The Kenneth Grahame Megapack, Page 45

  But whose the hand that shall reach us the herb of healing? Perdita blesses every guest at the shearing with a handful of blossom; but this gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is “grace and remembrance.” The fair Ophelia, rather: nay, for as a nursling she hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a “sorrow’s crown of sorrow.” What flowers are these her pale hand offers? “There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts!” For me rather, O dear Ophelia, the white poppy of forgetfulness.

  A BOHEMIAN IN EXILE

  A Reminiscence

  When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those faithful commons I would speak, narrating only “the short and simple annals of the poor.”

  It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom as a United States—a collection of self-ruling guilds, municipalities, or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. “There once was a king of Bohemia”—but that was a long time ago, and even Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign it was. These small free States, then, broke up gradually, from various causes and with varying speed; and I think ours was one of the last to go.

  With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. “Just for a handful of silver he left us”; though it was not exactly that, but rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.

  So they left us for their pleasure; and in due time, one by one—

  But I will not be morose about them; they had honestly earned their success, and we all honestly rejoiced at it, and do so still.

  When old Pan was dead and Apollo’s bow broken, there were many faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind, a remnant of the faithful. We had never expected to become great in art or song; it was the life itself that we loved; that was our end—not, as with them, the means to an end.

  We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory we;

  Give us the glory of going on and still to be.

  Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible; the old order had changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives as best might be.

  Fothergill said that he, for one, would have no more of it. The past was dead, and he wasn’t going to try to revive it. Henceforth he, too, would be dead to Bloomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man’s death, said “he changed his life.” This is how Fothergill changed his life and died to Bloomsbury. One morning he made his way to the Whitechapel Road, and there he bought a barrow. The Whitechapel barrows are of all sizes, from the barrow wheeled about by a boy with half a dozen heads of cabbages to barrows drawn by a tall pony, such as on Sundays take the members of a club to Epping Forest. They are all precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized “developed” one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white, picked out with green—the barrow, not the donkey—and when his arrangements were complete, stabled the whole for the night in Bloomsbury. The following morning, before the early red had quite faded from the sky, the exodus took place, those of us who were left being assembled to drink a parting whisky-and-milk in sad and solemn silence. Fothergill turned down Oxford Street, sitting on the shaft with a short clay in his mouth, and disappeared from our sight, heading west at a leisurely pace. So he passed out of our lives by way of the Bayswater Road.

  They must have wandered far and seen many things, he and his donkey, from the fitful fragments of news that now and again reached us. It seems that eventually, his style of living being economical, he was enabled to put down his donkey and barrow, and set up a cart and a mare—no fashionable gipsy-cart, a sort of houseboat on wheels, but a light and serviceable cart, with a moveable tilt, constructed on his own designs. This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and other artists’ materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like necessaries; and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he wanted to.

  He was in this state of comparative luxury when at last, by the merest accident, I foregathered with him once more. I had pulled up to Streatley one afternoon, and, leaving my boat, had gone for a long ramble on the glorious North Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before dinner. Somewhere over on Cuckhamsley Hill, by the side of the Ridgeway, remote from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his vesper pipe on the shaft of his cart, the mare cropping the short grass beside him. He greeted me without surprise or effusion, as if we had only parted yesterday, and without a hint of an allusion to past times, but drifted quietly into rambling talk of his last three years, and, without ever telling his story right out, left a strange picturesque impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated by fifty years from modern conventional existence. The old road-life still lingered on in places, it seemed, once one got well away from the railway: there were two Englands existing together, the one fringing the great iron highways wherever they might go—the England under the eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed at by many, in whatever places were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed on as of old: the England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of by-lanes and village-greens—the England of Parson Adams and Lavengro. The spell of the free untrammelled life came over me as I listened, till I was fain to accept of his hospitality and a horse-blanket for the night, oblivious of civilised comforts down at the Bull. On the downs where Alfred fought we lay and smoked, gazing up at the quiet stars that had shone on many a Dane lying stark and still a thousand years ago; and in the silence of the lone tract that enfolded us we seemed nearer to those old times than to these I had left that afternoon, in the now hushed and sleeping valley of the Thames.

  When the news reached me, some time later, that Fothergill’s aunt had died and left him her house near town and the little all she had possessed, I heard it with misgivings, not to say forebodings. For the house had been his grandfather’s, and he had spent much of his boyhood there; it had been a dream of his early days to possess it in some happy future, and I knew he could never bear to sell or let it. On the other hand, can you stall the wild ass of the desert? And will not the caged eagle mope and pine?

  However, possession was entered into, and all seemed to go well for the time. The cart was honourably installed in the coach-house, the mare turned out to grass. Fothergill lived idly and happily, to all seeming, with “a book of verses underneath the bough,” and a bottle of old claret for the friend who might chance to drop in. But as the year wore on small signs began to appear that he who had always “rather hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak” was beginning to feel himself caged, though his bars were gilded.

  I was talking one day to his coachman (he now kept three men-servants), and he told me that of a Sunday morning when the household had gone to church and everything was quiet, Mr Fothergill would go into the coach-house and light his pipe, and sit on the step of the brougham (he had a brougham now), and gaze at the old cart, and smoke and say nothing; and smoke and say nothing again. He didn’t like it, the coachman confessed; and to me it
seemed ominous.

  One morning late in March, at the end of a long hard winter, I was wakened by a flood of sunshine. The early air came warm and soft through the open window; the first magic suggestion of spring was abroad, with its whispered hints of daffodils and budding hawthorns; and one’s blood danced to imagined pipings of Pan from happy fields far distant. At once I thought of Fothergill, and, with a certain foreboding of ill, made my way down to Holly Lodge as soon as possible. It was with no surprise at all that I heard that the master was missing. In the very first of the morning, it seemed, or ever the earliest under-housemaid had begun to set man-traps on the stairs and along the passages, he must have quietly left the house. The servants were cheerful enough, nevertheless, and thought the master must only have “gone for a nice long walk,” and so on, after the manner of their kind. Without a word I turned my steps to the coach-house. Sure enough, the old cart was missing; the mare was gone from the paddock. It was no good my saying anything; pursuit of this wild haunter of tracks and by-paths would have been futile indeed. So I kept my own counsel. Fothergill never returned to Holly Lodge, and has been more secret and evasive since his last flight, rarely venturing on old camping grounds near home, like to a bird scared by the fowler’s gun.

  Once indeed, since then, while engaged in pursuit of the shy quarry known as the Early Perp., late Dec., E. Eng., and the like, specimens of which I was tracking down in the west, I hit upon him by accident; hearing in an old village rumours concerning a strange man in a cart who neither carried samples nor pushed the brewing interest by other means than average personal consumption—tales already beginning to be distorted into material for the myth of the future. I found him friendly as ever, equally ready to spin his yarns. As the evening wore on, I ventured upon an allusion to past times and Holly Lodge; but his air of puzzled politeness convinced me that the whole thing had passed out of his mind, as a slight but disagreeable incident in the even tenor of his nomadic existence.

  After all, his gains may have outbalanced his losses. Had he cared, he might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success; certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers, had any impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement. But he was for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen sense of certain sub-tones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in toiling for a harvest to be reaped when he was dust.

  Some for the glories of this life, and some

  Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come:

  Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,

  Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.

  JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE

  This is a remedial age, an age of keys for all manner of locks; so he cannot be said to ask too much who seeks for exact information as to how a young man ought, in justice to himself and to society, to deal with his relations. During his minority he has lain entirely at their mercy: has been their butt, their martyr, their drudge, their corpus vile. Possessing all the sinews of war, this stiff-necked tribe has consistently refused to “part”: even for the provision of those luxuries so much more necessary than necessities. Its members have crammed their victim full of precepts, rules of conduct, moral maxims, and most miscellaneous counsel: all which he intuitively suspected at the time, and has ascertained by subsequent experience, to be utterly worthless. Now, when their hour has come, when the tocsin has sounded at last, and the Gaul is at the gate, they still appear to think that the old condition of things is to go on; unconscious, apparently, of atonement due, of retribution to be exacted, of wrongs to be avenged and of insults to be wiped away!

  Over the north-west frontier, where the writ of the English Raj runs not, the artless Afghan is happy in a code that fully provides for relatives who neglect or misunderstand their obligations. An Afghan it was who found himself compelled to reprove an uncle with an unfortunate habit of squandering the family estate. An excellent relative, this uncle, in all other respects. As a liar, he had few equals; he robbed with taste and discretion; and his murders were all imbued with true artistic feeling. He might have lived to a green old age of spotless respectability but for his one little failing. As it was, justice had to be done, ruat cælum: and so it came about that one day the nephew issued forth to correct him with a matchlock. The innocent old man was cultivating his paternal acres; so the nephew was able, unperceived, to get a steady sight on him. His finger was on the trigger, when suddenly there slipped into his mind the divine precept: “Allah is merciful!” He lowered his piece, and remained for a little plunged in thought; meanwhile the unconscious uncle hoed his paddy. Then with a happy smile he took aim once more, for there also occurred to him the precept equally divine: “But Allah is also just.” With an easy conscience he let fly, and behold! there was an uncle the more in Paradise.

  It was probably some little affair of a similar quality that constrained a recruit in a regiment stationed at Peshawur to apply for leave of absence: in order to attend to family matters of importance. The Colonel knew it was small use refusing the leave, as in that case his recruit would promptly desert; so he could only ask, how long was the transaction like to take? It was told him, after consideration, that, allowing for all possible difficulties and delays, a month would meet the necessities of the case; and on that understanding he allowed his man to depart. At the end of the month he reappeared on duty, a subdued but mellow cheer shining through his wonted impassiveness. His Colonel ventured to inquire of him, in a general way, if the business in question were satisfactorily concluded. And he replied: “I got him from behind a rock.”

  There are practical difficulties in the way of the adoption of such methods at home. We must be content to envy, without imitating, these free and happy sons of the hills. And yet a few of the old school are left us still: averse from change, mistrustful of progress, sticking steadily to the good old-fashioned dagger and bowl. I had a friend who disposed of a relative every spring. Uncles were his special line—(he had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left an orphan)—though he had dabbled in aunts, and in his hot youth, when he was getting his hand in, he had even dallied with a grand-parent or two. But it was in uncles he excelled. He possessed (at the beginning of his career) a large number of these connections, and pursuit of them, from the mere sordid point of view of £ s. d., proved lucrative. But he always protested (and I believed him) that gain with him was a secondary consideration. It would hardly be in the public interest to disclose his modus operandi. I shall only remark that he was one of the first to realise the security and immunity afforded the artist by the conditions of modern London. Hence it happened that he usually practised in town, but spent his vacations at the country houses of such relations as were still spared him, where he was always the life and soul of the place. Unfortunately he is no longer with us, to assist in the revision of this article: nor was it permitted me to soothe his last moments. The presiding Sheriff was one of those new-fangled officials who insist on the exclusion of the public, and he declined to admit me either in the capacity of a personal connection or, though I tried my hardest, as the representative of “The National Observer.” It only remains to be said of my much-tried and still lamented friend, that he left few relatives to mourn his untimely end.

  But our reluctant feet must needs keep step with the imperious march of Time, and my poor friend’s Art (as himself in later years would sorrowfully admit) is now almost as extinct as the glass-staining of old, or “Robbia’s craft so apt and strange”; while our thin-blooded youth, too nice for the joyous old methods, are content to find sweetest revenge in severely dropping their relations. This is indeed a most effective position: it exasperates, while it is unassailable. And yet there remains a higher course, a nobler task. Not mere forgiveness: it is simple duty to forgive—even one’s guardi
ans. No young man of earnest aspirations will be content to stop there. Nay: lead them on, these lost ones, by the hand; conduct them “generously and gently, and with linking of the arm”; educate them, eradicate their false ideals, dispel their foolish prejudices; be to their faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind: in fine, realise that you have a mission—that these wretches are not here for nothing. The task will seem hard at first; but only those who have tried can know how much may be done by assiduous and kindly effort towards the chastening—ay! the final redemption even!—of the most hopeless and pig-headed of uncles.

  THE FAIRY WICKET

  From digging in the sandy, over-triturated soil of times historical, all dotted with date and number and sign, how exquisite the relief in turning to the dear days outside history—yet not so very far off neither for us nurslings of the northern sun—when kindly beasts would loiter to give counsel by the wayside, and a fortunate encounter with one of the Good People was a surer path to Fortune and the Bride than the best-worn stool that ever proved step-ladder to aspiring youth. For then the Fairy Wicket stood everywhere ajar—everywhere and to each and all. “Open, open, green hill!”—you needed no more recondite sesame than that: and, whoever you were, you might have a glimpse of the elfin dancers in the hall that is litten within by neither sun nor moon; or catch at the white horse’s bridle as the Fairy Prince rode through. It has been closed now this many a year (the fairies, always strong in the field, are excellent wicket-keepers); and if it open at all, ’tis but for a moment’s mockery of the material generation that so deliberately turned its back on the gap into Elf-Land—that first stage to the Beyond.