ON HEREFORD BEACON
Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd’s Point where she died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.
It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.
Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to – . But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd’s Point tell his own story.
He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep road side by side by the horse’s head he pointed out the Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road, Hereford beacon came in view.
“That’s where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”
He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.
“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th’ battle o’ Worcester from about here you know, sir.”
“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn’t killed at all. He died in his bed.”
The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I’ve heard folks say he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave’s there now. I’ve never sin it, but it’s there. I used to live o’er in Radnorshire and heard tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”
He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”
He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why should th’ old varmint a’ left th’ tower standing, sir?”
And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us to Wynd’s Point.
The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.
It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls – all speak with mute eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.
“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering, like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.
Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”
There is the secret of Jenny Lind’s love for Wynd’s Point, where the cuckoo – his voice failing slightly in these hot June days – wakes you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the deepening gloom of the vast plain.
Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd’s Point is Nature unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.
Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over half of busy England from where, beyond ‘the Lickey Hills, Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer’s Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is the moment to turn westward, where
Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.
The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey; the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go…
Down in the garden at Wynd’s Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
CHUM
When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.
I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott’s schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that “he didn’t know his own strength.”
But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.
There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores. You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.
He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind, that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow. For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man’s a man, for a’ that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was ipso facto suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman’s pair of trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.
One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully. Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping a stile – he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow – or had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them, for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the veterinary’s art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels in his native woods – for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in the heart of the woodland country – no longer made him tense as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian’s dream of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
ON MATCHES AND THINGS
I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she returned she brought tea – and sugar. In that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.
It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.
Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin – rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the slain… With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.
It is not one’s taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And matches… There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time o’ day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a commonplace civility.
And now… I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven’t any.” They simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly, smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that there aren’t any matches; haven’t been any matches for years and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite, wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other hasn’t got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.
I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me – but not so often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If – having borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late – I go into his room and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace Conference, or things like that – is he deceived? Not at all. He knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the tobacconist’s shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about Lords and the Oval.
And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one “of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the farmer’s family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”
Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the princess’s sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.