Part 10
“In the boxes, quite in a corner, sat several servants, who were said to be placed there to keep the seats for the families they served, till they should arrive; they seemed to sit remarkably close and still, the reason of which, I was told, was their apprehension of being pelted; for if one of them dares to look out of the box, he is immediately saluted with a shower of orange peel from the gallery.” And here the London experiences end.
Now for the open road. Having coached to Richmond, Mr. Moritz set out to reach Oxford on foot, sleeping at whatever village he came to at nightfall. But he was not very fortunate, either because he fell among peculiarly rude and inhospitable folk or because his appearance was so odd as to be irresistible. A traveller on foot in this country, he says, “seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected and shunned by everybody that meets him. At least this has hitherto been my case, on the road from Richmond to Windsor. When I was tired, I sat down in the shade under the hedges, and read Milton. But this relief was soon rendered disagreeable to me; for those who rode, or drove, past me, stared at me with astonishment; and made many significant gestures, as if they thought my head deranged. So singular must it needs have appeared to them to see a man sitting along the side of a public road, and reading. I therefore found myself obliged, when I wished to rest myself and read, to look out for a retired spot in some by-lane or cross-road.
“Many of the coachmen who drove by called out to me, ever and anon, and asked if I would not ride on the outside; and when, every now and then, a farmer on horseback met me, he said, and seemingly with an air of pity for me, ‘’Tis warm walking, sir!’ and when I passed through a village, every old woman testified her pity by an exclamation of ‘Good God!’”
His troubles continued, for an Eton inn refused to admit him at all, and the servants at the Windsor inn did all they could to make him uncomfortable. He had his revenge, however. “As I was going away, the waiter, who had served me with so very ill a grace, placed himself on the stairs, and said, ‘Pray remember the waiter!’ I gave him three halfpence: on which he saluted me with the heartiest ‘G--d d----n you, sir!’ I had ever heard. At the door stood the cross maid, who also accosted me with ‘Pray remember the chambermaid!’--‘Yes, yes,’ said I, ‘I shall long remember your most ill-mannered behaviour and shameful incivility’; and so I gave her nothing. I hope she was stung and nettled by my reproof: however, she strove to stifle her anger by a contemptuous, loud horse-laugh.”
An adventure with a foot-pad and rebuffs from other landlords followed, but in the little Berkshire village of Nettlebed, five miles north-west of Henley, he found repose. Nettlebed remained in his mind as the most charming spot in England: he liked the inn, he liked the people, and he liked the church. His description of the inn actually re-creates the past; indeed, it is not unworthy to stand beside that description of that inn in “The Old Curiosity Shop” in which the nature of dwarfs and giants was so illuminatingly discussed, over the landlord’s wonderful stew.
“‘May I stay here to-night?’ I asked with eagerness.
“‘Why, yes, you may.’--An answer which, however cold and surly, made me exceedingly happy.
“They showed me into the kitchen, and let me sit down to sup at the same table with some soldiers and the servants. I now, for the first time, found myself in one of their kitchens which I had so often read of in Fielding’s fine novels, and which certainly give one, on the whole, a very accurate idea of English manners.
“The chimney in this kitchen, where they were roasting and boiling, seemed to be taken off from the rest of the room and enclosed by a wooden partition: the rest of the apartment was made use of as a sitting and eating room. All round on the sides were shelves with pewter dishes and plates, and the ceiling was well stored with provisions of various kinds, such as sugar-loaves, black-puddings, hams, sausages, flitches of bacon, etc.
“While I was eating, a post-chaise drove up; and in a moment both the folding-doors were thrown open, and the whole house set in motion, in order to receive, with all due respect, these guests, who, no doubt, were supposed to be persons of consequence. The gentlemen alighted, however, only for a moment, and called for nothing but a couple of pots of beer; and then drove away again. Notwithstanding the people of the house behaved to them with all possible attention, for they came in a post-chaise.”
On at last tearing himself from Nettlebed, after three futile efforts, Mr. Moritz walked to Dorchester, where he hoped to sleep but was not permitted. Late at night, therefore, he set out for Oxford, and was joined on the way by another traveller to the same city, a young clergyman. They reached Oxford just before midnight, and Mr. Moritz proposed to sleep on a stone. “No, no,” said his companion: and here we come to the gem of the book.
Hitherto Mr. Moritz has been now and then a little caustic and always an alert observer, holding himself well in hand; but in the next two pages a very delightful satirical glint appears. I consider the midnight theological conversation that follows by no means unworthy to be remembered along with Hogarth’s picture of a not dissimilar occasion. Whether it is known at Oxford I have not inquired; but I have several friends there who would immensely relish it.
“‘No, no,’” said his friend, “‘come along with me to a neighbouring ale-house, where it is possible they mayn’t be gone to bed and we may yet find company.’ We went on a few houses further, and then knocked at a door. It was then nearly twelve. They readily let us in; but how great was my astonishment when, on being shown into a room on the left, I saw a great number of clergymen, all with their gowns and bands on, sitting round a large table, each with his pot of beer before him. My travelling companion introduced me to them, as a German clergyman, whom he could not sufficiently praise for my correct pronunciation of the Latin, my orthodoxy, and my good walking.
“I now saw myself in a moment, as it were, all at once transported into the midst of a company, all apparently very respectable men, but all strangers to me. And it appeared to me very extraordinary that I should, thus at midnight, be in Oxford, in a large company of Oxonian clergy, without well knowing how I had got there. Meanwhile, however, I took all the pains in my power to recommend myself to my company, and in the course of conversation I gave them as good an account as I could of our German universities, neither denying nor concealing that, now and then, we had riots and disturbances. ‘O, we are very unruly here too,’ said one of the clergymen, as he took a hearty draught out of his pot of beer, and knocked on the table with his hand. The conversation now became louder, more general, and a little confused; they enquired after Mr. Bruns, at present professor at Helmstadt, who was known by many of them.
“Among these gentlemen there was one of the name of Clerk, who seemed ambitious to pass for a great wit, which he attempted by starting sundry objections to the Bible. I should have liked him better if he had confined himself to punning and playing on his own name, by telling us again and again, that he should still be at least a Clerk, even though he should never become a clergyman. Upon the whole, however, he was, in his way, a man of some humour, and an agreeable companion.
“Among other objections to the Scriptures, he stated this one to my travelling companion, whose name I now learnt was Maud, that it was said in the Bible that God was a wine-bibber and a drunkard. On this Mr. Maud fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible for any such passage to be found in the Bible. Another divine, a Mr. Caern, referred us to his absent brother, who had already been forty years in the Church, and must certainly know something of such a passage if it were in the Bible, but he would venture to lay any wager his brother knew nothing of it.
“‘Waiter! fetch a Bible!’ called out Mr. Clerk, and a great family Bible was immediately brought in, and opened on the table among all the beer jugs.
“Mr. Clerk turned over a few leaves, and in the book of Judges, 9th chapter, verse 13, he read, ‘Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man?’
“Mr. Maud and Mr. Caern, who had before been most violent, now sat as if struck dumb. A silence of some minutes prevailed, when all at once the spirit of revelation seemed to come on me, and I said, ‘Why, gentlemen, you must be sensible that it is but an allegorical expression; and,’ I added, ‘how often in the Bible are kings called Gods!’
“‘Why, yes, to be sure,’ said Mr. Maud and Mr. Caern, ‘it is an allegorical expression; nothing can be more clear; it is a metaphor, and therefore it is absurd to understand it in a literal sense.’ And now they, in their turn, triumphed over poor Clerk, and drank large draughts to my health. Mr. Clerk, however, had not yet exhausted his quiver, and so he desired them to explain to him a passage in the prophecy of Isaiah, where it is said in express terms that God is a barber. Mr. Maud was so enraged at this, that he called Clerk an impudent fellow; and Mr. Caern again and yet more earnestly referred us to his brother, who had been forty years in the Church, and who therefore, he doubted not, would also consider Mr. Clerk as an impudent fellow, if he maintained any such abominable notions. [This is sheer Dickens, isn’t it?]
“Mr. Clerk all this while sat perfectly composed, without either a smile or a frown; but turning to a passage in Isaiah, chapter xx, verse 7, he read these words: ‘In the same day the Lord shall shave with a razor ... the head, and the hair of the feet: and it shall also consume the beard.’ If Mr. Maud and Mr. Caern were before stunned and confounded, they were much more so now; and even Mr. Caern’s brother, who had been forty years in the Church, seemed to have left them in the lurch, for he was no longer referred to. I broke silence a second time, and said, ‘Why, gentlemen, this also is clearly metaphorical, and it is equally just, strong and beautiful.’ ‘Aye, to be sure it is,’ rejoined Mr. Maud and Mr. Caern both in a breath; at the same time rapping the table with their knuckles. I went on, and said, ‘You know it was the custom for those who were captives to have their heads shorn; the plain import, then, of this remarkable expression is nothing more than that God would deliver the rebellious Jews to be prisoners to a foreign people, who would shave their beards!’ ‘Aye, to be sure it is; anybody may see it is; why it is as clear as the day!’ ‘So it is,’ rejoined Mr. Caern, ‘and my brother, who has been forty years in the Church, explains it just as this gentleman does.’
“We had now gained a second victory over Mr. Clerk; who being perhaps ashamed either of himself or of us, now remained quiet, and made no further objections to the Bible. My health, however, was again encored, and drunk in strong ale; which, as my company seemed to like so much, I was sorry I could not like. It either intoxicated or stupefied me; and I do think it overpowers one much sooner than so much wine could. The conversation now turned on many different subjects. At last, when morning drew near, Mr. Maud suddenly exclaimed, ‘D----n me, I must read prayers this morning at All-Souls!’”
The scene of that convivial disputation was the “Mitre”; and if there are any other equally amusing descriptions of a night in that inn I should like to read them. It reflects credit, not only upon the traveller, but also upon the very young lady, his translator, whose name, according to the editorial preface, was “fragrant with exemplary piety.”
Mr. Maud, before he departed on his conscientious errand, arranged to call for Mr. Moritz and show him Oxford; but the strong ale had been too much for the foreigner and he was not able to see the city till the day following. He was then taken to Corpus Christi and All Souls and other colleges. While “going along the street, we met the English poet laureate, Warton, now rather an elderly man; and yet he is still the fellow of a college. His greatest pleasure, next to poetry, is, as Mr. Maud told me, shooting wild ducks.” After Oxford, Mr. Moritz visited Stratford-on-Avon, which he reached in a coach. And after Stratford-on-Avon, he saw Birmingham and the Peak of Derbyshire, and so returned to London and Germany. He had other adventures and encounters, all described with liveliness; but here I must stop.
The ideal travel book could, I suppose, be written only by the Wandering Jew, who, never ceasing, as he does, to perambulate this globe, returning periodically, as one imagines, to every country, has it in his power in each successive description to note not only physical but social changes. I don’t know what intervals elapse between his visits to London, but they must be sufficiently lengthy to permit of very noticeable alterations, perceptible even to a footsore and disenchanted Hebrew of incredible age. In default of this ancient peripatetic, no one could do it better than Halley’s Comet, whose visits are paid punctually every seventy-four years.
The Windmill
Chance recently made me for a while the tenant of a windmill. Not to live in, and unhappily not to grind corn in, but to visit as the mood arose, and see the ships in the harbour from the topmost window, and look down on the sheep and the green world all around. For this mill stands high and white--so white, indeed, that when there is a thunder-cloud behind it, it seems a thing of polished aluminium.
From its windows you can see four other mills, all, like itself, idle, and one merely a ruin and one with only two sweeps left. But just over the next range of hills, out of sight, to the north-east, is a windmill that still merrily goes, and about five miles away to the north-west is another also active; so that things are not quite so bad hereabouts as in many parts of the country, where the good breezes blow altogether in vain. And recently as all the world knows there has been a boom in whole-meal bread which was to set many a pair of derelict mill-stones in action again.
Thinking over the losses which England has had forced upon her by steam and the ingenuity of the engineer, one is disposed to count the decay of the windmill among the first. Perhaps in the matter of pure picturesqueness the most serious thing that ever happened to England was the discovery of galvanized iron roofing; but, after all, there was never anything but quiet and rich and comfortable beauty about red roofs, whereas the living windmill is not only beautiful but romantic too: a willing, man-serving creature, yoked to the elements, a whirling monster, often a thing of terror. No one can stand very near the crashing sweeps of a windmill in half a gale without a tightening of the heart--a feeling comparable to that which comes from watching the waves break over a wall in a storm. And to be within the mill at such a time is to know something of sound’s very sources; it is the cave of noise itself. No doubt there are dens of hammering energy which are more shattering, but the noise of a windmill is largely natural, the product of wood striving with the good sou’-wester; it fills the ears rather than assaults them. The effect, moreover, is by no means lessened by the absence of the wind itself and the silent nonchalance of the miller and his man, who move about in the midst of this appalling racket with the quiet efficiency of vergers.
In my mill, of course, there is no such uproar; nothing but the occasional shaking of the cross-pieces of the idle sails. Everything is still, and the pity of it is that everything is in almost perfect order for the day’s work. The mill one day--some score years ago--was full of life; the next, and ever after, mute and lifeless, like a stream frozen in a night or the palace in Tennyson’s ballad of the “Sleeping Beauty.” There is no decay--merely inanition. One or two of the apple-wood cogs have been broken from the great wheel; a few floor planks have been rotted; but that is all. A week’s overhauling would put everything right. But it will never come, and the cheerful winds that once were to drive a thousand English mills so happily now bustle over the Channel in vain.
Not the least attractive thing about my mill is its profound woodenness. There is not enough iron in it to fill a wheelbarrow. The walls are wood, the sweeps, the brake, the wheels, the cogs (apple as I have said: how long were they discovering that apple was best, I wonder). Those fishing-smacks which from the topmost window we see on the grey waters do not owe more to the friendly forest.
I know a man who takes the loss of the windmill so much to heart that he is making a windmill map. He is beginning with Sussex only and marking with a cross every place--so far as he can now ascertain--where a windmill once stood. “That will show them what they have lost!” he says bitterly. “That will teach them to prefer steam!” The crosses will crowd like lovers’ kisses in some parts, for Sussex was a county of millers, and all over the Downs now one comes upon shallow pits from which ancient mills have been dug and dispersed. Imaginative archæologists find a thousand fantastic explanations of these hollows, and one even has been claimed for a prehistoric observatory; but all the time they are merely the foundations of windmills: nothing more romantic than that, and nothing less romantic.
To me, at any rate, this map will be a melancholy document. How much more so would it be to that greatest of mill-lovers and mill-painters and himself a miller and miller’s son, John Constable, could he see it! The Sussex mill-map alone would cause him to weep tears, for, though an alien, he knew our mills well, and painted many of them. Even at Brighton (such is the incorruptible beauty of these structures) he found mills to paint. One or two, indeed, still remain, but they are blackened stumps merely--only the ruins of the radiant aerial creatures of their prime, when the master sat before them with those paints and brushes whose magic secret it was to preserve and glorify English weather for all time. You will find some of these sketches in South Kensington Museum, particularly that masterpiece of wind and joyousness called “Spring,” which depicts the very mill in which the youthful artist, when milling was still his destiny, worked; and a favourite of mine is the “Mill Near Brighton,” seen over the shoulder of a poppied field, that hangs in the Salting collection at the National Gallery. Mr. Salting showed it to me soon after he bought it, and I longed for enough moral courage to snatch it from his hand and run. But one’s ordinary invertebrate easy rectitude prevailed, and I lost it.
Constable’s grief, I say, would be deep as he scanned this Sussex map for his lost darlings. How much more so when the Suffolk mill-map was laid before him! He used to say that a miller has a better chance to study the sky than any man: that is, on land. Certainly if he had never been a miller his own skies would not have the living truth that is theirs.
As to the loss of the miller, that is a matter that does not bear thinking about. That the elimination of this character, historically so shrewd and so genial, from the countryside should be borne with such equanimity proves the carelessness and apathy of England more almost than the rise of the dust-evolving, road-devouring car. And what chance has the English ballad poetry of the future with no millers to celebrate? But perhaps the bread boom will really bring him back. Devoutly do I hope so, for the only thing more beautiful in a landscape than a mill that is still is a mill that is active.
A Glimpse of Civilization
The sign of this inn, like that of so many in the fair land of France, was “Les Quatre Fils d’Aymon”; and who Aymon was, and what his four sons did, I wonder how many English people know. Aymon was the Duke of Dordogne, and his sons were Renaud, Guiscard, Alard, and Richard, and you may read of them in a twelfth-century French romance and in Victor Hugo’s _Légende des Siècles_. So much I can state, but no more. There are certain things that one’s memory will not retain, and the story of Aymon and his four sons is one of them. I have equal difficulty in remembering for certain whether the pen is mightier than the sword or the sword mightier than the pen.
But Aymon and his quartette matter nothing. What does matter is that in a French inn you may be as witty as you can, as intelligent as you can, but some one there will be more intelligent, more witty. We came to this inn, which is some three leagues distant from Paris, about five in the afternoon on a bitter, snowy day. We made the journey in a motor-car through the bleakest country I ever saw, chiefly over _pavé_, right from the heart of Paris, and the sign of Aymon and his family was the first to greet our eyes, strain them as we might. Hence, since there are few pleasures to compare with that of entering a warm inn while one is on a cold journey, we were very happy when the door closed behind us, and the rays of the circular stove in the middle of the room drew us to it like tentacles.
Where was the _patron_? (We had heard of the _patron_ as a character.) The _patron_, being also the _chef_, was in the kitchen--a vast, clean kitchen, with a glowing fire, and myriad copper pots on the walls; but he very willingly called in a lieutenant, and then brought certain hot cordials and himself to our table. Consider an English innkeeper being found at five in the afternoon in a spotless kitchen, himself in spotless white, and leaving it to discuss the world at large with two guests of a few minutes! For that is what we did--we discussed affairs. He had the “Petit Journal” before him, and we went through the pictures, and he dismissed men and matters with grunts and chuckles. He knew the world. He had lived and he knew. Napoleon III had once dined in this very inn, and a copper pipkin was still preserved on the kitchen wall in which part of the Imperial meal had been cooked; but it was nothing to our little host. President Fallières lunched there only a few months ago--in that very chair--but that also was nothing to him. Life is an individual business; life comes first; and an innkeeper has as much life to live as any one else, be it Emperor or President.
He is a short man, between fifty and sixty, with close-cropped, grizzled hair, a grizzled imperial, and a fierce, grizzled moustache in perpetual danger of being burned by his cigarette. As a young man he was cook to his officers’ mess, chiefly in Algiers, where he had a touch of sun, which accounts for a certain excitability and nervousness. (At a performance of “Biribi” at Antoine’s Theatre he had to be led out, it was so true and he so overwrought.) He would certainly have written poetry had his parents been rich. Trouble also he would as assuredly have plunged into; and indeed his life is not too smooth as it is, for he is terribly susceptible (those African sunstrokes!) and Madame had to keep both eyes very wide open before she ceased to care.