Windfalls

It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,” said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know, madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord’s side.”

And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you were brought up on a farm, weren’t you? Then you know what a ‘chin fly’ is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn’t want the old horse bitten in that way. ‘Why,’ said my brother, ‘that’s all that made him go!’ Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential ‘chin-fly’ biting him, I’m not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department go!” If one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give the palm to a woman – a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her. ‘Shall I speak for thee to the King?’ he said, ‘or to the captain of the host.’ Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet’s offer, ‘I dwell among mine own people.’”

It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on the world’s stage.

ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES

I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business point of view, is that it doesn’t wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.

But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a boiler? How – and this was still more important – how could I hope to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In Dante’s “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily “waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of that life’ which should be “real and earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.

I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a learned and articulate boiler.

Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.

There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable foundation.

It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within a dream – or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.” And we share the poet’s sense of exile —

In this house with starry dome,Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,Shall I never be at home?Never wholly at my ease?

From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or – ” And from this beginning – but the story is too fruity, too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.

ON HEREFORD BEACON

Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd’s Point where she died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.

It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.

Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to – . But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd’s Point tell his own story.

He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep road side by side by the horse’s head he pointed out the Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road, Hereford beacon came in view.

“That’s where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”

He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.

“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.

“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th’ battle o’ Worcester from about here you know, sir.”

“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn’t killed at all. He died in his bed.”

The cabman yielded the point without resentment.

“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I’ve heard folks say he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave’s there now. I’ve never sin it, but it’s there. I used to live o’er in Radnorshire and heard tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”

He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.

“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”

He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.

“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why should th’ old varmint a’ left th’ tower standing, sir?”

And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us to Wynd’s Point.

The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.

It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls – all speak with mute eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.

“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering, like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.

Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.

“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”

There is the secret of Jenny Lind’s love for Wynd’s Point, where the cuckoo – his voice failing slightly in these hot June days – wakes you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the deepening gloom of the vast plain.

Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd’s Point is Nature unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.

Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over half of busy England from where, beyond ‘the Lickey Hills, Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer’s Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.

The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is the moment to turn westward, where

Vanquished eve, as night prevails,Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.

The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey; the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go…

Down in the garden at Wynd’s Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.

And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,In an ocean of dreams without a sound.

Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.

CHUM

When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.

I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott’s schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that “he didn’t know his own strength.”

But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.

There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores. You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.