Part 15
"There is no 'but,'" said he, with an impressive but rather dangerous solemnity. "I say that the tigress came to earth just in front of me and advanced upon me by one and by two. I had no time to reload and to fire. I was all alone. What did I do?"
"That is what I was waiting to hear," I said. "It seems to me the climax of the whole story. I trust that you seized its--or I should say her--upper jaw with your left hand, lower jaw with your right hand, and tore the head asunder. There is no quicker way with a tigress."
"You are wrong," said he.
"Did you not, then," said I, "suddenly fasten both hands upon its throat and, digging your thumbs conversely from right and from left upon its windpipe, strangle it to death? Such a manoeuvre is a matter of moments, and he laughs best who laughs last."
"I did not," said he, in a rising anger.
At this moment the train began to slow down, and I knew the place it was approaching, for I am very familiar with the line. A porter who did not know me, but whom I secretly bribed, perceiving the danger of the circumstances, took my bag and made a great noise with it and asked a number of questions. Everybody got up, and the crowd of us began to jostle down the gangway of the eating-car. The Hero was at first just behind me, and was beginning to explain to me what exactly he did to the tigress when we were unfortunately separated by two commercial travellers, a professional singer, and a politician.
Fate dominates the lives of men, though Will is a corrective of Fate. Men in a restaurant-car are like the leaves that flutter from trees or like the particles of water in the eddying of a river. I drifted from him further and further still. When we came out upon the crowded platform I saw him, the Hero, waving his hand to me, desiring to re-establish with me human and communicable things and to tell me how he did at last destroy that mighty beast. But Fate, which is the master of human things, would not have it so, and Will, which is but a corrective of Fate for us poor humans, stood me in no stead. We drifted apart; we never met again. He was off perhaps to shoot (and miss) some other tigress (or, who knows, a tiger?) and I to another town where I might yet again wonder at the complexity of the world and the justice of God!
Anyhow, I never understood how he killed the tigress. Were it not for the evidence of my senses I should be willing to believe that the tigress killed him. But we must never believe anything that is even apparently against the evidence of our senses.
Farewell, dear mortals!
OUR INHERITANCE
How noble is our inheritance. The more one thinks of it the more suffused with pleasure one's mind becomes; for the inheritance of a man living in this country is not one of this sort or of that sort, but of all sorts. It is, indeed, a necessary condition for the enjoyment of that inheritance that a man should be free, and we have really so muddled things that very many men in England are not free, for they have either to suffer a gross denial of mere opportunity--I mean they cannot even leave their town for any distance--or they are so persecuted by the insecurity of their lives that they have no room for looking at the world, but if an Englishman is free what an inheritance he has to enjoy!
It is the fashion of great nations to insist upon some part of their inheritance, their military memories, or their letters, or their religion, or some other thing. But in modern Europe, as it seems to me, three or four of the great nations can play upon many such titles to joy as upon an instrument. For a man in Italy, or England, or France, or Spain, if he is weary of the manifold literature of his own country can turn to its endurance under arms (in which respect, by the way, victory and defeat are of little account), or if he is weary of these military things, or thinks the too continued contemplation of them hurtful to the State (as it often is, for it goes to the head like wine), he can consider the great minds which his nation has produced, and which give glory to his nation not so much because they are great as because they are national. Then, again, he can consider the landscapes of his own land, whether peaceably, as do older men, or in a riot of enthusiasm as do all younger men who see England in the midst of exercising their bodies, as it says in the Song of the Man who Bicycled:
... and her distance and her sea. Here is wealth that has no measure, All wide England is my treasure, Park and Close and private pleasure: All her hills were made for me.
Then he can poke about the cities, and any one of them might occupy him almost for a lifetime. Hereford, for instance. I know of nothing in Europe like the Norman work of Hereford or Ludlow, where you will perpetually find new things, or Leominster just below, or Ledbury just below that again; and the inn at each of these three places is called The Feathers.
Then a man may be pleased to consider the recorded history of this country, and to inform the fields he knows with the past and with the actions of men long dead. In this way he can use a battlefield with no danger of any detestable insolence or vulgar civilian ways, for the interest in a battlefield, if it is closely studied, becomes so keen and hot that it burns away all foolish violence, and you will soon find if you study this sort of terrain closely that you forget on which side your sympathies fail or succeed: an excellent corrective if, as it should be with healthy men, your sympathies too often warp evidence and blind you. On this account also one should always suspect the accuracy of military history when it betrays sneering or crowing, because, in the first place, that is a very unmilitary way of looking at battles, and, in the second place, it argues that the historian has not properly gone into all his details. If he had he would have been much too interested in such questions as the measurement of ranges, or, latterly, the presence and nature of cover to bother about crowing or sneering.
When a man tires of these there is left to him the music of his country, by which I mean the tunes. These he can sing to himself as he goes along, and if ever he tires of that there is the victuals and the drink, which, if he has travelled, he may compare to their advantage over those of any other land. But they must be national. Let him take no pleasure in things cooked in a foreign way. There was a man some time ago, in attempting to discover whose name I have spent too much energy, who wrote a most admirable essay upon cold beef and pickles, remarking that these two elements of English life are retreating as it were into the strongholds where England is still holding out against the dirty cosmopolitan mud which threatens every country to-day. He traced the retreat of cold beef and pickles eastward towards the City from the West End all along Piccadilly and the Strand right into Fleet-street, where, he said, they were keeping their positions manfully. They stand also isolated and besieged in one hundred happy English country towns....
The trouble about writing an article like this is that one wanders about: it is also the pleasure of it. The limits or trammels to an article like this are that, by a recent and very dangerous superstition, the printed truth is punishable at law, and all one's memories of a thousand places upon the Icknield Way, the Stane Street, the Pilgrim's Way, the Rivers Ouse (all three of them), the Cornish Road, the Black Mountain, Ferry Side, the Three Rivers, all the Pennines, all the Cheviots, all the Cotswolds, all the Mendips, all the Chilterns, all the Malvern Hills, and all the Downs--to speak of but a few--must be memories of praise--by order of the Court. One may not blame: therefore I say nothing of Northwich.
* * * * * * *
Some men say that whereas wealth can be accumulated and left to others when we die, this sort of inheritance can not, and that the great pleasure a man took in his own land and the very many ways in which he found that pleasure and his increase in that pleasure as his life proceeded, all die with him. This you will very often hear deplored. As noble a woman as ever lived in London used to say, speaking of her father (and she also is dead), that all she valued in him died with him, although he had left her a considerable fortune. By which she meant that not only in losing him she had lost a rooted human affection and had suffered what all must suffer, because there is a doom upon us, but that those particular things in which he was particularly favoured had gone away for ever. His power over other languages and over his own language, his vast knowledge of his own county, his acquired courtesy and humour, all mellowed by the world and time, these, she said, were altogether gone. And to us of a younger generation it was her work to lament that we should never know what had once been in England. Among others she vastly admired the first Duke of Wellington, and said that he was tall--which was absurd. Now this noble woman, it seems to me, was in error, for all of us who have loved and enjoyed know not only that we carry something with us elsewhere (as we are bound to believe), but leave also in some manner which I do not clearly perceive a legacy to our own people. We take with us that of which Peter Wanderwide spoke when he said or rather sang these lines--
If all that I have loved and seen Be with me on the Judgment Day, I shall be saved the crowd between From Satan and his foul array.
We carry it with us. And though it is not a virtue it is half a virtue, and when we go down in the grave like the character in _Everyman_, there will go down with us, I think, not only Good Deeds, a severe female, but also a merry little hobbling comrade who winks and grins and keeps just behind her so that he shall not be noticed and driven away. This little fellow will also speak for us, I think, and he is the Pleasure we took in this jolly world.
But I say that not only do we carry something with us, but that we leave something also; and this has been best put, I think, by the poet Ronsard when he was dying, who said, if I have rightly translated him, this--
"Of all those vanities" (he is speaking of the things of this world), "the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory--fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I; I have lived in it and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So do I go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as I am hungry and all longing for that of God."
That is very good. It would be very difficult to put it better, and if you complain that here Ronsard was only talking of fame or glory, why, I can tell you that the pleasure one takes in one's country is of the same stuff as fame. So true is this that the two commonly go together, and that those become most glorious who have most enjoyed their own land.
THE NEW ROAD
It is at once the most amusing and the most dramatic feature of our time that we can foresee--for some few years ahead--material things. Things moral escape us altogether. Never was there a generation of Europeans who could less determine what the near future held for the fate of national characters, of religions, or of styles in art; the more foolish attempt to escape this ignorance by pretending that things moral depend upon things material. They observe the cutting of a canal and prophesy the decline of one nation upon its completion, the growth of another--as though the power of nations armed resided in something lower than the Mind, and as though the success of armies (upon which all at last depends) were determined by the exchange of metals or by new routes of trade. Meanwhile, though the future, even the immediate future, of nations and of faiths is more closely hidden from us than ever, yet it is entertaining, and, as I have said, it is even dramatic, to watch our power of prophecy over material things.
We undertake works of such magnitude and spread over so long a span of years, they are accomplished under such conditions of international comprehension and security, that we can stand (sometimes) in a desert place and say, "Here, in five years, will be a town," or on a barren coast and say, "Here, in five years, will be a harbour." We can distract ourselves by imagining the contrast beforehand and by returning, when the work is done, to see how nearly one has imagined the truth. Bizerta once afforded such an opportunity, Rosyth now affords one, and so does that sight which set me writing this, and which I have just witnessed in a remote and hitherto quite silent valley. There, with little advertisement of public interest, one of the immemorial high-roads of Europe is under restoration and is about to return to life: the old High Road into Spain.
It is often remarked that the lines of European travel can hardly be permanently altered, that Nature has designed them. Generations do sometimes pass in which some profound change in man rather than in Nature affects a few of the great roads. The Roman line from the south northward, the highway from the Saone to the Straits of Dover, passing by Laon and Amiens, was deflected as the Dark Ages closed round the mind of Gaul. Water carriage succeeded the degraded high-roads. The convergence of water-ways in the basin of Paris made that basin the centre of travel, and the old way by Laon was forgotten. Yet modern conditions restored it. The railway has done again what the Roman engineers accomplished, and Laon is once again a halt upon the great road southwards, and once again the most direct avenue from the Channel to the Mediterranean follows the plain to the east of Paris. So it has come to be with a road equally famous, equally forgotten, the High Road from the North into Spain.
The Pyrenees lie, as every one knows, like an artificial wall between the valley of the Ebro and Gaul. How great the division is only those can believe who have seen with their own eyes the meadows and the deep orchards of Bearn, and then, after a painful crossing of the hills, have come upon the burnt deserts of Aragon. The road from the one to the other, the administrative road which bound Spain to Gaul, which connected Cæsaraugusta with Tolosa, that is, Saragossa with Toulouse, was a Roman Highway, called "the High Pyrenean," the highest and most central of the two main passes. It had, as I have said, Toulouse for its northern terminus, Saragossa for its southern. It had for two mountain towns, or depots, at the foot of either climb, Oloron, the town of the Ilurones, on the north; on the south the Bishop's town of Jaca. It had for its last outpost just before the last steep Urdos, the Forum Ligneum, to the north; to the south a cluster of huts and a station, whose Roman name has not come down to us, but which since the barbarian invasions has been called "Canfranc." This great road, like so many throughout the Empire, fell. You may yet trace its structure in those places where it is not identical with the modern way, but with the close of the Empire, and on nearly to our own time its surface was left unrepaired. Armies used it, as they used all the great Roman roads of the north and west, till the Twelfth Century. The Merovingians crossed it in their raids to the Ebro; Charlemagne sent men down it in the advance upon (and failure before) Saragossa--the expedition whose retreat was clinched by the destruction of his rearguard and the death of Roland in Roncesvalles. It was still a gate for armies when the reconquest of Spain from the Mohammedan began. Jaca was free before any other town of the Central North, Huesca fell before the first Crusade was fought, Saragossa before the second. Bearn, and indeed all Christendom, still used that high notch until the new civilisation of the Middle Ages had set in with the Twelfth Century, but from that beginning till our own time it was more and more forgotten. Spain, reconquered, corresponded with Europe by the sea. The two land roads that bound the Peninsula to Christendom ran round either end of the Pyrenean Chain. The central pass was abandoned when the great development of French roads, which was the work of Louis XIV, was imitated--most imperfectly--by his grandson in Madrid, it was the road by Burgos, Vittoria, and Bayonne that was renewed; the commercial energy of the Catalans in the same generation opened the Perthuis, broke into the Roussillon, and connected Barcelona with Perpignan and with Narbonne. But Aragon, the pivot and centre of the old Reconquest, Saragossa, the main town of the Roman communication with the north, lay off the two tracks of travel, half forgot Europe and by Europe were ill-remembered. It was Napoleon, or, to be more accurate, the Revolutionary Crusade, which reopened the central pass, and here, as in so many other places, began the return to Roman things. While the armies of the Empire, with their train and their artillery, were still tied to the sea road from the Roussillon, a small force without guns passed up the old Roman road (now come to be called the "Somport"), marched over its silent grasses, wading the Arroyos, the bridges over which had long since fallen in, appeared suddenly before Jaca, occupied that citadel, and pursued the way to Saragossa, there to join the main army and to lay a siege memorable beyond all modern sieges for an heroic defence. Buonaparte seized the advantage of that passage. He desired a road over which artillery could go. It was one of twenty which he so desired over the mountain ranges of Europe, and which a full century has barely seen completed; for within four years of his resolution his supremacy was broken at Leipsic and destroyed at Waterloo. The Third Empire continued the tradition; the road was carried up on the French side of the pass, but the universal power of 1808 was gone and the Spanish approach was neglected. It was not till the other day, till our own generation, that the full work was done, and that the great street from Toulouse to Saragossa right over the hills was once more open to the full power of travel. Yet travel failed it. In the meanwhile the railways had come; they had followed the coast roads, and the main line from Madrid to Paris ran tortuously through the mountains of Castile and turned twenty times in the labyrinth of Basque Valleys, between Vittoria and Irun. Saragossa was still upon one side; Aragon still remained remote; the new road was empty beneath the cliffs of its great hills.
To all this exception in Europe I had grown so used that I took pleasure, during each of my yearly passages over this road, in noting its loneliness, and in considering how the noise of this chief way between the south and the north had been silenced for so many centuries. The absence of men and of public knowledge was a perpetual, a renewed, and a permanent curiosity. There are many sites in Europe once peopled now lonely, once famous and now ignored, but this place seemed to be especially eccentric, and to have passed from something which had long been like the Æmilian Way or the stages of the Rhone Valley to something as untouched as the uplands of Cheviot or the moors of the West Riding over Ribble and above Airedale--very lonely places.
This year I found that the last change had come. Far down the Gave d'Aspe, in the gorge where Abdurrahman led the Mohammedan invasion into Gaul, there came loud thunders, for all the world as though it were really thundering on the gloomy shoulders of Anie, so many thousand feet beyond the clouds. Then, as I neared the head of the vale I saw Man at it. He was at it in swarms. He had dammed the torrent; he had fixed great turbine tubes, and he had begun the Hole in the Hill. For just the few miles of the ridge itself there was still silence--as there is still silence above the Gothard on the high road--but up from the Spanish valley, rolling up from it as it had rolled down the Val d'Aspe, came again the human thunder, and when the road had fallen its two thousand feet and touched the water of the River Aragon, there again was Man in great numbers working like an ant, burrowing under the terrible Garganta and determined upon his Hole in the Hill. The two tunnels will meet when each has accomplished three or four miles, and the work will be done. There will be a straight way from Paris to Madrid; the Pyrenees will have lost their unbroken line; the Roman scheme will have re-arisen; Saragossa will come forward again into the list of great European cities, and people will hear of Aragon. I do not know whether to be glad--seeing such proof that Europe always returns to itself--or sorry.
ON TWO TOWNS
The wide countrysides of Europe sum themselves up in central cities: municipalities inheriting from Rome. The lesser towns group round the larger; the bishops of the lesser suffragan to metropolitan of the greater cities, as it was fixed in the Roman order which Constantine inherited from Diocletian and which everywhere stamps the West with the framework of the Fourth Century. These great cities are not only the heads and inspirers of their provinces, they are also the gathering places of armies; the contrast and the fellowship between them is especially seen when either is the capital of a wide plain below a mountain range. Then each becomes the depot and the goal in turn of invading forces, each stands for the national fortunes upon either side of the passes. So, for the great Alps, you have Augsburg and Milan; so for the Vosges, Strasburg and Nancy; so for the Pyrenees, Saragossa and Toulouse.
No two cities in Europe are more representative of their provinces or stand better for symbolising the nature of their land. From the towers of each the long line of the Pyrenees may be traced, especially in early autumn mornings when the sky is clear with the approaching cold and when the first snow has fallen upon the summits. From Toulouse the dark Northern escarpment runs along the southern horizon in a wall, surprisingly level and seeming tiny in its long stretch or belt of grey; from Saragossa, much further off and more rarely the white strips and patches can be caught behind the nearer foothills, the whole in a glare of sunlight full upon it, like a desert tilted up; you just see them over dry, treeless plains, and immediately the sun rises they are lost in the hot haze. The Pyrenees thus stand between the two cities and belong to each, and the legends of the mountain regard now one, now the other, or, as in the Song of Roland, both combined (for the Horn of Roland as he died was heard southward in Saragossa, northward in Toulouse), and the smoke of each may just be seen or guessed from certain heights, from passes that look southward into Aragon or northward into Aquitaine.