Windfalls

He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind, that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow. For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man’s a man, for a’ that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was ipso facto suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman’s pair of trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.

One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully. Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping a stile – he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow – or had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them, for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the veterinary’s art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels in his native woods – for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in the heart of the woodland country – no longer made him tense as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian’s dream of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.

ON MATCHES AND THINGS

I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she returned she brought tea – and sugar. In that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.

It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.

Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin – rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the slain… With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.

It is not one’s taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And matches… There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time o’ day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a commonplace civility.

And now… I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven’t any.” They simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly, smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that there aren’t any matches; haven’t been any matches for years and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.

No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite, wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other hasn’t got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.

I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me – but not so often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If – having borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late – I go into his room and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace Conference, or things like that – is he deceived? Not at all. He knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.

But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the tobacconist’s shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about Lords and the Oval.

And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one “of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the farmer’s family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”

Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the princess’s sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.

ON BEING REMEMBERED

As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the bark – some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.

What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton’s hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of immortality – terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.

If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace’s “Exegi monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare’s proud declaration —

Not marble, nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had written a song of a sparrow —

And in this bush one sparrow built her nestOf which I sang one song that will not die.

Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.

Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence. “I’ll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. “Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of me comes but once in centuries.”

Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he said grandly; “I quit the time.” And beside this we may put Victor Hugo’s rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”

But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life? Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true, suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.

Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says: —

For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (Oh, you rogue!) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (”You were drunk last night, you dog“), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.

We may smile at Boswell’s vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray’s depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of “Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two thousand – or it may be three thousand – yes, let us do the thing handsomely and not stint the centuries – in the year three thousand and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for democracy – at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic to the Patagonian capital – swished, I need hardly remark, being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth’s atmosphere and made to complete a parabola on any part of the earth’s surface that may be desired – bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages of the ancient British capital – those passages which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.

An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch, marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha – a gentleman with a flowing beard and a dome-like brow – that overlooks the market-place, and places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells and a salvo of artillery.

There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the’ brilliant military feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the poem in which he poured out his creed —

He either fears his fate too much,Or his deserts are small.That dares not put it to the touchTo win or lose it all.

Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.”

“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But one must choose one’s poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give Mr – £200 and a commission to send your name echoing down the corridors of time.

Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr – (you will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.

But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the world babbles about us for ever.