show the old divisions of field from field. And
yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night into depopulated
Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a company of demons
like himself, even in these caves and thickets there were glad hearts
and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and
noble by old associations. These woods have rung to the horns of all
the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They have seen
Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis
I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of
Russia following his first stag. And so they are still haunted for
the imagination by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the
faces of memorable men of yore. And this distinction is not only in
virtue of the pastime of dead monarchs.
Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of men,
have here left their note, here taken shape in some significant and
dramatic situation. It was hence that Gruise and his leaguers led
Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, booted and spurred, and
with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met the Pope beside a woodland
cross. Here, on his way to Elba not so long after, he kissed the
eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate farewell to his
soldiers. And here, after Waterloo, rather than yield its ensign to
the new power, one of his faithful regiments burned that memorial of
so much toil and glory on the Grand Master's table, and drank its
dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes the remnants of the Host.
IN THE SEASON
Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
BORNAGE stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain small
and very quiet village. There is but one street, and that, not long
ago, was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between the
doorsteps. As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the
beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn where
artists lodge. To the door (for I imagine it to be six o'clock on
some fine summer's even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of
people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and
waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go on into the court you will
find as many more, some in billiard-room over absinthe and a match of
corks some without over a last cigar and a vermouth. The doves coo
and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is drawing water from the
well; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can see the
white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and some idle
painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes, jangling
a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-manger.
'EDMOND, ENCORE UN VERMOUTH,' cries a man in velveteen, adding in a
tone of apologetic afterthought, 'UN DOUBLE, S'IL VOUS PLAIT.'
'Where are you working?' asks one in pure white linen from top to
toe. 'At the Carrefour de l'Epine,' returns the other in corduroy
(they are all gaitered, by the way). 'I couldn't do a thing to it.
I ran out of white. Where were you?' 'I wasn't working. I was
looking for motives.' Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot
of men clustering together about some new-comer with outstretched
hands; perhaps the 'correspondence' has come in and brought So-and-so
from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-and-so who has walked over from
Chailly to dinner.
'A TABLE, MESSIEURS!' cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
first tureen of soup. And immediately the company begins to settle
down about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round with
sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit. There's the big
picture of the huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his
legs, and his legs - well, his legs in stockings. And here is the
little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a
hole last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from the
dessert. And under all these works of art so much eating goes
forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering in French and English,
that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the
door. One man is telling how they all went last year to the fete at
Fleury, and another how well so-and-so would sing of an evening: and
here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole future of
their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and making
faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most difficult and
admirable! A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and
resigns himself to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, and
calls for soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is
once more trampling the poor piano under powerful and uncertain
fingers.
Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat. Perhaps we go
along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some
pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is
organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces
under manful jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a
lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden
floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures, get
up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on
approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or sometimes -
suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-lit
dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light picks out
the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every vine-leaf on
the wall - sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready,
and a good procession formed in front of the hotel. The two
trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the long alley,
and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees, with
every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and
there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede us and
sound many a jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry
boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of
the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely beards and comely faces and
toilettes ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is
burnt and sent round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two
may pass with song and jest. And then we go home in the moonlit
morning, straggling a good deal among the birch tufts and the
boulders, but ever called together again, as one of our leaders winds
his horn. Perhaps some one of the party will not heed the summons,
but chooses out some by-way of his own. As he follows the winding
sandy road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the
distance, and die finally out, and still walks on in the strange
coolness and silence and between the crisp lights and shadows of the
moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-
away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on
forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-
place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human
ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his
mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly
silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the
hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and
away in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his
childhood passed between the sun and flowers.
IDLE HOURS
The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day. The
stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees
that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving
winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind
working on the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or
over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the
quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, transitory surface of the
sea. And yet in itself, as I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal
solitudes is not to be felt fully without the sense of contrast. You
must have risen in the morning and seen the woods as they are by day,
kindled and coloured in the sun's light; you must have felt the odour
of innumerable trees at even, the unsparing heat along the forest
roads, and the coolness of the groves.
And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you
have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon,
you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window - for
there are no blind or shutters to keep him out - and the room, with
its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you
in a sort of glory of reflected lights. You may doze a while longer
by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and
horses with which former occupants have defiled the partitions:
Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in hand; or,
maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after
artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders
easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets
of for what he calls his 'motive.' And artist after artist, as he
goes out of the village, carries with him a little following of dogs.
For the dogs, who belong only nominally to any special master, hang
about the gate of the forest all day long, and whenever any one goes
by who hits their fancy, profit by his escort, and go forth with him
to play an hour or two at hunting. They would like to be under the
trees all day. But they cannot go alone. They require a pretext.
And so they take the passing artist as an excuse to go into the
woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe.
With quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a
greyhound and with a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will
trot by your side all day and come home with you at night, still
showing white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour is
not to be exhausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please,
and all they will do is to give you a wider berth. If once they come
out with you, to you they will remain faithful, and with you return;
although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like
as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.
The forest - a strange thing for an Englishman - is very destitute of
birds. This is no country where every patch of wood among the
meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered
through by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a
profusion of clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be
regretted on its own account only. For the insects prosper in their
absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in
the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun
finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad transparent
creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and even between-
whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the dark
arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual drift of
insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things between the
trees. Nor are insects the only evil creatures that haunt the
forest. For you may plump into a cave among the rocks, and find
yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked viper
slither across the road.
Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden
by a friend: 'I say, just keep where you are, will you? You make
the jolliest motive.' And you reply: 'Well, I don't mind, if I may
smoke.' And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the
easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the
tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see
another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to
his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out
of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the
rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the
flecks of sun that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind
goes by and sets the trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like
butterflies of light. But you know it is going forward; and, out of
emulation with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out
the colour for a woodland scene in words.
Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All
the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as
though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its
highest key. The boulders are some of them upright and dead like
monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The
junipers - looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some
funeral procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three
hundred years and more in wind and rain - are daubed in forcibly
against the glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of their rusty
foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry
figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees!
The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up
with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty
years in England and not see.
Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to
a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long
ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white
and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and
pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a
little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to
sit and remember loves that might have been. There is a falling
flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes back in
incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at
night, with something of a forest savour.
'You can get up now,' says the painter; 'I'm at the background.'
And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the
wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows
stretching farther into the open. A cool air comes along the
highways, and the scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad their
ozone. Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret,
aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but
as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long gone
by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their brocades
a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds. One side of
the long avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other is plunged
in transparent shadow. Over the trees the west begins to burn like a
furnace; and the painters gather up their chattels, and go down, by
avenue or footpath, to the plain.
A PLEASURE-PARTY
As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go in
force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and
ordered a large wagonette from Lejosne's. It has been waiting for
near an hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other hurried
over his toilette and coffee; but now it is filled from end to end
with merry folk in summer attire, the coachman cracks his whip, and
amid much applause from round the inn door off we rattle at a
spanking trot. The way lies through the forest, up hill and down
dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful morning sunshine.
The English get down at all the ascents and walk on ahead for
exercise; the French are mightily entertained at this, and keep coyly
underneath the tilt. As we go we carry with us a pleasant noise of
laughter and light speech, and some one will be always breaking out
into a bar or two of opera bouffe. Before we get to the Route Ronde
here comes Desprez, the colourman from Fontainebleau, trudging across
on his weekly peddle with a case of merchandise; and it is 'Desprez,
leave me some malachite green'; 'Desprez, leave me so much canvas';
'Desprez, leave me this, or leave me that'; M. Desprez standing the
while in the sunlight with grave face and many salutations. The next
interruption is more important. For some time back we have had the
sound of cannon in our ears; and now, a little past Franchard, we
find a mounted trooper holding a led horse, who brings the wagonette
to a stand. The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it
appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the
moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-
roads and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most
ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of
Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the
doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is
busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too
facile sentry. His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified
and insinuating. It is not for nothing that the Doctor has voyaged
all the world over, and speaks all languages from French to
Patagonian. He has not come borne from perilous journeys to be
thwarted by a corporal of horse. And so we soon see the soldier's
mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart. 'EN
VOITURE, MESSIEURS, MESDAMES,' sings the Doctor; and on we go again
at a good round pace, for black care follows hard after us, and
discretion prevails not a little over valour in some timorous spirits
of the party. At any moment we may meet the sergeant, who will send
us back. At any moment we may encounter a flying shell, which will
send us somewhere farther off than Grez.
Grez - for that is our destination - has been highly recommended for
its beauty. 'IL Y A DE L'EAU,' people have said, with an emphasis,
as if that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am
rather led to think it does. And Grez, when we get there, is indeed
a place worthy of some praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster
of houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a quaint
old church. The inn garden descends in terraces to the river;
stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed with
rushes and embellished with a green arbour. On the opposite bank
there is a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly with willows
and poplars. And between the two lies the river, clear and deep, and
full of reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants cluster about the
starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half-way up upon the
piers in green luxuriance. They catch the dipped oar with long
antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of their
leaves. And the river wanders and thither hither among the islets,
and is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old building in
the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box
where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for his kitchen, one
oily ripple following another over the top of the yellow deal. And
you can hear a splashing and a prattle of voices from the shed under
the old kirk, where the village women wash and wash all day among the
fish and water-lilies. It seems as if linen washed there should be
specially cool and sweet.
We have come here for the river. And no sooner have we all bathed
than we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding
under the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies. Some
one sings; some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean over
the gunwale to see the image of the tall poplars far below, and the
shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and their own head
protruded, glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream. At
last, the day declining - all silent and happy, and up to the knees
in the wet lilies - we punt slowly back again to the landing-place
beside the bridge. There is a wish for solitude on all. One hides
himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another goes a walk in the
country with Cocardon; a third inspects the church. And it is not
till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes round from
glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint and fuse
once more into a jolly fellowship.
Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some of
the others, loath to break up company, will go with them a bit of the
way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It is dark in the
wagonette, and not so merry as it might have been. The coachman
loses the road. So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most
indifferent success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary to
applaud; and it seems as if the festival were fairly at an end -
'Nous avons fait la noce,
Rentrons a nos foyers!'
And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and
taken our places in the court at Mother Antonine's. There is punch
on the long table out in the open air, where the guests dine in
summer weather. The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces
round the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, against a
background of complete and solid darkness. It is all picturesque
enough; but the fact is, we are aweary. We yawn; we are out of the
vein; we have made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for
pleasure's sake, let's make an end on't. When here comes striding
into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, in a
jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable Blank; and
in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of our
laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, picture-
dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a
possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather
suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please. We are as merry as
ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to all
the good folk going farther. Then, as we are far enough from
thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an
hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered
with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a
wood fire in a mediaeval chimney. And then we plod back through the
darkness to the inn beside the river.
How quick bright things come to confusion! When we arise next
morning, the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the
face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's
lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally enough, their
voyage towards the Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies
upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the colour is washed out of
the green and golden landscape of last night, as though an envious
man had taken a water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a
sponge. We go out a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about
Grez have a trick of their own. They go on for a while among clumps
of willows and patches of vine, and then, suddenly and without any
warning, cease and determine in some miry hollow or upon some bald
knowe; and you have a short period of hope, then right-about face,
and back the way you came! So we draw about the kitchen fire and
play a round game of cards for ha'pence, or go to the billiard-room,
for a match at corks and by one consent a messenger is sent over for
the wagonette - Grez shall be left to-morrow.
To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back for
exercise, and let their kidnap-sacks follow by the trap. I need
hardly say they are neither of them French; for, of all English
phrases, the phrase 'for exercise' is the least comprehensible across
the Straits of Dover. All goes well for a while with the
pedestrians. The wet woods are full of scents in the noontide. At a
certain cross, where there is a guardhouse, they make a halt, for the
forester's wife is the daughter of their good host at Barbizon. And
so there they are hospitably received by the comely woman, with one
child in her arms and another prattling and tottering at her gown,
and drink some syrup of quince in the back parlour, with a map of the
forest on the wall, and some prints of love-affairs and the great
Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once
more the report of the big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the
sentries, and go on a while somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the
cannon in their ears and the rain beginning to fall. The ways grow
wider and sandier; here and there there are real sand-hills, as
though by the sea-shore; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps
upon the hillocks, and the race of sign-posts is no more. One begins
to look at the other doubtfully. 'I am sure we should keep more to
the right,' says one; and the other is just as certain they should
hold to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain
falls 'sheer and strong and loud,' as out of a shower-bath. In a
moment they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out
of their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in
their boots. They leave the track and try across country with a
gambler's desperatin, for it seems as if it were impossible to make
the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from
boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than
rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and
broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the distance.
And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the grumbling
thunder. There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer discomfort
about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that it is far
more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-corner than to
suffer in the person. At last they chance on the right path, and
make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest pair of wanderers
that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois d'Hyver, the
Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean hostelry, dry
clothes, and dinner.
THE WOODS IN SPRING
I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early springtime,
when it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable violets peep
from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most sit
down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about
your knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-manger opens on
the court. There is less to distract the attention, for one thing,
and the forest is more itself. It is not bedotted with artists'
sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of
English picnics. The hunting still goes on, and at any moment your
heart may be brought into your mouth as you hear far-away horns; or
you may be told by an agitated peasant that the Vicomte has gone up
the avenue, not ten minutes since, 'A FOND DE TRAIN, MONSIEUR, ET
AVEC DOUZE PIPUERS.'
If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that
permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country,
each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed
together and mingled the one into the other at the seams. You will
see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and
leafless oaks a little ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a
solemn green; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by themselves
in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of birches,
spreading out into snow-white branches yet more delicate, and crowned
and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. And then a long, bare
ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks between them, and
wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown heather. It is all
rather cold and unhomely. It has not the perfect beauty, nor the
gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later year, when it is no more
than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow, tremulous with insects,
intersected here and there by lanes of sunlight set in purple
heather. The loveliness of the woods in March is not, assuredly, of
this blowzy rustic type. It is made sharp with a grain of salt, with
a touch of ugliness. It has a sting like the sting of bitter ale;
you acquire the love of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And
the wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs the while by
voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart
tinkling to a new tune - or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember
in your boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure, this
thirst for exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand,
plunges you into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony
crest. it is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voice,
calling you farther in, and you turn from one side to another, like
Buridan's donkey, in a maze of pleasure.
Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches,
barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched
hand. Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of
underwood; thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great forest
of stalwart boughs spreads out into the golden evening sky, where the
rooks are flying and calling. On the sward of the Bois d'Hyver the
firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like fencers saluting;
and the air smells of resin all around, and the sound of the axe is
rarely still. But strangest of all, and in appearance oldest of all,
are the dim and wizard upland districts of young wood. The ground is
carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn with fir-apples and flakes of
fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in the thicket, guttered with rain,
tufted with lichen, white with years and the rigours of the changeful
seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are sown and carried away
again by the light air - like thistledown. The loneliness of these
coverts is so excessive, that there are moments when pleasure draws
to the verge of fear. You listen and listen for some noise to break
the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the
strain; your sense of your own identity is troubled; your brain
reels, like that of some gymnosophist poring on his own nose in
Asiatic jungles; and should you see your own outspread feet, you see
them, not as anything of yours, but as a feature of the scene around
you.
Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always unbroken.
You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops;
sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes with a long
steady rush, like the breaking of waves. And sometimes, close at
band, the branches move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the
wood thrills to its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the
road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry continual chirp, the dead
leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time your steps to the steady
recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe. From time to time, over the
low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by; and from time to time the
cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not sweet and rich and near
at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of the woods, thin and far
away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear suddenly the hollow,
eager, violent barking of dogs; scared deer flit past you through the
fringes of the wood; then a man or two running, in green blouse, with
gun and game-bag on a bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the
trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds are out,
and horns are blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the
clearings, and the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you,
where you sit perched among the rocks and heather. The boar is
afoot, and all over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages,
there is a vague excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither
the chase may lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken
to a single sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are few
people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters plying
their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering wood for
the fire. You may meet such a party coming home in the twilight:
the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the little ones
hauling a long branch behind them in her wake. That is the worst of
what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened
to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise you with false
hopes; for the adventure was unique. It was on a very cold, still,
sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air,
that this friend (who shall here be nameless) heard the notes of a
key-bugle played with much hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire
spread out along the green pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard
by a hill of naked boulders. He drew near warily, and beheld a
picnic party seated under a tree in an open. The old father knitted
a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire. The eldest son, in the
uniform of a private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-
bugle. Two or three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking
violets. And the whole party as grave and silent as the woods around
them! My friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their
peace; not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out
single notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work
and made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows.
They took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon. And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the woods
with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a growing
disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much for his
courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels. It might
have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was followed as he
ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever transpired to
clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata; or it may be (and
this is the theory to which I lean myself) that this is all another
chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the upright old man with the
eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the young dragoon with
the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.
MORALITY
Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.
Not one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have
arisen to spread abroad its fame. Half the famous writers of modern
France have had their word to say about Fontainebleau.
Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George Sand, de Senancour,
Flaubert, Murger, the brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each
of these has done something to the eternal praise and memory of these
woods. Even at the very worst of times, even when the picturesque
was anathema in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the forest still
preserved a certain reputation for beauty. It was in 1730 that the
Abbe Guilbert published his HISTORICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PALACE,
TOWN, AND FOREST OF FONTAINEBLEAU. And very droll it is to see him,
as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of what was then
permissible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abbe 'sont admirees
avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace: Ut
mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari libet.' The good man is not
exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he sets his back
against Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at any rate, was
classical. For the rest, however, the Abbe likes places where many
alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-Etoile, are kept up 'by a
special gardener,' and admires at the Table du Roi the labours of the
Grand Master of Woods and Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, 'qui a fait
faire ce magnifique endroit.'
But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality
of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully
changes and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed men, sick Francis
Firsts and vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind have come here
for consolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired out of the press
of life, as into a deep bay-window on some night of masquerade, and
here found quiet and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. It is
the great moral spa; this forest without a fountain is itself the
great fountain of Juventius. It is the best place in the world to
bring an old sorrow that has been a long while your friend and enemy;
and if, like Beranger's your gaiety has run away from home and left
open the door for sorrow to come in, of all covers in Europe, it is
here you may expect to find the truant hid. With every hour you
change. The air penetrates through your clothes, and nestles to your
living body. You love exercise and slumber, long fasting and full
meals. You forget all your scruples and live a while in peace and
freedom, and for the moment only. For here, all is absent that can
stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as you see may be old, or
toil-worn, or sorry; but you see them framed in the forest, like
figures on a painted canvas; and for you, they are not people in any
living and kindly sense. You forget the grim contrariety of
interests. You forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together
in unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that
gapes on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple enough, it
seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy out of
a last night's dream.
Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible. You
become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air,
where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affections. When
you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole round
world. You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot.
You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of saddle-
bags, into the enchanted East. You may cross the Black Forest, and
see Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted with old
cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own
reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass the spinal cord of
Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends her
marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea. You
may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be awakened
at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of the robin
in the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of the beaten
road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. Autumn
should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the lane; inn
after inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by river receive
your body in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and
high trees and pleasant villages should compass you about; and light
fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour
upon your way. You may see from afar off what it will come to in the
end - the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of
the feet, cut off from all near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an
Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem well - and yet, in the
air of the forest, this will seem the best - to break all the network
bound about your feet by birth and old companionship and loyal love,
and bear your shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town country,
until the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by
itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not
only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place. If the sea, for instance, lie just
across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change.
And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness is for much
in the effect produced. You reckon up the miles that lie between you
and intrusion. You may walk before you all day long, and not fear to
touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland into the
land of gin and steam-hammers. And there is an old tale enhances for
the imagination the grandeur of the woods of France, and secures you
in the thought of your seclusion. When Charles VI. hunted in the
time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there was captured an old stag,
having a collar of bronze about his neck, and these words engraved on
the collar: 'Caesar mihi hoc donavit.' It is no wonder if the minds
of men were moved at this occurrence and they stood aghast to find
themselves thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and following an
antiquity with hound and horn. And even for you, it is scarcely in
an idle curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this stag had
carried its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers and
winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the extent of
solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's hounds
and houses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves,
with all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and elude Death,
the mighty hunter, for more than the span of human years? Here,
also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the
gallop of the pale horse. But he does not hunt this cover with all
his hounds, for the game is thin and small: and if you were but
alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest thickets, you too
might live on into later generations and astonish men by your
stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is
nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the
impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more. You may count
your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter, or
by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his
wide circuit through the naked heavens. Here shall you see no
enemies but winter and rough weather. And if a pang comes to you at
all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows,
all the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that is no duty, in
the great peace, in the pure daylight of these woods, fall away from
you like a garment. And if perchance you come forth upon an
eminence, where the wind blows upon you large and fresh, and the
pines knock their long stems together, like an ungainly sort of
puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory chimney defined
against the pale horizon - it is for you, as for the staid and simple
peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and harness from
the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a battle there
in the old times; and, sure enough, there is a world out yonder where
men strive together with a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous
dispute. So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the
imagination. A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend
as of some dead religion.
CHAPTER VI - A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE A FRAGMENT 1879
ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO SERVE AS THE OPENING CHAPTER OF 'TRAVELS WITH
A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES.'
LE MONASTIER is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the
ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin;
and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of
some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-priest and
several vicars. It stands on the side of hill above the river
Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the
wolves sometime pursue the diligence in winter. The road, which is
bound for Vivarais, passes through the town from end to end in a
single narrow street; there you may see the fountain where women fill
their pitchers; there also some old houses with carved doors and
pediment and ornamental work in iron. For Monastier, like Maybole in
Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital, where the local aristocracy
had their town mansions for the winter; and there is a certain baron
still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent, who found means to
ruin himself by high living in this village on the hills. He
certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable spendthrift
on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are no
luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to
little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His
son, ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild
oats; and so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history
of centralisation in France. Not until the latter had got into the
train was the work of Richelieu complete.
It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by
groups of five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from
one group to another. Now and then you will hear one woman
clattering off prayers for the edification of the others at their
work. They wear gaudy shawls, white caps with a gay ribbon about the
head, and sometimes a black felt brigand hat above the cap; and so
they give the street colour and brightness and a foreign air. A
while ago, when England largely supplied herself from this district
with the lace called TORCHON, it was not unusual to earn five francs
a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in London. Now,
from a change in the market, it takes a clever and industrious work-
woman to earn from three to four in the week, or less than an eighth
of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of prosperity came
and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer.
The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in idleness,
and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a merry
life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in
Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or
the bagpipes led on the BOURREES up to ten at night. Now these
dancing days are over. 'IL N'Y A PLUS DE JEUNESSE,' said Victor the
garcon. I hear of no great advance in what are thought the
essentials of morality; but the BOURREE, with its rambling, sweet,
interminable music, and alert and rustic figures, has fallen into
disuse, and is mostly remembered as a custom of the past. Only on
the occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum discreetly in a wine-
shop or perhaps one of the company singing the measure while the
others dance. I am sorry at the change, and marvel once more at the
complicated scheme of things upon this earth, and how a turn of
fashion in England can silence so much mountain merriment in France.
The lace-makers themselves have not entirely forgiven our country-
women; and I think they take a special pleasure in the legend of the
northern quarter of the town, called L'Anglade, because there the
English free-lances were arrested and driven back by the potency of a
little Virgin Mary on the wall.
From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets
have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion.
Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples,
to attend mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there
are no fewer than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men
is a green tailcoat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a
complete suit to match. I have never set eyes on such degrading
raiment. Here it clings, there bulges; and the human body, with its
agreeable and lively lines, is turned into a mockery and laughing-
stock. Another piece of Sunday business with the peasants is to take
their ailments to the chemist for advice. It is as much a matter for
Sunday as church-going. I have seen a woman who had been unable to
speak since the Monday before, wheezing, catching her breath,
endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had waited upwards of a
hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had the week been twice
as long, she would have waited still. There was a canonical day for
consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a respectable
lady must study to conform.
Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in
polite concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or
two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a
gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe. The COURRIER (such is the
name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and arrive
at Monastier in good on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier in
good time for a six-o'clock dinner. But the driver dares not
disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking the
advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous business of
stage-coaching than we are used to see it.
As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises and
falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
new and father ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all
sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier,
bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a
little more than three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the
atmosphere proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little
timber except pines, and the greater part of the country lies in
moorland pasture. The country is wild and tumbled rather than
commanding; an upland rather than a mountain district; and the most
striking as well as the most agreeable scenery lies low beside the
rivers. There, indeed, you will find many corners that take the
fancy; such as made the English noble choose his grave by a Swiss
streamlet, where nature is at her freshest, and looks as young as on
the seventh morning. Such a place is the course of the Gazeille,
where it waters the common of Monastier and thence downwards till it
joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; a place for lovers to
frequent. The name of the river was perhaps suggested by the sound
of its passage over the stones; for it is a great warbler, and at
night, after I was in bed at Monastier, I could hear it go singing
down the valley till I fell asleep.
On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble as
the best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the population is,
in its way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth,
Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, an
'Ou'st-ce que vous allez?' only translatable into the Lowland 'Whaur
ye gaun?' They keep the Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done
on that day but to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and
cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-
makers have disappeared from the street. Not to attend mass would
involve social degradation; and you may find people reading Sunday
books, in particular a sort of Catholic MONTHLY VISITOR on the doings
of Our Lady of Lourdes. I remember one Sunday, when I was walking in
the country, that I fell on a hamlet and found all the inhabitants,
from the patriarch to the baby, gathered in the shadow of a gable at
prayer. One strapping lass stood with her back to the wall and did
the solo part, the rest chiming in devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay
flat on his face asleep among some straw, to represent the worldly
element.
Again, this people is eager to proselytise; and the postmaster's
daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy,
until she grew quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going
on between a Scotswoman and a French girl; and the arguments in the
two cases were identical. Each apostle based her claim on the
superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the
business with a threat of hell-fire. 'PAS BONG PRETRES ICI,' said
the Presbyterian, 'BONG PRETRES EN ECOSSE.' And the postmaster's
daughter, taking up the same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the
butt of it instead of the bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems,
and easily persuaded for our good. One cheerful circumstance I note
in these guerilla missions, that each side relies on hell, and
Protestant and Catholic alike address themselves to a supposed
misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I call it cheerful, for
faith is a more supporting quality than imagination.
Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy
orders. And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate.
It is certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or
across the seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a
fortune of at least 40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with
the spirit of adventure and the desire to rise in life, and leave
their homespun elders grumbling and wondering over the event. Once,
at a village called Laussonne, I met one of these disappointed
parents: a drake who had fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing
and disappear. The wild swan in question was now an apothecary in
Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in
America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single halfpenny in his
pocket. And now he was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is an
adventurous life! I thought he might as well have stayed at home;
but you never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in what he
sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to marry, a third to write
scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in public, and now this
fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As for his old
father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour. 'I had
always bread for him,' he said; 'he ran away to annoy me. He loved
to annoy me. He had no gratitude.' But at heart he was swelling
with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out
of his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of
paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. 'This comes from
America,' he cried, 'six thousand leagues away!' And the wine-shop
audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.
I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the
country. OU'ST QUE VOUS ALLEZ? was changed for me into QUOI, VOUS
RENTREZ AU MONASTIER and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There
was one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for
me whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They
were filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion,
the dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's
head on English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in
English Journals. The language, in particular, filled them with
surprise.
'Do they speak PATOIS in England?' I was once asked; and when I told
them not, 'Ah, then, French?' said they.
'No, no,' I said, 'not French.'
'Then,' they concluded, 'they speak PATOIS.'
You must obviously either speak French or PATIOS. Talk of the force
of logic - here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I was met with
a new mortification. Of all PATIOS they declared that mine was the
most preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word
there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones
were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in
ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly
disagreeable bewilderment. 'Bread,' which sounds a commonplace,
plain-sailing monosyllable in England, was the word that most
delighted these good ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them
frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and they all got it
carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for winter evenings. I
have tried it since then with every sort of accent and inflection,
but I seem to lack the sense of humour.
They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a
stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid
married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
some falling towards decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and
natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity when
that was called for by the subject of our talk. Life, since the fall
in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious air. The
stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a provocative and not
unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one of the grandmothers,
who was my great friend of the party, gave me many a sharp word of
judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, and gave
them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle in her eye that were
eminently Scottish. But the rest used me with a certain reverence,
as something come from afar and not entirely human. Nothing would
put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety of my native
tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a real
attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she
would always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to
see her sitting in judgment over the last. 'No, no,' she would say,
'that is not it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than
that. We must try again.' When I was about to leave she bade me
good-bye for this life in a somewhat touching manner. We should not
meet again, she said; it was a long farewell, and she was sorry. But
life is so full of crooks, old lady, that who knows? I have said
good-bye to people for greater distances and times, and, please God,
I mean to see them yet again.
One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they
could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was
nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body,
but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair
and square, by way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was
pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided PATOIS like a
weakness, commonly addressed her child in the language of a drunken
bully. And of all the swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an
old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire. I was making a sketch,
and her curse was not yet ended when I had finished it and took my
departure. It is true she had a right to be angry; for here was her
son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse for drink before the day was
well begun. But it was strange to hear her unwearying flow of oaths
and obscenities, endless like a river, and now and then rising to a
passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning.
In city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed; but in a
country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this
beastliness of speech surprised the ear.
The CONDUCTOR, as he is called, OF ROADS AND BRIDGES was my principal
companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more
or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specially
to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most
indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in
his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special
knowledge are the great social qualities, and what they are about,
whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether secondary
question.
I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and
grew to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could
make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the
wayside with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the
places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
apothecary's father, was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand
spent a day while she was gathering materials for the MARQUIS DE
VILLEMER; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child
running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
sort of reverence. It appears that he spoke French imperfectly; for
this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever he let
slip a broad and picturesque phrase in PATOIS, she would make him
repeat it again and again till it was graven in her memory. The word
for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it would be curious to
know if she afterwards employed it in her works. The peasants, who
knew nothing of betters and had never so much as heard of local
colour, could not explain her chattering with this backward child;
and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far from beautiful:
the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little to Velaisian
swine-herds!
On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an improving
acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the
supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called 'the gallantry'
of paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he
was a man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper.
But I am afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he
had seen one night a company of BOURGEOIS ET DAMES QUI FAISAIENT LA
MANEGE AVEC DES CHAISES, and concluded that he was in the presence of
a witches' Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the
suggestion, that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic
party. Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a
great empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the
road. The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the
cracking of his whip. He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet
it was impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a
hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night. At the
time, people said it was the devil QUI S'AMUSAIT A FAIRE CA.
I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.
The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
than formerly. 'C'EST DIFFICILE,' he added, 'A EXPLIQUER.'
When we were well up on the moors and the CONDUCTOR was trying some
road-metal with the gauge -
'Hark!' said the foreman, 'do you hear nothing?'
We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
'It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he.
For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.
Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put
out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and
it was some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of
our intentions.
The CONDUCTOR told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from
him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in
these uncouth timidities.
The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.
Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail of
their own fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle
of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus
equipped he takes the road with terror. All day the family sits
about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally without work
or diversion. The father may carve a rude piece of furniture, but
that is all that will be done until the spring sets in again, and
along with it the labours of the field. It is not for nothing that
you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain habitations. A
clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were indispensable in such a
life. . .
CHAPTER VII - RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM
THROUGH what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it should
be not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of
curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow.
From the mind of childhood there is more history and more philosophy
to be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a library. The
child is conscious of an interest, not in literature but in life. A
taste for the precise, the adroit, or the comely in the use of words,
comes late; but long before that he has enjoyed in books a delightful
dress rehearsal of experience. He is first conscious of this
material - I had almost said this practical - pre-occupation; it does
not follow that it really came the first. I have some old fogged
negatives in my collection that would seem to imply a prior stage
'The Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with the sound of a
trumpet' - memorial version, I know not where to find the text -
rings still in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps with
something of my nurses accent. There was possibly some sort of image
written in my mind by these loud words, but I believe the words
themselves were what I cherished. I had about the same time, and
under the same influence - that of my dear nurse - a favourite
author: it is possible the reader has not heard of him - the Rev.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly,
so that I must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I
was breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this
day:-
'Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.'
There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other - it is
but a verse - not only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible
even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to
spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood:
'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; -
I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either, since
I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse, from
then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has
continued to haunt me.
I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious and
pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in images,
words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent
beyond their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I
came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm, 'The Lord is my
shepherd': and from the places employed in its illustration, which
are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my
father, I am able, to date it before the seventh year of my age,
although it was probably earlier in fact. The 'pastures green' were
represented by a certain suburban stubble-field, where I had once
walked with my nurse, under an autumnal sunset, on the banks of the
Water of Leith: the place is long ago built up; no pastures now, no
stubble-fields; only a maze of little streets and smoking chimneys
and shrill children. Here, in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed
to myself to follow something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant;
and close by the sheep in which I was incarnated - as if for greater
security - rustled the skirt, of my nurse. 'Death's dark vale' was a
certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery: a formidable yet beloved
spot, for children love to be afraid, - in measure as they love all
experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces ahead
(seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny
passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd's staff, such
as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a
billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff sturdily
upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like one
whispering, towards my ear. I was aware - I will never tell you how
- that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement. The
third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-
'My table Thou hast furnished
In presence of my foes:
My head Thou dost with oil anoint,
And my cup overflows':
and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series. I saw
myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over my
shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an
authentic shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green court of
a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white imps
discharged against me ineffectual arrows. The picture appears
arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock
analysed the dream of Alan Armadale. The summer-house and court were
muddled together out of Billings' ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND; the imps
conveyed from Bagster's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS; the bearded and robed
figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the shoe-horn
was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it figured in
the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed out to me as
a jest by my father. It was shown me for a jest, remark; but the
serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest. Children are all
classics; a bottle would have seemed an intermediary too trivial -
that divine refreshment of whose meaning I had no guess; and I seized
on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn with delight, even as, a little
later, I should have written flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any
word that might have appealed to me at the moment as least
contaminate with mean associations. In this string of pictures I
believe the gist of the psalm to have consisted; I believe it had no
more to say to me; and the result was consolatory. I would go to
sleep dwelling with restfulness upon these images; they passed before
me, besides, to an appropriate music; for I had already singled out
from that rude psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds
of all, not growing old, not disgraced by its association with long
Sunday tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a companion
thought:-
'In pastures green Thou leadest me,
The quiet waters by.'
The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of
what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these
pleased me it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great
vacant world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots
that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances
that I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of
Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in
which I lay so long in durance. ROBINSON CRUSOE; some of the books
of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work
rather gruesome and bloody for a child, but very picturesque, called
PAUL BLAKE; these are the three strongest impressions I remember:
THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON came next, LONGO INTERVALLO. At these I
played, conjured up their scenes, and delighted to hear them
rehearsed unto seventy times seven. I am not sure but what PAUL
BLAKE came after I could read. It seems connected with a visit to
the country, and an experience unforgettable. The day had been warm;
H- and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness
across the road; then came the evening with a great flash of colour
and a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my play-mate had
vanished, or is out of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent
into the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales,
went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often
since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the
first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot,
and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then
that I knew I loved reading.
II
To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and
dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large proportion of their
pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking' overtakes
them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again
the chime of fair words or the march of the stately period. NON
RAGIONIAM of these. But to all the step is dangerous; it involves
coming of age; it is even a kind of second weaning. In the past all
was at the choice of others; they chose, they digested, they read
aloud for us and sang to their own tune the books of childhood. In
the future we are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone,
like pioneers; and the choice of what we are to read is in our own
hands thenceforward. For instance, in the passages already adduced,
I detect and applaud the ear of my old nurse; they were of her
choice, and she imposed them on my infancy, reading the works of
others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own; gloating on the
rhythm, dwelling with delight on assonances and alliterations. I
know very well my mother must have been all the while trying to
educate my taste upon more secular authors; but the vigour and the
continual opportunities of my nurse triumphed, and after a long
search, I can find in these earliest volumes of my autobiography no
mention of anything but nursery rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.
I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their
school Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on
the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in
'The Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was held to
have surpassed myself. 'Robert's voice,' said the master on this
memorable occasion, 'is not strong, but impressive': an opinion
which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me
for years in consequence. I am sure one should not be so deliciously
tickled by the humorous pieces:-
'What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,
Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?'
I think this quip would leave us cold. The 'Isles of Greece' seem
rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The
Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'
'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,
Whither flies the silent lark?' -
does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon these
lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy, impatient as the
wind,' he plunged into the sequel? And there was another piece, this
time in prose, which none can have forgotten; many like me must have
searched Dickens with zeal to find it again, and in its proper
context, and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsiderable
measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, in
such a pomp of poetry, to London.
But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out
for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
pleasure. My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the
proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopaedias,
physical science, and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon
the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners that anything
really legible existed as by accident. The PARENT'S ASSISTANT, ROB
ROY, WAVERLEY, and GUY MANNERING, the VOYAGES OF CAPTAIN WOODS
ROGERS, Fuller's and Bunyan's HOLY WARS, THE REFLECTIONS OF ROBINSON
CRUSOE, THE FEMALE BLUEBEARD, G. Sand's MARE AU DIABLE - (how came it
in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's TOWER OF LONDON, and four old
volumes of Punch - these were the chief exceptions. In these latter,
which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love
(almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I knew them
almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember
my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and
signed with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they
were the works of Mr. Punch. Time and again I tried to read ROB ROY,
with whom of course I was acquainted from the TALES OF A GRANDFATHER;
time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the
adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure
and surprise with which, lying on the floor one summer evening, I
struck of a sudden into the first scene with Andrew Fairservice.
'The worthy Dr. Lightfoot' - 'mistrysted with a bogle' - 'a wheen
green trash' - 'Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her': from that day to
this the phrases have been unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce
say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob
Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with transporting pleasure;
and then the clouds gathered once more about my path; and I dozed and
skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into the clachan of Aberfoyle,
and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith recalled me to myself. With
that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book concluded;
Helen and her sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or ten
with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was
reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her
father among the hills, or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I
think of that novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others;
they seem but shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite
which this awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir
Walter's by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.
Perhaps Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of
fiction are always the most real. And yet I had read before this GUY
MANNERING, and some of WAVERLEY, with no such delighted sense of
truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of
the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or to
the same degree. One circumstance is suspicious: my critical
estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I was
ten. ROB ROY, GUY MANNERING, and REDGAUNTLET first; then, a little
lower; THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL; then, after a huge gulf, IVANHOE and
ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN: the rest nowhere; such was the verdict of the
boy. Since then THE ANTIQUARY, ST. RONAN'S WELL, KENILWORTH, and THE
HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN have gone up in the scale; perhaps IVANHOE AND
ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN have gone a trifle down; Diana Vernon has been
added to my admirations in that enchanted world of ROB ROY; I think
more of the letters in REDGAUNTLET, and Peter Peebles, that dreadful
piece of realism, I can now read about with equanimity, interest, and
I had almost said pleasure, while to the childish critic he often
caused unmixed distress. But the rest is the same; I could not
finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have never finished it yet;
PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands,
and though I have since waded to an end in a kind of wager with
myself, the exercise was quite without enjoyment. There is something
disquieting in these considerations. I still think the visit to
Ponto's the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that mean that I
was right when I was a child, or does it mean that I have never grown
since then, that the child is not the man's father, but the man? and
that I came into the world with all my faculties complete, and have
only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . .
CHAPTER VIII - THE IDEAL HOUSE
Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to
spend a life: a desert and some living water.
There are many parts of the earth's face which offer the necessary
combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety. A great
prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even
greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye
measure differently. Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting than
distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a fine
forest for the imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble mountains.
A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and there upon a
knoll, or one of those rocky seaside deserts of Provence overgrown
with rosemary and thyme and smoking with aroma, are places where the
mind is never weary. Forests, being more enclosed, are not at first
sight so attractive, but they exercise a spell; they must, however,
be diversified with either heath or rock, and are hardly to be
considered perfect without conifers. Even sand-hills, with their
intricate plan, and their gulls and rabbits, will stand well for the
necessary desert.
The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea. A
great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood; its
sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the distance
of one notable object from another; and a lively burn gives us, in
the space of a few yards, a greater variety of promontory and islet,
of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool, with answerable changes
both of song and colour, than a navigable stream in many hundred
miles. The fish, too, make a more considerable feature of the
brookside, and the trout plumping in the shadow takes the ear. A
stream should, besides, be narrow enough to cross, or the burn hard
by a bridge, or we are at once shut out of Eden. The quantity of
water need be of no concern, for the mind sets the scale, and can
enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty inches. Let us approve the singer of
'Shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.'
If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard
with a heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small
havens and dwarf headlands; if possible a few islets; and as a first
necessity, rocks reaching out into deep water. Such a rock on a calm
day is a better station than the top of Teneriffe or Chimborazo. In
short, both for the desert and the water, the conjunction of many
near and bold details is bold scenery for the imagination and keeps
the mind alive.
Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the country where we
are to live is, I had almost said, indifferent; after that inside the
garden, we can construct a country of our own. Several old trees, a
considerable variety of level, several well-grown hedges to divide
our garden into provinces, a good extent of old well-set turf, and
thickets of shrubs and ever-greens to be cut into and cleared at the
new owner's pleasure, are the qualities to be sought for in your
chosen land. Nothing is more delightful than a succession of small
lawns, opening one out of the other through tall hedges; these have
all the charm of the old bowling-green repeated, do not require the
labour of many trimmers, and afford a series of changes. You must
have much lawn against the early summer, so as to have a great field
of daisies, the year's morning frost; as you must have a wood of
lilacs, to enjoy to the full the period of their blossoming.
Hawthorn is another of the Spring's ingredients; but it is even best
to have a rough public lane at one side of your enclosure which, at
the right season, shall become an avenue of bloom and odour. The old
flowers are the best and should grow carelessly in corners. Indeed,
the ideal fortune is to find an old garden, once very richly cared
for, since sunk into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that neglect;
it will thus have a smack of nature and wildness which skilful
dispositions cannot overtake. The gardener should be an idler, and
have a gross partiality to the kitchen plots: an eager or toilful
gardener misbecomes the garden landscape; a tasteful gardener will be
ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off
nature. Close adjoining, if you are in the south, an olive-yard, if
in the north, a swarded apple-orchard reaching to the stream,
completes your miniature domain; but this is perhaps best entered
through a door in the high fruit-wall; so that you close the door
behind you on your sunny plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle,
when you go down to watch the apples falling in the pool. It is a
golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will
take care of themselves. Nor must the ear be forgotten: without
birds a garden is a prison-yard. There is a garden near Marseilles
on a steep hill-side, walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your
ear will suddenly be ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful
singing: some score of cages being set out there to sun their
occupants. This is a heavenly surprise to any passer-by; but the
price paid, to keep so many ardent and winged creatures from their
liberty, will make the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure-
lover. There is only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged,
though even then I think it hard, and that is what is called in
France the Bec-d'Argent. I once had two of these pigmies in
captivity; and in the quiet, hire house upon a silent street where I
was then living, their song, which was not much louder than a bee's,
but airily musical, kept me in a perpetual good humour. I put the
cage upon my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for
meals, and kept it by my head at night: the first thing in the
morning, these MAESTRINI would pipe up. But these, even if you can
pardon their imprisonment, are for the house. In the garden the wild
birds must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that
should be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a nightingale
down the lane, so that you must stroll to hear it, and yet a little
farther, tree-tops populous with rooks.
Your house should not command much outlook; it should be set deep and
green, though upon rising ground, or, if possible, crowning a knoll,
for the sake of drainage. Yet it must be open to the east, or you
will miss the sunrise; sunset occurring so much later, you can go up
a few steps and look the other way. A house of more than two stories
is a mere barrack; indeed the ideal is of one story, raised upon
cellars. If the rooms are large, the house may be small: a single
room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more palatial than a
castleful of cabinets and cupboards. Yet size in a house, and some
extent and intricacy of corridor, is certainly delightful to the
flesh. The reception room should be, if possible, a place of many
recesses, which are 'petty retiring places for conference'; but it
must have one long wall with a divan: for a day spent upon a divan,
among a world of cushions, is as full of diversion as to travel. The
eating-room, in the French mode, should be AD HOC: unfurnished, but
with a buffet, the table, necessary chairs, one or two of Canaletto's
etchings, and a tile fire-place for the winter. In neither of these
public places should there be anything beyond a shelf or two of
books; but the passages may be one library from end to end, and the
stair, if there be one, lined with volumes in old leather, very
brightly carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by way of landing, to
a windowed recess with a fire-place; this window, almost alone in the
house, should command a handsome prospect. Husband and wife must
each possess a studio; on the woman's sanctuary I hesitate to dwell,
and turn to the man's. The walls are shelved waist-high for books,
and the top thus forms a continuous table running round the wall.
Above are prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot and a
Claude or two. The room is very spacious, and the five tables and
two chairs are but as islands. One table is for actual work, one
close by for references in use; one, very large, for MSS. or proofs
that wait their turn; one kept clear for an occasion; and the fifth
is the map table, groaning under a collection of large-scale maps and
charts. Of all books these are the least wearisome to read and the
richest in matter; the course of roads and rivers, the contour lines
and the forests in the maps - the reefs, soundings, anchors, sailing
marks and little pilot-pictures in the charts - and, in both, the
bead-roll of names, make them of all printed matter the most fit to
stimulate and satisfy the fancy. The chair in which you write is
very low and easy, and backed into a corner; at one elbow the fire
twinkles; close at the other, if you are a little inhumane, your cage
of silver-bills are twittering into song.
Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-
roofed, and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with
bright marble, is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a
capacious boiler.
The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided
chamber; here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or
actual countries in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments;
a carpenter's bench; and a spared corner for photography, while at
the far end a space is kept clear for playing soldiers. Two boxes
contain the two armies of some five hundred horse and foot; two
others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the foot-rules and
the three colours of chalk, with which you lay down, or, after a
day's play, refresh the outlines of the country; red or white for the
two kinds of road (according as they are suitable or not for the
passage of ordnance), and blue for the course of the obstructing
rivers. Here I foresee that you may pass much happy time; against a
good adversary a game may well continue for a month; for with armies
so considerable three moves will occupy an hour. It will be found to
set an excellent edge on this diversion if one of the players shall,
every day or so, write a report of the operations in the character of
army correspondent.
I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings. This
should be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor
thick with rich furs. The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic
quality on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the
seats deep and easy; a single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust or
so upon a bracket; a rack for the journals of the week; a table for
the books of the year; and close in a corner the three shelves full
of eternal books that never weary: Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne,
Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the one volume open at CARMOSINE
and the other at FANTASIO); the ARABIAN NIGHTS, and kindred stories,
in Weber's solemn volumes; Borrow's BIBLE IN SPAIN, the PILGRIM'S
PROGRESS, GUY MANNERING and ROB ROY, MONTE CRISTO and the VICOMTE DE
BRAGELONNE, immortal Boswell sole among biographers, Chaucer,
Herrick, and the STATE TRIALS.
The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of
varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf
of books of a particular and dippable order, such as PEPYS, the
PASTON LETTERS, Burt's LETTERS FROM THE HIGHLANDS, or the NEWGATE
CALENDAR. . . .
CHAPTER IX - DAVOS IN WINTER
A MOUNTAIN valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on
the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an
invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective
kind. The roads indeed are cleared, and at least one footpath
dodging up the hill; but to these the health-seeker is rigidly
confined. There are for him no cross-cuts over the field, no
following of streams, no unguided rambles in the wood. His walks are
cut and dry. In five or six different directions he can push as far,
and no farther, than his strength permits; never deviating from the
line laid down for him and beholding at each repetition the same
field of wood and snow from the same corner of the road. This, of
itself, would be a little trying to the patience in the course of
months; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of the snow, an
almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken identity of
colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The sun touches it
with roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of
crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded
near at hand, with wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though
wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of
blue. But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of
crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the
infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a
boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow,
seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour,
reminds you almost painfully of other places, and brings into your
head the delights of more Arcadian days - the path across the meadow,
the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the
colours, and the whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare
as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel,
you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour
of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough
waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the
sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no
other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the frozen
snow.
It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one
end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in
sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort the
walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about
their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to
jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy,
not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may perhaps be
an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas! no
muse will suffer this imminence of interruption - and at the second
stampede of jodellers you find your modest inspiration fled. Or you
may only have a taste for solitude; it may try your nerves to have
some one always in front whom you are visibly overtaking, and some
one always behind who is audibly overtaking you, to say nothing of a
score or so who brush past you in an opposite direction. It may
annoy you to take your walks and seats in public view. Alas! there
is no help for it among the Alps. There are no recesses, as in
Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on
the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the
voice of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the
rosemary and the sea-pines and the sea.
For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the
storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure,
chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-
weather scenes. When sun and storm contend together - when the thick
clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden daylight - there
will be startling rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain
summits. A sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky
among awful glooms and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great
mountain shoulder will be designed in living gold, and appear for the
duration of a glance bright like a constellation, and alone 'in the
unapparent.' You may think you know the figure of these hills; but
when they are thus revealed, they belong no longer to the things of
earth - meteors we should rather call them, appearances of sun and
air that endure but for a moment and return no more. Other
variations are more lasting, as when, for instance, heavy and wet
snow has fallen through some windless hours, and the thin, spiry,
mountain pine trees stand each stock-still and loaded with a shining
burthen. You may drive through a forest so disguised, the tongue-
tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all
still except the jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy
yourself in some untrodden northern territory - Lapland, Labrador, or
Alaska.
Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down stairs
in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by the
glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by
seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill.
The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the
top of the ascent in the first hour of the day. To trace the fires
of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-
tops stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty
minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing
vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the
day and still half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven
- these will seem to repay you for the discomforts of that early
start; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you
will find yourself upon the farther side in yet another Alpine
valley, snow white and coal black, with such another long-drawn
congeries of hamlets and such another senseless watercourse bickering
along the foot. You have had your moment; but you have not changed
the scene. The mountains are about you like a trap; you cannot foot
it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in
holes and corners, and can change only one for another.
CHAPTER X - HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
THERE has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed
in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded
soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle
of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-
yards within earshot of the interminable and unchanging surf - idle
among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either,
and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some
vivifying change. These were certainly beautiful places to live in,
and the climate was wooing in its softness. Yet there was a later
shiver in the sunshine; you were not certain whether you were being
wooed; and these mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be the
shores of death. There was a lack of a manly element; the air was
not reactive; you might write bits of poetry and practise
resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot to repair
your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, after all, that
there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid is now
asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall medicine him; the
demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den.
For even Winter has his 'dear domestic cave,' and in those places
where he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities.
Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal
moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone, the
southern sky. It is among these mountains in the new State of
Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of his
ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest
livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a
working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew
his life. Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead of the
regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare air
of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room - these are the
changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of self-
respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors, none
but an invalid can know. Resignation, the cowardice that apes a kind
of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts, is cast
aside at a breath of such a prospect. The man can open the door; he
can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all and not
merely an invalid.
But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We cannot all of us go
farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines
the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of
the old. Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its
wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this
time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow
piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on his
window. The mere fact is tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place
of wintering has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of bold
contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures, he is
not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill. He came for that, he
looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought.
A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either hand
that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you
climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of
hotels; a world of black and white - black pine-woods, clinging to
the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it
between the pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a
dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching to and fro upon the
snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or
sitting under sunshades by the door of the hotel - and you have the
larger features of a mountain sanatorium. A certain furious river
runs curving down the valley; its pace never varies, it has not a
pool for as far as you can follow it; and its unchanging, senseless
hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It is a river that a man
could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the rarest gold upon
the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, down into the
valley. From end to end the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end
to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal.
Only along the course of the river, but high above it, there hangs
far into the noon, one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard to fancy
a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon
the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale
and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an
intensity of purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the
intolerable lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An
English painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural
anger that 'the values were all wrong.' Had he got among the Alps on
a bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your eye;
the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the
summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh
slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no relation, and
might be in another sphere. Here there are none of those delicate
gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and spreadings-out into
the distance, nothing of that art of air and light by which the face
of nature explains and veils itself in climes which we may be allowed
to think more lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where everything
that is not white is a solecism and defies the judgment of the
eyesight; a scene of blinding definition; a parade of daylight,
almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying, and yet hearty
and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:
such is the winter daytime in the Alps.
With the approach of evening all is changed. A mountain will
suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that are
no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile, overhead, if
the weather be rightly characteristic of the place, the sky fades
towards night through a surprising key of colours. The latest gold
leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon shall rise,
and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and misted, and
here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and
there a warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and starlight,
kind and homely in the fields of snow.
But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally
exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind
bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snow-
flakes flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in
later from the top of the pass; people peer through their windows and
foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by
gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn; and when at last the
storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of unpolluted
snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs
and cheerful to the souls of men. Or perhaps from across storied and
malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about the mountains and
breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain valley. Every nerve is
set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and
negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole invalid world huddles
into its private chambers, and silently recognises the empire of the
Fohn.
CHAPTER XI - ALPINE DIVERSIONS
THERE will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium. The
place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in
double column, text and translation; but it still remains half
German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a company
of actors able, as you will be told, to act. This last you will take
on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet, confine themselves
to German and though at the beginning of winter they come with their
wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before Christmas they will have
given up the English for a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a
skirmish between the two races; the German element seeking, in the
interest of their actors, to raise a mysterious item, the KUR-TAXE,
which figures heavily enough already in the weekly bills, the English
element stoutly resisting. Meantime in the English hotels home-
played farces, TABLEAUX-VIVANTS, and even balls enliven the evenings;
a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year
are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the
young folks carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures
of a singing quadrille.
A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the QUARTERLY to
the SUNDAY AT HOME. Grand tournaments are organised at chess,
draughts, billiards and whist. Once and again wandering artists drop
into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going you
cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the
hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised performer who announces
a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or solitary
long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests at dinner-time
with songs and a collection. They are all of them good to see; they,
at least, are moving; they bring with them the sentiment of the open
road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol, and next week they will
be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in our
mountain prison. Some of them, too, are welcome as the flowers in
May for their own sake; some of them may have a human voice; some may
have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and
what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as
a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking
pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there
is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree to that
unearthly voice of singing that bewails and praises the destiny of
man at the touch of the true virtuoso. Even that you may perhaps
enjoy; and if you do so you will own it impossible to enjoy it more
keenly than here, IM SCHNEE DER ALPEN. A hyacinth in a pot, a
handful of primroses packed in moss, or a piece of music by some one
who knows the way to the heart of a violin, are things that, in this
invariable sameness of the snows and frosty air, surprise you like an
adventure. It is droll, moreover, to compare the respect with which
the invalids attend a concert, and the ready contempt with which they
greet the dinner-time performers. Singing which they would hear with
real enthusiasm - possibly with tears - from a corner of a drawing-
room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered by an unknown
professional and no money has been taken at the door.
Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks must
be intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to many days
of vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is
certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to
skate under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat,
through long tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But
the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A
Scotchman may remember the low flat board, with the front wheels on a
pivot, which was called a HURLIE; he may remember this contrivance,
laden with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran rattling down the
brae, and was, now successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round
the corner at the foot; he may remember scented summer evenings
passed in this diversion, and many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb,
and neglected lesson. The toboggan is to the hurlie what the sled is
to the carriage; it is a hurlie upon runners; and if for a grating
road you substitute a long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine
the giddy career of the tobogganist. The correct position is to sit;
but the fantastic will sometimes sit hind-foremost, or dare the
descent upon their belly or their back. A few steer with a pair of
pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the feet. If the
weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit
between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in
safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very
steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost
too appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world
vanishes; your blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the
foot, with all the breath knocked out of your body, jarred and
bewildered as though you had just been subjected to a railway
accident. Another element of joyful horror is added by the formation
of a train; one toboggan being tied to another, perhaps to the number
of half a dozen, only the first rider being allowed to steer, and all
the rest pledged to put up their feet and follow their leader, with
heart in mouth, down the mad descent. This, particularly if the
track begins with a headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating
follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled
to somersaults.
There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some
miles in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short
rivers, furious in their brevity. All degrees of skill and courage
and taste may be suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps the true
way to toboggan is alone and at night. First comes the tedious
climb, dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing-
space, alone with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and solemn to the
heart. Then you push of; the toboggan fetches way; she begins to
feel the hill, to glide, to, swim, to gallop. In a breath you are
out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful of stars reels
and flashes overhead. Then comes a vicious effort; for by this time
your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and you are spinning
round a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all the lights in
all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet; and the next you
are racing once more in the shadow of the night with close-shut teeth
and beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be landed on the
highroad by the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmosphere
tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with
stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the
pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the life of
man upon his planet.
CHAPTER XII - THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS
To any one who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps,
the row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first
surprise. He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would
lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears
the mark of sickness on his face. The plump sunshine from above and
its strong reverberation from below colour the skin like an Indian
climate; the treatment, which consists mainly of the open air,
exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids comes,
in a month or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters. But although
he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his astonishment will
grow greater, as he experiences the effects of the climate on
himself. In many ways it is a trying business to reside upon the
Alps: the stomach is exercised, the appetite often languishes; the
liver may at times rebel; and because you have come so far from
metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you shall recover.
But one thing is undeniable - that in the rare air, clear, cold, and
blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled
delight in his existence which can nowhere else be paralleled. He is
perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not,
perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an
enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may
not be health, but it is fun.
There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile
joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning, see the gold upon the
snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your
prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast
your shoe over the hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the
words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel
yourself fit 'on the wings of all the winds' to 'come flying all
abroad.' Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of
energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your bed;
that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are
unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is volatile;
and that although the restlessness remains till night, the strength
is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are half
conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be
so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and
though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a
song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with
aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.
It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is
its own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more
permanent improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it
lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the
dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you are
conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living
as merry as it proves to be transient.
The brightness - heaven and earth conspiring to be bright - the
levity and quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence - more stirring
than a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape: all
have their part in the effect and on the memory, 'TOUS VOUS TAPENT
SUR LA TETE'; and yet when you have enumerated all, you have gone no
nearer to explain or even to qualify the delicate exhilaration that
you feel - delicate, you may say, and yet excessive, greater than can
be said in prose, almost greater than an invalid can bear. There is
a certain wine of France known in England in some gaseous disguise,
but when drunk in the land of its nativity still as a pool, clean as
river water, and as heady as verse. It is more than probable that in
its noble natural condition this was the very wine of Anjou so
beloved by Athos in the 'Musketeers.' Now, if the reader has ever
washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and
gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling
noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although
strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among
the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we need not
say of intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a
strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.
The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary
ways. A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been
recognised, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a
sort peculiar to that climate. People utter their judgments with a
cannonade of syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them; and
the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By the
professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At
first he cannot write at all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to
the pressure of business, and the brain, left without nourishment,
goes into a mild decline. Next, some power of work returns to him,
accompanied by jumping headaches. Last, the spring is opened, and
there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant, hustling
polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be positively
offensive in hot weather. He writes it in good faith and with a
sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read what he has
written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he
to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. This
yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the
sentence has come upon him while he slept; and it is not he, it is
the Alps, who are to blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which
somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. Some day,
when the spring returns, he shall go down a little lower in this
world, and remember quieter inflections and more modest language.
But here, in the meantime, there seems to swim up some outline of a
new cerebral hygiene and a good time coming, when experienced
advisers shall send a man to the proper measured level for the ode,
the biography, or the religious tract; and a nook may be found
between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne shall be able to
write more continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat slower.
Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain? It is a
sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes
well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is
certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the
chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with vociferous
nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for breakfast in
the morning. Upon that theory the cynic may explain the whole affair
- exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all. But, on the
other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may itself be but a
symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects are strangely
similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort
of intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude. The fountain of
Juventus does not play steadily in these parts; but there it plays,
and possibly nowhere else.
CHAPTER XIII - ROADS - 1873
No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single
drawing, over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so
gradually study himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever
extract from the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions
that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous picture-
gallery. But what is thus admitted with regard to art is not
extended to the (so-called) natural beauties no amount of excess in
sublime mountain outline or the graces of cultivated lowland can do
anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the palate. We are
not at all sure, however, that moderation, and a regimen tolerably
austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and strengthening to the
taste; and that the best school for a lover of nature is not to the
found in one of those countries where there is no stage effect -
nothing salient or sudden, - but a quiet spirit of orderly and
harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can patiently
attend to each of the little touches that strike in us, all of them
together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such
as this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small
sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar
combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense
of how the harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with
something of nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your
'rural voluptuary,' - not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount
Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra,
but day by day to teach himself some new beauty - to experience some
new vague and tranquil sensation that has before evaded him. It is
not the people who 'have pined and hungered after nature many a year,
in the great city pent,' as Coleridge said in the poem that made
Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself; it is not those who make the
greatest progress in this intimacy with her, or who are most quick to
see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy. In this, as in everything
else, it is minute knowledge and long-continued loving industry that
make the true dilettante. A man must have thought much over scenery
before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no youngling enthusiasm on
hilltops that can possess itself of the last essence of beauty.
Probably most people's heads are growing bare before they can see all
in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing; and, even
then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation before
the faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the
windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus the study
of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with system.
Every gratification should be rolled long under the tongue, and we
should be always eager to analyse and compare, in order that we may
be able to give some plausible reason for our admirations. True, it
is difficult to put even approximately into words the kind of
feelings thus called into play. There is a dangerous vice inherent
in any such intellectual refining upon vague sensation. The analysis
of such satisfactions lends itself very readily to literary
affectations; and we can all think of instances where it has shown
itself apt to exercise a morbid influence, even upon an author's
choice of language and the turn of his sentences. And yet there is
much that makes the attempt attractive; for any expression, however
imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems a sort of
legitimation of the pleasure we take in it. A common sentiment is
one of those great goods that make life palatable and ever new. The
knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things,
even if they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen
them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest
pleasures.
Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have
recommended to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In
those homely and placid agricultural districts, familiarity will
bring into relief many things worthy of notice, and urge them
pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repetition; such as the
wonderful life-giving speed of windmill sails above the stationary
country; the occurrence and recurrence of the same church tower at
the end of one long vista after another: and, conspicuous among
these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and variety of the
road itself, along which he takes his way. Not only near at hand, in
the lithe contortions with which it adapts itself to the interchanges
of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a few hundred
feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the afternoon sun,
he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening that he can
always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the river-
side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has always
with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will find in that
sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level
there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention
ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour
of the ground, every little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life
and an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The road rolls upon
the easy slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows of
the sea. The very margins of waste ground, as they trench a little
farther on the beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the
hedge, have something of the same free delicacy of line - of the same
swing and wilfulness. You might think for a whole summer's day (and
not have thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and
succession of circumstances has produced the least of these
deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look for
the secret of their interest. A foot-path across a meadow - in all
its human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the GRATA
PROTERVITAS of its varying direction - will always be more to us than
a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. No reasoned
sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for
one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect;
and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of
personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of
free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of
road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we
write, some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious
aesthetic artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of
country. It is said that the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty
in his mind as he laid them down. And the result is striking. One
splendid satisfying sweep passes with easy transition into another,
and there is nothing to trouble or dislocate the strong
continuousness of the main line of the road. And yet there is
something wanting. There is here no saving imperfection, none of
those secondary curves and little trepidations of direction that
carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along with them. One
feels at once that this road has not has been laboriously grown like
a natural road, but made to pattern; and that, while a model may be
academically correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and
cold. The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between
himself and the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have
wandered into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over
the dunes like a trodden serpent. Here we too must plod forward at a
dull, laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our
frame of mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the
roadway. Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps resolve
with a little trouble. We might reflect that the present road had
been developed out of a tract spontaneously followed by generations
of primitive wayfarers; and might see in its expression a testimony
that those generations had been affected at the same ground, one
after another, in the same manner as we are affected to-day. Or we
might carry the reflection further, and remind ourselves that where
the air is invigorating and the ground firm under the traveller's
foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of small undulations, and he
will turn carelessly aside from the direct way wherever there is
anything beautiful to examine or some promise of a wider view; so
that even a bush of wild roses may permanently bias and deform the
straight path over the meadow; whereas, where the soil is heavy, one
is preoccupied with the labour of mere progression, and goes with a
bowed head heavily and unobservantly forward. Reason, however, will
not carry us the whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in
situations where it is very hard to imagine any possible explanation;
and indeed, if we drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an
open vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy almost at its
fullest. We feel the sharp settle of the springs at some curiously
twisted corner; after a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our
faces as we rattle precipitately down the other side, and we find it
difficult to avoid attributing something headlong, a sort of ABANDON,
to the road itself.
The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day's walk
in even a commonplace or dreary country-side. Something that we have
seen from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, as we
wander through folded valleys or among woods, that our expectation of
seeing it again is sharpened into a violent appetite, and as we draw
nearer we impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a
beating heart. It is through these prolongations of expectancy, this
succession of one hope to another, that we live out long seasons of
pleasure in a few hours' walk. It is in following these capricious
sinuosities that we learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish
reticence after another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the
whole loveliness of the country. This disposition always preserves
something new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to
many different points of distant view before it allows us finally to
approach the hoped-for destination.
In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse
with the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession
of saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples
our ways and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls 'the cheerful
voice of the public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road.' But
out of the great network of ways that binds all life together from
the hill-farm to the city, there is something individual to most,
and, on the whole, nearly as much choice on the score of company as
on the score of beauty or easy travel. On some we are never long
without the sound of wheels, and folk pass us by so thickly that we
lose the sense of their number. But on others, about little-
frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of moment; we have the
sight far off of some one coming towards us, the growing definiteness
of the person, and then the brief passage and salutation, and the
road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great while to come.
Such encounters have a wistful interest that can hardly be understood
by the dweller in places more populous. We remember standing beside
a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that
was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and
bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and after a
long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable
expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a GREAT DEAL OF
MEETING THEREABOUTS. The phrase is significant. It is the
expression of town-life in the language of the long, solitary country
highways. A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used
to in the pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of
the streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of
such 'meetings.'
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
minds by a road. In real nature, as well as in old landscapes,
beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is
plunged and saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with
the vague sense of desire up to the green limit of the horizon.
Travel is brought home to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and
hamlet that tempts us in the distance. SEHNSUCHT - the passion for
what is ever beyond - is livingly expressed in that white riband of
possible travel that severs the uneven country; not a ploughman
following his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue smoke of any
cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a sense of nearness
and attainability by this wavering line of junction. There is a
passionate paragraph in WERTHER that strikes the very key. 'When I
came hither,' he writes, 'how the beautiful valley invited me on
every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top! There the
wood - ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain
summits - ah, that I might look down from them over the broad
country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! Oh to lose
myself among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came
back without finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like
the future. A vast whole lies in the twilight before our spirit;
sight and feeling alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect,
and we yearn to surrender our whole being, and let it be filled full
with all the rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when
we hasten to the fruition, when THERE is changed to HERE, all is
afterwards as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped
estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.' It is to
this wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister.
Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies
before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can
outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods,
and overlook from the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in the
windings of the valleys that are still far in front. The road is
already there - we shall not be long behind. It is as if we were
marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard
the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly
and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long miles
of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?
CHAPTER XIV - ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES - 1874
IT is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we
have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side
after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A
few months ago some words were said in the PORTFOLIO as to an
'austere regimen in scenery'; and such a discipline was then
recommended as 'healthful and strengthening to the taste.' That is
the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in
scenery, it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk
before breakfast to whet the appetite. For when we are put down in
some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially if we have come to be
more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt
out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist
after a rye plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of
seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people
learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on
what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or
inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right
spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'FAIT DES
DISCOURS EN SOI POUR SOUTENIR EN CHEMIN'; and into these discourses
he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by the way;
they take their tone greatly from the varying character of the scene;
a sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road; and the
man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a
clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the
thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as
through differently coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the
equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at
will. There is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender
ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us,
so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves
some suitable sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense,
a centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle
and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in
others. And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the
quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place
with some attraction of romance. We may learn to go far afield for
associations, and handle them lightly when we have found them.
Sometimes an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a spot lit
up at once with picturesque imaginations, by a reminiscence of
Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay
figure for many an English lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would
hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man of admirable
romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious
figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly prepared for the
impression. There is half the battle in this preparation. For
instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in the proper spirit,
the wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands. I am happier
where it is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without trees.
I understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that
harmonise well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the
dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in
spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless,
unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills.
Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like
David before Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing
in me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right
humour for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in
consequence. Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time
enough were given, I should have all manner of pleasures, and take
many clear and beautiful images away with me when I left. When we
cannot think ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a
country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among the grass
for flowers, or pore, for long times together, over the changeful
current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in stones, when we
are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. We begin to peep
and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we find many
things beautiful in miniature. The reader will recollect the little
summer scene in WUTHERING HEIGHTS - the one warm scene, perhaps, in
all that powerful, miserable novel - and the great feature that is
made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sunshine: this is
in the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors;
interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque, than
the shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter of
which I shall presently have more to say.
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few
hours agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough we become at home
in the neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior
loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic
spirit which is its own reward and justification. Looking back the
other day on some recollections of my own, I was astonished to find
how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant
country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my
sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more nearly with
my inclination.
The country to which I refer was a level and tree-less plateau, over
which the winds cut like a whip. For miles and miles it was the
same. A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I
resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far
up as ever I had the heart to follow it. There were roads,
certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there
was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your
whole walk exposed to you from the beginning: there was nothing left
to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here
and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a
solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only accompanied, as
you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum
of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had learned
to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it
seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested
contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as
Hawthorne liked to put it, 'taken back to Nature' by any decent
covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed
to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare
sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the
blue transparent air; but this was of another description - this was
the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was
naked, and was ashamed and cold.
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had
passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each
other when they met with 'Breezy, breezy,' instead of the customary
'Fine day' of farther south. These continual winds were not like the
harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against your face
as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over your head,
or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the country after
a shower. They were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that
interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even
such winds as these have their own merit in proper time and place.
It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses of shadow. And what
a power they have over the colour of the world! How they ruffle the
solid woodlands in their passage, and make them shudder and whiten
like a single willow! There is nothing more vertiginous than a wind
like this among the woods, with all its sights and noises; and the
effect gets between some painters and their sober eyesight, so that,
even when the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured
like foliage in a gale. There was nothing, however, of this sort to
be noticed in a country where there were no trees and hardly any
shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or those of rigid houses
and walls. But the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure;
for nowhere could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull,
or a place of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean; he
must remember how, when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a
hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the
crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and
it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the
country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away hills all
marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of
the 'Prelude,' has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us
by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great
thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with as
good effect:-
'Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!'
I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape.
He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great
cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the
great unfinished marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark
stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform high
above the town. At that elevation it was quite still and warm; the
gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten it
in the quiet interior of the church and during his long ascent; and
so you may judge of his surprise when, resting his arms on the sunlit
balustrade and looking over into the PLACE far below him, he saw the
good people holding on their hats and leaning hard against the wind
as they walked. There is something, to my fancy, quite perfect in
this little experience of my fellow-traveller's. The ways of men
seem always very trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a
church-top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, and see far
below us the steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent
activity of the city streets; but how much more must they not have
seemed so to him as he stood, not only above other men's business,
but above other men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's!
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I
write. The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in
memory all the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was
only by the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found.
Between the black worm-eaten head-lands there are little bights and
havens, well screened from the wind and the commotion of the external
sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a
depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering
from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine.
One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others.
On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed
had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-
detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between their owners,
that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood in his own
doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two
enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires
at night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild
winter wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may
reconstruct for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was.
Not so when we are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us
only to intensify a contrary impression, and association is turned
against itself. I remember walking thither three afternoons in
succession, my eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how,
dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, I found myself in a new
world of warmth and shelter. The wind, from which I had escaped, 'as
from an enemy,' was seemingly quite local. It carried no clouds with
it, and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea
within view. The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about
them, were still distinguishable from these by something more
insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the last storm
had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely. It would be
difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took possession
of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I have said,
by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by previous
tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the
pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual
distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this
little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and
yet there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and
peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the
present moment and the memorials of the precarious past. There is
ever something transitory and fretful in the impression of a high
wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the
constitution of things; it must speedily begin to faint and wither
away like a cut flower. And on those days the thought of the wind
and the thought of human life came very near together in my mind.
Our noisy years did indeed seem moments in the being of the eternal
silence; and the wind, in the face of that great field of stationary
blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity of the
sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks of the sea
as 'hungering for calm,' and in this place one learned to understand
the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the broken
edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to
me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when now and
again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the quick
black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one could
fancy) with relief.
On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so
subdued and still that the least particular struck in me a
pleasurable surprise. The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in
the afternoon sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the
bank, that had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now
exhaled it into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature. I
remember that I was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some
dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and give expression to
the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating to myself -
'Mon coeur est un luth suspendu,
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne.'
I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve
to complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.
And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked
least to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own
ingratitude. 'Out of the strong came forth sweetness.' There, in
the bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, my strongest
impression of peace. I saw the sea to be great and calm; and the
earth, in that little corner, was all alive and friendly to me. So,
wherever a man is, he will find something to please and pacify him:
in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and women, and see
beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at the
corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country, there is no
country without some amenity - let him only look for it in the right
spirit, and he will surely find.