THE year was in its yellowing time, and the face of Nature a study
in old gold. ‘A field _or_, _semée_ with garbs of the same:’ it may
be false Heraldry—Nature’s generally is—but it correctly blazons the
display that Edward and I considered from the rickyard gate. Harold
was not on in this scene, being stretched upon the couch of pain: the
special disorder stomachic, as usual. The evening before, Edward, in
a fit of unwonted amiability, had deigned to carve me out a turnip
lantern, an art-and-craft he was peculiarly deft in; and Harold, as
the interior of the turnip flew out in scented fragments under the
hollowing knife, had eaten largely thereof: regarding all such jetsam
as his special perquisite. Now he was dreeing his weird, with such
assistance as the chemist could afford. But Edward and I, knowing that
this particular field was to be carried to-day, were revelling in the
privilege of riding in the empty waggons from the rickyard back to the
sheaves, whence we returned toilfully on foot, to career it again over
the billowy acres in these great galleys of a stubble sea. It was the
nearest approach to sailing that we inland urchins might compass: and
hence it ensued, that such stirring scenes as Sir Richard Grenville on
the _Revenge_, the smoke-wreathed Battle of the Nile, and the Death of
Nelson, had all been enacted in turn on these dusty quarter-decks, as
they swayed and bumped afield.
Another waggon had shot its load, and was jolting out through the
rickyard gate, as we swung ourselves in, shouting, over its tail.
Edward was the first up, and, as I gained my feet, he clutched me in a
death-grapple. I was a privateersman, he proclaimed, and he the captain
of the British frigate _Terpsichore_, of—I forget the precise number
of guns. Edward always collared the best parts to himself; but I was
holding my own gallantly, when I suddenly discovered that the floor we
battled on was swarming with earwigs. Shrieking, I hurled free of him,
and rolled over the tail-board on to the stubble. Edward executed a
war-dance of triumph on the deck of the retreating galleon; but I cared
little for that. I knew _he_ knew that I wasn’t afraid of him, but that
I was—and terribly—of earwigs: ‘those mortal bugs o’ the field.’ So I
let him disappear, shouting lustily for all hands to repel boarders,
while I strolled inland, down the village.
There was a touch of adventure in the expedition. This was not our
own village, but a foreign one, distant at least a mile. One felt
that sense of mingled distinction and insecurity which is familiar to
the traveller: distinction, in that folk turned the head to note you
curiously; insecurity, by reason of the ever-present possibility of
missiles on the part of the younger inhabitants, a class eternally
Conservative. Elated with isolation, I went even more nose-in-air than
usual: and ‘even so,’ I mused, ‘might Mungo Park have threaded the
trackless African forest and....’ Here I plumped against a soft, but
resisting body.
Recalled to my senses by the shock, I fell back in the attitude every
boy under these circumstances instinctively adopts—both elbows well up
over your ears. I found myself facing a tall elderly man, clean-shaven,
clad in well-worn black—a clergyman evidently; and I noted at once
a far-away look in his eyes, as if they were used to another plane
of vision, and could not instantly focus things terrestrial, being
suddenly recalled thereto. His figure was bent in apologetic protest.
‘I ask a thousand pardons, sir,’ he said; ‘I am really so very
absent-minded. I trust you will forgive me.’
Now most boys would have suspected chaff under this courtly style of
address. I take infinite credit to myself for recognising at once the
natural attitude of a man to whom his fellows were gentlemen all,
neither Jew nor Gentile, clean nor unclean. Of course, I took the blame
on myself; adding, that I was very absent-minded too. Which was indeed
the case.
‘I perceive,’ he said pleasantly, ‘that we have something in common.
I, an old man, dream dreams; you, a young one, see visions. Your lot
is the happier. And now—’ his hand had been resting all this time on
a wicket-gate—‘you are hot, it is easily seen;—the day is advanced,
_Virgo_ is the Zodiacal sign. Perhaps I may offer you some poor
refreshment, if your engagements will permit?’
My only engagement that afternoon was an arithmetic lesson, and I had
not intended to keep it in any case; so I passed in, while he held
the gate open politely, murmuring, ‘_Venit Hesperus, ite capellæ_:
come, little kid!’ and then apologising abjectly for a familiarity
which (he said) was less his than the Roman poet’s. A straight flagged
walk led up to the cool-looking old house, and my host, lingering in
his progress at this rose-tree and that, forgot all about me at least
twice, waking up and apologising humbly after each lapse. During
these intervals I put two and two together, and identified him as the
Rector: a bachelor, eccentric, learned exceedingly, round whom the
crust of legend was already beginning to form; to myself an object of
special awe, in that he was alleged to have written a real book. ‘Heaps
o’ books,’ Martha, my informant, said; but I knew the exact rate of
discount applicable to Martha’s statements.
[Illustration: “A STRAIGHT FLAGGED WALK LED UP TO THE COOL-LOOKING OLD
HOUSE, AND MY HOST, LINGERING IN HIS PROGRESS AT THIS ROSE-TREE AND
THAT, FORGOT ALL ABOUT ME AT LEAST TWICE”]
We passed eventually through a dark hall into a room which struck me
at once as the ideal I had dreamed but failed to find. None of your
feminine fripperies here! None of your chair-backs and tidies! This
man, it was seen, groaned under no aunts. Stout volumes in calf and
vellum lined three sides; books sprawled or hunched themselves on
chairs and tables; books diffused the pleasant odour of printers’
ink and bindings; topping all, a faint aroma of tobacco cheered and
heartened exceedingly, as under foreign skies the flap and rustle over
the wayfarer’s head of the Union Jack—the old flag of emancipation! And
in one corner, book-piled like the rest of the furniture, stood a piano.
This I hailed with a squeal of delight. ‘Want to strum?’ inquired
my friend, as if it was the most natural wish in the world—his
eyes were already straying towards another corner, where bits of
writing-table peeped out from under a sort of Alpine system of book and
foolscap.
‘O but may I?’ I asked in doubt. ‘At home I’m not allowed to—only
beastly exercises!’
‘Well, you can strum here, at all events,’ he replied; and murmuring
absently, ‘_Age, dic Latinum, barbite, carmen_,’ he made his way,
mechanically guided as it seemed, to the irresistible writing-table.
In ten seconds he was out of sight and call. A great book open on his
knee, another propped up in front, a score or so disposed within easy
reach, he read and jotted with an absorption almost passionate. I might
have been in Bœotia, for any consciousness he had of me. So with a
light heart I turned to and strummed.
Those who painfully and with bleeding feet have scaled the crags of
mastery over musical instruments have yet their loss in this: that the
wild joy of strumming has become a vanished sense. Their happiness
comes from the concord and the relative value of the notes they handle:
the pure, absolute quality and nature of each note in itself are only
appreciated by the strummer. For some notes have all the sea in them,
and some cathedral bells; others a woodland joyance and a smell of
greenery; in some fauns dance to the merry reed, and even the grave
centaurs peep out from their caves. Some bring moonlight, and some
the deep crimson of a rose’s heart; some are blue, some red, while
others will tell of an army with silken standards and march-music. And
throughout all the sequence of suggestion, up above the little white
men leap and peep, and strive against the imprisoning wires; and all
the big rosewood box hums as it were full of hiving bees.
Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend’s
eye over the edge of a folio. ‘But as for these Germans,’ he began
abruptly, as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, ‘the
scholarship is there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception,
the happy intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!’
‘They get nothing whatever from _us_,’ I said decidedly: the word
German only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile.
‘You think not?’ he rejoined doubtfully, getting up and walking about
the room. ‘Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a
critic. They are qualities—in youth—as rare as they are pleasing. But
just look at Schrumpffius, for instance—how he struggles and wrestles
with a simple γἁρ in this very passage here!’
I peeped fearfully through the open door, half-dreading to see some
sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was
still. I saw no trouble at all in the passage, and I said so.
‘Precisely,’ he cried, delighted. ‘To you, who possess the natural
scholar’s faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at all.
But to this Schrumpffius——’ But here, luckily for me, in came the
housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect.
‘Your tea is in the garden,’ she said severely, as if she were
correcting a faulty emendation. ‘I’ve put some cakes and things for the
little gentleman; and you’d better drink it before it gets cold.’
He waved her off and continued his stride, brandishing an aorist over
my devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a
moment’s break in his descant; and then, ‘You’d better drink it before
it gets cold,’ she observed again, impassively. The wretched man cast a
deprecating look at me. ‘Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice,’ he
observed feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden.
I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him,
I concluded he was absent-minded too, and attacked the ‘cakes and
things’ with no misgivings.
After a most successful and most learned tea a something happened
which, small as I was, never quite shook itself out of my memory. To
us at parley in an arbour over the high road, there entered, slouching
into view, a dingy tramp, satellited by a frowsy woman and a pariah
dog; and, catching sight of us, he set up his professional whine; and I
looked at my friend with the heartiest compassion, for I knew well from
Martha—it was common talk—that at this time of day he was certainly
and surely penniless. Morn by morn he started forth with pockets
lined; and each returning evening found him with never a sou. All this
he proceeded to explain at length to the tramp, courteously and even
shamefacedly, as one who was in the wrong; and at last the gentleman
of the road, realising the hopelessness of his case, set to and cursed
him with gusto, vocabulary, and abandonment. He reviled his eyes, his
features, his limbs, his profession, his relatives and surroundings;
and then slouched off, still oozing malice and filth. We watched the
party to a turn in the road, where the woman, plainly weary, came to a
stop. Her lord, after some conventional expletives demanded of him by
his position, relieved her of her bundle, and caused her to hang on his
arm with a certain rough kindness of tone, and in action even a dim
approach to tenderness; and the dingy dog crept up for one lick at her
hand.
‘See,’ said my friend, bearing somewhat on my shoulder, ‘how this
strange thing, this love of ours, lives and shines out in the
unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning?
Barren acres, all! But only stoop—catch the light thwartwise—and all is
a silver network of gossamer! So the fairy filaments of this strange
thing underrun and link together the whole world. Yet it is not the old
imperious god of the fatal bow—ἑρως ανἱκατε μἁχαν—not that—nor even the
placid respectable στοργἡ—but something still unnamed, perhaps more
mysterious, more divine! Only one must stoop to see it, old fellow, one
must stoop!’
The dew was falling, the dusk closing, as I trotted briskly homewards
down the road. Lonely spaces everywhere, above and around. Only
Hesperus hung in the sky, solitary, pure, ineffably far-drawn
and remote; yet infinitely heartening, somehow, in his valorous
isolation.