Part 6

Dipping the other day in that most agreeable of recent autobiographies, _The Reminiscences of Albert Pell_, I opened once again at his story of Sir John Lawes’ otters, and, re-reading it, I felt more than ever relieved that that one otter-hunt of my youth ended without bloodshed. “An otter,” wrote Mr. Pell, who knew most things about English woodlands and streams, “is a delightfully amusing pet, and extremely inquisitive. When indoor he pries into every room, upstairs and downstairs, but has, as a famous sportswoman says, a bad habit of getting up early in the morning, having a bath, if there is one in the room handy, then going up a chimney and returning to get into bed with his mistress. My friend Sir John Lawes, as great a man in sport as in science, had a pair of these animals at Rothamsted. They retired by day to a small pool in the park. It was his custom at one time to drive some miles to the railway-station at St. Albans, taking the train there for London. On his return he never failed to bring back a basket of fresh fish for the otters. As the carriage entered the park on the way back to the Hall the creatures, unmoved by any other traffic, recognized the paces of their master’s horses, and coming out of their retreat in haste across the grass, ran ahead of the carriage, jumping up like dogs at the horses’ noses till they reached the Hall, when, the basket being emptied before them, they hurried back with their present. Sir John took them up with him to his forest in Scotland, where the pair enjoyed the forest as much as he did, taking themselves off in the evening on fishing excursions in wild Highland waters, to return without fail before daylight. A wretch of a gillie killed the female, whereupon the disconsolate mate became irregular in his habits, staying out at first for one night, then for two or three, then a week, and finally never came back at all; probably lured away by the enchantments of some wild jade with whom he set up poaching and housekeeping.”

Is not that a charming story? I think the picture of the two creatures frisking ahead of the horses (like porpoises around the prow of a vessel) one of the most joyous it would be possible to conceive.

The sight of otters and kingfishers, alert and glancing, in their native haunts confers distinction; but there is a far more remarkable uniquity even than that; and I recently possessed it. What do you say to a Sunday morning walk in Sussex and coming upon the dead body of a badger lying just in the mouth of its burrow? On the strength of such an adventure I claim to be for the moment a creature enormously apart and loftily pinnacled. That we had badgers within half a mile, we knew. Mus Penfold often sees traces of them, although never has a living one met his sight; and last year, I regret to say, a party of stupid men with eight dogs were allowed by the farmer to dig out two of the young badgers and kill them. I did not watch them at their vile work, but I saw their _débris_ afterwards, and counted the bottles.

How this badger died we shall never know; but there he lay, just like a comfortable sleeping bear: in fact curiously like that little Malayan “Gypsy” whom I found at the Zoo and whom you will find elsewhere in this book. His head, black and yellow, was between his long-clawed paws quite naturally. But he was dead enough, and his skin is now in the house as a bloodless trophy and a proof that England is not yet wholly tamed.

The Owl

To return to the kingfisher and the epoch in one’s life made by the rare appearance of that glancing jewel, although this house is in owlish country, and we hear owls from dusk to dawn, yet the sight of one is hardly less rare and memorable. The effect is, of course, totally different. A kingfisher entrances, thrills; one sees it and glows. But the owl cuts deeper; one feels that one is in the presence of a thing not necessarily of evil but of mystery and darkness. That is to say, an owl at night. In broad day there can be nothing sinister about him, as I happen to know as well as any one.

On this matter I have a true story to tell, which, however, I shall quarrel with no one for disbelieving. One Sunday morning in the early summer a few years ago I was walking in a little pine-wood on a Kentish common. Suddenly, at half-past eleven, I was conscious that I was not alone, and lifting my eyes I saw on a bush close by a young owl. He was looking directly at me with such a stare in his deep orange orbs as only an owl can compass--steady, incurious, implacable. I stopped and stared at him, and thought first of the strangeness of the encounter and then of a humorous poem by an American publisher (Why don’t English publishers write humorous poems?) which I had learnt at school, beginning “Who stuffed that white owl?” This owl, it is true, was not white, but a beautiful arrangement in soft browns; yet he remained as motionless as that other, save that every now and then a shutter, timed to about three seconds exposure, covered his ’wildered lenses and retired again into the machinery of his head.

Seeing how young he was, and thinking it better that he should be looked after than left to the attentions of the Sunday afternoon villagers (who can be very deadly), I determined to take him home. I therefore opened a handkerchief, advanced slowly upon him, and spreading it over him carried him tenderly away. He made no resistance whatever. I was the first human being he had seen and might as easily have been friend as foe.

So far the story makes no great call on credulity. But the remarkable part is to come. I gave the owl to the boys at a neighbouring cottage, who had kept one before and understood feeding and so on, and it was arranged that when he was a little older he should be released. Very well. The next Sunday came and on that morning these boys also abstained from church and walked through this little pine-wood on the common, and at exactly the same time, and in what I take to be exactly the same place, they also found a young owl and captured it. (“You see this wet, you see this dry.”) That’s a very odd circumstance, isn’t it, and worthy of a place in any collection of coincidences?

Now, if I did not believe truth to be the only really interesting thing in the world, I should go on to state that when on the third Sunday I went to the little pine-wood again I found a third owl; but that is not so. Since then, indeed, except of course at the Zoo--where they have all kinds, although no longer any of those fascinating little creatures from some distant land who live in holes in the ground--I had never seen another owl near enough to observe it with any minuteness until the other evening in Sussex. Then, while it was still half light, a large barn-owl emerged from a clump of trees beside the road and flew before us and over us, as we drove along, for two hundred yards, finally disappearing among some ricks. It made no sound whatever; fish swimming in a clear stream are not less audible. Its light underpart gleamed softly like a lamp in a fog, and, like that, seemed almost to diffuse radiance.

This silence is very wonderful and soothing. I would prescribe the spectacle of the flight of owls at twilight for any disordered mind. But he would be a bold physician who recommended for any weak nerves the angry, screaming owls that sweep round this house in the middle of the night, especially when the weather is rough. Then they are ominous indeed.

Our owls live in the belfry, and though I have stood again and again in the gloaming, watching, I have seen them only once. On that occasion there had been some disagreement in the fields, for two of them came back in full flight together, one pursuing and one pursued, uttering terrible cries. I saw them black against the sky for a moment, disordered and beating, and then they disappeared into the masonry as silently and effectually as water into sand. No wonder, I thought, as I stumbled away among the graves, that some rustic minds think them not birds at all, but disembodied spirits.

The difference between these witches of the night returning from their quarrel and that soft glimmering ghost that had flown down the road was wide enough; but how much wider the gulf between those predatory termagants and the poor lost soul in the Kentish pine-wood. Even in his mild countenance, however, one could easily discern the makings of a bogey. To wake up in the small hours and find oneself beneath the scrutiny of such eyes in such a countenance would be enough for many of us.

What owls really are like, we shall, I suppose, never know: whether they are wise as legend would have them, or merely look so; whether they are truly sinister or only weird and carnivorous. These things we shall probably never know, but there is a lady in Hampshire who recently came nearer the secret than any one else has done. Her letter describing her experience was printed in the “Evening Standard” in the summer of 1910. The immediate neighbourhood of her house, she explained, was once a favourite hunting-ground of owls, but latterly they had steadily decreased, until to hear one had become something of a rarity. This she much regretted. When, therefore, one night she was awakened by an owl’s cry she sprang up and ran to the window in pleasure, and while there it amused her to answer it, mimicry of owls being a hobby of hers. But this time she mimicked better than she knew, for instantly out of the blackness came a crowd of owls to her window, angry and threatening and uttering strange sounds. She had, it seems, stumbled on something in the owl tongue of very serious import. Isn’t that interesting? She may have called out some deadly insult. She may have hit on a rally, a summons to arms. Whatever it was, it made her for the moment almost one of this mysterious, uncanny, nocturnal race. Her cry, in short, opened the door on a new world, vastly more enthralling in interest and strange possibilities than aviation or any of our modern inventions can make this. But it instantly shut again.

The Unusual Morning

One is liable day by day to a great many different kinds of surprises; but few persons can have known two in the same morning quite so unusual and diverse....

I was sitting in my room, writing, when a new and mysterious sound caught the ear. It came apparently from the heart of the wall, near the chimney, and was such a sound as in the dead of night would lay an icy hand on the heart. Since it was broad day I had courage and stood by the fireplace waiting. It grew louder and louder, nearer and nearer, and at last culminated in a scurry and clatter in the fireplace itself, from which there emerged a robust, testy, and exceedingly embarrassed starling. After looking round in dismay, he blundered across the room and settled on the highest row of books, where, secure in his altitude, he stared at me and collected his wits. I, too, collected mine and realized that my destiny was, as ever, prosaic. For I thought instantly of an American poet on the one hand, and on the other an English lady, a friend of mine, both of whom under similar conditions achieved romance. For when a bird visited Edgar Allan Poe in his study it was a raven, dark not alone with the sable hue of night but with mystery and fate, and when my friend awoke not long since in her room in a beautiful Wiltshire manor-house, what did she see brooding musically on the frame of an Old Master that hung on the opposite wall but a dove--emblem of peace and sweetness and everything that is fortunate?

How different my luck! A starling.... Of all the fowls of the air, would one not close one’s house to a starling first and foremost? Yet the only visitor from that so near yet so strange world of birds that ever came to me was this, the least poetical, least attractive.

That was the first surprise. For the understanding of the second, which occurred only an hour later, I must explain that this house is on a road which, almost immediately the gate is passed, ceases gradually to be a road at all, first declining to a cart-track, and then dwindling to nothing but a footpath or bridle-path up a South Down of extreme steepness. This means that when, as sometimes happens, a motor-car rushes past, we smile in our beards and await with stoicism and amusement the groanings and shrieks of agony that indicate that a mistake has been made and that a reluctant vehicle is being turned by an angry chauffeur in a space far too narrow for it. On the morning of which I write a car rushed by in the usual way, but as it did not at once return I assumed that the party were not uninstructed, but had come here by intent for a picnic, as has once or twice happened--lobsters’ claws and other alien and sophisticated _débris_ having been found on the turf; and so thinking I forgot them. An hour later, hearing the engine throb in the accustomed manner, I knew that the picnic was over, and again forgot them.

A moment after, however, I was called out into the garden by a series of shouts and whistles, to discover that the car had come to a stop for the very sufficient reason that it was on fire. A motor-car at any time is still--to me--a strange object, but to find one in full blaze close to the gate is really a shock. You must have seen it to appreciate it. There it stood, enveloped in flames, while leaning against the wall, with his head cooling at the bricks, was its dejected owner. “What a calamity! What a calamity!” was all that he could say, as he surveyed first the burning wheels, and then his blackened hands, and then me. “There’s nothing to be done, nothing,” he added.

But I did not wait; at least it was worth the effort of saving, and we brought water in every variety of vessel and hurled it over the conflagration. Here we were wrong, for by watering flaming petrol one simply increases the area of the fire. Having learnt this, we bent all our strength to getting the car a little farther along the road, away from the seat of danger, then hurling the water over it once more. This done, it was soon extinguished, and the owner and driver had an opportunity to explain.

“Such a thing has never happened to me before,” he said. “All these years and no accident. I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best. Nothing of the kind has ever happened to me before.”

Meanwhile he had been joined by his friends, two cool and collected ladies, who, all unconscious of the catastrophe, had been engaged in the least incendiary of pastimes--photographing the church--and they added their persuasions to our invitation to him to come in and consume restoratives.

Misfortune handled him curiously. No, he said, he would not drink, would not eat, did not want to wash, hated the idea of resting. And all the while, as he was thus affirming and surveying his blistered hands, he was approaching nearer to the table in the garden on which refreshments had been placed. Vowing he would never sit, he sat; declining the decanter with increased vehemence, he tilted it into his glass; abjuring cake, he conveyed a piece to his mouth. He then refused to drink any more, and was actually reaching out for the decanter as he spoke. Finally, he said that he had not the least desire to smoke, and took a cigarette. This was the last of his apostasies, for to the blackness of his hands he adhered. And all the while, at intervals, he was assuring us that, long as he had driven a car, he had never previously had an accident in his life. Never! “I had just filled the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best.... Nothing of the kind ever happened to me before....”

That is the story. They were soon gone; the car, a scorched ruin, was pushed into a neighbouring shed to await the repairers; and nothing remained of the incident save a black place in the road and a waste patch where grass had been. Life resumed its routine.

But why, when he came to give me his card, should I discover that he now lived in a house in which, as a child, some of my happiest hours were spent? No need for that added touch of coincidence. Why? He might as easily have inhabited every other house in the world. Here you have the prodigality of chance.

The Embarrassed Eliminators

We were talking about Lamb.

Some one suddenly asked: “Supposing that by some incredible chance all the Essays except one were to be demolished, which one would you keep?”

This kind of question is always interesting, no matter to what author’s work or to what picture gallery it is applied. But for the best resulting literary talk it must be applied to Shakespeare, Dickens or Elia.

“Why, of course,” at once said H., whose pleasant habit it is to rush in with a final opinion on everything at a moment’s notice, with no shame whatever in changing it immediately afterwards, “there’s no doubt about it at all--Mrs. Battle. Absolutely impossible to give up Mrs. Battle. Or, wait a minute, I’d forgotten Bo-Bo,--‘The Dissertation on Roast Pig,’ you know. Either Mrs. Battle or that.”

The man who had propounded the question laughed. “I saw that second string coming,” he said. “That’s what every one wants: one _or_ another. But the whole point of the thing is that one essay and one only is to remain: everything else goes by the board. Now? Let’s leave H. to wrestle it out with himself. What do _you_ say, James?”

“It’s too difficult,” said James. “I was going to say ‘The Old Actors’ until I remembered several others. But I’m not sure that that is not my choice. It stands alone in literature: it is Lamb inimitable. His literary descendants have done their best and worst with most of his methods, but here, where knowledge of the world, knowledge of the stage, love of mankind, gusto, humour, style and imaginative understanding unite, the mimics, the assiduous apes, are left behind. Miles. Yes, I vote for ‘The Old Actors.’”

“But, my dear James,” said L., “think a moment. Remember James Elia in ‘My Relations’; remember Cousin Bridget in ‘Mackery End.’ You are prepared deliberately to have these forever blotted out of your consciousness? Because, as I understand it, that is what the question means: utter elimination.”

James groaned. “It’s too serious,” he said. “It’s not to be thought of really. It reminds me of terrible nights at school when I lay awake trying to understand eternity--complete negation--until I turned giddy with the immensity of dark nothingness.”

Our host laughed. “You were very positive just now,” he said. “But have you forgotten a wistful little trifle called ‘Old China?’”

“Or, more on your own lines,” said W., who hates actors and acting, “the ‘South-Sea House’ or the ‘Old Benchers’? I will grant you the perfection--there is no other word--of the full-lengths of Dicky Suett and Bannister and Bensley’s Malvolio. There is nothing like it--you are quite right. Not even Hazlitt comes near it. One can see oneself with a great effort doing something passably Hazlittian in dramatic criticism, if one were put to it; but Lamb, Lamb reconstructs life and dignifies and enriches it as he does so. That essay in my opinion is the justification of footlights, grease-paint and all the tawdry business. And yet,”--W.’s face glowed with his eloquence, as it always does sooner or later every evening--“and yet if I were restricted to one Elia essay--dreadful thought!--it would not be ‘The Old Actors’ that I should choose, but--I can’t help it--‘Captain Jackson.’ I know there are far more beautiful things in Elia; deeper, sweeter, rarer. But the Captain and I are such old friends that it comes to this, I couldn’t now do without him.”

“Of course,” cried H. “I had forgotten. You remind me of something I simply must keep--the Elliston.” He snatched the “Essays” from our host’s hands and read the following passage, while we all laughed--a double laughter--overtly with him, and covertly at him, for if there is one man living who might be the hero to-day of a similar story, it is H. himself, who has a capriciousness, an impulsiveness, a forgetfulness, and a grandiosity that are Ellistonian or nothing.

“‘Those who knew Elliston,’” he read, “‘will know the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sorts of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of one dish at dinner. “I too never eat but one thing at dinner,”--was his reply--then after a pause--“reckoning fish as nothing.” The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savoury esculents which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.’”

“Well,” said our host, reclaiming the book, “my vote if I had one would be for ‘Mackery End in Hertfordshire’; and I make the declaration quite calmly, knowing that we are all safe to retain what we will. James will of course disagree with the choice; but then you see I am a sentimentalist, and when Lamb writes about his sister and his childhood I am lost. And ‘Mackery End’ delights me in two ways, for it not only has the wonderful picture of Bridget Elia in it, but we see Lamb also on one of his rapturous walks in his own county. I never see a field of wheat without recalling his phrase of Hertfordshire as ‘that fine corn country.’”

“All very well,” said James, “but if you talk like this how are you going to let ‘Dream Children’ go?”

“Ah, yes,” sighed our host, “‘Dream Children’--of course! How could I let that go? No, it’s too difficult.”

“What about this?” said the grave incisive voice of K., who had not yet spoken, and he began to read:--

“In proportion as the years both lessen, and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away ‘like a weaver’s shuttle.’ Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.’

“Who is going to foreswear that passage?” K. asked sternly, fixing his eyes on us as if we were one and all guilty of damnable heresy.

We all sighed.

K. searched the book again, and again began to read:--

“‘In sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool--as naturally as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables--not guessing at the involved wisdom--I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbor: I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and--prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors--I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a _tendre_, for those five thoughtless virgins.’