Windfalls, by (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George
Gardiner
TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
I think this book belongs to
you because, if it can be said to be about anything in particular--which it
cannot--it is, in spite of its delusive title, about bees, and as I cannot
dedicate it to them, I offer it to those who love them
most.
[Illustration: 0013]
PREFACE
|In offering
a third basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is hoped that the fruit
will not be found to have deteriorated. If that is the case, I shall hold
myself free to take another look under the trees at my leisure. But I fancy
the three baskets will complete the garnering. The old orchard from which the
fruit has been so largely gathered is passing from me, and the new orchard to
which I go has not yet matured. Perhaps in the course of years it will
furnish material for a collection of autumn leaves.
[Illustration:
0015]
[Illustration: 0021]
JEMIMA
|I took a
garden fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes. When Jemima saw
me crossing the orchard with a fork he called a committee meeting, or rather
a general assembly, and after some joyous discussion it was decided _nem.
con_. that the thing was worth looking into. Forthwith, the whole family of
Indian runners lined up in single file, and led by Jemima followed faithfully
in my track towards the artichoke bed, with a gabble of merry noises. Jemima
was first into the breach. He always is...
But before I proceed it is
necessary to explain. You will have observed that I have twice referred to
Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless, you said, "How careless of the
printer. Once might be forgiven; but twice----" Dear madam' (or sir), the
printer is on this occasion blameless. It seems incredible, but it's so. The
truth is that Jemima was the victim of an accident at the christening
ceremony. He was one of a brood who, as they came like little balls of yellow
fluff out of the shell, received names of appropriate ambiguity--all except
Jemima. There were Lob and Lop, Two Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?,
Greedy and Baby, and so on. Every name as safe as the bank, equal to
all contingencies--except Jemima. What reckless impulse led us to call
him Jemima I forget. But regardless of his name, he grew up into a
handsome drake--a proud and gaudy fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you
call him so long as you call him to the Diet of Worms.
And here he is,
surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble, gobble, and crowd in on me
so that I have to scare them off in order to drive in the fork. Jemima keeps
his eye on the fork as a good batsman keeps his eye on the ball. The flash of
a fork appeals to him like the sound of a trumpet to the warhorse. He will
lead his battalion through fire and water in pursuit of it. He knows that a
fork has some mystical connection with worms, and doubtless regards it as a
beneficent deity. The others are content to grub in the new-turned soil, but
he, with his larger reasoning power, knows that the fork produces the worms
and that the way to get the fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the
way he watches it I rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the
fork. Look at him now. He cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating
fork, expecting to see large, squirming worms dropping from it, and
Greedy nips in under his nose and gobbles a waggling beauty. My
excellent friend, I say, addressing Jemima, you know both too much and too
little. If you had known a little more you would have had that worm; if you
had known a little less you would have had that worm. Let me commend to
you the words of the poet:=
```A little learning is a dangerous
thing:
```Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
I've known
many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too much but don't
know enough. Now Greedy----
But clear off all of you. What ho! there....
The scales!... Here is a bumper root.... Jemima realises that something
unusual has happened, assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with
great animation. It is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners
such agreeable companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian
runners about. Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the
orchard without an idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in
a perpetual gossip. The world is full of such a number of things that
they hardly ever leave off talking, and though they all talk together
they are so amiable about it that it makes you feel cheerful to hear
them.... But here are the scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do
you say to that, Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
The
idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am enveloped
once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful risks in his
attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be ungracious to
complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it, I said, but you are
feasting to-day in order that others may feast tomorrow. You devour the worm,
and a larger and more cunning animal will devour you. He cocks up his head
and fixes me with that beady eye that gleams with such artless yet searching
intelligence.... You are right, Jemima. That, as you observe, is only half
the tale. You eat the worm, and the large, cunning animal eats you, but--yes,
Jemima, the crude fact has to be faced that the worm takes up the tale again
where Man the Mighty leaves off:=
`````His heart is
builded
```For pride, for potency, infinity,
```All heights, all
deeps, and all immensities,
```Arrased with purple like the house of
kings,
```_To stall the grey-rat, and the
carrion-worm_
```_Statelily lodge..._=
I accept your reminder,
Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like you, am only a link in the
chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries, who creates to devour and devours to
create. I thank you, Jemima. And driving in the fork and turning up the soil
I seized a large fat worm. I present you with this, Jemima, I said, as a mark
of my esteem...
[Illustration: 0024]
[Illustration:
0025]
ON BEING IDLE
|I have long laboured under a dark
suspicion that I am an idle person. It is an entirely private suspicion. If I
chance to mention it in conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I
announce that I am idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am
idle. The art of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and
claim a verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I
disarm you by laying down my arms. "Ah, ah," I expect you to say. "Ah, ah,
you an idle person. Well, that is good." And if you do not say it I at
least give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.
This is
not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things about ourselves
that we should not like to hear other people say about us. We say them in
order that they may not be believed. In the same way some people find
satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their early decease. They like
to have the assurance that that event is as remote as it is undesirable. They
enjoy the luxury of anticipating the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all
like to feel we shall be missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own
obsequies. I remember a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was "When I
am gone." One day he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his
knee, what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked
up cheerfully and said, "When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at the
funeral?" It was a devastating question, and it was observed that afterwards
the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his formidable
grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.
And if, after an assurance
from me of my congenital idleness, you were to express regret at so
unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad as the old gentleman. I should
feel that you were lacking in tact, and I daresay I should take care not to
lay myself open again to such _gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily
free from this niggling self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about
"Alpha of the Plough" without asking for any consideration for his feelings.
I do not care how he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle
person. I was never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours
he has been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The
Star_.
It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being
about quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it
back?--for summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage,
and there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf,
resolved to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint
his pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of this
May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare carolling
with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled wonder of the beech
woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself with the sunshine. You
cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it in. That, said he, is plain
to the meanest understanding. So he took it in. He just lay on his back and
looked at the clouds sailing serenely in the blue. They were well worth
looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds that drifted along silently and
dreamily, like vast bales of wool being wafted from one star to another. He
looked at them "long and long" as Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer
of genius, he said, would have loved to lie and look at those woolly
clouds.
And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became
absorbed in another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could
not have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he
began enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on
the wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one
could hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the
thin whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings
of the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf
beech near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song
of the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the
cuckoo sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside,
the "spink-spink" of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a
distant field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the
ring of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech
woods, the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in
the wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many
other things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the
heavenly bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy
softness invited to slumber....
When he awoke he decided that it was
too late to start an article then. Moreover, the best time to write an
article was the afternoon, and the best place was the orchard, sitting under
a cherry tree, with the blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and
the bees about you preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to
the bees. He would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty.
They did not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly
clouds. To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always "up
and doing." It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make
ten times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do
all the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of
these lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour
like the honey bee.
But it happened that as he sat under the cherry
tree the expert came out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of
looking at the hives alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at
looking. So he put on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is
astonishing how time flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so
many things to do and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to
make sure that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It
took more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in
one of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from
other hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen
was visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward.
At last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was
found. This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure
reason, rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the
throne appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at
last the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple
of her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had
escaped notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the
merciless law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and
before he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the
orchard announced another interruption of his task.
And to cut a long
story short, the article he set out to write in praise of the May morning was
not written at all. But perhaps this article about how it was not written
will serve instead. It has at least one virtue. It exhales a moral as the
rose exhales a perfume.
[Illustration: 0030]
[Illustration:
0031]
ON HABITS
|I sat down to write an article this
morning, but found I could make no progress. There was grit in the machine
somewhere, and the wheels refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new
fountain pen that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration
of an anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which
one or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me.
It was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a
most satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could
have written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink
and give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end
without a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead
of galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no
more speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in
the Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally
without effect on my Modestine.
Then it occurred to me that I was in
conflict with a habit. It is my practice to do my writing with a pencil.
Days, even weeks, pass without my using a pen for anything more than signing
my name. On the other hand there are not many hours of the day when I am
without a pencil between thumb and finger. It has become a part of my
organism as it were, a mere extension of my hand. There, at the top of my
second finger, is a little bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by
the friction of a whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A
pencil is to me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the
Duke of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was
to Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in
my hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am,
as they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as
an eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored,
forgotten. But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a
pen in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in
an atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and
my thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a
foreign language in which nothing pleased me.
This tyranny of little
habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere better described than in the
story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers of his school days. "There was,"
he said, "a boy in my class at school who stood always at the top, nor could
I with all my effort, supplant him. Day came after day and still he kept his
place, do what I would; till at length I observed that, when a question was
asked him, he always fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the
lower part of his waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my
eye, and in an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety
to know the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy
was again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was
not to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen
no more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of
his place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who
was the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of
him smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him
some reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never
renewed my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some
inferior office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I
believe he is dead, he took early to drinking."
It was rather a shabby
trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in regard to its unhappy
consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced and so permanently
undermined by a trifle would in any case have come. to grief in this rough
world. There is no harm in cultivating habits, so long as they are not
injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little more than bundles of habits
neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take away our habits and the residuum
would hardly be worth bothering about. We could not get on without them. They
simplify the mechanism of life. They enable us to do a multitude of things
automatically which, if we had to give fresh and original thought to them
each time, would make existence an impossible confusion. The more we can
regularise our commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the
more leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large
but not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang
up your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a
long time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a
vacant hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found
it absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats
and coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself
with such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen
wandering forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in
search of my own garments murmuring, "Where _did_ I put my hat?" Then one day
a brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat
on a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest
to it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it
worked like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about
finding them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow
to its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
But
habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We ought to
make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally break them to
assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ them, without being
discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once saw Mr Balfour so discomposed,
like Scott's school rival, by a trivial breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in
the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity House he was proposing a toast at
a dinner at the Mansion House. It is his custom in speaking to hold the
lapels of his coat. It is the most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you
want to fling your arms about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands
out of mischief and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was
wearing had no lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they
wandered about pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their
parents on Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction,
clung to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and
resumed the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled
with the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did
everything but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a
characteristic omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to
disaster as the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent.
He struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was
obvious that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels
on which to hang them.
I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I
put up my pen, took out a pencil, and, launched once more into the
comfortable rut of habit, ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock.
And this is the (I hope) pardonable result.
[Illustration:
0036]
IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
|It is time, I think, that
some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he is being
abused beyond his deserts. He has been unusually prolific this summer, and
agitated correspondents have been busy writing to the newspapers to explain
how you may fight him and how by holding your breath you may miraculously
prevent him stinging you. Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't
want to sting you. He is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable
weapon, not a bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone.
He is a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound to
confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those correspondents who
denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We shouldn't like to be sent to
the scaffold because we like jam and honey. But let him have a reasonable
helping from the pot or the plate, and he is as civil as anybody. He has his
moral delinquencies no doubt. He is an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a
ludicrously helpless condition from a debauch of honey and he shares man's
weakness for beer. In the language of America, he is a "wet." He cannot
resist beer, and having rather a weak head for liquor he gets most
disgracefully tight and staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless
declaring that he won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite
author is Mr Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so
waspishly about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about
beer.
This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An
empty beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never
gets out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on
wings. He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust
nobody and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference
of things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country
bumpkin that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he
went in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax.
You can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no
sight for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.
His
intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he fashions his
cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under glass, tells us
that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his familiar exit is cut off,
it does not occur to him that he can go out by the way he always comes in. A
very stupid fellow.
If you compare his morals with those of the honey
bee, of course, he cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It
avoids beer like poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't
waste its time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and
night during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter
and for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the
yellow stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him,
thank you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----.
He runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring
time in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September,
leaving only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family
of 20,000 or so next summer.
But I repeat that he is inoffensive if
you let him alone. Of course, if you hit him he will hit back, and if you
attack his nest he will defend it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a
bee sometimes will. Yet he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare
much better than the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he
stings. I feel competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and
bees, for I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in
the orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million
bees and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am
never deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling
around me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the
wasp, the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for
some obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction
of its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been
taking sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had
nineteen stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle
tyre.
It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man.
Like him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in
the nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the
starling devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or
cooked, and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his
little joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his
real virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a
clean fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially
of that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it
is very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day.
He got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he
sawed off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of
escape, and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily
away. And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes
a whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
And let this
be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will help a fellow in
distress.
Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking
food to one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This
was continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen
to stroke gently the injured wings.
There is, of course, a contra
account, especially in the minds of those who keep bees and have seen a host
of wasps raiding a weak stock and carrying the hive by storm. I am far from
wishing to represent the wasp as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and
when I see a queen wasp sunning herself in the early spring days I consider
it my business to kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that
one. But in preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and
if we wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance
for their enemy.
[Illustration: 0040]
[Illustration:
0041]
ON PILLAR ROCK
|Those, we are told, who have
heard the East a-calling "never heed naught else." Perhaps it is so; but they
can never have heard the call of Lakeland at New Year. They can never have
scrambled up the screes of the Great Gable on winter days to try a fall with
the Arrow Head and the Needle, the Chimney and Kern Knotts Crack; never have
seen the mighty Pillar Rock beckoning them from the top of Black Sail Pass,
nor the inn lights far down in the valley calling them back from the
mountains when night has fallen; never have sat round the inn fire and talked
of the jolly perils of the day, or played chess with the landlord--and
been beaten--or gone to bed with the refrain of the climbers' chorus
still challenging the roar of the wind outside--=
```Come, let us tie
the rope, the rope, the rope,
````Come, let us link it round, round,
round.
```And he that will not climb to-day
````Why--leave him on
the ground, the ground, the ground.=
If you have done these things you
will not make much of the call of the temple bells and the palm trees and the
spicy garlic smells--least of all at New Year. You will hear instead the call
of the Pillar Rock and the chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your
oldest clothes and wind the rope around you--singing meanwhile "the rope, the
rope,"--and take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will
step out at that gateway of the enchanted land--Keswick. Keswick!
Wastdale!... Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to
whom they open the magic casements at a breath.
And at Keswick you
call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go to Keswick without calling
on George Abraham. You might as well go to Wastdale Head without calling on
the Pillar Rock. And George tells you that of course he will be over at
Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle
with you on New Year's Day.
The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave
adieus, and are soon jolting down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where
every object is an old friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the
Bowder Stone and there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow
of Cat Bells. (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and
picking wimberries and waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
And there
before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the billowy summits of
Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky sentinels of the
valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name. Perhaps you jump down at
Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to Rosthwaite and
lunch.
And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street
is a myth and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of
the sanctuary and the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling
your rucksack on your back and your rope over your shoulder and set out
on the three hours' tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
It is dark
when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and these December days
are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by the landlord and
landlady--heirs of Auld Will Ritson--and in the flagged entrance you see
coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of climbers' boots--boots that
make the heart sing to look upon, boots that have struck music out of many a
rocky breast, boots whose missing nails has each a story of its own. You put
your own among them, don your slippers, and plunge among your old companions
of the rocks with jolly greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it
is--a master from a school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a
young clergyman, a barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham,
and so on. But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and the
eternal boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
Who
shall tell of the days and nights that follow?--of the songs that are sung,
and the "traverses" that are made round the billiard room and the barn, of
the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous climb, of the
letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and the departures for
the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich with new memories, you all
foregather again--save only, perhaps, the jolly lawyer and his fellows who
have lost their way back from Scafell, and for whom you are about to send out
a search party when they turn up out of the darkness with new material for
fireside tales.
Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's
Day--clear and bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost
in the air. In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up
ropes, putting on putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for
boots (the boots are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing
nails). We separate at the threshold--this group for the Great Gable, that
for Scafell, ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock.
It is a two and a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and
as daylight is short there is no time to waste. We follow the water
course up the valley, splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice,
cross the stream where the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount
the steep ascent of Black Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down
lonely Ennerdale, where, springing from the flank of the Pillar
mountain, is the great Rock we have come to challenge. It stands like a
tower, gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600 feet from its northern base to
its summit, split on the south side by Jordan Gap that divides the High
Man or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser rock.
We have been overtaken
by another party of three from the inn--one in a white jersey which, for
reasons that will appear, I shall always remember. Together we follow the
High Level Traverse, the track that leads round the flank of the mountain to
the top of Walker's Gully, the grim descent to the valley, loved by the
climber for the perils to which it invites him. Here wre lunch and here we
separate. We, unambitious (having three passengers in our party of five), are
climbing the East face by the Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending
by the New West route, one of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here;
theirs is from the other side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I
wish to speak, but of theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will
find the Slab and Notch route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it
is held in little esteem.
With five on the rope, however, our progress
is slow, and it is two o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring
and triumphant, and stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar
Rock, where the wind blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over
half the peaks of Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in
the book that lies under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on
the West face for signs of our late companions. The sound of their
voices comes up from below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a
glimpse of their forms. "They're going to be late," says George
Abraham--the discoverer of the New West--and then he indicates the closing
stages of the climb and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the
most thrilling escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock--two
men falling, and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of
those three, two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the
next year on the Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and
turn cheerfully to descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route
which ends on the slope of the mountain near to the starting point of the
New West route.
The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in
the East sheds no light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are
quite distinct, coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the
directions and distinguish the speakers. "Can't understand why those lads
are cutting it so fine," says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace
down cracks and grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and
safety. And now we look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one
thing is visible--a figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at
full stretch. There it hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the
rocks.
[Illustration: 0047]
The party, then, are only just making
the traverse from the chimney to the right, the most difficult manoeuvre of
the climb--a manoeuvre in which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain
stationary while his fellows pass him. "This is bad," says George Abraham and
he prepares for a possible emergency. "Are you in difficulties? Shall we
wait?" he cries. "Yes, wait." The words rebound from the cliff in the still
air like stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white
jersey, still moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every
word they speak echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board.
You hear the iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds
on the ringing wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if
both feet are dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a
hold. I fancy one or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look
at each other in silent comment. And all the time the figure in white,
now growing dim, is impaled on the face of the darkness, and the
voices come down to us in brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon
is sailing into the clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
At
last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery "All right" drops
down from above. The difficult operation is over, the scattered rocks are
reached and nothing remains but the final slabs, which in the absence of ice
offer no great difficulty. Their descent by the easy Jordan route will be
quick. We turn to go with the comment that it is perhaps more sensational to
watch a climb than to do one.
And then we plunge over the debris behind
Pisgah, climb up the Great Doup, where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we
reach the friendly fence that has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down
to the top of Black Sail Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours
later we have rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
In
a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one to his
office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem prosaic and
ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say only the word
"Wastdale" to them and you shall awake its echoes; then you shall see their
faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable things. They are no longer
men of the world; they are spirits of the mountains.
[Illustration:
0049]
[Illustration: 0050]
TWO VOICES
|Yes,"
said the man with the big voice, "I've seen it coming for
years. Years."
"Have you?" said the man with the timid voice. He had
taken his seat on the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of
the tube strike that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of
London.
"Yes, years," said big voice, crowding as much modesty into
the admission as possible. "I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long
way off. Suppose I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit
psychic."
"Ah," said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning
of the word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it
meant.
"Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George--that's the man
that up to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and property
and things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.' Why, his
speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's it's come back.
I always said it would. I said we should pay for it."
"Did you, though?"
observed timid voice--not questioningly, but as an assurance that he was
listening attentively.
"Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for
years--years, I did. And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in
no time. In the first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000
aeroplanes and train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what
I said. But was it done?"
"Of course not," said timid voice.
"I
saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why, but there
it is. I'm not much at the platform business--tub-thumping, I call it--but
for seeing things far off--well, I'm a bit psychic, you know."
"Ah,"
said timid voice, mournfully, "it's a pity some of those talking fellows are
not psychic, too." He'd got the word firmly now.
"Them psychic!" said big
voice, with scorn. "We know what they are. You see that Miss Asquith is
marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word, he'll turn out to be a German,
that's what he'll turn out to be. It's German money all round. Same with
these strikes. There's German money behind them."
"Shouldn't wonder at
all," said timid voice.
"I know," said big voice. "I've a way of seeing
things. The same in the Boer War. I saw that coming for years."
"Did
you, indeed?" said timid voice.
"Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to
some of my friends. There it was in black and white. They said it was
wonderful how it all turned out--two years, I said, 250 millions of money,
and 20,000 casualties. That's what I said, and that's what it was. I said the
Boers would win, and I claim they did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave
them all they asked for."
"You were about right," assented timid
voice.
"And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round
his finger--that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his
finger. Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building
a fleet as big as ours."
"Never did like that man," said timid
voice.
"It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the
armistice means. They've escaped--and just when we'd got them
down."
"It's a shame," said timid voice.
"This war ought to have
gone on longer," continued big voice. "My opinion is that the world wanted
thinning out. People are too crowded. That's what they are--they're too
crowded."
"I agree there," said timid voice. "We wanted
thinning."
"I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It
ought to have gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should
like to know his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says _John Bull_,
and that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a
case down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building
society--regular chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building
society went smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot."
"I
don't like those goody-goody people," said timid voice.
"No," said big
voice. "William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what that man knew. 'All the
world's a stage, and all the men and women players,' he said. Strordinary how
he knew things."
"Wonderful," said timid voice.
"There's never
been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare knew--not
one-half."
"No doubt about it," said timid
voice. |
|
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