‘Before leaving the High, where fashion used to sun itself, I should record that there was still a good deal of dressiness in Oxford. It was a sad falling off when I found myself, a generation or so later, discussing with Mr. Hall, in his shop in High Street, the decadence of the times, and the good old days when one never appeared in the High except in some sort of toilette — and sometimes a good deal of toilette! And as we talked, there would enter to us a customer, wearing, as Sergeant Buzfuz has it, the outward semblance of a Man, with hatless and touzled head, wearing a shabby Norfolk jacket with belt flying loose....’
Still remembering ‘Teddy’s’, Kenneth Grahame has, elsewhere, said of his old school:
‘The two influences which most soaked into me there, and have remained with me ever since, were the good grey Gothic on the one hand and, on the other, the cool secluded reaches of the Thames — the “Stripling Thames”, remote and dragon-fly haunted, before it attains to the noise, ribbons and flannels of Folly Bridge. The education, in my time, was of the fine old crusted order, with all the classics in the top bin — I did Greek verse in those days, so help me! But these elements, the classics, the Gothic, the primeval Thames, fostered in me, perhaps, the pagan germ that would have mightily shocked the author of The Sabbath.’
At St. Edward’s, in 1873, Kenneth Grahame became for the first time a published author. He had written to order (and without much inspiration) an essay on ‘The good and bad effects of Rivalry’. But it was, nevertheless, the best of those ‘shown up’. And it was therefore printed in the School Chronicle to encourage, as the pedagogue editor tells, ‘a care in composition’. The essay states, truly enough, that it is ‘one of the most difficult things in the world to feel kindly towards a rival’. It is signed ‘K. Grahame’. And the reward of print for ‘care in composition’ may have turned the author’s fancy, for the first time, towards Parnassus? A fancy destined to lie fallow for ten years.
But, in 1875, Kenneth being seventeen, it was decided that he should leave ‘the school that faces the Berkshire hills’, proceed to London and there, presently, enter the service, ‘from 10 to 4’, of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. And a kindly Old Lady enough was she and, allowing Kenneth high place in her famous house, never once looked askew at Thalia the Muse, she who came visiting him upon the premises, albeit that ‘it is one of the most difficult things in the world to feel kindly towards a rival’.
CHAPTER III. FALLOW GROUND
KENNETH’S nomination to a clerkship in the Bank of England, referred to in the last chapter, did not become operative until the end of 1878. It was on the 1st of January 1879 that he came to Threadneedle Street for the first time, walking from his Bloomsbury lodgings to the City through a choky yellow fog — a fog of a density that seems to-day to be, happily, extinct, a fog then known as a ‘London Particular Of what did the boy think as he went to his new work? Who shall say? But Kenneth Grahame was always too big for less than a philosophical view of life. He had begged to be allowed to go to the University, vowing that he would live, while up, with economy and, a degree taken, that he would make very good in one or other of the learned professions. Possibly he had dreamed of a Fellowship, of a cloistered life for ever with books and scholars, for ever with old Oxford faces, old friends, old oak, old wine; for ever with young Youth, green gardens, even flowing water, even flowing hours. But those in authority had decided against Oxford on the ground of expense. So Kenneth walked into the future chosen for him and saw thereof no further than his nose.
However, some years later, in half-holiday mood, and upon a summer day, he is able to write with resignation, even cheerfulness, of the obsequies of one’s ambitions:
‘After those nearly vertical rays outside, the copse, once its shelter is gained, is an instant relief and a most blessed refreshment. A little heaven of shade, it is stored with everything a sensible man can ask on a tropical day: everything, that is, but beer, which, indeed, must not be so much as thought of, if reason be to hold her seat in a distracted globe. In the open, the Lybian air not more adust, up to the dry lip of the gaping chalk-pit, is a stretch of sheep-cropped sward, and thereover the heated atmosphere broods flickering till the quiet distance is all a-jostle and a-quake; but here are peace, seclusion, a sweet-breathed wind, couch of bracken, swaying shelter of beechen green. Here might one lie and doze, and muse, and doze again, the most contented animal under the sun, the whole long, lazy afternoon — if only one could command the needful habit of mind. But to bring the green thought to the green shade — to go work-forgetting being world-forgot — holiday-making in rabbit-land, to take on a rabbit’s considering-cap — that is just what none of us, slaves as we are of every tricksy maggot in the over-fermented brain, may look to do. Once here, for instance, I had meant to dismiss with a backward jerk of the thumb the disagreeable entity I had dragged up with me, and, casting the body’s vesture, to commune trancedly with the woodland spirit, till it slipped its bark and leaf and blade, even as I my flesh and bones, and we twain were twain no more. But my petulant Ego will have none of it; he has a humour of aggressiveness to-day: and he takes the most disgusting way there is of showing it, by persistently recalling a certain past that I would resign to any dealer in marine stores on very easy terms. All pasts are hateful — one or two distinctly more hateful than others; and an Ego that on a day like this goes on reminding you of your own peculiar burden is — to say the least — no gentleman. But I can pretend to take no notice: making believe very much, I can sprawl on the bracken, and seem to ignore him. He hates that. I hear him muttering and growling in my ear, but fainter — fainter — fainter! It is plain that I have fobbed him off for good.
‘Then...! There is a rustle in the last year’s leaves that still cling round the edge of the wood; the young bracken-shoots are quivering and shaking: and yet the rabbits — I have it from one of themselves — have all gone to an At-Home to-day! With a sinking heart I watch a tiny procession come forth into the open. Woe is me! I know the faces in it, every one. The bearers are dead days; bespangled some, and some in plain russet, and many draggled and smirched, but all averse and resolute, grimly set towards the lip of the chalk-pit. And the stark little forms they carry, I know them too. Old hopes all of them, some pathetically deformed, others of comelier build and hide and hue, but, of all, the gauzy, transparent wings are folded straight and close. Their hour has come. Stark and cold, with no banner nor march-music, but in sad undecorated silence, they are carried out for committal to the chalk-pit. I watch the vanguard pass, and without a sigh; schoolboy hopes these, comically misshapen, tawdry and crude in colour — let the pit receive them, and a good riddance! But those poor little corpses at their heel — they are tight and trim enough, some of them at least. And their pinions are brave and well set on, and might have borne them fast and far. Who left these stout young fledglings to perish? Starvation and neglect are ugly words, in truth. Is it even now too late? With downcast faces the bearers pace on, and the chalk-pit engulfs their burdens one by one.
‘Let them go. Who cares? This beechen shade would not be cooler, the brave summer day no longer by an hour, had every one of them lived to wing it in triumph up to the very sun. Achievement ever includes defeat: at best I should only have found myself where I am now — with a narrowing strip of sun and sward between me and the vast inevitable pit a-gape for us each and all. And the grapes are sour; and the hopes are dead; and the funeral is nearing its end. Only one little corpse is left; and the very bearers seem to beweep their trifling burden. Some hues of life seem even yet to flush the frail limbs and the delicate features; the glorious wings are still tinctured with an iris as of Paradise. Not that one! Let me keep that just a little longer! Surely it cannot be dead? Only yesterday I nursed its failing little frame awhile. Take all the others, only leave me that! In vain. The small bearers avert their faces, and the dainty ephemerid, involved in the common doom, follows its mates over the chalk-pit’s edge into the still-unravined grave.
&nbs
p; ‘The sun is low by this time and strikes athwart: a cool wind wanders up the valley; the rabbits are dotting the neighbour field, intent on their evening meal; and — did somebody mention beer? or did I only dream it with the rest? It is time to have done with fancies and get back to a world of facts. If only one could! But that cry of the Portuguese Nun wails ever in the mind’s ear: “I defy you to forget me utterly.” Well, one can but try. It will be easier, now that they are really buried all. Hail and farewell to the short-lived dead! The pyre is out, the supreme valediction over and done.’
But to go back to winter. Because of the fog Kenneth had allowed ninety minutes for his mile-and-a-half walk eastward and arriving, punctually at ten o’clock, he found himself without a chief to report to and as yet, the only man in his department. An hour later he was to learn from a youthful colleague in a frock-coat and flourishing whiskers, the first principle of Finance. Which is that a London Particular excuses all things dilatory in a banker and especially is it indulgence, extenuation and ample justification for an extra hour in bed and a leisurely breakfast. But this was in 1879 and Kenneth had left school over two years earlier. He had meanwhile been a voluntary seeker for clerical experience in the Westminster offices of his uncle, John Grahame. Uncle John Grahame was a parliamentary agent and, at Westminster, Kenneth began to take an interest in the more gentlemanly of party politics as practised by Mr. Disraeli and the Marquis of Salisbury.
He lodged in Bloomsbury Street where later he was joined by his brother Roland who, as Kenneth, was also to obtain a clerkship in the Bank of England.
Kenneth paid twenty-five shillings a week for a bedroom and a sitting-room (the latter he shared with Roland) and for that sum his landlady gave him meals which, he writes (out of his love for a nobly sounding adjective), were ‘sumptuous He was often, however, in those days, a dinner guest at his uncle’s house in Sussex Gardens. A lady, who was then a little girl and, as such, recollects her cousin Kenneth’s regular coming to Sunday dinner, said recently in half-apology, that all she could remember of him was that he was ‘tall and kind to us children and nice to look at’. She added, ‘Oh, yes, and we were always glad, all of us, to see his face at the door.’ And the last, I think, would be, of the many ways a man is remembered, the best way of all.
The Grahame boys had been, in their schooldays, frequent visitors at Sussex Gardens during the Christmas holidays. Then had been wonderful nights at Drury Lane; then had Mr. Bilson (head clerk to Uncle John) been given afternoons off that he might take ‘the young gentleman’ to the Zoological Gardens or the Tower. ‘Seeing things’, such excursions were called.
In the summer holidays the Grahames, when not at Cranborne, came now and again to Portsmouth, where their maternal uncle, Commander Ingles, carried out his naval duties and occasions. Kenneth’s younger cousin, Reginald Ingles, writes of the (in comparison) big Kenneth of those holidays that: ‘He was the nice one who was always kind and whom we were always delighted to see and to go out with. He never ticked us off and was always ready to help us in little things.’
It was at Portsmouth that Kenneth began a life-long love for, and intimacy with, line-of-battle ships. The Hercules, his uncle’s ship, was in dry dock and what more natural and delightful than that the Ward-Room should invite the two boys, Kenneth and Reginald, to step up the gangway and come below to breakfast?
Brass-work winked, whiskered marines sprang clashing to the salute. Clean-looking, clean-shaven, bare-foot men did things with mops and pails and paint pots — even with muskets. A white gull sat at the peak, and several of its mates upon the railing. There were the guns (just like in Captain Marryat) which Kenneth and the youthful Reginald called ‘cannons’ until the gunnery-lieutenant told them differently. And lastly there was an aroma (no lesser word would do) of hot coffee (Kenneth was to become a specialist in coffee) and devilled kidneys. It was a glorious breakfast. Certainly it beat the breakfast of Tom Brown at the Coaching Inn. And it finished with (piping hot, plump, golden and smooth as cream) the first omelette that Kenneth had ever eaten. Unforgettable all. And, ever afterwards, Kenneth was expert in omelettes. Also in fighting-ships and, his life long, he was at home in a Ward-Room and never would he miss an opportunity of going on board anything that possessed a white ensign and a funnel.
Years after that blue August morning on Hercules, Kenneth Grahame and a friend visited an American flagship that lay off Portland Island. A rumour went abroad that the author of The Golden Age was at that very moment under the Star Spangled Banner. Those of the ship’s company whose kits did not include a copy of that small yellow volume (there were, I am told, only a few such kits) produced autograph books and fountain pens. And when Golden Age title-pages, ad infinitum, had had Kenneth Grahame’s endorsement and blessing, the autograph hunters came into action. The pretty ships lay in port for some further days, the Stars and Stripes fluttered seductively, but Kenneth Grahame lazily forebore to set further foot on any unit of that brave Fleet.
But in the days of Uncle John’s office in Westminster, in the early days of the Old Lady, Kenneth Grahame wrote nothing of the kind that attracts autograph hunters. His brain lay fallow as far as concerned literature, he was by day busy at the Bank of England, his spare time of an evening he gave to ‘the Volunteers He was tired, moreover, when he came home to Bloomsbury Street and he had little time or little taste for society.
His cousin, Reginald Ingles, who, as Kenneth before him, went, in 1877, to school at St. Edward’s, tells how Kenneth gave up one of his infrequent ‘days off’ to come to Oxford and look him up. He writes of that visit and of other days, thus:
‘You know how pleased a boy is when some relation comes to see him at school — and very few ever came to see me? I was delighted to see K. and I thought him such a nice, kind sort to come and such a nice-looking chap. He played in a cricket match for a bit. I remember it quite well. He stood at the wicket with his bat up in the air — not on the ground (some cricketers did in those days) — and put up a good innings and hit some fine slogs. He was most awfully nice to me. After I left school, when I was sixteen, I saw more of him. Father was promoted Captain and was doing the long course at Greenwich Naval College. We lived at Blackheath and I used to come to London sometimes and spend an evening with Kenneth and Roland at their diggings in Bloomsbury Street. They were both in the Bank of England then and both in the London Scottish — Kenneth was a Sergeant and very keen on drill and fencing. I remember their sitting-room well. Kenneth was always so kind when I went there. After dinner they smoked Honey Dew tobacco and nice briar pipes. And Kenneth made coffee. He was particular about coffee and he used to grind the beans and put the coffee in a brown earthenware coffee-pot with an earthenware strainer. It was good coffee that Kenneth made. Both he and Roland were very moderate drinkers, but sometimes we had a glass of hot whisky-and-water before I went home. Kenneth always treated me just as an equal, though I know now that I was rather young and foolish. We used to talk a lot and discuss the ordinary topics that young fellows do discuss. And once Kenneth took me to dine at a small Italian restaurant in Soho and we had about ten courses for 1s. 6d and drank Chianti out of a basket bottle and, afterwards, he took me to the Lyceum to see Faust. It was decent of him. And, once at Bloomsbury Street, I remember Kenneth lending me a long churchwarden clay pipe with red sealing-wax on the stem. It was one of his treasures — that churchwarden. But I unfortunately broke the bowl off by tapping it on the fire-grate to knock the ash out. Kenneth, though he looked just slightly annoyed, was awfully nice about it and said that it did not matter a bit. But he was always like that.’
The letter that I have quoted from was written by Major Ingles after his cousin’s death. There have been, I suppose, finer appreciations of Kenneth Grahame than this one. Yet I fancy that it would be the difficult thing for any artist of words to give a more lovable picture of a young man or big boy (Kenneth was little more than a big boy on the night when his pet churchwarden lost its head) than this unstudied
letter gives.
But the young years going, the young years coming brought the inevitable bubbles of Helicon to the top of the ink-pot, even the official ink-pot, at last. There came into practical being a small ledger book, no doubt originally bound for the baser uses of the Bank and its balances, wherein the young clerk began to write down his fugitive thoughts and fragments of the kind of verse that poetical young men, especially healthy and contented young men, do write.
Just how far a biographer may make free with a man’s private poetry I do not know. It seems as wrong as to photograph, in the nude, little children who must presently be old enough to blush. But the latter outrage is perpetrated daily, and without offence. So I will quote briefly, from this old ledger’s contents, for the sake of some of its youthful beauty, which is the excuse of all people who expose the very young to the plate. But before quoting from the young Grahame’s personal Muse I will give a fragment of verse, two fragments of verse, which are not his but which have served him, on the initial page of this his very personal book, as motive of his own thoughts, as introduction to his own budding imagery. The first quatrain on the first sheet is Matthew Arnold. I can fancy that to Kenneth, pent and impatient in Threadneedle Street of a jolly summer day, the muffled roar of City traffic in his ears, may have come a recollection of these apposite lines. And that he, opening the brand-new ledger that lay at his elbow, of a sudden, of a whimsy, scribbled them down for the love of them, thereby not only making an idle apprentice of himself but spoiling the Old Lady’s property:
‘In the huge world, that roars hard by,
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 75