In Alastair’s second year at Christ Church, in May 1920, in the days when Death and Sudden Death began once more to be exceptional in Youth and forgotten in the land, an accident at a level-crossing near Oxford Station took him instantly.
Of the many hundreds of letters arising out of the tragedy, letters from every sort and condition of sympathizer, I will quote from three. I make my brief choices for representative reasons. I quote a letter of the Dean of Christ Church, dated July 1920, because I think that its restrained allusion to a terrible meeting and moment leaves no more to be said as to what was tragic and final in the cruel matter. Dr. Strong writes from Christ Church:
‘DEAR MRS. GRAHAME, — I thank you for your letter. I am leaving this house to-morrow. And a great part of my possessions have been already removed. But I am still working in my study, which has many memories — none sadder than that here I had to tell you and his father of your dear son’s death.
‘Yours very sincerely,
‘THOMAS B. STRONG’
I quote from a letter of Miss Anna Gregory, ‘boys’ maid’ at Alastair’s House at Eton, because it is well, above all things, to be remembered for kindness and courtesy and in the friendly terms of workaday. Miss Gregory writes:
.. ‘I shall never forget his memory. He was always so kind and courteous. He was the only boy in his tutor’s house that I ever even thought of cutting the bread-and-butter thin for. I trust you may be comforted.’
And a fellow undergraduate writes of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s appreciation of Alastair: ‘I think you must be glad that somebody has written down so well what we all felt instinctively but could not express.’
I quote these words because they speak for every one who was sorry and also because they serve to introduce what Sir Arthur said, in the Oxford Magazine of 18th June 1920.
‘It is a pious office (and the Magazine has, from the first, faithfully performed it) to print some record of any son of Oxford whose end rounds off an honourable tale of accomplished work. We pay, so far as their numbers allow, a like tribute to those who fell in the late War; equalling them with their seniors. We owe that much at least to them, and we can go on pretending to ourselves — for without the soothing lie life would be unendurable — that they were not betrayed to early death. But, the War ended, there begins again the old quarrel with Fate over those whom abstulit atra dies, whom it is snatching just as before, without any shade of a plea that they died to save us, or to save England, or to save any other mortal thing the preservation of which would compensate for murder of youth and promise. Whatever our date at Oxford, we have all known one or two contemporaries “perished in their prime” over whom we have had to dismiss the professional mourner to the street; over whom in the strength of indignation we really are able to browbeat Fate and demand whether or not it knows its business.
‘Alastair Grahame was an undergraduate of Christ Church. He went out for a solitary walk after Hall on the night of May 7th, and on his way home, crossing the intricate railway lines by Port Meadow, was cut down by a train and instantly killed. No, after all, there is nothing to accuse, if a boy — with, as he had, some defect of eyesight — choses to stray, at night, across the complicated metals of two railway lines. Aware of it or no, he has run the risk, and there’s an end. And this will do, if we as sternly cancel out humbug on the other side — all talk about Guardian Angels, “it is not growing like a tree”, &c., or “Death’s self being sorry”.
‘I knew Alastair Grahame from his infancy. He was always an “unusual” boy: not merely one of the boys (far more usual than is commonly supposed) who are unable to view Rugby or Eton save as prisons and look forward to Oxford or Cambridge for the gaol delivery of their souls; but one who, coming to adore Oxford, still saw it as a preparative. School games afflicted his soul, because it was impatient. It could not wait to play with taken-for-granted amusements; it was (I think) a trifle too contemptuous of his fellows so easily accepting themselves as, at the best, “noble playthings of the gods”. But he found delight and gaiety and wisdom in the simplest happenings of animals and people. Above all he was gentle: to animals quite instinctively a young image of St. Francis (yet I must not say instinctively, remembering that one of the loveliest books of our time and the least appreciated commensurately with its worth, The Wind in the Willows, is based all on letters written to amuse him as a child). To all his elders and to the poor, he bore himself with the sweetest of courtesy. On whatever else he might have improved, his high manners were his own and absolute. As for patriotism, he was too young to serve; but this did not prevent his offering himself more than once. He was turned back twice; and he took these reverses seriously, envying the luckier ones so far as his nature allowed him to envy.
‘He fell back, as I know, on a dream of sacrifice to make the world better when this turmoil should be over. He was consciously fitting himself; and I do not doubt that he was wandering, occupied with these dreams, when brute force hurled itself upon them and annihilated them all.
‘A few, I dare say, who look back upon this Summer Term of riotous renewal will remember a small tragedy which opened it. But I wish that all who are building up hopes, just now for their country, might realize what a paragraph in The Times—” Undergraduate’s Death: killed on the line at Oxford” — meant to one who, himself bound for Cambridge, and the avid young life there renewing itself, actually repeating, as his eyes withdrew from the English landscape of Spring, “I turned from all she brought to those she could not bring,” found himself staring stupidly at the announcement and the name of the victim, Alastair Grahame. Above all private sorrow and sympathy I knew the quenching, suddenly, brutally, of a high hope, not selfish. It was as if, among the few stars left in an elderly man’s heaven, one had suddenly dropped to extinction. Well enough I see Oxford indifferent to the fate of any particular son; but sorely must we lament one who never began to live until he had found her and would, we believe, have lived to reward her with honourable achievement.’
Above the dust which young Alastair was done with, his father caused these words to be written: ‘Here was laid to rest on his twentieth birthday, 12th of May 1920, Alastair, only child of Kenneth and Elspeth Grahame, of whose noble ideals, steadfast purposes and rare promise remains only a loved and honoured memory.’
Well did the child Alastair ask, years ago, concerning a world whose acquaintance he had so lately made, ‘Why is there trouble?’ Now, may happen (since ‘Death is Promotion’), he has been answered.
CHAPTER X. THE LIZARD LIGHTS
IN a man’s working life there must be holidays, if his work is to be the best work, if it is to be good work even. Kenneth Grahame’s ‘spiritual homes’ were ‘the two sea-boots’ — Italy and the Duchy of Cornwall. To the one or the other he went, when young, on vacation. And when, in his later years, the fogs of November sent him to seek the sun, it was in the Duchy or in Italy that he sought it. Kenneth, Edinburgh born though he was, rarely visited Scotland, a ‘gangrel Scot’ he preferred the South — the ‘uncovenanted lands But when he did go North he was content there and he writes of his last visit to Scotland that ‘it was really an immense success. The weather was magnificent and we were, even for the Highlands, in the most beautiful country. The boy was simply drunk with it all and grieved sorely to leave it. There was a joy of colour everywhere. But of course (there’s aye something) travelling in August is always infernal and we had to couch like the beasts of the field, in temperance inns and such’. [GRAHAME BIOG]
But though the blue Adriatic summoned him periodically, as likewise did the haunted groves and Sicilian beaches, Kenneth Grahame was a Cornishman, if not by birth at least by inclination. He went to the West for the first time in 1884. Then he and his sister, Kenneth being on holiday from the Bank of England, visited The Lizard in idle August and there Kenneth gazed into the sea pools (as other young men gaze into the eyes of a girl) and was captivated. And back in Bloomsbury, he remembered and he wrote of Triton and Mermaid a
nd the ‘dragon-haunted’ sea:
‘From each generation certain are chosen whom Nature, in those rathe years when she imprints our plastic wax with that wonderful signet-ring of hers, leads by the hand one fated day within sight and sound of the sea. There — howbeit scarce in years enough to distinguish between vision and fact — the elect is made aware, or dreams, of a marvellous emergence and dazedly hears the very Triton blow on his wreathed horn. And in the blare that issues from out the crooks of the sea-thing’s shell are mingled many elements — wind-shaken water, whip and creak and rattle of shrouds, flap of idle sails in halcyon spells, cry of gulls at pasture on the pale acres that know no plough; but run through them all, making the chord perfect, is a something that suggests the dazzling laughter of Oceanus in a crinkling calm, with a certain haunting smell of weed and tar. Henceforth, that adept is possessed. Deskbound, pent in between city walls — a fellow, say, fast held in the tangle of Christ Church bells; a solicitor behind wire-blinds in some inland market-town — henceforth the insistent echo will awake and take him betimes, claiming him as one with the trident brand on him. For the Triton knows his man, and whom he has once chosen he never again lets go.
‘This thing may befall him, indeed, who has never even sniffed salt in the air, nor watched the solan, a rocket reversed, spirt high the spray in his joyous huntings. On him it will come suddenly out of some musty book of magic: wherein the sulphur clouds roll tremendous round the tall masts of fighting ships topped by the meteor flag, or the boats, with muffled oars, steal forth to the cutting out of the French brig. He will hear the lap and gurgle of waves he has never seen, along the sides of a craft whose streaks no man has laid: wherefore it has come to pass that many a stout mariner of England has known nothing more nautical than the brown sails of barges sliding by his farmstead, through pasturage dotted with browsing kine. If the conditions be reversed, and Nature, as first known to him, was ever one half of it the shifting sea, then the Triton will have certainly hailed him one day or other, and thenceforward the call sounds ever in his ear. Or, it may be, having thrilled to the Triton’s note ere he knew right from wrong, the vision it evokes for him shall be circumscribed and homely as the writer’s own: which is of big blacksided fishing-boats, drawn high and dry on a wondrous beach. These were his daily food, though once a week the mysterious steamer from the outer world crawled by with clockwork singularity. Fishing-boats and the weekly steamer — these he had endlessly limned and dislimned, though the slate was given (sure) for better ends, ere the white day when the little plump of yachts cast anchor off the tiny town. The first reading of the Arabian Nights — they were something like that to him, these slim Sultanas of the sea! Had not the rural policeman been courting his nursemaid, the vision had lacked completeness; to the young god he owes it, that he was rowed out, enraptured, himself and the maiden in the stern, the man of order at the oars, while the unseen Eros balanced it in the bows. The writhing golden sea-weed shimmered fathoms deep below. Above were these fairy galleys, and you could spy their dainty fitments, and spell out the names on their gilded bows. And when at last they spread white wings and vanished, the slate for long would record no meaner portraiture. It is small wonder that to this boy the trains, whose acquaintance he was soon to make, should seem ungainly rattletraps. True it is that they held one piece of fascination; for the arms of an ancient city were painted on the carriage-doors, and these were made additionally mysterious by the rhyme communicated by a good-natured porter, which told how “This is the tree that never grew, this is the bird that never flew; this is the fish that never swam, this is the bell that never rang.” But for all that, the train was damned, in that it took you away, out of earshot of the Triton’s bugling; so that only once you might get a certain small effect of grace when suddenly, as it rattled past some dingy town, over the reeking house-tops there appeared a tangled tracery of masts, while a delicate waft of tar and harbour-mud breathed of the authentic, unsuspected Paradise at hand.
‘Isled in far-reaching downs, the inland farmstead knows no harsh Atlantic: the sole murmur that surges and breaks about its doors commingles the cackle and grunt and lot of its dependants. Two china dogs of seductive aspect adorn the mantelshelf in a kitchen recking not of nets nor crab-pots, with certain fruits in wax, cunningly fashioned, fairer far than Nature’s own, and with two great smooth shells, wherein the sea’s secret lingers, in shadow as it were, and eternized. Once, long years ago, they were filled with the Triton’s music, and ever since, the natural phonographs of the god, they have faithfully retained its echoes till the understanding one shall come. And as he listens at the lips of them, farm and farmstead melt away; the solid miles break up and disappear; and once again he is walking the wind-blown sands, while at his side his ancient mistress, malicious, serpentine, beautiful, coils and fawns, and laughs and caresses, and calls to him, as of old.
‘And what of the Triton’s point of view? He, too, is doubtless drawn to an alien element by some subtle attraction not in the unstable glancing world wherein he abides. Is there far down in him a sympathetic string responding to the voice of the wind in the pine tops, the flow of gorse and heather, the hum of wandering bees? Hath he an affection for the warm-skinned beasts that stray by the shores, which the cold flocks and herds of Proteus fail to satisfy? Or doth he turn, perchance, from the chill caresses of green-haired mermaidens, to dream of some rich-blooded minion of the dairy? Whatever the reason, who doubts that there are discontents down in the sea as well as high on his banks? And neither of us can change places, which is possibly just as well. No: we can but hail each other fraternally, on those rare occasions when recognition is permitted, and the last tripper has left the beach one moment free.’
Year after year Kenneth returned to that remote West. There he spoke as an equal to the dark men of the sea who sat on the settle at the inn and smoked and lied and drunk a glass and put to sea again their lives in their own strong hands.
He learnt to ‘whiff’ for pollock (a matter of rowing) and to ‘sail’ (a red mainsail and a little mizzen) for mackerel (a form of trailing with three plummet lines, one on each side and one astern, by which you may fill a boat with the bonny fish), he learnt to lay, and haul, a ‘boulter’. And a ‘boulter’ is a mile-long sea-line punctuated with corks and bristling with a system of ‘dropper’ hooks baited with mussel or lug worm. When you haul the boulter it brings in-board eight glittering furlongs of fish.
Conger, too, he learnt to catch, putting out to a summer sea at 6 p m. The pilchard fleets are shooting their nets beyond Fowey and the August dusk has come by 7.30. The lugger lamps glitter. In six fathoms of smooth water the anchor falls. The stout lines are baited with squid. The conger — but Kenneth Grahame held that the fun with a twenty-five-pound conger only really began after you got it into the boat. And it was fun rather appropriate (he said) to some rollicking old farce at the Vaudeville of other days. The conger usually knocked the lamp over and then went, full of fight, ‘swingeing’ and slithering from stem to stem, Kenneth meanwhile, and the boatman, bludgeoning each other by moonlight in their attempts to subdue it. Great knockabout business it was.
And once, off Kynance Cove, trolling with rod and line, a spoon of great dimensions and a wire trace that would hold a narwhal, a fish, in the late afternoon, took the gargantuan bait and ‘sounded’ with a prodigious dive of five fathoms. It then, still deep down, began to tow the boat out to sea. After a while the boatman, weather and tide being contrary, said that he would not be responsible for the safety of the ship’s company unless the fish was cut adrift. The angler laid his rod down and took hold of the line and hauled upon it with all his mighty strength, and Kenneth was a big man and in the flower of his youth. He says that he saw, or ever the sea-line parted, a great and sinister shape, or shadow, in the water—’ like the shape that followed Rorie’s cobble in Aros’. And, with the night falling and the wind coming on to blow, he was well rid of whatever it was, I think.
So Kenneth became a Cor
nishman by adoption and learnt to love the Cornish fisherfolk and to enjoy their friendliness to him. He liked their Spanish looks, he liked the foreign names by which some called themselves, he liked the soft southern voices that addressed him (or any one else) by such affectionately-sounding utterances as ‘my dear life’ and ‘my dear soul’.
And once, when he landed and stood among his fisher friends after a night with the pilchard fleet, he, sunburnt and covered with scales ‘like Harlequin’, this is what came of it. The late principal of Hertford College, Oxford, Dr. Boyd, was a visitor at The Lizard and out betimes. He was a benefactor of the fishermen who, as a class, he loved and with whom he was always anxious to converse. What wonder then that on this occasion Dr. Boyd singled out a splendid-looking young man in a blue jersey and a peaked cap as the subject for his friendly advances? In Kenneth Grahame’s own words:
‘He came up and asked had I had good luck with the fish?— “The best, sir,” said I and touched my cap.
Presently, after a few more remarks, he went away. But, in a minute, he was back again and begging my pardon for his mistake. “Sir,” said I, “I have never been more flattered in my life.”’
Most of all he liked Cornish food—’ Thunder-and-Lightning’ (which is Cornish cream and treacle zig-zagged over warm, new bread, in the form of forked lightning and of sheet). ‘Splits’ he liked also (fresh rolls opened, spread thickly with the thickest of cream and closed again) and ‘Star-Gazy Pie’ which is made from fresh pilchards whose noses peer upwards through the lightest and most flaky of pie-crust.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 89