Part 3

For the truth is that Inns (may God preserve them, and of the few remaining breed, in spite of peril, a host of new Inns for our sons), Inns, Inns are the mirror and at the same time the flower of a people. The savour of men met in kindliness and in a homely way for years and years comes to inhabit all their panels (Inns are panelled) and lends incense to their fires. (Inns have not radiators, but fires.) But this good quintessence and distillation of comradeship varies from countryside to countryside and more from province to province, and more still from race to race and from realm to realm; just as speech differs and music and all the other excellent fruits of Europe.

Thus there is an Inn at Tout-de-suite-Tardets which the Basques made for themselves and offer to those who visit their delightful streams. A river flows under its balcony, tinkling along a sheer stone wall, and before it, high against the sunset, is a wood called Tiger Wood, clothing a rocky peak called the Peak of Eagles.

Now no one could have built that Inn nor endowed it with its admirable spirit, save the cleanly but incomprehensible _Basques_. There is no such Inn in the Béarnese country, nor any among the Gascons.

In Falaise the Normans very slowly and by a mellow process of some thousand years have engendered an Inn. This Inn, I think, is so good that you will with difficulty compare it with any better thing. It is as quiet as a tree on a summer night, and cooks crayfish in an admirable way. Yet could not these _Normans_ have built that _Basque_ Inn; and a man that would merge one in the other and so drown both is an outlaw and to be treated as such.

But these Inns of South England (such as still stand!)--what can be said in proper praise of them which shall give their smell and colour and their souls? There is nothing like them in Europe, nor anything to set above them in all the world. It is within their walls and at their boards that one knows what South England once did in the world and why. If it is gone it is gone. All things die at last. But if it _is_ gone--why, no lover of it need remain to drag his time out in mourning it. If South England is dead it is better to die upon its grave.

Whether it dies in our time or no you may test by the test of its _Inns_. If they may not weather the chaos, if they fail to round the point that menaces our religion and our very food, our humour and our prime affections--why, then, South England has gone too. If, if (I hardly dare to write such a challenge), if the Inns hold out a little time longer--why, then, South England will have turned the corner and Europe can breathe again. Never mind her extravagances, her follies or her sins. Next time you see her from a hill, pray for South England. For if she dies, you die. And as a symptom of her malady (some would say of her death-throes) carefully watch her Inns.

Of the enemies of Inns, as of rich men, dull men, blind men, weak-stomached men and men false to themselves, I do not speak: but of their effect. Why such blighting men are nowadays so powerful and why God has given them a brief moment of pride it is not for us to know. It is hidden among the secret things of this life. But that they _are_ powerful all men, lovers of Inns, that is, lovers of right living, know well enough and bitterly deplore. The effect of their power concerns us. It is like a wasting of our own flesh, a whitening of our own blood.

Thus there is the destruction of an Inn by gluttony of an evil sort--though to say so sounds absurd, for one would imagine that gluttony should be proper to Inns. And so it is, when it is your true gluttony of old, the gluttony of our fathers made famous in English letters by the song which begins:

I am not a glutton But I do like pie.

But evil gluttony, which may also be called the gluttony of devils, is another matter. It flies to liquor as to a drug; it is ashamed of itself; it swallows a glass behind a screen and hides. There is no companionship with it. It is an abomination, and this abomination has the power to destroy a Christian Inn and to substitute for it, first a gin-palace, and then, in reaction against that, the very horrible house where they sell only tea and coffee and bubbly waters that bite and sting both in the mouth and in the stomach. These places are hotbeds of despair, and suicides have passed their last hours on earth consuming slops therein alone.

Thus, again, a sad enemy of Inns is luxury. The rich will have their special habitations in a town so cut off from ordinary human beings that no Inn may be built in their neighbourhood. In which connection I greatly praise that little colony of the rich which is settled on the western side of Berkeley Square, in Lansdowne House, and all around the eastern parts of Charles Street, for they have permitted to be established in their midst the "Running Footman," and this will count in the scale when their detestable vices are weighed upon the Day of Judgment, upon which day, you must know, vices are not put into the scale gently and carefully so as to give you fair measure, but are banged down with enormous force by strong and maleficent demons.

Then, again, a very subtle enemy of Inns is poverty, when it is pushed to inhuman limits, and you will note especially in the dreadful great towns of the North, more than one ancient house which was once honourable and where Mr. Pickwick might very well have stayed, now turned ramshackle and dilapidated and abandoned, slattern, draggle-tail, a blotch, until the yet beastlier reformers come and pull it down to make an open space wherein the stunted children may play.

Thus, again, you will have the pulling down of an Inn and the setting up of an Hotel built of iron and mud, or ferro-concrete. This is murder.

Let me not be misunderstood. Many an honest Inn calls itself an hotel. I have no quarrel with that, nor has any traveller I think. It is a title. Some few blighted and accursed hotels call themselves "Inns"--a foul snobbism, a nasty trick of words pretending to create realities.

No, it is when the thing is really done, not when the name is changed that murder calls out to God for vengeance.

I knew an Inn in South England, when I was a boy, that stood on the fringe of a larch wood, upon a great high road. Here when the springtime came and I went off to see the world I used to meet with carters and with travelling men, also keepers and men who bred horses and sold them, and sometimes with sailors padding the hoof between port and port. These men would tell me a thousand things. The larch trees were pleasant in their new colour; the woods alive with birds and the great high road was, in those days, deserted: for high bicycles were very rare, low bicycles were not invented, the rich went by train in those days; only carts and caravans and men with horses used the leisurely surface of the way.

Now that good Inn has gone. I was in it some five years ago, marvelling that it had changed so little, though motor things and money-changers went howling by in a stream and though there were now no poachers or gipsies or forestmen to speak to, when a too smart young man came in with two assistants and they began measuring, calculating, two-foot-ruling and jotting. This was the plot. Next came the deed. For in another year, when the Spring burst and I passed by, what should I see in the place of my Inn, my Inn of youth, my Inn of memories, my Inn of trees, but a damnable stack of iron with men fitting a thin shell of bricks to it like a skin. Next year the monster was alive and made. The old name (call it the Jolly) was flaunting on a vulgar signboard swing in cast-iron tracing to imitate forged work. The shell of bricks was cast with sham white as for half-timber work. The sham-white was patterned with sham timbers of baltic deal, stained dark, with pins of wood stuck in: like Cheshire, not like home. Wrong lattice insulted the windows--and inside there were three bars. At the door stood an Evil Spirit, and within every room upstairs and down other devils, his servants, resided.

It is no light thing that such things should be done and that we cannot prevent them.

From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most. No conscious efforts, no Bond Street nastiness of false conservation, will save the beloved roofs. Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.

VIII

ON ROWS

THE HON. MEMBER: _Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker! Is the Hon. Member in order in calling me an insolent swine?_

(_See Hansard passim_)

A distinguished literary man has composed and perhaps will shortly publish a valuable poem the refrain of which is "I like the sound of broken glass."

This concrete instance admirably illustrates one of the most profound of human appetites: indeed, an appetite which, to the male half of humanity, is more than an appetite and is, rather, a necessity: the appetite for rows.

It has been remarked by authorities so distant and distinct, yet each so commanding, as Aristotle and Confucius, that words lose their meanings in the decline of a State.

Absolutely purposeless phrases go the rounds, are mechanically repeated; sometimes there is an attempt by the less lively citizens to _act_ upon such phrases when Society is diseased! And so to-day you have the suburban fool who denounces the row. Sometimes he calls it ungentlemanly--that is, unsuitable to the wealthy male. If he says _that_ he simply cannot know what he is talking about.

If there is one class in the community which has made more rows than another it is the young male of the wealthier classes, from Alcibiades to my Lord Tit-up. When men are well fed, good-natured, fairly innocent (as are our youth) then rows are their meat and drink. Nay, the younger males of the gentry have such a craving and necessity for a row that they may be observed at the universities of this country making rows continually without any sort of object or goal attached to such rows.

Sometimes he does not call it ungentlemanly, but points out that a row is of no effect, by which he means that there is no money in it. That is true, neither is there money in drinking, or breathing, or sleeping, but they are all very necessary things. Sometimes the row is denounced by the suburban gentleman as unchristian; but that is because he knows nothing about human history or the Faith, and plasters the phrase down as a label without consideration. The whole history of Christendom is one great row. From time to time the Christians would leap up and swarm like bees, making the most hideous noise and pouring out by millions to whang in their Christianity for as long as it could be borne upon the vile persons of the infidel. More commonly the Christians would vent their happy rage one against the other.

The row is better fun when it is played according to rule: it sounds paradoxical, and your superficial man might conceive that the essence of a row was anarchy. If he did he would be quite wrong; a row being a male thing at once demands all sorts of rules and complications. Otherwise it would be no fun. Take, for instance, the oldest and most solid of our national rows--the House of Commons row. Everybody knows how it is done and everybody surely knows that very special rules are observed. For instance, there is the word "traitor." That is in order. It was decided long ago, when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, of Birmingham, called Mr. Dillon a traitor. But I have heard with my own ears the word "party-hack" ruled out. It is not allowed.

By a very interesting decision of the Chair, pointing is ruled out also. If a member of the House suddenly thrusts out his arm with a long forefinger at the end of it and directs this instrument towards some other member, the Chair has decided the gesture to be out of order. It is, as another member of the Chamberlain family has said, "No class." Throwing things is absolutely barred. Nor may you now imitate the noise of animals in the chamber itself. This last is a recent decision, or rather it is an example of an old practice falling into desuetude. The last time a characteristic animal cry was heard in the House of Commons was when a very distinguished lawyer, later Lord Chief Justice of England, gave an excellent rendering of a cock-crow behind the Speaker's chair during a difference of opinion upon the matter of Home Rule--but this was more than twenty years ago.

It is a curious thing that Englishmen no longer sing during their rows. The fine song about the House of Lords which had a curse in it and was sung some months ago by two drunken men in Pall Mall to the lasting pleasure of the clubs, would come in very well at this juncture; or that other old political song now forgotten, the chorus of which is (if my memory serves me), "Bow wow wow!"

No one has seized the appetite for a row more fully than the ladies who demand the suffrage. The "disgraceful scenes" and "unwomanly conduct" which we have all heard officially denounced, were certainly odd, proceeding as they did from great groups of middle-class women as unsuited to exercises of this sort as a cow would be to following hounds, but there is no doubt that the men enjoyed it hugely. It had all the fun of a good football scrimmage about it, except when they scratched. And to their honour be it said they did not stab with those murderous long pins about which the Americans make so many jokes.

Before leaving this fascinating subject of rows, we will draw up for the warning of the reader a list of those to whom rows are abhorrent. Luckily they are few. Money-lenders dislike rows; political wire-pullers dislike rows; very tired men recovering from fevers must be put in the same category, and, finally, oddly enough, newspaper proprietors.

Why on earth this last little band--there are not a couple of dozen of them that count in the country--should have such a feature in common, Heaven only knows, but they most undoubtedly have; and they compel their unfortunate employees to write on the subject of rows most amazing and incomprehensible nonsense. There is no accounting for tastes!

IX

THE PLEASANT PLACE

A gentleman of my acquaintance came to me the other day for sympathy.... But first I must describe him:--

He is a man of careful, not neat, dress: I would call it sober rather than neat. He is always clean-shaven and his scanty hair is kept short-cut. He is occupied in letters; he is, to put it bluntly, a litteratoor; none the less he is possessed of scholarship and is a minor authority upon English pottery.

He is a very good writer of verse; he is not exactly a poet, but still, his verse is remarkable. Two of his pieces have been publicly praised by political peers and at least half a dozen of them have been praised in private by the ladies of that world. He is a man fifty-four years of age, and, if I may say so without betraying him, a little disappointed.

He came to me, I say, for sympathy. I was sitting in my study watching the pouring rain falling upon the already soaked and drenched and drowned clay lands of my county. The leafless trees (which are in our part of a low but thick sort) were standing against a dead grey sky with a sort of ghost of movement in it, when he came in, opened his umbrella carefully so that it might not drip, and left it in the stone-floored passage--which is, to be accurate, six hundred years old--kicked off his galoshes and begged my hospitality; also (let me say it for the third time) my sympathy.

He said he had suffered greatly and that he desired to tell me the whole tale. I was very willing, and his tale was this:

It seems that my friend (according to his account) found himself recently in a country of a very delightful character.

This country lay up and heavenly upon a sort of table-land. One went up a road which led continually higher and higher through the ravines of the mountains, until, passing through a natural gate of rock, one saw before one a wide plain bounded upon the further side by the highest crests of the range. Through this upland plain ran a broad and noble river whose reaches he could see in glimpses for miles, and upon the further bank of it in a direction opposite that which the gate of rock regarded, was a very delightful city.

The walls of this city were old in their texture, venerable and majestic in their lines. Within their circumference could be discerned sacred buildings of a similar antiquity, but also modern and convenient houses of a kind which my friend had not come across before, but which were evidently suited to the genial, sunlit climate, as also to the habits of leisured men. Their roofs were flat, covered in places by awnings, in other places by tiled verandas, and these roofs were often disposed in the form of little gardens.

Trees were numerous in the city and showed their tops above the lower buildings, while the lines of their foliage indicated the direction of the streets.

My friend was passing down the road which led to this plain--and as it descended it took on an ampler and more majestic character--when he came upon a traveller who appeared to be walking in the direction of the town.

This traveller asked him courteously in the English tongue whether he were bound for the city. My friend was constrained to reply that he could not pretend to any definite plan, but certainly the prospect all round him was so pleasant and the aspect of the town so inviting, that he would rather visit the capital of this delightful land at once than linger in its outskirts.

"Come with me, then," said the Traveller, "and if I may make so bold upon so short an acquaintance, accept my hospitality. I have a good house upon the wall of the town and my rank among the citizens of it is that of a merchant;--I am glad to say a prosperous one."

He spoke without affectation and with so much kindness, that my friend was ravished to discover such a companion, and they proceeded in leisurely company over the few miles that separated them from their goal.

The road was now paved in every part with small square slabs, quite smooth and apparently constructed of some sort of marble. Upon either side there ran canalised in the shining stone a little stream of perfectly clear water. From time to time they would pass a lovely shrine or statue which the country people had adorned with garlands. As they approached the city they discovered a noble bridge in the manner, my friend believed, of the Italian Renaissance, with strong elliptical arches and built, like all the rest of the way, of marble, while the balustrade upon either side of it was so disposed in short symmetrical columns as to be particularly grateful to the eye. Over this bridge there went to and fro a great concourse of people, all smiling, eager, happy and busy, largely acquainted, apparently, each with the others, nodding, exchanging news, and in a word forming a most blessed company.

As they entered the city my friend's companion, who had talked of many things upon their way and had seemed to unite the most perfect courtesy and modesty with the widest knowledge, asked him whether there was any food or drink to which he was particularly attached.

"For," said he, "I make a point whenever I entertain a guest--and that," he put in with a laugh, "is, I am glad to say, a thing that happens frequently--I make a point, I say, of asking him what he really prefers. It makes such a difference!"

My friend began his reply with those conventional phrases to which we are all accustomed, "That he would be only too happy to take whatever was set before him," "That the prospect of his hospitality was a sufficient guarantee of his satisfaction," and so forth: but his host would take no denial.

"No, no!" said he. "Do please say just what you prefer! It is so easy to arrange--if you only knew!... Come, I know the place better than you," he added, smiling again; "you have no conception of its resources. Pray tell me quite simply before we leave this street"--for they were now in a street of sumptuous and well-appointed shops--"exactly what shall be commissioned."

Moved by I know not what freedom of expression, and expansive in a degree which he had never yet known, my friend smiled back and said: "Well, to tell you the truth, some such meal as this would appeal to me: First two dozen green-bearded oysters of the Arcachon kind, opened upon the _deep_ shell with all their juices preserved, and each exquisitely cleaned. These set upon pounded ice and served in that sort of dish which is contrived for _each_ oyster to repose in its own little recess with a sort of side arrangement for the reception of the empty shells."

His host nodded gravely, as one who takes in all that is said to him.

"Next," said my friend, in an enthusiastic manner, "real and good Russian caviar, cold but not frozen, and so touched with lemon--only just so touched--as to be perfect. With this I think a little of the wine called Barsac should be drunk, and that cooled to about thirty-eight degrees--(Fahrenheit). After this a True Bouillon, and by a True Bouillon," said my friend with earnestness, "I mean a Bouillon that has long simmered in the pot and has been properly skimmed, and has been seasoned not only with the customary herbs but also with a suspicion of carrot and of onion, and a mere breath of tarragon."

"Right!" said his host. "Right!" nodding with real appreciation.

"And next," said my friend, halting in the street to continue his list, "I think there should be eggs."

"Right," said his host once more approvingly; "and shall we say----"

"No," interrupted my friend eagerly, "let me speak. Eggs _sur-le-plat_, frizzled to the exact degree."

"Just what I was about to suggest," answered his delighted entertainer, "and black pepper, I hope, ground large upon them in fresh granules from a proper wooden mill."

"Yes! Yes!" said my friend, now lyric, "and with _sea_ salt in large crystals."

On saying which both of them fell into a sort of ecstasy which my friend broke by adding:

"Something quite light to follow ... preferably a sugar-cured Ham braised in white wine. Then, I think, spinach, not with the ham but after it; and that spinach cooked perfectly dry. We will conclude with some of the cheese called Brie. And for wine during all these latter courses we will drink the wine of Chinon: Chinon Grillé. What they call," he added slyly, "the _Fausse maigre_; for it is a wine thin at sight but full in the drinking of it."

"Good! Excellent!" said his host, clapping his hands together once with a gesture of finality. "And then after the lot you shall have coffee."

"Yes, coffee roasted during the meal and ground immediately before its concoction. And for liqueur...."

My friend was suddenly taken with a little doubt. "I dare not ask," said he, "for the liqueur called Aquebus? Once only did I taste it. A monk gave it me on Christmas Eve four years ago and I think it is not known!"

"Oh, ask for it by all means!" said his host. "Why, we know it and love it in this place as though it were a member of the family!"

My friend could hardly believe his ears on hearing such things, and said nothing of cigars. But to his astonishment his host, putting his left hand on my friend's shoulder, looked him full in the face and said:

"And now shall _I_ tell you about cigars?"

"I confess they were in my mind," said my friend.

"Why then," said his host with an expression of profound happiness, "there is a cigar in this town which is full of flavour, black in colour, which does not bite the tongue, and which none the less satisfies whatever tobacco does satisfy in man. When you smoke it you really dream."

"Why," said my friend humbly, "very well then, let us mention these cigars as the completion of our little feast."