 XII. The servants of the rich. Do you mark there, down in the lowest point in the innermost funnel of hellfire pit, souls writhing in smoke, themselves like glowing smoke and tortured in the flame? You ask me what they are. These are the servants of the rich. The men who in their mortal life opened the doors of the great houses, and drove the carriages, and sneered at the unhappy guests. Those larger souls that bear the greatest doom, and manifest the more dreadful suffering, they are the butlers, boiling in molten gold. What you cry? Is there then indeed, as I once heard in childhood, justice for men and in equal balance, and the final doom for evil deeds? There is. Look down into the murky hollow, and reverer the awful accomplishment of human things. These are the men who would stand with powder on their heads like clowns, dressed in fantastic suits of gold and plush, with an ugly scorn upon their faces, and whose pleasure it was, while yet their time of probation lasted, to forget every human bond and to cast down the nobler things in man, treating the artist as dirt and the poet as a clown, and beautiful women, if they were governesses or poor relations, or in any way dependence, as a meat object for silent mockery. But now their time is over, and they have reaped the harvest which they sowed. Look and take comfort all you who may have suffered at their hands. Come closer. See how each separate sort suffers its peculiar penalty. There go a hopeless shoal through the reek. Their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom. There is nothing to comfort them, not even memory, and they know that forever and forever they must plunge and swirl, driven before the blasts, now hot, now icy, of their everlasting pain. These are those men who were wont to come into the room of the poor guest at early morning with a steadfast and assured step, and a look of insult. These are those who would take the tattered garments and hold them at arm's length, as much to say, what rags these scribblers wear. And then casting them over the arm with a gesture that meant, well, they must be brushed, but heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces. Would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and notably loose tobacco. These are they that would then take out with the utmost patience private letters, money pocket books, knives, dirty crumpled stamps, scraps of newspapers, broken cigarettes, pawn tickets, keys, and much else, muttering within themselves, so that one could almost hear it, with their lips, but who jumble these pauper's stuff they're shoddy with. They do not even know that in the house of the great it is not customary to fill the pockets. They do not know that the great remove at night from their pockets such few trinkets of diamond gold as they may contain. Where were they born or bred? To think that I should have to serve such cattle? No matter. He has brought money with him. I am glad to see. Borrowed no doubt, and I will bleed him well. Such thoughts one almost heard as one lay in the beds of the great, despairing. Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which is a ritual with the horrid tribe. Then a great bath would be trundled in, and he would set beside it a great can, and silently pronounce the judgment that whatever else was forgiven, the middle class, one thing would not be forgiven them, then neglect of the bath, of the splashing abound of the water, and of the adequate wetting of the towel. All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands, but be comforted. They writhe in hell with their fellows. That man who looked us up and down so insolently when the great doors were opened in St. James Square, and who thought one's boots so comic, he too and all his like burned separately. So does that fellow with the wine that poured it out ungenerously and clearly thought that we were in luck's way to get the bubbly stuff, at all, in any measure. He that conveyed his master's message with a pomp that was instinct with scorn, and he that drove you to the station, hardly daining to reply to your timid sentences, and knowing well your tremors and your abject ill-ease, be comforted. He too burns. It is the custom in hell when this last batch of scoundrels, the horsey ones, come up in batches, to be dealt with by the authorities thereof, for them first to be asked in awful tones how many pieces of silver they have taken from men below the rank of a squire, or whose income was less than a thousand pounds a year, and the truth on this they are compelled by fate to declare. Whereupon, before their tortures begin, they receive as many stripes as they took Florence. Nor is there any defect in the arrangement of divine justice in their regard, save that the money is not refunded to us. Cooks, housemates, poor little scullery-mates, under-gardners, estate-tarpenters of all kinds, small stable-ads, and in general all those humble servants of the rich, who are debarred by their insolent superiors from approaching the guest, and neither wound them with contemptuous looks, nor follow these up by regandish demands for money, these you will not see in this pit of fire. For them is reserved a high place in paradise, only a little lower than that supreme and cloudy height of bliss wherein repose the happy souls of all who on this earth have been journalists. But gamekeepers, more particularly those who make a distinction and will take nothing less than gold, a paper, and grooms of the chamber, and all such, these suffer torments forever and forever. So has immutable justice decreed, and thus is the offended majesty of man a-menged. And what, you will ask me, perhaps at last, what of the dear old family servants who are so good, so kind, so attached to Master Arthur and to Lady Jane? Ah, of these the infernal plight is such that I dare not set it down. There is a special secret room in hell, where there villainous hypocrisy, and that a cursed mixture of yielding and the false independence, wherewith they flattered and be fooled their masters. Their thefts, their bullying of beggarmen, have at last a full reward. Their eyes are no longer sly and cautious, lit with the pretense of affection, nor are they here rewarded with good fires and in excess of food and prerequisites and pensions. But they sit heartless, gibbering with cold, and they stare broken at the prospect of a dark eternity. And now and then one or another, an aged, serving man or a white-haired housekeeper, will ring their hands and say, All that I had once, only once, shown in my mortal life, some momentary gleam of honor, independence, or dignity. All that I had but once, stood up in my freedom, and spoken to the rich as I should. Then it would have been remembered for me, and I should now have been spared this place. But it is too late. For there is no repentance known among the servants of the rich, nor any exception to their vileness. They are hated by men when they live and when they die, they must for all eternity consort with demons. CHAPTER XIII. There are two kinds of jokes, those jokes that are funny because they are true, and those jokes that would be funny anyhow. Think it out and you will find that it is a great truth. Now the joke I have here for the delectation of the broken-hearted is of the first sort. It is funny because it is true. It is about a man whom I really saw and really knew and touched, and on occasions treated ill. He was. The sunlight played upon his form. Perhaps he may still flounder under the light of the sun and not yet have gone down into that kingdom, whose kings are less happy than the poor as tined upon the upper fields. It was at college that I knew him, and I retained my acquaintance with him. Oh, I retained it in a loving and cherishing manner until he was grown to young manhood. I would keep it, still, did fate permit me to do so, for he was a treasure. I have never met anything so complete for the purposes of laughter, though I am told there are many such in the society which bred his oafish form. He was a noble in his own country, which was somewhere in the pine forests of the Germanys, and his views of social rank were far, far too simple for the silent subtlety of the English rich. In his poor turn-up of a mind he ordered all men thus—first, reigning sovereigns and their families, secondly, mediatized people, third, princes, fourth, dukes, fifth, nobles, then came a little gap, and after that little gap, the others. Most of us in our college were the others. But he, as I have said, was a noble in his distant land. He had not long been among the young Englishmen when he discovered that a difficult tangle of titles ran hither and thither among them, like random briars, through an undergrowth. There were honourables, and there were lords, and heaven knows what, and there were two sirs, and altogether it puzzled him. He couldn't understand why a man should be called Mr. Jinks and his brother Lord Blaufescue, and that if a man could be called Lord Blaufescue while his father Lord Brobdingnag was alive, how was it that quite a fresher should be called Sir Hauke? No, he was Sir John Hauke, and when the devil did one, put in the Christian name, and when didn't one, and why should one, and what was the order of precedence among all these? I think that last point puzzled him more than the rest, for in his own far distant land in the pine woods where peasants uglier than sin groveled over the potato crop and called him barren. There were no such devilish contraptions, but black was black and white was white. Here in this hypocritical England to which his father had sent him as an exile, everything was so wrapped up in deceiving masks. There was the captain of the eleven, or the president of the boat club. By the time he had mastered that there might be great men, not only without actual title, he had long ago disparate of that. But without so much as cousinship to one, he would stumble upon a fellow with nothing whatsoever to distinguish him, not even the high jump, and yet in with the highest. It tortured him, I can tell you. After he had sat upon several fourth-year men, he himself a fresher, from an error as to their rank. After he had been duly thrown into the water, blackened as to his face with blacking, sentenced to death in a court-martial, and duly shot with a blank cartridge, an unpleasant thing, by the way, looking down a barrel. After he had had his boots, of which there were seven pair, packed with earth, and in each one a large geranium planted. After all these things had happened to him in his pursuit of an Anglo-German understanding, he approached a lanky, pot-bellied youth, whom he had discovered with certitude to be the cousin of a duke, and begged him secretly to befriend him in a certain matter which was this. The baron out of the Germanys proposed to give a dinner to no less than thirty people, and he begged the pot-bellied youth in all secrecy to collect for him an assembly worthy of his rank, and to give him privately not only their names but their actual precedents according to which he would arrange them at the table, upon his right and upon his left. But what did the pot-bellied youth do? While he went out and finding all his friends one after the other, he said, You know, sausage. Yes, they said, for all the university-new sausage. Well, he was going to give a dinner, said the pot-bellied one, who was also slow of speech, and you have to come, but I'm going to say you are the duke of Rochester, or whatever title he might have chosen. And so speaking, and so giving the date in place, he would go on to the next. Then when he had collected not thirty but sixty of all his friends and acquaintances, he sought out the noble two-ton again, and told him that he could not possibly ask only thirty men without lifelong jealousies and hatreds. So sixty were coming and the two-ton, with some hesitation, for he was fond of money, agreed. Never shall I forget the day when those sixty were ushered solemnly into a large reception-room in the hotel. Blameless use of varying aspect, most of them quite sober, since it was but seven o'clock, presented one by one to the host of the evening, each with his title and style. To those whom he recognized as equals, the aristocrats spoke with charming simplicity. Those who were somewhat his inferiors, the lords by courtesy and the simple baronets, he put immediately at their ease, and even the honorable saw at a glance that he was a man of the world, for he said a few kind words to each. As for a man with no handle to his name, there was not one of the sixty so low, except the Mr. Pupisba, of whom the gatherer of that feast whispered to the host that he could not but ask him, because, though only a second cousin, he was the heir to the Marquis of Cork, hence his Norman name. It was a bewilderment of the baron, for he might have to meet the man later in life as the Marquis of Cork, whereas for the moment he was only Mr. Pupisba, but anyhow he was put at the bottom of the table, and that was how the trouble began. In my time, I am talking of the nineties, young men drank wine. It was before the bishop of London had noted the great change, and Mr. Pupisba and his neighbor, Lord Henry Job, were quite early in the feast, occupied in a playful contest which ended in Mr. Pupisba's losing his end seat and going to grass. He rose not unruffled, with a burst collar, and glared a little uncertainly over the assembled wealth and lineage of the evening. Lord Benin, the son of our great general, Lord Ashentee of Benin, his real name was Mitchum, God rest his soul, addressed to the unreal Pupisba an epithet, then fashionable, now almost forgotten, but always unprintable. Mr. Pupisba, forgetting what nobility imposes, immediately hurled at him an as-yet half-emptied bottle of champagne. Then it was that the bewildered baron learnt, for the last time and for that matter for the first time, to what the island race can rise when it really lets itself go. I remember I was a nephew, if I remember right, above the din and confusion of light, for candles also were thrown. What appeals, as in a tone of command, and then, as in a tone of supplication, both in the unmistakable accents of the cousin overseas. And I even remembered what I may call the great sacrilege of that evening, when Lord Gogomeg seized our host affectionately round the neck and pressing the back of his head with his large and red left hand, attempted to grind his face into the tablecloth, after a fashion unknown to the haughty lords of the twofold world. During the march homewards an adventure, enlightened with a sharp skirmish and tooth losses at the hands of the police, I know not what passed through the mind of the youth, who had hitherto kept so careful a distinction between blood and blood, whether like Hannibal he swore eternal hatred to the English, or whether in his patient German mind he noted it all down as a piece of historical evidence to be used in his diplomatic career. We shall not be told. I think in the main he was simply bewildered. Of the many other things we made him do before eight weeks I have no space to tell. How he asked us what was the fashionable sport, and how we told him polo, and made him by a polo pony, sixteen hands high, with huge great bones and a broken nose, explaining to him that it was stamina and not appearance that the bluff Englishmen loved in a horse. How we made him wear his arms embroidered upon his handkerchief, placing several for a pattern and taking the thing as a common place by sly illusion for many preparatory days. How we told him that it was a custom to call every Sunday afternoon for half an hour upon the wife of every married don of one's college. How we challenged him to the great college feat of throwing himself into the river at midnight. How finally we persuaded him that the ancient custom of the university demanded the presentation to one's tutor at the end of term of an elaborate thesis of one hundred pages long upon some subject of theology. How he was carefully warned that surprise was the essence of this charming tradition, and not a word of it must be breathed to the august recipient of the favour. How he sucked in the knowledge that the more curious and strange the matter, the higher would be his place in the schools. And how the poor fool elaborately wasted what God gives such men for brains in the construction of a damning refutation against the monophysites. How his tutor, a humble little nervous fool, thought he was having his leg pulled. All these things I have no space to tell you now. But he was rich. Doubtless by the custom of his country he is now in some great position plotting the ruin of Britannia, and certainly she deserves it in this case. He was most unmercifully ragged. The end of CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV One day as I was walking along the beach at South Sea I saw a little man sitting upon a campstool and very carefully drawing the old round stone fort which stands in the middle of the shallow water, one of the four that so stands, and which looks from South Sea as though it were about half way across to the island. I said to him, Sir, why are you drawing that old fort? He answered, I am a German spy, and the reason I draw that fort is to provide information for my government which may be useful to it in case of war with this country. When the gentleman sitting upon the campstool who was drawing the old round stone fort in the middle of the water talked like this, he annoyed me very much. You merely waste your time, said I. These forts were put up nearly sixty years ago and they are quite useless. I know nothing about that, said the little man. He had hair like camp and prominent weak blue eyes of a glaze sort, and altogether he struck me as a fool of no insignificant calibre. I know nothing about that. I obey orders. I was told to draw this fort, and that I am now doing. You do not draw well, said I, but that is neither here nor there. I mean that what you draw is not beautiful. What I really want to know is why in thunder you were told to draw that round stone barrel for which no one in Europe would give a five pound no. I have nothing to do with all that, said the little man again, still industriously drawing. I was told to draw that fort, and fort I draw. And he went on drawing the old round stone fort. Can you not tell me for whom you are drawing it, I said at last? Yes, said he, with great pleasure. I am drawing it for his kinglike and kaiserlike majesty by the grace of God and the authority of the holy sea, William King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke of Romchel, Count Hollenzollern of the great German Empire, Emperor. With that he went on drawing the old round stone fort. I do assure you most solemnly, said I again, that you can be of no use whatever to your master in this matter. There are no guns upon that ridiculous thing. It has even been turned into a hotel. But the little man paid no attention to what I said. He went on obeying orders. He had often heard that this was the strength of his race. How could there conceivably be any guns on it, said I imploringly? Do thank what you are at. Do look at the range between you and ride. Do consider what modern gunnery is. Do wake up. Do. But the little man, with hair like him, said again, I know nothing about all that. I am a lieutenant in the high spy corps, and I have been told to draw this fort, and I must draw it. And he went on drawing the old round stone fort. Then gloom settled upon my spirit, for I thought that civilization was imperil, if men such as he really existed, and really went on in this fashion. However, I went back into Salsi, into the town, and there I bought a chart. Then I struck off ranges upon the chart, and marked them in pencil, and I also marked the fairway through spithead into the Portsmouth Harbor. Then I came back to the little man, and I said, Do look at this. He looked at it very patiently and carefully, but at the end of so looking at it, he said, I do not understand these things. I do not belong to the high map-making corps. I belong to the spy corps, and I have orders to draw this fort. And he went on drawing the old round stone fort. Then seeing I could not persuade him, I went into a neighboring church, which is dedicated to the patron of spies, to wit St. Judas, and I prayed for this man. I prayed thus. Oh, St. Judas, soften the flinty heart of this spy, and turn him by your powerful intercession, from his present perfectly useless occupation of drawing the old round stone fort, to something a little more worthy of his distinguished mission, and a gallant profession he adorns. When I had prayed thus diligently, for half an hour, something within me told me that it was useless, and when I got back to the seashore I found out what the trouble was. Prayers went off my little man, like water off a cabbage leaf. My little man, with hair like hemp, was a no-god-ite, for he so explained to me in a conversation we had upon the four last things. I have done my drawing, he said, at the end of this conversation, and he said it in a tone of great satisfaction. Now I shall go back to Germany. No, said I, you shall do nothing of the kind. I will have you tried first in a court, and you should be sent to prison for being a spy. Very well, said he, and he came with me to the court. The magistrate tried him, and did what they call in the newspapers, looking very grave. That is, he looked silly and worried. At last he determined not to put the spy in prison, because there was not sufficient proof that he was the spy. Although he added, I have little doubt but that you have been prying into the most important military secrets of the country. After that I took the spy out of court again, and gave him some dinner, and that night he went back home to Germany with his drawing of the old round stone fort. It is certainly an extraordinary way of doing business. But that is their lookout. They think they are efficient, and we think they are efficient, and when two people of opposite interests are agreed on such a matter, it is not for third parties to complain. THE YUNG PEOPLE One of my amusements, a mournful one I admit, upon the fine spring days, is to watch in the streets of London the young people, and to wonder if they are what I was at their age. There is an element in human life which the philosophers have neglected, and which I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name has been coined for it, but I am not at a loss to describe it. It is that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere change in perspective or in point of view. It is that change which makes death so recognizable and too near, achievement necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. It is more than that. It is the sort of seeing things from that far side of them which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years, but which is now palpable and part of the senses, known. All who had passed a certain age know what I mean. This change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth, and it is best to trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the young. There I see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough and walking a little too stiffly down Coxburg Street. Does he think himself immortal, I wonder, as I did? Does the thought of oblivion appall him as it did me? That he continually suffers in his dignity, that he thinks the passers-by all watch him, and that he is in terror of any singularity in dress or gesture. I can well believe, for that is common to all youth. But does he also, as I did and those of my time, propose great things which are quite unattainable and think the somewhat of success in any art to be the natural wage of living? Then other things occur to me. Do these young people suffer or enjoy all our old illusions? Do they think the country invincible? Do they vaguely distinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the former, from whom they spring, are provided with their well-being by some natural and fatal process like the recurrence of day and night? Are they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do? I wonder. Possibly they are. I have not seen one of them wearing a billy-cock hat with the tailcoat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the street, and is life divided for them today as it was then into three periods. In their childhood they are much more important years at a public school, which last fill up most of their consciousness, their new untried occupation. And do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? I think they must, judging by their eyes. I think they too believe that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in any trade is best recognized and best paid, that labor is a happy business and that women are of two kinds, the young who go about to please them, the old to whom they are indifferent. And do they drink? I suppose so. They do not show it yet. Do they gamble? I conceive they do. Are their nerves still sound? Of that there can be no doubt. See them hop on and off the motorbuses and cross the streets. And what of their attitude towards the labels? Do they take, as I did, every man much talked of for a great man? Are they different when they meet such men? And do they feel themselves to be in the presence of gods? I should much like to put myself into the mind of one of them, and see if, to that generation, the simplest of all social lies is gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a prime minister, a versifier, an ambassador, a lawyer who frequently comes up in the press, to be some very superhuman person, and doubtless also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much talked of or much printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart and all the rest of England in a ruck below. Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment? We used all to be so bewildered. Things did not fit in with the very simple and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the state. The motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable, saved to a few base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cats, men who would always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation, will come the discovery that of these men and of such material the great are made, and will the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came to their elders? I must believe that young men walking down Coxpur Street think that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of unlimited means and command the world. Further, I must believe that the young man walking down Coxpur Street, he has got to Northumberland Avenue by now, appears in a static world. For him things are immovable. There are the old fathers and mothers and uncles, the very old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death. All the children, he thinks, will be always children, and all the lovely women always young, and loyalty and generous regards are twin easy matters, reposing natively in the soul, and as yet, unbetrayed. Well if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young people, quite half the world, is happy. Not one of that happy half remembers the lion of Northumberland house, or the little streets there were behind the foreign office, or the old strand, or temple-bar, or what coots used to be like, or simpsons, or so-ho is yet uninvaded by the great and good Lord Shep'sbury. No one of the young can pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works. And for them, all the new things, houses which are veils of mud on stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of taxicabs, and the icky hotels, are the things that always were, and always will be. A year to them is twenty years of hours. The summer for them is games and leisure. The winter is the country and a horse. Time is slow and stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal, but will not be. For they hammer out a lyric quite indistinguishable from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing. Or am I all wrong? Is the world so rapidly changing that the young also are caught with the obsession of change? Why then not even half the world is happy. The end of Chapter 15. The end of Section 17. Section 18. This, and that, and the other. This is LibriVox Recording. In the parish of Isnoil, in the country of Wiltshire, and towards the western side of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse covered, abrupt, and somewhat over seven hundred feet above sea in height. From the summit of it a man can look westward, northward, and eastward, over a great rising roll of countryside. To the west, upon a skyline of a level range of hills, not high, runs that long wood called Selwood, and there makes an horizon. To the north the cultivated uplands merge into high, open down, bare turf of the chalk, which closes the view for miles against the sky, and is the watershed between the northern and the southern Avon. Eastward that chalkland falls into the valley which holds Salisbury. From this high knoll a man perceives the two days march, which Elford made with his levees, when he summoned the men of three shires to fight with him against the Danes. He overthrew them at Ethan Dune. The struggle of which these two days were the crisis was of more moment to the history of Britain and of Europe than any other which has imperiled the survival of either, between the Roman times and our own. That generation in which the stuff of society had worn most threadbare, and in which its continued life, individually the living memory of the empire and informed by the faith, was most in peril, was not the generation which saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that which witnessed the breaking of the Mohammedan tide in the Eighth when the Christians carried it through the near portiers between the River Vien and the Chain, the upland south of Chateaureau. The gravest moment of peril was for that generation whose grandfathers could remember the order of Charlemagne and which fought its way desperately through the perils of the later ninth century. Then it was during the great Scandinavian harry of the north and west that Europe might have gone down. Its monastic establishment was shaken, its relics of central government were perishing of themselves, letters had sunk to nothing, and building had already about it something nearly savage when the swirl of the pirates came up all its rivers. And though legend had taken the place of true history, and though the memories of our race were confused almost to dreaming, we were conscious of our past and our inheritance, and seemed to feel that now we had come to a narrow bridge which might or might not be crossed, a bridge already nearly ruined. If that bridge were not crossed, there would be no future for Christendom. Southern Britain and Northern Gaul received the challenge, met it, were victorious, and so permitted the survival of all the things we know. At Ethan Dunne and before Paris the double business was decided. Of these twin victories the first was accomplished in this island. Alfred is its hero and its site is that chalk upland above the Vale of Trowbridge, near which the second of the two white horses is carved. The hills above Eddington and Bratton, upon the Westbury Road. The Easter of 878 had seen no king in England. Alfred was hiding with some small band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip against the Severn Sea. It was one of those eclipses which time and again in the history of Christian warfare have just preceded the actions by which Christendom has re-arisen. In Whites and Week Alfred reappeared. There is a place at the southern terminal of the Great Wood, Selwood, which bears a Celtic affix and is called Pencilwood. The head of the forest, and nearer it there stood, not to within living memory but nearly so, a shire stone called Egbert's Stone. Their Wiltshire Somerset and Dorset met. It is just eastward of the gap by which men come by the south round Selwood into the open country. There the levees, that is the lords of Somerset, and the Wiltshire and their followers, come also riding from Hemshire, met the king. But many had fled over the sea from fear of the pagans. And seeing the king as was meet, come to life again, as it were after such tribulations, and receiving him, they were filled with an immense joy, and there the camp was pitched. Next day the host set out eastward to try its last adventure with the barbarians, who had ruined half the west. Day was just breaking when the levees set forth and made for the uplands and for the water-partings. Not by Mere and the marshes of the valley, but by the great camp of white sheet and the higher land behind it, the line of marching and mounted men followed the king across the open turf of the chalk to where three hundreds meet, and where the gathering of the people for justice and the courts of the counts had been held before the disasters of that time had broken up the land. It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for a tree, which marked the junction of the hundreds. No more than three hundred years ago this tree still stood, and bore the name of the Ili oak. The place of that day's camp stands up above the water of Deverell, and is upon the continuation of that Roman road from Serum to the Mendips and to the sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccountably upon its issue from the great bridge wood. The army had marched ten miles, and there the second camp was pitched. With the next dawn the advance upon the Danes was made. The whole of that way, which should be famous in every household in this country, is now deserted and unknown. The host passed over the high rolling land of the downs from summit to summit, until from that central crest which stands above and to the east of Westbury they saw before them directly northward and a mile away the ring of earthwork which is called today Bratton Castle. Upon the slope between the great host of the pirates came out to battle. It was there from those naked hides that overlooked the great plain of the northern Avon that the fate of England was decided. The end of that day's march and ashen was the pressing of the pagans back behind their earthworks, and the men who had saved our great society sat down before the ringed embankment, watching all the gates of it, killing all the stragglers that had failed to reach that protection, and rounding up the stray horses and cattle of the pagans. That siege endured for fourteen days. At the end of it the north men treated, conquered by hunger, by cold and by fear. Alfred took hostages, as many as he willed. Guthram their king accepted our baptism, and Britain took that upward road which gall seven years later was to follow, when the same anarchy was broken by utes under the walls of Paris. All this great affair we have doubtfully followed today, in no more than some three hundred words of Latin, come down doubtfully over a thousand years. But the thing happened where, and as I have said, it should be as memorable as those great battles in which the victories of the republic established are exalted, but perilous modern day. The end of Section 18. The end of Chapter 16. Section 19. This, that, and the other. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. This, that, and the other, by Hilaer Bellach. Section 19. Chapter 17. The Death of Robert the Strong. Up in the higher valley of the river Sarth, which runs between low knolls through easy meadowland, and is a place of cattle and a pasture interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher land to the crossings of the river. It was in the year 866. The older servants in the chief of men's retinue could remember Charlemagne. Two leaders rode before the troop. They were two great owners of land, and each possessed of commissions from the imperial authority. The one had come up hastily northwards from Poitiers, and the other had marched westward to join him, coming from the deuce with his command. Each was a comms. A lord, administrator of a countryside at its capital, and had power to levy free men. Their retainers also were many. About them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them before the footmen were four squadrons of mounted followers. The forces had already marched far that morning. It was winding and lying down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside, and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages. But they could see no sign of their quarry. They were hunting the pirates. The scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken camped till lately, till mid-morning. But in the last miles of their marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the rare peasantry were confused. They found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at a place where it left the hills for the water meadows. And here they recovered the trace of their prey. A wounded man, his right arm bound roughly with sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away beyond the stream, and had a light smoke which rose into the still summer air just beyond the screen of woods in its neighborhood. He had seen the straggling line of the northern men an hour before, hurrying over the down and coming towards that farm. Above the two leaders, the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse the less easily, and whose handling of the rain was brutally strong, rode up and questioned and requisitioned the peasant. Could he guess the numbers? It might be two hundred. It was not three. How long had they been in the countryside? Four days at least. It was four days ago that they had tried to get into the monastery near the new castle and had been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. What damage had they done? He could not tell. The reports were few that he had heard. His cousin from up the valley complained that three oxen had been driven from his fields by night. They had stolen a chain of silver from St. Giles without respect for the shrine. They had done much more, how much he did not know. Had they left any dead? Yes, three whom he had helped to bury. They had been killed outside the monastery wall. One of his fields was of the monastery benefits, and he had been summoned to dig the graves. The Lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly eyes and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from forty years. That equal was armored, but the Lord who had spoken to the peasant, full of body and squat square of shoulder, thick of neck, tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather coat, strung with rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for him some miles before, and he hung loose upon the saddle-hook. He had taken off also the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point. He preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair, and to risk its action than to be weighed upon longer by that iron. And this, though at any moment the turn of a spiny might bring them upon some group of the barbarians. Upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the expectation of the armed men was fixed. His repute had gone through all the north of Gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and in throwing. He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted no lineage, but vague stories went about that his father was from the Germanys, that his father was from the Paris, that it was his mother who had brought him to court, that he was a noble with mystery that forbade him to speak of his birth, that he was a slave whom the emperor had enfranchised, and to whom he had given favor, that he was a farmer's son, a yeoman. On these things he had never spoken. No one had met men nor women of his blood, but ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of the empire, adding also one village to another in his possession, from the first which he had obtained no man knew how, purchasing land with the prophets of office after office. He had been comms of tours, comms of Auxerre, comms of Nevers, he had a commission for all the military work between Lyor and the scene. There were songs about him, and myths and tales of his great strength. Before it was at this that the populace most wondered. So the man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little forces, seeking for the pirates, when unexpectedly, upon emerging from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. Two hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone bridge unbroken. Only beyond a group of huts and houses, wood and stone and a heavy low round arch bulk of a church, marked the goal of the pirates, and there they were. They had seen the imperial levy, the moment that it left the trees, and they were running, tall, lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with battle-axe or a short spear. They were making for cover in the houses of the village. Only the two leaders, called the marshallers of their levies, gave orders that the footmen should follow, trotted in line over the bridge at the head of the squadron, and once the water was passed formed into two little bodies of horse, and galloped across the few fields into the streets of the place. Just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church there, the last of the marauders, retarded under the weight of some burden he would save, was caught and pinned by a short-speared throne. He fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue, to gods of his own in the Northland. But all his comrades were fast in the building, and there was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the doors. Then within a moment an arrow flashed from a window slit, just missing one of the marshalls. The comms of portiers shouted for wood to burn the defense of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were pressed. The baggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. Even as this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at short range from within the church tower. The first of the footmen had come up, and some half-dozen picked for marksmanship, or attempting to thread, with their whistling arrows, the slits in the thick walls, whence the bolts of the Vikings came. One such opening was caught by a lucky aim. For some moments its fire ceased, then came another arrow from it. It struck the commies of portiers, and he went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. Next with a second shaft the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a panic. No servant dared stab it, but a marshall did. Robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. He was in a fury mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door, blow upon blow, having in his hand a stone so huge that even at such a moment they marveled at him. Unarmored, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, Robert the strong thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge broke, and he heard a solute of laughter from his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted straining, a great beam which lay there and tunneled it like a battering ram against the second hinge. But just as the shock came, an arrow from the tower caught him also. It struck where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down. Even as he fell the great door gave, and the men of the imperial levee, fighting their way in, broke upon the masked pirates that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword. Four men tended the leader. One man holding his head upon his knee, the three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be tended. But his body was no longer convulsed, the motions of the arms had ceased, and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the thick blood hardly followed it. He was dead. The name of this village and this church was Brissarth, and the man who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose, was the first father of all the Capetians, the French kings. From this man sprang Yudhis, who defended Paris. From the sea rovers, Hugh Carpat and Philip Augustus, and Louis the Saint and Philip the Fair, and so through century after century, to the kings that rode through Italy, to Henry IV, to Louis XIV, and the splendor of his wars, and to that last unfortunate who lost the two lorries on August 10, 1793. His line survives today for its eldest heir is the man whom the Basques would follow. His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he claims the crown of Spain. The end of Section 19, the end of Chapter 17. CHAPTER 18 The Crooked Streets Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets? I wonder. Which are my delight, and hurt no man living? Every day the wealthier nations are pulling down one or another in their capitals and their great towns. They do not know why they do it, neither do I. It ought to be enough surely to drive the great broad ways which commerce needs, and which are the life channels of a modern city, without destroying all the history and all the humanity in between, the islands of the past. For note you, the Crooked Streets are packed with human experience and reflect, in a lively manner, all the chances and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men. One marks a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient stream, the third a track some animal took to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. Another is the line of an old defense, another shows where a rich man's garden stopped long before the first ancestor, one's family cantrace, was born. A garden, now all houses, and its owner, who took delight in it, turned to be a printed name. Leave men alone in their cities, pester them not with their futilities of great governments, nor with the fads of two powerful men, and they will build you Crooked Streets of their very nature, as moles throw up the little mounds, or bees construct their combs. There is no ancient city but glories, or has gloried in a whole foison and multitude of Crooked Streets. There is none, however, wasted and swept by power, which, if you leave it alone through natural things, will not breed Crooked Streets in less than a hundred years, and keep them for a thousand more. I know a dead city called Timgod, which the sands or the barbarians of the Atlas overwhelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies between the desert and the Algerian fields, high up upon a mountainside. Its columns stand. Even its fountains are apparent, though their waterways are choked. There is a great forum or marketplace, all flagged and even, and the ruined walls of its houses mark its emplacement on every side. All its streets are straight, set out with a line, and by this you may judge how a Roman town lay when the last order of Rome sank into darkness. Well take any other town which has not thus been mummified and preserved but has lived through the intervening time, and you will find that man, active, curious, intense, in all the fruitful centuries of Christian time, has endowed them with Crooked Streets, which kind of streets are the most native to Christian men. So it is with Arles, so it is with Nimes, so it is with old Rome itself, and so it is with the city of London, on which by special providence the curse of the straight street has never fallen. So that it is to this day a labyrinth of little lanes. It was intended, after the great fire, to set it all out in order with piazzas and boulevards and the rest, but the English temper was too strong for any such nonsense, and the streets and the courts took to the natural lines which suit us best. The Renaissance indeed everywhere began this plague of vistas and the avenues. It was determined three centuries ago to rebuild Paris as regular as a chessboard, and nothing but money saved the town, nor rather the lack of money. You may to this day see in a square called the Place de Vosges, what was intended, but when they had driven their straight street two hundred yards or so the extreper ran dry and thus was old Paris saved. But in the last seventy years they have heard it badly again. I have no quarrel with what is regal and magnificent with splendid ways of a hundred feet or more, with great avenues and lines of palaces. But why should they pull down my nest beyond the river, straw street and rat street, and all those winding belts round the little church of St. Julian the Poor, where they say that Dante's studying and where Danton in the madness of his grief dug up his dead love from the earth on his returning from the wars. Crooked streets will never tire a man, and each will have its character, and each will have a soul of its own. To proceed from one to another is like traveling in multitude or mixing with a number of friends. In a town of crooked streets it is natural that one should be the moneylender street and another that of the burglars, and a third that of the politicians, and so forth, through all the trades and professions. Then also how much better are not the beauties of a town seen from crooked streets. After those old Dutch towns where you suddenly come round a corner upon great stretches of salt water, or those towns of central France from which one street and then another show you the gothic in a hundred ways, it is as it should be when you have the back of Chartres Cathedral towering up above you, from between and above two houses, gabled and almost meeting. It is what the builders meant when one comes out from such fissures into the great place, the Parvis of the Cathedral, like a sailor from a river into the sea. Not that certain buildings were not made particularly for wide approaches and splendid roads, but that these, when they are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon was wise enough when he designed that there should lead us all up beyond the Tiber to St. Peter's, a vast imperial way. But the modern, nondescript horde which has made Romans prey is very ill-advised to drive those new straight streets foolishly, emptily, with mean façades of plaster and great gaps that will not fill. You will have noted in your travels how the crooked streets gather names to themselves which are as individual as they and which are bound up with them as our names are with all our own human reality and humor. Thus I bear in mind certain streets of the town where I served as a soldier. There was the street of the three little heaps of wheat, the street of the trumpeting moor, the street of the false heart, and an exceedingly pleasant street called, who grumbles at it, and another short one called, the street of the devil in his haste, and many others. From time to time those modern town counselors from whom heaven has wisely withdrawn all immoderate sums of money, and who therefore have not the power to take away my crooked streets and put straight ones in their place, change old names to new ones. Every such change indicates some snobbery of the time, some little battle exaggerated to be a great thing, some public fellow or other in parliament or what not, some fad of the learned or of the important in their day. Once I remember seeing in an obscure corner a twist of dear old houses, built before George III was king, and on the corner of this row was painted Kippling Street, late Nelson Street. Upon another occasion I went to a little Norman market town up among the hills where one of the smaller squares was called, the place of the three mad nuns, and when I got there after so many years and was beginning to renew my youth, I was struck all of a heap to see a great enameled blue and white affair upon the walls. They had renamed the triangle, they had called it the place Victor Hugo. However, all you who love crooked streets, I bid you lift up your hearts. There is no power on earth that can make man build straight streets for long. It is a bad thing, as a general rule, to prophesy good or to make men feel comfortable with the vision of a pleasant future. But in this case I am right enough. The crooked streets will certainly return. Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I never saw until the other day, and that in another man's work but which, having once seen it, I shall retain all the days of my life. O Pase Graviari David Deus, his Cope you, Finum, or words to that effect, I can never be sure of a quotation, still less of a scantion, and anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing it from another man. I have changed it so much, the better. CHAPTER XIX The Place Apart Little pen be good, and flow with ink, which you do not always do, so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer, and the happiness I had of it. One summer morning, as I was wandering from one house to another, among the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village, and good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish you could recite the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands when there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is still northern. The place was not very far from the western sea. The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it a solemn slope, of woodland leading up gently to where, two miles or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of the treetops made a line along the sky. Clouds of little happy herveying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought, as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good things. But indeed I had come to things of a graver kind. A path went on a thwart the woods and upwards. This path was first regular and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved a clear way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were open all about me and there was a little breeze, yet the birds piped singly, and the height was lonely, when I reached it, as though we were engaged in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of trees. Then had not often come that way, and those men only the few of the countryside. Just where the slope began to go downwards again, upon the further side, these little clearing ceased and the woods closed in again. The path or what was left of it wholly failed, and I had now to push my way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sword, and I saw before me the valley. His floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one. Moreover that descent had been gentle. The valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had passed, but to the right and so away northward the pleasant empty dale. Let me describe it. Upon the further bank, for it was not steep enough to call a wall, the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low chestnuts, with here and there a tall silver birch standing up among them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was behind that long afternoon of hills. Opposite the higher eastern slope stood full, though gentle to the glorious light, and it was all a rise of pastureland. Its crest which followed up and away northward for some miles showed here and there a brown rock, aged and strong, but low and half covered in the grass. These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any sense of savagery. It warmed rather than forbade the approach of humankind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow, the narrowing floor of that Eden lay, winding, closing slowly until it ended in a little cup-like pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley converged upon its northern conclusion. This pass was perhaps four miles away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little less. The sun, as I have said, was shining upon all this. It made upon the little cup-like place a gentle shadow and a gentle light. Both curved as the light might fall low and a slant upon a wooden bowl cloned in a soft green cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward. Therefore I went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the wood and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this single and most unexpected veil. So strange was the place, even at this first sight, that I thought to myself, I have happened upon one of those holidays God gives us, for we cannot give ourselves holidays. Nor if we are slaves can our masters give us holidays, but God only, until at last we lay down all the business and leave our work for good and all, and so much for holidays. Anyhow the valley was a wonder to me there. It was not as our common and earthly things. There was a peace about it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active which invited and intrigued. The meadows had a summons in them, and all was completely still. I heard no bird from the moment when I left the woodland, but the little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a companion as I went on. It made no murmur, but its lid full and at once mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either side. I thought there must be chalk beneath it from his way of going. The pasture was not mown yet. It was short, but if it had been fed there was no trace of herds anywhere, and indeed the grass was rather more in height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. No wind moved it. There were no divisions in this little kingdom. There were no walls or fences or hedges. It was all one field, with the woods upon the western slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right, on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. Where have I found a place so much its own master, and so contentedly alone? If any man owned that valley, blessed be that man. But if no man owned it, and only God, then I could better understand the benediction which he had imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than an hour. Here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was not concerned with unanswerable things. Here was a place in which memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had been well purged out of them. The ultimate age of the world which is also its youth was here securely preserved. I was not so foolish as to attempt the prolongation of this blessedness. These things are not for possession. They are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps possess, but not while the business is on. I went along at a good sober pace of traveling, taking care to hurt an old blossom with my staff, and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves or of those that had movement. So I went until I came to the low pass, at the head of the place, and when I had surmounted it, I looked down a steep great fall into quite another land. I had come to a line where I met two provinces, two different kinds of men, and the second valley was the end of one. The moor, for so I would call it, upon the further side, fell away and away distantly till at its foot it struck a plain, whereon I could see further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields, and the anxious life of men. The end of Section XXI, the end of Chapter 19, Section XXII, this and that and the other. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Use that and the other by Hilaer Bellach. Section XXII, Chapter XX, The Ebro Plain I wish I could put before men who have not seen that sight the abrupt shock which the northern eye receives when it first looks from some rampart of the Pyrenees upon the new deserts of Spain. Deserts is a term at once too violent and too simple. The effect of that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar vision of the Sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas, nor is it the effect which those stretches of white, blinding sand give forth when looking southward toward Mexico and the sun. A man shades his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare river of Arizona from the cliff edge of a cuck-table land. Man grows in that new Spain beneath one. Many towns stand founded there. Christian churches are established. A human society stands firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waist of land. But to the northern eye, first seeing it, nade to a northerner well acquainted with it but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision, it is always a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society as he has known them, and have found a place there. And that, although he knows that nowhere in Europe have the fundamental things of Europe, then fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along this naked and burnt valley of the Hebrew. I will suppose the traveler to have made his way on foot from the boundaries of the Basque country, from the peak of any down through the high Pyrenean silences, to those banks of the Aragon, where the river runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the main Pyrenean chain. I will suppose him to have crossed that roll of thick mud, which the tumbling Aragon is in all these lower reaches, to have climbed the further range, which is called the mountains of stone, or the mountains of the rock. In coming upon its further southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him, that vast extent of uniform, dead brown stretching, through an air metallically clear, to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs of the Tagus. It is a characteristic of the stretched Spanish upland, from within side of the Pyrenees to within side of the Southern Sea, that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than any views in Europe, and partly from the height of that interior land, partly from the Iberian eridity of its earth, these views are as sharp in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as might be the landscapes of a dead world. The traveller, who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of the Pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of any through forests, not indeed as plentiful as those of the French side, but still dignified by many and noble trees, and alive with cascading water. While he was yet crossing the awful barriers, one standing out parallel before the next, which guard the mountains on their Spainward fall, he would continuously have perceived, though set him dry, inhospitable soil, bushes and clumps of trees, something at times resembling his own northern conception of pastureland, the herbage upon which he would pitch his camp, the branches he would pick up for firewood, still though sparse and southern, would have reminded him of home. But when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and sees that last the whole sweep of the Ibro country spread out before him, it is no longer so. His eye detects no trees, save that belt of green which accompanies the course of the river, no glit of water. Though human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were, with the mud and the dust of the earth, from which it rose, and gazing at a distant clump in the plains beneath him far off, the traveler asks himself doubtfully whether these humbogs are but small, abrupt, insignificant hills, or a nest of the houses of men, things with histories. For the rest, all that immeasurable sweep of yellow, brown, bare earth fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final limit, by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. Those far and dreadful hills are unreleaved by crag, or wood, or mist. They are a mere height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off Aragon from the south, and the old from the new Castile, save where the higher knot of the Moncaole stands tragic and enormous against the sky. This experience of Spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected and so universally misstated by the pens of travelers and historians, is best seen in autumn sunsets, I think, when behind the mass of distant mountains an angry sky lights up in its unfruitful aspect of desolation, and though lending it a color it can never possess in commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility, or of romance, of yield, or adventure in that doomed silence. The vision of which I speak does not, I know, convey this particular impression, even to all of the few who may have seen it thus, and they are rare. They are rare because men do not now approach the old places of Europe in the old way. They come into a Spanish town of the north by those insufficient railways of our time. They return back home with no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly, than in England. Yet even those few I say who enter Spain from the north, as Spain should be entered, over the mountain roads, have not all of them received the impression of which I speak. I have so received it, I know, I could wish that to the northerner it were the impression most commonly conveyed, a marvel that men should live in such places, a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a distant bell that ritual and creed should have survived there, so absolute in its message of desolation. With a more familiar acquaintance this impression does not diminish, but increases, especially to one who shall make his way painfully on foot for three long days from the mountains to the mountains again, who shall toil over the great bare plain, who shall cross by some bridge over Ebro, and look down. It may be at a trickle of water, hardly moving in the midst of a broad stony bed, or it may be at turbid spade, roaring a furlough broad after the rains. In either case unusable and utterly unfriendly to man, who shall hobble from little village to little village, despairing at the silence of men in that silent land, and at their lack of smiles, and at the something fixed which watches one, from every wall, who shall push on over the sight of wheel tracks which pass for roads, they are not roads, across the infinite, unmarked, undifferenced field. To one who has done all these things, I say, getting the land into his senses hourly, there comes an appreciation of its willful silence and of its unaccomplished soul. That knowledge fascinates and bids him return. It is like watching with a sick who were thought dead, who are in your night of watching upon the turn of their evil. It is like those hours of the night in which the mind of some troubled sleeper awakened, can find neither repose nor variety, but only a perpetual return upon itself, but waits for dawn. Behind all this lies, as behind a veil of dryness stretched from the hills to the hills, for those who will discover it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable spirit of Spain. Chapter 21 The Little River Men forget too easily how much the things they see around them, in the landscapes of Britain, are the work of men. Most of our trees were planted and carefully nurtured by man's hand. Our plows for countless centuries have made even the soil of the plain the lines of a great view. Its group of hedge and a building, a bridge and a road are very largely the creation of that curious and active breed which was set upon this dull round of the earth to enliven it, which alone of creatures speaks and has foreknowledge of death and wonders concerning its origin and its end. It is man that has transformed the surface and the outline of the old countries, and even the rivers carry his handiwork. There is a little river on my land which very singularly shows the historical truth of what I am saying here. As God made it, it was but a drain rambling through the marshy clay of the tangled underwood, sluggishly feeling its way through the hollows in general weathers, scouring in a shapeless flood after the winter rains dried up, and stagnant in isolated pools in our hot summers. Then no one will ever know how many centuries ago man came busy and curious, and doing with his hands. He took my little river, he began to use it to make it and to transform it, and to erect of it a human thing. He gave to it its ancient name, which is the ancient name for water in which you will find scattered upon streams large and small, from the Pyrenees up to the northern sea, and from the west of Germany to the Atlantic. He calls it the Edur. Therefore pedants pretend that the name is new and not old, for pedants hate the fruitful humor of antiquity. Well, not only did man give my little river an inconceivable number of generations ago, the name which it still bears, but he bridged it, he banked it, he scoured it, and he dammed it, until he had made of it a thing to his own purpose and the companion of the countryside. With the fortunes of man in our western and northern land, the fortunes of my little river rose and fell. But the Romans may have done with it we do not know, for a clay soil preserves but little. Coins sink in it, and the foundations of buildings are lost. In the breakdown which we call the Dark Ages, and especially perhaps after the worst business of the Danish invasion, it must have broken back very nearly to the useless and unprofitable thing it had been, before man came. The undergrowth, the little oaks, and the maples, the coarse grass, the thistle patches, and the briars enroached upon tilled land. The banks washed down, floods carried away the rotting dams, the water wheels were forgotten and perished. There seemed to have been no mills, there is no good drinking water in that land, save here and there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well. The people of the Dark Ages, broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the desolation of my valley. Then came the Norman, the short man with the broad shoulders and the driving energy, and that regal sense of order which left its stamp wherever he marched, from the Grampians to the Euphrates. He tamed that land again, he plowed the clay. He cut the undergrowth, and he built a great house of monks and a fine church of stone, where for so long there had been nothing but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves of the field. To my little river the Norman was particularly kind. He dug it out and deepened it, he bridged it again, and he sluiced it. Rimmed to its banks it was once more the companion of men, and what is more he dug it out so thoroughly, all twenty miles to the sea, that he could even use it for barges and for light boats, so that this head of the stream came to be called Shipley, for goods of ships could be floated, when all this was done, right up to the wharf which the night Templars had built above the church, to meet the waters of the stream. All the Middle Ages, that fruitfulness and that use continued, but with the troubles in which the Middle Ages closed, and in which so much of our civilization was lost, the little river was once more half abandoned. The church still stood, but stone by stone the great building of the Templars disappeared. The river was no longer scoured, its course was checked by dense bush and reed. The wild beasts came back, the lands of the king were lost. One use remained to the water. The Norman's old canalization was forgotten, and the wharf had slipped into a bank of clay, and was now no more than a tumbled field, with no deep water standing by. This use was the hammer ponds. Here and there the stream was banked up. The little fall thus afforded was used to work the heavy hammers of the smithies, in which the iron of the countryside was worked. For in this clay of ours there was iron stone everywhere, and the many oaks of the wheel furnished the charcoal for its smelting. The metalwork of the great ships that fought the French, many of their guns also, and bells and railings for London, were smithied or cast at the issue of these hammer ponds. But coal came, and the new smelting. Our iron was no longer worked, and the last usulness of the little river seemed lost. Then for two generations all that land lay apart. The stream quite choked or furiously flooding, the pads unworkable in winter, no roads but only green lanes in London, forty miles away, unknown. The last resurrection of the little river was begun today. The railway was the first bringer of good news, if you will allow me to be section apologist for civilization. Then came good hard roads and numbers, and quite lately the bicycle and rest of all the car. The energy of men reached a door once again, and once again began the scouring and making of the banks and the harnessing of the water for man, so that though we have not tackled the canal as we should, that will come. Yet with every year the a door grows more and more of a companion again. It has furnished two fine great lakes for two of my neighbors, and in one place after another they have bridged it as they should, and though clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have banked it as well. The other day as I began anew and great and good dam, with sluices and with puddled clay behind oak boards, and with huge oak uprights and oak and spurs to stand the rush of the winter floods, I thought to myself, working in that shimmering and heated air, how what I was doing was one more of the innumerable things that men had done through time incalculable, to make the river their own, and the thought gave me great pleasure for one becomes larger by mixing with any company of men, whether of our brothers now living or of our fathers who are dead. This little river, the River Adour, before I have done with it, will be as charming and as well bred a thing as the Norman or the Roman knew. It shall bring up properly to well-cut banks, these shall be boarded, it shall have clear depths of water in spite of the clay and reeds, and the waterly shall grow only where I choose. In every way it shall be what the things of this world were made to be, the servant, and the instrument of man. The end of Section 23, the end of Chapter 21, Section 24, this and that and the other. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This and that and the other, by Hilaer Bellach. Section 24, Chapter 22, Some Letters of Shakespeare's Time From Lord Mulberry to his sister, Mrs. Blake. My dear Victoria, yes by all means tell your young friend Mr. Shakespeare that he can come to Paxton on Saturday. As you say that he can't get away until the later train, I will have Perkins meet him from the village. I don't suppose he rides, but I can't mount him anyhow. I hope there is no trouble about church on Sunday. From Mrs. Myers to Lady Clog. One thing I am looking forward to, dear, is this little coon Shakespeare. Victoria told me about him. She says sometimes he will play, and sometimes he won't play. But she says he is quite in harness just now. It seems that sometimes he talks all of a sudden, and one can get him to sing. Anyhow, I do want to see what he's like. The rest of this letter is about other matters. From Mrs. Hornbull and Sons to William Shakespeare Esquire. Sir, we have now sent in our account three times, and the last time with a pressing recommendation that you should settle it. But you have not honored us by any reply. We regret to inform you that if we do not receive a check by Wednesday the 22nd instant, we shall be compelled to put the matter into other hands. From John Shakespeare to his mother, Mrs. Shakespeare. Dearest Mama, I am afraid Billy really can't pay that money this week. He was awfully apologetic about it, and I gave him a good talking to. But if he hasn't got it, he hasn't. After all, it isn't absolutely necessary until the 30th. From Jonathan True Love Esquire to William Shakespeare Esquire. Dear old chap, I am going to do something very unconventional. But we know each other well enough, I think. Can you let me have the five pounds I lent you two years ago? I have to get in every penny I can this week suddenly. If you can't, don't bother to answer, I'm not going to press you. From Sir Henry Portman, Attorney General, to the Secretary of the Crown Prosecutor. Dear Jim. No, I can't manage to get round to the Ritz this evening. Mary says that she wants Johnny to leave Dresden. What inconceivable rubbish! Why can't you let him stay where he is? You might as well drown yourself as leave Dresden. What on earth could it lead to? By the way, do choke off that silly ass baits if he is still worrying about Shakespeare. No one wants anything done, and, number one, would be awfully angry if there was a prosecution. Rather than allow it, I'd find the money myself. Yours, H.P. From James Jevons and Company, publisher to William Shakespeare Esquire. Dear Sir, our attention has been called to your work by our correspondent in Iddenburg, and he asks us whether we think you could see your way to something dealing with Scottish history. He does not want a cast in the form of a play for which he says there will be no sale with the Scottish public, seeing exceedingly English cast of your work. But if you could throw it into a ballot form, he thinks something could be done with it. Of course, such things can never be renumerative at first. The Edinburgh firm, for whom he writes, proposed to buy sheets at four and a half or five pence, and to give a royalty of ten percent to be equally divided between our firm and yourself. They could not go beyond five hundred copies for the first edition. It may be worth your while in spite of the trifling renumeration to consider this offer in order to secure copyright and to prevent any pirating of future editions in Scotland. Pray advise, we are your obedient servant, James Jevons and Company. From Monsieur's Firelight, Agents to William Shakespeare Esquire. Dear Mr. Shakespeare, we have had a proposal from Monsieur's Capon in the matter of your collected poems. As you know, verse is not just now much in demand with the public, and they could not manage in advance on royalties. They proposed ten percent on a five-chilling book after the first two hundred and fifty copies sold. The Honorarium is, of course, purely nominal, but it might lead to more business later on. Could you let us know your views upon the matter? Very faithfully yours, pro-Firelight and Company. From Clarence de Vier-Chamandalee to William Shakespeare Esquire. Dear Sir, having certain sums free for investment, I am prepared to lend, not as a money lender, but as a private banker, sums from ten pounds to fifty thousand pounds on note of hand alone without security. No business done with miners. Very faithfully yours, Clarence de Vier-Chamandalee. From William Shakespeare to Sir John Flawless, scribbled hastily in pencil. I will try and come if I can, but it's something awful. I only got my proofs read by two o'clock in the night. I had to do my article for the owl before ten this morning. Then I have to go and meet the church defense league people on my way to the station, and catch a train to a place where Mrs. Blake wants me to go somewhere in the Midlands, about five. I think I can look in on my way to the station. The man you ask me to see about the brandy is a fraud. Would you, like a good fellow, tell Charlie not to forget to mention in his article that Hamlet will only be played on Tuesdays and Fridays in the afternoon matinees? Don't forget this, because people want to know what it is going to be. That was a very good notice in the jumper. I do feel so ill. W.S. From S. Jennings, secretary to George Montabank Esquire. Dear sir, Mr. Shakespeare is at present away from home, and will return upon Thursday when I will immediately lay your manuscript before him. I am very faithful to yours, as S. Jennings, secretary. Mr. Muskwright of Warwick to William Shakespeare Esquire. Dear Mr. Shakespeare, I have never met you, and perhaps you will take it as a great importance on my part to be writing as I do. But I must write to tell you the deep and sincere pleasure I have received from your little brochure, Venus and Adonis, which the reverend William Clark R. clergyman lent me only yesterday. I read it through at a sitting, and I could not rest until I had written to tell you the profound spiritual consolation I derived from its perusal. I am, dear Mr. Shakespeare, very much your admirer, George Muskwright, to William Shakespeare Esquire unsigned and written in capital letters, rather irregularly. No doubt you think yourself a fine fellow and the friend of the working man. I don't think. Some of us know more about you than you think we do. I heard you at the Queen's Hall, and you made me sick. You aren't fit to black the boots of the man you talked against. To William Shakespeare Esquire, O. H. M. S., printed. Sir, in pursuance with the provisions of Her Majesty's Benevolent Act, you are hereby required to prepare a true and correct statement of your emoluments from all forms in writing, literary income duly signed by you within twenty-one days from this date, if however you elect to be assessed by the district commissioners under a number or a letter, and C, and C, and C. From the Earl of Essex to William Shakespeare Esquire, lithographed. Dear sir, I have undertaken to act as chairman this year of the annual dinner of the League for the Support of Insufficiently Talented Dramatic Authors. You are doubtless acquainted with the admirable objects, C, and C. I hope I may see your name among the stewards whose position is purely honorary and is granted upon payment of five guineas at C, and C. This laudable at C, and C, very faithfully yours, Essex. From Mrs. Parkinson to William Shakespeare Esquire, dear Mr. Shakespeare, can you come and talk for our Destitute Pickpockets Association on Thursday the 18th? I know you are a very busy man, but I always find it is the most busy man who somehow managed to find time for charitable objects. If you could manage to do so, I would send my motor round for you to Pillsbury Row, and it would take you out to Rickmansworth where the meeting is to be. I'm afraid it cannot take you back, but there is a convenient train at twenty minutes to eight, which gets you into London a little after nine for dinner. Or if that is too late, you might catch the six-thirty, which gets you in at eight-fifteen. Only that will be rather a rush. My daughter tells me how much she admired your play, Macduff, and very much wants to see you. From the Duchess of Dump to William Shakespeare Esquire, dear Mr. Shakespeare, I want to ask you a really great favor. Could you come to my animals' ball on the Fourth of June dressed up as a gorilla? I do hope you can. We have to tell people what costumes they are to wear for fear they should duplicate. Now, don't say no. It's years since we met. Last February, wasn't it? Yours ever, Caroline Dump. I printed on blue paper with the royal arms. In the name of the Queen's Grace, Oyes. Whereas there has appeared before us Henry Holt, the commissioner of the Queens, and C. and C. And whereas, as the said Henry Holt maketh, deposition that he has against you in writing, William Shakespeare, a claim for the sum in writing, of pound twenty-seven to shilling one pence, we now hereby notify you that you are summoned to appear before us at C at C upon in writing, Wednesday the twenty-fifth of May in the year of our Lord in writing, sixteen-o-one, given under the common seal this in writing, second day of May sixteen-o-one. Henry Holt, a commissioner of the Queens, at C at C. The end of section twenty-four, the end of chapter twenty-two. Section twenty-five, this and that and the other. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. This, that and the other. Section twenty-five, chapter twenty-three, on acquaintance with the great. It is generally recognized in this country that an acquaintance more or less familiar with the great, that is, with the very wealthy and preferably with those who have been wealthy for at least one generation, is the proper entry into any form of public service. I am in a position to advance for the benefit of younger men of my own social rank, certain views which I think will not be unprofitable to them in this matter. I will suppose my reader to be still upon the right side of thirty, to be the son of some professional man, to have been kept at the expense of some anxiety to his parents for five years or so at a public school, and to have proceeded to the university upon a loan. At such a start he cannot fail, if he is in any way lively or amiable, to have made the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two of a whole group of men whose fathers may properly be called the great, and who themselves will inherit a similar distinction unless they die prematurely of hard-living or hereditary disease. After such a beginning, common to many of my readers, the friendship and patronage of these people would seem to be secure. And yet we know from only too many fatal instances that it is nothing of the kind, and that of twenty young men who have scraped up acquaintance with their betters at Winchester or Magdalene, to take two names at random, not two are to be found at the age of forty still familiarly entering those London houses which are rated at over a thousand pounds a year. The root cause of such failures is obvious enough. The advantage of acquaintance with wealthy or important people would, so far as general opportunities go, be lost, if one did not advertise it, and here comes in a difficulty which has wrecked innumerable lives. For by a pretty paradox with which we are all of us only too well acquainted, the wealthy and important are particularly averse to the recitation of acquaintances with themselves. Formerly about seventy years ago, your man who would succeed recited upon the slightest grounds in public and with emphasis his friendship with the great. It was one of Disraeli's methods of advancement. The great discovered the crude method, denounced it, vilified it, and towards the year 1860 it had already become impossible. William tells me he remembers his dear father warning me of this. Those who would advance in the next generation were compelled to advance in methods, so simple, and to take refuge in allusion. Thus the young fellow in the late sixties, the seventies, and the very early eighties, was helped in his career by professing a profound dislike for such and such a notability, and swearing that he would not meet him. For to profess dislike was to profess familiarity with the world in which that notability moved. Or again, to analyze rather curiously, and on the whole unfavorably, the character of some exceedingly wealthy man, was a method that succeeded well enough in hands of average ability. While a third way was to use Christian names, and yet to use them with a tone of indifference as though they belonged to acquaintances rather than friends. But the great are ever on the alert, and this habit of illusion was in its turn tracked down by their unfailing noses, so that in our own time it has been necessary to invent another. I do not promise it any longer survival. I write only for the moment, and for the fashions of my time. But I think a young man is well advised in this second decade of the twentieth century, to assume towards the great an attitude of silent and sometimes weary familiarity, and very often to pretend to know them less well than he does. Thus three men will be in a smoking room together. The one, let us say, will be the master of the king's billiard room, an aged Jew who has lent money to some cabinet minister. The second, a local squire, well to do, and about 50 years of age. The third is my young reader, whose father, let us say, was a successful dentist. The master of the king's billiard room will say that he likes Puffy. The squire will say that he doesn't like him much because of such and such a thing. He will ask the young man for his opinion. Now, in my opinion, the young man will do well at this juncture to affect ignorance. Let him deliberately ask to have it explained to him who Puffy is, although the nickname may be familiar to every reader of a newspaper. And on hearing that it is a certain Lord Patterson, he should put on an expression of no interest and say that he has never met Lord Patterson. Something of the same effect is produced when a man remains silent during a long conversation about a celebrity, and then towards the end of it says some really true and intimate thing about him, such as that he rides in long stirrups, or that one cannot bear his double eyelids, or that his gout is very amusing. Another very good trick which still possesses great force is to repudiate any personal acquaintance with the celebrity in question, and treat him merely as someone whom one has read of in the newspapers. But next, as though following a train of thought, to begin talking of some much less distinguished relative of his with the grossest possible familiarity. A common and not ineffective way, which I mentioned to conclude the list, is to pretend that you have only met the great man in the way of business at large meetings or in public places, where he could not possibly remember you, and to pretend this upon all occasions and very often. But this method is only to be used when, as a matter of fact, you have not met the celebrity at all. As for letting yourself be caught on awareness and showing a real and naïve ignorance of the great, that is not only a fault against which I will now warn you, for I believe you to be incapable of it, but it is also one against which it is of no good to warn anyone, for whoever commits it has no chance whatever of that advancement which it is the object of these notes to promote. When you are found walking with a grate in a street, a thing which, as a rule, they feel a certain shyness in doing, at least in company with people of your position, it is as well if your companion meets another of his own order, to stand a little to one side, to profess interest in the objects of a neighboring shop window, or the pattern of the railings. Such at least is the general rule to be laid down for those who have not the quickness or ability to seize at once the better method, which is as follows. Catch if you can the distant approach of the other great before your great has spotted him, and then, upon some pretext, preferably accompanied by the pulling out of your watch, depart. For there is nothing that so annoys the great during the conference of any two of them as the presence of a third party of your station. Since my remarks must be put into a brief compass, though I have much more to say upon this all important subject, I will conclude with what is perhaps the soundest piece of advice at all. Never, under any occasion or temptation, bestow a gift, even of the smallest value upon the great. Never let yourself be betrayed into a generous action, nor if you can possibly prevent it so much as a generous thought in their regard. They are not grateful. They think it impertinent, and it looks odd. There is a note of equality about such things, and this particularly applies to unbosoming yourself in correspondence, which is very odious and offensive. Moreover, as has been proved in the case of countless unhappy lives, when once a man of the middle class falls into the habit of asking the great to meals, of giving them books or pictures or be trained towards them in any fashion, a spirit of true companionship, he bursts, and that as a rule after a delay quite incredibly short. Some men of fair substance have, to my knowledge, been wholly ruined in this manner within the space of one parliamentary session, a hunting season, or even a single week at cows in the Isle of Wight. From which spot I send these presents, and where, by the way, at the time of writing the stock of forage in the Forecastle is extremely low, with no supplies forthcoming from the mainland. God bless you.