CHAPTER XLI.

Little further remains to be told. The story of my life, that is of its

more interesting and critical portion, which I began to write in the long

summer mornings when hay harvest kept more than half the parish busy

in the fields, has occupied my leisure hours until now, when the first

December snow showers fling a glittering mantle about royal Hover, rising

there across the valley amid the domes and spires of the mighty pines.

And, as the record nears completion, the question comes, what shall

be done with it? Shall I lock it away with other treasured sacred

things—a few letters, one or two faded portraits (early examples of the

photographer’s doubtfully flattering art), a woman’s glove, too, and

a tag of once white ribbon foxed by age—a little hoard to be burned

unlooked on when the peaceful churchyard, here close at hand, receives

the baser part of me, and my soul goes back to God who gave it? Or,

when that time comes, undreaded yet uncraved for—since life still is

sweet—shall this record pass into the hands of her who has been its chief

inspiration, the Laura, worthy of how far more melodious a Petrarch, the

Beatrice, worthy of how far more eloquent a Dante, than my obscure and

humble self? Is it mere weakness, outcome of an old man’s doting and

futile vanity, clutching at the shadow where the substance is, and always

had been, beyond his grasp, which makes me thus desire—when revelation

can no longer bring heartburnings or disquiet—those wise and glorious

eyes should read the secret of my love and of my sacrifice at last?

Sentimental? And, after all, why not? For who am I to condemn sentiment,

which, if it contain no corrupt and morbid elements, is surely the

strongest driving power towards noble deeds and heroical ventures human

history can show? To decry or fear sentiment is to decry or fear the

finest achievements of art, of literature, of romance, I had almost said

of religion itself—all that, in short, upon which spirit, as distinct

from matter, feeds and thrives.

And this, quite naturally if not quite obviously, brings me back to the

year Hartover was up at Cambridge. During the few days I spent there

myself, while making my peace with the members of the deserted reading

party and, to some extent, with the good Master himself, I contrived

to find time for an afternoon at Westrea. Nellie Braithwaite must hear

something of all which had lately happened; yet to inform her by letter

appeared to me inadvisable. I did not approve of carrying on any sort of

correspondence behind her father’s back. I must not raise hopes which

might never be realised; but I might, without indiscretion, let her know

Hartover was not only free, but fired, through that same freedom, with

liberal ideas and worthy purposes—let her know, further, I had been

faithful to my promise, and had thrown in my lot with the dear boy’s for

good and all, so that nothing short of rejection on his part would make

me leave him again.

But I speedily perceived, with mingled shame and admiration, any fear

of raising undue hopes was quite uncalled for. I had underrated alike

the courage and sensibility of Nellie Braithwaite’s nature. For her

gladness at my news was veiled by a sweet reserve both of expression and

inquiry—assurance of Hartover’s well-being bringing all her maidenly

dignity into play. Henceforth, as I saw, she would wrap her love about

with silence, hiding it even from me, her chosen friend, in delicate yet

lofty pride. No finger would she raise to beckon Hartover or recall that

early love passage; while, as I also saw, my presence in future would be

less acceptable to her because, from my closeness to Hartover, I formed,

in a measure, a link between him and herself.

I left Westrea, on my return journey to Cambridge, somewhat crestfallen.

As reward of my zeal in fulfilling—and successfully, moreover—the promise

I gave her, was I to be exiled from her confidence? That seemed arbitrary

and, indeed, a little unjust. Whereupon I made a reflection—made how many

thousand times already by how many thousands of my sex!—that the ways of

woman, be she pure and noble or, alas! signally the reverse, are one and

all mysterious, past forecasting and past finding out.

And at that I had to leave it. For Hartover, on his part, spoke no word,

gave no sign. Hover, the moors, the stables, the kennels, and, as I

observed with satisfaction, so much of the varied business of the great

property as he could get in touch with, filled his time and mind to the

exclusion of all question of—in his own phrase—‘petticoats.’ Was Nellie

Braithwaite forgotten then? Once again I must be stern with myself; for

how should it advantage me even if she was?

But specially did stables and kennels bulk big among the dear boy’s many

interests and occupations during that pleasant long vacation, whereby

Warcop was made the happiest of men. For one morning, about a fortnight

after our arrival, Hartover threw a letter to me across the breakfast

table.

‘Read that,’ he said. ‘The Rusher signs his abdication—gives up the

hounds, moves his horses—or what he is pleased to call his—I think I

know who has paid for them and their keep for a good dozen years now—and

hunts in Leicestershire this winter. My father must not, of course,

be worried, so her Magnificence forwards the letter to me. Really, it

strikes me as rather pathetic, Brownlow. How are the mighty fallen! But,

pathetic or not, the hounds must be hunted this season or the mouth of

our enemy—Bramhall, to wit—will be altogether too extensively enlarged

over us.—Oh! well, if it comes to that, I suppose I can hunt them well

enough myself, with Warcop’s help, putting in a day every fortnight or so

from Cambridge during term time. I’ll back myself to be a popular master

before the end of the winter, though there will be prejudices to live

down, no doubt. Gad! so much the better—_carrière ouverte aux talents_.

After all, I can canoodle and coax against most people, you know, and be

nine foot high, too, when I like.’

Which was perfectly true. Had I not experience thereof? I fell in with

this idea the more readily since our English institution of fox-hunting

plays so large a part in country life, bringing landlord and tenant

together on equal terms, and establishing a friendly and wholesome

relation invaluable as between class and class. Mastership of the Hover,

though infringing somewhat upon the routine of his college work, was in

my opinion calculated to prove an excellent introduction to those larger

and immensely more important forms of mastership which, for Hartover,

seemed to loom up by no means far ahead.

But creaking gates hang long, the proverb says. And this proved true of

the invalid at Bath. The months passed, and yet Lord Longmoor, though

increasingly fanciful, increasingly querulous, increasingly a sick man,

in truth, still kept a feeble hold of life through autumn, winter,

spring, and on into the golden heats of midsummer. The May term again

drew to its close, and with it Hartover’s sojourn at Cambridge. How had

the university affected and influenced him? Chiefly, I believed, as a

pause, a place of recovery before further effort. Out of the great world

he had come, surfeited by all too heavy a meal—for one of his age—of

the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Back into the

great world, it was ordained, he must return. But he had rested by the

way, had slept off the effects, so to speak, of that over-much and evil

fruit-eating, had at once steadied and grown younger.

Meanwhile he was the darling of the college; where, from the good Master,

through ranks of dons and gownsmen, down to gyps and bed-makers, he was

an object of interest and of admiration. And this less from snobbery, the

vulgar spirit—too common among us—which ‘loves a lord,’ than from his own

charm and grace and the irresistible way he had with him. The affection

he inspired and interest he excited, touched and amused him, when he

happened to be conscious of it; but his eyes, so I fancied, were set on

something beyond, and as the time of departure drew near I seemed to

observe in him a growing preoccupation and restlessness.

And so the anniversary of his hurried journey to find me came

round—the anniversary, too, of Fédore’s death. Did he remember it, I

wondered—remember his torment of suspense and desolation? He never spoke

of Fédore, or of the crowded events of those few rather desperate days.

The recuperative power of youth is wellnigh unlimited. Was remembrance of

them erased from his mind by a natural and healthy process of attrition,

or was his silence intentional? Again I wondered.

When he left Cambridge I should go with him, and not for the long

vacation merely. But, by the Master’s kind advice and permission, I was

to retain both my fellowship and my rooms, putting in so much residence

in the course of the year as I could manage. Of this I was glad. Not for

an instant did I hesitate to follow Hartover; but it would, I own, have

caused me a keen pang to sever my connection with the university entirely.

All day, on the anniversary of Fédore’s death, I had been packing

and sorting my now not inconsiderable library, destroying—odious

occupation—old letters and papers. While so engaged the thought of Nellie

Braithwaite had been curiously, almost oppressively, present to me. Only

thrice had I seen her during the past eight or nine months. I should, in

all probability, see her even less frequently in future. Yes, Hartover’s

emancipation, strangely enough, parted us far more effectually than

Hartover’s wrongdoings or Hartover’s troubles ever had. Would she live

on, without change of estate or of place, from girlhood to womanhood,

womanhood to old age, busied with home and household, and the care of her

father, still cherishing the exquisite yet unfruitful love of her youth?

That was a lovely picture, but a sad one. As I destroyed papers, sorted

and packed my books, I almost unconsciously placed another picture beside

it. For years hence, when the shadows grew long, might it not be possible

she would weary of such an existence? Then, in the twilight, might not my

turn come, might not she and I grow old together, dwelling under the same

roof, bearing the same name at last? A lovely picture too—if a little dim

and pallid—lovely at least to me. I went on with my sorting and packing,

a smile on my lips and grip of not unpleasant pain about my heart.

Went on, until it grew too dark for me to read the names of the books

as I took them down off the shelves. I lighted the candles on my study

table, using a wax vesta from an old silver box the dear boy had once

given me. And, so doing, I recollected with a start that, absorbed in

my own preparations for departure, I had not seen him all day. The

occurrence was so unusual that, realising it, I felt somewhat uneasy.

I recollected, moreover, that he had not put in an appearance at hall.

This increased my uneasiness. I sent round to his rooms, in the big

quadrangle, only to learn that he had gone out riding early, taking no

groom with him, and leaving no information as to the probable time of his

return or as to his destination.

Nine o’clock, half-past nine, ten o’clock struck. Darling of the college

or not, at this rate my young lord ran a chance of being ignominiously

gated. Uneasiness deepened into anxiety, anxiety into downright alarm.

It was not possible to sit still in this state of suspense any longer.

I went out on to the landing, down my staircase, and half-way across

the small court—charming in the warm gloom of the midsummer night, with

its tinkling fountain, its squares and oblongs of lamplit window—when

footsteps rang out under the archway, and a young man came towards

me, not in regulation cap and gown, but high riding boots, white cord

breeches, his coat and hat appearing white also, so thickly overlaid were

they by dust.

Hartover slipped his arm within mine.

‘That’s right,’ he said, with a queer, gay, yet half-shy little laugh. ‘I

could have sworn I should find you, every feather on end, clucking after

your lost chick; so I came right on here, without stopping to change or

have a brush.’

‘But where have you been, my dear boy?’ I cried, still agitated, struck,

moreover, by a strangeness in his manner. Not that his gaiety was forced.

On the contrary, it seemed to bubble up and overflow out of some depth of

incontrollable gladness.

‘Doing the best day’s work of my life,’ he answered. ‘But let me come up

to your rooms. We can’t talk here. And there are things to explain. Good

as the day’s work is, you still have to put the finishing touch to it.

Can’t do without you, you see, in good fortune any more than in bad—even

if I wanted to, which, God knows, I don’t. But forty miles, dear old man,

in dust and sun—or nearer fifty, for, like a fool, I lost my way coming

back and gandered about for ever so long in those fenlands. Gad! how

enchanting they are though, Brownlow!—The vast reed beds, and great meres

like shining mirrors, holding miles of sky in their pretty laps, and the

long skeins of wild-fowl rising off them and calling to the sunset. I

have never understood the fascination of a flat country before. I must go

and have another look at it all some day—some day—because it will speak

to me of⸺’

He broke off. And again he laughed, mounting the dark stairs so rapidly

beside me that I had some ado to keep pace with him.

Once inside, he threw hat, gloves, and crop down on the table, blew out

the candles, and, crossing the room, lowered himself gingerly on to the

window seat.

‘Let’s sit in the dark.—Jeshurun! I am stiff, though!—You don’t mind—the

dark I mean—do you? It’s more peaceful.’

I minded nothing but delay, for a feverish impatience was upon me.

‘Yes,’ he went on; ‘the finishing touch has to be yours, Brownlow.

There’s something I want you to do for me, as usual.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘This: You remember that which happened a year ago to-day?’

His tone changed, sobered. I did remember, and told him so.

‘I have waited through a whole year as a penance—a penance self-inflicted

in expiation of certain sins. During that year I have lived cleanly.’

And I felt, rather than saw, his eyes fixed on mine—felt, too, that his

face flushed.

‘I knew perfectly well by waiting I risked losing what I supremely long

for. But I accepted that risk as part of my penance—the very heart of it,

in fact.’

‘Yes,’ I murmured, greatly marvelling to what his speech should lead up.

He leaned across and laid his hand on my knee.

‘I rode over to Westrea to-day,’ he said.

‘Westrea? What do you know—how have you heard about Westrea?’ I exclaimed.

‘From Warcop, when last we were at Hover. I could not say anything to

you, Brownlow, because I would not have you involved. The Braithwaites

were your friends, and I didn’t want, of course, to come between you and

them, which could hardly have been avoided if—well, if things had turned

out badly for me.’

Again that note of uncontrollable gladness in his voice.

‘I felt it would be unfair to ask questions of you, as I could not

explain; and the penance had to be completed in full before I could talk

of it. But Warcop was different. I had no scruple in finding out from him

where they—where she—now lived. And⸺’

He turned, leaning his elbow on the window-sill, speaking softly, and

looking out into the fair windless night.

‘I—I have seen her. I have been with her nearly all day. Braithwaite

was away, luckily—at Thetford, I believe she told me—at some political

meeting. She has not changed, except that she is even more beautiful than

I remembered. And she loves me. She will marry me, when her father gives

his consent.’

A minute or more of silence, for I could not bring myself to speak. But,

absorbed as Hartover was in his own joy, he failed to notice it, I

think. Presently he faced round, and once more I felt his eyes fixed on

mine.

‘And this is where your good offices come in, dear old man,’ he went on.

‘Of course I shall go to Braithwaite myself, and ask for her hand with

all due form and ceremony. But I want you to see or write to him too,

and back me up. Tell him I’m not the young rake and wastrel he probably

imagines me to be—and which—well—I once was. Tell him he needn’t be

afraid to trust her to me; for I know the world pretty thoroughly by

now, and still find her the noblest and most precious thing in it. Tell

him,’—and he laughed a little naughtily—‘he may just as well give in

first as last, for have her I will, if I’m obliged to kidnap her, carry

her off without with your leave or by your leave. Nothing will stop me

short of death; so he’d best accept the inevitable. I am perfectly aware

I belong to a class he’d like to exterminate—that he regards me as an

absurd anachronism, a poisonous blotch on the body politic. But, as I

was explaining to her to-day, I can’t help being who I am. This, anyhow,

is not my fault.—Ah! and that’s so delicious about her, Brownlow!—Just

what has made other women keen to catch me, actually stands in my way

with her. She doesn’t care a row of pins, I verily believe, for money,

or rank, or titles. It is I, myself, she loves, not what I can give her.

Quaint, you know, after two or three seasons of London mothers with

daughters on hand for sale—it strikes one as quaint, but, good Lord, how

mighty refreshing!’

Again he leaned his elbow on the window-sill, turning his head. I could

just make out the line of his profile, the lips parted in something

between a sigh and laughter.

‘She’s so clever, too—so splendidly awake. Picture the endless delight

of showing her beautiful things, new and beautiful places! And she is

so well read—far better read than I. That’s very much thanks to you,

Brownlow. She spoke of you so sweetly, and of the comfort and help your

friendship had been to her. I’m very grateful; though, upon my word, I

came deucedly near being jealous once or twice, and inclined to think she

praised you a wee bit too highly. But, joking apart, dear old man, you

will see Braithwaite and give me a good character?’

He rose as he spoke. It was time. I could not have endured much longer.

For I had been racked if ever man had—each sentence of Hartover’s—merry,

serious, teasing, eloquent, tender—an added turn of the screw under which

muscles parted and sinews snapped. How thankful I was to the merciful

darkness which hid me! My voice I could, to some extent, command, but by

my looks I must have been betrayed.

Hartover felt the way across to the table, picked up his hat, gloves, and

crop. Mechanically I rose too, and followed him out on to the landing.

‘The sooner the better,’ he said slyly. ‘Think how long I’ve waited!

I ascertained Braithwaite will be at home all day. Couldn’t you go

to-morrow?’

‘If I can get a conveyance,’ I answered.

‘There are my horses.’

But twenty miles’ ride out, and twenty back, with such an interview in

the interval, was, I felt, beyond my strength.

‘Oh! well; leave it to me, then. I’ll arrange,’ the boy said, ‘if you’ll

let me. Good-night, Brownlow, and God bless you! You’re the dearest and

best friend living.’

He ran down the dark stairs, and swung across the little court. I

listened, till the sound of his footsteps died out under the archway,

and went back, shutting and locking both doors behind me. Then came

the blackest hour of my life—worse than the racking—wherein I fought,

in solitude, with the seven devils of envy, hatred, and malice, the

devil of loneliness too; with the natural animal man in me, and with

visions—almost concrete in their vividness and intensity—of what Nellie’s

love must and would surely be to him on whom she bestowed it.

Of the following day I retain a strange memory, as of something unreal

and phantasmal. I believe I looked much as usual, talked as usual,

behaved in a reasonable and normal manner. But my speech and action were

alike mechanical. My brain worked, my material and physical brain, that

is; but for the time being soul and heart were dead in me. I felt no

emotion, felt nothing, indeed, save a dumb ache of longing the day were

over and I free to rest.

For I drove out to Westrea, of course. How could I do otherwise? True to

his word, Hartover had made all necessary arrangement, as he sent word to

me early. At the same time he sent round a note, with the request I would

deliver it to Nellie—of which more hereafter. I found Braithwaite at home

and greatly perturbed in mind; for, like the fearless and honourable

being she was, Nellie had already told him both the fact and purpose of

Hartover’s visit.

‘I know what brings you here, Brownlow,’ he said, as he met me in the

porch. ‘And I could wish you a worthier errand. I confess I am very sore.

I flattered myself this mad project had received its quietus long ago. I

object to it as strongly as I ever objected, and for the same reasons.

Such a marriage is equally contrary to my wishes and my convictions.

Permitting it, I, having preached to others, should indeed become myself

a castaway. What will those who share my views as to the iniquity of the

aristocratic, the feudal system—which strangles the independence and

stunts the moral and material growth of three-fifths of, so-called, free

Englishmen—think of me, when they find me throwing principle to the winds

for the vulgar satisfaction of seeing my daughter a countess?’

This, and much more to the same effect, weighted by sufficient substratum

of truth to render it difficult to combat. Not only natural and genuine

fear for Nellie’s future happiness, but all his native obstinacy was

aroused. In vain, as it seemed, I pleaded the change in Hartover, the

seriousness of his purpose, the depths of his affection, his growing

sense of responsibility. In vain, too, I made a clean breast of certain

family matters, spoke of Fédore’s unscrupulous pursuit, her ladyship’s

complicity, and of the intrigues which had surrounded Hartover, as I

feared, from childhood.

‘Granted all you say,’ he answered. ‘Granted the young man’s reformation

is sincere and promises to be lasting, can you honestly advise me,

my dear Brownlow, to let my daughter become part and parcel of a

society thus permeated by low scheming and, on your own showing, by

downright immorality? You are actuated by a fantastic and chivalrous

devotion to this handsome young princeling, which blinds you to facts.

Sensible fellow though you are, he has dazzled and bewitched you, just

as he dazzles and bewitches my poor Nellie. But having an honest and

deep-seated objection to anything in the shape of princelings, I retain

my clearness of eyesight, and am actuated by common sense and prudence

regarding the safety of my daughter.’

‘At the cost of breaking her heart?’ I rather wearily ventured.

Whereupon we started to argue the whole question over again. While thus

engaged we had sauntered to the door of the pleasant low-ceilinged

living-room opening on to the garden, which, brilliant in colour, rich

with the scent of sweet-briar and syringa, of borders thick-set with

pinks, sweet-williams and roses, basked between its high red walls in

the still afternoon sunshine. On the threshold Braithwaite turned to me,

saying almost bitterly:

‘Ah! Brownlow, I am disappointed. Why couldn’t you speak for yourself,

man? How willingly would I have given her to you, had you asked me! Often

have I hoped, since you stayed under my roof at Easter year, it might

eventually come to that.’

Well for me I had been racked and devil-hunted last night till emotion

was dead in me!

‘Why have I never spoken for myself? Because—well—look at Nellie. There

is your answer.’

And I pointed to the upward sloping pasture. Now I divined the contents

of that note which the boy had confided to me for delivery. I was not

only his ambassador, but his despatch rider. My mission hardly unfolded,

he followed daringly close behind.

For down across the turf walked Hartover leading his horse, hat in hand.

Beside him, in blue-sprigged muslin gown and lilac sun-bonnet, walked

Nellie. As we stepped out of the doorway she caught sight of us, and the

sound of her voice came in soft but rapid speech. The young man, whose

head inclined towards her, looked up and gallantly waved his hat. They

reached the bottom of the slope, and as they stood side by side on the

bank, the great brown hunter, extending its neck, snuffed the coolth off

the water. Only the brimming stream and bright garden lay between them

and us.

‘Mr. Braithwaite,’ Hartover called, ‘shall I be forced to run away with

her? Time and place favour it; and, Gad! sir, my horse has plenty left in

him yet.’

He slipped his arm round the girl’s waist and made a feint of tossing her

on to the saddle.

‘Confound the fellow’s impudence!’ Braithwaite growled, as he moved back

into the house.

But his eyes were wet. He was beaten. Youth and love had won the day, and

he knew it.

Thus came the end, or rather the beginning. For the end—as I look across

the valley this morning at royal Hover, wrapped in that glittering mantle

of new-fallen snow—is not, please God, for a long time yet.

Still, in point of fact, Nellie Braithwaite never became Lady Hartover.

For Braithwaite exacted an interval of six months before the wedding; and

before those same six months were out the poor creaking gate, away at

Bath, had creaked itself finally out of earthly existence, and into—let

us charitably hope—a more profitable heavenly one; while—such after all

is the smooth working of our aristocratic and hereditary system, with

its _le roi est mort, vive le roi_—over his great possessions his son, my

always very dear, and sometime very naughty, pupil, reigned in his stead.

As to myself, Cambridge and Hover, Hover and Cambridge, till, the home

living falling vacant, I removed myself and my books here to this

pleasant parsonage, where learned and unlearned, gentle and simple, young

and old, are good enough to come and visit me, and confide to me their

hopes, and joys, disappointments, sorrows, and sometimes—poor souls—their

sins.

THE END.

_THE TERCENTENARY OF RICHARD HAKLUYT._

_November 23, 1616._

These is nothing more essentially English than the passion for adventure

and exploration, for seeing and colonising the world. It is a strange

passion: it leads men to leave the fair and comfortable villages, the

meadow-lands and sheltering woods to which they were born, for desolation

and strange seas, to exchange the temperate airs of England for the

rigours of Arctic nights and the burning of tropic mornings, to give up

security and good living for starvation and hardship, for death by thirst

or famine, or the cruelties of ‘salvages.’ Yet to this call of the blood

few Englishmen turn an utterly deaf ear—for century after century, and

generation after generation, they have followed the call and strewed

their bones about the world, while those who came home again simply

inflamed others to follow their adventuring footsteps.

We look upon the Elizabethan age as our perfect flowering time in poetry

and drama and the courtly arts. We know, moreover, how in that reign our

seamen first fully realised themselves, and one of the greatest among

them accomplished his fruitful circumnavigation of the globe. It is

singularly fitting, therefore, that such a time should have produced the

man who realised the epic quality of the voyagings and travels done in

his day and in times past, and who dedicated his life to setting down

some worthy record of those things. That man was Richard Hakluyt—or

Hacklewit, as his name was commonly pronounced and often spelt by his

contemporaries, and that spelling gives it a native English look more

in keeping with his nature than the accepted form. Three hundred years

ago, in November 1616, the same year as Shakespeare, he died, bequeathing

to posterity the work of his life in that noble book called by him ‘The

Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English

Nation, made by Sea or Overland to the Remote and furthest Distant

Quarters of the Earth at any time within the Compasse of these 1600

Yeares.’

Such a work grew from no common inspiration; it was not compiled, as

many later ‘monumental’ works have been, from other men’s researches:

it was part of the very fabric of his life. He spent laborious days and

nights, he gave long patient years to his self-imposed task, he studied

and he travelled, he talked with living men and inquired of the works of

dead ones; all knowledge was his province, so that it bore on his great

subject. It is doubtful if the annals of literature can show a more

passionate and more persistent devotion. As Hakluyt himself said to ‘The

Reader’ in the second edition of his ‘Voyages’:

‘For the bringing of which into this homely and rough-hewen

shape, which here thou seest; what restlesse nights, what

painefull dayes, what heat, what cold I have endured; how many

long and chargeable journeys I have travelled; how many famous

libraries I have searched into; what varieties of ancient and

moderne writers I have perused; what a number of old records,

patents, privileges, letters, etc., I have redeemed from

obscuritie and perishing; into how manifold acquaintance I

have entered; what expenses I have not spared; and yet what

opportunities of private gaine, preferment, and ease I have

neglected; albeit thyselfe canst hardly imagine, yet I by daily

experience do finde and feele; and some of my entier friends

can sufficiently testifie. Howbeit (as I told thee at the

first) the honour and benefits of this Common weale wherein I

live and breathe hath made all difficulties seeme easie, all

paines and industrie pleasant, and all expenses of light value

and moment unto me.’

The records of his life are scanty: that autobiographical passage, and

one other, are almost all he tells us about himself. He was content

with personal obscurity so long as his work was accomplished. It is

significant that, although buried in Westminster Abbey, the place of

his grave is not known, nor is any portrait of him believed to be in

existence. He called himself simply Richard Hakluyt, Preacher, and though

he meant that in the clerical sense which was his profession, we may give

it another meaning as well, for he was Preacher of Empire to England, and

of the splendid words of _Ecclesiasticus_, ‘Let us now praise famous men,

and our fathers that begat us.’

His life story is singularly complete and quite undeviating in aim. The

great object for which he was to work was revealed to him early, and

cannot be better told than in the grave simplicity of his own words, in

his ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ to Sir Francis Walsingham:

‘I do remember that being a youth, and one of Her Majestie’s

scholars at Westminster that fruitfull nurserie, it was my

happe to visit the chamber of Mr. Richard Hakluyt my cosin, a

Gentleman of the Middle Temple, well knowen unto you, at a

time when I found lying open upon his boord certeine bookes of

Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe: he seeing me somewhat

curious in the view thereof, began to instruct my ignorance,

by shewing me the division of the Earth into three parts after

the olde account, and then according to the latter, and better

distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the

knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bayes, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires,

Kingdomes, Dukedomes, and Territories of each part, with

declaration also of their speciall commodities, and particular

wants, which by the benefit of traffike, and entercourse of

merchants, are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought

me to the Bible, and turning to the 107 Psalme, directed me to

the 23 and 24 verses, where I read, that they which go downe

to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see

the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe, etc.

which words of the Prophet together with my cousins discourse

(things of high and rare delight to my young nature) tooke in

me so deepe an impression, that I constantly resolved, if ever

I were preferred to the University, where better time, and

more convenient place might be ministered for these studies, I

would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kinde of

literature, the doores whereof (after a sort) were so happily

opened before me.’

It was a true vocation the young Hakluyt had found, and he faithfully

followed it all the days of his life. He took his degree as Master of

Arts at Oxford in 1577, having learned five languages for the sake of

his maritime inquiries; and then lectured ‘in the common schools,’

demonstrating the advances of geography—in his own attractive words,

he ‘had waded on still farther and farther in the sweet studie of the

historie of Cosmographie.’ His first book appeared in 1582, dedicated to

Sir Philip Sidney, and called ‘Divers voyages touching the discoverie of

America and the Ilands adjacent unto the same, made first of all by our

Englishmen.’

Hakluyt was convinced, as he set forth in his book, that for the future

development of exploration and ‘plantation’ (as colonisation was called

in those days) by the English, our principal necessity was a good system

of education in nautical affairs. This need he continued to urge upon men

of influence throughout his life; to Lord Howard of Effingham, the year

after the Armada, he wrote (‘as being the father and principall favourer

of the English Navigation’), pointing out—

‘the meanes of breeding up of skilfull sea-men and mariners

in this Realme. Sithence your Lordship is not ignorant,’ he

continued, ‘that ships are to little purpose without skilfull

sea-men; and since sea-men are not bred up to perfection of

skill in much less time (as it is said) than in the time of two

prentiships; and since no kinde of men of any profession in

the common wealth passe their yeres in so great and continuall

hazard of life; and since of so many, so few grow to gray

heires: how needfull it is, that by way of Lectures and such

like instructions, these ought to have a better education,

than hitherto they have had: all wise men may easily judge.

When I call to minde, how many noble ships have bene lost, how

many worthy persons have bene drenched in the sea, and how

greatly this Realme hath bene impoverished by losse of great

Ordinance and other rich Commodities through the ignorance of

Our Sea-men, I have greatly wished there were a Lecture of

Navigation read in this Citie, for the banishing of our former

grosse ignorance in Marine Causes, and for the increase and

generall multiplying of the sea-knowledge in this age, wherein

God has raised so generall a desire in the youth of this Realme

to discover all parts of the face of the earth, to this Realme

in former ages not knowen.’

To the advancing of navigation, which he justly called ‘the very walls

of this our Island,’ he was most anxious that a lectureship should be

established ‘in London or about Ratcliffe.’ Sir Francis Drake shared

this wish, and offered twenty pounds a year towards its support, but as

another twenty was needed and no one offered it, Hakluyt’s dream of the

training of the complete navigator came to naught. Perhaps it was not

so much needed as he thought in his anxious care, for during the whole

of Elizabeth’s reign only one dockyard-built ship, the small _Lion’s

Whelp_, was lost by stress of weather or grounding, while English ships

weathered gales in which whole Spanish fleets foundered at sea. But

Hakluyt’s desire was fundamentally a sound one, for in those early days

when science was in its infancy, and tradition and rule-of-thumb the

only guide, his mind reached forward to the value of technical training.

Another matter in which he was in advance of his time was his concern

in the ‘curing of hot diseases,’ wherein he had a far-off vision of our

modern schools of Tropical Medicine. Hakluyt’s ‘industry,’ which indeed

was on a colossal scale, was much commended by his contemporaries, but

while doing full homage to that unflagging zeal, we perceive other

qualities which engage our affection as industry alone could not do. No

one can read his beautiful dedications and prefaces without being touched

by his ardour, the freshness of his enthusiasm for all that pertains

to the sea-greatness of England, which he both recorded and foresaw.

The splendid fervour of Elizabethan poetry is in them. He gives to his

great book all the riches of his mind, and regards the achievements it

chronicles with a most passionate pride. He tells the reader that ‘it

remaineth that thou take the profits and pleasure of the worke: which

I wish to bee as great to thee, as my paines and labour have bene in

bringing these raw fruits unto this ripeness, and in reducing these loose

papers into this order.’ To him ‘Geographie and Chronologie’ are ‘the

Sunne and the Moone, the right eye and the left of all history,’ and all

history is but the ‘prologue to the omen coming on’ of English greatness

at sea. He sees the unknown regions of the globe as the scene, past and

to come, of that great drama of exploration where our seamen by their

‘high heart and manly resolution’ were to win new lands for England by

‘their high courage and singular activity.’ In seas uncharted, in a world

imperfectly known and full of fantastic terrors, he yet believed that

‘Where the dishevelled ghastly sea-nymph sings,

Our well-rigged ships shall stretch their swelling wings,’

and he desired, as might be expected from his thoroughness, not only to

write of those things, but to experience them. He planned to accompany

Drake’s West Indies voyage of 1585, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s fatal

one in 1583, but happily some unknown cause prevented his embarking

with Gilbert. England could ill have spared him with his great task

unaccomplished.

In 1589, the year after the defeat of the Armada, the fruit of his

labours appeared in the first edition in one folio volume of ‘The

Principal Navigations.’ After another ten years of labour the second and

final edition in three folio volumes was published in 1598-1600. When

that work appeared he might justly have said with Drake, ‘I am the man I

have promised to be.’ He had accomplished the toil he had set himself,

and doing so produced a work which is nearer being the epic of the

English people than any other book we have. Every activity of his busy

life was made to serve that central purpose. He went abroad, he lived

for five years in France as chaplain to Queen Elizabeth’s Ambassador; he

gained ecclesiastical preferment, becoming prebendary of Bristol, rector

of Wetheringsett in Suffolk, archdeacon of Westminster, and Chaplain of

the Savoy. He married, he had a son—but all these things are shadowy

to us: Hakluyt is the chronicler of the ‘Voyages,’ the mouthpiece of

Elizabethan England at sea, and as such he would wish that we remembered

him. Drayton showed the responsiveness of his contemporaries when he sang:

‘Thy voyages attend

Industrious Hackluit,

Whose reading shall inflame

Men to seek fame

And much commend

To after times thy wit.’

We do not feel that Hakluyt cared greatly about commending to after times

his wit, but that his book should inflame ‘men to seek fame’ was its

very object and purpose. He lived in the age of exploration and great

attempts; Englishmen were just fully awakening to their heritage, and

determined no longer to be forestalled by the Spaniards and Portuguese in

the adventure of the globe. The regions left them to explore were more

dangerous and difficult than what Hakluyt calls ‘the mild, lightsome,

temperate, and warm Atlantic Ocean, over which the Spaniards and

Portugals have made so many pleasant, prosperous and golden voyages.’

But from the rigours of harsh latitudes they won their fame and their

hardihood. We love Hakluyt’s gorgeous Elizabethan pride when he speaks

favourably of the Northern voyages of the Dutch, but ‘with this proviso;

that our English nation led them the dance, brake the yce before them,

and gave them good leave to light their candle at our torch.’

What a father he was to his seamen, how he rejoiced in their triumphs,

sympathised in their affections, and understood their ‘sea-sorrows’!

Many and bitter are those sorrows, as recorded in his ‘Voyages,’ and the

men of that day, many of whom had known the savageries of Spain, and all

of whom had lived through the coming of the ‘Invincible Armada,’ would

thrill to the grand Biblical opening of that poignant narrative of John

Hartop, ‘Man being born of a Woman, living a short time is replenished

with many miseries, which some know by reading of histories, many by the

view of others’ calamities, and I by experience.’

‘I by experience’—that is the very voice of Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ its

unique and authentic value, the quality which makes it no book but a

living document of the English people. In his labour to make it that

Hakluyt drew to himself all he needed, from the humble and from the

great. He tells us how many ‘virtuous gentlemen’ helped him, and gives us

a galaxy of great Elizabethan names—Sir John Hawkins (who knew something

of ‘sea-sorrows,’ for when he returned from his West Indies voyage he

said to Walsingham, ‘If I should write of all our calamities I am sure a

volume as great as the Bible will scarce suffice’), Sir Walter Ralegh,

Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord Howard of Effingham,

the Lord Treasurer Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil, foreign cosmographers

and scholars like Mercator, Ortelius, and Thevet, were his friends and

correspondents. He valued them all, and not less did he value each humble

sailor he came across, such as Mr. Jennings and Mr. Smith, ‘the master

and master’s mate of the ship called the _Toby_, belonging to Bristol,’

or a nameless seaman, ‘One of mine acquaintance of Ratcliffe.’ He

travelled two hundred miles on horseback to speak with one Thomas Buts,

the sole survivor of a Labrador voyage. From the lips of all he learned,

and nothing was insignificant to him if it bore upon the sea or far

countries or the restless adventures and heroisms of the men of his race.

It is the story of the travels of individual men, he truly says, which

brings us to a full knowledge of the world, ‘not those weary volumes

bearing the titles of Universal Cosmography, which some men that I could

name have published as their own.’ It came too late for inclusion in

his book; but how he would appreciate the saying of Sir Henry Middleton

when the Red Sea was ‘discovered’ (a hundred years after the Portuguese

discovered it), and the Turks claimed it as a close sea. ‘To come into

this sea,’ Middleton answered splendidly, ‘I needed no leave but God’s

and my King’s,’ and followed up his answer with cannon shot. Hakluyt,

like most passionate pioneers of Empire, lacked the humour that was

Shakespeare’s: ‘Master,’ says one of the fishermen in _Pericles_, ‘I

marvel how the fishes live in the sea,’ and was answered: ‘Why, as men do

a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.’ The gravity of a great

purpose is seldom seasoned with humour, and more to Hakluyt’s liking than

Shakespeare’s jest would have been the thought of Samuel Daniel:

‘And who, in time, knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?’

He was filled with a spacious philanthropy to the unknown world,

and would bestow on it the benefits of our tongue and our laws. His

gentleness and wisdom did not fail him even on the thorny question of

the propagation of the Christian religion among the ‘salvages’ of the

Indies:

‘The means,’ he says, ‘to send such as shall labour effectually

in this business is, by planting one or two colonies of

our nation upon that firm [mainland] where they may remain

in safety and first learn the language of the people near

adjoining (the gift of tongues being now taken away) and by

little and little acquaint themselves with their manners, and

so with discretion and mildness distill into their purged minds

the sweet and lively liquor of the gospel.’

His sagacity and good judgment is shown by the way in which he dealt with

and arranged the enormous mass of material he accumulated. The wild and

fantastic methods of some Elizabethan historians were not to his mind: he

launched not out into a Universal History of the World on Ralegh’s plan,

and by his very restraint and the value of his material produced a book

which will live as long as the English language, while Ralegh’s ambitious

effort has gone to dust, which weighs light in the balance compared

with the jewelled lines of his lyric, ‘If all the world and love were

young.’ Hakluyt shirks none of the pedestrian necessities of his task:

he carefully records the name of the historian of each voyage, as well

as the name of the voyager, so that every man may ‘answer for himself,

justify his reports, and stand accountable for his own doings.’ Moreover,

he exercises a stern supervision over the superfluous—a necessity if

he was to get as many voyages and as much information as possible into

the compass of his volumes, for as Professor Walter Raleigh says in his

inspiring Introductory Essay to Maclehose’s edition of Hakluyt, ‘It was

the habit of his age to begin even a nautical diary with a few remarks on

the origin of the world, the history of man, and the opinions of Plato.’

Delightful though such remarks would now be to the student of Elizabethan

literature, Hakluyt had little use for them. He had a stern, a great,

and a practical intent in compiling his ‘Principal Navigations,’ and

a far better thing to him than literary graces would be the knowledge

that the profits of the East India Company were increased by £20,000

through the study of his book. He classified and arranged his voyages in

three series: first the voyages to the South and South-East; then the

North-Eastern voyages; and last the voyages to the West, ‘those rare,

delightfull and profitable histories,’ and ‘the beginnings and proceeding

of the two English Colonies planted in Virginia,’ of which Ralegh said,

‘I shall yet live to see it an English nation.’

Such, in rough outline, is that great work of his, which perhaps might

justly represent us to the world, with the Plays of Shakespeare, in the

two aspects of which we are most proud, our seamanship and our poetry,

were two books only to be taken from our literature. Shakespeare and

Hakluyt, who by a singular coincidence both died in the same year, make

together an epitome of the English people. In a large number of cases

they share the fate of classics, especially classics on the great scale,

and are ‘taken as read.’ But no matter: their thought and their passion,

different though they are in degree, have permeated the very marrow of

our minds, we absorb them unconsciously simply because we are English.

The most unlettered seaman is a ‘pilgrim’ of Hakluyt’s and an embodiment

of his hopes; the most casual or most glorious Englishman is a type

of Shakespeare’s, and to be found in that ‘universal gallery’ of his

plays. In Hakluyt we enjoy the English combination of the poetic and the

practical, and delight in his shrewdness and his pure enthusiasm.

He set out to prove, in a partially discovered world, that in the

splendid saying of an earlier Englishman, Robert Thorne, ‘There is no

land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable.’ That might be the motto of his

book; while as to him and all the seamen he fathered and gloried in we

may take the delightful words of Fuller and see them as ‘bound for no

other harbour but the Port of Honour, though touching at the Port of

Profit in passage thereunto.’

E. HALLAM MOORHOUSE.

_THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: FIGHTING STRENGTH._

BY BOYD CABLE.

The fighting strength of the three batteries of a Brigade of Field

Artillery, at the time of the First Expeditionaries, totalled 18 guns,

18 officers, and about 650 non-commissioned officers and men. You might

remember those figures, or when you have finished the reading of this

tale just refer back to them.

The Brigade was posted before the action opened in a cornfield which

lay on the banks of a canal, and the guns were ‘concealed’ behind some

of the innocent-looking stooks of cut corn which were ranged in rows

along the field. It was the Brigade’s first action, and every officer

and man waited with expectant eagerness for the appearance of the enemy.

On the other side of the canal there was a wide stretch of open ground,

but to the gunners it appeared too good to be true that the enemy would

advance across that open and give the guns a chance of sweeping them off

the earth with shrapnel. At some points tongues and spurs of thick wood

ran out towards the canal, and it was rather through and under cover

of the trees that the artillerymen expected the enemy to try to press

in on the front which ran roughly along the line of the canal. Such an

advance would not give the guns so visible and open a target for so long

a time; but, on the other hand, there was still an open space between

the nearest parts of the woods and the canal bank, and if the attack

were confined to the approaches through the woods it meant that the guns

could concentrate on a much narrower front, and there was never a gunner

of them there but believed his own battery alone, much less the whole

Brigade, capable of smashing up any attempt to debouch from the woods and

of obliterating any force that tried it. Nevertheless, all their training

and teaching and manœuvres and field-days of peace times indicated the

woods as the likeliest points of attack, because it had been an accepted

rule laid down in peace—and there were plenty of men in the batteries who

remembered the same and very much sterner rule laid down in the South

African War—that infantry could not, across the open, attack entrenched

positions held by infantry and covered by artillery.

On the whole, the Brigade were very well satisfied with the look of

things, and having taken careful ranges to the different points of the

probable targets, with special attention to the wood edges, uncapped a

goodly number of fuzes, given a last look to the mechanism of guns and

gear, put some finishing touches to the cunning arrangement of corn

stooks, they lit pipes and cigarettes and settled down comfortably to

wait developments.

The developments came rapidly, but being at first more or less after

the expected routine as laid down in their teaching, the Brigade were

not unduly disturbed. The first fire of the enemy artillery was, as far

as the Brigade could see, not particularly well aimed, and although it

made a great deal of noise and smoke appeared to be doing little harm to

the infantry trenches, and none to the artillery behind them. Presently

the men watched with great interest, but little realisation of its

significance, a grey dove-winged shape that droned up out of the distance

across the line, swung round and began a careful patrol along its length.

But after that the shells commenced to find the infantry trenches with

great accuracy, and to pour a tremendous fire upon them. The Brigade

listened and watched frowningly at first, and with growing anger and

fidgetings, the screaming and crashing of the German shells, the black

and white clouds of smoke that sprang so quickly up and down the infantry

lines before them. They were at last given orders to fire, and although

at first they were firing at an invisible target, the gunners brisked

up and went about their business with great cheerfulness. All along the

line the other British batteries were opening with a most heartening

uproar that for the time filled the ear and gave the impression that our

guns were dominating the situation. That, unfortunately, did not last

long. The German rate and weight of fire increased rapidly, until it

reached the most awe-inspiring proportions, and it began to look as if

the British infantry were to be smothered by shell-fire, were to be blown

piecemeal out of their scanty trenches, without being given a chance to

hit back.

The Artillery Brigade whose particular fortunes we are following had,

up to now, escaped quite lightly with nothing more than a few slight

casualties from chance splinters of high-explosive shells that had burst

some distance from them.

But suddenly the gunners were aware of a strange and terrifying sound

rising above the thunder-claps of their own guns, the diminishing whinny

of their own departing shells, the long roll of gun-fire on their flanks,

the sharp tearing crashes of the enemy shell-bursts—a sound that grew

louder and louder, rose from the hissing rush of a fast-running river

to a fiercer, harsher note, a screaming vibrating roar that seemed to

fill the earth and air and sky, that drowned the senses and held the men

staring in amazement and anticipation of they knew not what. Then when

the wild whirlwind of sound had reached a pitch beyond which it seemed

impossible for it to rise, it broke in a terrific rolling c-r-r-r-ash

that set the solid earth rocking. One battery was hidden from the other

two by a writhing pall of thick black smoke, out of which whirled clods

of earth, stones, and a flying cloud of yellow straw. When the smoke

dissolved, and the dust and straw and chaff had settled, the other two

batteries could see a gun of the third overturned, the gunners rolling

or limping or lying still about it, an odd man here and there staggering

from the other guns—but all the rest of the gunners in their proper and

appointed places, the five remaining guns firing one by one in turn as

regularly as if on a peace practice. The Brigade had been introduced to

something quite new to it, and that it certainly never expected to meet

in open field of battle—a high-explosive shell from one of the heaviest

German pieces. But unexpected as it was, more terrible than the gunners

had ever imagined, there was no time now to think about such things. The

German infantry attack was advancing under cover of their artillery, a

crackling roll of rifle fire was breaking out from the infantry trenches,

sharp orders were shouting along the lines of guns. There was a pause

while fuses were set to new times, while fresh aim was taken and new

ranges adjusted.

‘Target, infantry advancin’—open sights...!’ said one of the gun-layers

in repetition of his orders. ‘But where’s the bloomin’ infantry to get my

open sights on?’

‘Where?’ shouted his Number One, and pointed over the layer’s shoulder as

he stood up to look over the gun shield for a wider view. ‘Can’t you see

’em there? ’Ave you gone blind?’

‘_That?_’ said the layer, staring hard. ‘Is that infantry?’ He had

been looking for the scattered dots of advancing men that were all

his experience had told him to see of an advancing line. He was quite

unprepared for the solid grey mass that he actually did see.

‘That’s infantry,’ snapped his sergeant. ‘Did you think it was

airyplanes? Get to it now.’

The layer got to it, and in a few seconds the whole of the Brigade was

pouring shells on the advancing mass as fast as the guns could be

served. The Battery commanders had a vague idea that the enemy infantry

had made some terrible mistake, had in error exposed themselves in

mass in the open. When the guns had brought swift retribution for

the mistake the mass would vanish; but meantime here was the guns’

opportunity—opportunity such as no gunner there had ever hoped to have.

But when the mass persisted and pushed on in the teeth of the fire that

every one knew must be murderous beyond words, the rate of gun-fire was

slowed down, and the batteries set themselves deliberately to wipe this

audacious infantry out of existence.

But then suddenly it began to look as if it were to be the Brigade that

would be wiped out. A number of German guns turned on it, battered it

with heavy high-explosive, lashed it with shrapnel, rent and tore and

disrupted it with a torrent of light and heavy shells, a scorching

whirlwind of fire, with blasts of leaping flame, with storms of splinters

and bullets. One after another guns of the Brigade were put out of

action, with guns destroyed or overthrown, with ammunition waggons blown

up, with gun detachments killed or wounded. Gun by gun the fighting

strength of the Brigade waned; but as each gun went the others increased

their rate of fire, strove to maintain the weight of shells that a

Brigade should throw. The guns that were destroying them were themselves

invisible. To the Brigade there was no movement of men, no tell-tale

groups, no betraying flash even, to show where their destroyers were in

action. It is true that the Brigade spent no time looking for them, would

not have spent a round on them if it had seen them. Its particular job

had been plainly indicated to it—to stop the advancing infantry—and it

had no time or shells to spare for anything else.

But grimly and stoically though they took their punishment, gamely and

desperately though they strove to fulfil their task, it was beyond them.

The grey mass was checked and even stopped at times, but it came on

again, and at the guns the ranges shortened and shortened, to a thousand

yards, to eight, seven, six hundred. After that it was a hopeless fight,

so far as this Brigade was concerned. Most of their guns were out of

action, their ammunition was nearly all expended, they were under a rifle

fire that scourged the guns with whips of steel and lead, that cut down

any man who moved from the shelter of his gun’s shield. Such guns as were

left, such men as could move, continued to fire as best they might at

ranges that kept getting still shorter and shorter. No teams could bring

up ammunition waggons, so the rounds were carried up by hand across the

bullet-swept field, until there were no more rounds to bring.

Since they were useless there, an attempt was made to bring the guns out

of action and back under cover. It failed when after a minute or two

half the remaining men had been cut down by bullets, and the commanders

saw that nothing could move and live in the open. Then the order was

passed to leave the guns and retire the men as best they could. That

was at high noon, and for the next two or three hours the gunners tried

in ones and twos to run the gauntlet of the fire and get back to cover.

Some tried to crawl or to lie prone and wriggle out on their bellies;

others stripped off bandoliers and haversacks and water-bottles, some

even their jackets and boots to ‘get set’ like runners in a hundred-yard

dash, crouching in the shelter of the gun shield, leaping out and away

in a desperate rush. But crawl or wriggle or run made little odds. Some

men went half the distance to safety, a few went three-quarters, one

or two to within bare places of cover; but none escaped, and most went

down before they were well clear of the gun. The few that from the first

refused sullenly to abandon their guns, that swore amongst themselves to

stick it out till dark if necessary and then drag the crippled guns away,

came off best in the end because they lay and crouched under the scanty

cover the guns gave, and watched the others go out to their deaths. They

lay there through the long dragging hours of the afternoon with the

bullets hissing and whistling over and past them, with the shells still

crumping and crashing down at intervals, with the gun shields and wheels

and steel waggon covers ringing and smacking to the impact of bullet and

splinter, with one man here and another there jerking convulsively to a

fresh wound—his first or his twenty-first as the case might be—groaning

or cursing through set teeth, writhing in pain, or lying silent and still

with all pain past.

Late in the afternoon there came a lull in the firing and a lessening

of the bullet storm, and the order—a very imperative order—was passed

for every man who could move to retire from the guns. So the few whole

men came away, helping the wounded out as best they could; and even then

they would not come empty-handed, and since they could not bring their

guns, and they knew it was a retirement from the position, they stayed

to collect the gun fittings, crawling about amongst the disabled pieces

and shattered carriages, with the bullets still hissing and snapping

about their ears, throwing dust spurts amongst their feet, whisking

and swishing through the scattered corn stooks. They brought away the

sights and breech mechanisms and sight- and field-clinometers, and every

other fitment they could carry and thought worth having (and in that

they were even wiser than they knew, for in those days such things as

dial-sights were precious beyond words, and once lost could scarcely

be replaced). And laden down under the weight and unhandiness of these

things—the breech fittings alone weigh some forty pounds, and make a

most unpleasantly awkward thing to carry—the handful of men left in each

battery doubled laboriously out across the field and into comparative

safety. At the cost of persistent attempts and some more men a gun was

also manhandled out.

The battery that had salvaged its gun brought it safely through the

Retreat which followed the action. The other batteries had to be content

to keep their pitifully scant ranks together and stagger wearily over the

long miles of the great Retreat lugging their cumbersome breech-blocks

and dial-sights and gun gear with them. They clung at least to these

as the outward and visible sign of being Gunners and the remains of

Batteries, and they marched and hung together, waiting eagerly and

hopefully for the day that would bring new guns to them and reserves to

‘make up the strength.’

An unknown General passed them one day where they were halted by the

roadside for what one of the gunners facetiously called ‘inspection of

gun-park an’ stores.’ And ‘just see all the batteries’ guns is in line

an’ properly dressed by the right,’ he added, with a glance at the one

gun left to them.

‘What—er—lot is this?’ asked the General of the officer who was

‘inspecting.’

‘The Umpty-Noughth Brigade, Field Artillery, sir,’ said the officer;

‘Umptieth, Oughtieth, and Iddyieth Batteries.’ (It may have sounded

pathetically ridiculous, but it was no more or less than the bare truth;

for it was as units and batteries that these remnants had marched and

hung close together, and, given new guns and fresh drafts, they would be

batteries and units again. After all, it is the spirit of and as a unit

that counts.)

The General looked at the drawn-up ranks of the batteries, the gun

detachments represented by two or three men, or by one man, or by

an empty gap in the line; he saw the men grey with dust, with torn

clothing, with handkerchiefs knotted at the corners replacing lost caps,

with puttees and rags wound round blistered feet—but with shoulders

set back, with heads held up and steady eyes looking unwinking to

their front. He looked, too, at the one gun, scarred and dented and

pitted and pocked with splinter marks and bullet holes, at each little

pile of breech-blocks and sights and fittings that lay spread out on

handkerchiefs and haversacks and rags in the place of the other guns; and

he noticed that dirty and dusty and dishevelled as the men might be, the

gun parts were speckless and dustless, clean and shining with oil.

The General spoke a few curt but very kindly words to the officer quite

loud enough for ‘the Brigade’ to hear, saying he remembered hearing some

word of their cutting up and the fine finish they had made to their

fight, congratulating them on the spirit that had held them together,

wishing them luck, and hoping they would have their new guns before the

time came to turn and hit back and begin the advance.

‘I hope so, sir,’ said the officer simply; ‘and thank you.’

The General saluted gravely and turned to go, but halted a moment to ask

a last question. ‘How many of you—how many of the Brigade came out of

that show?’ he said.

‘Only what you see here, sir—one gun, one officer, and fifty-three men,’

said the officer.

You may remember what was the full fighting strength of a Field Artillery

Brigade; but you must also remember that there is another sort of

‘fighting strength,’ greater far than mere numbers, the sort of strength

that this poor shattered remnant of a Brigade still held undiminished and

unabated—the stoutness of heart, the courage, the spirit that made the

old ‘Contemptible Little Army’ what it was.

PRESS BUREAU: PASSED FOR PUBLICATION.

_SQUIRES AND TRADE IN OLDEN TIMES._

When did the idea that trade was derogatory to men of good birth,

otherwise the Continental point of view based on a different social

structure, creep into England? No writer, so far as I know, has ever

attempted an explanation of what suggests a paradox. That it is an

alien importation and in conflict with the facts of English life up to

a certain period seems indisputable, and all evidence would point to

the Hanoverian succession as roughly marking this mysterious change

of attitude. Eliminating, and for obvious reasons, the greater and

more powerful Houses, the record of most old English families is a

contradiction in terms of the rigid but quite logical observance of a

Continental _noblesse_. There is about an even chance that sooner or

later you tap the root of the family and its fortunes in a woolstapler,

a goldsmith, a vintner, an iron-forger, a flockmaster, a haberdasher,

or a grocer, and last, but assuredly not least, in a successful lawyer.

What is more, we find these worthies seated upon their newly acquired

acres with a coat of arms, inherited or acquired, without any apparent

consciousness of being upstarts or parvenus. In the modern sense they

were probably not so regarded by their longer-seated country neighbours.

As the latter’s near relations, to say nothing of their collaterals, were

themselves largely engaged in trade of some sort or in various avocations

assuredly not more aristocratic, such an attitude would be inconceivable!

We all know the modern ideas about such things, and need not waste words

over them. Nor is it of any consequence how much they may have modified

in the last fifty years. For our point lies in the fact that they could

not well have existed at a period to which a popular superstition

attributes a rigid and long-lost exclusiveness. The ‘very respectable

family’ of Blankshire in Jane Austen’s time undoubtedly looked askance

at trade. Yet it seems probable that their own great-great-grandfathers

would not even have understood what such an attitude meant. It does

seem rather whimsical that the Continental point of view should have

established itself in theory, if not altogether in practice, in a country

whose landed gentry had not merely intermarried freely with commerce, but

in such innumerable instances were themselves the product of it. Nor is

this all. For in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their progeny

and collaterals were of necessity much engaged in trade, and indeed not

seldom in occupations that in these presumably democratic days would be

rejected offhand by anyone with the least pretension to gentility. The

more decorative alternatives to a livelihood, as we should now regard

them, either did not exist much before the Georges and the rapid economic

developments of the eighteenth century, or were utterly inadequate to

the demands of the younger son, when, with smaller properties and larger

families, his name was legion.

Scotland and Wales do not come within the scope of these inquiries, for,

I trust, obvious reasons. Some Scottish writers, however, have dealt

rather frankly with these things and incidentally disclosed to their

countrymen the perhaps not always palatable fact that shopkeeping in

Edinburgh was once a recognised occupation for persons of family, while

as for that quite other Scotland, the Highlands, tavern-keeping (and what

taverns!) was quite usual among men of birth.[1] But the complexities

of English social life since the Feudal period are infinitely greater.

Probably not half the families seated upon the land to-day go back beyond

George III. Estimates of certain districts occasionally published give

something like this result. Of several counties I can of my own knowledge

arrive at something like an approximate conclusion, and it agrees with

these others. But counties and districts in this respect differ vastly.

The Home Counties, for instance, have virtually broken with their past.

They are full of aliens. Landed property of every kind is mainly in the

hands of a more or less new element from all parts of Britain and the

Empire, which derives most of its income from outside sources. Half a

dozen counties are in a social sense little more than glorified suburbs.

The landscape may remain in part rural, though thickly sprinkled with

exotic marks. Sport and agriculture may be active. Ingenuous novelists

and essayists in London or the suburbs may write of these regions as

representing normal English rural life and society. The visiting American

may imagine he is looking upon a typical English country-side. But all

this is, of course, an utter fallacy. The influence of London even in

old times covered a considerable radius. Fifty miles in nearly every

direction would be no overestimate of its range to-day.

But it has been given me during the last quarter of a century to make a

tolerably intimate acquaintance almost parish by parish with a good many

other English counties more typical for the purpose in hand, to trace

back the fortunes of families and estates, and, not least, to appraise

their domestic history as it is written on tomb and tablet in hundreds

of parish churches. Genealogies, county histories, family documents are

eloquent enough of the various careers followed by men of gentle birth

and of the enterprises which brought so many landed families into being

and continued to engage the energies of younger sons regardless of

lineage. Most of us have heard, from the lips, probably, of old ladies

of a past generation, that the Army and Navy, Church and Bar, were the

only callings for a gentleman. Anglo-Irish squireens, of Cromwellian

or Williamite origin, with the thickest of brogues, still very likely

give utterance to what half a century ago was accepted as a sort of good

old English tradition. It occurred to no one, apparently, that in old

England, say pre-Georgian England, there was no Army to speak of and no

Navy (as a career for a gentleman); that the Church meant anything or

nothing; while the Bar, aristocratic no doubt, was a little too much

so, or at least too expensive, for most younger sons of average country

squires. But it is on the chancel walls of parish churches that the Tudor

or Jacobean _novus homo_ proclaims most convincingly the current absence

of any commercial shamefacedness. To-day the merchant squire who starts

the family tomb with the family acres is almost always writ down thereon

as a territorial magnate pure and simple. All allusion to the shop is

suppressed.

The alderman squire of the seventeenth century, on the other hand, looks

down on us from beneath his inherited or acquired armorial bearings quite

unabashed in the character of a prosperous mercer or woolstapler. With

the ladies, too, who so frequently brought the profits of commerce to

improve the fortunes of a distinguished line, the parental haberdasher or

clothier who provided their dower is frankly recognised in their own or

their husband’s mortuary inscription. And this, I have little doubt, for

the simple reason that there was no incentive to the curious make-believe

that has since been fostered by a healthy but utterly confused social

system. Human nature assuredly has not changed. Quite possibly there

was friction on other accounts between the Londoner and his country

neighbours. But as the sons and uncles and cousins of the latter were

deep in trade, local or otherwise, the candour of the sculptured tomb in

the parish church seems merely natural.

The Londoner, too, may have been of that wealthy city connection who

lived gorgeously, and, as we know, not merely entertained the higher

nobility and men of wit and fashion, but were often welcomed guests at

the tables of the great. Such a man’s outlook on life and knowledge of

the world must have been in inverse ratio to that of most country squires

of that day. He probably spoke the Court English, the sound and quality

of which one would give much to hear, whereas the other’s speech is

shrouded in no such mystery, for it was unquestionably in most cases the

dialect of his county, more or less modified. But provincial towns as

well as London produced citizen squires. Some, no doubt, had an inherited

right to armorial bearings, having regard to the number of cadets of

landed families who went into trade. But if not they assumed arms, often

indeed while still burghers, and heraldic experts tell us that this

procedure was regarded as a perfectly legitimate one, so long as they did

not annex some already in use; nor was any suggestion of misplaced vanity

thereby involved.

That there were diverse kinds of country squires in those times goes

without saying. A lord, too, was then a lord indeed! We have ample

evidence that there are certain conspicuous but untitled families, both

of Tudor and Norman origin, of wider culture, a Court connection, and in

closer touch with the outside world. We may never know how these diverse

elements regarded one another. Probably there is not much to know. Rural

Society had not yet acquired a big S in the modern sense. The forms and

ritual which gave the ladies of a later day opportunities for snubbing

one another were not yet. They were all much occupied in domestic cares,

and furthermore there were no roads as we understand the word. When

they migrated to their town houses or lodgings in Exeter, Shrewsbury,

or Worcester for a short winter season, as was the custom of many, the

burgesses, as such, could hardly have been excluded from their company,

for so many of them were relations. It is curious to note, too, how

during Marlborough’s wars a professional army began to introduce a new

social element, though a very small one, into provincial centres. In

this connection _The Recruiting Officer_ is distinctly illuminating.

For Farquhar writes from his own experience as an officer quartered in

Shrewsbury, to whose inhabitants, or rather ‘To all friends round the

Wrekin,’ he dedicates the play.

For it was not merely the English democracy that so hated the notion

of a standing army, but the country squires were among its stoutest

opponents, since, as officers of the militia, it reduced them at once to

an inferior military position. The young officer of Queen Anne’s time

appears in the provinces as a gentleman from whom the superior airs and

graces of a man of the world, familiar even with Continental usages, are

to be looked for, and no doubt resented by the country bucks. Brawls on

this account with civilians were fairly frequent. The hospitable squire

himself seems to accept with equanimity a slightly patronising attitude

from his military guest. For the virtue of his daughters he lives in a

constant state of alarm while the terrible captains, lieutenants, and

ensigns, with their fine uniforms and insinuating worldly ways, are in

the neighbourhood. It must be admitted that the ladies themselves give

some cause for this anxiety.

But to return to our muttons. Several of the older families of Wiltshire

spring from the cloth manufacture which flourished so early in that

great wool-producing country. Others arose from like sources and died

out after a few generations of squiredom, leaving no memory but that

emblazoned upon the walls of their parish church, and maybe some gem of

a small Tudor or Jacobean manor-house now occupied by a big sheep-farmer

of more sumptuous life and habit than the builder. Wilts, Gloucester,

Worcester, Hereford, and Salop, in whole or part, I may say at once, are

more particularly in my mind in these pages, for the excellent reason

that I know them more intimately than any of those other portions of

England which could be taken as typical for the purpose in hand. But I

feel tolerably confident that what can be said of Worcester or Wilts

will apply to Yorkshire or Norfolk. The extremities of the country, on

the other hand, may be not inaptly illustrated by the ancient tag, or

one may fairly say ‘brag,’ of the always rather money-worshipping and

comfort-loving Englishman:

‘A squire of Wales, a Knight of Cales,

And a laird of the North Countree:

A yeoman of Kent, with his yearly rent,

Could buy them out all three.’

Here again is the whimsical lament of a Cromwellian sequestrator on the

Welsh border:

‘Radnorsheer, poor Radnorsheer!

Never a park and never a deer,

Never a squire of £500 a year

But Richard Fowler of Abbey cwm-hir.’

The figure here mentioned would represent a fairly well-endowed squire of

that period in a normal county.

To illustrate the intimate association of trade and land in the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries by a stray example or two may seem beside

the mark. But here at any rate, culled almost at random from one of

my notebooks, is John Groves, the first of his name to be squire of

Mickleton in Gloucestershire. He was a Yorkshireman who had made money

by trade in London. He died in 1616 in his 103rd year, just after his

portrait had been taken, a work of art which makes him look extremely

wide awake! His son remained as a haberdasher in London and married a

squire’s daughter. Their son became squire of Mickleton as well as a

prominent Bencher of the Temple, and incidentally the father of nineteen

children, the eldest of whom married a grocer, obviously with the family

blessing; the second daughter, a judge’s son; while the eldest son

succeeded to Mickleton. The pedigree of the Sandys family, founded by

a North-country lad who became an archbishop, for long one of the most

prominent in Worcestershire and afterwards ennobled, reveals a grocer and

a haberdasher at the very zenith of its fame. Bishop Percy, of ballad

renown, was a recognised cadet of the great Northumbrian House. His

father was a grocer in Worcester, and the beautiful half-timbered house

he occupied in Bridgnorth still stands.

And what, again, of these swarms of younger sons and their careers? In

Elizabeth’s time the land produced less than a third of the grain per

acre that it does to-day, when, some urban critics of British agriculture

may be surprised to hear, our figures lead the world. There could have

been no princely portion for the younger sons from an estate of, say,

2000 acres. What did they do? There was no Army or Navy, nor often,

for the poor man, any Bar. The Church, for a clever youth, held great

opportunities, but in the seventeenth century could hardly have commended

itself as the snug and gentlemanly provision it became later. Nor am

I forgetting that many squires’ sons became a sort of upper servants

in the households of great nobles. But the custom died out, I think,

during the Tudor period. Nor again must the small expeditionary forces

from time to time dispatched by the Crown or led by adventurers to the

Continent be overlooked. But the supply of commissions must have been

limited, and in any case the job was but a temporary one. Unlike the

Scotch and Irish, each stimulated by quite different but equally cogent

reasons, the Englishman does not figure much as a soldier of fortune in

foreign armies, while of the Colonies a word or so later. But in the

meantime we may well ask ourselves, why this search after showy and

romantic careers for the younger son of olden days? He had plenty of

ordinary prosaic openings at home, and took them as a matter of course.

It is quite certain that his sisters and his cousins and his aunts did

not hold up their hands at the notion of trade, for half of them were

allied, or prospectively allied, to it. It was deemed a fortunate thing

if, through kinship or interest, an apprenticeship offered in the house

of a big tradesman in London. Not a few, indeed, of the famous London

apprentices we hear so much about were country gentlemen’s sons. More

found occupations in their own district, in such lines, for instance, as

the great Severn trade, with its boat-loads of caps and crockery, butter

and cheese, iron and Virginia tobacco, passing back and forth between

Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Worcester, Gloucester, and Bristol, and the squire

himself very often took a share in such ventures. Others became millers,

maltsters, tanners, glovers, or even shopkeepers in the country towns.

Some rented farms, which meant a very different existence for them and

their wives from that which would be entailed by a similar proceeding

in the same class of life to-day. Most of my own generation, I fancy,

grew up with a hazy notion that Cromwell was a plebeian because he was a

country brewer or the like. There are, perhaps, plenty of well-informed

adults even now who do not realise that he was not merely of a landed

family but of a wealthy and powerful one which had sumptuously

entertained King James at Hinchingbrooke, though originally sprung from

plain Glamorgan squires. For the son of a younger son, Cromwell, _alias_

Williams, seems to have been exceptionally well endowed. Attorneys

and surgeons too occur fairly often in family records, or as marrying

squires’ daughters, and parsons of course are well in evidence. Simple

arithmetic precludes the possibility of more than one eldest son in the

matrimonial market for each family of girls. Some of their marriages

would, I feel sure, surprise those who vaguely imagine that things in

this particular were not merely as now, or as yesterday if you like, but

‘more so.’

In the maritime counties, particularly the western ones, the sea no doubt

attracted many a younger son. The Newfoundland fisheries, long before our

North American Colonies were founded and for over a century afterwards,

were of enormous importance to Devonshire, for this was a Mediterranean

as well as a home trade. It is said that a third of the eligible manhood

of the county disappeared thence in April to return in November, while

squires with loose cash became part owners in ships, and their sons

frequently sailed in them. The constant wars in Ireland during the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their chances of loot and land,

must also have attracted a good many young gentlemen. But of the hundred

and odd English purchasers of estates in the six Plantation counties of

Ulster the outlay was too large for the ordinary younger son, so far as

one can judge from the list of planters, the particulars concerning them

and the prices paid, as given in the Government survey of the day.[2]

The American Colonies and the West Indies, particularly the former,

figure as the favourite dumping-ground of the seventeenth-century younger

son with the historian, when skimming briefly over these social trifles.

The Americans themselves too, with a natural and venial yearning for

decorative ancestors, work the younger-son tradition for all it is worth,

and paint him when they get him as a much more important person than he

really was. The New Englanders may be excepted, for they are a precise

people and have worked out their genealogies carefully to the original

Pilgrim father (using that term in a general sense) with more regard for

him as a sturdy pioneer than as a possible armiger. He was generally,

in fact, of respectable middle-class family. The theocratic atmosphere

of New England was not calculated to attract the offspring of squires

or the like. The southern colonies are, of course, their traditional

goal. Captain John Smith, virtual founder of Virginia, took out seventy

such with _gent_ marked against each of their ill-fated names on his

invaluable chronicle. They died to a man, poor fellows, and the only

gleam in their brief and melancholy story is when the indomitable captain

led out batches of them to fell trees and they swore so roundly at

their blistering hands that a bucket of water down the neck was decreed

for every oath, after which ‘all was merriment and good humour.’ The

next ‘Supply,’ including more of them, also died off. But a great many

younger sons undoubtedly went to Virginia when the colony settled down to

prosperity, and a great many of other sorts too. After the Civil Wars,

ex-Royalists of all ranks and grades flocked there, most of the more

important to return, naturally, at the Restoration. In conning the lists

of these early settlers and then taking stock of those who ultimately

came out on top as men of property and in a sense founders of families,

it is interesting to speculate from their names, difficult enough with

English ones, what various sources they came from. In the hard struggle

of early colonial life the common men had probably rather the best of

the younger son. An early governor of Virginia writes home with a touch

of irritation, ‘Everybody here wants to be a gentleman,’ and the colony

was assuredly run till the Revolutionary war in the interests of those

who either were so by birth or became so through prosperity. With a few

notable exceptions, most of the older and leading colonial families bear

names of undistinguished sound to an English ear.

English tastes do not run much to genealogy, at any rate in any

logical or accurate form. Hence no doubt the hardy superstitions and

make-believes that flourish among us. What exacts most respect and

consequently most desire is assured position, including the money to

maintain it. That of a squire _qua_ squire still receives ungrudging

recognition, allowing, of course, for political asperities. The rustic on

the estate may sniff a little at a brand-new one, but outside story-books

he does not care two straws whether he is the third or the tenth of his

line. The Southerners, and indeed Americans generally, have developed of

late an astounding passion for ancestry. There is more patter, and upon

the flimsiest grounds, about ‘blue blood,’ ‘high breeding,’ ‘patrician

bearing,’ ‘cavalier stock,’ and suchlike stuff, in some modern American

novels, good and bad, about modern American life, than in a whole year’s

output of fiction in Old England. But outside the State Historical

Societies a delightful _naïveté_ is the prevailing note; and this is not

strange, perhaps, with an extremely sentimental people, who, as regards

the Southern States, have, unlike the West Indies, been absolutely out of

touch with English social life and its subtleties since immigration there

virtually ceased, about 1700 A.D.[3]

With regard to our national indifference to exact genealogy and

the modern American craze for glittering forebears, I will hazard

the relation of an incident which struck me at the time as a most

entertaining and significant illustration of both. Now some dozen years

ago the ancient town of Shrewsbury celebrated the battle of 1403 by a

series of festivities. These included a banquet given to a hundred or

more notabilities of the town, and county and other guests, of whom the

writer was one. Another was a genial person who had come all the way

from South Carolina (or Georgia) in the character of a lineal descendant

of the great Norman, Roger de Montgomery, who eight hundred years

before had built Shrewsbury Castle. There are probably thousands of

lineal descendants of the mighty Roger, just as there are thousands of

legitimate descendants now living of even greater men than he, to wit the

Plantagenet and other kings of England.[4] But our ingenuous friend from

the States had not gone to work this way at all. His name merely happened

to be Montgomery, and to many South Carolinians that would be quite

enough, though it may well seem incredible to an Englishman, rather hazy

though he may possibly be about such things, that the twentieth-century

bearer of an ordinary place-name like Kent, Chester, or Durham should on

that account assume descent from the twelfth-century Norman who held one

or other of those counties as his fief![5]

Our American visitor, however, a quiet and modest person, was taken

at his own valuation, which I am positive was quite sincere. Perhaps

the company took it vaguely for granted that he had traced his descent

through orthodox sources. But I do not think this picturesque appeal

interested them enough to provoke criticism of any kind even in a county

where long pedigrees and old families are unusually numerous. Even the

association of the modern surname with the mediæval barony did not

seem to strike anyone or to arouse suspicion, probably because they

were Englishmen and cared (in detail) for none of these things, though

many descendants of other Marcher barons bearing famous local names

were present. The stranger, however, had come all the way from South

Carolina, as he piously, almost pathetically believed, to represent the

American branch of the early Norman rulers of Montgomery and builders of

Shrewsbury Castle. It was enough that he was a guest, and above all an

American, and presumably an entertaining orator. So of course he was put

on the toast list, where, unhappily, he belied his nationality. But the

humour of the situation seemed quite lost upon the company. A hundred

faces looked serious, and subsequently bored. But then they could not

know, as I had cause to know, the daring of an unsophisticated American

when on the war-path for an ancestor. A distinguished writer on mediæval

history sitting next to me was shaking with suppressed mirth, and

probably a clerical antiquary or two were enjoying themselves, but on the

whole I feel sure the joke was missed.

The multiplicity and individualism of English surnames form a strange

contrast to the tautology of Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and some

parts of Southern Scotland, where, with rare exceptions, a name alone

means nothing. Great numbers of English names carry of themselves

distinction, though the possession of them may sometimes be accidental;

or again, when among the early American colonists you find such names as

Baskerville, Fettiplace, or Champernowne, if you know your England at

all, you know for a certainty who they are and whence they came. But the

bulk of English surnames have no particular social significance one way

or the other, though many at once proclaim their county, particularly

in the lower ranks of life, which have shifted less. Upon the whole our

names are perhaps not very sonorous or inspiring. Some are hideously

ugly, while many seem of themselves to preclude the possibility of gentle

blood, though this is never a safe assumption. Constantly in remote

country churches one finds the place of honour among the dead occupied

for two or three centuries by a name that seems curiously ill-assorted

with broad acres and coat armour. Sometimes it may be a long extinct one

whose place knows it no more; or again, one of those still surviving

families that have flourished in respectable obscurity, but in local

regard, for centuries without ever catching the public ear, or perhaps

even the ear of the next county but one!

Now Prodgers was once upon a time the supreme conception of a comical

vulgarian with Mr. Punch. But the only Prodgers I ever heard of in real

life was that ancient family of Wernddu and Gwernvale in Monmouthshire,

now extinct or territorially so. Their traditional quarrel with their

cousins the Powells of Perther on the score of family precedence led to a

well-known humorous incident, which illustrates in entertaining fashion

the passion of Welshmen for these things as opposed to the comparative

apathy of their Saxon neighbours. The once contemned cockney pseudonym of

_Punch_ is of course a corrupted Welsh name (Ap-Rodger), and curiously

rare: one of the very few, in fact, that of itself would suggest gentle

blood. Rodgers were evidently scarce when the Welsh in the sixteenth

century found the inconvenience of pedigree nomenclature and adopted

the Christian name of their father (usually) as a permanent surname,

rejecting the picturesque suggestion, as it is said, of Henry VIII. that

the names of their estates or farms should be adopted; the consequence

being that both have to be used to-day in most Welsh counties, on every

occasion, from sheer necessity.

Trade could never have entered very seriously into the life of the

armiger in most Welsh counties before the eighteenth century, for the

sufficient reason that there was none. What the Welsh younger son did

must remain a mystery, for Welsh social life between the Reformation,

which darkened rather than illuminated the Principality, and the

Hanoverian period, is itself rather obscure. There is no reason to

suppose that the predilection for pedigrees which distinguishes the Welsh

would have included any prejudice against trade had the opportunity

arisen. But the genealogical instinct of the Cambrian is not altogether

due, I think, to pride of race. A venial vanity, no doubt, has a fair

share in it, but genealogy of itself has a strong detached interest for

Welshmen. You will find men among all classes with an entirely impersonal

interest in the ancestry of their neighbours. ‘I should like to show

you a little collection of pedigrees I have at home’ is an offer I have

had frequently made to me in Wales, and I can assure the reader that a

Welsh MS. pedigree is a tolerably formidable document. I myself knew well

a working man in Cardiganshire who spent his leisure hours in walking

about collecting such material purely for his own amusement. Imagine a

Wiltshire ploughman thus occupied!

Welsh social history is a thing apart. You do not expect to run up

against a mercer or a goldsmith in a Welsh family tree which soars away

through generations of virtual fixtures on the soil, and through a dim

and pastoral past, till it finds its inevitable source in one or other

of the five royal or fifteen noble tribes of Wales. And there you are!

Rather disconcerting, however, is the small scale on which the dignity

of a Welsh armiger must often have supported itself, not so very long

ago. In the small grey stone houses still surviving in fair numbers,

one seems to have arrived at a life so primitive as to require some

readjustment of social values; men farming their own land, and not too

much of it nor yet too fertile, beyond a doubt. I fear that, despite

the pedigree, our London haberdasher’s well-dowered daughter would have

turned up her nose at an average Welsh squire in Elizabeth’s golden

days. The Welsh were never great sea-goers, though a few, like Morgan,

rose to fame as buccaneers. The superfluous sons must have taken to

farming in some fashion, and though never much given to colonising there

was an agricultural movement into Pennsylvania early in the eighteenth

century. This probably included a good many of the Welsh gentry, for a

contemporary English traveller, describing the characteristics of the

various groups of settlers, alludes to the Welsh as ‘greatly devoted to

hunting and dogs.’[6]

Again, under the healthy, happy-go-lucky English social system, which

must always, as now, have bewildered the foreigner, the intrusion of

a genealogically unqualified female and her strain of blood into a

family is quite overlooked. Marriage with respectable and often no doubt

quite presentable women of neither birth nor fortune occurs constantly

in pedigrees, as one would expect. But when only a female remains to

continue the line and her husband takes her name this attitude is

conveniently reversed and the paternal blood ignored. When that wonderful

lady, Miss Kynnersley, of Loxley, in Staffordshire, married the most

excellent Baron de Bode, her family strongly objected for the good old

English reason that the baron was a foreigner. But when the bride arrived

in Germany the tables were turned, the baron’s relations withholding any

recognition of her till a satisfactory account of the lady’s pedigree was

furnished by the Heralds’ College. The Kynnersleys were fortunately of

the _élite_ of our gentry, and all was satisfactory. But when a further

demand for eight successive generations of armigers on the female side

was made, any country squire’s daughter in England may well have felt

some anxiety. However, the many who have read her delightful letters will

remember that this clever, capable, and pushful English baroness secured

the friendship and intimacy of much bigger people all over Europe than

the mother and sisters of a German baron, though she had this too. But

her brother the squire never forgave her.

A. G. BRADLEY.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Lawyers acquired land very freely in Scotland at all times. Whatever

may have been the methods by which some legal founders of families in

England acquired wealth, Scottish writers, including Sir Walter Scott,

give a dark picture of the lawyer laird. The comparative poverty of

land-owners, and land being the sole security for money in the country,

gave the sharp man of business peculiar opportunities. In addition to

this the cryptic phraseology of Scottish law, so inimitably set forth by

Sir Walter himself, helped to bewilder and confound the unfortunate laird

caught in its meshes.

[2] Pynnar’s _Survey of Ulster_, 1617.

[3] Ulster Presbyterians formed the chief influx after this period.

They went to the Back country and did not assimilate with the English

colonists.

[4] See Marquis de Ruvigny’s published Rolls.

[5] Montgomery was a subsidiary fief of the Norman Roger who was also

Earl of Shrewsbury.

[6] An American antiquary resides or used to reside in Wales, where,

having mastered the intricacies of Welsh genealogy, he made it his

business to elucidate their pedigrees for Pennsylvania Welsh families

upon orthodox principles.

_A HIGHLAND ANZAC._

BY LADY POORE.

Clean aims, rare faculties, strength and youth,

They have poured them freely forth

For the sake of the sun-steeped land they left

And the far green isle in the North.

_Australia’s Men_, by DOROTHEA MACKELLAR.

For the first time in the life of each of us Phœbe and I have been to

Scotland. It is excusable in Phœbe, who is so many years my junior and

only paid her first visit to the British Isles in 1904, but I am ashamed

to think I have been going to and fro upon the earth and the sea for

nearly half a century without once crossing the Border. And yet the

postponement of this excursion into the near unknown is not without

advantages. One has heard of people who had neither permission nor

opportunity to read the Bible till they were grown up, and to them it

came as a revelation of wonder and beauty. That is what the Highlands

have been to us whose minds have already been filled with impressions of

various shapes, colours, sizes, and consistencies till it is surprising

there should be one corner left, one spot of absorbent tissue upon

which the imprint of a new sensation may be received. The long journey,

undertaken at a moment when London was like a basement kitchen and even

Perth no better than a stuffy attic, ended in the aromatic ethereal

sweetness of a six-mile drive through heather, bog-myrtle, and bracken,

past twisted firs, red-barked and shaggy-headed, standing crookedly

against a blushing sunset sky.

We woke next morning with the waters of Lochalsh plashing and murmuring

not many yards from our beds. Ten huge seagulls screamed and squabbled

over their breakfast on a field of orange seaweed slashed with silver

pools and embossed with blue-black knobs of granite; and with them,

grudgingly tolerated as humble retainers, were three hoodie crows and a

yellow hen with nine chicks of mixed parentage. Beyond the pools lay a

stretch of darkling water shadowed by the black velvet hills of Skye—twin

hills that faced us with a narrow strait between them leading south.

It was hard to dress quickly with half one’s attention flying out of

the window, but the prospect of eating real porridge was alluring, and

after breakfast the exploration of a new world. We would not have changed

places with Columbus.

We were the only visitors at the comfortable grey-gabled hotel at Z⸺ and

absorbed and gladly held the friendly, if undemonstrative, attention

of the tiny village, a row of little houses set by the lochside on a

sheep-trimmed sward where bare-legged children with dark bright eyes kept

holiday from dawn to dusk in company with a couple of sheep dogs and a

pack of wise-faced, short-legged terriers. Thatched cottages from whose

moss-grown roofs grass and ferns sprouted, and low stone houses whose

walls were gay with scarlet fuchsias and blazing tropœlum crouched behind

fenced gardens in which the prose of potatoes and cabbages was enlivened

by the invasion of tall blood-red poppies with navy-blue hearts and

grey-green leaves.

We had been a week at Z⸺, a week of undiminished fervour as explorers

within a three-mile radius, favoured with warm sunshine and blessed

by the sight of mountains, sea, and sky varying almost from minute to

minute in colour, character and atmosphere, when the Highland Anzac

descended from a dog-cart at our very door. We had lazily breakfasted

in our rooms, and I was dressing at the moment but peeped behind the

blind in time to catch a glimpse of the broad-brimmed hat of the tall

soldier. Instantly I pinned my _Australia_ brooch (the shoulder and hat

badge of the Australian Imperial Force) into my tie and sent my maid to

tell Phœbe of her countryman’s approach. Before I was ready to leave my

room I heard her welcoming the new-comer. Had he been the last and least

of Australia’s soldiers he must have responded to the friendship in her

warm, deep tones; but he was of the true and the best type—the type now

familiar to English eyes, yet, somehow, exotic still. Nearly six feet

high is Donald Macleod, rose-bronze of skin, broad of shoulder and lean

of limb; square-browed and endowed with well-opened eyes of a blue, now

bright, now shadowed, like the waters of a mountain tarn, and fringed

with thick black lashes. When he laughs he squeezes up his eyes till the

dark fringes interlace, and his small teeth flash white between lips not

full but kindly and humorous. He is a corporal, and we believe him to be

twenty-four. Born in New South Wales and educated at the best of Sydney’s

schools—and they are very good—he travelled westward like the rising

sun to Perth (W.A.). A pearl-fisher of Broome by choice and occupation,

he basked for a few years in and on the sunny waters of a tropical

archipelago, and when the Empire wanted him he came, one of twenty-two

Macleods, expatriated patriots of his clan who, from the simple private

to the distinguished colonel, have left their all at the Antipodes to

follow the old flag. He was in the first division of the A.I.F. to see

service in Flanders, and there to the slight wound he had received at

Gallipoli he added five others, all in his left side, which chiefly

interest him as providing a reason for his joining the Australian Flying

Corps, a service in which he would not have to carry a pack.

The mettle and temperament of the Anzac fit him peculiarly for dashing

enterprises. He is wasted on slow and dogged nibbling and unsuited for

the tame but valuable task of following up the pioneer. His psychological

attitude and mental equipment, like his physique, are those of the

race-horse: he _may_ break his heart if he is badly ridden in a race, but

he will surely break it if he is put to ploughing.

‘I’m ashamed of this jacket,’ said Donald Macleod, surveying his shabby

sleeve with disfavour. ‘I bought it off a fellow the other day when I

hadn’t a rag to my back, but I’ll get a tailored jacket, not an “issued”

one, in London.’ ‘I hear the Anzacs’ measurements are an inch every way

more than the English soldiers,’ said Phœbe proudly. ‘That’s right,’

answered the boy. ‘And an inch or so less in every way in boots,’ said

I to myself. Corporal Macleod was wearing a pair of clumsy-looking

English-made boots, and I remembered the beautifully cut boots and

gaiters I had seen worn by a couple of newly arrived Australian Tommies

in London a month or two ago. It is a fact that Australian khaki and

leather equipment is vastly superior to that produced in England.

Australian sheep and cattle have afforded their very best, and Australian

factories have put their finest work into the Anzacs’ uniforms, so that

the most ordinary private has a look of unusual smartness as long as his

workaday rig holds together.

Our Anzac had been given ten days’ furlough as soon as ever he was fit to

leave the hospital where he had been for ten weeks, and had come north

to visit his unknown Highland ‘aunties’ a few miles from Z⸺. They were

kind and hospitable, but it wasn’t ‘life,’ and Donald Macleod is very

human, bubbling with vitality, eager for experiences. The lift he had

been offered to Z⸺ that morning gave him a chance to stretch a mind weary

with answering questions about his family in Western Australia on his

last morning in Scotland, and when his fellow-travellers, two elderly

members of a School Board Committee, had been deposited at our door, he

was free to browse around alone. But we did not let him browse alone. In

our own sitting-room we gave him ‘morning tea,’ an institution dear to

Australians and easily adopted by those who visit Australia, and then

we went and sat on a great purple rock, crested with white and orange

lichens and three parts surrounded by the falling tide, and talked about

the war. Corporal Macleod was as completely free from shyness as he was

from ‘swank,’ answering our questions frankly but minimising his own

share in the world’s earthquake. ‘They’re awfully good to us in England,

but the papers insist on making us all out heroes, whereas we’re really

only good soldiers,’ was the refrain of his reminiscences. ‘And it’s the

same in France, mind you. I talk French a bit (there’s all sorts to talk

to up at Broome), but the French beat me once they begin to chat. They

were ripping to us at Dijon; the French ladies couldn’t do enough for

us at the railway station with flowers and fruit and what not. One of

our chaps pondered a bit and then said to the leading lady: “Madame, le

rose de Dijon est le gloire de Dijon, mais _je_ dis les dames de Dijon

est le vrai gloire de Dijon.” She seemed to grasp what he meant and went

on talking nineteen to the dozen and smiled more than that. But some of

the peasants were completely “boxed” by the Australian badges. They kept

asking if we were _Autrichiens_. You see we were the first Australians to

get over. They know all about it now, and nothing is too good for us.’

It was near Armentières that our Anzac was wounded. A bursting shell made

five holes in him as he was lying on the ground. ‘I got the news of the

Battle of Jutland when they were dressing my wounds, and, my word! it

hurt more than the dressing. I said to myself, “This is _my_ bad day,

sure enough.” It beats me now how the papers made such a sad song about

that victory. The day before I was near being wiped out by a shell.

Only that something made me wait and talk to a parson—not a habit of

mine—it would have got me clean. He was a good chap too, and I don’t mind

owing him my life. You’d be surprised to see the way the French and the

Belgians carry on their business as if nothing was happening. There was

an old woman used to bring the newspapers into our trenches as regular as

clockwork, no matter how the Boche was strafing us.’

‘Aren’t you proud of being a Highlander?’ we asked, for our minds were so

full of the charm of the place and the history of its people that we felt

positively envious of the boy’s origin.

He smiled disarmingly and answered ‘I haven’t much of an eye for scenery:

I don’t seem to notice it much, anyway; and, to say the truth, I’m keen

on getting to a place in Hampshire called A⸺ where a big swell a friend

in Westralia gave me an introduction to lives. There’ll be more people

there, and I’ve not seen many so far outside the hospital at X⸺.’ ‘Were

they good to you there?’ I asked. ‘Good as gold, but uncommon strict, and

there were more flowers to smell than food to eat on the table at meals

some days. But they were kind, and no mistake. The ward-sister opened

all the windows of the ward I was in to let me hear the gramophone in

another wing spouting out “Australia will be there.” There were a lot of

enterics among the patients, poor chaps. Queer, isn’t it? how the ones

I’m most sorry for seem to get the least attention from visitors. Why, I

wouldn’t wear my wound stripe in hospital for fear they’d feel out of it,

but there were ladies, young and pretty and old and ugly, who’d come into

the ward and, if they saw a man with a couple of fingers missing or a

bandage round his head, it was “Oh, I _am_ so sorry you are wounded! Does

it hurt much? Would you care to come out for a motor-ride and have tea at

our house this afternoon?” ... The wounded chap would say “My wound’s all

right, thank you, I’m only wearing that bandage to please the doctor”;

but she’d go on pouring out sympathy and invitations till the poor devil

was forced to accept. Next bed, perhaps, there’d be an enteric, dead

sick of hospital and feeling like nothing on earth. “Where were _you_

wounded?” the lady would ask. “Not wounded, miss—enteric (or perhaps

dysentery)’s my trouble.” “Ooo-hh!” says the sympathiser with wounded

men only, and on she goes to the next bed. No drives or tea-parties for

the men that were lying there weeks and weeks, while we that were well

and fit, but for a bullet-hole or two or a scratch of a shell, would be

fairly smothered with attention. My word! it used to make me feel sick

and ashamed.’

Phœbe was in Cairo in March and had seen the shocked faces and up-raised

hands of those who unsparingly condemned the mad pranks of idle Anzacs

in that city, the most unsuitable headquarters for half-disciplined

troops imaginable. ‘Were you one of the men who decorated Ibrahim Pasha’s

equestrian statue by putting a nose-bag on his horse?’ she asked. ‘I

wasn’t in that,’ said Corporal Macleod, ‘but I helped to throw a piano

out of the window of one of the houses we wrecked in the quarter that

ruined so many of our men. I wish the fire that followed had burnt the

whole beastly place up.’ ‘So do I,’ Phœbe agreed. ‘Why, in the name of

common sense, they didn’t create a camp city on the banks of the canal

I shall never understand. It was a crazy thing to turn loose a pack of

new-made soldiers, cramped and restless after a six weeks’ voyage on

board crowded troopships, in a place like Cairo, that breeds more harpies

and sharpers to the square yard than perhaps any other city in the world,

unless it’s San Francisco.’

‘What about General Birdwood?’ I asked. ‘Have you ever spoken to him?’

The Anzac’s eyes disappeared behind their lashes and his teeth flashed in

a glad grin. ‘Once,’ he answered. ‘There’s hardly one of us who can’t say

he had the opportunity. He asked me when I thought the war’d be over, and

I had to smile. My word! he’s a fine chap.’

The gentlemen of the School Board Committee had done their work, and

when we saw the ‘machine’ drive round from the stables we left our rock

and returned to the hotel. The minister climbed stiffly into the front

seat, and our Anzac, after a warm handshake, saluted and took his place

beside the white-haired grocer at the back. Phœbe and I gazed and waved

from the door till the merry face with its strong oval framed in the

curve of a brown chin-strap receded in a blur of white dust from the long

straight road. ‘I wish he had seemed the least little bit impressed by

the Highlands,’ I said regretfully.

‘You needn’t worry,’ answered Phœbe. ‘When he gets back to West Australia

and has time to sort out his memories and talk things over with his

people he’ll be just as proud of being a Highlander as he is of being an

Anzac.’

_THE BRINK OF ACHERON._

Far down the glen, on the crest of a conspicuous spur—a bright spot of

colour. Major Duckworth of King George III.’s Own Fusiliers dived his

hand into the mighty pocket of his overcoat, drew out his glass, and

focussed it on the object. It was a scarlet coat—the King’s uniform.

Four hours had passed since then, and at length Duckworth was forced to

recognise that not alone would he have only his pains for his labour,

but that he was hopelessly lost amongst the intricacies of the Sierra

de Avila. The valley that had seemed so full of feature at first, was

for him featureless. Each subsidiary glen seemed exactly like the other;

every spur looked the twin of the next. To add to the difficulties of the

situation the mists had come down to within a hundred feet of the bottoms.

Moreover, he had disobeyed orders; and he realised that when he

returned—_if_ he returned—to camp, his reception by Sir Edward Pakenham,

however reasonable his excuses, would be the reverse of sympathetic.