THE CAPTAIN MAKES HISTORY
One day George entered the churchyard and set his face towards a big
sycamore, with the resolution of setting his back against it. He had
been tempted by the wide trunk and smooth bark for a long time; but his
attempt to reach the tree failed entirely because it stood upon the
unfrequented side of the churchyard, and was surrounded by an
entanglement of brambles and nettles some yards in depth.
Determined to reach that sycamore somehow, George complained to his
uncle about the abominable condition of the churchyard; and Captain
Drake reprimanded the vicar for "allowing the resting places of our
historic dead to become a trackless jungle;" and the vicar once more
implored the sexton to give up the public-house; and the sexton declared
there were no such blackberries in all the parish as could be gathered
from those brambles.
The matter would have ended there had it not been for Captain Drake, who
visited the territory, explored to within fifteen feet of the sycamore,
then called a meeting of parishioners and, with the aid of diagrams,
showed how the foremost line of nettles was advancing so rapidly in a
north-westerly direction as to threaten the main approach to the vestry;
while a screen of brambles had already reached a nameless altar tomb
whereon the youth of the place by traditional right recorded their
initials.
The seriousness of the weed peril had not been realised until then; as
the Dumpy Philosopher remarked, they had all been asleep and thus had
been taken unprepared; but, when the parishioners did realise it, an
army of offence was raised quickly; the nettles were eradicated and the
brambles uprooted; that portion of the churchyard was thrown open to the
public; and George attained his resting place beside the sycamore.
He had lounged against it several times before his eyes fell upon an
inscription which appeared familiar, although obscured by moss and
yellow lichen. As the tombstone was not more than three yards away, he
was able to reach it without much difficulty. Reclining upon the turf,
he summoned up energy to open his pocketknife and to scrape away the
lichen until the full meaning of the discovery burst upon him.
Later in the day the Yellow Leaf met Squinting Jack, and said, "I saw
Mr. Drake running like wildfire down the street this forenoon. If I
hadn't seen 'en wi' my own eyes, I wouldn't ha' believed it."
"I saw 'en too wi' my own eyes," replied Squinting Jack. "And still I
don't believe it."
Captain Drake would have run too had there been less of him. George had
never been a liar--the poor fellow had no imagination and rarely picked
up a newspaper--still his story sounded too impossible to be true. They
reached the newly discovered tombstone; the Captain read the
inscription; and in a voice trembling with emotion murmured, "Amelia
Drake, of Black Anchor Farm, in this parish."
The portion of stone which bore the date of her departure had sunk into
the ground.
"George, my lad," cried the Captain, "this is the grave of my long-lost
great-grandmother."
"The missing link," added the nephew, with the joyous certainty of one
about to negotiate a loan.
"Our pedigree is now complete. I am certain my father used to speak of a
rumour which insisted that his grandmother's name was Amelia; and now we
have discovered she lived in this parish, at Black Anchor Farm, which no
doubt had passed to her husband--who is down on the pedigree as having
been probably lost at sea--from the lineal descendant of the great
Founder himself. The name of the farm proves that. You see, George, the
reference is to a black anchor, a new freshly tarred anchor, not to an
old rusty red one. I must have the stone cleaned. And we will show our
respect by planting roses here."
"If it hadn't been for me, this grave would never have been discovered,"
said George, ready to produce a statement of his bankruptcy.
"That's true, my lad. It's the best day's work you have ever done in
your life."
"Skilled labour, too," reminded George, still advertising.
"I won't forget," his uncle promised.
Black Anchor Farm was situated about two miles from the centre of the
village. It was not a place to covet, consisting of a mean little
thatched house; stable and barn of cob walls propped up by pieces of
timber; and half a dozen fields which brought forth furze and bracken in
great abundance. People named Slack occupied the place; the man was a
lame dwarf who tried to work sometimes, but honestly preferred poaching;
the woman went about in rags and begged; while the children were little
savages, kept from school by their father, and trained to steal by their
mother.
The Captain refused to be discouraged when he visited the home of his
ancestors and discovered a hovel; but wrote to the owner for
information, interviewed the vicar, turned up the registers, and
consulted the Yellow Leaf.
The letter was answered by a solicitor, who expressed his sorrow at
never having heard of the family of Drake. The vicar mentioned that the
name Anchor occurred frequently in the neighbourhood, and was
undoubtedly a corruption of Anchoret, which signified a person who
sought righteousness by retiring from a world of sin. He considered it
probable that the site had been occupied formerly by the cell of a
hermit who had distinguished himself by wearing a black cloak.
Although the Captain gave days and nights to the registers, he could
find no entry concerning his family, of whom most, he was convinced, had
been lost at sea, apart from the funeral of Amelia Drake. The Yellow
Leaf, after remaining some days in a state of meditation, distinctly
recalled a tradition concerning a lady (the Captain thanked him for the
lady) who had lived alone at Black Anchor Farm for a number of years,
receiving no visitors, and leaving the place only to obtain fresh
supplies of liquid consolation. The end of her history was so unpleasant
he did not care to dwell upon it, but apparently this lady was
discovered at last ready for her funeral, and according to report it was
a pity she had not been discovered earlier.
Still the Captain refused to be discouraged. His nobility of character
would not permit him to disown the memory of his great-grandmother,
although he thought it terribly sad she should have sunk so low. If she,
during recurring fits of temporary insanity, had disgraced the great
name, he had added lustre to it. If the former country residence of Sir
Francis Drake had fallen into a ruinous condition, it should be his
privilege to restore it with a few magic touches of the pen. He resolved
to devote the remaining years of his life to the writing of _A History
of the Parish of Highfield_.
"The vicar was not altogether mistaken, my love," he remarked to Mrs.
Drake. "He associates the name of Black Anchor with a hermit who wore a
dark coloured vestment of some description, and no doubt he is right. My
unfortunate great-grandmother did live there entirely alone, and would
naturally be regarded as a hermit by the superstitious people of this
parish. And we need not be surprised to discover that she always wore
black--silk or velvet, I presume--the last poor remnants of her former
greatness. It is an established fact, I believe, that elderly ladies
generally wear black."
As a compiler of history the Captain was in many ways well equipped. He
wrote rapidly, which was of great importance, because the least relevant
chapter in the life of a parish required a vast number of words. He
possessed a gift of making the past real because he owned a powerful
imagination. While confidence in his own abilities freed him from a
slavish adherence to facts which could serve no useful purpose.
Realising the importance of concentrating upon some particular feature,
in order that the narrative might be made continuous, he had not the
slightest difficulty in selecting that feature. The keynote of the
entire work was sounded by the opening sentence:
"Although the Parish of Highfield is but little known to Englishmen, and
occupies an extremely small portion of the map, being entirely excluded
from the standard Atlas used in schools--in our opinion
unjustifiably--it must nevertheless remain for ever famous on account of
its associations with the sublime name of Drake."
The opening chapter dealt with the destruction of the Spanish _Armada_.
The second gave an account of the arrival of Sir Francis Drake in
Highfield parish, fully describing his purchase of a site and the
erection of a stately manor house, of which unfortunately nothing
remained except a few fragments "fraught with sweet Elizabethan
memories." The site was still known as Black Anchor, which was
undoubtedly the name conferred by the great Admiral upon his country
residence, because he regarded it as a place to which he could retire
from the world, where he could muse amid the solitude of nature, where
he could rest, or, in the phrase of the seaman, "cast his anchor." It
was here that Queen Elizabeth visited him, and, according to some
authorities who seemed to deserve serious attention, it was here, and
not in London, that the Queen conferred the honour of knighthood upon
this magnificent bulwark of her throne.
The third chapter was devoted entirely to the royal visit, concerning
which tradition was happily not silent. It was indeed a simple matter to
follow the Queen's progress towards its culminating point, which was
unquestionably Highfield Manor, as Black Anchor Farm was known in those
days, through the adjoining parishes, all possessing manors of which
some had survived to the present time, but most had fallen down, at each
of which the royal lady had enjoyed a few hours' slumber.
Several pages were allotted to this habit of Elizabeth, who was
apparently unable to travel more than five miles without going to bed;
and in these the author sought to prove the existence of some malady, a
kind of travelling sickness, no doubt exaggerated by the roughness of
the roads and constant jolting of the coach, so that the physician in
attendance felt himself compelled to advise his royal mistress to sleep
at every village through which she passed.
The peculiarities of monarchs, remarked the author, are more conspicuous
than the virtues or vices of ordinary people. The nervousness of King
Charles the Second was no less remarkable than Queen Elizabeth's
recurring fits of somnolence: he was continually retiring into
cupboards, standing behind doors, or climbing into oak trees, owing to a
morbid dread of being looked at. King Charles had secreted himself
inside a cupboard within the boundaries of Highfield parish, but this
was not to be regarded as a coincidence, for a patient inquiry into
local traditions elicited the fact that, wherever Queen Elizabeth had
slept in the best bed of the manor house, King Charles had climbed a
tree (usually the common oak, _Quercus robur_) in the garden. As the
writer was dealing with the parish of Highfield only, it would be
outside the scope of his work to give a list of villages, in Devonshire
alone, which claimed to possess pillows upon which Elizabeth had deigned
to rest her weary head; but he was satisfied that the Highfield pillow
had been stored away in precisely the same cupboard used by Charles
during one of his secretive moments. Both these interesting relics had
been destroyed, as was customary, by fire.
The fourth chapter flourished the Drake pedigree, copied from the
original document in the author's possession; and went on to give a
pathetic account of Amelia, the lonely and eccentric lady who was the
last representative of the famous family to reside at Highfield Manor.
Three facts concerning her could be stated with certainty: she was of a
singularly retiring nature, she was accustomed to wear a black silk
dress upon all occasions, and she was murdered by some unknown ruffian
for the sake of certain valuable heirlooms she was known to possess. It
appeared probable that she was a poetess as, according to local
tradition, she could frequently be heard singing; while her fondness for
cats, a weakness which had descended to her great-grandson, was a
clearly marked feature of her character.
The fifth chapter was a triumph of literary and artistic handiwork. Even
Mrs. Drake, who did not approve of the undertaking because she had to
meet the expenses of publication, felt bound to admit that, if William
had not chosen to become a great sea-captain, a certain other William,
who had written plays for a living, might conceivably have been toppled
from his eminence; for nothing could have been more thrilling than the
story of a family vault, "filled with the bones and memories of the
greatest centuries in British history," becoming first neglected, then
forgotten, and finally overgrown by brambles and nettles: a vault, let
the reader remember, not containing rude forefathers of the hamlet, but
members of the family of Drake; a vault, not situated in the Ethiopian
desert, nor abandoned within some Abyssinian jungle, but built beneath
the turf of an English churchyard hard by a simple country Bethel. This
vault became entirely lost! Summer followed spring, autumn preceded
winter, year after year, while the nettles increased, and the brambles
encroached yet more upon the consecrated ground, until the very site of
the famous vault was lost to sight--this sentence being the one literary
flaw upon an otherwise perfect chapter--and the oldest inhabitant had
ceased to tell of its existence.
Here the _History of the Parish of Highfield_ was interrupted by some
chapters dealing with the birth, education, early struggles, voyages,
adventures, success, and retirement of Captain Francis Drake; together
with an account of Mrs. Drake and her relations; with a flattering
notice of George Drake, Esquire, who was later to win renown as the
explorer of Highfield churchyard and the discoverer of the long-missing
vault. It was shown also how the Captain had been guided by Providence
to the village, formerly the home of his ancestors, and how "the lure of
the place had been nothing but the silver cord of an hereditary
attraction stretched through the centuries to reach the golden bowl of
his soul." Mrs. Drake objected to this sentence, and the printer made
still stranger stuff of it; but George upheld his uncle's contention
that poetical prose could not be out of place in a work dealing with the
origin and progress of a wayside village.
At this point the author interpolated, by means of footnotes, a few
remarks, which he owned were unconnected with the purport of his work:
Domesday Book alluded to Highfield in one deplorably curt sentence; the
church contained nothing of interest; an oak tree, which had formerly
shaded the village green, no longer existed; the views were local,
charming, and full of variety; the streams contained fish; botanists
would discover furze and heather upon the adjacent moorland; the name of
the place was derived probably from two Anglo-Saxon words which
signified a field standing in a high place.
The author arrived at that fateful day when George, led by his interest
in arboriculture to inspect a magnificent specimen of sycamore upon the
south side of the churchyard, found his progress checked by tangled
growths which, to the eternal disgrace of the parish, had been permitted
to conceal "the precious memorial and cradle of British supremacy upon
the main." Mrs. Drake opposed this sentence still more strongly, but the
Captain pleaded inspiration and retained it.
There followed a stirring account of "the wave of indignation that burnt
with its hot iron the souls of the villagers, when their attention had
been drawn to a state of neglect which threatened to deprive them of the
obvious benefits of their own burying ground, and was rapidly making it
impossible for the mourner to drop the scalding tear or the fragrant
flower upon the sepulchre of some dear lost one." A vivid page described
the destruction of brambles and nettles, the removal of five cart loads,
the subsequent bonfire in which "these emblems of Thor and Woden melted
into flame and were dissipated into diaphanous smoke clouds."
The style unfortunately became confused when the author dealt at length
with the actual Discovery, and represented himself as head of the family
kneeling in humble thankfulness beside the mouldering stone marking the
hallowed spot where Drakes lay buried.
The work included with an account of Windward House, a description of
the furniture, a complete list of the antiquities, among which, owing to
a printer's error, appeared the names of Kezia and Bessie; with a
reference to the cats, monkeys, parrots, and giant tortoise. Then
Captain Drake lay down his pen, put aside the well-thumbed dictionary,
and, calling wife and nephew, informed them solemnly, "The last words
are written. I have rounded off my existence with a book."
Nothing much was said for some minutes. The author was obviously
struggling with emotion; Mrs. Drake put her handkerchief to her eyes;
George smiled in a nervous fashion and trifled with the coppers in both
pockets. Kezia and Bessie were called in and the news was broken to
them: the Parish of Highfield now possessed a history.
"This," said the Captain gently, "is one of the great moments in the
thrilling record of a most distinguished family. I feel as the sublime
founder must have done while standing with wooden bowl in his hand
gazing across the sparkling sea." Then he murmured brokenly, "Heaven
bless you all," and stumbled from the room.
When the publisher sent in his estimate, Mrs. Drake was quite unable to
understand how a newspaper could be sold for one halfpenny. The leading
item, which was a charge for sufficient paper to print one thousand
copies, came as a revelation to her; for she had always supposed that
paper, like string and pins, could be had for nothing. As the publisher
pressed strongly for a few illustrations of local scenery, the Captain
was compelled to sacrifice, for economical reasons, three chapters of
his voyages, together with the whole of his valuable footnotes. When
George suggested that the history of the parish itself did not appear to
be treated with that fullness the Captain was capable of giving it, the
old gentleman replied, "What we lose in the letterpress we'll make up by
the pictures. I quite agree with the printer, my lad: the beauty and
dignity of my work will be enhanced considerably by the addition of a
few engravings."
Six photographs were therefore taken exclusively for this volume, by the
son of the postmistress who was an expert with the camera; and
reproduced by the usual special process upon a particularly valuable
kind of Oriental paper. The frontispiece represented Captain Francis
Drake in a characteristic attitude. The five other illustrations
depicted Windward House from the southeast; present day aspect of Black
Anchor Farm; George Drake, Esquire, discoverer of the missing vault;
stone marking site of vault and bearing the name of Amelia Drake; and
finally, Captain Francis Drake in another characteristic attitude, with
Mrs. Drake in the background. The lady, having shifted behind her
husband during the moment of exposure, has disappeared entirely.
Two copies were sold. The vicar bought one out of a sense of duty, while
the Dismal Gibcat purchased the other, to discover whether there was
anything in it which would justify him in bringing an action for libel.
Both were disappointed.