‘That dogs can perceive the presence of spirits invisible to the human eye has been counted unto those over-praised animals for righteousness; but really a dog who can detect any peculiarly precious and lovable stink while it is still three streets off and across a square and down a mews, ought to make no bones (which, indeed, were hard for him to do) about a healthy, full-sized ghost in the same room. It would be more to the point to know if ghosts see dogs; and if they do, what do they think of them? Also, if the ghost of a certain distinguished General would flee at the quiet entry of the parlour cat? Be this as it may, it is a fact that ghosts, if you let them, are apt to take credit to themselves for qualities of which they have no monopoly. Why are they entitled to plume themselves upon a dislike to cock-crowing? One need not be a ghost to curse the day when the first cock strutted out of the Ark, and, letting fly his war-whoop, set an eternal fashion of defiance to humanity asleep. Their habit, again, of appearing unexpectedly when you are busy and themselves not wanted, is shared by many of your dearest friends; whose power of sudden evanishment is not, alas! so general a gift.
“Tis strange, considering how armorial bearings were allotted for deeds of valour, and often chosen from the object on which such valour had displayed itself, that you never find the ghost in heraldry, either as original or as augmentation. “Sable, three spectres gules, sheeted argent” would be a chaste and pretty blazoning: but it never occurs. Can it be that these famous men of old were none too fond of tackling a ghost? Something of the sort, probably; for courage is much a matter of fashion, and in those days little credit attached to this sort of valiancy, at least among laymen. On the contrary, it might even get its possessor mixed up with stakes, tar-barrels, faggots, and similar unpleasantnesses. Of course, exceptions will at once occur to the reader — more especially in northern legend. In the Sagas, indeed, it seemed usual to “qualify” on a ghost before experimenting with your pals; and when the Widow Thorgud asks Howard the Halt to help her against her dead husband, who has a most unwarrantable habit (for a dead man) of coming home to bed, Howard says he is getting too old for that sort of thing, but advises her to ask his son, for “meet it is for young men to try their manliness in such wise”. The Beowulf-and-Grendel conflict is only one of many such duellos; but the weird and magnificent ghosts of the Sagas (fit rivals to them of Japan) belong less to the spectral order than to the class of “haunts” — the actual dead body, spirit-possessed; of whom Thrawn Janet is a lineal descendant.
‘In fine, the ghost may have his faults (as who has not?); but he has entwined himself securely round our affections, and we should miss him sore if he were taken from us. “And with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you,” as Sidney said of the poet, “with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner.” Thrice fortunate, then, this age of ours: which, having shaken itself free of revealed religion, and that old bugbear of a First Cause, has yet managed (Science aiding), to “go more solid” for the ghost than any of its ancestors before it!’
CHAPTER XII. BOHAM’S: (PART II)
SOON the house was ready, the family in. One of its first visitors was an American Naval Officer. He was taken to see the Saxon farmhouse I have referred to. The sailor said to the farmer’s wife that, where he hailed from, a hundred years was considered a ‘long-way-back’. He was prompted to say this by the date, 1600, upon the parlour mantelpiece. His hostess said, ‘Oh, if you’re interested in old houses you may like to see the rest of this one; we are at present in the new wing.’
Houses apart, Blewbury was full of interest. There were the racing stables; and the sheeted strings of thoroughbreds were to be seen in charge of the village choir (the lads from Mr. Cannon’s) on their way to or from the gallops presided over by old White Horse himself. There were the ancient Arcadians of the place, shepherds, cress-pickers and others, to be cultivated. The shepherds were of the true archaic type, old as the chalk itself, wise and slow as Time, telling the tale of their sheep in notches notched upon crook or staff. To one of them, Zephaniah Grace, husband of Hephzibah, Kenneth Grahame refers naming him ‘one of the greatest gentlemen I ever knew’. He adds, of Zephaniah’s bob-tail ‘Jack’: ‘I always feel I have known him longest of the three, because, when I first came to these parts, and used to meet master and dog on the roads, Zephaniah would slip by, silently, in his shy, shepherdy way, but Jack would linger behind a moment, leap upon me for a swift lick, and then scurry after his master, for sheep dogs are very severely disciplined hereabouts. Perhaps we all ought to serve a term of two years or so as sheep dogs on the downs — we should be better men and women.’
In Blewbury, Christian names (as Zephaniah) were chosen from the Scriptures. The village was full of Lukes and Keziahs, Aarons and Dorcases. In one family of seventeen (the Bible exhausted), twin brothers were named (the mother bad been in service and had had ‘a real old book’ given her by ‘the lady she lived with’) — Orson and Valentine. Orson was old when Kenneth knew him. His father had raised his seventeen children on a maximum income of nine shillings per week and on that he had reared them, each one, strong and tall. Orson had himself become a wage-earner when still ‘horse-high’. That is to say, while he was still small enough to walk, without stooping, under a horse’s belly. He earned sixpence a week and worked twelve hours a day for it (and an occasional raw turnip); and, at harvest-time, little Orson worked sixteen hours a day.
The Grahames were served, at one time, by Job and Deborah — or Debbie. Job was Debbie’s third husband. He had waited for her since her girlhood and now, once more, he nearly missed her. For it was only on learning that her current fiance’s late wife had hanged herself that Debbie prudently gave a possible cause of suicide his conge and wedded Job. The girl who made Debbie’s wedding-dress said to Debbie that she hoped the new husband would be kinder than the last. Debbie said, ‘Abigail Barley, you ain’t no call to say nothing about the one who’s gone. I forgave him freely and never more shall you make wedding gown of mine.’
Another of Kenneth’s village cronies was the nonogenarian known as Blewbury Jones’s ‘last baby Blewbury Jones was the miser parson of Blewbury (immortalized in Our Mutual Friend, and noticed also in Miss Sitwell’s, recent, English Eccentrics) and old Harry was the latest babe at font in his incumbency. This ‘arid and joyless’ old cleric, on a stipend of eighty pounds, yet saved £18,000 — a colossal fortune in his times.
War and Peace found the Grahames at Boham’s Farm. In the war days Kenneth, ex-sergeant of the London Scottish, drilled the Blewbury boys, aged from fourteen years to ninety, in Mr. Caudwell’s big barn. This was the barn whose door and its decorations had been, in happier days, motive to one of the infrequent essays of the ‘Boham’ years:
‘In the time of the waning year, a stroll through the woods may force one to own up to and acknowledge the season’s conventional melancholy. The recognition is annoying: one so much prefers to find convention in the wrong. But on that particular morning the spirit of melancholy walked abroad, too potent to be denied. My only chance seemed to be resolutely to reject the application to my own condition, and, with a touch of joyance, to reflect instead, as I sauntered along, on the exceeding parlous state of my friends.
‘I had mentally run through the sorry catalogue (’tis no long one), and damned them all most heartily, ere I quitted the wood, and sought the lee-side of the great barn, to kindle a fresh pipe in its shelter; and it was as I raised my eyes from the expiring match that the mute, sad decoration of the barn-door struck me with some touch of remorse. The Tuscan poet, led by the Mantuan Shade, saw below many a friend of old time planted in fire, in mud, in burning marl, “ove i bolliti faceano alte strida”; but to come across them nailed in rows on a barn-door, seems to have been specially reserved for me. I had handled them severely, perhaps, during my meditations in the wood: but certainly I neither expected nor desired to find them all thus transfixed, with plumage smirched and fur bedraggled, wasted by the sun and rain. You now, with t
he soft white throat and delicate paws, all sinuous grace and sleek beauty when alive — so it has come to this? And yet, my fair lady, you were once the arrantest of blood-suckers, and drained the life out of many a one in your merry career. What? They were only silly rabbits! Well, perhaps they were a brainless lot, not greatly to be pitied; but the wheel has gone round, and now it is the rabbits’ turn to laugh. And your fine neighbour of the tawny back, with the vivid glint of turquoise-blue on either wing: the handsomest spark in our English woods — I was thinking of him only just now. A loud-voiced fellow rather; fond of showing off and cutting a dash; with a weakness for a lord; altogether not quite the best form perhaps; — and yet, what a good sort of chap he was, after all! now, his strident accents are hushed, his gay feathers drop one by one. What strange fate has fixed him cheek by jowl with our friend of the solemn face and round eyes? Of him we were wont to see little; during daylight hours; but after dinner, when he flapped around seeking his prey! — well, they are all now in the same silent row, the bore as well as the chatterer. Yon dingy fellow with the hooky beak and cruel claws — you knocked some fur out of my back once, old boy, though I just managed to wriggle down a friendly burrow in time; I don’t grudge you to the barn-door — nor yet this half-dozen of rats, rodent no longer. But in the ranks I still espy another friend or two for whom this fate seems unduly hard.
‘And yet one might come to a worse end. The merry winds still sing in our plumage — what is left of it; the kindly sun still warms us through, sounds of the cheery farm-yard are ever in our ears, light and life and song surround us still, and nothing any longer has power to hurt. Was I a churl, haply, in life? a mean and grasping niggard? No more liberal fellow now decorates a barn-door. Does any one want a lock of my hair, a gay feather from my plumage. ’Tis at your service; to weave into your nest, or enshrine in a locket — all’s one to me — help yourself. Proud was I, perhaps — stand-offish, given to airs? There’s no pride about me any longer. Your barn-door is a mighty leveller, and clears the mind of cant and prejudice. Why was hanging in chains ever condemned as relic of barbarism? It is civility itself! Let us swing and creak in the wind, and brother call to brother across the barren moor, till the elements shred and take us piecemeal.
‘Yet the human majority, by some such instinct as that which drags the wounded rabbit to his hole, shrinks ever from uplifted exposure such as this. “Out of sight” is still their cry: “only let it be somewhere out of sight, once we are worn and old and dropping to pieces!” The burden of Brer Rabbit’s appeal to his tormentor was, whatever he did, not to fling him in “dat brier-patch”; and humanity leaves to the fates an exceeding wide choice, so long as only they are not nailed up on that barndoor.
‘Perhaps, then, my poor friends are not entirely happy in their unsought publicity. Might it not be a kindly act on my part to give their poor remains a decent burial? To scatter just that gift of a little dust which shall bring to their unquiet shades release and repose? I owe them some sort of reparation for my hard thoughts concerning them half an hour ago, when I never dreamt of finding them gibbeted here. And yet — a sudden suspicion chills the blood. Were it not wise to get away quietly, but swiftly, while time yet serves for retreat? For the Grim Old Keeper who fixed them there — may he not be lurking somewhere hard by — with a mind, perhaps, to seize me and nail me up alongside the rest?’
Much else than sergeant-majoring fell, in war-time, on Kenneth Grahame’s shoulders. The successor of Blewbury Jones had gone to France; Kenneth Grahame helped his locum. There was no squire in Blewbury and no doctor. Kenneth did, what he might, of the duties of both. He organized a local factory of surgical aids. He arranged, and presided at, the feast given to the soldiers of Blewbury who, after the Armistice, returned to their homes. And he wrote the memorial of those who did not return.
From 1914 to 1918 he spared himself not at all in the interests of the small community which looked up to him; he was its stimulus, its example and its consoler. In the last role he once sympathized with an old villager who had lost a devoted wife. Kenneth summed up the virtues of the deceased by saying, ‘She did make you so comfortable always.’ The bereft husband replied, ‘Why, drat the ‘ooman, say I, if she couldn’t do that.’
I cannot better describe Kenneth Grahame’s attitude towards his neighbours in this Arcady than by borrowing his own words and asking a reader to imagine the author’s self in the garb of his Pan: ‘Both iron road and level highway are shunned by the rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the sheep-track on the limitless downs or the foot-path through copse and spinney not without pleasant fellowship with feather and fur. Nor does it follow from all this that the god is unsocial. Albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother-deities, he loveth the more unpretentious human kind, especially them that are adscripti glebae, addicted to the kindly soil and to the working thereof: perfect in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. For he is only half a god after all, and the red earth in him is strong. When the pelting storm drives the wayfarers to the sheltering inn, among the little group upon the bench and settle Pan has been known to appear at times, in homely guise of hedger-and-ditcher or weather-beaten shepherd from the downs. Strange lore and quaint fancy he will then impart, in the musical Wessex or Mercian he has learned to speak so naturally; though it may not be till many a mile away that you begin to suspect that you have unwittingly talked with him who chased the flying Syrinx in Arcady and turned the tide of fight at Marathon.’
And at harvest-homes (still, in the shadow of the downs, the old-fashioned feasts were held when barns ‘resounded to flap of flail’) the social red earth was strong in him. Kenneth was kindly welcome, beneath the flitch and ham-hung rafters. There would he take one end of the long oaken table and there the guests, weather-beaten and hobnailed, would come, and, knuckling their foreheads, sit down and open out their coloured handkerchiefs wherein nested plate and beer-mug, knife and fork. It was the mighty platters then, heaped high with pork and crackling, with roast beef and gravy, that Kenneth Grahame and the host, each at his respective end, would carve.
And when the plum-puddings and apple-tarts had succeeded the joints and when enough, enough to float a frigate, of the strong, brown, humming ale had been taken, followed song and recitation — to the mighty enjoyment of the burly ‘half-god’ sitting ‘vice ‘to — Farmer Larkin (as likely as not). ‘The White Rose in its Splendour’ was a favourite. So was ‘Green Brooms to Buy’, the refrain of which, roared in thunderous, smock-frock melody, is, ‘I’m a lady by nature, a lady by name, and all that I have is my own.’
There were ‘Fly’s on the Turmuts’ and ‘The Proud Tailor’ (the tailor fell through the bed thimbles and all). And there would follow, ‘Do not trust him, Gentle Lady’ and ‘The Pilgrim of Love’. The mugs were filled and emptied and filled again, and it was time to go home. ‘So they set off up the hill. The lights in the little village began to go out, but there were stars and a late moon, as they climbed the downs together. And, as they turned the last corner, snatches of an old song were borne back on the night breeze.’
And, sometimes to Blewbury, the painted caravans came, halted and again took the road. And who so pleased to welcome the Egyptians as Kenneth Grahame? And who, in Blewbury or elsewhere, wrote better about them?
‘In a hedgeless country of high downland, on a road that came flowing down, a long white ribbon, straight as it were out of the eastern sky, we would watch, each succeeding spring, for the first appearance of these fairy cruisers of the road. But when at last we caught sight of a certain small yellow caravan, with pretty Mrs. S. and the latest baby sitting in front, her husband (who had charge of the dartthrowing department) walking at the horse’s head, then we knew that our turn had come at last!— “Enter Autolycus singing!” For close on the yellow caravan would surely come the larger one, with father and mother and the cooking utensils; and then that other which held Mrs. S.’s three comely young sisters, whom we knew as the Princesses, each, though
so young, already a specialist of some sort, and who all slept in one broad bed placed across the rear of their caravan, looking, I should imagine, like three little St. Ursulas by Carpaccio. Later the swing-boats and the wooden horses would straggle in, and all the paraphernalia of the stalls and booths, and the horses (not the wooden ones, of course) would be led away and picketed. Then perhaps, beside a late camp fire, time would be found to renew acquaintance and hear all the news of the past winter; for the winters, to the women at least, were by no means a period of suspended animation.
‘One does not, it seems, when autumn is over, desert one’s caravan for humdrum bricks and mortar. One camps, by arrangement with some one or other, on some piece of waste land or only partly used builder’s yard or undeveloped building site on the outskirts of London itself, or of the big new towns, but lately villages themselves, that have sprung up as dormitories to the great city; and there, through all weathers, through rain and frost and snow, one sticks it out in one’s little wooden caravan. This may sound very poor fun; but the actual fact was far otherwise. These girls were at first quite strangely reluctant to enlarge upon the joys of a leisured winter life in the neighbourhood of a large city. The reason for this only transpired later, and showed a quite charming delicacy of feeling on their part. “We thought,” they explained in effect, “that it would make you dissatisfied with your hard lot as compared with ours, and perhaps you would be feeling jealous and discontented. For you live in this poky remote little village all the year round, and see nothing and know nothing, and never even guess at all the glamour and excitement that more fortunately placed classes such as ours are free to enjoy.” We meekly admitted our social disadvantages, but pressed to be allowed a peep at urban life and its glories; and by degrees heard all about the jolly excursions to town, after the train with the black-coated city men had departed, and visits to Parks, Piccadillies, Regent Streets; the studies of shop-windows, and all the ladies’ frocks; then bun-shops, matinees, more bun-shops, and a first-class performance at some West End theatre; finally the rush for the last train back, the sleepy journey down, the tramp along a muddy lane and across a field or two to the little caravan at last, making a blacker spot against the dull winter sky; and then the cheerful dazzle of the reflector-lamp on the wall, the cup of cocoa and snack of supper, and laughter and sense of snugness; and so to bed at last, St. Ursula-wise, in the little cabin that was all their very own.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 92