by Ruskin Bond
I told him that I had seen a frog unlike other frogs. Together we went down across the fields below the Cearne to Trevereux pond where there was a nightingale singing, and there Hudson found my 'other frog' which was in reality a kind of toad—a natterjack.
Hudson's next visit was in the summer. It was a warm balmy night. I had been allowed to stay up and we were all sitting in the front porch, when the sound of a nightjar calling, not far off, aroused Hudson.
We followed him silently to the top of the garden, and there in the next field, we hid under some bushes. I was under a gorse bush and had to keep motionless and silent in spite of its prickles.
Then Hudson began calling to the birds, imitating their whirring rattle perfectly. Soon a nightjar answered him, then after a pause Hudson called again, and so it went on, bird and man calling to each other until in the end, the birds—for there were more than one—came to investigate. There was a sudden clap of wings over our heads and a dark shadowy bird whirled away, then another warning clap of wings as another swept over and discovered the impostor. After that it was no good, and we got up, brushed the leaves and prickles off our clothes and walked back, delighted by our sudden contact with the nightjars.
There were glow-worms that night in the grass, and it was then that I told Hudson that I had seen a phosphorescent light like a chain of green beads and, on lighting a match, had found a centipede. Once again my observation was confirmed and I won praise.
Another visitor who came about that time was a short, thickset man of great energy and determined character—Hilaire Belloc. During his visits, he seldom listened to anything my parents said and never stopped talking; he sat up late drinking wine and talking to my father and then got up much too early the next morning. But he not only had energy within himself; he imparted it to all of us, and for a short time after his visit, the defeatist atmosphere that my father's philosophy imparted to me was blown away.
Nothing in the world could be more poisonous to a boy than that philosophy. For Edward usually spoke as though he believed that the finest talents were never recognized; the most sensitive and charming people were ruined and oppressed by the coarse and brutal; that the survival of the fittest meant that ruthlessness, brutality, ugliness and stupidity triumphed and exterminated the beautiful, the sensitive and the gifted. And I was, of course, axiomatically to regard myself as one of the doomed minority. This philosophy, which might have had some truth in it had it been propounded by the Last of the Mohicans, was grotesque nonsense. But I did not realize what nonsense it was until I was nearly twenty, when one day I said to myself:
For hundreds of thousand of years the weakly and the stupid have died; the ugly girls have gone unwed and the beautiful ones been chosen for the mothers of the race by the strongest and most intelligent men. I and everyone else in the world are the inheritors of the successful: why should I fail now when the blood of the winners in life's race runs through my veins? I will not identify myself with a dinosaur.
The memory of Hilaire Belloc's self-confidence faded away; a more lasting memorial of one of his visits was a huge red-and-yellow casserole which he sent to my mother for making bæuf en daube.
A far more frequent visitor, and one more congenial to Constance, was a bald serious man of about Edward's age who was to become for many years a close friend of both my parents. He wrote to Constance,2 in the first instance, because he admired the works of Turgenev, which he had read in her translations, and had himself literary ambitions. Indeed, he had already published a novel and a volume of verses under the Nom de plume of John Sinjohn. He was John Galsworthy, and my parents invited him down to the Cearne and at once adopted the position of his literary mentors.
On his first visit he arrived at the same time as a cat with a kitten. Before departing on holiday with their family, some neighbours, knowing us as cat-lovers, brought us their half-wild cat which had newly kittened. Two days later I found our palsied dog, Puppsie, bouncing in on the cat and the kitten in the big room. I rushed forward and grabbed Puppsie by the collar and dragging him away when the cat sprang at me and, missing my eye, tore my eyebrow asunder. In spite of the pain and one eye being full of blood, I remember looking with awe at the mother cat, which had sprung on to the mantelpiece where she remained with arched back and rigid tail, a spitting fury.
The incident had unhinged her, and she subsequently attacked everyone who entered the room. Jack Galsworthy was scratched, though not so severely as I. At last she was trapped in a basket, and Jack and Constance carried the yowling animal and its kitten back to their home, where they liberated them in a woodshed, leaving enough provisions for a few days.
Most of the people I had hitherto known would have been flustered or would have reacted in some way to the savage fury of the maddened animal yowling horribly and tearing at the wicker-basket. Galsworthy did not react; he remained calmly detached. The cat might have been gently purring for all the emotional response it evoked from him. On one of his early visits the miscreant Puppsie dug up and was dragging a bullock's head into the house, which had been bought many weeks before with some intention of making soup, or feeding the dogs, but which had been buried because bluebottles had laid their eggs on it. These had now reached their greatest development, and maggots were falling from it in legions when my mother and Galsworthy intercepted Puppsie with it in the hall. The literary aspirant did not turn a hair, though the stench would have overpowered most people. He calmly fetched a shovel and a wheelbarrow, conveyed the horrible object to the bottom of the garden, dug a large hole, buried it and then returned to wash his hands carefully and dust his knees with a handkerchief scented with a few drops of eau de cologne.
My chief interest in Galsworthy was that he had stalked deer with a Red Indian guide. He was kind and generous to me, and I rewarded him with the honourable title of Running Elk.
At this stage of his life he was in violent revolt against the Forsyte traditions, and my parents influenced him considerably and not only with literary advice. It was from Edward that Galsworthy drew Bosinney in The Man of Property—which gives a certain piquancy to the violent discussion, published in their correspondence, in which Edward assailed Jack for not understanding Bosinney's character, and Bosinney's creator defended himself as best as he might. The reason for Galsworthy's revolt against the Forsyte traditions of his family was that he was in love with Irene (Ada), who was married to his cousin.
For several years he was deeply unhappy, and all his best work was written at this time. Finally, after his father's death, Jack and Ada resolved to take the decisive step; she left her husband and went to the man she loved. From that moment Galsworthy was finished as a serious writer. He was happy; he soon became successful and influential, and his natural goodness, his serious desire to assist all the deserving causes near to his heart, ruined his talent. Ada was a sensitive and beautiful woman, with dark hair turning grey and brown eyes, and there was something about her that made me recall bumble bees seen among the velvety petals of dark wallflowers.
Later on, when I was about fifteen, I remember going with Constance and the Galsworthys to a concert. On taking our seats, Ada unpinned her toque and skewered it on to the back of the stall in front with a steel hatpin. Shortly afterwards a gentleman was shown to the seat in front of her. He sat down and leant heavily back in it. There was a violent exclamation and he jumped up. Ada was overwhelmed with concern, which was not dispelled by the gentleman exclaiming: 'Madam, you might have caused my instant death!' and his departing in search of a doctor. During the interval he returned and took his seat in a gingerly manner and, when the concert was over, informed Jack that the doctor thought no vital organ had been touched. I thought the whole incident was extremely comic, and the deep and anxious concern of Jack and Ada added to my amusement, so that I found a good deal of difficulty in suppressing my merriment. My mother also grew very flushed in the face for the same reason. I don't think any of us was able to devote full attention to the music.
On another occasion, Wells was brought by the Oliviers' girls alone, and I walked back with them. H.G's liveliness and activity dominated all of us, and I remember his instant response to Brynhild's sparkling eyes and flashing smile. But any attraction they felt for each other was suppressed and its expression averted when he played a violent game of rounders after tea.
Wells was, at the time I first saw him, an active figure in the Fabian Society and, when a clash arose between him and the Webbs, my father joined the Society purely in order to vote for Wells and Wells's supporters, when they put up for the Executive Committee. A month later, when Wells had been defeated, Edward resigned.
Constance was quite indignant with him over this: he was not a socialist and had no business to pretend to be one merely in order to take part in a fight; but Edward only laughed and left his defence to Maitland, who supported Wells.
H.G. had already caused uneasiness among the conventional owing to his lack of respect for the taboos attaching to sexual desires and, at one moment Lady Olivier forbade her daughters to read The Sea Lady. I remember that Brynhild and Margery poured out their indignation to Edward.
But a little while after I had left University College School, Wells moved to church Row, Hampstead, and the scandal of Annu Veronica broke. The row was prodigious and a considerable portion of it reached my ears. In his Experiment in Autobiography, Wells explains that, like many of his characters, the heroine of Ann Veronica was suggested by an actual young woman, who is represented as taking the initiative in sexual relations with a demonstrator in Zoology, a typically Wellsian hero. My memory is that the outraged parents of this young woman attempted to destroy Wells, who became the target for a fantastic social persecution. He was turned out of his club—the Savile—and he and his wife were cut and boycotted, in particular by many socialists who were afraid he would fasten the label of Free Love for ever to the movement.
Shaw, unlike the Webbs, who hated Wells, was one of the few of the leading Fabians to behave with common sense; he urged all concerned to hush up the scandal. But it was too late.
Olivier, though remaining most friendly with Wells, wrote to him at this time a moderate and sensible letter, saying he would not like Wells to be seen in public in the company of his daughters. This letter was the cause of a strange scene at the very height of the scandal. I went one day with Brynhild to an exhibition of paintings in Bond Street. After we had been there some time, she suddenly caught sight of Wells, who was hiding from us behind some pictures on a stand running down the middle of the room. Brynhild called out to him in her clear voice and Wells turned and fled like a rabbit. But he took refuge in a cul-de-sac, and Brynhild and I followed and ran him to earth. Her cheeks were scarlet as she held out her hand and her eyes flashed more than ever as she said:
'I won't let you cut me, Mr Wells, so don't ever dare to try to do so again.'
I don't think I ever saw her look lovelier than she did at that moment. She held Wells in talk for five minutes and forced him to look at some of the pictures with us. I could see Wells put into some of the games he made us play. There was rampageous bumping around a table and knocking over of chairs when I had expected to sit around, on my good behavior, listening to highbrow conversation. And then I was dragged into a nursery where a little war was in progress and saw H.G. Wells, in a whirlwind of tactical enthusiasm, ousting his small sons Frank and Gyp from the peaceful enjoyment of their toy soldiers.
I don't think Wells took much notice of me then: but a year or two later, meeting me by the Hampstead Fire Station, opposite the Tube, he said: 'You are following exactly in my footsteps and I suppose later on you'll throw up biology to write novels.' It turned out that he was right in that prophecy as in so many others.
-From The Golden Echo
1Edward Garnett, the author's father, most gifted of publisher's advisers; his occupation, 'the discovery of talent in unknown writers.'
2Constance Garnett, the author's mother, translator of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
THE LAST LESSON
Alphonse Daudet
I started for school very late that morning and was in great dread of a scolding, especially because M. Hamel had said that he would question us on participles, and I did not know the first word about them. For a moment I thought of running away and spending the day out of doors. It was so warm, so bright! The birds were chirping at the edge of the woods; and in the open field, back of the saw-mill, the Prussian soldiers were drilling. It was all much more tempting than the rule for participles, but I had the strength to resist, and hurried off to school.
When I passed the town hall there was a crowd in front of the bulletin board. For the last two years all our bad news had come from there—the lost battles, ties, the draft, the orders of the commanding officer—and I thought to myself, without stopping:
'What can be the matter now?'
Then, as I hurried by as fast as I could go, the blacksmith, Wachter, who was there, with his apprentice, reading the bulletin, called after me:
'Don't go so fast, bub; you'll get to your school in plenty of time!'
I thought he was making fun of me, and I reached M. Hamel's little garden all out of breath.
Usually, when school began, there was a great bustle, which could be heard out in the street, the opening and closing of desks, lessons repeated in unison, very loud, with our hands over our ears to understand better, and the teacher's great ruler rapping on the table. But now it was all so still! I had counted on the commotion to get to my desk without being seen; but, of course, that day everything had to be as quiet as Sunday morning. Through the window I saw my classmates, already in their places, and M. Hamel walking up and down with his terrible iron ruler under his arm. I had to open the door and go in before everybody. You can imagine how I blushed and how frightened I was.
But nothing happened. M. Hamel saw me and said very kindly:
'Go to your place quickly, little Franz. We were beginning without you.'
I jumped over the bench and sat down at my desk. Not till then, when I had got a little over my fright, did I see that our teacher had on his beautiful green coat, his frilled shirt, and the little black silk cap, all embroidered, that he never wore except on inspection and prize days. Besides, the whole school seemed so strange and solemn. But the thing that surprised me most was to see, on the back benches that were always empty, the village people were sitting quietly like ourselves; old Hauser, with his three-cornered hat, the former mayor, the former postmaster, and several others besides. Everybody looked sad; and Hauser had brought an old primer, thumbed at the edges, and he held it open on his knees with his great spectacles lying across the pages.
While I was wondering about it all, M. Hamel mounted his chair, and, in the same grave and gentle tone which he had used to me, said:
'My children, this is the last lesson I shall give you. The order has come from Berlin to teach only German in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. The new master will come tomorrow. This is your last French lesson. I want you to be very attentive.'
What a thunderclap these words were to me!
Oh, the wretches; that was what they had put up at the town hall!
My last French lesson! Why, I hardly knew how to write! I should never learn any more! I must stop there, then! Oh, how sorry I was for not learning my lessons, for seeking birds' eggs, or going sliding on the Saar!
My books, that had seemed such a nuisance a while ago, so heavy to carry, my grammar, and my history of the saints, were old friends now that I couldn't give up. And M. Hamel, too; the idea that he was going away, that I should never see him again, made me forget all about his ruler and how cranky he was.
Poor man! It was in honour of this last lesson that he had put on his fine Sunday-clothes, and now I understood why the old men of the village were sitting there in the back of the room. It was because they were sorry, too, that they had not gone to school more. It was their way of thanking our master for his forty years of faithful service and of showing their respect for the country that was theirs no more.
While I was thinking of all this, I heard my name called. It was my turn to recite. What would I not have given to be able to say that dreadful rule for the participle all through, very loud and clear, and without one mistake? But I got mixed up on the first words and stood there, holding on to my desk, my heart beating, and not daring to look up. I heard M. Hamel say to me:
'I won't scold you, little Franz; you must feel bad enough. See how it is! Every day we have said to ourselves: "Bah! I've plenty of time. I'll learn it tomorrow." And now you see where we've come out. Ah, that's the great trouble with Alsace; she puts off learning till tomorrow. Now those fellows out there will have the right to say to you: "How is it; you pretend to be Frenchmen, and yet you can neither speak nor write your own language?" But you are not the worst, poor little Franz. We've all a great deal to reproach ourselves with.
'Your parents were not anxious enough to have you learn. They preferred to put you to work on a farm or at the mills, so as to have a little more money. And I? I've been to blame also. Have I not often sent you to water my flowers instead of asking you to learn your lessons? And when I wanted to go fishing, did I not just give you a holiday?'