Chapter 13

I put my silk hat away at night with the firm resolution that nothing short of an invitation to Buckingham Palace, or some similar incredible disaster, should make me drag it into the light again. For the truth is that the war has given the top-hat a knock-out blow. It had been tottering on our brows for some time. There was a very hot summer a few years ago which began the revolution. The tyranny of the top-hat became intolerable, and quite "respectable" people began to be seen in the streets with Panamas and straws. But these were only concessions to an irresponsible climate, and the silk hat still held its ancient sway as the crown and glory of our City civilisation. And now it has toppled down and is on the way, perhaps, to becoming as much a thing of the past as wigs or knee-breeches. It is almost as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester. Cabinet Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.

It may be that it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection. But the wig returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in _The Rivals_ there is an early hint of its final disappearance. There was never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it began, as the "Alexandra limp" of our youth began, in snobbery. Was it not a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair? This aping of the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue. When Lady Percy in _Henry IV._ is lamenting Hotspur she says:--

... he was, indeed, the glass Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves. He had no legs that practised not his gait; And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish, Became the accents of the valiant; For those that could speak low and tardily, Would turn their own perfection to abuse. To seem like him.

In the case of the top-hat the disappearance is due to the psychology of the war. The great tragedy has brought us down to the bed-rock of things and has made us feel somehow that ornament is out of place, and that the top-hat is a falsity in a world that has become a battlefield. I don't think women have shared this feeling to the same extent. I am told there were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter. But, perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus. And they may be right. We had better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable change. Let us enjoy it without boasting.

Our enjoyment may be short-lived. We must not be surprised if this incredible hat returns in triumph with peace. It has survived the blasts of many centuries and infinite changes of fashion. It is, I suppose, the most ancient survival in the dress that men wear. There is in the Froissart collection at the British Museum an illumination (dating from the fifteenth century) showing the expedition of the French and English against the Barbary corsairs. And there seated in the boats are men clad in armour. They have put their helmets aside and are wearing top-hats! And it may be that when Macaulay's New Zealander, centuries hence, takes his seat on that broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he will sit under the shelter of a top-hat that has out-lasted all our greatness.

There must be some virtue in a thing that is so immortal. If the doctrine of the survival of the fittest applies to dress, it is the fittest thing we have. Trousers are a thing of yesterday with us, but our top-hat carries us back to the Wars of the Roses and beyond. It is not its beauty that explains it. I have never heard any one deny that it is ugly, though custom may have blunted our sense of its ugliness. It is not its utility. I have never heard any one claim that this strange cylinder had that quality. It is not its comfort It is stiff, it is heavy, it is unmanageable in a wind and ruined by a shower of rain. It needs as much attention as a peevish child or a pet dog. It is not even cheap, and when it is disreputable it is the most disreputable thing on earth. What is the mystery of its strange persistence? Is it simply a habit that we cannot throw off or is there a certain snobbishness about it that appeals to the flunkeyism of men? That is perhaps the explanation. That is perhaps why it has disappeared when snobbishness is felt to be inconsistent with the world of stern realities and bitter sorrows in which we live. We are humble and serious and out of humour with the pretentious vanity of our top-hat.

ON LOSING ONE'S MEMORY

The case of the soldier in the Keighley Hospital who has lost his memory in the war and has been identified by rival families as a Scotchman, a Yorkshireman, and so on is one of the most singular personal incidents of the war. On the face of it it would seem impossible that a mother should not know her own son, or a brother his brother. Yet in this case it is clear that some of the claimants are mistaken. The incident is not, of course, without precedent. The most notorious case of the sort was that of Arthur Orton, the impudent Tichborne claimant, whose strongest card in his imposture was that Lady Tichborne believed him to be her long-lost son. In that case, no doubt, the maternal passion was the source of a credulity that blinded the old lady to the flagrant evidence of the fraud.

But, generally speaking, our memory of other faces is extremely vague and elusive. I have just come in from a walk with a friend of mine whom I have known intimately for many years. Yet for the life of me I could not at this moment tell you the colour of his eyes, nor could I give a reasonable account of his nose or of the shape of his face. I have a general sense of his appearance, but no absolute knowledge of the details, and if he were to meet me to-morrow with a blank stare and a shaven upper lip I should pass him without a thought of recognition.

Memory, in fact, is largely reciprocal, and when one of the parties has lost his power of response the key is gone. If the lock won't yield to the key, you are satisfied that the key is the wrong one, no matter how much it looks like the right one. I think I could tell my dog from a thousand other dogs; but if the creature were to lose his memory and to pass me in the street without answering my call, I should pass on, simply observing that he bore a remarkable likeness to my animal.

Most of us, I suppose, have experienced in a momentary and partial degree a sudden stoppage of the apparatus of memory. You are asked, let us say, to spell "parallelogram." In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's, and the more you try to sort them out the less convincing do they seem. Or walking with a friend you meet at a turn in the street that excellent woman, Mrs. Orpington-Smith. You know her as well as you know your own mother, but the fact that you have got to introduce her by her name forthwith sends her name flying into space. The passionate attempt to capture it before it escapes only makes its escape more certain, and you are reduced to the pitiful expedient of mumbling something that is inaudible.

The worst experience of a lapse of memory that ever came to me was in the midst of a speech which I had to make before a large gathering in a London hall. I had got to the middle of what I had to say when it seemed to me that the whole machine of the mind suddenly ceased to work. It was as though an immense loneliness descended on me. I saw the audience before me, but apart from vision I seemed bereft of all my faculties. If I had in that instant been asked for my name I am doubtful whether I could have got anywhere near it. Happily some one in a front row, thinking I was pausing for a word, threw out a suggestion. It was like magic. I felt the machine of memory start again with an almost audible "puff, puff," and I went on to the end quite comfortably. The pause had seemed terribly long to me, but I was surprised afterwards to find that it had been so brief as to be generally unnoticed or regarded as an artful way of emphasising a point. I let it go at that, but I knew myself that in that moment I had lost my memory.

Even distinguished and expert orators have been known to suffer from this absolute lapse of memory. The Rosebery incident--was it in the Chesterfield speech?--is perhaps the best known, but I once heard Mr. Redmond, the calmest and most assured of speakers, come to an _impasse_ in the House of Commons that held him up literally for minutes.

We are creatures of memory, and when, as in the Keighley case, memory is gone personality itself has gone. Nothing is left but the empty envelope. The more fundamental functions of memory, the habits of respiration, of walking and physical movement, of mastication, and so on, remain. The Keighley man still eats and walks with all the knowledge of a lifetime. He probably preserves his taste for tobacco. But these things have nothing to do with personality. That is the product of the myriad mental impressions that you have stored up in your pilgrimage. There is not a moment in your life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, a scent in the garden, a tone of voice, a curve in the path--everything comes to us weighted with its own treasures of memory, bitter or sweet, but always significant.

It is a mistake to suppose that memory is merely a capacity to remember facts. In that respect there is the widest diversity of experience. Macaulay could recite _Paradise Lost_, while Rossetti was a little doubtful whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round the sun. I once met an American elocutionist who could recite ten of Shakespeare's plays, and he showed me the wonderful system of mnemonics by which he achieved the miracle. But he was a mere recording machine--a dull fellow. The true argosy of memory is not facts, but a perfume compounded of all the sunsets we have ever seen, all the joys and friendships, pleasures and sorrows we have ever known, all the emotions we have felt, all the brave and mean things we have done, all the broken hopes we have suffered. To have lost that argosy is to be dead, no matter how healthy an appetite we retain.

ON WEARING A FUR-LINED COAT

A friend of mine--one of those people who talk about money with an air of familiarity that suggests that they have got an "out-crop" of the Rand reef in their back-gardens--said to me the other day that I ought to buy a fur-lined coat. There never was such a time as this for buying a fur-lined coat or a sealskin jacket, said he. What with the war, and the "sales," and the tradesmen's need of cash, they were simply being thrown at you. You could have them almost for the trouble of carrying them away. A trifle of fifteen or twenty pounds would buy one a coat that would be cheap at sixty guineas. And, remember, there was wear for twenty years in it. And think of the saving in doctor's bills--for you simply can't catch colds if you wear a fur coat. In short, not to buy a fur coat at this moment was an act of gross improvidence, a wrong to one's family, a ... a ... And then he looked, with the cold disapproval of a connoisseur, at the coat I was wearing. And in the light of that glance I saw for the first time that it was ... yes ... certainly, it was not what it had been.

Now I am not going to pretend that I have a soul above fur-lined coats. I haven't; I love them. And by fur coats I don't mean those adorned with astrakhan collars, which I abominate. A man in an astrakhan coat is to me a suspicious character, a stage baron, one who is probably deep in treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The suspicion is unjust to the gentleman in the astrakhan coat, of course. Most suspicions are unjust. And if you ask me to give reasons for this unreasoning hostility to astrakhan, I do not know that I could find them. Perhaps it is the dislike I have for artificial curls; perhaps it is that the astrakhan collar reminds me of those unhappy pet dogs who look as though they had been put in curl papers overnight and sent out into the streets by their owners as a poor jest. Yes, I think it must be that sense of artificiality which is at the root of the dislike. No doubt the curls are natural. No doubt the woolly sheep of Astrakhan do wear their coats in these little heaven-sent ringlets. But ... well ... "I do not like thee, Doctor Fell."

But fur-lined coats, with fine fur collars, are quite another affair. If I had the "magic nib," I could grow lyrical over them. I could, indeed. In place-of this article I would write an ode to a fur-lined coat. I would sing of the Asian wilds from whence it came, of its wondrous lines and its soft and silken texture, of its generous warmth and its caressing touch. I would set up such a universal hunger for fur coats that the tradesmen in Oxford Street and Regent Street would come and offer me a guinea a word to write advertisements for them.

And yet I shall not buy a fur-lined coat, and I will tell you why. A fur coat is not an article of clothing: it is a new way of life. You cannot say with reckless prodigality, "Here, I will have a fur coat and make an end of this gnawing passion." The fur coat is not an end: it is a beginning. You have got to live up to it. You have got to take the fur-coat point of view of your relations to society. When Chauncey Depew, as a boy, bought a beautiful spotted dog at a fair and took it home, the rain came down and the spots began to run into stripes. He took the dog back to the man of whom he had bought it and demanded an explanation. "But you had an umbrella with that dog," said the man. "No," said the boy. "Oh!" said the man, "there's an umbrella goes with that dog."

And so it is with the fur-lined coat. So many things "go with it." It is in this respect like that grand piano to which you succumbed in a moment of paternal weakness--or after a lucky stroke in rubber. The old furniture, which had seemed so unexceptionable before, suddenly became dowdy in the presence of this princely affair. You wanted new chairs and rugs and hangings to make the piano accord with its setting. Even the house fell under suspicion, and perhaps you date all your difficulties from the day that you bought that grand piano, and found that it had set you going on a new way of life just beyond your modest means.

If I bought a fur-lined coat I know that I should want to buy a motor-car to keep it company. It is possible, of course, to wear a fur coat in a motor-bus, but if you do you will assuredly have a sense that you are a little over-dressed, a trifle conspicuous, that the fellow-passengers are mentally remarking that such a coat ought to have a carriage of its own. It would provoke the comment that I heard the other night as two ladies in evening dress left a bus in a pouring rain. "Well," said one of the other lady passengers--a little enviously I thought, but still pertinently--"if I could afford to wear such fine clothes I think I would take a Cab." Yes, decidedly, the fur-lined coat would not be complete without the motor-car.

And then consider how it limits your freedom and raises the tariff against you. The tip that would be gratefully received if you were getting into that modest coat that you have discarded would be unworthy of the fur-lined standard that you have deliberately adopted. The recipient would take it frigidly, with a glance at the luxurious garment into which he had helped you--a glance that would cut you to the quick. Your friends would have to be fur-lined, too, and your dinners would no longer be the modest affairs of old, but would soar to the champagne standard. It would not be possible to slip unnoticed into your favourite little restaurant in Soho to take your simple chop, or to go in quest of that wonderful restaurant of Arne's of which "Aldebaran" keeps the secret. The modesty of Arne's would make you blush for your fur-lined coat.

"The genteel thing," said Tony Lumpkin's friend, "is the genteel thing at any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation according-ly." That is it. The fur-lined coat is a genteel thing; but you have to be "in a concatenation according-ly." And there's the rub. It is not the coat, but its trimmings, so to speak, that give us pause. When you put on the coat you insensibly put off your old way of life. You set up a new standard, and have got to adapt your comings and goings, your habits and your expenditure to it. I once knew a man who had a fur-lined coat presented to him. It was a disaster. He could not live "in a concatenation according-ly." He lost his old friends without getting new ones. And his end ... Well, his end confirmed me in the conviction of the unwisdom of wearing a fur-lined coat before you are able, or disposed, to mould your life to the fur-lined standard.

IN PRAISE OF WALKING

I started out the other day from Keswick with a rucksack on my back, a Baddeley in my pocket, and a companion by my side. I like a companion when I go a-walking. "Give me a companion by the way," said Sterne, "if it be only to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." That is about enough. You do not want a talkative person. Walking is an occupation in itself. You may give yourself up to chatter at the beginning, but when you are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary consultation over the map--that is enough for the way.

At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour, but I love still better to break them. For one of the joys of walking is the sense of freedom it gives you. You are tied to no time-table, the slave of no road, the tributary of no man. If you like the road you follow it; if you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and Helvellyn be your way. Every short cut is for you, and every track is the path of adventure. The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your wine cup. You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give. And then, on your way again singing:--

Bed in the bush with the stars to see. Bread I dip in the river-- There's the life for a man like me. There's the life for ever.

What liberty is there like this? You have cut your moorings from the world, you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life--the whistle of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep--add to the sense of primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day. There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into these wild fastnesses of the mountains.

And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale, or--yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of "The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out:

I'm not a climber, not a climber, Not a climber now, My weight is going fourteen stone-- I'm not a climber now.

We shall not find Gaspard there to-night--Gaspard, the gay and intrepid guide from the Dauphiné, beloved of all who know the lonely inn at Wastdale. He is away on the battle-field fighting a sterner foe than the rocks and precipices of Great Gable and Scawfell. But Old Joe, the shepherd, will be there--Old Joe, who has never been in a train or seen a town and whose special glory is that he can pull uglier faces than any man in Cumberland. He will not pull them for anybody--only when he is in a good humour and for his cronies in the back parlour. To-night, perchance, we shall see his eyes roll as he roars out the chorus of "D'ye ken John Peel?" Yes, Wastdale shall be to-night's halt. And so over Black Sail, and down the rough mountain side to the inn whose white-washed walls hail us from afar out of the gathering shadows of the valley.

To-morrow? Well, to-morrow shall be as to-day. We will shoulder our rucksacks early, and be early on the mountains, for the first maxim in going a journey is the early start. Have the whip-hand of the day, and then you may loiter as you choose. If it is hot, you may bathe in the chill waters of those tarns that lie bare to the eye of heaven in the hollows of the hills--tarns with names of beauty and waters of such crystal purity as Killarney knows not. And at night we will come through the clouds down the wild course of Rosset Ghyll and sup and sleep in the hotel hard by Dungeon Ghyll, or, perchance, having the day well in hand, we will push on by Blea Tarn and Yewdale to Coniston, or by Easedale Tarn to Grasmere, and so to the Swan at the foot of Dunmail Raise. For we must call at the Swan. Was it not the Swan that Wordsworth's "Waggoner" so triumphantly passed? Was it not the Swan to which Sir Walter Scott used to go for his beer when he was staying with Wordsworth at Rydal Water? And behind the Swan is there not that fold in the hills where Wordsworth's "Michael" built, or tried to build, his sheepfold? Yes, we will stay at the Swan whatever befalls.