The First of November
Next morning when I woke it was because the Poet was timidly walking about the room, making as much noise as he dared, but unwilling to be longer alone.
The fire was out, and the small place looked mournful under that grey dawn. I could see through the window that the weather had changed and the air was warmer. All the sky was hurrying cloud, and there would be rain I thought from one time to another on that day. But it would be a good day I thought, for it was All-Hallows, which balances the year, and makes a counterweight, as it were, to All Fools’ in her earlier part, when she is light and young, and when she has forgotten winter and is glad that summer is near, and has never heard the name of autumn at all, or of the fall of leaves.
Grizzlebeard also stirred and woke, and then, last, the Sailor, rather stupored, and all of them looked at me as much as to say: “Have you no breakfast here?” But I, seeing what was in their minds, met them at once determinedly, and said:
“In this house we breakfast after the fashion of the heroes, our fathers, that is, upon last night’s beer, and the bread and cheese of our suppers. So did they breakfast who fought with De Montfort up on Mount Harry at the other end of the county six hundred years ago and more, when they had marched all the day before as it was, and were marshalled against the king with the morning. Sorely against their will! For there is no fight in a man until it is past nine o’clock, and even so he is the better for coffee or for soup. But today there is no fighting, but only trudging, so let us make our breakfast thus and be off.”
They were none of them content, but since I would have it so and since there was no help for it, they drank that stale beer, a mug each, with wry faces, and nibbled a little at the stale bread. Then we left the rest of the loaf and the cheese for the mice, who keep house for me there when I am away, and frighten off newcomers by pretending that they are the spirits of the dead.
So we went out through the door and across the little green to a wobble road that is there, and by a way across the fields to Steyning, where we should find the high road to Washington and Storrington and Amberley Bridge, and so over to the country beyond Arun and the things we knew.
As we went south over those fields, with the new warmth of the hurrying clouds above us and the Downs growing higher and higher, the Poet saying what the others had spared to say, began to grumble. For he said that beer was no breakfast for a man, but give him rather tea.
The Sailor. “Poet, I think you must be a vegetarian, and very probably (like most men of your luxury) you are yet afraid of your body—a lanky thing, I grant.”
Myself. “Burn me those men who are afraid of the Flesh! Water-drinkers also, and caterwauling outers, and turnip mumblers, enemies of beef, treasonable to the immemorial ox and the tradition of our human kind! Pifflers and snifflers, and servants of the meanest of the devils, tied fast to halting, knock-kneed Baphomet, the coward’s god, and chained to the usurers as is a mangy dog to a blind man!”
The Sailor. “Come, let us take it up! Hunt me them over the hills with horn and with hound! Drive them, harry them, pen them, drown them in the river, and rid me them from our offended soil! They are the betrayers of Christendom! They are the traducers of those mighty men our fathers, who upon the woodwork of the Table and the Bed, as upon twin pillars, founded the Commonweal.”
Myself. “Come, Poet, are you not convinced?”
The Poet. “Of what? That I should have a decent respect for my body?”
The Sailor. “Respect go hang itself by the heels until it gets some blood into its pale face, and then take a basting to put life into it!”
Grizzlebeard. “Do you not know, Poet, that by all these anti-belly tricks of yours you would canalise mankind into the trench that leads to hell? For there is nothing that cannot be made to serve the Master of Evil by abuse, nor anything which cannot by a just and reasonable enjoyment be made to glorify God. Have you any lack of pleasure in this rush of the clouds above us. Or does he seem to you a niggler, the fellow that rides the southwest wind?”
The Poet. “What is all this flood of yours, you three? What have I said about or against the Body?”
Myself. “Nay, Poet, but we will tell you more than you care to hear! Consider that glorious great tube a gun, whence shells may be lobbed at such as are worthy of the game. Your man that smirks his hatred of war is he that potters into the dirty adventures against the very weak (but by God’s providence his aim is damnable), and he is the man that fees lawyers to ruin the poor.”
The Sailor. “What all this may have to do with the Body I know not. But this I say: Give it due honour—treat it well, keep it with care. It is a complicated thing—you could not have made it, and if you hurt it it is hard to mend. … Oh, my succinct and honourable Body! I cherish you! you are my friend! I cannot do without you! On the day I have to do without you I shall be all at sea! With the eyes in you do I read books written by women with a grievance, and with the ears of you do I hear the noise of the vulgarians, and with the feet of you do I enter the houses of the rich but fly the presence of fools! Most profitable, consistent, homogeneous, and worthy Body! I salute you; I take comfort in you; I am glad indeed they gave you to me for this brief mortal while! Little Body! Little Body! Believe me, were I wealthy I would cram you with good things! Nor was I ever better pleased than when I heard from a Franciscan in Crawley that when they hang me I shall not lose you altogether, but that you will return to me some time or another;—but when exactly was never fully set down. Anyhow, I shall catch on to you again and recover you very properly set up and serviceable, without bump or boss, a humpless, handsome thing!”
The Poet. “All this is quite beside the mark, and you have vented upon me nothing but your temper for lack of breakfast. Never in my life have I believed the things which you would have me believe, nor said a word against this vessel which holds my soul as tight as a bottle does a cork, and of which I know so much, but of my soul so little, though my soul is my only companion.”
Grizzlebeard. “The Body is a business which we all know too well, but the Soul is another matter. For I knew a man once (not of this county) who said there was no soul, and would have proved it. He had once long ago by an apparatus of his tried to prove there was a soul—but the proof was lacking. So next he naturally thought there could be no soul, and he set out to prove that on his four fingers and his thumb, without gimcracks, pragmatically, and in a manner convincing to the blind. And he set out with an apparatus to find proof that there was no soul—but that proof was also lacking. So let us have done with all this, and find our way through this tall screen of trees to Steyning, and to the good house that is there, and have something Christian to prepare us for our road. For the Lord knows that Myself and Queen Elizabeth were wrong in making small, stale beer and bread a proper breakfast for a man. Strong beer and beef are the staple.”
The Sailor. “Besides which All-Hallows is a great feast, and feeding goes with feasting. We will knock at Myself’s door when we are next worried by the duty of fasting for some great evil to be atoned, or when ugly Lent comes round.”
When we had got into the town of Steyning, the Sailor, the Poet, Grizzlebeard, and I, we went into the inn, hotel, guesthouse, or hostelry, and there very prettily asked as we passed the host that cold meat and ale might be served us in the smoking-room.
But when we got into the smoking-room, the Sailor, the Poet, Grizzlebeard, and I, we were not a little annoyed to see in a corner of the room, crouched up against the fire in a jolly old easy-chair, which little suited his vile and scraggy person, a being of an unpleasant sort. He had a hump which was not his fault, and a sour look which was. He was smoking a long churchwarden pipe through his sneering lips. There was very little hair upon his face, though he did not shave, and the ear turned towards us, the left ear, had been so broken that it looked pointed, and made one shudder. The sneer on his lips was completed by the long slyness of his eye. His legs were as thin as sticks, and he had one crossed over the other; his boots had elastic sides to them, and horrible tags fore and aft, and above them were measly grey socks thin and wrinkled. He did not turn nor greet us as we appeared.
It was our fashion during this memorable walk to be courteous with all men and familiar with none—unless you call that familiarity when the Poet threw beer at a philosopher to baptize him and wake him into a new world, as you shall later read.
We therefore sat awkwardly round the edges of the table, the Poet at the end of it opposite to the window that gives on the stable-yard, Myself next to him at the corner, next to me the Sailor, and beyond him Grizzlebeard, who seemed the most contented of us all, and was in no way put out by the blasted being near the fire, but rather steeped himself in memories of his own, and had eyes that looked further than the walls. We, the younger men, drummed our fingers a little upon the table till the beer was brought in, and then began to wonder what wines were kept in so old a house, and the Poet and the Sailor alternately told lies; the Poet telling of rare wines he had found in the houses of the rich, the Sailor talking of wines that never were in ports far off beyond the wide peril of the seas. Grizzlebeard, hearing them confusedly, said that his father had bought a Tokay in at 204s. the dozen. This also was a lie. And I, to please them, spoke of true wines, notably of that wine which comes from the inside of a goatskin in Val d’Aran, Sobrarbe, and the roots of Aragon: the vilest and most tonic wine in the world, alive with the power of the goat.
While we thus spoke (in a quiet way so as not to offend) the beer came in, and our talk drifted on to the price of wines, and from that to those who could afford the price of wine, and from that to the rich, and from that to the very rich. And at last the Poet said:
“I should like to be very rich.”
Whereupon, to the annoyance of us all, the nasty fellow next to the fire took his long, silly pipe out of his mouth, blew a little blue wisp of smoke without body in it from his lips, and said:
“Ugh! What do you call very rich?”
The Poet was by nature a hesitating man, and he was frightened by one speaking to him unexpectedly—and one so hideous! So he said vaguely:
“Oh! not to have to think of things; and not to be forever in the jeopardy of honour; to be able to dip when one liked into one’s purse and to pay for what one wanted, and to succour the needy, and to travel or rest at pleasure.” Then he added, as men will who are of infinite imagination and crammed with desires, “My wants are few.”
He was thinking, perhaps, of a great house upon an eastern hill that should overlook the Mediterranean Sea, and yet be easily in touch with London, and yet again be wholly isolated from the world, and have round it just so many human beings as he might wish to have there, and all at his command.
I, sitting next to him, took up the conversation as in a game of cards, and began:
“That can’t be done! When you are wishing for wealth you are by the nature of things wishing for what man allows and controls. You are wishing, therefore—”
“Don’t preach!” said the Person by the fire. The Sailor, to make things pleasanter, began hurriedly:
“If I were very rich I should want a number of definite things, as this gentleman said,” waving his hands towards that gentleman to avoid all unpleasantness, which is a way they have in the foc’sle.
“He didn’t say it,” I murmured. “I said it.”
Whereat the Sailor kicked vigorously and wide under the table by way of hint, and caught the Poet, who howled aloud. Then only was the Person by the fire moved to a single gesture. He looked round sharply with his head and a twist of his eyes, not changing a muscle of his body, but glancing as an animal glances, and moving as an animal moves.
“Go on!” he commanded.
The Sailor was a combative man: but he mastered himself, and went on gradually;
“Oh! I should like to give big dinners pretty often and to go to plays.”
Which was a silly sentence, but true enough. He corrected it, adding:
“And I should like to have a jolly little house, and five or ten or twenty or thirty, or perhaps a hundred acres of land; and there would have to be wood upon it. And I should hate to be near a railway, so I would have a motor; and I must have a telephone, but it must not bring people to the place, so I would have a private telephone wire stretching for miles. And one must have water on one’s place. And I should like electric light for the offices, but one wants candles for the rooms.”
When he had got thus far the man near the fire jerked his head over his shoulder at Grizzlebeard. The Sailor stopped astonished, and Grizzlebeard, a little frightened I think, said rapidly:
“Really, I don’t know! I don’t think I want to be very rich. I suppose I am very rich by any good standard. My house has twenty-three rooms in it, counting the old scullery, which is now a cellar. And I have quite four acres of dug garden-land, and undug land not to be counted. I am a gentleman also, and I can put up as many of my friends as care to come and see me. I have four horses, money in the bank, and no debts. I burn my own wood, and build with my own timber; and I quarry my stone out of my own ground. Really I need no more!”
He remembered something, however, and he said:
“It would be a good thing to help the nations. It would be a good thing to enfranchise the nations which are caught in the usurer’s hellish web.”
He was silent. Many memories moved in him, but he was too old to think that much could be done with the world; and how could money do much against the abominations of the world?
It was the Sailor who found courage enough to tackle the Johnnie in the chair.
“And what would you do,” he said aggressively, “if you were very rich?”
The Man in the Chair did not move.
“I am talking to you, sir,” said the Sailor sharply.
“I know that,” snarled the Man in the Chair in an inhuman way. Then, just before the Sailor exploded, he added,
“I should sit here in this chair smoking this pipe with this very tobacco in it and looking at this very fire. That’s what I should do, and there would be you four men behind me.”
“Oh, you would, would you?” said the Sailor. “And how do you know that you would be just as you are?”
“Because I am very rich already,” said the Man in the Chair in a low metallic voice, full of dirty satisfaction. … “I am exceedingly rich. I have more money than any other man in the large town of the north where I was born. Yes, I’m rich enough.”
He leaned forward towards the fire for a moment, then he took out a card and tossed it to the Sailor.
“That’s my name,” he said. And we bade him “Good day,” and all went out.
We took the road so as not to go through Wiston Park, for though the house there is as good a sight as any in England, why, it was not ours, and we went past that field where the Saint wheeled his mother in a wheelbarrow, and cursed the haymakers, so that it always rains there in mowing time.
For he was, as the phrase goes in those parts, a Holy Man, and had great power. But as he was very poor, no one guessed it. And first, in following God, he sold his motor to buy a brougham, and then he sold his brougham to buy a dogcart, and then he sold his dogcart to buy a broken down, paint-scratched, nasty go-cart; and then, still serving God, not man, he sold his go-cart and his nag and bought a wheelbarrow. For some thing he must have to take his old mother to church in. Now all this happened in the year of our Lord , just after Sussex got the Faith and hundreds of years before she lost it again, and a little before St. Leonard cursed the nightingales.
So he was taking his mother to church in the wheelbarrow when the haymakers laughed at him as he passed, and the Saint said: “Laugh men, weep heaven.” And immediately there fell on that field only two inches of rain in half-an-hour, and that on the two-day swathes all ready for Tedding, and Lord! how they did curse and swear! And from that day to this, whether hay time come in May month or in June, it rains in the hay time on that one field.
Now when we had gone about a mile from Steyning and had so turned into the Washington Road, the Sailor bethought him of the card, and pulled it out, and there was written—
Mr. Deusipsenotavit,
Brooks’s.
The Sailor looked at it right away up, and upside down, and sideways, and held it up to the light so as to look through it as well, and then said:
“It is a foreign name.”
Grizzlebeard took it from him, and after a close view of it said:
“It is a Basque name: it is agglutinative.”
And we all went on to Washington, talking of a thousand things.
As we so talked there came over the edge of the high hills that stood like a wall above us, and from the hurrying clouds before the southwest wind, the first drops of rain, and the Poet said:
“What! Must we go forward on this road although it is raining?”
The Sailor. “Yes, Ninny-lad, most certainly! What else were roads made for but to give a man hard going over wet land?”
The Poet. “Well, I say there is a time for everything, and rain-time is not the time for walking on a road.”
The Sailor. “Why, then, you mean that autumn days, such as these, are not to be taken at their full measure, nor to give us their full profit, but that we are to go down to dry death without knowing the taste of Sussex air in the rain?”
The Poet. “No, I say it aloud, there are days for everything, although we do not know the reason why, and that is why I never will be shaved on a Sunday, for I count it unlucky.
“You may have noticed up and down England some men with nasty little undergrowths upon their upper lips alone, and others with great wild beards like Grizzlebeard here, and others with moth-eaten beards as it were—the worst of all; depend upon it they shaved, each of them, at some time or another of a Sunday.
“It is a day of rest, and there is no labour like shaving. It is a day of dignity, and there is no grimacing, sour-faced, donnish occupation like that of shaving. So I say: ‘There is a day for everything, and everything has its lucky time except burial.’ ”
Myself. “There now! And that was the very thing I was going to say had its most varying days! For does not the old rhyme go:
‘Buried on Monday, buried for health,
Buried on Tuesday, buried for wealth;
Buried on Wednesday, buried at leisure,
Buried on Thursday, buried for pleasure;
Buried on Friday, buried for fun,
Buried on Saturday, buried at one.’ ”
The Sailor. “Why?”
Myself. “There you show yourself what you are, a man that follows the sea. For on land here we knock off work at twelve on Saturday—that is parsons, gravediggers, coffin-carriers, mourners, and the rest, who very willingly dispose of the dead between seven and five of a week day, but do claim their half-holiday. But you sailors may claim your half till you are black in the face, another disposes of your time! And even if a law were passed that you should loll about from eight bells on Saturday noon to the dog watch of Monday, as we do on land, that other would tickle you up with a snorter before you had lit your pipes. Tumble up there the lot! Watch? I’ll watch you, watch or no watch! Tumble up there and take it lively! Run up and clew them in till your hands freeze! Pull, you lubbers, pull! Squirm over the yard like a row of tumblers at a fair, and make fast and be damned to you! Better for you than for me.
“Then the song goes on (for us jolly people on land; as for you at sea, you may die and drown as you will):
‘Buried on Sunday after eleven,
You get the priest and you go to heaven.’ ”
Grizzlebeard. “This is rank folly, for absolution is for living men.”
Myself. “There you go, Grizzlebeard, verbalising and confumbling, and chopping logic like the Fiend! exegetic and neo-scholastic, hypograstic, defibulating stuff! An end to true religion! Soft, old man, soft; the blessing over a coffin does no man any harm, and is a great solace to uneasy spirits. You are forever running into the very gate of heresy with your determinations. It is a bad and a feverish state you have fallen into. Make amends while you yet have time! Or perhaps when you come to die you shall have no candles round your coffin and no large black cloth over it spangled with silver tears, and no bishop to sprinkle it; nay, who knows, not even a monk nor a parish priest, nor so much as a humble little curate from the castle.
“When death is on you, Grizzlebeard, I would have you write out in large black letters on a big white board, ‘This man believed,’ and hang it round your neck and so die. In this way there will be no error.
“For errors are made in this matter I assure you, and one man, though secretly devout (he came from near my own farm), was by such an error buried anyhow and in common fashion with prayers only, so that he had to haunt Normans (as they called the house) on the Dial Post Road. And a job it was, I can tell you! For the people in that house feared ghosts, and when he walked, though he walked never so gently, they would give great bloodcurdling shrieks, such as threw him into a trembling and a sweat—poor spirit!—until the ghost-masters who set the uncomforted dead such tasks had mercy on him, and let him go haunt the Marine Parade at Worthing, where no man minded him.”
The Poet. “Then how was he rested at last?”
Myself. “Why, in the usual fashion; by the drawing of a pentagon upon the sand and the sacrificing in its middle of a pure white hen. I have done.”
The Sailor. “It is as well, for it has stopped raining.”
And so it had. To our comfort and the changing of our minds.
So all along the road under Chanctonbury, that high hill, we went as the morning broadened: along a way that is much older than anything in the world: a way that leads from old Pevensey Port through the Vale of Glynde and across Cuckmere and across Ouse, and then up to the height of Lewes, and then round the edge of the Combe, and then down on to the ledge below the Downs, making Court House and Plumpton Corner, West Meston, Clinton, and Hollow Pie Combe (though between these two it branches and meets again, making an island of Wolstonbury Hill), and then on by Poynings and Fulking and Edburton, and so to the crossing of the water and the Fort of Bramber, and so along and along all under the Downs until it passes Arun at Houghton Bridge, and so by Bury and Westburton, and Sutton and Duncton, Graffham and Cocking, and Diddling and Harting—all Sussex names and all places where the pure water having dripped through the chalk of the high hills, gushes out in fountains to feed that line of steadings and of human homes. By that way we went, by walls and trees that seemed as old as the old road itself, talking of all those things men talk of, because men were made for speech and for companionship, until we came to the crossroads at Washington; and there, said I to my companions:
Myself. “Have you heard of Washington Inn?”
Grizzlebeard. “Why, yes, all the world has heard of it; and when Washington the Virginian, a general overseas, was worriting his army together a long time ago, men hearing his name would say: ‘Washington? … Washington? … I know that name.’ Then would they remember the inn at Washington, and smile. For fame is of this character. It goes by the sound of names.”
The Poet. “For what, then, is the inn of Washington famous?”
The Sailor. “Not for a song, but for the breeder of songs. You shall soon learn.”
And when he had said that we all went in together, and, in the inn of Washington, we put it to the test whether what so many men had sung of that ale were true or no. But hardly had the Sailor put his tankard down, when he cried out in a loud voice:
“It is true, and I believe!”
Then he went on further: “Without any doubt whatsoever this nectar was brewed in the waxing of the moon and of that barley which Brutus brought hither in the first founding of this land! And the water wherein that barleycorn was brewed was May day dew, the dew upon the grass before sunrise of a May day morning. For it has all the seven qualities of ale, which are:—
א Aleph = Clarity,
ב Beth = Savour,
ג Gimel = A lively hue,
ד Daleth = Lightness,
ה He = Profundity,
ו Vau = Strength retained,
and lastly, ז Zayin, which is Perfection and The End.
“It was seeking this ale, I think, that Alexander fought his way to Indus, but perished miserably of the colic in the flower of his age because he did not find it.
“Seeking this ale, I think it was, that moved Charlemagne to ride both North and South, and East and West, all his life long in those so many wars of his whereof you may read in old books; for he lived to be two hundred years and more, and his bramble beard became as white as sea-foam and as tangled, and his eyes hollow with age. And yet he would not abandon the quest for Mitchell’s Ale which they sell at Washington: but he could not find it, and so died at last of chagrin.
“And hearing of this ale from a Familiar, Aldabaran sought Saragossa in disguise, and filled ten years full, planning and devising how to get it from the Emir of El Kazar, who was in league with the Evil One; then, in the very moment of his triumph, and as he was unlocking that cellar door, a guardian slave slew him with a sword, and his soul went forth, leaving the cask untasted.
“So also St. Offa, of Swinestead in Mercia, fainting at the thought of this ale which tempting demons had let him smell in a dream, was near to missing his salvation. He left his cell and went out beyond Kent, over the narrow seas into the Low Countries, and wandered up and down for seven years, until at last he went distracted and raving for lack of the liquor. But at last he was absolved at Rome.
“Then you have that Orlando, whose fury was aroused by nothing else but a passionate need for this same brew. For he had led a peaceful life as a cobbler in Upper Beeding until he heard by chance of this ale, and immediately he set out to seek it, and in so doing was led to all his heroic deeds and also to wounds and dissolution at last, and died without ever putting his lips to the tankard.
“Shall I make mention of Gastos or of Clemens? Of Artaxerxes, of Paulus or Ramon, who all expected and desired this thing in vain? Or recall Praxiteles or Zeno his cousin, Periscopolos the Pirate, Basil of Cyrene, or Milo? They also wasted themselves upon that same endeavour. But to me who am nobler than them all, it has been granted to drink it, and now I know that it resolves all doubts, and I shall go to my great death smiling. It is the satisfaction of all yearnings, and the true end of all philosophies. Of the Epicurean, for it is a final happiness. Of the Stoic, for it leaves me indifferent to every earthly thing. Of the Hegelian, for it is It. And I see in the depths of it, the conclusion of desire and of regret, and of recollection and of expectation, and of wonder. This is that of which the great poets sang when they said that time itself should be dissolved, of which the chief of them has written:
‘Till one eternal moment stops his powers:
Time being past then all time past is ours.’
It is indeed good beer; and when we leave our valleys we will all drink it together in Paradise.”
Grizzlebeard. “You are right.”
The Poet. “Yes, you are.”
Myself. “We are all right together.”
Grizzlebeard. “It is little wonder that for such as this or worse, the Sons of the Acheans fought ten long years round Troy, or that, nourished by this royal thing, the men of Sussex in old time defeated all their foes, and established themselves firmly upon this ancient land.”
Myself. “Yes, indeed! Cadwalla, who was the first King of Sussex to learn the true Faith, and who endeared himself forever to St. Wilfrid and to the Pope, by giving to the one ten thousand, but to the second twenty thousand barrels of this most admirable and impossible-to-be-too-much-praised Cervisian nectar (you may find his tomb in Rome), was moved to extend our power right over sea, even to the Isle of Wight. When he had subdued that land, he took the two princes that were the heirs to its throne, and put them to death. And he conquered all Sussex and all Kent and was mighty before his thirtieth year—all on the ale of Washington, Mitchell’s Ale of the Washington Inn! Of such potency it was!”
I looked through the window as I so concluded, and there again had come the storms of rain.
“We will not start,” I said. “It is raining.”
The Poet. “But just now …”
Myself. “Oh, Poet! will you also be teasing us with logic, or have you not learnt in your little life how one man may drive off for a game a whole drove of horses, while another may not so much as glance over a little new set maple hedge no higher than his knee? So it is! Let us hear no more of justice and the rest, but sit here snug in the middle of the world, and make Grizzlebeard do the talking. He has lived longest and knows most, yet has he given us neither a story nor a song.”
“You have told us,” said Grizzlebeard willingly enough, “the story of Cadwalla, who had that fine imperial instinct in him which made him chafe even within the wide limits of his Sussex kingdom, and sail over the sea with that great expedition of his to conquer and annex the Isle of Wight, the two princes, heirs to which, he also very imperially murdered. Your story made me think of all those other times in history when the armies and the banners of this immortal county have shown themselves in distant lands.”
The Sailor. “It is interesting that you should know so much, dear Grizzlebeard, but those are far-off things, and we have no true record of them.”
Myself. “Yet, Grizzlebeard, since you are upon this topic, I very often have much desired to know how it is that this county of ours seems everywhere to exceed its natural boundaries, and to have planted a foot north, east, and west in the territory of others; guarding itself, as it were, by bastions and belts of territory not its own, and preserving them as symbols and guarantees of its great military power.”
The Poet. “Nay, doubtless, the county of Sussex would have expanded southward were it not that it was there contained by the sea, which will brook no man’s foot.”
The Sailor. “Say rather that there was no annexation southward, because the salt sea, being unharvested, there was nothing worth annexing; but, even as it is, the fishermen of Sussex will not have foreigners prying about in their preserves, and from the Owers Bank right away to Dungeness, if you will hail a fishing-boat at night he will answer you in the Sussex way. Nor are men of strange seaboards tolerated in that sea.”
Myself. “I still desire to ask you, Grizzlebeard, since you are the oldest of us, and have in your house so many papers and records, not to speak of in your mind so many ancient traditions of this inviolate land, how is it that Sussex has sovereignty over and beyond the marsh of the Rother, and over and beyond the ridge of hills wherein take their rise the Adur, the Arun, and the Ouse? For I have often looked at that flat piece without any boundary of its own beyond Crawley, in which all the men seem to be Surrey men, and which I yet notice to be marked Sussex upon the map. How comes it that we are the masters not only of our own rivers, but also of the head waters of the Snouzling Mole, the Royal Medway, and other lesser streams?”
“It so happens,” answered Grizzlebeard, with immense satisfaction, “that I can answer that question. For this great thing was done at about the time when the tyrant Napoleon was pursuing his petty ambitions among the beggarly nations of the Continent, and it had its origin and spring in that most beloved part of this beloved county whence I also take my being, and where I also was born—I mean the parts round about Hailsham, where the flats invite the sea. There has the fate of our county been twice decided. And since also the full story of the Great Fight has been preserved in the diaries and records of my own family, I am well fitted to tell it to you. For the next few hours I will retail it. Though the rain passes over and the sun comes out, still shall I go on, for it is a favourite of mine. I will go on and on, and relate unendingly the same while you yawn and stretch; nay, though you implore me to cease or attempt to coerce me, yet shall I continue the story until I have completed it.
“You must know, then, that the king who was over Sussex at that time being then in the fortieth year of his age and the twenty-second of his reign, a man not only august but universally loved, and one very tender to the consumers of malt liquor, but a strict governor of brewers (God rest his soul!), a song arose in those parts concerning the tyrant Napoleon and his empty boasting, that when he had conquered Prussia, Russia, Bornesia, Holland, all Italy and Spain, he would challenge the power of Sussex itself before he had done with warfare; and this song, let me tell you, ran as follows.”
With this Grizzlebeard, clearing his aged throat, tunefully carolled out the following manly verse in the tune to which all Sussex songs have been set, without exception, since the beginning of time—the tune which is called “Golier.”
“If Bonaparte
Shud zummon d’Eart
To land on Pevensey Level,
I have two sons
With our three guns
To blarst un to the de‑e‑vil.”
“It is,” continued Grizzlebeard, when the long-drawn notes of the challenge had died away, “a very noble and inspiring song, compared with which ‘To the North, Merry Boys,’ is but music-hall blare, and the ‘Marseillaise’ a shrieking on a penny whistle.
“Now this song,” he continued, “being of its right virtue and glory a hymn that could not but spread far among men, travelled all over our county, being known and commented on in Lewes in the king’s own castle, and eastward all along the beach to Hastings, and beyond that to the banks of Brede and over Brede to Rother, which was in those days the boundary of this land; for we had not then begun to give laws to East Guildford, on the left bank of the river mouth.
“As luck would have it, it travelled, perhaps in the speech of pedlars, or printed as a broadside and sold from their packs, all up the valley of Rother and up among the Kentish men, and was soon known in Appledore, Small Hythe, and so on, right up to Goudhurst itself, which stands upon a hill. And here it was that ill-fortune lay in wait for the Kentish men, who had always been a proud lot and headstrong, though relying upon St. Thomas of Canterbury and other worthies, and furiously denying that they had tails. For they had no more humour about them than you will find in a cathedral verger, and so much for Kent.
“Well, then, by the time this great song had come up on to Goudhurst, where it stands upon its hill, the Kentish men in their pride and folly, or perhaps only in their ignorance (for I would not do them wrong), turned it to suit their own purpose and vanity and had begun to sing it thus:
‘If Bonaparte
Shud zummon d’Eart
To land on Pevensey Level,
There are three men
In Horsemonden
Will blarst un to the de‑e‑vil.’
“Which corruption and degradation of so great a strain they very frequently repeated over their cups at evening in the security of their inland homes.
“Now, when news of this came into Sussex and reached the king, where he sat in his castle of Lewes, considering his own greatness and the immensity of the world, he could scarcely believe his ears. For that the Kentish men should sing songs of their own and even put on airs when it so suited them, nay, timorously raid over Rother to pinch a pig when the goodman was from home, he thought tolerable enough; but that they should take the song which was, as it were, the very heart of Sussex, and turn it to their own uses, was, he thought, quite past bearing, and, indeed, as I have said, he could hardly credit it.
“So he very courteously sent a herald mounted upon a little brown donkey and beautifully apparelled, who came to the King of Kent, where he sat or rather sprawled at meat in Canterbury. And this herald, blowing his trumpet loudly in the King of Kent’s ear, delivered him the letter of the King of Sussex, and spurring round his steed, very gallantly capered away.
“The King of Kent, as you may well believe, was quite unable to read, but there is no lack of clerks in Canterbury, so he had one brought, who trembling broke open the seal whereon were stamped the arms of Sussex, and read to his master as follows:
“ ‘Brother Kent: We hear, though we will not believe it, that certain of your subjects (without your knowing it, we will swear) have taken to their own use our private anthem, and are singing it wantonly enough in Goudhurst and sundry other of your worthy hamlets; and that, not content with this usurpation of our sovereign right and of the just possessions of our dear people (we are even told, though our soul refuses to entertain it), they have so murdered, changed, and debased this Royal Hymn as to use it in praise of their own selves, and in particular of a steading and sties called Horsemonden, of which neither we nor we think any other man has ever heard.
“ ‘We do you, therefore, to wit, by these presents, brother Kent, that you do instantly command and proclaim by heralds throughout your dominions that under pain of horrible torture and death this practice shall immediately cease, if, indeed, we are rightly informed that it has arisen.
“ ‘Greetings and fraternal benedictions.—Given by us in our castle of Lewes on the first day of the October brewing, in the year 3010 since Brutus landed from Troy and laid the foundations of our house.
“The King of Kent when this message was read to him ordered the unhappy priest to immediate execution (as is the custom in that county when they deal with clerics), but no sooner had he done so than he regretted the act, for not knowing how to write he must needs dictate another letter. So he sent for another priest, who was a long time coming, but when he came bade him write as follows:
“ ‘Brother Sussex, a word in your ear: We may not be book-larned, but we will stand no nonsense, and so sure as hops are hops we will, with some small fragment of our forces, but sufficient to the purpose, come up into your land and harry it, and burn down the steadings and the ricks and carry away all the pigs and cattle; and we will storm your castle, and we will put a new Bishop in Chichester in the place of your Bishop, and we will put our reeves into Midhurst, Horsham, Arundel, and other places, and as for your Royal seat there we will put our own nephew upon it. But as for you we will keep you in chains.
“This letter he despatched to the King of Sussex, who when he received it conceived it impossible to avoid war.
“Yet he hoped in his honourable and gentle heart that this last extremity should be avoided, and he sent yet another letter, putting it in words even more fair and mannerly than the first, saying that he desired no more than peace with his due rights and honour; and this letter he sent by a herald as he had sent the first. But this second herald the King of Kent put to death, so that now there was no choice but to take arms. So the King of Sussex summoned his army to meet him within fourteen days in the courtyard of the best inn of Lewes, which was in those days called the Turk’s Head, but has since been destroyed by those wicked men who hate inns and all other good and lovable things. Marshalling his army there, and seeing to their accoutrements and putting them in good heart, he took the road for Brede, and posted himself upon the height of that hill which has ever since been called Battle, facing towards the rising sun.
“The day was the 14th of October, the hearts of all were merry and high, and every man was prepared to do most dreadful things. But how the fight was joined, and how it went, and of the wonderful deeds done in it and of its imperishable effects I must next tell you.”
The Poet. “I should like to hear the Kentish version of this tale.”
“You must know, then, that the King of Sussex, being thus posted a little before sunrise upon the hill now called Battle, and looking eastward over Brede, he first harangued all his men in proper fashion, and drew them up with skill into a line, urging them whatever they did not to break their rank until they should have defeated the enemy, which when they had accomplished it, they were free to pursue. And having so spoken he observed coming across the valley the forces of his enemy, the King of Kent, armed with long hop-poles, and carrying themselves in very fierce demeanour. Nay, as they marched they most insolently sang the song which was the cause of all this quarrel; and the Horsemonden contingent in particular, which was in the van, or place of honour, gave forth with peculiar violence the new lines they had composed to their own glory.
“Though this sight, as you may imagine, was malt vinegar and pickles to the men of Sussex, they stirred not a foot, and they said not a word, but in a grim and determined manner did they turn up the sleeves of their right arms, spit into their palms, and very manfully clench their ash-plants, wherewith they did thoroughly determine to belabour and bang the invaders of their happy homes. And there should be mentioned, in particular, the men of Hailsham, my dear native place, who on that day carried ash-plants so heavy and huge that ten men of our time could hardly carry one, though they should stagger under it as builders do under a scaffolding pole.
“Now the men of Kent began to climb the hill, the men of Sussex watching them silently from above, and being most careful in their order to preserve all due regard, and not to walk upon the ornamental beds, or to disturb the shrubberies of the kind gentleman who had permitted them to draw up their line in the grounds of Battle Abbey. For in those gardens, note you, is the position which all the great generals of his staff had pointed out to the King of Sussex, saying that it was ‘a key,’ and though he could make no sort of guess what that might mean, there had he drawn up his array.
“When the men of Kent felt the steepness of the hill, their song died away; they began to puff and to blow; and their line, which they had ordered like so many cattle drovers, was all to pieces, so that while the first of their men, and the leanest, were already approaching the men of Sussex, the last were still tying up their shoelaces at the bridge, or arguing with the little old man in green corduroy who kept the level-crossing over the railway. For he was assuring them that a train was signalled, and that their advance was most dangerous; but they were protesting that if he would but let them through the wicket gate, which stands by the side of the great railway gates, they could pop across before it came.
“This disarray and grievous lack of generalship in the ranks of Kent was the ruin of that force, seeing that it is laid down in all books of military art that if a line be broken it has lost its strength. But, as you may guess, the art was all on our side, the folly and misfortune upon that of our enemies, whom the God of Battles had already devoted to a complete discomfiture.
“For when the first arrivals of them came to the crest of the hill, all puffed and blown with their climbing, some were banged in the face, others swiped upon the sides, others heavily pushed in the chest, and others more painfully caught upon the point of the chin. Others again were blinded by stout blows in the eye, or turned silly by clever cuts upon the corner of the jaw, whangs upon the noddle, and other tactical feats too numerous to mention. For our king, and yet more his staff, and generals and quartermasters too, were great masters of the art of war. In this skilful manner, then, were the foremost men of Kent sophistically handled, until at last the whole score of them (for the vanguard were at least of that number) broke and ran for cover, and by that action threw into a confusion and stampede the other hundred or so who were still straggling up the hill. Nor was there any heart left in the men of Kent save in the mouths of a few (and their king was one of them), who, having taken refuge in an upper room of the inn that stands by Brede, shouted out mingled encouragement and menace, and bade the fighters in the road below play the man. But these men, considering rather the banging they were getting than the words of their commanders up there in safety, altogether and at one moment fled, bunched into one lump, very frightened and speedy, and spreading rumours that their pursuers were not men but devils. And as they ran they threw their hop-poles down to give them greater speed, and some cast off their coats, and many more lost their hats as they ran, and in general they fell into a rout and confusion.
“As you may imagine, the men of Sussex had by this time the word of command to fall upon them and spare them not at all. Which order they obeyed, belabouring the men of Kent vilely with their ash-plants, and herding and harrying and shepherding them together into the narrow pass of the level-crossing, where they all pushed and screamed, and, especially those on the outermost part who were the recipients of the ash-plant blessing, showed an immoderate eagerness to be off.
“At last the train of which I spoke having passed, and the little man in green corduroy who kept the level-crossing having consented to open the gates, they all poured through in a great stream, tearing for their lives with one half of the men of Sussex after them, pursuing and scattering the foe in every direction, while the other half remained behind in Brede, for a purpose I will presently tell you.
“The men of Kent then being broken and dispersed all over that countryside, some took refuge in Egham Wood, and others fled to Inkpin, and the more stalwart but not the more brave worked round as best they could to Robertsbridge, while a dozen or more ran to earth in Staplecross. So all that countryside was strewn with hiding and crouching men, some of whom got away and some of whom were taken prisoners, but none of whom reformed nor showed themselves able to rally.
“Meanwhile their king and his staff, being surrounded in that inn, surrendered upon terms which the King of Sussex in his high and generous heart would not make too hard.
“The first article, then, of this treaty was that for every prisoner released the Treasury of Kent should pay the sum of one shilling, unless he were a Kentish gentleman, and for him the ransom was half-a-crown. And until the money should be paid the prisoners should be held.
“Then the second article was that the men of Kent should pay to the King of Sussex 100 pockets of hops a year by way of tribute, which custom was continued even to our own time, nor did it cease until hops became so cheap that no one would be at the pains of carrying them to Lewes from the Sussex border.
“But the third article, which more concerns us, was that the right bank of Rother from over against Wittersham, so over the canal and then down the wall of Wallingmarsh, and so right to the sea coast, should pass from the Crown of Kent to the Crown of Sussex, and be held by the King of Sussex and his heirs forever. And so it stands to this day. And to this new frontier land the King of Sussex gave the name of Guildford Level, because it was indeed level, and in honour of the town of Guildford in Surrey, which was his mother’s dower. And he built there East Guildford, and founded it and endowed it. But it never throve; so that when men talk of Guildford they commonly mean Guildford in Surrey as being the larger of the two towns. And the King of Sussex built a lighthouse in this new province for mariners, and having now both sides of Rye harbour, he deepened it and dredged it so that it became the royal place you know, and far out at sea, where the Fairway begins, he set an old broom fast in the sand by the broomstick, with the besom end of it above the waters, so that no man might miss the Fairway, and there it still stands, a blessing to mariners.
“When the King of Sussex had done all these things he went back home to his castle of Lewes, but not before he had most royally dined and entertained his army in the inn at Battle, and caused to be broached for them 1732 barrels of that exceedingly old ale, called Audit Ale, the memory of which is preserved in those parts most wonderfully.
“This is the story of how the men of Kent were conquered by the men of Sussex and Guildford Level and the marsh were annexed and made a bastion, as it were, of our kingdom. And on account of this great fight it is that Battle is called Battle, and not at all on account of that other skirmish with the Normans, in which we so thoroughly defeated them also, that they turned their backs to the Weald, and ran off as best they could to Dover and the mean places of the East. For we would never have William for our king, and we never did. But he is Duke William for us, and Duke William only now and forever. Amen!”
The Poet. “It is possible the men of Kent would tell a different story!”
Myself. “But that does not tell us the way in which we got hold in this county of all the parts about Crawley, and the belt of land which is very manifestly that of Surrey men.”
Grizzlebeard. “Why, that was what they call strategical. When the barons of Surrey, the chief of whom lived in a hole under Reigate Hill, heard of the Battle and knew of what stuff the King of Sussex was and all his men, they came of their own accord and asked him to hold that belt of land in which their rivers rise, so as to have the better protection. To this he very willingly agreed, and in this fashion was the northern boundary of Sussex drawn.”
Myself. “And it has stopped raining.”
The Sailor. “And may it never rain again, for while it rains we sit here in inns and hear nothing but interminable stories.”
When he had said that, we all got up and took the road again, desiring to be in Storrington for lunch, for the weather had a good deal delayed us.
So we went on along that same old road, always westward, until we came to Storrington, and there we went into the inn called “The White Horse,” and when we got in there fatigue came upon us and a sort of gloom, and a quarrelling temper, such as men will get up between them when they have been penned together for too long, even if they have been out upon a broad high road, and have played the part of companions.
As we sat thus together, the Sailor, the Poet, Grizzlebeard and I, gloomily considering the workedness-out of all things, and the staleness of experience, there came in quite suddenly a very tall young gentleman, less than thirty years of age, lean, and having a thinnish light moustache, more turned up on one side than on the other. His eyes were kindly and wild, and from beneath his hat, which was tilted on the back of his head, appeared over his high forehead wisps of grey-brown hair. He had on white leather breeches; he was booted and spurred; his tail coat was grey, with metal buttons upon it, and round his throat instead of a collar was a soft piece of cloth, which had once been carefully arranged, but which was now draggled. It was fastened by a safety-pin made of gold. A little mud was splashed on his hat, a little less upon his face, much more upon his boots and breeches.
This Being held himself back as he walked into the room, shut the door behind him with a great deal of noise, and said “Evening!” genially. Then he sat down on one of the Windsor chairs, sighing deeply.
He jumped up again, rang the bell, didn’t wait for it to be answered, put his head through the door, and said, “Some of the same!” shut the door, sat down again, and laughed.
We were pleased to see him with us, and we suggested that even so early he had been hunting the fox, which was indeed the case. I asked him (though I knew nothing of these things) whether he had a good run, to which he answered, shaking his head rapidly and biting one of his moustachios:
“No! No! C’r’inly not! … Nearly lost me life!”
“I am sorry to hear that,” said Grizzlebeard, who had often hunted the fox, but now did so no longer. The Poet, the Sailor, and I sat silent to hear what the newcomer might have to say. He heaved a deep and contented breath as of a man in port from stormy seas, leant forward with his lean body, swung his brown gloved hands slowly between his white leather legs and said:
“Wasn’t my horse. … Haven’t got a horse. … Never had one. …”
Then turning to Grizzlebeard, whom he rightly imagined to be the wealthiest of our group, he said, “Like riding?”
“Yes,” said Grizzlebeard, thinking carefully, “I have always liked to ride horses. I like it still in moderation.”
“Ah!” said the stranger wisely, with his head on one side. “That’s it. Now the way you ride’em doesn’t really matter much; it’s the kind of horse!”
“Played cup and ball with you?” said I, kindly.
“Contrariwise, he went quite smooth and easy; but oh my Lord, his courage! …
“You know,” he went on, tapping his left palm with his right forefinger, “there’s a kind of courage that’s useful and another kind that’s foolhardy. Now this horse (which was old Benjamin’s of Petworth) didn’t mind danger and he didn’t know danger; so there was no merit as you may say; but I’m not denying a good thing when I see it, and I tell you he was a hero!”
He sat down again and thought considerably about the horse. There was a sort of lyricism or inspiration in him. He looked up at the ceiling and said, “Lord! What a brute!” Then he spread his hands outwards, staring at us with his eyes, and said, “He was red all over, and his eyes were red as well, and he chucked his head up in the air like a big lizard, and he tried to bite his bit in two with his great teeth, and he snarled and spat defiance, and he could never stand on more than two feet at a time, and he changed them ten times a second. It was what they call ‘dancing.’ That’s how he went on while all the other people were sitting quietly on their beastly great well-fed animals, looking silly. I didn’t say anything to him; I didn’t feel it was my place; but an ass of an ironmonger man who’s been buying land out Graffham way said, ‘Whoa then! Whoa there!’ … Silly gheezer! Made the beast perfectly mad. … He did hate it! … and I had no way of telling him it wasn’t my fault, though I longed to—from the bottom of my heart. Then old Squire Powler, who married my aunt Eliza for her money, and butters up my father about his Dowser-man and the wells, came up and asked me where I had got the beast from, and I said, ‘From Hell,’ and he went away looking like a fool.”
When this excitable young man had said all this, he was afraid (as men of breeding are when they have got quite off the rails) that he had said too much. But Grizzlebeard, who had the kindest of hearts, said genially, “Oh, there’s no harm in old Mr. Powler.” And even I, though I did not know Squire Powler, said I believed that Dowsers were quite genuine, which was the truth and did no harm.
The tall lean man wanted to be silent after his explosion, but Grizzlebeard drew him on, and the young man’s own straightforwardness forbade him to be silent. He was bottling up the tale and it must out, so he burst forth again.
“Well, there! The first thing all the other people did was to go after the little dogs across a field or two. And this horse, which was to carry me about, he stood stock still and looked at them as though he thought they were mad. Then he suddenly raced away in a half circle with his head down, and stopped short in front of an oak tree. This annoyed me so much that I leant forward and slapped him on the side of his face. And my word! Didn’t he snap round and try to bite my foot! And then he began hopping sideways in a manner most horrible to see and to feel. Now by this time I was wondering what would become of me, and I could fairly have cried, for if he didn’t go back into Petworth where somebody could catch him—and that was what I hoped—the only other thing would be to get off and give him a kick in the ribs and let him run, and then I should have to buy him, and Lord knows who’d find the money for that! S’posin’ he went and drowned his silly self in Timberley Brook or got hung up on a post? Eh! What?”
This tall, lean young man again thought that he had exceeded, but our sympathetic faces, nay, our appealing eyes, prompted him to continue. He went on more slowly.
“All of a sudden, a long way off, all the little dogs began making those yelping noises of theirs which they do when they get excited, and as I was right high up on this tall animal I could see their white tails wagging out by Burton Rough, a little beyond the Jesuits. I got really interested. … What? Then I stopped thinking of anything, because he, this horse I mean, began going as quickly as ever he could, quite straight, and I knew that there was the Rother in between. Oh Lord! You talk of a mouth! …
“Now, when you want to pull up a horse that’s got too Frenchy, if you take me,” he continued, looking extremely intelligent, and prepared to detail the whole process, “there’re lots of dodges. Some men’ll give a sharp jerk sideways, and try to wrench his head off, and I knew a man (he’s dead now … kind o’ soldier) who just pulled and pulled and then suddenly let go. He said that was the way. But what I do is to saw backwards and forwards right and left ’til he’s reg’lar bored and can’t stand it. Then he’ll stop to see what’s the matter. Any horse will. Even if he’d a mouth like an old conscience. ’Least I thought any horse would ’til today; but old Benjamin’s horse didn’t. Never thought an animal could go so straight! Got quite close to the turf and tucked his shins under him somehow, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, so quick, you couldn’t tell hardly when he touched and when he didn’t. I wasn’t able to turn round and look at his tail ’cause I was so anxious, but it must have been standing straight out … his neck was, anyway; and I knew the Rother was gettin’ closer all the time. He didn’t take a lep exactly when he got to the hedges, but he just went on gallopin’ and they went by from under him. Thought I never saw the old roofs long way off look so quiet! When I came to Mr. Churton’s field, the one where the cows are, I thought all of a sudden, ‘Sposin’ there’s wire?’ It’s a measly sort of crinkled hedge, but enough to hide wire. Well, long ’fore I’d remembered, he was past it; and that was the only place you’d have known you were passin’ anything. He missed somethin’ with one of his hind feet, damn him, but he was off again. Then I saw the Rother, and I thought to myself quite clearly, ‘Either he’ll jump right over this river, and then it’ll be a sort o’ miracle because it’s eight times as far as any horse has jumped before, and it’s just as easy to sit that as anything, because it will be just sailing through the air; or else he’ll go into the water, and then he won’t play the fool any more.’ For I’d always heard that when a wild, common, mad horse got into cold water it cured him, same as ’t would anybody else. But there! That’s just what didn’t happen! Neither of ’em! You’ll believe me … when he got to the brink of that water—wow!—he swerved round like a swallow and made for the high road and Petworth again! An’ when he got on the high road he began dancing slowly home and puffing as though he’d done a day’s work, and every now and then he’d sneeze. … My word, what a day!”
“It can’t have taken you a day; it’s only lunch time yet,” said Grizzlebeard gently.
“No,” said the genial stranger, getting up towards the door and looking over his shoulder, “Not it! Didn’t take twenty minutes!” Then he roared through the door: “ ’Nother the same!” shut the door again, and went on: “Twenty minutes ’t most! Over b’ ’leven! But it filled up the day all right. Haven’t been able to think of anything else for hours. And he came back to old Benjamin’s as quiet as a lamb, only with that hellish red glint in his eye. And the stable fellow said:
“ ‘You’ve been takin’ it out of ’im!’
“I was so angry I didn’t know what to say; anyhow, I said: ‘Take your Beelzebub.’ And the stable boy said quite fiercely: ‘ ’E ain’t Beelzebub, and you’ve no right to call ’im so out of his name!’ So there might have been a scrap, but I was too tired, and I said I’d take something ladylike to ride home with, and I’ve got it in the stable now, an’ I must be getting on. It’s late, and I’m very tired.”
We told him one after the other, and then all in chorus, that we were enchanted beyond measure with the description of his day. Grizzlebeard asked him whether he had heard anything of the run, but he shook his head, and the Poet, who had little imagined that such things were possible in English fields, watched them both with some alarm.
Then we all went out with him to the stables to see his beast. There was a half-light in the stables, a gloom, and standing in the stall an extraordinary sheepish-looking thing, very old and fat, with a cunning face, standing hardly fifteen hands, and plainly determined to take easily the last of its pilgrimage upon this earth. The tall, wild-eyed gentleman went to it, patted it gently upon its obese neck, and as he did so he sighed with a deep sigh of satisfaction and of content. We led it out and saw him get on. His legs looked inordinately long. He very cheerily bade us “Good evenin’,” and as he rode out eastward down the road we heard the slapping of his mount’s shoes upon the wet surface, as though in spite of her lethargy (for she was a mare) the weight of the rider was too much for her. It was a slow sort of sidling gait that the noise betrayed as it fainted into the distance. If he had suffered from horses that morning, that afternoon he was having his revenge; it was the horse that suffered.
As we stood there in the stable yard talking, a very short ostler of a hard appearance, with the straw of ages in his teeth, came up, and, believing us to be wealthy, hit his forehead hard with the forefinger of his right hand. Grizzlebeard, who loved his country like his soul and was always sincere, and never allowed enough for the follies and vices of men, but believed them better or wiser than they were, said to the ostler with great curiosity: “I ought to know that young man. He was a nephew of Sir John Powler’s, I believe?” The ostler said as smartly as a serpent: “Yessir! I don’t know about that, sir. He’s Master Battie, of The Kennels, sir, where his father ’lows him to live, sir. He’s back from abroad, sir.”
Grizzlebeard looked down the road gently, thinking of the whole countryside and fixing his man. Then he said a little sadly: “Oh! that’s Batteson; that was the third one, the one his poor mother used to think so much of, and wouldn’t send away.”
We all went into the house together, and when we got there Grizzlebeard, after deep thought, said: “Now what an extraordinary thing that a man brought up like that, as a boy anyhow, should have allowed himself to get on to a horse like that! Who could ride a horse like that?”
The Sailor. “Why, no one, but let us be up and going. We must not waste this day, but soon we shall get over that lift of land which lies between us and Arun. Let us take the road.”
So we went out and took the Amberley road, and we passed the heath that is there, leaving the pond upon our right, and we passed the little wood of pine trees, and Grizzlebeard said:
“How much taller is this wood! I knew it when I was a boy!”
And I said, “Yes, and it is taller even for me.”
And the Poet said, “I know it.”
And the Sailor said, “I know it too.”
Myself. “Yes, we all know this landmark, and we all know these ups and downs, and Rackham Mount, and the monastery behind us, and Parham, that great house. For we are on the fringe of the things we know and in a border country as it were. Very soon we shall speak with our own people under our own hills.”
Grizzlebeard. “In this hour, then, we shall get over the height of land; and the first of us that sees the river Arun must tell the others, and we will arrange for him some sort of prize, since you all three speak in such terms of the valley.”
The Poet. “We do not speak of it so from any common affection, no, nor from any affection which is merely deep, but because it is our own country, and because the sight of one’s own country after many years is the one blessed thing of this world. There is nothing else blessed in this world, I think, and there is nothing else that remains.”
Myself. “What the Sailor says is true. When we get over that lift of land upon the Amberley road before us we shall see Arun a long way off between his reeds, and the tide tumbling in Arun down towards the sea. We shall see Houghton and Westburton Hill, and Duncton further along, and all the wall of them, Graffham and Barlton, and so to Harting, which is the end where the county ceases and where you come to shapeless things. All this is our own country, and it is to see it at last that we have travelled so steadfastly during these long days.”
The Poet. “Whatever you read in all the writings of men, and whatever you hear in all the speech of men, and whatever you notice in the eyes of men, of expression or reminiscence or desire, you will see nothing in any man’s speech or writing or expression to match that which marks his hunger for home. Those who seem to lack it are rather men satiated, who have never left their villages for a time long enough to let them know the craving and the necessity. Those who have despaired of it are the exiles, and the curse upon them is harder than any other curse that can fall upon men. It is said that the first murder done in this world was punished so, by loss of home; and it is said also that the greatest and the worst of the murders men ever did has also been punished in the same way, by the general exile of its doers and all their children. They say that you can see that exile in their gestures and in the tortured lines of their faces and in the unlaughing sadness of their eyes.”
Grizzlebeard. “Tell me, Sailor, when you say that thus, coming home, you will be satisfied, are you so sure? For my part, I have travelled very widely, especially in Eastern places (which are the most different from our own), and, one time and another—altogether forty times—I have come back to the flats of my own country, eastward of the Vale of Glynde. I have seen once more the heavy clouds of home fresh before the wind over the Level, and I have smelt, from the saltings and the innings behind Pevensey, the nearness of the sea. Then indeed I have each time remembered my boyhood, and each time I have been glad to come home. But I never found it to be a final gladness. After a little time I must be off again, and find new places. And that is also why in this short journey of ours I came along with you all, westward into those parts of the county which are not my own.”
The Sailor. “I cannot tell you, Grizzlebeard, whether a man can find completion in his home or no. You are a rich man, and you have travelled as rich men do, for pleasure—which rich men never find.”
Grizzlebeard. “Nor poor men either!”
The Sailor. “Well, poor men do not seek it, so they are not saddened, but rich men, anyhow, travel to find it and never find it; then if they return to find it in their homes, why of course they will not find it there either, for a man must come back home very weary and after labour, or some journeying to which he was compelled, if he is to taste home.”
Myself. “Nevertheless, Sailor, what Grizzlebeard has asked, or rather what he means by asking it, is true. We none of us shall rest, not even in the Valley of Arun; we shall go past and onwards.”
The Poet. “I think we shall.”
Myself. “We shall go past and onwards; we shall not be content, we shall not be satisfied. The man who wrote that he had not in all this world a native place knew his business very well indeed, and it is the business of all verse.”
The Poet. “Nevertheless we know it in dreams. There are dreams in which men do attain to a complete satisfaction, reaching the home within the home and the place inside the mind. And such a man it was, remembering such dreams, who wrote that he had forgotten the name of his own country and could not find his way to it. But this man had in him a sense that soon the name of his own country would be revealed to him, and he knew that when he heard the name he should find the place well enough; it would come back at once to him, as the memory of his love and of the Dovrefjeld came to that man who had brought home the master-maid in the story. He had brought her home from over seas; but later he had forgotten her, from eating human food.
“This man said he foresaw a fateful moment coming, and that he had it like a picture within. He would be in a tavern sitting by himself and two others would be there talking low together, so that he should not hear. Yet one of these talking low would speak the name of his own country, and when he heard the name of his own country (he said) then he knew that he would rise up, and take his staff and go.
‘I will go without companions,
And with nothing in my hand—’ ”
Myself. “That is a mistake. If he has a staff in his hand he will have something in his hand. I think he put it in for the rhyme.”
The Sailor. “Do not, do not interrupt the Poet, or he will not be able to continue his poetry; besides which, one is not bound to these things in poetry as one is in arithmetic; it has been proved a thousand times by the human race in chorus.”
Grizzlebeard. “Go on, Poet.”
The Poet—
“I shall go without companions,
And with nothing in my hand;
I shall pass through many places
That I cannot understand—
Until I come to my own country,
Which is a pleasant land!
The trees that grow in my own country
Are the beech tree and the yew;
Many stand together,
And some stand few.
In the month of May in my own country
All the woods are new.”
The Sailor. “I believe I know where this place is of which the Poet talks. It is the corner of the hill above the Kennels, between Upwaltham and Gumber.”
The Poet (angrily). “It is nothing of the sort. It is a place where no man ever has been or will be—at least not such men as you!”
Grizzlebeard. “Do not be angry, Poet; but tell us if there is any more.”
The Poet. “There is very little more, and it runs like this:—
‘When I get to my own country
I shall lie down and sleep;
I shall watch in the valleys
The long flocks of sheep.
And then I shall dream, for ever and all,
A good dream and deep.’ ”
Grizzlebeard. “That is the point—that is the point. If a man could be certain that he would sleep and dream forever, then in coming back to his own country he would come to a complete content! But you must mark you how in all the stories of the thing, even in the story of the homecoming of Ulysses, they do not dare to tell you all the human things that followed and all the incompletion of its joys.”
Myself. “For my part I think you are very ungrateful or very mystical; or perhaps you have got religion. But at any rate it is your business and not mine. I say for my part, if I can get back to that country which lies between Lavant and Rother and Arun, I will live there as gratefully as though I were the fruit of it, and die there as easily as a fruit falls, and be buried in it and mix with it forever, and leave myself and all I had to it for an inheritance.”
Grizzlebeard. “Well then, Myself, since you think so much of your own country, how shall we mark the passage of Arun when we come to the bridge of it?”
Myself. “Let us draw lots who shall drown himself for a sacrifice to the river.”
The Poet. “Let us count our money—it must be getting low, and I have none.”
The Sailor. “No, let us tell (so many years after, no one cares) the story of the first love each of us had—such of us as can remember.”
Each of us, lying in his heart, agreed.
When we had given this promise each to the others (and each lying in his heart) the rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to such a height of land that the rain and the veils of it did but add to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together were not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder. At this place the flat water meadows, the same that are flooded and turned to a lake in midwinter, stretch out a sort of scene or stage, whereupon can be planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder of Rackham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines, the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted heaths and commons which flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the Hampshire border, beyond which there is nothing. This is the foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made that when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for which the whole county of Sussex was made, and the ornament worthy of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat where the line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the hills of home.
All we four stood upon that height in the rain that did not hide the lights upon the fields below and beyond us, and we saw white and glinting in the water meadows the river Arun, which we had come so many miles to see; for that earlier happening of ours upon his rising place and his springs in the forest, did not break our pilgrimage. Our business now was to see Arun in his strength, in that place where he is already full of the salt sea tide, and where he rolls so powerful a water under the Bridge and by Houghton Pit and all round by Stoke Woods and so to Arundel and to the sea.
Then we looked at that river a little while, and blessed it, and felt each of us within and deeply the exaltation of return, the rain still falling on us as we went. We came at last past the great chalk pit to the railway, and to the Bridge Inn which lies just on this side of the crossing of Arun.
When we had all four come in out of the rain into Mr. Duke’s parlour at the Bridge Inn, and when we had ordered beer and had begun to dry ourselves at the fire, the Sailor said:
“Come, Grizzlebeard, we promised to tell the stories of our first loves when we came to Arun; and as you are much the oldest of us do you begin.”
“With all my heart,” said Grizzlebeard, “for, as you know, I am not one of those belated heretics who hold such things sacred, believing as I do that that only is sacred which attaches directly to the Faith. … Nevertheless … to remember that great time, and how securely I was held, and in what a port lay the vessel of my soul, I do feel upon me something that should silence a man. …”
“By what moorings were you held?” said I.
“By three,” he answered. “Her eyelids, her voice, and her name.” Then after a little pause he went on:
“She was past her youth. Her twenty-fifth year was upon her. Her father and her mother were dead. She was of great wealth.
“She had one brother, who lived away in some great palace or other in the north, and one sister who was married far off in Italy. She herself had inherited an ancient house of stone set in her own valley, which was that of the river Brede, and most dear to her; for it was there that she had lived as a child, and there would she pass her womanhood.
“Into this house I was received, for she was much older than I, and when I first knew her I was not yet a man. Thither perpetually in the intervals of study I returned. Insensibly my visits grew most natural; I passed the gates which are the beginning of a full life, and constantly I found myself, in spite of a more active bearing and a now complete possession of my youth, alone in her companionship. Her many servants knew me as a part of their household: her grooms who first had taught me to ride, her keepers with whom I had first shot, her old nurse, a pensioner, who favoured this early friendship. The priest also called me by my name.
“We walked together in long avenues; the lawns of four hundred years were a carpet for us. We paced her woods slowly together and often watched together in the frosty season of the year the early setting of the sun behind bare trees. At evening by her vast and regal fires we sat side by side, speaking in that light alone to each other of dead poets and of the wars and of things seen and of small domestic memories grown to be pictures clear and lovable.
“Then at last I knew what briar it was that had taken root within me.
“In her absence—during the long nights especially—there returned to me the drooping of her eyes: their slow and generous glances. Waking and far off from her, when I saw in some stranger that same rare lowering of the lids I was troubled.
“Her voice, because it was her very self, so moved me, that whenever I heard it upon my way to her doors, whenever I heard it speaking even in the distance no matter what things to another, I trembled.
“Her name, which was not Mary nor Catherine, but was as common and simple a name, was set above the world and was given power over my spirit. So that to hear it attached even to another or to see it written or printed on a page everything within me stirred, and it was as though a lamp had been lit suddenly in my soul. Then, indeed, I understood how truly there are special words of witchcraft and how they bind and loose material things.”
An enthusiasm came into Grizzlebeard’s eyes, something at once brilliant and distant like the light which shines from the Owers miles out to sea. He opened his hand down on the table with a fine gesture of vigour, and cried out:
“But what a vision is that! What a spring of Nature even for the poor memory of a man! I mean the unrestricted converse with such a friend at the very launching of life! When we are still without laws and without cares, and yet already free from guardians, and in the full ownership of our own selves, to find a shrine which shall so sanctify our outset: to know, to accompany, and to adore!
“Do not ask me whether I contemplated this or that, union or marriage, or the mere continuance of what I knew, for I was up in a world where no such things are considered. There was no time. No future threatened me, no past could be remembered. I was high above all these things.
“By an accident of fortune I was called away, and in a distant town over seas had alien work put before me, and I mixed with working men. I faithfully currycombed lean horses, and very carefully greased the axles of heavy wheels, till, after nineteen months, I could come home, and returning I made at once for the Valley.
“As I approached the house I was conscious of no change. The interval had vanished, and I was once again to see and to hear.
“The man that opened the door to me knew me well. I asked for her by her title and her name—for she was noble. He answered me, using her title but not her name. He told me that she would be home that evening late, and he gave me a note to read from her. The writing on that little square of paper renewed in me with a power I knew too well the magic of a sacred place to which I had deliberately returned. As I held it in my hand I breathed unsteadily, and I walked in a fever towards the great gates of iron; nor did I open the letter till I had taken refuge for the next few hours of evening in the inn of her village, where also I was known and had been loved by all in my boyhood.
“There, underneath a little lamp, alone and with food before me, I read the invitation from her hand.
“I learnt in it that she had married a man whose fame had long been familiar to me, a politician, a patriot, and a most capable manufacturer. She told me (for I had warned her of my landing) that they would be back at seven to pass two nights in this country house of theirs, and she begged me to be their guest, at least for that short time.
“A veil was torn right off the face of the world and my own spirit, and I saw reality all bare, original, evil and instinct with death. Nor would I eat and drink, but at last I cried out loud, mourning like a little child; and when I was rested of this I stood by the window and gazed out into the darkness until I had recovered my nature, and felt again that I was breathing common air.
“When spirits fall it is not as when bodies fall; they are not killed or broken; but I had fallen in those moments from an immeasurable height, and the rest of my way so long as I might live was to be passed under the burden to which we all are doomed. Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature, I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose name she had mingled her own.”
Myself. “What did he manufacture?”
Grizzlebeard. “Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you, that no one could compete with him.” Then he resumed: “I entered and was received. Her voice gave me again for a moment some echoes of the Divine: they faded; and meanwhile her face, her person, with every moment took on before me a less pleasing form.
“I have been assured by many who knew us both that what I saw was far from novel. To me it was as strange as earthquake. Her skin, I could now see, though in the main of a sallow sort, was mottled with patches of dead-white (for she disdained all artifice). Her teeth were various; I am no judge whether they were false or true. Her eyes suffered from some affection which kept them half closed; her voice was set at a pitch which was not musical; her gestures were sometimes vulgar; her conversation was inane. I thought in the next quarter of an hour that I had never heard so many things quoted from the newspapers in so short a time.
“But we chatted together merrily enough all three until she went to bed. Then I sat up for some hours talking with the jolly master of the house of politics and of lard. For I had found in my travels and in my new acquaintance with men that every man is most willing and most able to speak of his own trade. And let me tell you that this man had everything in him which can make a good citizen and a worthy and useful member of the State. His intelligence was clear and stable, his range of knowledge sufficient, his temper equable, and his heart so warm that one could not but desire him the best of fates. I have not met him for many years, but I saw in the last honours list that he had purchased a title. I still count him for an older friend.
“Next morning at a hearty breakfast I grew to like him better than ever, and I could see in the healthy light of a new day what excellent qualities resided even in the wife whom he had chosen. The work to which my poverty (for then I was poor) compelled me, called me by an early train to town, and since that morning I have lived my life.
“But that first woman still sits upon her throne. Not even in death, I think, shall I lose her.”
“Grizzlebeard, Grizzlebeard,” said I, “these things are from Satan! Children and honest marriage should long ago have broken the spell.”
“I am not married,” said he, “neither have I any children.”
“Then loves here and there should have restored you to yourself.”
He shook his head and answered: “It was not for lack of them, great or small. There have been hundreds … but let us say no more! There was some foreigner who put it well when he said, ‘Things do not come at all, or if they come, they come not at that moment when they would have given us the fullness of delight.’ ”
There remained in his pewter a little less than half the beer it had held. He gazed at it and noted also at his side, by the fire, a deal box full of sand, such as we use in my county for sanding of the floor.
Steadily, and with design, he poured out all the beer upon the sand, and put down his pewter with a ring.
The beer did not defile the sand. It was soaked in cleanly, and an excellent aroma rose from it over the room. But beer, as beer, beer meant for men, good beer and nourishing, beer fulfilling the Cervisian Functions, beer drinkable, beer satisfying, beer meet-to-be-consumed: that beer it could never be again.
Then Grizzlebeard said: “You see what I have done. I did it chiefly for a sacrifice, since we should always forego some part of every pleasure, offering it up to the Presiders over all pleasure and pouring it out in a seeming waste before the gods to show that we honour them duly. But I did it also for a symbol of what befalls the chief experience in the life of every man.”
There was a long silence when Grizzlebeard had done. From where I sat I could look through the window and see the line of the Downs, and the great beech woods, and birds swinging in the rainy air; and I remembered one pair of men and women, and another and another, and then I fell to thinking of a man whom I had known in a foreign place, who at once loved and hated—a thing to me incomprehensible. But he was southern. Then I heard the silence broken by the Poet, who was saying to the Sailor:
“Now it is your turn.”
And the Sailor said, “By all means if you will,” and very rapidly began: “My first love lived in the town of Lisbon, after the earthquake and before the Revolution, when I was a lad of seventeen, and already very weary of the sea. She, upon her side, may have been thirty-six or a trifle more, but in that climate women age quickly. Our romance was short; it lasted but five hours. Indeed, my leave on shore was not much longer, for I was serving in the galley, shame be it said; but a boy must earn his living, and rather than be late on board I would have fled to the hills.”
“What was her name?” said the Poet.
“I do not know,” answered the Sailor, “I did not ask. … But one moment! … I am not so sure that this was my first love … I fear the vividness of my recollection has misled me. Unless I am quite wrong,” he went on, musing slowly, “it was in Newhaven, before we set sail upon that Lusitanian cruise, that I met my first love, by name Belina … or stay! … Wrong again, for that was my second ship. Now you ask me and I begin to search my memory, my first love was not there at all, but at a place called Erith, in London River. At least I think so. …
“Bear with me a moment, gentlemen,” he said piteously, putting his hand to his forehead; “the years have trampled up my young affection. … Yes, it was that woman at Erith, Joan they called her (did the men). Joan! … Unless it was that curious and rather unpleasant woman who lived on the far side of Foulness, with her father, and used to row out with fruit and things when the tide was off the mud, and just before the boats waiting to get through the Swin had water enough to weigh anchor. … It was one of the two I am fairly sure. The younger woman in Goole (for when I was young, though few things of any size went up river as far as that, we did) was, if I remember right, not a Love at all but a mere Consoler—”
The Poet. “I do not think you are serious; I don’t think you understand what you say.”
The Sailor. “Why, then, since you know better, you can give me your own list; I have no doubt it will do as well as mine, for my memory is very confused upon these matters.”
The Poet. “I cannot tell you anything about your affairs, and it seems you cannot tell us either; but I can very well describe my own, since I must do so by the terms of our agreement, though I would rather keep silent.
“I was passing in a certain year, just at the end of my schooldays, by a path which led between the two lakes at Bringhanger. It is about a mile from the house, and people do not often pass that way, though it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. The first green was upon the trees, but their buds were still so small that one could see the hills near by through their open branches, and the wind, though it was gentle, looked cold upon the surface of the mere, for it was very early morning. Then it was that I saw upon the further shore, mixed as it were with the foliage and half-veiled by reeds, a young woman whom I was not to see again; who she was or by what accident she came there I have never known. I made at once to watch her form as it passed into the boughs of that lakeside and made in the tracery of them a sort of cloud, as I thought, so that I was not certain for a moment whether I had really seen a human thing or no. Immediately, as though she had melted into the trees, she was gone, and I went on my way. But as I wandered, going eastwards towards Arun, this vision grew and fixed itself within my mind, and then for the next days of lonely travel in the County from inn to inn, it became my companion, until at last I took it for my fellow-traveller. I have kept it in my heart ever since.”
The Sailor. “Great heavens, what a lie!”
The Poet answered angrily that it was no lie, but the Sailor stood his ground.
“It is a lie,” said he, “and a literary lie, which is the most contemptible of all lies.”
“I cannot prove it,” answered the Poet sullenly. “I cannot even prove that what I saw was human.”
“No,” said the Sailor, “you cannot, for you got it in a book, or you mean to put it in a book; but all that kind of talk has no more flesh and blood in it than the rot-talk of the literary men who write about huntin’ in Grub Street. Wow! I would not be seen dead in a field with such flimsy stuff.”
“It was then I wrote,” said the Poet dreamily, as though there were no one by, “five lines which enshrine her memory.”
And as he recited them the Sailor put up first his thumb and then one finger after another, to mark the completion of each line and the rhymes.
“The colour of the morning sky
Was like a shield of bronze,
The something or other was something or other.”
“The what?” said the Sailor.
“I cannot remember the exact words,” said the Poet, “and I have never been able to complete that line properly, but I have the rhythm of it in my head right enough,” and he went on—
“Her little feet came wandering by
The edges of the ponds.”
“Now I’ve got you,” shouted the Sailor triumphantly, “ ‘ponds’ does not rhyme with ‘bronze.’ ”
“Yes it does!” said the Poet, with excitement. “It’s just one of those new rhymes one ought to use. One does not pronounce the d in pond. At least,” he added hurriedly, “not in the plural.”
The Sailor appealed to Grizzlebeard.
“Grizzlebeard,” he shouted, “the Poet is telling lies and making bad rhymes! Grizzlebeard!”
Then he looked closer and saw that Grizzlebeard was asleep.
But at the shouting of the Sailor, “Eh? What?” he said, waking with a start, “have I missed a story?”
“Two,” said I, “each duller and worse than the last.”
“Then I am glad I slept,” said Grizzlebeard.
Myself. “You do well to be glad! The Sailor lied about twenty wenches and the Poet lied about one, but the Sailor’s lies were the more entertaining of the two, and also, what is not the same, the more possible. They were lying about their first loves, as you may well believe.”
Grizzlebeard (muttering). “Well, well, small blame to them, we all do that more or less. And you, Myself, have you told your story?”
The Sailor (eagerly). “No, he has not, he has shirked it.”
The Poet. “He has led us on, and he himself has said nothing, which is not fair.”
Myself. “I was only waiting my turn, and I shall be very happy to tell you those entertaining things. I make no secret of them. That is not my religion, thank Heaven.”
At this point I put on such gravity as the circumstance demanded, and looking at my companions in a sober fashion, so that they might expect a worthy revelation, I took from the ticket-pocket of my coat a sovereign, new minted, yellow red, stamped in the effigy of the King, full-weighted, excellently clean and sound. And holding this up between my finger and my thumb, I said:
“Here is my first love! Whom I met when first I came out from the warmth of home into the deserts of this world, and who has ever been absolutely sure and true, and has never changed in the minutest way, but has ever been sterling and fixed and secure. And in the service of this first love of mine I, in my turn, have been absolutely faithful, and from that loyalty I have never for one moment swerved. Gentlemen, to be faithful in that sort is a rare and a worthy thing!”
Then I put back the sovereign in my pocket, gently and reverently, and taking up the pewter I drank what was left in it, and said to them in more solemn tones:
“You see what I have done. I have quite drained this tankard. It is empty now. I did it chiefly because I felt inclined; since it is commonsense that we should never forego any one of the few pleasures which we may find to hand. But I did it also for a symbol of what jolly satisfaction a man may get if he will do what every man should do; that is, take life and its ladies as he finds them during his little passage through the daylight, and his limping across the stage of this world. So now you know.”
But Grizzlebeard shook his head and said:
“All these things are follies! But since the rain is over let us be off again. It is November: the days are brief; and the light will not last us long. Let us press forward over Arun, and pursue our westward way beneath the hills.”
So we did as he bade us, crossing the long bridge and seeing the water swirling through on the strong brown tide, and so along the causeway, and up the first ride into Houghton, where is that little inn, “St. George and the Dragon,” at which King Charles the Second, the first King of England to take a salary and be a servant, drank as he fled from Worcester many years ago. And we went on that ancient way, that hollow way, which the generations and the generations rolling upon wheels and marching upon leather, all on their way to death, have worn down so far below the level of the brown ploughed land. We went past Bury to Westburton, and still onwards to the place where some dead Roman had his palace built, near the soldiers’ road, in a place that looks at a great hollow of the Downs and is haunted by the ruin of fifteen hundred years. But we did not stop to look at the stone pictures there, nor at that sacred head of Winter wherein this southern lord had bidden his slaves express the desolation of our cold and of our leafless trees. We went on through the steep, tumbled land, down the sharp dip of Bignor, and up the sharp bank of Sutton: always westward, following the road. And as we went, with the approach of evening the wind had cleared the sky. There were no more clouds.
And as we went along the Sailor said:
“Poet, it is some time since you tried to give us verse, and I would not press you, for I know well enough that it is hard labour to you with that nasty sense of failure all the time. None the less I will beg you to try your hand, if only to amuse us, for there is nothing lightens a road like a song, and we have gone already many, many miles.”
The Poet. “With all my heart, since we are now upon the edge of Burton and its ponds, which, with the trees along them, and the heathy lands, and the way that the whole setting of them look at the wall of the Downs, is perhaps the most verse-producing mile in the world. Inspired by this let me give you the most enchanting of songs:—
‘Oh gay! But this is the spring of the year!
The sun—’ ”
The Sailor. “Halt! Halt at once! You have gone mad, if indeed to such brains as yours such dignities are reserved. Has it not yet sunk into that corked head of yours that it is All-Hallows? For though it is notorious that poets neither see what is before them, nor hear, nor smell, but work in the void (and hence their flimsiness), yet, if you cannot see the bare branches and the dead leaves, nor smell autumn, nor catch the quality of the evening, for the Lord’s sake write nothing. It would be far better so.”
The Poet. “I am not writing but singing, and it is my pleasure to sing of spring time. Whether I sing well or no you cannot tell until I have accomplished my little song. But you have put me out and I must begin again.”
Whereupon with less merriment, but full of courage, he took up that strain once more.
“Oh gay! But this is the spring of the year!
The sun shall gladden me all the day,
And we’ll go gathering May, my dear,
And we’ll go gathering May;
For the skies are broad and the throstle is here …
And we’ll go gathering May.”
When the Poet had sung this again (and his voice flattened towards the end of the short thing), the Sailor, clasping his hands behind his back, began to move more slowly, and so compelled us to slacken pace. He cast his eyes upon the ground, and for a while was lost beneath the surface. He then quoted in a deep tone, but to himself:
“O God! O Montreal!”
The Poet. “I don’t understand.”
The Sailor. “No, you would not.”
Grizzlebeard (kindly). “It is a quotation, Poet. It is a quotation from the poem of an Englishman who went to Montreal one day and found that they had put Discobolos into breeches. Whereupon this Englishman, suffering such an adventure among such Colonials, wrote an ode to celebrate the event, and mournfully repeated throughout that ode, time and again, ‘O God! O Montreal!’ ”
Myself. “Yes, since that time it has passed into a proverb, and is used to emphasise those occasions on which the mind of man has fallen short of its high mission in any department of art.”
The Poet. “Oh!”
The Sailor (looking up). “Tell me, Poet, did you write that yourself?”
The Poet (defiantly). “Yes.”
The Sailor (after a short pause). “Tell me, Poet, what is a throstle?”
The Poet. “I don’t know.”
The Sailor. “I thought so. And tell me, Poet, does he come out in the spring?”
The Poet. “I daresay. Most things do.”
The Sailor. “Well, well, we won’t quarrel; but if you have written much more like this, publish it, and we will have some fun.”
The Poet was now thoroughly annoyed, not being so companionable a man (by reason of his trade) as he might be. For men become companionable by working with their bodies and not with their weary noddles, and the spinning out of stuff from oneself is an inhuman thing.
So I said to him to soothe him:
“I am no judge of verse, Poet, but I think it would go very well to real music. Will you not get someone else to put music to it?”
The Poet answered angrily:
“No, I will not, and since the Sailor thinks it is so easy to write good verse on the spur of the moment, let him try.”
The Sailor (gaily). “Why, I can do these things in my sleep. I have written the loveliest things on my shirt-cuff before now, listening to public men at dinners. As also alone in those cells to which the police have sometimes confined me for the hours between revelry and morning, I have adorned the walls with so many little, charming little, pointed little, tender little, suggestive little, diaphanous little Stop-shorts or There-you-are’s as would, were they published in a book, make me more famous than last year’s Lord Mayor.”
Grizzlebeard. “Yes, but you have not taken up the challenge.”
The Sailor (easily). “I will do so at once.”
And he rattled out:
“When open skies renew the year,
And yaffle under Gumber calls,
It’s because the days are near
When open skies renew the year,
That under Burton waterfalls
The little pools are amber clear,
And yaffle, yaffle, yaffle, yaffle,
yaffle under Gumber calls.”
Then he went on very rapidly:
“Now that is verse if you like! There you have good verse, pinned and knowled; strong-set verse, mitred and joined without glue! Lord! I could write such verse forever and not feel it! But I care little for fame, and am at this moment rather for bread and cheese, seeing that we are coming near the Cricketers’ Arms at Duncton, a house of call famous for this: that men sit there and eat to get strength for the climbing of Duncton Hill, or, if they are going the other way about, they sit there and eat after their descent thereof.”
The Poet. “It is all very well, but that verse of yours is not yours at all. It is Elizabethan and water, and let me tell you that the Elizabethan manner can be diluted about as successfully as beer. Mix your ale with water half and half, and give me news of it. So with Elizabethan when you moderns think that you have tapped the barrel.”
The Sailor. “What you say is not true. This is my own verse, and if you tell me it is in the manner of those who wrote at £40 the go under Queen Elizabeth, I am not ashamed. Many men lived in that reign who wrote with dexterity.”
The Poet. “Well, then, what is a Yaffle?”
The Sailor. “Why, it is a real bird.”
The Poet (surlily). “Yes, like the Great Auk.”
The Sailor. “No, not like the Great Auk at all; for the Great Auk of whom it is written:
‘Here the Great Auk, a bird with hairy legs,
Arrives in early spring and lays its eggs’
(and that was written of Beachy Head) is dead. But the Yaffle is alive and is a woodpecker, as you would know if you poets had not all your senses corked, as I have said. For when the woodpecker cries ‘Yaffle’ in the woods, all the world of it, except poets, is aware.
“Moreover, in my song there are no women. One knows your bad poet by an excess thereof; but of this sex in the sentimental manner I have also written, saying in majestic rhyme:—
‘If all the harm that women do
Were put into a barrel
And taken out and drowned in Looe
Why, men would never quarrel!’ ”
Myself. “How any man can speak ill of women in the same breath with the Looe stream that races through the sea not far from the Owers Light is more than I can understand, seeing that no man hears the name of the Owers Light without remembering that song which was sung to a woman, and which goes:—
‘The heavy wind, the steady wind that blows beyond the Owers,
It blows beyond the Owers for you and me! …’ ”
The Poet. “It seems to me you are not of the trade; you are choppy in verse, very short-winded, halting; spavined, I think.”
The Sailor. “Why! I have sung the longest songs of you all! And since you challenge me, I will howl you one quite rotund and complete, but I warn you, your hair will stand on end!”
Grizzlebeard. “I dread the Sailor. He is blasphemous and lewd.”
The Sailor. “Judge when you have heard. It is a carol.”
The Poet. “But it is not Christmas.”
The Sailor. “Neither is it spring, yet by licence we sang our songs of springtime—and for that … Well, let me seize you all. It has a title—not my own. We call this song ‘Noël.’ ”
Myself (prettily). “And I congratulate you, Sailor, on your whimsical originality and pretty invention in titles.”
The Sailor—
“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!
A Catholic tale have I to tell!
And a Christian song have I to sing
While all the bells in Arundel ring.“I pray good beef and I pray good beer
This holy night of all the year,
But I pray detestable drink for them
That give no honour to Bethlehem.“May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me,
And may all my enemies go to hell!
Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!
May all my enemies go to hell!
Noël! Noël!”
Grizzlebeard: “Rank blasphemy as I said, and heresy, which is worse. For at Christmas we should in particular forgive our enemies.”
The Sailor. “I do. This song is about those that do not forgive me.”
The Poet. “And it is bad verse, like all the rest.”
The Sailor. “Go drown yourself in milk and water; it is great, hefty howl-verse, as strong and meaty as that other of mine was lovely and be-winged.”
Grizzlebeard. “What neither the Poet nor you seem to know, Sailor, is that the quarrels of versifiers are tedious to standers-by, so let us go into the Cricketers’ Arms and eat as you say, in God’s name, and occupy ourselves with something pleasanter than the disputed lyric.”
Myself. “Very well then, let us go into the Cricketers’ Arms, where Mr. Justice Honeybubble went when I was a boy, and there delivered his famous Opinion: his Considered Opinion, his Opinion of permanent value, his Opinion which is the glory of the law.”
“What opinion was that?” said Grizzlebeard, going through the inn door, and we following him.
“I can tell you without much difficulty,” said I, “if you will listen, but I warn you it is a dull, dull thing. Then, for that matter so was that historical lecture of yours upon the Sussex War. But I listened to that, so now you shall listen to me.”
They sat down not very well pleased, but I assured them that when they had heard it they would understand more law than most. “For the law,” said I, “is not the dull subject some think it, but a very fascinating trade, full of pleasant whims and tricks for throwing an opponent. It is not all a routine of thrusting poor men in prison, as is too commonly believed, and as I have notes here of what that great Judge, Mr. Justice Honeybubble, said and did when he harangued the men of Duncton in the Cricketers’ Arms twenty years ago, when I was a boy, and as that feat of his is still famous throughout this part of the County, you will do well to listen.” They ordered their beer therefore, and I had mine free, as is the custom of the County for the one who tells the story, and then taking certain notes from my pocketbook, and putting them in order as is necessary when we are to follow technical matters, I gave it them broadside.
“Well, then, Mr. Justice Honeybubble was a man full of sane humour, my friends. He was of a healthy habit of body. He was a man, as are many of the law, who preserved a vigorous gait into old age, and an expression of alertness in his limbs and his eyes. His face was ruddy, his eyebrows were thick, his white hair was close, and there was plenty of it.
“It was his pleasure to take long walks when his duties gave him leisure, and he especially chose these grassy uplands; and once he came aswinging down by what used to be, but is not, Glatting Beacon, and so through the Combe and the leafless beeches of Burton Hanger to Duncton and the Cricketers’ Arms. It was evening, the air was cold and pure. He strode steadily down the steep road, swinging that walking-stick or rather club which was his dearest companion. In such a mood and manner did he enter this inn where we are now. He entered it with the object of eating and drinking something before going on to find the train at Petworth; for in the days of which I speak public refreshment was permitted to all.
“He was delighted to find, in the main room, a gathering; it was of peasants who were discussing a point of difficulty. They respectfully saluted him upon his entrance, for he always dressed with care, and the constant exercise of bullying men who could not reply had given him a commanding manner.
“He stood before the fire surveying them in a kindly but authoritative way, and listened closely while they discussed the matter before them; nor was it easy to discover in what precisely their difficulty lay, save that it concerned two disputants, one George, another Roland, and that the matter of it was thus:—Two pigs, ‘Maaster,’ ‘Masr’ Burt, the change of a sovereign, and Chichester market.
“Roland had put his case not without fire, and had appealed to right being right.
“George had replied in tones of indignation that he was not of that type of character which submits to the imputation of folly.
“Each had reposed his case upon the known personalities and conditions of ‘Maaster,’ ‘Masr’ Burt, Chichester market, current coin, and pigs. When, after a little silence, the assembly, deliberating over their mugs, approached the problem, they did so by slowly reciting each in turn at intervals of about thirty seconds the ritual phrases, ‘Ar!’ ‘That’s it,’ and in the case of the eldest man at the end of the table the declaration native to this holy valley, ‘Mubbe soa: mubbe noa.’
“Mr. Justice Honeybubble, who had himself been compelled upon one occasion to sum up for no less than four hours and twenty-three minutes, took pity upon these his fellow-men, and said:
“ ‘Perhaps, gentlemen, I can be of some use to you: I am, chrm, chrm, accustomed to the weighing of, er, evidence (in the fullest sense of that word), and I have had no little, chrm, experience in matters which have been laid before me, chrm, in, er, another capacity.’
“The peasants, who took him for no less than a noble Justice of the Peace, landowner, and perhaps colonel of some auxiliary force, respectfully acceded to his desire, and were not disappointed when the humane jurist ordered fresh ale for the whole company, including himself. He then sat down in a brown wooden chair with arms, which stood before the fire, crossed his legs, put the tips of his fingers together, and faced his audience with an expression peculiarly solemn which partly awed and partly fascinated the disputants and the areopagus at large.
“Roland and George had just begun to state their case again and to speak both at once and angrily, for they were unaccustomed to forensic ways, when the Judge silenced them with a wave of his large white right hand, and thus gave tongue:
“ ‘We have here,’ said he, ‘what lawyers call an issue; that is, a dispute in opinion, or, at any rate, in statement, as to an objective truth. We eliminate all factors upon which the parties are agreed, and especially,’ here he leant forward and clenched his fist in an impressive manner, ‘all those subjective impressions which, however important in themselves, can have no place,’ and here he waved his right arm in a fine sweeping gesture, ‘before a civil tribunal.’
“At this point George, who imagined from the tone of the Bench that things were going ill for him, put on an expression of stubborn resolution; while Roland, who had come to a similar conclusion and thought his cause in jeopardy, looked positively sullen. But the Assessors who sat around were as greatly moved as they were impressed, and assumed attitudes of intelligent interest, concentrating every power of their minds upon the expert’s exposition of judgment.
“ ‘So far, so good,’ said Mr. Justice Honeybubble, breathing a deep sigh and drinking somewhat from the tankard at his side. ‘So far, so good. Now, from the evidence that has been laid before me it is clear that Burt as a third party can neither concur nor enter any plea of Demurrer or Restraint. That,’ he added sharply, turning suddenly upon an old man at the end of the table, ‘would be Barottage.’ The old man, who was by profession a hedger and ditcher, nodded assent. ‘And Barottage,’ thundered the worthy Judge, ‘is something so repugnant to the whole spirit of our English law, that I doubt if any would be found with the presumption to defend it!’ His electrified audience held their breaths while he continued in somewhat milder tones, ‘I admit that it has been assimilated to Maintenance by no less an authority than Lord Eldon in his decision of the matter in Crawford v. Croke. But in the Desuetude of Maintenance, and the very proper repeal of Graham’s Act in … or possibly ’ (frowning slightly) ‘I am not sure. … However, the very proper repeal of Graham’s Act has left Barottage,’ and here his voice rose again and vibrated with his fullest tones, ‘has left Barottage in all its native hideousness, an alien and therefore an iniquitous and a malign accretion upon the majestic body of our English Common Law.’ At this point a slight cheer from Roland, who saw things brightening, was suppressed by a glance like an angry searchlight from the eye of the Judge, who concluded in full diapason, ‘Nor shall it have any mercy from me, so long as I have the strength and authority to sit upon this Bench.’
“Mr. Justice Honeybubble drank again, and as he was evidently reposing his voice for the moment, the now terrified but fascinated agriculturists murmured profound applause. Their patriotism was moved, the tradition of centuries rose in their blood, and had an appeal been made to them at that moment they would have shed it willingly, however clumsily, in defence of that vast fabric of the Law. … In a low, regular and impressive voice which marked the change of subject, Mr. Justice Honeybubble continued:
“ ‘Now, gentlemen, consider the pigs. It often happens, nay, it must happen in the course of judicial proceedings, that our decision relies not only on the balance of human testimony (and you are there, remember, to judge fact not law), but upon the fitting together of circumstances as to which that testimony relates, and in noting the actions or the situation of things or even of persons incapable in their nature of entering that witness-box’ (and here he pointed to a large stuffed fish in a glass case, towards which all his audience turned with one accord, looking round again in a somewhat blank manner) ‘and telling us upon oath’ (the word oath in a deep bass) ‘what they themselves saw and heard in a manner that shall convey the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You cannot subpoena a pig—’
“ ‘Ar! zo you zay. Ar!’ broke in the excited George, who was now confident that by some trick of cunning he was being deprived of his pigs, ‘Ar! zo you …’
“ ‘Silence!’ roared Mr. Justice Honeybubble. ‘Am I to be interrupted sitting here on this Bench, not even by counsel, but by one of the parties to the case? I trust I may never have to call attention again in the course of my duties to so disgraceful a breach of the immemorial traditions of an English Court of Justice! Snff! … I repeat, we cannot subpoena a pig’ (he repeated it with stern eyes fixed full on the unfortunate George). ‘But what we can do, gentlemen, is to ask ourselves what in all reasonable probability would have been the case if under those circumstances, neglecting for the moment what has been said relative to any letters or affidavits put in, were it not what the plaintiff has supposed it to be. Chrm!’
“Here, as the intricacy of detail was making the exposition somewhat difficult to follow, all leant forward and summoned their very keenest attention to bear upon the problem.
“ ‘The decision would depend,’ went on Mr. Justice Honeybubble in a tone of finality and relief, ‘upon the conclusion at which you would arrive in the former or in the latter concatenation of events.’
“He leant back in his chair, spread out his hands amply towards them, as offering them well-weighed, unbiased, and unmoved by a tittle, the great body of evidence which he had sifted and arranged with such marvellous skill.
“ ‘It is for you, gentlemen,’ he concluded, rising, ‘to say which of the two conclusions in your conscience after all that you have heard is the true one. Remember that if there is the faintest doubt in the mind of any one of you it is his solemn duty to give the benefit of the doubt to that party in the suit who would have most advantage from it. I believe I have not influenced you in that decision to the one side or to the other. I hope I have not. Certainly I can speak from my heart and say that in this very grave and important business I have tried to preserve and lay before you a general view which should be absolutely impartial; and now I must leave you to your decision.’
“With this Sir Thingumbob Honeybubble nodded to all present, seized his staff, and, passing briskly through the door, left them drowned in a tremendous silence. As he went out he had the kindly thought to order the replenishment of their mugs, and so, glancing at his watch, he went at a smart pace down the road past Burton Rough to the station. But he went through the darkness smiling to himself all the way and humming a little tune.
“Now was not that a fine full-fed judge and worthy of being remembered as he is throughout this valley for that famous decision?”
When I had told them all this we took the road again, thinking about lawyers and talking of them, and from that the conversation came by an easy stage to moneylenders, and from them again to traitors, and so we passed in review all the principal activities of mankind in the space of about one mile, until we had exhausted every matter, and there was no more to be said.
After this we all fell silent and tailed off, Grizzlebeard going ahead and getting further and further from us in great thoughtful strides, and the Poet about halfway between; but the Sailor and I taking it easy, for it was agreed between us that we should all meet at the next Inn whatever it might be. That Inn we found no more than two miles along the road.
And when we had picked up the Poet, who was waiting there for us, he told us that Grizzlebeard had gone in about a quarter of an hour before, and that he feared that he must have got into some entertainment, for all that time he had not come out or made a sign; so, said the Poet, we ought all to go in and find him.
So we turned into that little house as in duty bound, seeing that it was five miles since we had last acknowledged the goodness of God in the drinking of ale, which is a kind of prayer, as it says in the motto:
“Laborare est orare sed potare clarior,”
which signifies that work is noble, and prayer its equal, but that drinking good ale is a more renowned and glorious act than any other to which man can lend himself. And on this account it is that you have a God of Wine, and of various liquors sundry other Gods, that is, Imaginations of men or Demons, but in the matter of ale no need for symbol, only that it is King.
But when we came up to the house, and turned into it, we found that Grizzlebeard, who had gone in already before us, was in that short time deeply engaged with a Stranger who, maugre Heaven, was drinking tea!
There they sat, hardly noticing our entry, and were at it hammer and tongs in an argument.
The Stranger was a measly sort of fellow in a cloak, tall, and with a high voice and words of a cultured kind, and his eyes were like dead oysters, which are unpleasing things; and he and Grizzlebeard, though they had so recently met, were already in the midst of as terrible a balderdash of argument as ever the good angels have permitted on this sad earth.
We spoke to Grizzlebeard loudly, but the stranger paid no attention to us.
We were very much astonished and looked round-eyed at this, but Grizzlebeard only looked up and nodded. He was too much caught by the discussion to do more.
“I should meet that,” he was saying, “by a dichotomy.”
“By a what?” said the Sailor.
The Poet. “By something German I think.”
But Grizzlebeard, paying no heed to us at all, said to his earnest fellow: “Not teleological; you must not think that; but, if you like, still less ateleological.”
Myself. “Good, nor ontological I hope, for that is the very Devil.”
The Stranger, purposely ignoring us, then replied to Grizzlebeard alone:
“The argument cannot be met thus, because though you will not postulate the reality of time as a process, you must admit it as a dimension.”
“Not under compulsion!” said the Sailor fiercely.
But Grizzlebeard, as though we three were not there, replied to the Stranger:
“The word ‘dimension’ is a petitio elenchi.”
The Stranger (eagerly). “There I pin you, that is sheer Monism!”
Grizzlebeard (more eagerly still). “Not at all! Not at all! On the contrary, Monism would be your position.”
The Sailor (to the Poet and Myself). “Let us go hence, my children, and drink in the bar with common men, for the Devil will very soon come in by the window and fly away with these philosophers. Let us be apart in some safe place when the struggle begins.”
With that we all went out and stayed about ten minutes, drinking with certain labouring men, and paying for their drinks, because we were better off than they. And to these men we told such lies as we thought might entertain them, and then, after about twenty minutes, the Sailor said to us:
The Sailor. “Those two hateful ones we have left must by this time have come to the foundations of the world, and have thoroughly thrashed it out how it was that God laid down the roots of the hills, and why millstones and the world are round, and even whether they have free will or no: a thing never yet discovered save through the Bastonnade. But come, let us rout them out! I know this philosophy: when men are at it they chain themselves down for hours.”
With that he led us back to the room, and sure enough we heard them still at it hammer and tongs, and Grizzlebeard was saying, leaning forward, and half standing up in his excitement:
“Why then, there you are! With the content of reality expressed in contradictory terms!”
The Stranger. “There is no contradiction, but a variety of aspect, which is resolved in a higher unity.”
The Sailor (in a solemn tone). “Grizzlebeard! Darkness will soon fall upon the Weald, and before it falls we must be beyond Graffham, nay, far beyond. So make up your mind, either to differ with this honest gentleman, or to give way to him here and at once. And in any case you are to find your God” (and here he took out his watch) “within exactly ten minutes from now, for if you do not we will find Him for you in a sudden way. So in ten minutes find us also in the common bar, or perish in your sins!”
Then we all three went out again, and heard from the common bar a singing going on, the chorus of which was Golier, which is indeed the true chorus of all songs, and the footing or underwork of every sort of common chant and roar of fellowship. But when we came in again the poorer men from shyness stopped. Only the Sailor said to them, “I think we must sing you a new song, which they are singing, out Horsham way, of Duke William; but you must remember it, for I cannot write it down.” And with that he sang at them this verse:
“Duke William was a wench’s son,
His grandfer was a tanner!
He drank his cider from the tun,
Which is the Norman manner:
His throne was made of oak and gold,
His bow-shaft of the yew—
That is the way the tale is told,
I doubt if it be true!“But what care I for him?
My tankard is full to the brim,
And I’ll sing Elizabeth, Dorothy, Margaret, Mary, Dorinda, Persephone, Miriam,
Pegotty taut and trim.“The men that sailed to Normandy
Foul weather may they find;
For banging about in the waist of a ship
Was never to my mind.
They drink their rum in the glory-hole
In quaking and in fear;
But a better man was left behind,
And he sits drinking beer.“But what care I for the swine?
They never were fellows of mine!
And I’ll sing Elizabeth, Dorothy, Margaret, Mary, Dorinda, Persephone, Miriam, Pegotty, Jezebel, Topsy, Andromeda.”
The Poet. “To your aid with She-dactyls—
“Magdalen, Emily, Charity, Agatha, Beatrice, Anna, Cecilia, Maud, Cleopatra, Selene, and Jessica. …”
The Sailor (clinching it)—
“Barbara stout and fine.”
Myself (to the company). “Now is not that a good song, and does it not remind you of Duke William, who so kindly came over here to this county many years ago, and rid us of north countrymen forever?”
One man in the company said that he could not remember this song, but wished it written down, to which the Sailor answered that this could not be because it was copyright, but that, God willing, he would be passing that way again next year or the year after, and then would give it them once more, so that they could have it by heart, and when he had said this, he put down money so that they all might drink again when he had gone, and led us back to the room where the Stranger and Grizzlebeard were. But he took with him a full tankard of beer, and that for reasons which will presently be seen.
For he stopped outside the door behind which we could hear the voices of the disputants still at it with their realities and their contents, and their subjectivities and their objectivities, and their catch-it-as-it-flies, and he said to us:
The Sailor. “Have you not seen two dogs wrangling in the street, and how they will Gna! Gna! and Wurrer-Wurrer all to no purpose whatsoever, but solely because it is the nature of dogs thus doglike to be-dog the wholesome air with dogged and canicular noise of no purport, value, or conclusion? And when this is on have you not seen how good housewives, running from their doors, best stop the noisome noise and drown it altogether by slop, bang, douches of cold wet from a pail, which does dis-spirit the empty disputants, and, causing them immediately to unclinch, humps them off to more useful things? So it is with philosophers, who will snarl and yowl and worry the clean world to no purpose, not even intending a solution of any sort or a discovery, but only the exercise of their vain clapper and clang. Also they have made for this same game as infernal a set of barbaric words as ever were blathered and stumbled over by Attila the king when the Emperor of Constantinople’s Court Dentist pulled out his great back teeth for the enlargement of his jaw. Now this kind of man can be cured only by baptism, which is of four kinds, by water, by blood, and by desire: and the fourth kind is of beer. So watch me and what I will do.”
Then he went in ahead of us, and we all came in behind, and when we came in neither Grizzlebeard nor the Stranger looked up for one moment, but Grizzlebeard was saying, with vast scorn:
“You are simply denying cause and effect, or rather efficient causality.”
To which the Stranger answered solemnly, “I do!”
On hearing this reply the Sailor, very quickly and suddenly, hurled over him all that was in the pint pot of beer, saying hurriedly as he did so, “I baptize you in the name of the five senses,” and having done so, ran out as hard as he could with us two at his heels, and pegged it up the road at top speed, and never drew rein until he got to the edge of Jockey’s Spinney half a mile away, and we following, running hard close after, and there we found him out of breath and laughing, gasping and catching, and glorying in his great deed.
“Now,” said he, “I warrant you, Grizzlebeard will come up in good time, and though he will be angry he will be confused.”
Sure enough, Grizzlebeard came up after us, somewhat more than a quarter of an hour behind, and though he was angry, the hill had taken up some of his anger and had blown him, and when he had cursed at the Sailor, and had told him that the Stranger was, in a sense, his guest, the Sailor bade him be at ease, saying that the Stranger was, in a sense, his boredom and intolerable drag, and that had he not done violence we should never have got on the road at all.
“But tell me,” he added, “did you not settle anything by the time we got away? You had been at it a good hour, and one would think that men could find out in that time whether they had a Maker or no, and what Dimension was and what Degree.”
But Grizzlebeard was surly and would not answer him, and in the slow recovery of his temper the road seemed long enough: more particularly through the Poet, who, thinking to be genial, began to rattle off a judgment of the world and to say that it was a good thing to agree, and also to bend oneself to practical matters; and thence to talking of fanatics, and so to maundering on of authority, and saying that any man could do well with his life if he only had the sense not to offend those who were his superiors on his way upwards, and to pay decent attention to what those in control desired of him.
To this sort of balance Grizzlebeard, being the oldest of us, would have agreed; but in his anger, which, though it was declining, still smouldered, he chose to contradict, and he said in a gruff way:
Grizzlebeard. “What our fathers called ‘selling one’s soul.’ Yes; it is the easiest and the worst thing a man can do.”
The Sailor. “The worst, perhaps, though I’m not so sure of it, but the easiest, oh no! And I say I am not so sure it is the worst. For one never sells anything unless one is hard up, and hard-up men are never really wicked; it is the rich that are wicked. At least so I have always been told by the poor, who are not only the great majority of men and therefore likely to be right, but also have no interest to serve in saying what they say. … But easy, no! Do not tell me it is easy, so long as there stands for a dreadful example the story of Peter the Politician, which all the world should hear.”
Grizzlebeard. “And all the world has heard it.”
The Sailor (sweetly). “But not you, Grizzlebeard, so I must give it at due length to spin the road out and to do you especial honour.”
Grizzlebeard (milder). “Do so, then. Even your tale may be less dull than tramping the last hour of a day in silence.”
The Sailor. “You must know, then, that Peter the Politician, after having sold every public honour which he could drag upon the counter and every public office and every kind of power except his own, and after he had sold his country and his friends and his father and his mother and even his children, and his self-respect of course, and all the rest of it, had nothing left to sell but his very soul. But sell that he must, for have money he must; without money no man can live the Great Life and go out to dine in the new hotels that are built out of iron and plaster, and the Lord have mercy on us all!
“Well then, Peter the Politician did up his soul in a little brown paper parcel, all beautifully sealed with sealing-wax and tied up with expensive string; for the public pay for these things where politicians are concerned.
“He did up his soul, did I say, into this little parcel? I err! It was his secretary that did it up; not his unpaid secretary—his real secretary, a humble little man.
“For you must know that politicians have three kinds of secretaries: the first kind, who may be called Secretarius Maximus, is a rich man’s son, and his place has been paid for: he is called secretary so that he may be advanced to office, and he does nothing at all except ride about in a motorcar and come and sit by when there is any jabbering to be done for his master. Then there is the second kind of secretary, who is usually a friend’s son, and may be called Secretarius Minor; he expects no advancement to a politician’s future, but only some little job or other in the Civil Service after his years of labour. And his labour is this: to tell the third secretary what he has to do. Now this third secretary, who may be called Secretarius Minimus, receives the sum of thirty shillings every Saturday, and for this he must sweat and toil and be at beck and call, and go to bed late and get up early, and wear himself to a shadow, and then at forty go and be a secretary at less wages if he can get the job, or else hang himself or stand in a row for soup on the Embankment; and there is an end of him.
“Well, then, I say it was this third or working secretary who had done up Peter the Politician’s soul in a pretty little parcel, in brown paper paid out of the taxes, with fine red seals paid out of the taxes, and with strong, thin, and splendid string paid out of the taxes; and since the politician was very careful about his soul and it did not weigh much, he took it with him himself and set off to the Devil’s office to sell it; and where that office was he knew very well, for he had spent most of his time there while he was a young man, and had served his apprenticeship in another part of the same building.
“When Peter the Politician sent in his card he was received with great courtesy by the Limbo-man who kept the doors, and he was asked to sit down on a chair in a sort of little private outer room where distinguished people await the pleasure of the Head Devil.
“In this little outer room there were one or two books to read about problems, especially marriage, and there were some prints upon the wall which were not well done and which the Devil had taken as a bad debt from a publisher; and there was also a calendar, but there were no Saints’ Days marked on it, as you may well believe, but only the deaths of conspicuous people, and Peter the Politician did not study it.
“Now when he had been sitting there for about an hour without the need of a fire, there came in a neat little tight little dressed-up-to-the-nines little Imp in buttons, who was very polite indeed, and told him how sorry His Master was to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but the fact was he was in the midst of a great deal of business. Then the little Imp went out and left Peter the Politician alone—and he waited another two hours.
“At the end of this time another taller and older Imp, dressed not in buttons, but in a fine tailcoat (for he was a Tailed Imp), came in and apologised more than ever and said that His Master the Head Devil was extremely sorry to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but would he kindly send in what his business was, and he hoped it would immediately be attended to?
“Then Peter the Politician answered in his short, dignified way that he had come to sell his soul.
“ ‘Of course! Of course!’ said the tailcoated Imp. ‘Dear me! You must excuse me; we have so much to do today that we are really run off our hooves. Of course,’ he added, anxiously polite, ‘there is a regular office …’
“ ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Peter the Politician as impatiently as his dignity would allow. ‘I know all about that office, but under the circumstances and seeing that I am known here …’
“ ‘Yes, of course!’ said the big Imp again, and he went out hurriedly, and Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours.
“He hummed a little and he shuffled his feet, and he drummed with his fingers, and he began very seriously to think whether he would not go somewhere else, only he knew of no one out of Hell who wanted his soul. So he sighed at last and continued to wait with as much resignation as he could.
“And after another two hours there came in a very tall, gentlemanly, and deep-voiced Major Devil, who told him how exceedingly sorry he was that His Master should have to keep him waiting, especially now they knew the nature of his business, but the pressure of work that day was really awful! And would Peter the Politician, for this once, be kind enough to send in his offer, because the Head Devil really could not come out?
“So Peter the Politician said severely—
“ ‘Luckily I have brought the goods with me.’ And he handed the Major Devil his nice little brown paper parcel, and the Major Devil went out apologising.
“Then Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours. At the end of it there came in a really superior Devil with his hair parted in the middle and a standup-and-turndown collar, and the accent, and everything. He sat down genially at the same table as Peter the Politician, and leant towards him and said most affably and courteously—
“ ‘My dear sir, my Master is very sorry indeed, but there has been a terrible slump in this sort of thing since August; the bottom is quite knocked out of the market, and—and—well, to tell you straight out, what we want to know is how many you have to offer?’
“ ‘How many!’ said Peter the Politician, with a real annoyance unworthy of his rank.
“ ‘Yes,’ said the suave and really important Secretary Devil (for such he was), ‘the fact is, my Master says he can’t quote for these singly in the present state of the market, but if you could bring a gross …’
“At this Peter the Politician got up swearing, and went out, forgetting to take his soul with him, and leaving it there on the table all tied up.
“And that is why some people go about saying that he has lost his soul, for he certainly never sold it; and this should teach you that it is not easy to sell one’s soul, though it is exceedingly easy to lose it or to give it away.”
The Poet (with great interest). “This is the very first time I have heard this story!”
Myself. “It is not the fifteenth that I have heard it. The first time I heard it was from a Yankee, and he told it much quicker and better than the Sailor.”
The Sailor (angrily). “Then you may go back to Yankeeland and hear it there!”
Myself. “Do not be angry, Sailor, you did your best, and I learned several things I did not know before. For instance, about that calendar; I never knew why the deaths of great men were put down in calendars.”
The Sailor (a little mollified). “Well, you know now. And you also know that when you want to sell your soul you will have to make up a truck-load before you can get reasonable rates.”
Grizzlebeard. “I think the Sailor’s story is immoral.”
The Poet. “I think so too, for he talks in a flippant way about things which ought to be talked of respectfully.”
Grizzlebeard. “No, not on that account; it is immoral because it makes out that souls are of different sizes and values. Now it is well known that souls are exactly equal, and that when you weigh them one against the other they do not differ by a grain of sand, and when you measure them there is not a hundredth of an inch between two of them. And that in value they are all precisely the same. This has been laid down at no less than 572 Synods, three Decisions of the Holy Office, and one Ecumenical Council.”
The Sailor. “Yes, but not in the four first Councils, and still less at Nicea, so that stumps you!”
Grizzlebeard (solemnly). “Nicea be damned!”
Myself. “Very well, by all means, but not Trent I hope, which is a very important one, and to be quarrelled with only at a high risk.”
“No,” said Grizzlebeard, “not Trent, nor Constance for that matter, though it troubles me more.”
Then we fell silent again. The grey evening had advanced as we listened to the Sailor’s story, and it was growing cold. We went through the half light and the gloaming until it was upon the edge of darkness, time for the evening meal. And we were so weary with the many, many miles of that day that we agreed together to sleep if it were possible in the same place we might eat at, that is, in the next inn. For we were now near the end of all the road we had to go, being but a mile or two from the County border. And as we went we debated our last feast and our last conversation, our last songs, and our necessary farewells.
“My friends,” said I, “all men before death make a feast if they can. It is an ancient custom, and one well approved by time. Feast before battle if you can, and before death which may come in battle. All such death as comes to men in health, it is well to feast before it. Now, with tomorrow morning we shall come to the end of this little journey of ours, all along the County, all the way from end to end. Thus we shall attain, as you may say, the death of our good time. For it is agreed between us that when we come to the Hampshire border we shall separate and see each other no more.”
The Sailor. “Yes, that is agreed.”
Myself. “Well, then, let us make a feast.”
The Poet. “By all means, and who shall pay?”
Grizzlebeard. “In general it is I that should pay, for I am the richest. We have made no feast in all these days, but since this is to be a solemn sort of feast, and a kind of Passover (for we are soon to pass over the boundary into Hampshire), every man must give his share.”
Myself. “I am very willing, only if I do so, I must call the food and drink.”
The Sailor. “I am not willing at all, but unwilling as I am, most certainly will I eat nothing and drink nothing to which I am not inclined.”
The Poet. “In the matter of eating and drinking! am with you all, but in the matter of paying I differ from you altogether, for I have nothing.”
Myself. “How is this, Poet? It was only today that I saw you with my own eyes at the Bluebell paying for a mug of beer with a labouring man.”
The Poet. “It was my last money, and I did it for charity.”
The Sailor. “Then now you may have the reward of charity and starve.”
Myself. “No, no, there is a way out of these matters which is quite unknown to children and to savages, but open to men of intelligence and culture as are we. It is to do things by way of paper instead of metal. A fund shall be formed, each one shall pay into the fund a piece of paper on which shall be written, ‘I will meet one-quarter of the bill,’ and each man shall sign. When this is done, one of us four shall be the financier, and shall pay the bill. Then the paper will be called in, and I will pay, and Grizzlebeard will pay, and the Sailor will pay, but you, the Poet, will not pay, and you will be adjudicated bankrupt.”
Grizzlebeard. “Yes, your principle is right in the main, but I demur to the simplicity of your last clause. I will not allow the honest Poet to go bankrupt. I will buy up his paper, and he shall be my slave for life, and if I can so arrange it, his family for a good time after as well.”
The Poet. “I shall be delighted, Grizzlebeard, and I will pay you my debt in songs.”
Grizzlebeard. “Not if I know it. You will pay it in cash and at interest, and as to how you shall earn it, that is your lookout.”
Myself. “Well, anyhow, it is determined that we make a feast, and I say for my part that there must be in this feast bacon and eggs fried together in one pan, and making a great commonalty in one dish.”
The Sailor. “Excellent; and the drink shall be beer.”
The Poet. “Besides this, what we need is two large cottage loaves of new bread, and butter, and some kind of cheese.”
Myself. “Poet, did you not tell me that you were of this County and of this land?”
The Poet. “I did.”
Myself. “I think you lied. Who in Sussex ever heard of ‘some kind of cheese’? You might as well talk in Hereford of ‘some kind of cider,’ or in Kent of ‘some kind of foreigner’ coming over by their boats from the foreign lands. I think you must have been out of Sussex, Poet, for many years of your life, and at the wrong time.”
The Poet. “Why, that is true.”
Myself. “And, undoubtedly, Poet, you acquired in other counties a habit of eating that Gorgonzola cheese, which is made of soap in Connecticut; and Stilton, which is not made at Stilton; and Camembert, and other outlandish things. But in Sussex, let me tell you, we have but one cheese, the name of which is Cheese. It is One; and undivided, though divided into a thousand fragments, and unchanging, though changing in place and consumption. There is in Sussex no Cheese but Cheese, and it is the same true Cheese from the head of the Eastern Rother to Harting Hill, and from the sea-beach to that part of Surrey which we gat from the Marches with sword and with bow. In colour it is yellow, which is the right colour of Cheese. It is neither young nor old. Its taste is that of Cheese, and nothing more. A man may live upon it all the days of his life.”
Grizzlebeard. “Well, then, there is to be bacon and eggs and bread and cheese and beer, and after that—”
Myself. “After that every man shall call for his own, and the Poet shall drink cold water. But I will drink port, and if I taste in it the jolly currant wine of my county, black currants from the little bushes which I know so well, then I shall give praise to God. For I would rather drink that kind of port which is all Sussex from vine to vat, and brewed as the Sussex Men brew, than any of your concoctions of the Portuguese, which are but elderberry, liquorice, and boiled wine.”
As we thus decided upon the nature of the feast, the last of the light, long declined, had faded upon the horizon behind the latticework of bare branches. The air was pure and cold, as befitted All-Hallows, and the far edges of the Downs toward the Hampshire border had level lines of light above them, deeply coloured, full of departure and of rest. There was a little mist upon the meadows of the Rother, and a white line of it in the growing darkness under the edges of the hills. It was not yet quite dark, but the first stars had come into the sky, and the pleasant scent of the wood fires was already strong upon the evening air when we found ourselves outside a large inn standing to the north of the road, behind a sort of green recess or common. Here were several carts standing out in the open, and a man stood with a wagon and a landaulette or two, and dogcarts as well, drawn up in the great courtyard.
The lower rooms of this old inn were brilliantly lighted. The small square panes of it were shaded with red curtains, through which that light came to us on our cold evening way, and we heard the songs of men within; for there had been some sort of sale, I think, which had drawn to this place many of the farmers from around, and some of the dealers and other smaller men.
So we found it when we knocked at the door and were received. There was a pleasant bar, and opening out of it a large room in which some fifteen or twenty men, all hearty, some of them old, were assembled, and all these were drinking and singing.
Their meal was long done, but we ordered ours, which was of such excellence in the way of eggs and bacon, as we had none of us until that moment thought possible upon this side of the grave. The cheese also, of which I have spoken, was put before us, and the new cottage loaves, so that this feast, unlike any other feast that yet was since the beginning of the world, exactly answered to all that the heart had expected of it, and we were contented and were filled.
Then we lit our pipes, and called each for our own drink, I, for my black currant port, and Grizzlebeard for brandy; the Poet, at the Sailor’s expense, for beer, and the Sailor himself for claret. Then, these before us, we sat ourselves at the great table, and saluted the company. But we were not allowed to make more conversation before an old man present there, sitting at the head of the table, one with a small grey beard and half-shut considering eyes, struck the board very loudly with his fist, and cried “Golier”—which appeared to be a sort of symbol, for on his saying this word, all the rest broke out in chorus:
“And I will sing Golier!
Golier, Golier, Golier, Golier,
And I will sing Golier!”
When this verse (which is the whole of the poem) had been repeated some six times, I knew myself indeed to be still in my own County, and I was glad inside my heart, like a man who hears the storm upon the windows, but is himself safe houseled by the fire. So did I know Hampshire to be stretching waste a mile or two beyond, but here was I safe among my own people by the token that they were singing that ancient song “Golier.”
When they had sung as many verses of this, our national anthem, as they saw fit, a young man called for “Mas’r Charles,” and from an extreme corner of the table there came this answer:
“If so be as I do carl or be carled upon. …”
But he did not finish it, for they all took up very loudly the cry, “Mas’r Charles, Mas’r Charles,” whereupon the very old man, rising to his very old feet, put his very old hands upon the table, bending forward, and looking upwards with a quizzical face full of years and expectation, said:
“Arl I can sing were that song o’ Californy, that were sixty year ago,” and he chuckled. Then said another old man near by:
“Ar, there you do talk right, Mas’r Charles. There were Hewlett’s Field, what some called Howlett’s Field, which come to be called ‘Californy’ in that same time when …” but the younger men who could not hear him were calling out:
“Mas’r Charles, Mas’r Charles,” until silence was created again by the hammer of the chairman’s fist, who very solemnly called upon Mas’r Charles, and Mas’r Charles in a quavering voice gave us the ancient dirge:
“I am sailing for America
That far foreign strand,
And I whopes to set foot
In a fair fruitful land,
But in the midst of the ocean
May grow the green apple tree
Avoor I prove faalse
To the girl that loves me.“The moon shall be in darkness,
And the stars give no light
But I’ll roll you in my arms
On a cold frosty night.
And in the midst of the ocean
May grow the green apple tree.”
Here the company, overcome by the melancholy of such things, joined all together in a great moan:
“Avoor I prove faalse
To the girl that loves me.”
This song so profoundly affected us all, and particularly the Poet, that for some moments we were not for another, when the Sailor looking up in an abrupt fashion, said:
“Gentlemen, I will sing you a song, but it is on condition you can join in the chorus.”
To which the chairman far off at the end of the table answered:
“Ar, Mister, if so be as we know it.”
Then a younger man protested:
“Nout but what we can arl on us sing it arter un,” and this was the general opinion. So when that fist at the end of the table had performed its regular ritual, and when also more beer had been brought as the occasion demanded, the Sailor began to shout at the top of his voice, and without undue melody, this noble song, the chorus of which he particularly emphasised, so that it was readily repeated by all our friends:
“Thou ugly, lowering, treacherous Quean
I think thou art the Devil!
To pull them down the rich and mean,
And bring them to one level.
Of all my friends
That found their ends
By only following thee.
How many I tell
Already in Hell,
So shall it not be with me!”
On hearing this last line they all banged and roared heartily, and shouted in enormous voices:
“Zo zhall ee not be,
Zo zhall ee not be,
Zo zhall ee not be wi’ me!”
which, by zealous repetition, they made a chorus, and one old fellow that had his chin very nearly upon the table said, “Aye, marster! But who be she?”
“Why,” said the Sailor, “She whom we rail at in this song is that Spirit of getting-on-ed-ness and making out our life at the expense of our fellow men and of our own souls.”
“We mun arl get on! If so be as can!” said a young miller from down the valley.
“Yes,” said the Sailor shortly, “but let me tell you they overdo it in the towns. I do not blame your way … and anyhow the song must go on,” whereat he began the second verse:
“I knew three fellows were in your thrall,
Got more than they could carry,
The first might drink no wine at all,
And the second he would not marry;
The third in seeking golden earth
Was drownded in the sea,
Which taught him what your wage is worth,
So shall it not be with me!”
And they all cried out as before:
“Zo zhall ee not be,
Zo zhall ee not be,
Zo zhall ee not be wi’ me.”
Then the Sailor began again:
“There was Peter Bell of North Chappel,
Was over hard and sparing,
He spent no penny of all his many,
And died of over caring;
He saved above two underd pound
But his widow spent it free,
And turned the town nigh upside down,
So shall it not be with me!”
And again, but more zealously than before, they gave him their chorus, for they all knew North Chapel, and several wagged their heads and laughed, and one more aged liar said that he remembered the widow.
But the Sailor concluding sang, with more voice than even he had given us in all those days:
“Then mannikins bang the table round,
For the younger son o’ the Squire,
Who never was blest of penny or pound,
But got his heart’s desire.
Oh, the Creditors’ curse
Might follow his hearse,
For all that it mattered to he!
They were easy to gammon
From worshipping Mammon,
So shall it not be with me!”
And in one mighty chorus they all applauded and befriended him, shouting:
“Zo zhall ee not be,
Zo zhall ee not be,
Zo zhall ee not be wi’ me.”
“Ar! but that be main right!” said the chief moneylender of that place, his eyes all beaming; and indeed for the moment you would have thought that not one of them but had renounced the ambitions of this world, while the Sailor hummed to himself in a murmur:
“And Absalom,
That was a King’s son,
Was hangéd on a tree,
When he the Kingdom would have won,
So shall it not be with me!”
The time had now come when the guests must be going save those who were to sleep in the house that night, and whose cattle were stabled there. But when Grizzlebeard and I asked the host apart whether there were room for us, he said there was not, not even in his barn where many would that night lie upon the straw. But if we would pay our reckoning we might sleep (and he would give us blankets and rugs for it) before that fire in that room.
We told him we would be off early, we paid our reckoning, and so for the third time in those three nights we were to sleep once more as men sleep in wars, but by this time our bones were hardened to it.
And when the last man had gone his way to bed or barn we were left with one candle, and we made our camp as best we could before the fire, and slept the last sleep of that good journeying.