to accost each other, even if they have not been introduced, as indeed
is the custom (if you will observe it narrowly) of the mass of the
population at home. There is, indeed, a story of a man who stood upon
the bridge at Lyons wringing his hands and shouting out as he gazed
upon the arrowy Rhone which was bearing down very rapidly a drowning
human head: "Will no one introduce me to that gentleman that I may
save him? For I am an excellent swimmer." But this story would not
apply to the mass of males upon the Continent. We therefore were ready
to accost each other. He spoke to me in a curious language which I
believed to be Hungarian--for though I do not know Basque I should have
recognised the Basque terminations, and Finnish would not be used in
the West of Europe, and save for Basque, Hungarian, and Finnish all
other tongues have something in common. The Teutonic dialects, though
they are infinite, can at once be distinguished, and a Russian does not
address you in his own tongue in a foreign country. When, therefore,
this stranger man had spoken to me in this tongue which I believed to
be Hungarian, I replied to him gently in the Limousin dialect as being
the most southern with which I had any acquaintance, and upon the
principle, that with foreigners the more southern you are the better
chance you have. He answered in pure Italian, which is of no use to me.
I spoke to him then in the French of Paris, which he understood ill,
but did not speak at all. At last we tumbled upon a mutual language,
which, for the honour I bear you, I will not name; but it was neither
Latin nor Arabic, nor the language of the Genoese; and if I called it
lingua franca you would feel a legitimate annoyance.
We had not spoken of many things before he told me his own
characteristics, which were these: that he was a brave man but modest;
that he had a contempt for riches, and was content to live upon the
small income derivable from funds inherited from his father; that
he revered the memory of his father; that he was devoted to his
mother, "who lived in a modest way in a provincial town, hating the
extravagance of the capital. He further told me that he had been by
profession a soldier, and upon my asking whether his stoical life were
not diversified by some amusement he answered that he had permitted
himself certain recreations, but only those befitting the uniform he
wore, and notably was he addicted to the chase of wild and powerful
beasts.
"It is often remarked," he said, "by those who know nothing of the
business, that modern firearms have made the destruction of the larger
carnivora too easy a task for the sportsman. This may in general be
the case, but only if men are fighting under luxurious conditions. A
man going out by himself with his gun, unaccompanied by a dog, and
determined upon the destruction of some one considerable four-footed
beast of prey, still runs a certain risk."
"You are right," said I, "and a relative of mine who under such
conditions attempted the bear, though having only designed to attempt
wild-fowl, in the impenetrable thickets of Scandinavia, was very
bitterly disappointed and has been lamed for life."
At this my companion was a little put out. "The bear is not
carnivorous," he said, "and a brave man should be able to tackle a bear
with his hands. I really cannot understand how your relative (as you
call him), if he had a fowling-piece or even so much as a pocket-pistol
with a range of ten yards, could not shoot off a bear.... But to return
to my original thesis, which is that the larger carnivora are really
dangerous to a man walking alone, however well armed he may be. It
was so armed but undefended by companions that I found myself on the
borders of the Indian Ocean five years ago...."
"Which border of that vast sea did you inhabit?" said I with some
curiosity, and I was beginning to make a list of all its boundaries,
including the magnificent but undeveloped districts which fringe the
north-west of the great island of Australia, when he went on as though
I had not spoken--
" ... A tiger, or, I should rather say, a tigress, growled in the dense
underwood, and I was immediately upon the alert."
"Knowledge," I replied, "is a remarkable thing; it amazes me and my
friends who are familiar with the classics, though I believe there is
very little to know in that department. Even the chemists astonish me,
and the people who talk technically about warships are remarkable men;
but I see that in your case, as in that of so many others, I have
more to learn with every day I live, for there came a growl from the
underwood and you knew it to be that of a tiger--nay, of a tigress.
But," I continued, lifting my hand as he would interrupt me, "though it
fills me with admiration it does not make me hesitate, for I know men
who can talk a language after passing a week in the country to which it
is native, and I beg you to fulfil my curiosity."
"I heard the growl of a tigress," said he, eager to continue his
narrative, "proceeding from the underwood, which is called in that
country _rawak_."
"Why is it called _rawak_?" I interrupted.
"Because," he explained, with an intelligent look, "it is composed of
_mera_ roots and _sinchu_ closely interlaced, with a screen of reeds
ten feet high or more waving above it."
I told him that I now perfectly understood and desired to hear more.
"I heard," said he, "the growl of a tigress, and I at once made ready
my arm and prepared for the worst."
"When you say made ready your arm" (I again interrupted him) "I want
to seize the matter clearly, for the interest of your tale absorbs
me--what exactly did you do to the instrument, for I am acquainted
with a certain number of firearms, and each has to be prepared in a
different manner?"
"I pulled the bolt," said he coldly, and then maintained rather an
offended silence.
"Did you not snap the safety catch?" said I, in some fear that I had
put him out by my cross-examination.
"No, sir," said he, "my rifle (for such it was) was adorned by no
such appliance. But I pulled the spring ratchet home. And by way of
precaution I pressed my thumb upon the main-pin for fear that the
ratchet of the cambor should slip from the second groove."
"Now I understand you perfectly," I said, "and I beg you to continue."
And as I said this I leaned my head upon my hand so far as the jolting
of the express train would allow me, and watched him with a thoughtful
frown.
"Well, sir," went on the Unknown in an independent manner, "if you will
believe me, when the beast sprang I missed him--I mean her."
"One moment," I said, "one moment. I cannot believe you. You mean that
you missed some vital spot. That you missed so enormous an animal in
mid-air, as large as a cottage, and in full career to bear you down,
fraught with death, with pain, and with defeat, spreading its arms
like windmills, and roaring to announce its approach--that I will not
believe."
"You are right," said he, eyeing me in an iron manner, "I did not
wholly miss the ferocious monster--or rather, monstress. When we
sportsmen say 'miss' we mean hitting some part of the animal which is
not vital or which still permits it to pursue its abominable purpose.
At any rate the tigress (for such it was) fell to earth within a few
feet of me. It did not reach me. It had miscalculated its spring...."
"It is a curious point," said I (always desirous to pursue a
conversation and to prolong it), "how difficult it is for a man, or a
beast for that matter, to estimate the distance which he has to jump.
I well remember trying to jump the River Rother, which is near the
eastern boundary of my own county...."
"You will allow me," he interrupted.
"No, sir," I continued, "pray let me tell you what I had to say, for
it is in my mind and I wish to be rid of it. I well remember, I say,
trying to jump the River Rother and missing by three feet, but if you
will believe me----"
"Will you allow me?" he said, a little angrily.
"In a moment, sir," said I, "in a moment.... Well, I say I missed it
by three feet, and many a friend of mine has missed things by a little
minus, but the funny thing is that they never miss it by a little plus.
Now, isn't that worth judging? I did indeed know one case...."
"I am determined you shall allow me," said my companion, becoming
earnest.
"One moment," I pleaded, lifting my right hand slightly from the
table. "I was once with a man who had to jump from an old piece of
fortification on to the top of a wall about ten feet off, and if he
jumped not far enough he fell into the soft ditch about five feet deep.
But if he jumped too far he fell into an enormous fosse a hundred feet
deep. And, by the Lord, he jumped exactly three inches too far! Poor
devil!... Now, if this tigress of yours had only jumped just over your
head you would have had her at a disadvantage. You could have changed
your front with the rapidity familiar to men of your profession,
organised a concentrated fire against her just as she was executing her
turning movement, and got her behind the shoulder-blade. But...."
"There is no 'but,'" said he, with an impressive but rather dangerous
solemnity. "I say that the tigress came to earth just in front of me
and advanced upon me by one and by two. I had no time to reload and to
fire. I was all alone. What did I do?"
"That is what I was waiting to hear," I said. "It seems to me the
climax of the whole story. I trust that you seized its--or I should say
her--upper jaw with your left hand, lower jaw with your right hand, and
tore the head asunder. There is no quicker way with a tigress."
"You are wrong," said he.
"Did you not, then," said I, "suddenly fasten both hands upon its
throat and, digging your thumbs conversely from right and from left
upon its windpipe, strangle it to death? Such a manoeuvre is a matter
of moments, and he laughs best who laughs last."
"I did not," said he, in a rising anger.
At this moment the train began to slow down, and I knew the place it
was approaching, for I am very familiar with the line. A porter who did
not know me, but whom I secretly bribed, perceiving the danger of the
circumstances, took my bag and made a great noise with it and asked
a number of questions. Everybody got up, and the crowd of us began to
jostle down the gangway of the eating-car. The Hero was at first just
behind me, and was beginning to explain to me what exactly he did to
the tigress when we were unfortunately separated by two commercial
travellers, a professional singer, and a politician.
Fate dominates the lives of men, though Will is a corrective of Fate.
Men in a restaurant-car are like the leaves that flutter from trees
or like the particles of water in the eddying of a river. I drifted
from him further and further still. When we came out upon the crowded
platform I saw him, the Hero, waving his hand to me, desiring to
re-establish with me human and communicable things and to tell me
how he did at last destroy that mighty beast. But Fate, which is the
master of human things, would not have it so, and Will, which is but a
corrective of Fate for us poor humans, stood me in no stead. We drifted
apart; we never met again. He was off perhaps to shoot (and miss) some
other tigress (or, who knows, a tiger?) and I to another town where I
might yet again wonder at the complexity of the world and the justice
of God!
Anyhow, I never understood how he killed the tigress. Were it not for
the evidence of my senses I should be willing to believe that the
tigress killed him. But we must never believe anything that is even
apparently against the evidence of our senses.
Farewell, dear mortals!
OUR INHERITANCE
How noble is our inheritance. The more one thinks of it the more
suffused with pleasure one's mind becomes; for the inheritance of a man
living in this country is not one of this sort or of that sort, but
of all sorts. It is, indeed, a necessary condition for the enjoyment
of that inheritance that a man should be free, and we have really so
muddled things that very many men in England are not free, for they
have either to suffer a gross denial of mere opportunity--I mean
they cannot even leave their town for any distance--or they are so
persecuted by the insecurity of their lives that they have no room for
looking at the world, but if an Englishman is free what an inheritance
he has to enjoy!
It is the fashion of great nations to insist upon some part of their
inheritance, their military memories, or their letters, or their
religion, or some other thing. But in modern Europe, as it seems to
me, three or four of the great nations can play upon many such titles
to joy as upon an instrument. For a man in Italy, or England, or
France, or Spain, if he is weary of the manifold literature of his own
country can turn to its endurance under arms (in which respect, by
the way, victory and defeat are of little account), or if he is weary
of these military things, or thinks the too continued contemplation
of them hurtful to the State (as it often is, for it goes to the head
like wine), he can consider the great minds which his nation has
produced, and which give glory to his nation not so much because they
are great as because they are national. Then, again, he can consider
the landscapes of his own land, whether peaceably, as do older men, or
in a riot of enthusiasm as do all younger men who see England in the
midst of exercising their bodies, as it says in the Song of the Man who
Bicycled:
... and her distance and her sea.
Here is wealth that has no measure,
All wide England is my treasure,
Park and Close and private pleasure:
All her hills were made for me.
Then he can poke about the cities, and any one of them might occupy
him almost for a lifetime. Hereford, for instance. I know of nothing
in Europe like the Norman work of Hereford or Ludlow, where you will
perpetually find new things, or Leominster just below, or Ledbury just
below that again; and the inn at each of these three places is called
The Feathers.
Then a man may be pleased to consider the recorded history of this
country, and to inform the fields he knows with the past and with the
actions of men long dead. In this way he can use a battlefield with
no danger of any detestable insolence or vulgar civilian ways, for
the interest in a battlefield, if it is closely studied, becomes so
keen and hot that it burns away all foolish violence, and you will
soon find if you study this sort of terrain closely that you forget on
which side your sympathies fail or succeed: an excellent corrective
if, as it should be with healthy men, your sympathies too often warp
evidence and blind you. On this account also one should always suspect
the accuracy of military history when it betrays sneering or crowing,
because, in the first place, that is a very unmilitary way of looking
at battles, and, in the second place, it argues that the historian has
not properly gone into all his details. If he had he would have been
much too interested in such questions as the measurement of ranges, or,
latterly, the presence and nature of cover to bother about crowing or
sneering.
When a man tires of these there is left to him the music of his
country, by which I mean the tunes. These he can sing to himself as he
goes along, and if ever he tires of that there is the victuals and the
drink, which, if he has travelled, he may compare to their advantage
over those of any other land. But they must be national. Let him take
no pleasure in things cooked in a foreign way. There was a man some
time ago, in attempting to discover whose name I have spent too much
energy, who wrote a most admirable essay upon cold beef and pickles,
remarking that these two elements of English life are retreating
as it were into the strongholds where England is still holding out
against the dirty cosmopolitan mud which threatens every country
to-day. He traced the retreat of cold beef and pickles eastward towards
the City from the West End all along Piccadilly and the Strand right
into Fleet-street, where, he said, they were keeping their positions
manfully. They stand also isolated and besieged in one hundred happy
English country towns....
The trouble about writing an article like this is that one wanders
about: it is also the pleasure of it. The limits or trammels to
an article like this are that, by a recent and very dangerous
superstition, the printed truth is punishable at law, and all one's
memories of a thousand places upon the Icknield Way, the Stane Street,
the Pilgrim's Way, the Rivers Ouse (all three of them), the Cornish
Road, the Black Mountain, Ferry Side, the Three Rivers, all the
Pennines, all the Cheviots, all the Cotswolds, all the Mendips, all the
Chilterns, all the Malvern Hills, and all the Downs--to speak of but
a few--must be memories of praise--by order of the Court. One may not
blame: therefore I say nothing of Northwich.
* * * * * * *
Some men say that whereas wealth can be accumulated and left to others
when we die, this sort of inheritance can not, and that the great
pleasure a man took in his own land and the very many ways in which
he found that pleasure and his increase in that pleasure as his life
proceeded, all die with him. This you will very often hear deplored.
As noble a woman as ever lived in London used to say, speaking of her
father (and she also is dead), that all she valued in him died with
him, although he had left her a considerable fortune. By which she
meant that not only in losing him she had lost a rooted human affection
and had suffered what all must suffer, because there is a doom upon us,
but that those particular things in which he was particularly favoured
had gone away for ever. His power over other languages and over his own
language, his vast knowledge of his own county, his acquired courtesy
and humour, all mellowed by the world and time, these, she said, were
altogether gone. And to us of a younger generation it was her work to
lament that we should never know what had once been in England. Among
others she vastly admired the first Duke of Wellington, and said that
he was tall--which was absurd. Now this noble woman, it seems to me,
was in error, for all of us who have loved and enjoyed know not only
that we carry something with us elsewhere (as we are bound to believe),
but leave also in some manner which I do not clearly perceive a legacy
to our own people. We take with us that of which Peter Wanderwide spoke
when he said or rather sang these lines--
If all that I have loved and seen
Be with me on the Judgment Day,
I shall be saved the crowd between
From Satan and his foul array.
We carry it with us. And though it is not a virtue it is half a virtue,
and when we go down in the grave like the character in _Everyman_,
there will go down with us, I think, not only Good Deeds, a severe
female, but also a merry little hobbling comrade who winks and grins
and keeps just behind her so that he shall not be noticed and driven
away. This little fellow will also speak for us, I think, and he is the
Pleasure we took in this jolly world.
But I say that not only do we carry something with us, but that we
leave something also; and this has been best put, I think, by the poet
Ronsard when he was dying, who said, if I have rightly translated him,
this--
"Of all those vanities" (he is speaking of the things of this world),
"the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory--fame. No one of my time
has been so filled with it as I; I have lived in it and loved and
triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to
garner and possess it after I shall die. So do I go away from my own
place as satiated with the glory of this world as I am hungry and all
longing for that of God."
That is very good. It would be very difficult to put it better, and if
you complain that here Ronsard was only talking of fame or glory, why,
I can tell you that the pleasure one takes in one's country is of the
same stuff as fame. So true is this that the two commonly go together,
and that those become most glorious who have most enjoyed their own
land.
THE NEW ROAD
It is at once the most amusing and the most dramatic feature of our
time that we can foresee--for some few years ahead--material things.
Things moral escape us altogether. Never was there a generation of
Europeans who could less determine what the near future held for the
fate of national characters, of religions, or of styles in art; the
more foolish attempt to escape this ignorance by pretending that things
moral depend upon things material. They observe the cutting of a canal
and prophesy the decline of one nation upon its completion, the growth
of another--as though the power of nations armed resided in something
lower than the Mind, and as though the success of armies (upon which
all at last depends) were determined by the exchange of metals or by
new routes of trade. Meanwhile, though the future, even the immediate
future, of nations and of faiths is more closely hidden from us than
ever, yet it is entertaining, and, as I have said, it is even dramatic,
to watch our power of prophecy over material things.
We undertake works of such magnitude and spread over so long a span
of years, they are accomplished under such conditions of international
comprehension and security, that we can stand (sometimes) in a
desert place and say, "Here, in five years, will be a town," or on a
barren coast and say, "Here, in five years, will be a harbour." We
can distract ourselves by imagining the contrast beforehand and by
returning, when the work is done, to see how nearly one has imagined
the truth. Bizerta once afforded such an opportunity, Rosyth now
affords one, and so does that sight which set me writing this, and
which I have just witnessed in a remote and hitherto quite silent
valley. There, with little advertisement of public interest, one of the
immemorial high-roads of Europe is under restoration and is about to
return to life: the old High Road into Spain.
It is often remarked that the lines of European travel can hardly be
permanently altered, that Nature has designed them. Generations do
sometimes pass in which some profound change in man rather than in
Nature affects a few of the great roads. The Roman line from the south
northward, the highway from the Saone to the Straits of Dover, passing
by Laon and Amiens, was deflected as the Dark Ages closed round the
mind of Gaul. Water carriage succeeded the degraded high-roads. The
convergence of water-ways in the basin of Paris made that basin the
centre of travel, and the old way by Laon was forgotten. Yet modern
conditions restored it. The railway has done again what the Roman
engineers accomplished, and Laon is once again a halt upon the great
road southwards, and once again the most direct avenue from the Channel
to the Mediterranean follows the plain to the east of Paris. So it has
come to be with a road equally famous, equally forgotten, the High Road
from the North into Spain.