Part 5
“On one side of this end of the room was the door of a closet wherein stood the strong beer and the wine, which never came thence but in single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observ’d. For he never exceeded in drink or permitted it.” In another account of Mr. Hastings his iron rule with regard to liquor was suggested to have caused much unhappiness to his guests. And I must admit that there seems to be something wrong in a house where you may not see the bottle, much less handle it. But, on the other hand, it is such unexpected whims and unreasonableness that are the life-blood of these old originals. Any dull creature can be reasonable.
Now comes a priceless touch: “On the other side was the door into an old chapel, not used for devotion. The pulpit, as the safest place, was never wanting of a cold chine of beef, venison pasty, gammon of bacon, or great apple pye, with thick crust, extremely baked.” “Never wanting” is splendid. One longs to know more of the service of this house--of the cook who fell in so complacently with such a master’s needs and ways. “Never wanting!”
Like Bishop Corbet’s fairies, Mr. Hastings was of the old profession. “His table cost him not much, though it was good to eat at. His sports supplied all but beef and mutton, except Fridays, when he had the best salt fish (as well as other fish) he could get; and was the day his neighbours of best quality most visited him. He never wanted a London pudding, and always sung it in with ‘My part lies therein-a.’” “He always sung it in.” Here lies an old custom indeed, dead, I suppose, as Mr. Hastings himself and all his spaniels and kittens. Who sings in a pudding to-day? And, indeed, what pudding is worth singing in? Not the rice which I had yesterday, at any rate.
And so we come to the end: “He was well-natured but soon angry.... He lived to be a hundred; never lost his eyesight, but always wrote and read without spectacles; and got on horseback without help. Until past four score he rode to the death of a stag as well as any.” He was buried in Horton church in 1650 at the age of ninety and nine, and England will never know anything like him again. Gone are such spacious days and ways; gone such idiosyncrasy and humour. Only, I imagine, on the bowling-greens are Mr. Hastings’ characteristics to be still observed; for our old devotees of that leisurely contest, that most pacific warfare, cannot in their attitudes, gestures and expressions differ much from the Squire of Woodlands. Just so did he, three hundred years ago, contort and twist his frame, as he watched his bowl’s career and bent every nerve and fibre to influence it to swerve at the last dying moment on the jack between his two rivals. These elemental anxieties do not change.
Thoughts on Tan
In my search for the curious, which I hope that nothing will ever satiate, I came recently upon this advertisement at the end of a not too respectable comic paper:--
HANDSOME MEN are slightly sun-burnt. “Sunbronze” gives this tint. Harmless. Detection impossible. Makes men really handsome. Society Lady writes:--“Sunbronze is wonderful, charming, and genuine.” 1s. 1½d., etc.
When I read it first I laughed. Then I cut it out. Then I began not to laugh; and I am not sure now that one ought not to weep....
We were considering earlier in this volume a certain kind of fool’s paradise--the paradise which surrounds the collector-fool who genuinely believes his geese to be swans. That amiable simpleton deceived no one; he was merely soothingly and caressingly self-deceived to the top of his bent through a heaven-sent want of true taste. Compared with him the man who deliberately rubs a mixture on his face in order to induce his friends to believe that he has been much in the sun when he has not is complex indeed--for he is deceiving every one else without for an instant deceiving himself at all. For that is my reading of that advertisement. I do not accept its face value; I do not believe that it is bought by men in order to render themselves more attractive to the fair. My reading is that it is bought by men (and perhaps by women too: you observe the testimony of the Society Lady?) in order that it may lend colour to their assertion that they have been fashionably or expensively holiday-making when they have not.
But why pretend? you say. Ah! you are perhaps well-to-do. Nothing keeps you at home; or even if it did, it would not cause you shame. But can you not believe that there are others?...
We feel that we are greater than we know
--as Wordsworth says. That is an exalted mood. A commoner experience would perhaps be expressed thus:--
We hope you’ll think us greater than we are.
That aspiration, at any rate, is at the bottom of the success of such a lotion as this; and it is prevalent.
A full inquiry into this foible of poor human nature would need a volume; nor could I carry it out. Something of the minute scientific method of Professor Sully would be needed, with a considerable infusion of Thackeray added, and a leaven of pity, too.
Pity indeed. For though sheer brazen impudence and a determined lady-killing may resort to this strange bottle, this phial of mockery, yet I seem to see it being smuggled into simpler homes too. The poor clerk, for example, who is forced by sheer poverty to spend his week or fortnight in his London home, and by sheer shame to spend it almost _perdu_; reading the paper in bed, smoking his pipe in his back yard, helping with the children, playing pool at night over his glass in the public-house at the corner--how would he feel when he returned to work at the end of the period and had to confess that he had been nowhere? That is the point to consider, for few of us are great, and he is very small indeed. Amid triumphant stories of Margate and Southend, Yarmouth and Southsea, Brighton and even Guernsey, where would he be if he told the truth? Nowhere. And what fun is it not to be anywhere? Don’t you see? And so do you blame him if he spends 1s. 1½d., and anoints his countenance with a little of this delusive fluid on the morning of his return, and, strong in its testimony, talks vaguely but sufficiently of Herne Bay? Do you blame him? You must be a devil of a fellow if you do.
In a way he is entirely justified, for there is no doubt that he is gaining self-respect by losing it: that is to say, he would feel almost too paltry if he had to confess to the real squalid economy of his fortnight. And it is not good to feel too paltry.
But the wish to be thought more fashionable than one is, is not confined to the respectable poor--the poor, that is, who are forced to make something of a show: surely the least enviable class of all; the poor, in other words, who have to forego all the privileges of being poor. There is another class--Major Pendennis was at the head of it--who must intrigue a little too, if they are not to be too miserable. I remember a little man who had a room in Jermyn Street and lived in his Club; it was his habit to disappear for a fortnight or so every 11th of August, and reappear very brown and very vocal of the moors. His colour was genuine--no 1s. 1½d. bottle, but the Lord of Light himself had conferred it; yet not by beams that fell in Yorkshire or Scotland, but on Brighton’s pier. How, then, did his narrative of triumph in the butts carry conviction? What was his particular “Sunbronze”? He wore in the ribbon of his hat a little row of grouse feathers.
And that possibly is what one has to remember--that “Sunbronze” takes many forms--more than I know, or you know, or ever shall know, however extensive our knowledge may be at this moment. For we all “Sunbronze” a little; at least if not quite all, nearly all. We nearly all hope you’ll think us greater than we are.
On Leaving One’s Beat
When I am going for a long railway journey I always buy a number of papers associated with walks of life as far as possible removed from my own. Then the time passes easily. The ordinary papers one reads too quickly; the exorbitant require attention--they open the door to new worlds. I do not mean to suggest that one could go so far as to find entertainment in the Financial Supplement to the “Times”--that is too much; but the organs of dog-fancying, yachting, cricket, prize-fighting, the police, estate agents, licensed victuallers--these are sufficiently unusual and concentrated to be entertaining if they are really studied. Their exclusiveness, their importance, I particularly like: the suggestion they throw out that in this world all is vanity save their own affairs (as indeed it is). Such self-centredness is very exhilarating.
But the best fun of all is to be found in the stage and variety-hall papers. Not only are they the most amusing, but also the most human, for the sock and buskin have a way of forcing the heart to the sleeve. Limelight does more than all the sun of the tropics to bring emotion to the surface without shame; and it thus comes about that the periodicals of the players are full of refreshment to the cabined and reserved. Reading one of them the other day, I found in the advertisement columns (which should never be neglected) the following rich feast of opportunity, on which I have been ruminating ever since:--
“THE ANGEL OF HIS DREAMS.”
Wanted, to rehearse April 19th, Summer Tour, Autumn if suitable, Dashing Leading Lady; must have power, pathos, intensity, and be capable of strong character work. Emotional Juvenile Lady, with pathos and intensity (look 17 in first Act; state if sing). Handsome wardrobe essential in both cases. Clever Emotional Child Actress, over 14, look 9; own speciality. Tall, Robust, Aristocratic Heavy Man; Aris. Old Man (Small Double and S.M.). Young Char. Juv. Man (Small Double); Bright Low Comedian (short).
References, lowest summer terms, and photos essential.
--There is an advertisement if you like! Did you ever hear of so many strange wants? I certainly never did; nor ever did I hear of so many vacancies that I could not myself do anything towards filling. For, as a rule, one feels one could make some kind of a show in most capacities--one could maintain for a little while the illusion of being a gentleman’s butler, or even a gardener, a sleeping partner, an addresser of envelopes, a smart traveller, an election agent, a sub-editor, or any of the things that are so frequently advertised for, supposing one to have applied for the post and have been engaged. But how begin to be a “Young Char. Juv. Man (Small Double)”? That leaves me utterly at sea. And “S.M.,” what is that?
It was while pondering upon these matters that I realized what an excellent thing it would be for many of us whose imagination is weak, and whose sympathetic understanding is therefore apt to break down, if we could now and then completely change our beat. Many a hidebound, intolerant, self-satisfied Puritan do I know who, forced into such a touring company as this, compelled by sheer adversity to assume the habit of a “Small Double and S.M.,” or a “Bright Low Comedian,” would come out of the ordeal far sweeter and fitter to play his part in the human drama, however he may have disappointed the promoters of “The Angel of His Dreams.” We remain--it is largely the fault of the shortness of life and the need of pence--too much in our own grooves. We are too ignorant of what we can really do.
That advertisement came from an organ of the legitimate Stage. Obviously. In a less classic and more intimate music-hall paper, which I bought at the same time, I found the charming announcement of the birth of a son to a North of England Valentine Vox. After stating the event--“The wife of ‘Baddow’ (ventriloquist) of a son”--it went on thus:--“Both doing well. Baddow takes this opportunity of thanking the managers and agents who so kindly transferred, altered, and rearranged dates, so that I played places near and was able to stay in Liverpool for this event.” There is something very engaging in the _naïveté_, pride and pleasure of that statement. It contains so much of the warm-heartedness of the variety-stage, where money and sympathy equally come easily and go easily. Baddow’s suppression of his Christian name, or even initial, I like: his satisfaction in having reached a position where both are negligible, together with the suspicion that he is aware that the advertisement would be of less value if the star style were tampered with. I like also his complacency as a parent of some importance. And then there is in it too the new evidence of the kindliness of those in power, all working together to keep the properly anxious ventriloquist near at home; and finally the really adorable transition, indicating real emotion, from the somewhat stilted if imposing third person to the familiar first.
The good, affectionate Baddow! I hope mother and son are still doing well, and that the son will grow up to be a comfort to his parents, and as a ventriloquist not unworthy of his father (though never surpassing him), and a delight to audiences.
The Deer-Park
After too many years I found myself last week once again in the first deer-park I ever saw; and the change was only in me. The same beautiful creatures were there, of the dappled variety, feeding in little groups, standing motionless as a stranger approached, and moving across the open or amid the trees of the avenue with the silent, timid curiousness of their kind. The sun was golden through cracks in the heavy clouds, and the deer’s soft dapplings shone in its light, while when they moved in any number they twinkled, glittered, almost smouldered.
Now and then an old stag, with antlers so broad and branching that they seemed not his at all, but a borrowed head-dress assumed almost as if for a charade, would pass with dignity and extreme deliberation from one group to another; now and then a fawn would trot up to its mother on legs of such slender delicacy that their serviceableness for anything but the most exquisite decoration seemed impossible; and twice there were royal battles between young stags, whose horns met in a terrifying clash and clatter like spears on shields.
These contests were interesting not only for the attack and counter-attack, but for the conduct of the older stags, two of which at once approached very slowly, but full of purpose, to act as referees, and, if necessary, to interfere. It was precisely the same in each engagement, although they were half a mile apart. The second was the more exciting, for once or twice the referee had to break in, and once with a furious rush one of the fighters charged his opponent clean into the river, down a steep bank, and then jumped in after him and continued the battle. All this we saw as we sat under one of the lime-trees in the beautiful avenue, and I remembered, as I sat there, that just such sounds as these--the rattling of antlers in concussion--we had been accustomed to hear years and years ago when we were children and lodged in a cottage by the park gates. Certainly I had not heard it since, but gradually it grew more and more familiar, rising to the surface of consciousness after this so long submersion.
What the life of a park deer is I have no notion, nor was there anyone to ask; but since that is thirty-five years ago at the least, it is improbable that any of these lovely creatures, so rare and dainty and fragile as to be almost unreal, are the same that used to thrill us at that distant day; yet I repeat there was no visible change whatever, save in me. Everything else was the same--the footpaths; the lime avenue; the oak deer-fence, still often in need of repair; the large house, once so awe-inspiring and now so ugly; the church by the Scotch firs; the red sand of the road; the curious house with the bas-relief of a hog on a plate of Sussex iron near the church--but most of all the deer, just as fairylike, just as thrilling, as ever, and moving exactly in their old mysterious ways. I was glad I had seen so few deer since, and none dappled. I will not see these again for some time, just to keep that emotion of surprise and delight green and sweet.
Considering how many deer-parks England has--though far from enough--it is remarkable that the sight of deer should be such an epoch in the life of the ordinary person. Yet the very word deer-park gives me a quickening of the pulse, and, I hope, always will. I came away wondering what Jamrach or Cross would want for a pair; but I have lost the wish for them. They should be kept more extraordinary than that. They must remain an event. I am even sorry for villagers who live near deer-parks; while having so much, they miss so much.
The other creature from romance that I group with the deer as making a red-letter day for a child, and indeed for some of us who are older, is the peacock. Now and then, but how rarely, there would be an excursion to some great mansion. The passage from room to room amid gilt furniture and ancestral portraits was an excitement, no doubt; but the most memorable sight of all was the blue breast of the peacock on the terrace-wall, caught through one of the diamond panes. Until I moved to London and contracted the Kew Gardens Sunday habit, I suppose that I had not seen ten peacocks in my life, and now again I see them ordinarily not once a year; but a little while ago I visited a poet who lives in an old house in the very heart of the country, and there I found many peacocks. They walked proudly and affectedly about the garden, they sat on the walls and on the roofs of the out-buildings, they screamed at each other and spread their tails. The complete skin of one that had died burned blue in the hall.
I expressed the usual commonplace as to their destructiveness of flowers.
“To me,” said the poet, “they _are_ flowers. One cannot have both, so I have peacocks.”
From this, my first and latest deer-park, which has but a handful of cottages near it, we walked to the market town, a mile and a half away, and there I sought in vain for the little toy and sweet shop where all those years ago my first bow and arrow was bought. I know just where it stood, but new and imposing premises occupy its place. The bow was given me by one of those bachelor visitors who have it in their power at extraordinarily small cost to glorify the existence of small boys and emparadise the world. It is among the deeper tragedies that one can never receive one’s first bow and arrow again.
The Rarities
I have been staying in the remote country with an aristocrat, by which, of course, I mean not a man with two motor-cars, or a man with illustrious quarterings, but one through whose garden runs a trout-stream. I used to think that the possession of a cedar alone conferred aristocracy, and I still think that in some measure it does; but a stream with trout in it...! Moreover, this friend of mine has a cedar too.
It is odd how late in life one does some of the most desirable things. Here am I, who, ever since I can remember, have been longing to be idle with a book in a chair beside running water; yet not till last week did I find the conditions perfect. The sun was hot, yet not too hot; the book did not matter, yet was not despicable, and once a peacock butterfly settled upon the open page, and this justified in an instant the existence of author, publisher, paper-maker, printer, binder, and book-seller; the air was filled not only with the pretty whispering burble of the current, but also with the plashing of a fountain in its marble basin and the steady descent of water through a sluice; sweet scents came and went with the gentle breeze, and one had but to lift the eyes to see phloxes and dahlias in all their rich glory. And once--but that is too wonderful an experience to be mentioned without more ceremony.
Just as one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so is one man’s commonplace another’s phenomenon. To an Englishman, for example, in Dieppe it is nothing to read that a swallow-tailed butterfly has been seen in England, because on the cliffs between Dieppe and Le Puy swallow-tails are as prevalent as garden-whites with us. But what a thrill for the English schoolboy with his net to see one in his native meadows! Again, it is nothing to a gamekeeper to watch a family of foxes at play in the early morning; but it would be an unforgettable spectacle to a town dweller. And I daresay that there are readers of these lines in Norfolk who are as accustomed to the sight of kingfishers as I who live far from water am to that of rooks; but to me kingfishers have appeared so seldom that they are like angels’ visits and mark the years. I remember one on the Rother, near Midhurst, in 1884; another near Abingdon in 1889; another at Burford Bridge in 1890; and a fourth in the valley between Rievaulx and Helmsley in 1894. That is my total--four kingfishers in quite a long and not indolent life, which includes at least two separate weeks on the Avon devoted to the search for this bird--not the frequented Avon either, but the Avon’s quieter parts such as one finds near the Combertons and about Harington Weir.
At least that was my total until last week. But now I must add a fifth, for as I was sitting by this little stream, thinking of nothing, quietly ruminative and happily receptive, suddenly a jewel darted through the air, and, burning bright against the sombre depths of a yew, disappeared again. Almost before I had realized its presence my fifth kingfisher was gone; but the day was made perfect by the flash.
And had I sat on I might have had even greater luck, for a fortnight ago, while my friend was standing motionless on his bridge, an otter climbed out of the water close by and strolled along the bank, bright-eyed and inquisitive. Luck is the only word; and, as I once wrote elsewhere, it is a kind of luck which goes entirely by favour of the gods. I have it not. The only otter I ever saw was at the Zoo; and incidentally I might add that the otter is the only animal in the Zoo for which (with the exception of the mice) one does not feel sorry. He seems so content; and has so much of his “native pewter” (so to speak) to revel in; and is so continuously and rapturously alive, making the best of both worlds--water and land. Whenever I look at him--and he is three or four strong just now--I again realize that one of the most satisfactory memories I can indulge is that on the single occasion on which I joined an otter hunt nothing was killed.
It was seventeen years ago. The pack had come all the way to Sussex from Wales, accompanied by an indefatigable owner, who illustrated, curiously, pathetically, almost tragically, the hold that the chase can exert upon an English gentleman. For he was a ruin: he was paralyzed below the waist, and had the use only of one arm; but strapped securely on a tried and faithful pony, he was able to direct and follow the hunt. It was a strange sight: the old placid pony tugging at the lush grass, while its crippled rider, in the grip of the passion of pursuit, yelled like a demon. Hour after hour this stricken centaur patrolled the banks and urged on his hounds with shouts and cries pouring from his twisted lips. Not an otter-haunted stream in England but knew him! I often think of him and wonder.