The walk from Oatlands Park Hotel to Cobham is beautiful with memorials
of Older England. Even on the grounds there is a quaint brick gateway,
which is the only relic of a palace which preceded the present pile. The
grandfather was indeed a stately edifice, built by Henry VIII., improved
and magnified, according to his lights, by Inigo Jones, and then
destroyed during the civil war. The river is here very beautiful, and
the view was once painted by Turner. It abounds in "short windings and
reaches." Here it is, indeed, the Olerifera Thamesis, as it was called
by Guillaume le Breton in his "Phillipeis," in the days of Richard the
Lion Heart. Here the eyots and banks still recall Norman days, for they
are "wild and were;" and there is even yet a wary otter or two, known to
the gypsies and fishermen, which may be seen of moonlight nights plunging
or swimming silently in the haunted water.
Now we pass Walton Church, and look in, that my friend may see the massy
Norman pillars and arches, the fine painted glass, and the brasses. One
of these represents John Selwyn, who was keeper of the royal park of
Oatlands in 1587. Tradition, still current in the village, says that
Selwyn was a man of wondrous strength and of rare skill in horsemanship.
Once, when Queen Elizabeth was present at a stag hunt, he leaped from his
horse upon the back of the stag, while both were running at full speed,
kept his seat gracefully, guided the animal towards the queen, and
stabbed him so deftly that he fell dead at her majesty's feet. It was
daintily done, and doubtless Queen Bess, who loved a proper man, was well
pleased. The brass plate represents Selwyn as riding on the stag, and
there is in the village a shop where the neat old dame who presides, or
her daughter, will sell you for a penny a picture of the plate, and tell
you the story into the bargain. In it the valiant ranger sits on the
stag, which he is stabbing through the neck with his _couteau de chasse_,
looking meanwhile as solemn as if he were sitting in a pew and listening
to _De profundis_. He who is great in one respect seldom fails in some
other, and there is in the church another and a larger brass, from which
it appears that Selwyn not only had a wife, but also eleven children, who
are depicted in successive grandeur or gradation. There are monuments by
Roubiliac and Chantrey in the church, and on the left side of the altar
lies buried William Lilly, the great astrologer, the Sidrophel of
Butler's "Hudibras." And look into the chancel. There is a tablet to
his memory, which was put up by Elias Ashmole, the antiquary, who has
left it in print that this "fair black marble stone" cost him 6 pounds
4_s_. 6_d_. When I was a youth, and used to pore in the old Franklin
Library of Philadelphia over Lilly, I never thought that his grave would
be so near my home. But a far greater literary favorite of mine lies
buried in the church-yard without. This is Dr. Maginn, the author of
"Father Tom and the Pope," and many another racy, subtle jest. A fellow
of infinite humor,--the truest disciple of Rabelais,--and here he lies
without a monument!
Summon the sexton, and let us ask him to show us the scold's, or
gossip's, bridle. This is a rare curiosity, which is kept in the vestry.
It would seem, from all that can be learned, that two hundred years ago
there were in England viragoes so virulent, women so gifted with gab and
so loaded and primed with the devil's own gunpowder, that all moral
suasion was wasted on them, and simply showed, as old Reisersberg wrote,
that _fatue agit qui ignem conatur extinguere sulphure_ ('t is all
nonsense to try to quench fire with brimstone). For such diavolas they
had made--what the sexton is just going to show you--a muzzle of thin
iron bars, which pass around the head and are padlocked behind. In front
a flat piece of iron enters the mouth and keeps down the tongue. On it
is the date 1633, and certain lines, no longer legible:--
"Chester presents Walton with a bridle,
To curb women's tongues that talk too idle."
A sad story, if we only knew it all! What tradition tells is that long
ago there was a Master Chester, who lost a fine estate through the idle,
malicious clack of a gossiping, lying woman. "What is good for a
bootless bene?" What he did was to endow the church with this admirable
piece of head-gear. And when any woman in the parish was unanimously
adjudged to be deserving of the honor, the bridle was put on her head and
tongue, and she was led about town by the beadle as an example to all the
scolding sisterhood. Truly, if it could only be applied to the women and
men who repeat gossip, rumors reports, _on dits_, small slanders, proved
or unproved, to all gobe-mouches, club-gabblers, tea-talkers and
tattlers, chatterers, church-twaddlers, wonderers
if-it-be-true-what-they-say; in fine, to the entire sister and brother
hood of tongue-waggers, I for one would subscribe my mite to have one
kept in every church in the world, to be zealously applied to their vile
jaws. For verily the mere Social Evil is an angel of light on this earth
as regards doing evil, compared to the Sociable Evil,--and thus endeth
the first lesson.
We leave the church, so full of friendly memories. In this one building
alone there are twenty things known to me from a boy. For from boyhood I
have held in my memory those lines by Queen Elizabeth which she uttered
here, and have read Lilly and Ashmole and Maginn; and this is only one
corner in merrie England! Am I a stranger here? There is a father-land
of the soul, which has no limits to him who, far sweeping on the wings of
song and history, goes forth over many lands.
We have but a little farther to go on our way before we come to the
quaint old manor-house which was of old the home of President Bradshaw,
the grim old Puritan. There is an old sailor in the village, who owns a
tavern, and he says, and the policeman agrees with him, that it was in
this house that the death-warrant of King Charles the First was signed.
Also, that there is a subterranean passage which leads from it to the
Thames, which was in some way connected with battle, murder, plots,
Puritans, sudden death, and politics; though how this was is more than
legend can clearly explain. Whether his sacred majesty was led to
execution through this cavity, or whether Charles the Second had it for
one of his numerous hiding-places, or returned through it with Nell Gwynn
from his exile, are other obscure points debated among the villagers.
The truth is that the whole country about Walton is subterrened with
strange and winding ways, leading no one knows whither, dug in the days
of the monks or knights, from one long-vanished monastery or castle to
the other. There is the opening to one of these hard by the hotel, but
there was never any gold found in it that ever I heard of. And all the
land is full of legend, and ghosts glide o' nights along the alleys, and
there is an infallible fairy well at hand, named the Nun, and within a
short walk stands the tremendous Crouch oak, which was known of Saxon
days. Whoever gives but a little of its bark to a lady will win her
love. It takes its name from _croix_ (a cross), according to Mr. Kemble,
{134} and it is twenty-four feet in girth. Its first branch, which is
forty-eight feet long, shoots out horizontally, and is almost as large as
the trunk. Under this tree Wickliffe preached, and Queen Elizabeth
dined.
It has been well said by Irving that the English, from the great
prevalence of rural habits throughout every class of society, have been
extremely fond of those festivals and holidays which agreeably interrupt
the stillness of country life. True, the days have gone when burlesque
pageant and splendid procession made even villages magnificent. Harp and
tabor and viol are no longer heard in every inn when people would be
merry, and men have forgotten how to give themselves up to headlong
roaring revelry. The last of this tremendous frolicking in Europe died
out with the last yearly _kermess_ in Amsterdam, and it was indeed
wonderful to see with what utter _abandon_ the usually stolid Dutch flung
themselves into a rushing tide of frantic gayety. Here and there in
England a spark of the old fire, lit in mediaeval times, still flickers,
or perhaps flames, as at Dorking in the annual foot-ball play, which is
carried on with such vigor that two or three thousand people run wild in
it, while all the windows and street lamps are carefully screened for
protection. But notwithstanding the gradually advancing republicanism of
the age, which is dressing all men alike, bodily and mentally, the
rollicking democracy of these old-fashioned festivals, in which the
peasant bonneted the peer without ceremony, and rustic maids ran races
_en chemise_ for a pound of tea, is entirely too leveling for culture.
There are still, however, numbers of village fairs, quietly conducted, in
which there is much that is pleasant and picturesque, and this at Cobham
was as pretty a bit of its kind as I ever saw. These are old-fashioned
and gay in their little retired nooks, and there the plain people show
themselves as they really are. The better class of the neighborhood,
having no sympathy with such sports or scenes, do not visit village
fairs. It is, indeed, a most exceptional thing to see any man who is a
"gentleman," according to the society standard, in any fair except
Mayfair in London.
Cobham is well built for dramatic display. Its White Lion Inn is of the
old coaching days, and the lion on its front is a very impressive
monster, one of the few relics of the days when signs were signs in
spirit and in truth. In this respect the tavern keeper of to-day is a
poor snob, that he thinks a sign painted or carven is degenerate and low,
and therefore announces, in a line of letters, that his establishment is
the Pig and Whistle, just as his remote predecessor thought it was low,
or slow, or old-fashioned to dedicate his ale-shop to Pigen Wassail or
Hail to the Virgin, and so changed it to a more genteel and secular form.
In the public place were rows of booths arranged in streets forming
_imperium in imperio_, a town within a town. There was of course the
traditional gilt gingerbread, and the cheering but not inebriating
ginger-beer, dear to the youthful palate, and not less loved by the tired
pedestrian, when, mixed half and half with ale, it foams before him as
_shandy gaff_. There, too, were the stands, presided over by jaunty,
saucy girls, who would load a rifle for you and give you a prize or a
certain number of shots for a shilling. You may be a good shot, but the
better you shoot the less likely will you be to hit the bull's-eye with
the rifle which that black-eyed Egyptian minx gives you; for it is
artfully curved and false-sighted, and the rifle was made only to rifle
your pocket, and the damsel to sell you with her smiles, and the doll is
stuffed with sawdust, and life is not worth living for, and Miching
Mallocko says it,--albeit I believe he lives at times as if there might
be moments when it was forgot.
And we had not been long on the ground before we were addressed furtively
and gravely by a man whom it required a second glance to recognize as
Samuel Petulengro, so artfully was he disguised as a simple-seeming
agriculturalist of the better lower-class. But that there remained in
Sam's black eyes that glint of the Romany which nothing could disguise,
one would have longed to buy a horse of him. And in the same quiet way
there came, one by one, out of the crowd, six others, all speaking in
subdued voices, like conspirators, and in Romany, as if it were a sin.
And all were dressed rustically, and the same with intent to deceive, and
all had the solemn air of very small farmers, who must sell that horse at
any sacrifice. But when I saw Sam's horses I marked that his disguise of
himself was nothing to the wondrous skill with which he had converted his
five-pound screws into something comparatively elegant. They had been
curried, clipped, singed, and beautified to the last resource, and the
manner in which the finest straw had been braided into mane and tail was
a miracle of art. This was _jour de fete_ for Sam and his _diddikai_, or
half-blood pals; his foot was on his native heath in the horse-fair,
where all inside the ring knew the gypsy, and it was with pride that he
invited us to drink ale, and once in the bar-room, where all assembled
were jockeys and sharps, conversed loudly in Romany, in order to exhibit
himself and us to admiring friends. A Romany rye, on such occasions, is
to a Sam Petulengro what a scion of royalty is to minor aristocracy when
it can lure him into its nets. To watch one of these small horse-dealers
at a fair, and to observe the manner in which he conducts his bargains,
is very curious. He lounges about all day, apparently doing nothing; he
is the only idler around. Once in a while somebody approaches him and
mutters something, to which he gives a brief reply. Then he goes to a
tap-room or stable-yard, and is merged in a mob of his mates. But all
the while he is doing sharp clicks of business. There is somebody
talking to another party about _that horse_; somebody telling a farmer
that he knows a young man as has got a likely 'oss at 'arf price, the
larst of a lot which he wants to clear out, and it may be 'ad, but if the
young man sees 'im [the farmer] he may put it on 'eavy.
Then the agent calls in one of the disguised Romanys to testify to the
good qualities of the horse. They look at it, but the third _deguise_,
who has it in charge, avers that it has just been sold to a gentleman.
But they have another. By this time the farmer wishes he had bought the
horse. When any coin slips from between our fingers, and rolls down
through a grating into the sewer, we are always sure that it was a
sovereign, and not a half-penny. Yes, and the fish which drops back from
the line into the river is always the biggest take--or mistake--of the
day. And this horse was a bargain, and the three in disguise say so, and
wish they had a hundred like it. But there comes a Voice from the
depths, a casual remark, offering to bet that 'ere gent won't close on
that hoss. "Bet yer ten bob he will." "Done." "How do yer know he
don't take the hoss?" "He carn't; he's too heavy loaded with Bill's
mare. Says he'll sell it for a pound better." The farmer begins to see
his way. He is shrewd; it may be that he sees through all this myth of
"the gentleman." But his attention has been attracted to the horse.
Perhaps he pays a little more, or "the pound better;" in greater
probability he gets Sam's horse for the original price. There are many
ways among gypsies of making such bargains, but the motive power of them
all is _taderin_, or drawing the eye of the purchaser, a game not unknown
to Gorgios. I have heard of a German _yahud_ in Philadelphia, whose
little boy Moses would shoot from the door with a pop-gun or squirt at
passers-by, or abuse them vilely, and then run into the shop for shelter.
They of course pursued him and complained to the parent, who immediately
whipped his son, to the great solace of the afflicted ones. And then the
afflicted seldom failed to buy something in that shop, and the corrected
son received ten per cent. of the profit. The attention of the public
had been drawn.
As we went about looking at people and pastimes, a Romany, I think one of
the Ayres, said to me,--
"See the two policemen? They're following you two gentlemen. They saw
you pallin' with Bowers. That Bowers is the biggest blackguard on the
roads between London and Windsor. I don't want to hurt his charackter,
but it's no bad talkin' nor _dusherin_ of him to say that no decent
Romanys care to go with him. Good at a mill? Yes, he's that. A reg'lar
_wastimengro_, I call him. And that's why it is."
Now there was in the fair a vast institution which proclaimed by a
monstrous sign and by an excessive eruption of advertisement that it was
THE SENSATION OF THE AGE. This was a giant hand-organ in connection with
a forty-bicycle merry-go-round, all propelled by steam. And as we walked
about the fair, the two rural policemen, who had nothing better to do,
shadowed or followed us, their bucolic features expressing the intensest
suspicion allied to the extremest stupidity; when suddenly the Sensation
of the Age struck up the Gendarme's chorus, "We'll run 'em in," from
Genevieve de Brabant, and the arrangement was complete. Of all airs ever
composed this was the most appropriate to the occasion, and therefore it
played itself. The whole formed quite a little opera-bouffe, gypsies not
being wanting. And as we came round, in our promenade, the pretty girl,
with her rifle in hand, implored us to take a shot, and the walk wound up
by her finally letting fly herself and ringing the bell.
That pretty girl might or might not have a touch of Romany blood in her
veins, but it is worth noting that among all these show-men and
show-women, acrobats, exhibitors of giants, purse-droppers,
gingerbread-wheel gamblers, shilling knife-throwers, pitch-in-his-mouths,
Punches, Cheap-Jacks, thimble-rigs, and patterers of every kind there is
always a leaven and a suspicion of gypsiness. If there be not descent,
there is affinity by marriage, familiarity, knowledge of words and ways,
sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom
as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong
together. It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody
quite understands it. No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet
_clearly_ explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population,
excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of
English people like ourselves. It is leavened with direct Indian blood;
it has, more or less modified, a peculiar _morale_. It was old before
the Saxon heptarchy.
I was very much impressed at this fair with the extensive and unsuspected
amount of Romany existent in our rural population. We had to be
satisfied, as we came late into the tavern for lunch, with cold boiled
beef and carrots, of which I did not complain, as cold carrots are much
nicer than warm, a fact too little understood in cookery. There were
many men in the common room, mostly well dressed, and decent even if
doubtful looking. I observed that several used Romany words in casual
conversation. I came to the conclusion at last that all who were present
knew something of it. The greatly reprobated Bowers was not himself a
gypsy, but he had a gypsy wife. He lived in a cottage not far from
Walton, and made baskets, while his wife roamed far and near, selling
them; and I have more than once stopped and sent for a pot of ale, and
shared it with Bill, listening meantime to his memories of the road as he
caned chairs or "basketed." I think his reputation came rather from a
certain Bohemian disregard of _convenances_ and of appearances than from
any deeply-seated sinfulness. For there are Bohemians even among
gypsies; everything in this life being relative and socially-contractive.
When I came to know the disreputable William well, I found in him the
principles of Panurge, deeply identified with the _morale_ of Falstaff; a
wondrous fund of unbundled humor, which expressed itself more by tones
than words; a wisdom based on the practices of the prize-ring; and a
perfectly sympathetic admiration of my researches into Romany. One day,
at Kingston Fair, as I wished to depart, I asked Bill the way to the
station. "I will go with you and show you," he said. But knowing that
he had business in the fair I declined his escort. He looked at me as if
hurt.
"_Does tute pen mandy'd chore tute_?" (Do you think I would rob _you_ or
pick your pockets?) For he believed I was afraid of it. I knew Bill
better. I knew that he was perfectly aware that I was about the only man
in England who had a good opinion of him in any way, or knew what good
there was in him. When a _femme incomprise_, a woman not as yet found
out, discovers at last the man who is so much a master of the art of
flattery as to satisfy somewhat her inordinate vanity, she is generally
grateful enough to him who has thus gratified her desires to refrain from
speaking ill of him, and abuse those who do, especially the latter. In
like manner, Bill Bowers, who was every whit as interesting as any _femme
incomprise_ in Belgravia, or even Russell Square, believing that I had a
little better opinion of him than anybody else, would not only have
refrained from robbing me, but have proceeded to lam with his fists
anybody else who would have done so,--the latter proceeding being, from
his point of view, only a light, cheerful, healthy, and invigorating
exercise, so that, as he said, and as I believe truthfully, "I'd rather
be walloped than not fight." Even as my friend H. had rather lose than
not play "farrer."
This was a very pretty little country fair at Cobham; pleasant and purely
English. It was very picturesque, with its flags, banners, gayly
bedecked booths, and mammoth placards, there being, as usual, no lack of
color or objects. I wonder that Mr. Frith, who has given with such
idiomatic genius the humors of the Derby, has never painted an
old-fashioned rural fair like this. In a few years the last of them will
have been closed, and the last gypsy will be there to look on.
There was a pleasant sight in the afternoon, when all at once, as it
seemed to me, there came hundreds of pretty, rosy-cheeked children into
the fair. There were twice as many of them as of grown people. I think
that, the schools being over for the day, they had been sent a-fairing
for a treat. They swarmed in like small bee-angels, just escaped from
some upset celestial hive; they crowded around the booths, buying little
toys, chattering, bargaining, and laughing, when my eye caught theirs, as
though to be noticed was the very best joke in the whole world. They
soon found out the Sensation of the Age, and the mammoth steam bicycle
was forthwith crowded with the happy little creatures, raptured in all
the glory of a ride. The cars looked like baskets full of roses. It was
delightful to see them: at first like grave and stolid little
Anglo-Saxons, occupied seriously with the new Sensation; then here and
there beaming with thawing jollity; then smiling like sudden sun-gleams;
and then laughing, until all were in one grand chorus, as the speed
became greater, and the organ roared out its notes as rapidly as a
runaway musical locomotive, and the steam-engine puffed in time, until a
high-pressure scream told that the penn'orth of fun was up.
As we went home in the twilight, and looked back at the trees and roofs
of the village, in dark silhouette against the gold-bronze sky, and heard
from afar and fitfully the music of the Great Sensation mingled with the
beat of a drum and the shouts of the crowd, rising and falling with the
wind, I felt a little sad, that the age, in its advancing refinement, is
setting itself against these old-fashioned merry-makings, and shrinking
like a weakling from all out-of-doors festivals, on the plea of their
being disorderly, but in reality because they are believed to be vulgar.
They come down to us from rough old days; but they are relics of a time
when life, if rough, was at least kind and hearty. We admire that life
on the stage, we ape it in novels, we affect admiration and appreciation
of its rich picturesqueness and vigorous originality, and we lie in so
doing; for there is not an aesthetic prig in London who could have lived
an hour in it. Truly, I should like to know what Francois Villon and
Chaucer would have thought of some of their modern adorers, or what the
lioness Fair-sinners of the olden time would have had to say to the
nervous weaklings who try to play the genial blackguard in their praise!
It is to me the best joke of the age that those who now set themselves up
for priests of the old faith are the men, of all others, whom the old
gods would have kicked, _cum magna injuria_, out of the temple. When I
sit by Bill Bowers, as he baskets, and hear the bees buzz about his
marigolds, or in Plato Buckland's van, or with a few hearty and true men
of London town of whom I wot, _then_ I know that the old spirit liveth in
its ashes; but there is little of it, I trow, among its penny
prig-trumpeters.