UNCLE SPENCER

Some people I know can look back over the long series of their childish

holidays and see in their memory always a different landscape--chalk

downs or Swiss mountains; a blue and sunny sea or the grey,

ever-troubled fringe of the ocean; heathery moors under the cloud with

far away a patch of sunlight on the hills, golden as happiness and,

like happiness, remote, precarious, impermanent, or the untroubled

waters of Como, the cypresses and the Easter roses.

I envy them the variety of their impressions. For it is good to have

seen something of the world with childish eyes, disinterestedly

and uncritically, observing not what is useful or beautiful and

interesting, but only such things as, to a being less than four

feet high and having no knowledge of life or art, seem immediately

significant. It is the beggars, it is the green umbrellas under

which the cabmen sit when it rains, not Brunelleschi’s dome, not the

extortions of the hotel-keeper, not the tombs of the Medici that

impress the childish traveller. Such impressions, it is true, are of

no particular value to us when we are grown up. (The famous wisdom of

babes, with those childish intimations of immortality and all the rest,

never really amounted to very much; and the man who studies the souls

of children in the hope of finding out something about the souls of

men is about as likely to discover something important as the man who

thinks he can explain Beethoven by referring him to the savage origins

of music or religion by referring it to the sexual instincts.) None the

less, it is good to have had such childish impressions, if only for

the sake of comparing (so that we may draw the philosophic moral) what

we saw of a place when we were six or seven with what we see again at

thirty.

My holidays had no variety. From the time when I first went to my

preparatory school to the time when my parents came back for good

from India--I was sixteen or seventeen then, I suppose--they were all

passed with my Uncle Spencer. For years the only places on the earth’s

surface of which I had any knowledge were Eastbourne, where I was at

school; Dover (and that reduced itself to the harbour and station),

where I embarked; Ostend, where Uncle Spencer met me; Brussels, where

we changed trains; and finally Longres in Limburg, where my Uncle

Spencer owned the sugar factory, which his mother, my grandmother, had

inherited in her turn from her Belgian father, and had his home.

Hanging over the rail of the steamer as it moved slowly, stern

foremost, through the narrow gullet of Ostend harbour, I used to

strain my eyes, trying to pick out from among the crowd at the quay’s

edge the small, familiar figure. And always there he was, waving his

coloured silk handkerchief, shouting inaudible greetings and advice,

getting in the way of the porters and ticket-collectors, fidgeting with

a hardly controllable impatience behind the barrier, until at last,

squeezed and almost suffocated amongst the grown men and women--whom

the process of disembarkation transformed as though by some malevolent

Circean magic into brute beasts, reasonless and snarling--I struggled

to shore, clutching in one hand my little bag and with the other

holding to my head, if it was summer, a speckled straw, gaudy with the

school colours; if winter, a preposterous bowler, whose eclipsing

melon crammed over my ears made me look like a child in a comic paper

pretending to be grown up.

“Well, here you are, here you are,” my Uncle Spencer would say,

snatching my bag from me. “Eleven minutes late.” And we would dash for

the custom-house as though our lives depended on getting there before

the other trans-beasted passengers.

My Uncle Spencer was a man of about forty when first I came from my

preparatory school to stay with him. Thin he was, rather short, very

quick, agile, and impulsive in his movements, with small feet and

small, delicate hands. His face was narrow, clear-cut, steep, and

aquiline; his eyes dark and extraordinarily bright, deeply set under

overhanging brows; his hair was black, and he wore it rather long,

brushed back from his forehead. At the sides of his head it had already

begun to go grey, and above his ears, as it were, two grey wings were

folded against his head, so that, to look at him, one was reminded of

Mercury in his winged cap.

“Hurry up!” he called. And I scampered after him. “Hurry up!” But of

course there was no use whatever in our hurrying; for even when we

had had my little hand-bag examined, there was always the registered

trunk to wait for; and that, for my Uncle Spencer, was agony. For

though our places in the Brussels express were reserved, though he

knew that the train would not in any circumstances start without us,

this intellectual certainty was not enough to appease his passionate

impatience, to allay his instinctive fears.

“Terribly slow,” he kept repeating. “Terribly slow.” And for the

hundredth time he looked at his watch. “Dites-moi,” he would say, yet

once more, to the sentry at the door of the customs-house, “le grand

bagage...?” until in the end the fellow, exasperated by these questions

which it was not his business to answer, would say something rude;

upon which my Uncle Spencer, outraged, would call him _mal élevé_ and

a _grossier personnage_--to the fury of the sentry but correspondingly

great relief of his own feelings; for after such an outburst he could

wait in patience for a good five minutes, so far forgetting his anxiety

about the trunk that he actually began talking to me about other

subjects, asking how I had got on this term at school, what was my

batting average, whether I liked Latin, and whether Old Thunderguts,

which was the name we gave to the headmaster on account of his noble

baritone, was still as ill-tempered as ever.

But at the end of the five minutes, unless the trunk had previously

appeared, my Uncle Spencer began looking at his watch again.

“Scandalously slow,” he said. And addressing himself to another

official, “Dites-moi, monsieur, le grand bagage...?”

But when at last we were safely in the train and there was nothing

to prevent him from deploying all the graces and amiabilities of his

character, my Uncle Spencer, all charm and kindness now, devoted

himself wholeheartedly to me.

“Look!” he said; and from the pocket of his overcoat he pulled out a

large and dampish parcel of whose existence my nose had long before

made me aware. “Guess what’s in here.”

“Prawns,” I said, without an instant’s hesitation.

And prawns it was, a whole kilo of them. And there we sat in opposite

corners of our first-class carriage, with the little folding table

opened out between us and the pink prawns on the table, eating with

infinite relish and throwing the rosy carapaces, the tails, and the

sucked heads out of the window. And the Flemish plain moved past us;

the long double files of poplars, planted along the banks of the

canals, along the fringes of the high roads, moving as we moved,

marched parallel with our course or presented, as we crossed them at

right angles, for one significant flashing moment the entrance to

Hobbema’s avenue. And now the belfries of Bruges beckoned from far off

across the plain; a dozen more shrimps and we were roaring through

its station, all gloom and ogives in honour of Memling and the Gothic

past. By the time we had eaten another hectogram of prawns, the modern

quarter of Ghent was reminding us that art was only five years old and

had been invented in Vienna. At Alost the factory chimneys smoked;

and before we knew where we were, we were almost on the outskirts of

Brussels, with two or three hundred grammes of sea-fruit still intact

on the table before us.

“Hurry up!” cried my Uncle Spencer, threatened by another access of

anxiety. “We must finish them before we get to Brussels.”

And during the last five miles we ate furiously, shell and all; there

was hardly time even to spit out the heads and tails.

“Nothing like prawns,” my Uncle Spencer never failed to say, as the

express drew slowly into the station at Brussels, and the last tails

and whiskers with the fishy paper were thrown out of the window.

“Nothing like prawns when the brain is tired. It’s the phosphorus, you

know. After all your end-of-term examinations you need them.” And then

he patted me affectionately on the shoulder.

How often since then have I repeated in all earnestness my Uncle

Spencer’s words. “It’s the phosphorus,” I assure my fagged friends, as

I insist that they shall make their lunch off shellfish. The words come

gushing spontaneously out of me; the opinion that prawns and oysters

are good for brain-fag is very nearly one of my fundamental and, so to

say, instinctive beliefs. But sometimes, as I say the words, suddenly

I think of my Uncle Spencer. I see him once more sitting opposite me

in a corner of the Brussels express, his eyes flashing, his thin face

expressively moving as he talks, while his quick, nervous fingers pick

impatiently at the pink carapaces or with a disdainful gesture drop

a whiskered head into the Flemish landscape outside the open window.

And remembering my Uncle Spencer, I find myself somehow believing

less firmly than I did in what I have been saying. And I wonder with

a certain sense of disquietude how many other relics of my Uncle

Spencer’s spirit I still carry, all unconsciously, about with me.

How many of our beliefs--more serious even than the belief that prawns

revive the tired brain--come to us haphazardly from sources far less

trustworthy than my Uncle Spencer! The most intelligent men will be

found holding opinions about certain things, inculcated in them during

their childhood by nurses or stable-boys. And up to the very end of our

adolescence, and even after, there are for all of us certain admired

beings, whose words sink irresistibly into our minds, generating there

beliefs which reason does not presume to question, and which though

they may be quite out of harmony with all our other opinions persist

along with them without our ever becoming aware of the contradictions

between the two sets of ideas. Thus an emancipated young man, whose

father happens to have been a distinguished Indian civilian, is an

ardent apostle of liberty and self-determination; but insists that the

Indians are and for ever will be completely incapable of governing

themselves. And an art critic, extremely sound on Vlaminck and Marie

Laurencin, will praise as masterly and in the grand manner--and praise

sincerely, for he genuinely finds them so--the works of an artist whose

dim pretentious paintings of the Tuscan landscape used to delight,

because they reminded her of her youth, an old lady, now dead, but whom

as a very young man he greatly loved and admired.

My Uncle Spencer was for me, in my boyhood, one of these admired

beings, whose opinions possess a more than earthly value for the

admiring listener. For years my most passionately cherished beliefs

were his. Those opinions which I formed myself, I held more

diffidently, with less ardour; for they, after all, were only the

fruits of my own judgment and observation, superficial rational

growths; whereas the opinions I had taken from my Uncle Spencer--such

as this belief in the curative properties of prawns--had nothing to do

with my reason, but had been suggested directly into the sub-rational

depths, where they seemed to attach themselves, like barnacles, to the

very keel and bottom of my mind. Most of them, I hope, I have since

contrived to scrape off; and a long, laborious, painful process it has

been. But there are still, I dare say, a goodly number of them left, so

deeply ingrained and grown in, that it is impossible for me to be aware

of them. And I shall go down to my grave making certain judgments,

holding certain opinions, regarding certain things and actions in a

certain way--and the way, the opinions, the judgments will not be mine,

but my Uncle Spencer’s; and the obscure chambers of my mind will to the

end be haunted by his bright, erratic, restless ghost.

There are some people whose habits of thought a boy or a young man

might, with the greatest possible advantage to himself, make his

own. But my Uncle Spencer was not one of them. His active mind darted

hither and thither too wildly and erratically for it to be a safe

guide for an inexperienced understanding. It was all too promptly

logical to draw conclusions from false premises, too easily and

enthusiastically accepted as true. Living as he did in solitude--in a

mental solitude; for though he was no recluse and took his share in

all social pleasures, the society of Longres could not offer much in

the way of high intellectual companionship--he was able to give free

play to the native eccentricity of his mind. Having nobody to check or

direct him, he would rush headlong down intellectual roads that led

nowhere or into morasses of nonsense. When, much later, I used to amuse

myself by listening on Sunday afternoons to the speakers at Marble

Arch, I used often to be reminded of my Uncle Spencer. For they, like

Uncle Spencer, lived in solitude, apart from the main contemporary

world of ideas, unaware, or so dimly aware that it hardly counted, of

the very existence of organised and systematic science, not knowing

even where to look for the accumulated stores of human knowledge. I

have talked in the Park to Bible students who boasted that during the

day they cobbled or sold cheese, while at night they sat up learning

Hebrew and studying the critics of the Holy Book. And I have been

ashamed of my own idleness, ashamed of the poor use I have made of my

opportunities. These humble scholars heroically pursuing enlightenment

are touching and noble figures--but how often, alas, pathetically

ludicrous too! For the critics my Bible students used to read and

meditate upon were always at least three-quarters of a century out of

date--exploded Tübingen scholars or literal inspirationalists; their

authorities were always books written before the invention of modern

historical research; their philology was the picturesque _lucus a non

lucendo_, bloody from by-our-Lady type; their geology had irrefutable

proofs of the existence of Atlantis; their physiology, if they happened

to be atheists, was obsoletely mechanistic, if Christians, merely

providential. All their dogged industry, all their years of heroic

striving, had been completely wasted--wasted, at any rate, so far as

the increase of human knowledge was concerned, but not for themselves,

since the labour, the disinterested ambition, had brought them

happiness.

My Uncle Spencer was spiritually a cousin of these Hyde Park orators

and higher critics. He had all their passion for enlightenment and

profound ideas, but not content with concentrating, like them, on a

single subject such as the Bible, he allowed himself to be attracted

by everything under the sun. The whole field of history, of science

(or rather what my Uncle Spencer thought was science), of philosophy,

religion, and art was his province. He had their industry too--an

industry, in his case, rather erratic, fitful, and inconstant; for

he would start passionately studying one subject, to turn after a

little while to another whose aspect seemed to him at the moment more

attractive. And like them he displayed--though to a less pronounced

degree, since his education had been rather better than theirs (not

much better, however, for he had never attended any seat of learning

but one of our oldest and most hopeless public schools)--he displayed

a vast unawareness of contemporary thought and an uncritical faith in

authorities which to a more systematically educated man would have

seemed quite obviously out of date; coupled with a profound ignorance

of even the methods by which one could acquire a more accurate or at

any rate a more “modern” and fashionable knowledge of the universe.

My Uncle Spencer had views and information on almost every subject one

cared to mention; but the information was almost invariably faulty

and the judgments he based upon it fantastic. What things he used to

tell me as we sat facing one another in the corners of our first-class

carriage, with the prawns piled up in a little coralline mountain on

the folding table between us! Fragments of his eager talk come back to

me.

“There are cypresses in Lombardy that were planted by Julius Cæsar....”

“The human race is descended from African pygmies. Adam was black and

only four feet high....”

“_Similia similibus curantur._ Have you gone far enough with your

Latin to know what that means?” (My Uncle Spencer was an enthusiastic

homœopathist, and the words of Hahnemann were to him as a mystic

formula, a kind of _Om mani padme hum_, the repetition of which gave

him an immense spiritual satisfaction.)

And once, I remember, as we were passing through the fabulous new

station of Ghent--that station which fifteen or sixteen years later I

was to see all smashed and gutted by the departing invaders--he began,

apropos of a squad of soldiers standing on the platform, to tell me

how a German professor had proved, mathematically, using the theories

of ballistics and probabilities, that war was now impossible, modern

quick-firing rifles and machine-guns being so efficient that it was,

as my Uncle Spencer put it, “sci-en-tif-ic-ally impossible” for any

body of men to remain alive within a mile of a sufficient number of

mitrailleuses, moving backwards and forwards through the arc of a

circle and firing continuously all the time. I passed my boyhood in the

serene certainty that war was now a thing of the past.

Sometimes he would talk to me earnestly across the prawns of the

cosmogonies of Boehme or Swedenborg. But all this was so exceedingly

obscure that I never took it in at all. In spite of my Uncle Spencer’s

ascendancy over my mind I was never infected by his mystical

enthusiasms. These mental dissipations had been my Uncle Spencer’s wild

oats. Reacting from the rather stuffily orthodox respectability of his

upbringing, he ran into, not vice, not atheism, but Swedenborg. He had

preserved--a legacy from his prosperous nineteenth-century youth--an

easy optimism, a great belief in progress and the superiority of modern

over ancient times, together with a convenient ignorance of the things

about which it would have been disquieting to think too much. This

agreeable notion of the world I sucked in easily and copiously with my

little crustaceans; my views about the universe and the destinies of

man were as rosy in those days as the prawns themselves.

It was not till seven or eight o’clock in the evening that we finally

got to our destination. My Uncle Spencer’s carriage--victoria or

brougham, according to the season and the state of the weather--would

be waiting for us at the station door. In we climbed and away we

rolled on our rubbered wheels in a silence that seemed almost magical,

so deafeningly did common carts and the mere station cabs go rattling

over the cobbles of the long and dismal Rue de la Gare. Even in the

winter, when there was nothing to be seen of it but an occasional green

gas-lamp, with a little universe of pavement, brick wall and shuttered

window dependent upon it and created by it out of the surrounding

darkness, the Rue de la Gare was signally depressing, if only because

it was so straight and long. But in summer, when the dismal brick

houses by which it was flanked revealed themselves in the evening

light, when the dust and the waste-paper came puffing along it in

gusts of warm, stale-smelling wind, then the street seemed doubly long

and disagreeable. But, on the other hand, the contrast between its

sordidness and the cool, spacious Grand’ Place into which, after what

seemed a carefully studied preparatory twisting and turning among the

narrow streets of the old town, it finally debouched, was all the more

striking and refreshing. Like a ship floating out from between the jaws

of a canyon into a wide and sunlit lake, our carriage emerged upon

the Grand’ Place. And the moment was solemn, breathlessly anticipated

and theatrical, as though we were gliding in along the suspended

calling of the oboes and bassoons, and the violins trembling with

amorous anxiety all around us, rolling silently and with not a hitch

in the stage carpentry on to some vast and limelit stage where, as

soon as we had taken up our position well forward and in the centre,

something tremendous, one imagined, would suddenly begin to happen--a

huge orchestral tutti from contrabass trombone to piccolo, from bell

instrument to triangle, and then the tenor and soprano in such a duet

as had never in all the history of opera been heard before.

But when it came to the point, our entrance was never quite so dramatic

as all that. One found, when one actually got there, that one had

mistaken one’s opera; it wasn’t _Parsifal_ or _Rigoletto_; it was

_Pelléas_ or perhaps the _Village Romeo and Juliet_. For there was

nothing grandiosely Wagnerian, nothing Italian and showy about the

Grand’ Place at Longres. The last light was rosy on its towers, the

shadows of the promenaders stretched half across the place, and in

the vast square the evening had room to be cool and quiet. The Gothic

Church had a sharp steeple and the seminary by its side a tower, and

the little seventeenth-century Hôtel de Ville, with its slender belfry,

standing in the middle of that open space as though not afraid to

let itself be seen from every side, was a miracle of gay and sober

architecture; and the houses that looked out upon it had faces simple

indeed, burgess and ingenuous, but not without a certain nobility, not

without a kind of unassuming provincial elegance. In, then, we glided,

and the suspended oboeings of our entrance, instead of leading up to

some grand and gaudy burst of harmony, fruitily protracted themselves

in this evening beauty, exulted quietly in the rosy light, meditated

among the lengthening shadows; and the violins, ceasing to tremble with

anticipation, swelled and mounted, like light and leaping towers, into

the serene sky.

And if the clock happened to strike at the moment that we entered, how

charmingly the notes of the mechanical carillon harmonised with this

imaginary music! At the hours, the bells in the high tower of the Hôtel

de Ville played a minuet and trio, tinkly and formal like the first

composition of an infant Boccherini, which lasted till fully three

minutes past. At the half-hours it was a patriotic air of the same

length. But at the quarters the bells no more than began a tune. Three

or four bars and the music broke off, leaving the listener wondering

what was to have followed, and attributing to this fragmentary stump

of an air some rich outflowering in the pregnant and musical silence,

some subtle development which should have made the whole otherwise

enchanting than the completed pieces that followed and preceded,

and whose charm, indeed, consisted precisely in their old-fashioned

mediocrity, in the ancient, cracked, and quavering sweetness of the

bells that played them, and the defects in the mechanism, which

imparted to the rhythm that peculiar and unforeseeable irregularity

which the child at the piano, tongue between teeth, eyes anxiously

glancing from printed notes to fingers and back again, laboriously

introduces into the flawless evenness of “The Merry Peasant.”

This regular and repeated carillonage was and indeed still is--for the

invaders spared the bells--an essential part of Longres, a feature

like the silhouette of its three towers seen from far away between the

poplars across the wide, flat land, characteristic and recognisable.

It is with a little laugh of amused delight that the stranger to

Longres first hears the jigging airs and the clashes of thin, sweet

harmony floating down upon him from the sky, note succeeding unmuted

note, so that the vibrations mingle in the air, surrounding the clear

outlines of the melody with a faint quivering halo of discord. After

an hour or two the minuet and trio, the patriotic air, become all

too familiar, while with every repetition the broken fragments at

the quarters grow more and more enigmatic, pregnant, dubious, and

irritating. The pink light fades from the three towers, the Gothic

intricacies of the church sink into a flat black silhouette against the

night sky; but still from high up in the topless darkness floats down,

floats up and out over the house-tops, across the flat fields, the

minuet and trio. The patriotic air continues still, even after sunset,

to commemorate the great events of 1830; and still the fragments

between, like pencillings in the notebook of a genius, suggest to

the mind in the scribble of twenty notes a splendid theme and the

possibility of fifteen hundred variations. At midnight the bells are

still playing; at half-past one the stranger starts yet again out

of his sleep; re-evoked at a quarter to four his speculations about

the possible conclusions of the unfinished symphony keep him awake

long enough to hear the minuet and trio at the hour and to wonder

how any one in Longres manages to sleep at all. But in a day or two

he answers the question himself by sleeping unbrokenly through the

hints from Beethoven’s notebook, and the more deliberate evocations

of Boccherini’s childhood and the revolution of 1830. The disease

creates its own antidote, and the habit of hearing the carillon induces

gradually a state of special mental deafness in which the inhabitants

of Longres permanently live.

Even as a small boy, to whom insomnia was a thing unknown, I found

the bells, for the first night or two after my arrival in Longres,

decidedly trying. My Uncle Spencer’s house looked on to the Grand’

Place itself, and my window on the third floor was within fifty yards

of the belfry of the Hôtel de Ville and the source of the aerial music.

Three-year-old Boccherini might have been in the room with me whenever

the wind came from the south, banging his minuet in my ears. But after

the second night he might bang and jangle as much as he liked; there

was no bell in Longres could wake me.

What did wake me, however--every Saturday morning at about half-past

four or five--was the pigs coming into market. One had to have spent

a month of Saturdays in Longres before one could acquire the special

mental deafness that could ignore the rumbling of cart-wheels over the

cobbles and the squealing and grunting of two or three thousand pigs.

And when one looked out what a sight it was! All the Grand’ Place was

divided up by rails into a multitude of pens and pounds, and every

pound was seething with pink naked pigs that looked from above like so

much Bergsonian _élan vital_ in a state of incessant agitation. Men

came and went between the enclosures, talking, bargaining, critically

poking potential bacon or ham with the point of a stick. And when the

bargain was struck, the owner would step into the pen, hunt down the

victim, and, catching it up by one leather ear and its thin bootlace of

a tail, carry it off amid grunts that ended in the piercing, long-drawn

harmonics of a squeal to a netted cart or perhaps to some other pen

a little farther down the line. Brought up in England to regard the

infliction of discomfort upon an animal as being, if anything, rather

more reprehensible than cruelty to my fellow-humans, I remember being

horrified by this spectacle. So, too, apparently was the German army

of occupation. For between 1914 and 1918 no pig in the Longres market

might be lifted by tail or ear, the penalty for disobedience being a

fine of twenty marks for the first offence, a hundred for the second,

and after that a term of forced labour on the lines of communication.

Of all the oppressive measures of the invader there was hardly one

which more profoundly irritated the Limburgian peasantry. Nero was

unpopular with the people of Rome, not because of his crimes and vices,

not because he was a tyrant and a murderer, but for having built in the

middle of the city a palace so large that it blocked the entrance to

several of the main roads. If the Romans hated him, it was because his

golden house compelled them to make a circuit of a quarter of a mile

every time they wanted to go shopping. The little customary liberties,

the right to do in small things what we have always done, are more

highly valued than the greater, more abstract, and less immediate

freedoms. And, similarly, most people will rather run the risk of

catching typhus than take a few irksome sanitary precautions to which

they are not accustomed. In this particular case, moreover, there was

the further question: How _is_ one to carry a pig except by its tail

and ears? One must either throw the creature on its back and lift it

up by its four cloven feet--a process hardly feasible, since a pig’s

centre of gravity is so near the ground that it is all but impossible

to topple him over. Or else--and this is what the people of Longres

found themselves disgustedly compelled to do--one must throw one’s

arms round the animal and carry it clasped to one’s bosom as though

it were a baby, at the risk of being bitten in the ear and with the

certainty of stinking like a hog for the rest of the day.

The first Saturday after the departure of the German troops was a bad

morning for the pigs. To carry a pig by the tail was an outward and

visible symbol of recovered liberty; and the squeals of the porkers

mingled with the cheers of the population and the trills and clashing

harmonies of the bells awakened by the carilloneur from their four

years’ silence.

By ten o’clock the market was over. The railings of the pens had been

cleared away, and but for the traces on the cobbles--and those too the

municipal scavengers were beginning to sweep up--I could have believed

that the scene upon which I had looked from my window in the bright

early light had been a scene in some agitated morning dream.

But more dream-like and fantastical was the aspect of the Grand’ Place

when, every year during the latter part of August, Longres indulged in

its traditional kermesse. For then the whole huge square was covered

with booths, with merry-go-rounds turning and twinkling in the sun,

with swings and switchbacks, with temporary pinnacles rivalling in

height with the permanent and secular towers of the town, and from

whose summits one slid, whooping uncontrollably with horrified delight,

down a polished spiral track to the ground below. There was bunting

everywhere, there were sleek balloons and flags, there were gaudily

painted signs. Against the grey walls of the church, against the

whitewashed house-fronts, against the dark brickwork of the seminary

and the soft yellow stucco of the gabled Hôtel de Ville, a sea of many

colours beat tumultuously. And an immense and featureless noise that

was a mingling of the music of four or five steam organs, of the voices

of thousands of people, of the blowing of trumpets and whistles, the

clashing of cymbals, the beating of drums, of shouting, of the howling

of children, of enormous rustic laughter, filled the space between

the houses from brim to brim--a noise so continuous and so amorphous

that hearkening from my high window it was almost, after a time, as

though there were no noise at all, but a new kind of silence, in which

the tinkling of the infant Boccherini’s minuet, the patriotic air, and

the fragmentary symphonies had become for some obscure reason utterly

inaudible.

And after sunset the white flares of acetylene and the red flares of

coal-gas scooped out of the heart of the night a little private day, in

which the fun went on more noisily than ever. And the gaslight striking

up on to the towers mingled half-way up their shafts with the moonlight

from above, so that to me at my window the belfries seemed to belong

half to the earth, half to the pale silence overhead. But gradually, as

the night wore on, earth abandoned its claims; the noise diminished;

one after another the flares were put out, till at last the moon was

left in absolute possession, with only a few dim greenish gas-lamps

here and there, making no attempt to dispute her authority. The towers

were hers down to the roots, the booths and the hooded roundabouts, the

Russian mountains, the swings--all wore the moon’s livery of silver and

black; and audible once more the bells seemed in her honour to sound a

sweeter, clearer, more melancholy note.

But it was not only from my window that I viewed the kermesse. From the

moment that the roundabouts began to turn, which was as soon as the

eleven o’clock Mass on the last Sunday but one in August was over, to

the moment when they finally came to rest, which was at about ten or

eleven on the night of the following Sunday, I moved almost unceasingly

among the delights of the fair. And what a fair it was! I have never

seen its like in England. Such splendour, such mechanical perfection in

the swings, switchbacks, merry-go-rounds, towers, and the like! Such

astonishing richness and variety in the side-shows! And withal such

marvellous cheapness.

When one was tired of sliding and swinging, of being whirled and

jogged, one could go and see for a penny the man who pulled out

handfuls of his skin, to pin it up with safety-pins into ornamental

folds and pleats. Or one could see the woman with no arms who opened a

bottle of champagne with her toes and drank your health, lifting her

glass to her lips with the same members. And then in another booth,

over whose entry there waved--a concrete symbol of good faith--a pair

of enormous female pantaloons, sat the Fat Woman--so fat that she could

(and would, you were told, for four sous extra), in the words of the

Flemish notice at the door, which I prefer to leave in their original

dialectical obscurity, “heur gezicht bet heur tiekes wassen.”

Next to the Fat Woman’s hutch was a much larger tent in which the

celebrated Monsieur Figaro, with his wife and seven children, gave

seven or eight times daily a dramatic version of the Passion of Our

Saviour, at which even the priesthood was authorised to assist. The

Figaro family was celebrated from one end of the country to another,

and had been for I do not know how many years--forty or fifty at least.

For there were several generations of Figaros; and if seven charming

and entirely genuine children did indeed still tread the boards, it

was not that the seven original sons and daughters of old M. Figaro

had remained by some miracle perpetually young; but that marrying and

becoming middle-aged they had produced little Figaros of their own,

who in their turn gave rise to more, so that the aged and original M.

Figaro could count among the seven members of his suppositious family

more than one of his great-grandchildren. So celebrated was M. Figaro

that there was even a song about him, of which unfortunately I can

remember only two lines:

“Et le voilà, et le voilà, Fi-ga-ro,

Le plus comique de la Belgique, Fi-ga-ro!”

But on what grounds and in what remote epoch of history he had been

called “Le plus comique de la Belgique,” I was never able to discover.

For the only part I ever saw the venerable old gentleman play was that

of Caiaphas in the _Passion of Our Saviour_, which was one of the

most moving, or at any rate one of the most harrowingly realistic,

performances I ever remember to have seen; so much so, that the voices

of the actors were often drowned by sobs and sometimes by the piercing

screams of a child who thought that they were really and genuinely

driving nails into the graceful young Figaro of the third generation,

who played the part of the Saviour.

Not a day of my first kermesses passed without my going at least

once, and sometimes two or three times, to see the Figaros at their

performance; partly, no doubt, because, between the ages of nine and

thirteen, I was an extremely devout broad churchman, and partly because

the rôle of the Magdalene was played by a little girl of twelve or

thereabouts, with whom I fell in love, wildly, extravagantly, as one

only can love when one is a child. I would have given fortunes and

years of my life to have had the courage to go round to the back after

the performance and talk to her. But I did not dare; and to give an

intellectual justification for my cowardice, I assured myself that it

would have been unseemly on my part to intrude upon a privacy which I

invested with all the sacredness of the Magdalene’s public life, an

act of sacrilege like going into church with one’s hat on. Moreover, I

comforted myself, I should have profited little by meeting my inamorata

face to face, since in all likelihood she spoke nothing but Flemish,

and besides my own language I only spoke at that time a little French,

with enough Latin to know what my Uncle Spencer meant when he said,

“_Similia similibus curantur_.” My passion for the Magdalene lasted

through three kermesses, but waned, or rather suddenly came to an end,

when, rushing to the first of the Figaros’ performances at the fourth,

I saw that the little Magdalene, who was now getting on for sixteen,

had become, like so many young girls in their middle teens, plump and

moony almost to the point of grossness. And my love after falling to

zero in the theatre was turned to positive disgust when I saw her, a

couple of mornings later before the performance began, walking about

the Grand’ Place in a dark blue blouse with a sailor collar, a little

blue skirt down to her knees, and a pair of bright yellow boots lacing

high up on her full-blown calves, which they compressed so tightly

that the exuberant flesh overflowed on to the leather. The next year

one of old M. Figaro’s great-grandchildren, who could hardly have been

more than seven or eight, took her place on the stage. My Magdalene

had left it--to get married, no doubt. All the Figaros married early:

it was important that there should be no failure in the supply of

juvenile apostles and holy women. But by that time I had ceased to take

the slightest interest either in her, her family, or their sacred

performance; for it was about the time of my fifth kermesse, if I

remember rightly, that my period of atheism began--an atheism, however,

still combined with all my Uncle Spencer’s cheerful optimism about the

universe.

My Uncle Spencer, though it would have annoyed him to hear any one say

so, enjoyed the kermesse almost as much as I did. In all the year,

August was his best month; it contained within its thirty-one days less

cause for anxiety, impatience, or irritation than any other month; so

that my Uncle Spencer, left in peace by the malignant world, was free

to be as high-spirited, as gay and kind-hearted as he possibly could

be. And it was astonishing what a stock of these virtues he possessed.

If he could have lived on one of those happy islands where nature

provides bananas and cocoanuts enough for all and to spare, where

the sun shines every day and a little tattooing is all the raiment

one needs, where love is easy, commerce unknown, and neither sin nor

progress ever heard of--if he could have lived on one of these carefree

islands, how entirely happy and how uniformly a saint my Uncle Spencer

would have been! But cares and worldly preoccupations too often

overlaid his gaiety, stopped up the vents of his kindness; and his

quick, nervous, and impulsive temperament--in the Augusts of his life

a bubbling source of high spirits--boiled up in a wild impatience, in

bilious fountains of irritation, whenever he found himself confronted

by the passive malignity of matter, the stupidity or duplicity of man.

He was at his worst during the Christmas holidays; for the season of

universal goodwill happened unfortunately to coincide with the season

of sugar-making. With the first frosts the beetroots were taken out

of the ground, and every day for three or four months three hundred

thousand kilograms of roots went floating down the labyrinth of little

canals that led to the washing-machines and the formidable slicers of

my Uncle Spencer’s factory. From every vent of the huge building issued

a sickening smell of boiled beetroot, mingled with the more penetrating

stink of the waste products of the manufacture--the vegetable fibre

drained of its juice, which was converted on the upper floors of

the building into cattle food and in the backyard into manure. The

activity during those few months of the beetroot season was feverish,

was delirious. A wild orgy of work, day and night, three shifts in

the twenty-four hours. And then the factory was shut up, and for the

rest of the year it stood there, alone, in the open fields beyond the

fringes of the town, desolate as a ruined abbey, lifeless and dumb.

During the beetroot season my Uncle Spencer was almost out of his mind.

Rimmed with livid circles of fatigue, his eyes glittered like the eyes

of a madman; his thin face was no more than pale skin stretched over

the starting bones. The slightest contrariety set him cursing and

stamping with impatience; it was a torture for him to sit still. One

Christmas holidays, I remember, something went wrong with the machinery

at the factory, and for nearly five hours the slicers, the churning

washers were still. My Uncle Spencer was almost a lost man when he got

back to the Grand’ Place for dinner that evening. It was as though a

demon had possessed him, and had only been cast out as the result of a

horrible labour. If the breakdown had lasted another hour, I really

believe he would have gone mad.

No, Christmas at Uncle Spencer’s was never very cheerful. But by the

Easter holidays he was beginning to recover. The frenzied making of

sugar had given place to the calmer selling of it. My Uncle Spencer’s

good nature began to have a chance of reasserting itself. By August,

at the end of a long, calm summer, he was perfect; and the kermesse

found him at his most exquisitely mellow. But with September a certain

premonitory anxiety began to show itself; the machinery had to be

overhauled, the state of the labour market examined, and when, about

the twentieth of the month, I left again for school, it was a frowning,

melancholy, and taciturn Uncle Spencer who travelled with me from

Longres to Brussels, from Brussels to Ostend, and who, preoccupied with

other thoughts, waved absent-mindedly from the quay, while the steamer

slowly slid out through the false calm of the harbour mouth towards a

menacing and equinoctial Channel.

But at the kermesse, as I have said, my Uncle Spencer was at his

richest and ripest. Enjoying it all as much as I did myself, he would

spend long evenings with me, loitering among the attractions of the

Grand’ Place. He was sad, I think, that the dignity of his position

as one of the leading citizens of Longres did not permit him to mount

with me on the roundabouts, the swings, and the mountain railways. But

a visit to the side-shows was not inconsistent with his gravity; we

visited them all. While professing to find the exhibition of freaks

and monsters a piece of deplorable bad taste, my Uncle Spencer never

failed to take me to look at all of them. It was a cardinal point in

his theory of education that the young should be brought as early

as possible into contact with what he called the Realities of Life.

And as nothing, it was obvious, could be more of a Reality than the

armless woman or the man who pinned up his skin with safety-pins, it

was important that I should make an early acquaintance with them, in

spite of the undoubtedly defective taste of the exhibition. It was

in obedience to the same educational principle that my Uncle Spencer

took me, one Easter holidays, to see the Lunatic Asylum. But the

impression made upon me by the huge prison-like building and its

queer occupants--one of whom, I remember, gambolled playfully around

me wherever I went, patting my cheeks or affectionately pinching my

legs--was so strong and disagreeable, that for several nights I could

not sleep; or if I did, I was oppressed by hideous nightmares that

woke me, screaming and sweating in the dark. My Uncle Spencer had to

renounce his intention of taking me to see the anatomy room in the

hospital.

Scattered among the monsters, the rifle-ranges, and the games of

skill were little booths where one could buy drink and victuals.

There was one vendor, for instance, who always did a roaring trade

by selling, for two sous, as many raw mussels as any one could eat

without coughing. Torn between his belief in the medicinal qualities

of shellfish and his fear of typhoid fever, my Uncle Spencer hesitated

whether he ought to allow me to spend my penny. In the end he gave his

leave. (“It’s the phosphorus, you know.”) I put down my copper, took

my mussel, bit, swallowed, and violently coughed. The fish were briny

as though they had come out of the Dead Sea. The old vendor did an

excellent business. Still, I have seen him sometimes looking anxious;

for not all his customers were as susceptible as I. There were hardy

young peasants who could put down half a pound of this Dead Sea fruit

without turning a hair. In the end, however, the brine did its work on

even the toughest gullet.

More satisfactory as food were the apple fritters, which were

manufactured by thousands in a large temporary wooden structure that

stood under the shade of the Hôtel de Ville. The Quality, like Uncle

Spencer and myself, ate their fritters in the partial privacy of a

number of little cubicles arranged like loose-boxes along one side of

the building. My Uncle Spencer walked resolutely to our appointed box

without looking to the left hand or to the right; and I was bidden to

follow his example and not to show the least curiosity respecting the

occupants of the other loose-boxes, whose entrances we might pass on

the way to our own. There was a danger, my Uncle Spencer explained to

me, that some of the families eating apple fritters in the loose-boxes

might be Blacks--Blacks, I mean, politically, not ethnically--while

we were Liberals or even, positively, Freemasons. Therefore--but as

a mere stranger to Longres I was never, I confess, quite able to

understand the force of this conclusion--therefore, though we might

talk to male Blacks in a café, have business relations and even be on

terms of friendship with them, it was impossible for us to be known

by the female Blacks, even under a booth and over the ferial apple

fritters; so that we must not look into the loose-boxes for fear that

we might see there a dear old friend who would be in the embarrassing

situation of not being able to introduce us to his wife and daughters.

I accepted, without understanding, this law; and it seemed to be a

perfectly good law until the day came when I found that it forbade me

to make the acquaintance of even a single one of the eleven ravishing

daughters of M. Moulle. It seemed to me then a stupid law.

In front of the booths where they sold sweets my Uncle Spencer never

cared to linger. It was not that he was stingy; on the contrary, he was

extremely generous. Nor that he thought it bad for me to eat sweets;

he had a professional belief in the virtues of sugar. The fact was that

the display in the booths embarrassed him. For already at the kermesse

one began to see a sprinkling of those little objects in chocolate

which, between the Feast of St. Nicholas and the New Year, fill the

windows of every confectioner’s shop in Belgium. My Uncle Spencer had

passed a third of a lifetime at Longres, but even after all these

years he was still quite unable to excuse or understand the innocent

coprophily of its inhabitants. The spectacle, in a sweet-shop window,

of a little _pot de chambre_ made of chocolate brought the blush of

embarrassment to his cheeks. And when at the kermesse I asked him to

buy me some barley-sugar or a few _bêtises de Cambrai_, he pretended

not to have heard what I asked, but walked hastily on; for his quick

eyes had seen, on one of the higher shelves of the confectioner’s

booth, a long line of little brown pots, on whose equivocal aspect it

would have been an agony to him if, standing there and waiting for

the barley-sugar to be weighed out, I had naively commented. Not

that I ever should have commented upon them; for I was as thoroughly

English as my Uncle Spencer himself--more thoroughly, indeed, as being

a generation further away from the Flemish mother, the admixture of

whose blood, however, had availed nothing against my uncle’s English

upbringing. Me, too, the little brown pots astonished and appalled by

their lack of reticence. If my companion had been another schoolboy of

my own age, I should have pointed at the nameless things and sniggered.

But since I was with my Uncle Spencer, I preserved with regard to

them an eloquent and pregnant silence; I pretended not to have seen

them, but so guiltily that my ignoring of them was in itself a comment

that filled my poor Uncle Spencer with embarrassment. If we could

have talked about them, if only we could have openly deplored them

and denounced their makers, it would have been better. But obviously,

somehow, we could not.

In the course of years, however, I learned, being young and still

malleable, to be less astonished and appalled by the little chocolate

pots and the other manifestations of the immemorial Flemish

coprophily. In the end I took them almost for granted, like the natives

themselves, till finally, when St. Nicholas had filled the shops with

these scatological symbols, I could crunch a pot or two between meals

as joyously and with as little self-consciousness as any Belgian child.

But I had to eat my chocolate, when it was moulded in this particular

form, out of my Uncle Spencer’s sight. He, poor man, would have been

horrified if he had seen me on these occasions.

On these occasions, then, I generally took refuge in the housekeeper’s

room--and in any case, at this Christmas season, when the sugar was

being made, it was better to sit in the cheerful company of Mlle Leeauw

than with my gloomy, irritable, demon-ridden Uncle Spencer. Mlle

Leeauw was almost from the first one of my firmest and most trusted

friends. She was a woman of, I suppose, about thirty-five when I first

knew her, rather worn already by a life of active labour, but still

preserving a measure of that blonde, decided, and regular beauty which

had been hers in girlhood. She was the daughter of a small farmer near

Longres, and had received the usual village education, supplemented,

however, in recent years by what she had picked up from my Uncle

Spencer, who occupied himself every now and then, in his erratic and

enthusiastic way, with the improvement of her mind, lent her books from

his library, and delivered lectures to her on the subjects that were

at the moment nearest to his heart. Mlle Leeauw, unlike most women

of her antecedents, felt an insatiable curiosity with regard to all

that mysterious and fantastic knowledge which the rich and leisured

keep shut up in their libraries; and not only in their books, as she

had seen herself (for as a girl had she not served as nursery-maid in

the house of that celebrated collector, the Comte de Zuitigny?) not

only in their books, but in their pictures too--some of which, Mlle

Leeauw assured me, a child could have painted, so badly drawn they

were, so unlike life (and yet the count had given heaven only knew how

much for them), in their Chinese pots, in the patterns of the very

carpets on the floor. Whatever my Uncle Spencer gave her she read

with eagerness, she listened attentively to what he said; and there

emerged, speck-like in the boundless blank ocean of her ignorance, a

few little islands of strange knowledge. One, for example, was called

homœopathy; another the Construction-of-Domes (a subject on which

my Uncle Spencer was prepared to talk with a copious and perverse

erudition for hours at a time; his thesis being that any mason who knew

how to turn the vaulted roof of an oven could have built the cupolas of

St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, and Santa Maria del Fiore, and that therefore

the praises lavished on Michelangelo, Wren, and Brunelleschi were

entirely undeserved). A third was called Anti-Vivisection. A fourth

Swedenborg....

The result of my Uncle Spencer’s teaching was to convince Mlle Leeauw

that the knowledge of the rich was something even more fantastic than

she had supposed--something unreal and utterly remote from life as it

is actually lived, artificial and arbitrary, like the social activities

of these same rich, who pass their time in one another’s houses, eating

at one another’s expense, and being bored.

This conviction of the complete futility of knowledge did not make her

any the less eager to learn what my Uncle Spencer, whom she regarded

as a mine and walking compendium of all human learning, could offer

her. And she enchanted him by her respectful attentiveness, by the

quickness of her understanding--for she was a woman of very great

natural intelligence--and her eagerness for every fresh enlightenment.

She did not confide to him her real opinion of knowledge, which was

that it was a kind of curious irrelevant joke on the margin of life,

worth learning for precisely the same reasons as it is worth learning

to handle the fork at table--because it is one of the secrets of the

rich. Admiring my Uncle Spencer sincerely, she yet took nothing that

he taught her seriously, and though, when with him, she believed in

millionth-of-a-grain doses and high spiritual potencies, she continued,

when she felt out of sorts or I had overeaten, to resort to the old

tablespoonful of castor-oil; though with him she was a convinced

Swedenborgian, in church she was entirely orthodox; though in his

presence she thought vivisection monstrous, she would tell me with

gusto of those happy childish days on the farm, when her father cut the

pig’s throat, her mother held the beast by the hind-legs, her sister

danced on the body to make the blood flow, and she held the pail under

the spouting artery.

If to my Uncle Spencer his housekeeper appeared as he liked to see

her, and not as at ordinary times she really was, it was not that she

practised with him a conscious insincerity. Hers was one of those

quick, sensitive natures that adapt themselves almost automatically to

the social atmosphere in which at the moment they happen to be. Thus

with well-bred people she had beautiful manners; but the peasants from

whose stock she had sprung found her as full of a hearty Flemish gusto,

as grossly and innocently coarse as themselves. The core of her being

remained solidly peasant; but the upper and conscious part of her mind

was, so to speak, only loosely fastened to the foundation, so that it

could turn freely this way and that, without strain or difficulty,

according to changing circumstances. My Uncle Spencer valued her, not

only as a competent, intelligent woman, which she always was in every

company, but also because she was, considering her class and origins,

so remarkably well-mannered and refined, which, except with him and his

likes, she was not.

With me, however, Mlle Leeauw was thoroughly natural and Flemish. With

her quick and, I might say, instinctive understanding of character, she

saw that my abashed reaction to coprology, being of so much more recent

date than that of my Uncle Spencer, was much less strong, less deeply

rooted. At the same time, she perceived that I had no great natural

taste for grossness, no leaning to what I may call Flemishism; so that

in my presence she could be her natural Flemish self and thus correct

an absurd acquired delicacy without running the risk of encouraging

to any undue or distressing degree a congenital bias in the opposite

direction. And I noticed that whenever Matthieu (or Tcheunke, as they

called him), her cousin’s boy, came into town and paid a call on her,

Mlle Leeauw became almost as careful and refined as she was with my

Uncle Spencer. Not that Tcheunke shared my uncle’s susceptibilities.

On the contrary, he took such an immoderate delight in everything that

was excrementitious that she judged it best not in any way to indulge

him in his taste, just as she judged it best not to indulge my national

prejudice in favour of an excessive reticence about these and similar

matters. She was right, I believe, in both cases.

Mlle Leeauw had an elder sister, Louise--Louiseke, in the language of

Longres, where they put the symbol of the diminutive after almost every

name. Louiseke, like her sister, had never married; and considering

the ugliness of the woman--for she resembled Mlle Leeauw as a very

mischievous caricature resembles its original, that is to say, very

closely and at the same time hardly at all, the unlikeness being

emphasised in this case by the fact that nature had, for the shaping

of certain features, drawn on other ancestral sources, and worse ones,

than those from which her sister’s face had been made up--considering

her ugliness, I repeat, it was not surprising. Though considering her

dowry, perhaps it was. Louiseke was by no means rich; but she had the

five hundred francs a year, or thereabouts, which her sister also had,

after their father died and the farm was sold, together with another

two hundred inherited from an old aunt of her mother’s. This was a

sufficient income to allow her to live without working in a leisure

principally occupied by the performance of religious exercises.

On the outskirts of Longres there stands a small béguinage, long since

abandoned by its Béguines, who are now all over Belgium a diminishing

and nearly extinct community, and inhabited by a colony of ordinary

poor folk. The little old gabled houses are built round the sides of a

large grassy square, in the centre of which stands an abandoned church.

Louiseke inhabited one of these houses, partly because the rent was

very low, but also because she liked the religious associations of the

place. There, in her peaked high house, looking out across the monastic

quadrangle to the church, she could almost believe herself a genuine

Béguine. Every morning she went out to hear early Mass, and on Sundays

and days of festival she was assiduous in church almost to the point of

supererogation.

At my Uncle Spencer’s we saw a great deal of her; on her way to church,

on her way home again, she never failed to drop in for a word with her

sister Antonieke. Sometimes, I remember, she brought with her--hurrying

on these occasions across the Grand’ Place with the quick, anxious

tread, the frightened, suspicious glances to left and right, of a

traveller crossing a brigand-haunted moor--a large bag of green baize,

full of strange treasures: the silver crown and sceptre of Our Lady,

the gilded diadem of the Child, St. Joseph’s halo, the jewelled silver

book of I forget which Doctor of the Church, St. Dominick’s lilies,

and a mass of silver hearts with gilded flames coming out of them.

Louiseke, whose zeal was noted and approved of by M. le Curé, had the

rare privilege of being allowed to polish the jewellery belonging to

the images in the church. A few days before each of the important

feasts the painted plaster saints were stripped of their finery and

the spoil handed over to Louiseke, who, not daring to walk with her

precious burden under her arm as far as her own house in the béguinage,

slipped across the Grand’ Place to my Uncle Spencer’s. There, on the

table in Antonieke’s room, the green baize bag was opened, and the

treasures, horribly dirty and tarnished after their weeks or months of

neglect, were spread out in the light. A kind of paste was then made

out of French chalk mixed with gin, which the two sisters applied to

the crowns and hearts with nail-brushes, or if the work was fine and

intricate, with an old toothbrush. The silver was then wiped dry with a

cloth and polished with a piece of leather.

A feeling of manly pride forbade me to partake in what I felt to be a

womanish labour; but I liked to stand by with my hands in my pockets,

watching the sisters at work among these regal and sacred symbols, and

trying to understand, so far as my limited knowledge of Flemish and my

almost equally limited knowledge of life would admit, the gossip which

Louiseke poured out incessantly in a tone of monotonous and unvarying

censoriousness.

I myself always found Louiseke a little forbidding. She lacked the

charm and the quality, which I can only call mellowness, of her sister;

to me she seemed harsh, sour-tempered, and rather malevolent. But it

is very possible that I judged her unfairly; for, I confess, I could

never quite get over her ugliness. It was a sharp, hooky, witch-like

type of ugliness, which at that time I found particularly repulsive.

How difficult it is, even with the best will in the world, even for a

grown and reasonable man, to judge his fellow-beings without reference

to their external appearance! Beauty is a letter of recommendation

which it is almost impossible to ignore; and we attribute too often

the ugliness of the face to the character. Or, to be more precise,

we make no attempt to get beyond the opaque mask of the face to the

realities behind it, but run away from the ugly at sight without

even trying to find out what they are really like. That feeling of

instinctive dislike which ugliness inspires in a grown man, but which

he has reason and strength enough of will to suppress, or at least

conceal, is uncontrollable in a child. At three or four years old a

child will run screaming from the room at the aspect of a certain

visitor whose face strikes him as disagreeable. Why? Because the ugly

visitor is “naughty,” is a “bad man.” And up to a much later age,

though we have succeeded in preventing ourselves from screaming when

the ugly visitor makes his appearance, we do our best--at first, at any

rate, or until his actions have strikingly proved that his face belies

his character--to keep out of his way. So that if I always disliked

Louiseke, it may be that she was not to blame, and that my own peculiar

horror of ugliness made me attribute to her unpleasant characteristics

which she did not in reality possess. She seemed to me, then, harsh

and sour-tempered; perhaps she wasn’t; but, in any case, I thought so.

And that accounts for the fact that I never got to know her, never

tried to know her, as I knew her sister. Even after the extraordinary

event which, a year or two after my first visit to Longres, was to

alter completely the whole aspect of her life, I still made no effort

to understand Louiseke’s character. How much I regret my remissness

now! But, after all, one cannot blame a small boy for failing to have

the same standards as a man. To-day, in retrospect, I find Louiseke’s

character and actions in the highest degree curious and worthy of

study. But twenty years ago, when I knew her, her ugliness at first

appalled me, and always, even after I had got over my disgust,

surrounded her, for me, with a kind of unbreathable atmosphere, through

which I could never summon the active interest to penetrate. Moreover,

the event which now strikes me as so extraordinary, seemed to me then

almost normal and of no particular interest. And since she died before

my opinion about it had had time to change, I can only give a child’s

impression of her character and a bald recital of the facts so far as I

knew them.

It was, then, at my second or third kermesse that a side-show, novel

not only for me (to whom indeed everything--fat women, fire-swallowers,

elastic men, and down to the merest dwarfs and giants--was a novelty),

but even to the oldest inhabitants of Longres, who might have been

expected to have seen, in their time, almost everything that the world

had ever parturated of marvels, rarities, monsters, and abortions,

made its appearance on the Grand’ Place. This was a troupe of devil

dancers, self-styled Tibetan for the sake of the name’s high-sounding

and mysterious ring; but actually made up of two expatriated Hindus and

a couple of swarthy meridional Frenchmen, who might pass at a pinch as

the Aryan compatriots of these dark Dravidians. Not that it mattered

much what the nationality or colour of the dancers might be; for on the

stage they wore enormous masks--huge false heads, grinning, horned,

and diabolic, which, it was claimed in the announcement, were those in

which the ritual dances were performed before the Dalai Lama in the

principal convent of Lhassa. Comparing my memories of them with such

knowledge of oriental art as I now possess, I imagine that they came in

reality from the shop of some theatrical property maker in Marseilles,

from which place the devil dancers had originally started. But they

were none the less startling and bloodcurdling for that; just as the

dances themselves were none the less salaciously symbolical, none

the less typically and conventionally “oriental” for having been in

great measure invented by the Frenchmen, who provided all the plot and

dramatic substance of the ballets, while the astonished and admiring

Indians contributed only a few recollections of Siva worship and the

cult of the beneficent _linga_. This co-operation between East and West

was what ensured the performance its success; the western substance

satisfied by its perfect familiarity, while the eastern detail gave

to the old situations a specious air of novelty and almost a new

significance.

Charmed by the prospect of seeing what he supposed would be a few

characteristic specimens of the religious rites of the mysterious East,

and ambitious to improve my education by initiating me into the secrets

of this Reality, my Uncle Spencer took me to see the dancers. But the

dramatic pantomime of the Frenchmen represented a brand of Reality that

my uncle did not at all approve of. He got up abruptly in the middle

of the first dance, saying that he thought the circus would be more

amusing; which, for me, it certainly was. For I was not of an age to

appreciate either the plastic beauty or the peculiar moral significance

of the devil dancers’ performance.

“Hinduism,” said my Uncle Spencer, as we threaded our way between the

booths and the whirling machines, “has sadly degenerated from its

original Brahmanistic purity.” And he began to expound to me, raising

his voice to make itself heard through the noise of the steam organs,

the principles of Brahmanism. My Uncle Spencer had a great weakness for

oriental religions.

“Well,” asked Mlle Leeauw, when we got back for dinner, “and how did

you enjoy the dancers?”

I told her that my Uncle Spencer had thought that I should find the

circus more amusing. Antonieke nodded with a significant air of

understanding. “Poor man,” she said, and she went on to wonder how

Louiseke, who was going to see the dancers that evening, would enjoy

the show.

I never knew precisely what happened; for a mystery and, as it were, a

zone of silence surrounded the event, and my curiosity about everything

to do with Louiseke was too feeble to carry me through it. All I know

is that, two or three days later, near the end of the kermesse, young

Albert Snyders, the lawyer’s son, came up to me in the street and

asked, with the gleeful expression of one who says something which he

is sure his interlocutor will find disagreeable: “Well, and what do

you think of your Louiseke and her carryings on with the black man?”

I answered truthfully that I had heard nothing about any such thing,

and that in any case Louiseke wasn’t our Louiseke, and that I didn’t

care in the least what she did or what might happen to her.

“Not heard about it?” said young Snyders incredulously. “But the black

man goes to her house every evening, and she gives him gin, and they

sing together, and people see their shadows dancing on the curtains.

Everybody’s talking about it.”

I am afraid that I disappointed young Snyders. He had hoped to get a

rise out of me, and he miserably failed. His errors were two: first,

to have supposed that I regarded Louiseke as our Louiseke, merely

because her sister happened to be my Uncle Spencer’s housekeeper;

and, secondly, to have attributed to me a knowledge of the world

sufficient to allow me to realise the scandalousness of Louiseke’s

conduct. Whereas I disliked Louiseke, took no interest in her actions,

and could, moreover, see nothing out of the ordinary in what she was

supposed to have done.

Confronted by my unshakable calm, young Snyders retired, rather

crestfallen. But he revenged himself before he went by telling me that

I must be very stupid and, what I found more insulting, a great baby

not to understand.

Antonieke, to whom I repeated young Snyders’s words, merely said that

the boy ought to be whipped, specifying with a wealth of precise detail

and a gusto that were entirely Flemish how, with what instrument, and

where the punishment ought to be applied. I thought no more about

the incident. But I noticed after the kermesse was over and the

Grand’ Place had become once more the silent and empty Grand’ Place

of ordinary days, I noticed loitering aimlessly about the streets a

stout, coffee-coloured man, whom the children of Longres, like those

three rude boys in _Struwwelpeter_, pursued at a distance, contorting

themselves with mirth. That year I went back to England earlier than

usual; for I had been invited to spend the last three weeks of my

holidays with a school friend (alas, at Hastings, so that my knowledge

of the earth’s surface was not materially widened by the visit). When

I returned to Longres for the Christmas holidays I found that Louiseke

was no longer mere Louiseke, but the bride of a coffee-coloured

husband. Madame Alphonse they called her; for nobody could bother with

the devil dancer’s real name: it had an Al- in it somewhere--that was

all that was known. Monsieur and Madame Alphonse. But the news when I

heard it did not particularly impress me.

And even if I had been curious to know more, dense silence continued

to envelop the episode. Antonieke never spoke to me of it; and lacking

all interest in this kind of Reality, disapproving of it even, my

Uncle Spencer seemed to take it silently for granted. That the subject

was copiously discussed by the gossips of Longres I do not doubt; and

remembering Louiseke’s own censorious anecdotage, I can imagine how.

But in my hearing it was never discussed; expressly, I imagine--for

I lived under the protection of Antonieke, and people were afraid of

Antonieke. So it came about that the story remained for me no more

remarkable than that story recorded by Edward Lear of the

“... old Man of Jamaica

Who casually married a Quaker;

But she cried out, ‘Alack,

I have married a black!’

Which distressed that old Man of Jamaica.”

And perhaps, after all, that is the best way of regarding such

incidents--unquestioningly, without inquisitiveness. For we are all

much too curious about the affairs of our neighbours. Particularly

about the affairs of an erotic nature. What an itch we have to know

whether Mr. Smith makes love to his secretary, whether his wife

consoles herself, whether a certain Cabinet Minister is really the

satyr he is rumoured to be. And meanwhile the most incredible miracles

are happening all round us: stones, when we lift them and let them

go, fall to the ground; the sun shines; bees visit the flowers;

seeds grow into plants, a cell in nine months multiplies its weight

a few thousands of thousands of time, and is a child; and men think,

creating the world they live in. These things leave us almost perfectly

indifferent.

But concerning the ways in which different individuals satisfy the

cravings of one particular instinct we have, in spite of the frightful

monotony of the situation, in spite of the one well-known, inevitable

consummation, an endless and ever-fresh curiosity. Some day, perhaps,

we may become a little tired of books whose theme is always this

particular instinct. Some day, it may be, the successful novelist will

write about man’s relation to God, to nature, to his own thoughts and

the obscure reality on which they work, not about man’s relation with

woman. Meanwhile, however....

By what stages the old maid passed from her devoutness and her

censorious condemnation of love to her passion for the Dravidian, I can

only guess. Most likely there were no stages at all, but the conversion

was sudden and fulgurating, like that upon the road to Damascus--and

like that, secretly and unconsciously prepared for, long before the

event. It was the sheer wildness, no doubt, the triumphant bestiality

and paganism of the dances that bowled her over, that irresistibly

broke down the repressive barriers behind which, all too human,

Louiseke’s nature had so long chafed. As to Alphonse himself, there

could be no question about his motives. Devil dancing, he had found,

was an exhausting, precarious, and not very profitable profession. He

was growing stout, his heart was not so strong as it had been, he was

beginning to feel himself middle-aged. Louiseke and her little income

came as a providence. What did her face matter? He did not hesitate.

Monsieur and Madame Alphonse took a little shop in the Rue Neuve.

Before he left India and turned devil dancer, Alphonse had been a

cobbler in Madras--and as such was capable of contaminating a Brahman

at a distance of twenty-four feet; now, having become an eater of beef

and an outcast, he was morally infectious at no less than sixty-four

feet. But in Longres, luckily, there were no Brahmans.

He was a large, fat, snub-faced, and shiny man, constantly smiling,

with a smile that reminded me of a distended accordion. Many a pair

of boots I took to him to be soled--for Antonieke, though she was

horrified at having what she called a negro for her brother-in-law,

though she had quarrelled with her sister about her insane and

monstrous folly, and would hardly be reconciled to her, Antonieke

insisted that all our custom should go to the new cobbler. That, as she

explained, “owed itself.” The duty of members of one family to forward

one another’s affairs overrode, in her estimation, the mere personal

quarrels that might arise between them.

My Uncle Spencer was a frequent caller at the cobbler’s shop,

where he would sit for hours, while M. Alphonse tapped away at his

last, listening to mythological anecdotes out of the “Ramayana” or

“Mahabharata,” and discussing the Brahmanistic philosophy, of which,

of course, he knew far more than a poor Sudra like Alphonse. My Uncle

Spencer would come back from these visits in the best of humours.

“A most interesting man, your brother-in-law,” he would say to

Antonieke. “We had a long talk about Siva this afternoon. Most

interesting!”

But Antonieke only shrugged her shoulders. “_Mais c’est un nègre_,” she

muttered. And my Uncle Spencer might assure her as much as he liked

that Dravidians were not negroes and that Alphonse very likely had

good Aryan blood in his veins. It was useless. Antonieke would not be

persuaded, would not even listen. It was all very well for the rich to

believe things like that, but a negro, after all, was a negro; and that

was all about it.

M. Alphonse was a man of many accomplishments; for besides all the

rest, he was an expert palmist and told fortunes from the hand with a

gravity, a magisterial certainty, that were almost enough in themselves

to make what he said come true. This magian and typically oriental

accomplishment was learnt on the road between Marseilles and Longres

from a charlatan in the travelling company of amusement makers with

whom he had come. But he did the trick in the grand prophetic style,

so that people credited his cheiromancy with all the magical authority

of the mysterious East. But M. Alphonse could not be persuaded to

prophesy for every comer. It was noticed that he selected his subjects

almost exclusively from among his female customers, as though he were

only interested in the fates of women. I could hint as much as I liked

that I should like to have my fortune told, I could ask him outright

to look at my hand; but in vain. On these occasions he was always too

busy to look, or was not feeling in the prophetic mood. But if a young

woman should now come into the shop, time immediately created itself,

the prophetic mood came back. And without waiting for her to ask him,

he would seize her hand, pore over it, pat and prod the palm with his

thick brown fingers, every now and then turning up towards his subject

those dark eyes, made the darker and more expressive by the brilliance

of the bluish whites in which they were set, and expanding his

accordion smile. And he would prophesy love--a great deal of it--love

with superb dark men, and rows of children; benevolent dark strangers

and blond villains; unexpected fortunes, long life--all, in fact, that

the heart could desire. And all the time he squeezed and patted the

hand--white between his dark Dravidian paws--from which he read these

secrets; he rolled his eyes within their shiny blue enamel setting, and

across all the breadth of his fat cheeks the accordion of his smile

opened and shut.

My pride and my young sense of justice were horribly offended on these

occasions. The inconsistency of a man who had no time to tell my

fortune, but an infinite leisure for others, seemed to me abstractly

reprehensible and personally insulting. I professed, even at that age,

not to believe in palmistry; that is to say, I found the fortunes

which M. Alphonse prophesied for others absurd. But my interest in

my own personality and my own fate was so enormous that it seemed

to me, somehow, that everything said about me must have a certain

significance. And if M. Alphonse had taken my hand, looked at it, and

said, “You are generous; your head is as large as your heart; you will

have a severe illness at thirty-eight, but your life after that will

be healthy into extreme old age; you will make a large fortune early

in your career, but you must beware of fair-haired strangers with blue

eyes,” I should have made an exception and decided for the nonce that

there must be something in it. But, alas, M. Alphonse never did take

my hand; he never told me anything. I felt most cruelly offended, and

I felt astonished too. For it seemed to me a most extraordinary thing

that a subject which was so obviously fascinating and so important as

my character and future should not interest M. Alphonse as much as it

did me. That he should prefer to dabble in the dull fates and silly

insignificant characters of a lot of stupid young women seemed to me

incredible and outrageous.

There was another who, it seemed, shared my opinion. That was Louiseke.

If ever she came into the shop from the little back sitting-room--and

she was perpetually popping out through the dark doorway like a cuckoo

on the stroke of noon from its clock--and found her husband telling

the fortune of a female customer, her witch-like face would take on an

expression more than ordinarily malevolent.

“Alphonse!” she would say significantly.

And Alphonse dropped his subject’s hand, looked round towards the door,

and, rolling his enamelled eyes, creasing his fat cheeks in a charming

smile, flashing his ivory teeth, would say something amiable.

But Louiseke did not cease to frown.

“If you must tell somebody’s fortune,” she said, when the customer had

left the shop, “why don’t you tell the little gentleman’s?” pointing to

me. “I’m sure he would be only too delighted.”

But instead of being grateful to Louiseke, instead of saying, “Oh,

of course I’d like it,” and holding out my hand, I always perversely

shook my head. “No, no,” I said. “I don’t want to worry M. Alphonse.”

But I longed for Alphonse to insist on telling me about my exquisite

and marvellous self. In my pride, I did not like to owe my happiness

to Louiseke, I did not want to feel that I was taking advantage of her

irritation and Alphonse’s desire to mollify her. And besides pride, I

was actuated by that strange nameless perversity, which so often makes

us insist on doing what we do not want to do--such as making love to a

woman we do not like and whose intimacy, we know, will bring us nothing

but vexation--or makes us stubbornly decline to do what we have been

passionately desiring, merely because the opportunity of doing what

we wanted has not presented itself in exactly the way we anticipated,

or because the person who offered to fulfil our desires has not been

sufficiently insistent with his offers. Alphonse, on these occasions,

having no curiosity about my future and taking no pleasure in kneading

my small and dirty hand, always took my refusals quite literally and

finally, and began to work again with a redoubled ardour. And I would

leave the shop, vexed with myself for having let slip the opportunity

when it was within my grasp; furious with Louiseke for having presented

it in such a way that the seizing of it would be humiliating, and with

Alphonse for his obtuseness in failing to observe how much I desired

that he should look at my hand, and his gross discourtesy for not

insisting even in the teeth of my refusal.

Years passed; my holidays and the seasons succeeded one another with

regularity. Summer and the green poplars and my Uncle Spencer’s

amiability gave place to the cold season of sugar-making, to

scatological symbols in chocolate, to early darkness and the moral

gloom of my Uncle Spencer’s annual neurasthenia. And half-way between

the two extremes came the Easter holidays, pale green and hopefully

burgeoning, tepid with temperate warmth and a moderate amiability.

There were terms, too, as well as holidays. Eastbourne knew me no more;

my knowledge of the globe expanded; I became a public schoolboy.

At fifteen, I remember, I entered upon a period of priggishness which

made me solemn beyond my years. There are many boys who do not know

how young they are till they have come of age, and a young man is

often much less on his dignity than a growing schoolboy, who is afraid

of being despised for his callowness. It was during this period that

I wrote from Longres a letter to one of my school friends, which he

fortunately preserved, so that we were able to re-read it, years later,

and to laugh and marvel at those grave, academic old gentlemen we

were in our youth. He had written me a letter describing his sister’s

marriage, to which I replied in these terms:

“How rapidly, my dear Henry, the saffron robe and Hymen’s torches

give place to the nænia, the funeral urn, and the cypress! While your

days have been passed among the jocundities of a marriage feast, mine

have been darkened by the circumambient horrors of death. Such,

indeed, is life.”

And I underlined the philosophic reflection.

The horrors of death made more show in my sonorous antitheses than they

did in my life. For though the event made a certain impression upon

me--for it was the first thing of the kind that had happened within my

own personal orbit--I cannot pretend that I was very seriously moved

when Louiseke died, too old to have attempted the experiment, in giving

birth to a half-Flemish, half-Dravidian daughter, who died with her. My

Uncle Spencer, anxious to introduce me to the Realities of Life, took

me to see the corpse. Death had a little tempered Louiseke’s ugliness.

In the presence of that absolute repose I suddenly felt ashamed of

having always disliked Louiseke so much. I wanted to be able to explain

to her that, if only I had known she was going to die, I would have

been nicer to her, I would have tried to like her more. And all at once

I found myself crying.

Downstairs in the back parlour M. Alphonse was crying too, noisily,

lamentably, as was his duty. Three days later, when his duty had been

sufficiently done and the conventions satisfied, he became all at once

exceedingly philosophic about his loss. Louiseke’s little income was

now his; and adding to it what he made by his cobbling, he could live

in almost princely style. A week or two after the funeral the kermesse

began. His old companions, who had danced several times backwards and

forwards across the face of Europe since they were last in Longres,

re-appeared unexpectedly on the Grand’ Place. Alphonse treated himself

to the pleasure of playing the generous host, and every evening when

their show was over the devils unhorned themselves, and over the

glasses in the little back parlour behind Alphonse’s shop they talked

convivially of old times, and congratulated their companion, a little

enviously, on his prodigious good fortune.

In the years immediately preceding the war I was not often in Longres.

My parents had come back from India; my holidays were passed with them.

And when holidays transformed themselves into university vacations and

I was old enough to look after myself, I spent most of my leisure in

travelling in France, Italy, or Germany, and it was only rarely and

fleetingly--on the way to Milan, on my way back from Cologne, or after

a fortnight among the Dutch picture galleries--that I now revisited

the house on the Grand’ Place, where I had passed so many, and on the

whole such happy, days. I liked my Uncle Spencer still, but he had

ceased to be an admired being, and his opinions, instead of rooting

themselves and proliferating within my mind, as once they did, seemed

mostly, in the light of my own knowledge and experience, too fantastic

even to be worth refuting. I listened to him now with all the young

man’s intolerance of the opinions of the old (and my Uncle Spencer,

though only fifty, seemed to me utterly fossilised and antediluvian),

acquiescing in all that he said with a smile in which a more suspicious

and less single-hearted man would have seen the amused contempt. My

Uncle Spencer was leaning during these years more and more towards

the occult sciences. He talked less of the construction of domes and

more of Hahnemann’s mystic high potentials, more of Swedenborg, more

of Brahmanistic philosophy, in which he had by this time thoroughly

indoctrinated M. Alphonse; and he was enthusiastic now about a new

topic--the calculating horses of Elberfeld, which, at that time, were

making a great noise in the world by their startling ability to extract

cube roots in their heads. Strong in the materialistic philosophy, the

careless and unreflecting scepticism which were, in those days, the

orthodoxy of every young man who thought himself intelligent, I found

my Uncle Spencer’s mystical and religious preoccupations marvellously

ludicrous. I should think them less ridiculous now, when it is the

easy creed of my boyhood that has come to look rather queer. Now it is

possible--it is, indeed, almost necessary--for a man of science to be

also a mystic. But there were excuses then for supposing that one could

only combine mysticism with the faulty knowledge and the fantastic

mental eccentricity of an Uncle Spencer. One lives and learns.

With Mlle Leeauw, on these later visits, I felt, I must confess,

not entirely at my ease. Antonieke saw me as essentially the same

little boy who had come so regularly all those years, holiday after

holiday, to Longres. Her talk with me was always of the joyous events

of the past--of which she had that extraordinarily accurate and

detailed memory which men and women, whose minds are not exercised by

intellectual preoccupations and who do not read much, always astonish

their more studious fellows by possessing. Plunged as I then was in all

the newly discovered delights of history, philosophy, and art, I was

too busy to take more than a very feeble interest in my childish past.

Had there been skating on the canals in 1905? Had I been bitten by a

horse-fly, the summer before, so poisonously that my cheek swelled up

like a balloon and I had to go to bed? Possibly, possibly; now that

I was reminded of these things I did, dimly, remember. But of what

earthly interest were facts such as these when I had Plato, the novels

of Dostoievsky, the frescoes of Michelangelo to think of? How entirely

irrelevant they were to, shall we say, David Hume! How insipid compared

with the sayings of Zarathustra, the Coriolan overture, the poetry of

Arthur Rimbaud! But for poor Antonieke they were all her life. I felt

all the time that I was not being as sympathetic with her as I ought to

have been. But was it my fault? Could I rebecome what I had been, or

make her suddenly different from what she was?

At the beginning of August 1914 I was staying at Longres on my way

to the Ardennes, where I meant to settle down quietly for a month or

so with two or three friends, to do a little solid reading before

going south to Italy in September. Strong in the faith of the

German professor who had proved, by the theories of ballistics and

probabilities, that war was now out of the question, my Uncle Spencer

paid no attention to the premonitory rumbles. It was just another

little Agadir crisis and would lead to nothing. I too--absorbed, I

remember, in the reading of William James’s _Varieties of Religious

Experience_--paid no attention; I did not even look at the papers.

At that time, still, my Uncle Spencer’s convictions about the

impossibility of war were also mine; I had had no experience to make me

believe them unfounded, and, besides, they fitted in very well with my

hopes, my aspirations, my political creed--for at that time I was an

ardent syndicalist and internationalist.

And then, suddenly, it was all on top of us.

My Uncle Spencer, however, remained perfectly optimistic. After a

week of fighting, he prophesied, the German professor would be proved

right and they would have to stop. My own feeling, I remember, was

one of a rather childish exhilaration; my excitement was much more

powerful than my shock of horror. I felt rather as I had felt on the

eve of the kermesse when, looking from my window, I gazed down at the

mountebanks setting up their booths and engines in the square below.

Something was really going to happen. That childish sense of excitement

is, I suppose, the prevailing emotion at the beginning of a war. An

intoxicating Bank Holiday air seems to blow through the streets. War is

always popular, at the beginning.

I did not return immediately to England, but lingered for a few days

at Longres, in the vague hope that I might “see something,” or that

perhaps my Uncle Spencer might really--as I still believed--be right,

and that, perhaps, the whole thing would be over in a few days. My

hope that I should “see something” was fulfilled. But the something

was not one of those brilliant and romantic spectacles I had imagined.

It consisted of a few little troops of refugees from the villages

round Liége--unshaven men, and haggard women with long tear-marks

on their dusty cheeks, and little boys and girls tottering along as

though in their sleep, dumb and stupid with fatigue. My Uncle Spencer

took a family of them into his house. “In a few days,” he said,

“when everything’s over, they’ll be able to go home again.” And when

indignantly Antonieke repeated to him their stories of burnings and

shootings, he wouldn’t believe them.

“After all,” he said, “this is the twentieth century. These things

don’t happen nowadays. These poor people are too tired and frightened

to know exactly what they are saying.”

In the second week of August I went back to England. My Uncle Spencer

was quite indignant when I suggested that he should come back with

me. To begin with, he said, it would all be over so very soon. In the

second place, this was the twentieth century--which was what the

Cretans said, no doubt, when in 1500 B.C., after two thousand years of

peace, prosperity, and progressive civilisation, they were threatened

by the wild men from the north. In the third place, he must stay at

Longres to look after his interests. I did not press him any further;

it would have been useless.

“Good-bye, dear boy,” he said, and there was an unaccustomed note of

emotion in his voice, “good-bye.”

The train slowly moved away. Looking out of the window, I could see him

standing on the platform, waving his hat. His hair was white all over

now, but his face was as young, his eyes as darkly bright, his small

spare body as straight and agile as when I had known him first.

“Good-bye, good-bye.”