Part 1

[Frontispiece: (priests singing to man in window)]

THE WAYFARER'S LIBRARY

MANY FURROWS

"Alpha of the Plough" (Alfred George Gardiner)

LONDON & TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.

_All rights reserved_

FIRST PUBLISHED ... 1924 FIRST PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES ... 1927

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

When Benedick said that he would die a bachelor he did not know, as he observed later, that he would live to be married. In the same way, I have to confess that when in my preface to _Windfalls_ I hinted that it would be the last of these little books, I did not think that there would be another.

Mr. Dent has convinced me of my mistake. This is the fourth collection I have made and, warned of the danger of forecasting the future, I will say no word in prejudice of a fifth. The essays, like those in the previous volumes, have appeared in _The Star_, many of them also in the _Manchester Evening News_ and some in the _Glasgow Citizen_.

CONTENTS

Dream Journeys On Coming Home A Log Fire On Saying "Please" Billitch at Lord's On Shop Windows A Day with the Bees On Shaking Hands On a Finger-Post The Open Window On an Unposted Letter A Note on Dress Farewell to Hampstead On Plagiarism The Case of Dean Inge A Tale of Fleet Street On the Top Note Tea and Mr. Bennett On Buying and Selling On Big Words Do We Buy Books? Other People's Jobs Why I Don't Know On Anti-Climax The Unknown Warrior Naming the Baby The Cult of the Knife and Fork A Soliloquy in a Garden A Night's Lodging Those People Next Door How We Spend Our Time A Sentence of Death On an Elderly Person Taming the Bear Ourselves and Others An Offer of £10,000 In a Lumber-Room Our Neighbour the Moon On Smiles When in Rome... The Jests of Chance In Defence of "Skipping" An Old English Town On People with One Idea To an Unknown Artist On Living for Ever On Initials Planting a Spinney On Wearing an Eyeglass A Man and His Watch Youth and Old Age The Golden Age The Top of the Ladder On Faces--Past and Present In Praise of Maiden Aunts October Days

MANY FURROWS

DREAM JOURNEYS

I had a singular dream last night. I found myself on Robinson Crusoe's Island and, curiously enough, in Robinson Crusoe's rôle. In the bright sunshine, by the sea-shore. I was turning over the stores of eatables, chiefly bags of potatoes, it seemed to me, that were lying about. There was abundance to go on with and I did not feel at all disturbed at the prospect of not being called for for many a long day. I was alone, but without the sense of solitude. Indeed, I was entirely happy and free from care. I feel, even now that I am awake, the glow of the warm sunshine and the peace of the sands and the sea. Most dreams are easily traceable to some waking circumstance, and this quite enjoyable spiritual experience was, I suppose, due to a conversation I had had about Honolulu and my regret that I was never likely to see the islands of the Pacific. The friendly spirit who has charge of my dreams evidently took the hint and wafted me away to Juan Fernandez. I am half-disposed, so pleasant is the memory, to regret that he did not leave me there, wrapped in immortal dreams of plenty, peace and sunshine.

I shall repeat the experiment of nudging my amiable djinn into agreeable activity. I have a great many schemes to put before him, and if my friends discover that I am talking with enthusiasm about Pizarro they will know that I am putting in a plea with the director of dreams for a trip to Peru, and that if I am unusually concerned, even distressed, about the fate of Mummery, or the importance of conquering Mount Everest, I have in mind the possibility of a climbing excursion in the Himalayas. It is an excellent way of filling up the blanks in one's experience.

As we get on in years we become conscious of those blanks. We feel that we are in danger of missing much of the show we came to see. While we are young, say, up to fifty, we are not troubled. There seems plenty of time still to do everything worth doing, and see everything worth seeing. But after fifty the horizon shrinks most alarmingly, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it expands most alarmingly, and we find that, not only is Heaven, as Hood said, farther off than it seems in childhood, but that the desirable places of the earth have become more inaccessible. When I was a boy and had my imagination stirred by tales of the backwoods and Russell's songs about

The land of the free Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea,

I had no doubt that I should one day roll down with it, probably in a canoe, with a friendly Indian. Everything seemed possible then. Life was so enormously long an affair that the only disturbing thought was how you would be able to fill it up, and you had no more idea of missing a trip up the Amazon or seeing the Rockies and Niagara and the Grand Cañon when you grew up than of not being privileged to smoke a pipe or to have a latchkey or to go to Lord's or the Oval and see Grace whenever you felt inclined.

In this comfortable conviction that we shall do everything in good time we jog along doing nothing in particular, getting more and more like the donkey we used to see at Carisbrooke Castle years ago, tramping round and round its tread-mill without ever reaching anywhere. We are not disquieted. We feel that any day in the infinite days before us we shall be threading the Thousand Islands or climbing the Heights of Abraham, or seeing the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset in Venice, or the dawn coming up like thunder on the road to Mandalay, or standing in the Coliseum at Rome or among the ruins of Carthage or Timgad, or sailing among the isles of Greece or catching the spicy breezes that, according to the hymn of the good Bishop Heber, whom we could not suspect of romancing, come from Ceylon's favoured isle.

And so with other things. One day, assuredly, we shall take to horse-riding, and canter gaily round Rotten Row, or we shall go yachting in the Mediterranean or shooting in Scotland. And think of the books we shall read in the enormous leisure that lies before us. There is that fellow Karl Marx, for example. He certainly must be read--some day. It is absurd not to know what he said, when all the world goes on babbling so learnedly about him. No doubt he is a dull fellow, but we cannot, of course, leave the world without knowing why he created such a hubbub. And there are a lot of other high-brows that we shall become acquainted with in good time. We shall really study those categorical imperatives of the illustrious Kant, and the monism of Spinoza, and the _Leviathan_ and the _Novum Organum_, and a score of other solemn books that ought to be read and must be read--some day. We are not worried about these things. We have years and years before us, and shall need some stout fellows like these to make the time pass by.

That is how we drift until, somewhere in the fifties, we begin to suspect that we are cutting it rather fine, and that all those riches of experience that we confidently expected to enjoy and those intellectual conquests that we intended to make are slipping beyond our grasp. Karl Marx is still joyfully unthumbed, the _Novum Organum_ still beckons us unavailingly from the abode where the eternal are, and we are still hazy about the categorical imperatives of the illustrious Kant. The call of the mighty Missouri falls faint on our ears, and Ceylon's spicy breezes we have to take at second-hand from the saintly Heber. We are chained to the No. 16 bus to Cricklewood or the tube to Shepherd's Bush, and when we break loose we find ourselves on the pier at Brighton or heroically scaling Beachy Head. We pass our dreams of adventure on to hopeful and undazzled youth, browsing greedily in the breathless pages of Prescott. We are not even sure that we want to go now, so habituated have we become to the familiar tread-mill. I daresay the Carisbrooke donkey would have been broken-hearted at the idea of a trip to Cowes. We are like Johnson when he was asked if he would not like to see Giant's Causeway. "Sir, I should like to see it, but I should not like _to go to see it_."

It would be pleasant if we could educate our dreams to spirit us away without all the trouble of tickets and luggage and travel to the sights and experiences we have missed. Do not tell me it would be an idle illusion. There was no illusion in my island. I can see it in my mind as clearly as any place I ever visited in the flesh, and if I had the skill I could draw its hills and paint its tranquil sea and sunny sands for you. To-night I hope to spend with Mummery in the Alps.

ON COMING HOME

A friend of mine found himself the other day on the platform of a country station in the south of Scotland near the sea-coast. A middle-aged couple were the only people visible, and they sat together on the single form provided for waiting passengers. They did not speak, but just sat and gazed at the rails, at the opposite platform, at the fields beyond, at the clouds above, at anything, in fact, within the range of vision. My friend went and sat beside them to wait for his train. Presently another person, a woman, appeared, and advancing to the other two, addressed them. She wondered what train the couple were waiting for. Was their holiday over?

"Oh no," said the woman. "We've another week yet."

"Then maybe ye're waiting for a friend?" speired the other.

"No," replied the woman. "We're juist sitting. We like to come here in the evening and see the trains come in and out. It's a change, and it makes us think of home. Eh," she said, with a sudden fervour that spoke of inward agonies, "you do miss your home comforts on a holiday."

I fancy this excellent woman, sitting on the platform to watch the trains go homewards, and yearning for the day to come when she will take a seat in one of them, disclosed a secret which many of us share, but few of us have the courage to confess. She was bored by her holiday. It was her annual Purgatory, her time of exile by the alien waters of Babylon. There she sat while the commonplaces of her home life, her comfortable bed, the mysteries of her larder, the gossip of her neighbours, the dusting of the front parlour, the trials of shopping, her good man's going and returning, the mending of the children's stockings, and all the little somethings-and-nothings that made up her daily round, assumed a glamour and a pathos that familiarity had deadened. She had to go away from home to discover it again. She had to get out of her rut in order to find that she could not be happy anywhere else. Then she could say with Touchstone, "So this is the forest of Arden: well, when I was at home I was in a better place."

It does not follow that her holiday was a failure. It was a most successful holiday. The main purpose of a holiday is to make us home-sick. We go to the forest of Arden in order that we may be reconciled to No. 14, Beulah Avenue, Peckham. We sit and throw stones on the beach in the sunshine until we get sick of doing nothing in particular, and dream of the 8.32 from Tooting as the children of Israel dreamed of the fat pastures of Canaan. We climb the Jungfrau and explore the solitudes of the glaciers so that we can recover the rapture of Clapham Common and the felicities of Hampstead Heath. We endure the dreary formalities of hotel life and the petty larcenies of the boarding-house in order that we may enjoy with renewed zest the ease and liberties of our own fireside.

In short, we go on a holiday for the pleasure of coming back. The humiliating truth is, of course, providentially concealed from us. If it were not, we should stay at home and never see it afresh through the pleasant medium of distance and separation. But no experience of past disillusions dims the glow of the holiday emotion. I have no doubt that the couple on the platform set out from Auld Reekie with the delight of children let out from school. We all know the feeling. "Behold ... Beyond ..." cried young Ruskin when the distant vision of the snowy battlements of the Oberland first burst on his astonished eyes. "Behold ... Beyond," we cry as we pile up the luggage and start on the happy pilgrimage. And the emotion is worth having, even though we know it will end in a sigh of relief when we reach No. 14, Beulah Avenue again and sink into the familiar arm-chair and mow the bit of lawn that has grown shaggy in our absence, and exchange reminiscences with No. 13 over the fence, and feel the pleasant web of habit enveloping us once more.

It is when the holiday is over that we begin to enjoy it. Then we come, as Gissing says, under the law that wills that the day must die before we can enjoy to the full its light and odour. We are never, by the perversity of our nature, quite so happy as we think we were after the event had become a memory, and no doubt by next spring the couple who sat on the station platform watching the homeward-bound trains with longing eyes will recall the gay holiday they had without a suspicion that they welcomed the end of it as children welcome release from school. The illusion will only mean that they are a little sick of home again, and that they need the violent medicine of a holiday to make them home-sick once more.

A LOG FIRE

I came in from the woods with a settled purpose. I would spend the evening in exalting the beauty of these wonderful November days in the country. The idea presented itself to me not merely as a pleasure but as a duty. Long enough had November been misjudged and slandered, usually by Cockney poets like Tom Hood, who looked at it through the fogs of a million coal fires. Bare justice demanded that the truth should out, that the world should be told of this beautiful though aged spinster of the months who clothed the landscape in such a radiant garment of sunshine, carpeted the beech-woods with such a glow of gold and russet, filled the hedgerows with the scarlet of the hips and haws, the wine-red of the blackthorn, and the yellow of the guelder rose, and awoke the thrushes from their late summer silence.

This fervour for my Lady November is no new passion. There are certain things about which I have never made up my mind, and about which, I suppose, I never shall make up my mind. That is to say I make it up, and then unmake it, after which I remake it, like the child on the sea-shore who sees his sand-castle swept away by one tide, and returns to build it for another tide to sweep away. Thus, if I say that I prefer Bach's Concerto for Two Violins to any piece of music I have ever heard, I do not guarantee that a year hence I may not be found swearing by the Londonderry air, or a Hebridean song (the _Island Shieling Song_, for example), or the _Magic Flute_, or something from Schumann. A year later I may be round to the intertwined loveliness of the two violins again. And if I affirm that the _Brothers Karamazov_ is the greatest achievement of the imagination since Shakespeare, I do not promise not to say the same thing of something else, _David Copperfield_ or _Les Miserables_, when, after a due interval, I express my view again. And so with pictures and authors and towns and trees and flowers--in short, all the things that appeal to the changing emotions or to that vague and unstable thing called taste.

So it is in regard to the merits of the months. I have been trying all my life to come to a final decision on this great question. It seems absurd that one should spend, as I have spent, fifty or sixty years doing little else but sample the months without arriving at a fixed and irrevocable conclusion as to which I like best. But that is the case. I am a mere Don Juan with the months. I go flirting about from one to the other, swearing that each is more beautiful than her rivals. When I am with June it seems absurd that there should be anything else than June, and when I am with August I would not sacrifice August with its waving cornfields and its sound of the reaper for half the calendar. But then comes September, and I chant Swinburne to her as though I had never loved another:

September! all glorious with gold as a king In the raiment of triumph attired, Outlightening the summer, outsweetening the spring, It broods o'er the woodlands with limitless wing, A presence of all men desired.

I do not doubt that I have declared that October, ruddy October, chill October, is the pick of the bunch, and I know that on the first bright day in February, when I see the snowdrops peeping out and hear the rooks in the elms, I shall be found declaring that this is the choicest moment of the year. And April--April with the trees bursting into green and the meadows "smo'ered wi' new grass," as they say in the dales, and the birds coming up from the south bringing tidings of the summer--well, what can one say of April, Shakespeare's April, Shakespeare's "sweet o' the year," except that there is none like her?

But I know that when May comes in and the orchards burst into foam, and the lilac, laburnum and pink hawthorn make every suburban street lyrical with colour and the beech-woods are clothed in that first tender green that seems to make the sunlight sing as it streams through and dapples the golden carpet of last year's leaves with light and shade, and the bees are humming like an orchestra in the cherry and damson trees and the birds are singing as though they are divinely drunk, and the first brood of young swallows are making their trial flights from the nest in the barn and

When nothing that asks for bliss Asking aright is denied, And half of the world a bridegroom is And half the world a bride.

--then I know that I shall desert even My Lady April and give the palm to the undespoiled splendour of May, singing meanwhile with Francis Thompson:

By Goddés fay, by Goddés fay, It is the month, the merry month, It is the merry month of May.

In this shameless wandering of the affections I have come round once more to November, and I marvel, as I have marvelled many a year before, that the poets have left unsung the elderly beauties of this month, the quietude of its tones, the sombre dignity of its landscape, the sense of a noble passing, the fading colours, the falling leaves, the winds changing to a note of requiem among the dismantled branches--

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

And lamenting this neglect I resolved to pay my tribute. But first I must make up the fire, for though my Lady November is beautiful she is austere. She has frozen the pump and the grass is thick with hoar-frost, and to be just to her one must be warm. So I piled on the logs and prepared to be warm and enthusiastic.

Then I did a foolish thing, I sat down in an armchair and surrendered myself to the fire's comfortable companionship. There is nothing more friendly or talkative than a fire. Even a coal fire, if you look at it steadfastly, will become as communicative as a maiden aunt. It knows all the gossip of the family, especially the gossip about old, forgotten things. It will talk to you of events so remote that they seem to belong to the country of dreams. It will bring out faded portraits, and sing old songs, and burst into laughter that you have not heard perhaps for forty years, and revive antique jokes, and hand round steaming elderberry wine o' Christmas nights, and make shadowgraphs on the wall as if you were a little boy again, and send you sliding and skating under the glittering stars. It forgets nothing about you, and it tells its memories so cheerfully and serenely that it leaves nothing for tears. All this, even a coal-fire will do when it is really in the vein and you have time to sit and listen.

But a wood fire has a magic beyond this. Its very smell is an intoxication as rapturous as romance, compounded of all you have read of the backwoods, of memories of the charcoal-burners, and of Coal Munk Peter, of tales of the woodlands, Tristan and Iseult, and Robin Hood, and Good King Wenceslaus, and the Children of the New Forest, of Giles Winterbourne and Marty South, and all the delightful people with whom the mind loves to go a-gypsying far away from this foolish world. Of course, you have to be something of a sentimentalist or a romantic to feel all this--such a person as I once walked with for a month in the Black Forest, to whom the smell of the woodlands was as exciting as wine, and the sight of a charcoal-burner's camp a sort of apocalyptic vision. How well I remember those summer nights when, leaving the forest inn, we would plunge into the woodlands, he singing that haunting air Der Mai ist gekommen and interrupting it with a shout as he saw the glimmer of the charcoal-burner's fire through the boles of the pine trees....

But a wood fire is not only an idyll. It is an occupation. With a coal fire it is different. You put on a shovel of coals, and there's an end of it. But a wood fire will furnish light and pleasing employment for a whole evening. And by a wood fire I do not mean those splinters of wood that you buy in towns, but thumping logs--beech or apple or fir, as the case may be--a yard or two long and with the bark intact that you lay across the fire-dogs and turn round and round until they are burned through at the centre and fall into the embers beneath in a glorious blaze, sending out such a generous warmth as only comes from a wood fire. Once or twice I drew myself away from this seductive task and sat down at the table, determined to write such a moving panegyric on November as would make it the haughtiest month of the year. Once I even went outside to get inspiration from the stars and the moon that was flooding the valley with a mystic light and the hoar-frost that lay like a white garment over the orchard. I heard the hoot of the owl in the copse near by and the sound of the wind in the trees and the barking of a distant dog and came back to my task with a stern resolve to see it through. But the struggle was in vain. Always there was some nice readjustment of the logs necessary to call me to the charmed circle of the wood fire; always at the end I found myself planted in the arm-chair watching the changing scenery of the glowing embers.

So the article was not written after all. Perhaps it was as well, for I do not think I have the brush to do justice to My Lady November. It may be that that is why the wood fire had so easy a triumph.

ON SAYING "PLEASE"