‘It is strange, isn’t it, and also most puzzling, how a great and prosperous nation can pour out its blood and treasure simply for the privilege of being Slaves — and of Enslaving?
‘Our little village has played up well, sending some seventy men out of a total population of less than 500 souls. I think there has been a certain amount of nonsense talked about the recruiting. From all I have seen I should say that men have come in splendidly — and are still coming in; and good stuff too. We missed getting down to Fowey for a few weeks after Christmas as I had counted on doing, so I’m not in a position to give you any gossip from Town Quay, for though I’ve heard from Q. once or twice, on business, he was quite silent as to local affairs, except as to recruiting, which had been taking up all his time. So you probably know more about the place than I do, for you see a local paper and I don’t. Also I don’t go into Oxford as of old. One misses the boys, and it’s sad to see the river deserted, and have nobody playing the garden-ass or the giddy-goat. Oxford has played up well and no mistake.
‘In London, when we run up for the day, things seem to me to be going on very much as usual. Of course we are not there at night, when things may be quieter than of old, but during the day it seems as busy and bustling as ever. I generally go to some sort of afternoon performance, and it is exceedingly difficult to obtain seats.
‘The “veterans” of Blewbury have started a Volunteer Defence Corp, and we drill, in the evenings, in a beautiful great timber-framed thatched barn — like my own, only three times as big. The rats run in and out of the thatch along the rafters, and the barn cat, who ought to be attending to them, sits on wheat sacks and reviews us with great delight. He is having the time of his life, for he thinks that these drills are specially got up for him, to brighten the monotony of his long dull evenings. The corps have elected me their Commanding Officer — the cat concurring — because they said I was the most martial-looking of the crowd, and there I agree with them; they were careful to add, however, that it wasn’t for any other reason whatever, and that also I can fully understand.
‘E. keeps pretty well.
‘In normal times we should now run away somewhere where it was dry and sunny, with a cheerful restaurant or two in the foreground; as it is we have to stay at home and talk about the places we would have gone to if we could.
‘I hope the boys are all flourishing and doing well in their respective pursuits and careers. P.M. will, I suppose, be careering schoolwards daily, and fairy tales are laid aside for facts. We also wish to be warmly remembered to Jerry, who would really weep if he knew how long it was since I saw a lobster, and we are of course anticipating a really better account of yourself, for your case is one that has always responded most hopefully to a complete rest, which is what you talk of trying, and which, after all, is a cure for nine maladies out of ten.
‘Mrs. Purves, I note, keeps up her indomitable spirits, which are worth exactly £1,000,000 a year.
‘Yours most sincerely,
‘KENNETH GRAHAME’
Mr. Purves died shortly after this last letter was posted.
CHAPTER XIV. FOLLOWING THE SUN: (PART I)
THERE was no true comparison of course for, to Kenneth Grahame, Cornwall was the place, the only place, whither the jaded went when weariest. Cornwall was as certain as Heaven was certain when a man was weary of earth.
But at intervals he wanted that ‘Old Master’, the sun — wanted ‘beggars, fleas and vines’. And he went to Italy for all four of them. And of the sun he wrote:
‘Solis et artis opus: thus smiled the friendly legend from the dial upon me sitting among the vines hard by the swift Rhone; and there was something cheery in the text, no less than in the feel of the warm sun striking hard between my shoulder-blades. For a month past I had been impaled on an Alpine peak; set hip to haunch, too, with an athletic, unperceptive humanity, the male part of it mostly in orders; hounded about by guides with the eyes of wolves; and insulted by blatant boards in advertisement of “Lawn-tennis ground and English Chapel”. And it was but now, as I sprawled in flowers, that I began to realize how the mind may starve and pine in glacial surroundings. Poet and novelist alike are wont to insist on the superiority of nature in a large-paper copy, with a plenitude of margin, totally uncut, and the merest dribble of text. They think small things of you if they catch you stretching in soft grass, with the dumpy duodecimo you are so fond of — the little fat book crammed full of human life, a Rabelaisian chuckle oozing from its every well-thumbed page. Yet Nature is capable of brutalities, as well as man; and in her excessiveness, be it in volcano, glacier, earthquake, or whelm of snow, she must — if we are to look facts in the face — be evened with the colliery, the leprosy of suburban brickfields, the devastating network which the railway-spider ejects abroad.
‘“There is surely,” saith Sir Thomas (of Norwich), “a piece of divinity within us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage to the sun.” We have all of us far too good an opinion of ourselves to deny the pleasing impeachment. And yet, after fully allowing for the divinity, we are conscious of a residuum of very solid stuff, that must needs look thankfully to the sun as very master and lord. Solis et artis opus: ’tis the work of solar heat and Nature’s fashioning thumb, and it will ever throb sympathetic to anything that, like itself, is of Art and Him; to anything the effect of him St. Francis hailed as Brother Sun. Nay, it is frankly glad to lay by its divine element and own its debt to the old maker that draws out us funguses in this damp alluvial under-world, and ripens us till we rejoice to be alive. For, like Hesperus, he also bringeth all good things: as I realized when, in strolling through the little town, sweating and happy, I chanced upon a real cat. True, she fled my approach on the wings of terror. Still, she was no vision, but good honest cat. In the courtyard of the hotel, a grave old mastiff bitch smiled permissively, while the children lugged forth her puppies one by one, and the merry brood of younglings tumbled in the dust together, two-legs claiming no vantage over four-legs. And later, when the bedroom candle flickered timorously down the passage — was there not, in yonder painted chamber, the most authentic and the most bloody among ghosts? Aloft there, these several elements had not been. Cats may have their failings, but they are not born fools, and before those icy altitudes they prefer a level where the mellow shine, as it soaks into their fur, recalls a happy past to them, and they behold themselves walking divine in Egypt, duly worshipped as they should ever be. And as for ghosts, what self-respecting spook could put up with the ceaseless clumping of nailed boots, at one in the morning? Along a corridor that should rightly — at that hour — have been all his own? Even the poor human worm had been used to turn in his sheets, and sleepily damn the dumpers ere he snored again; and, a sensitive spectre in his place had been driven wild. It was annoying to reflect that all the while I had gone lingering on above the snow-line in the futile expectancy of getting, somehow, “braced”, the sun was saving up these genial comrades for me here!
‘We forget too much that, like all good fellows, he is essentially responsive. Treat him well, and he will treat you well. Consequently, we abuse him for nine months of the year as an absentee, and the three others we challenge him with umbrellas and straw hats, insult him with statistics in The Times, accuse him of unnatural alliances with gipsy comets: behave, in fact, as if this sober-sided and steadygoing director of our very limited company were himself of the race of these same bushy-pated eccentrics, and portended woe! Now, if we would only meet him half-way: if we would treat him to sun-dials, loggias, patios; dot our Regent Street pavement with little green tables; stud our walls with bits of Robbia’s craft so apt and strange, he, being our brother and our helper, would call more regularly than he does, and stay a little longer every time. Truly, here, as everywhere, we persist in the shy British mistake of leaving all the overtures to the other party. As I sat there, the old fellow was silently at work on a masterpiece of his, in an environing wilderness of clustered grapes. They on their pa
rt were imbibing and storing his every particle: so that in each fast-mellowing globule a tricksy spirit was making ready some day to spread his filmy wings, and flash through the brain of man, kindling as he went — what high thoughts, what passions, what poems yet undreamed? The potentiality of the place was overpowering. Was it not by sun-gendered sprites of just such a nativity that our own rare Herrick was finely touched to his fine issues? And might not this vine-clad slope be the cradle of a thought that should create an epoch? If it should hap, His were the gift, and His the glory! The great poet, singer, artist, our master, ever original and ever new, whose cult and whose system shall not have their day nor cease to be!’
Kenneth began these southern truancies when quite a young man and he saw Rome in the days of the contadini and when, in the Piazza di Spagna, still lingered some of the characteristics that Shelley knew. Still on the Spanish Steps were to be seen the ciociari and ciociare — the models who, loafing picturesquely, waited some Angelo who might hire them and meanwhile ogled English tourists and sold them gay flowers of all colours. A trove of one of these early Italian visits is a plaque, a blue-and-white della Robbia, a Madonna and child, picked up in Tuscany to be treasured for years and to have a final resting-place between the windows on the outside wall of 5 Kensington Crescent. There it still is, unless the house has been pulled down since last I passed by. It was an aesthetic joy to Kenneth and a source of displeasure to Sarah Bath who came of chapel folk.
In post-war years Kenneth Grahame’s chief concern in Rome was to find unorthodox places wherein to eat and, afterwards, to wander among palaces and churches hoping ever that in the firmament of Rome some new and exquisite shooting-star might, on his turning an unfamiliar corner, disclose itself to him in the vaulting shape of a hitherto unknown fountain.
For he loved running water, from a yard of pump splashing into a horse trough to a ton of sparkling Thames tipping into Whitchurch weir pool, and he could truly say: ‘Water first of Singers’, or
‘Water brown, water bright —
Pearls and swirls that sever;
Running water’s my delight
Always and for ever;
Let it from the chalk go peep,
Let it from the limestone leap,
Let it off the granite steep
Pour, or from the mill be;
Sunshine’s daughter,
Running water
Was and ever will be.’
But fountain water was the best of all especially if it ran to the expression of a rare fancy in chaste and chiselled stone and leapt, in Roman sunlight, against some inspired background. Then was he enchanted indeed. And, best of all the lyrics in marble, he loved the delicate and jocund grace of the Fountain of the Tortoises — the Fontana delle Tartarughe. Its frivolous jets, its sponsoring tortoises (to whom bare, bronze youths for ever give ‘leg-ups’ into the brimming basins) delighted the eternal boy in him. He loved too The Barcaccia — the boat that Father Tiber bore to the foot of the Spanish steps on the waters of the great flood of 1598. Pietro Bernini translated that shallop into stone and, into it and out of it, runs the Trevi water — the best water in the world; (so men say who know not, of an August day, the small fern-fringed spring that bubbles out of the granite on the high, purple rigging of Battock in Angus).
There was also the Fontana di Trevi concerning which there is a legend fostered by the romantic (and also by the Municipal Authorities who periodically shut off the water to cleanse the basin). The legend is that those who leave Rome and who desire to return to her must throw a coin into the basin by moonlight and over the left shoulder. And by moonlight Kenneth Grahame would sometimes, of his good nature, accompany a party of pretty American girls who desired to throw their dimes into the water and be sure of a trip to Europe next fall. He would sit, a silent figure, in that shallow amphitheatre of stone which sweeps about the fountain, lulled by the cool splash of it, by the semi-silence of the night, and by the intonations of the nymphs.
Another fountain that ‘kept still the poet’s dream’ was that system of four that have, since time began, perpetually played in the great square of Peter. It is said, I know not on whose authority, that the Kaiser, after attending a Papal Function at St. Peter’s, paused without to inspect his guard of honour. This duty accomplished, he waved an imperial hand towards the sparkling and immutable four and he said, ‘And now they may turn the water off.’
Kenneth Grahame met most of the eminent archaeologists of Rome and, learning of them, became an excellent guide to the more unusual sights of the city. Miss Beatrice Harraden has said that he seemed ‘to be able to make the past and the present known to his companion without appearing to transfer the information from himself to the one benefited’.
But Rome, to him, was not entirely the place of fountains, quaint eating-houses and the grandeur of the Past. He was wondrous fond of toys and sweets; the marrons-glaces of ‘The Golden Gate’ were never to be passed by unbought, and it was a serious sorrow that he was rarely in Rome during the hot weather, during the delicious season of the cream and the water ice. There were, however, for consolation, the vendors of paper-butterflies and of floating-geese, the latter artfully launched in the basin of the Medici fountain, the former fluttered in the air (oh, but alive) by the magician who dealt in them until they were transferred from his skilled fingers to the hot and chubby paws of small purchasers. Whereupon the bobbing geese (they were never ducks) and the tremulous butterflies became, to the woeful disappointment of the cherubs who had parted with their pocket money, as devoid of animation as a tinned tongue.
When in Rome he lived at the Hotel des Princes in the Piazza di Spagna, the centre of English life in Rome since the days when travellers, who did the ‘grand tour’, used to park their carriages in the square. He loved the sunshine on the Spanish Steps, a ‘song in stone’ he called them, even when unadorned by the baskets of the flower-sellers and the colour and fragrance of rose and violet, lily and carnation. He would climb to the top notes of the song and find there the Trinita de’ Monti and the Pincio. And he would sit and see sometimes the glory of Rome, but more often would he watch the swans in the little toy lake below the water Clock playing ‘up tails all’ just as did the swans below the bridge at Whitchurch.
Among the restaurants that he was happiest in and whither he took the friends he wished to entertain, was the Ritrovo dei Poeti — the Meeting Place of the Poets. Wandering in the flower market he found the little wineshop whose lintel bore this intriguing title. He entered and found the place to be as good as its word. Although partly filled with capacious market women greasily eating macaroni and washing it down with tumblers of raw red wine, there sat apart, sipping, sipping, a company of a picturesque and even a romantic appearance. A group they were of dark young men with unkempt locks and blue or bristly chins. They wore floppy ties and wide sombrero hats; so like the Cafe Royalists of Regent Street were they that Kenneth began to fumble for the half-crown that one or other would, recognizing him, forthwith borrow. They were quite obviously poets.
But to be certain he inquired of the market women. These daughters of Flora laughed loudly and derisively.
‘Poets?’ they cried ‘Dios, no indeed, they are a party of Neapolitan umbrella-menders — if he looks outside the Signore will see their bundles and their baskets upon the steps.’ And so it was. But Kenneth, anxious that the Ritrovo dei Poeti should be justified in its name, invited to lunch with him there, a real poet, the American Ambassador, Robert Underwood Johnson, and, himself to make a second (it takes two poets to make a Ritrovo), the thing was, for all time, accomplished. And the red Gensano wine was pronounced, by both bards, to be admirable.
He would haunt also the Ristorante Concordia and eat fettuccini Concordia — the flat macaroni which is the attraction of the place. He found his host there to be an ex-Garibaldino and that the restaurant cats were friendly and sociable. There was also the restaurant run by Russian refugees where a Russian Princess, in diamond earrings, mad
e the omelette which an Archduke served to you. And when you asked for the bill you were begged not to mention it. So you dropped what you thought was right into an earthenware pot and went out into a squalid street where socialists and soldiers continually shot at each other.
Kenneth Grahame took small part in the social activities of Rome; he was a lion who had little wish to be lionized. Yearly, it is said, towards the end of their stay, Mrs. Grahame would lead her husband to a table covered with visiting-cards and suggest that some of the calls might be returned. Yearly he would answer, ‘I have no cards with me. Have you? ‘— ‘No.’
‘Then let’s leave it over till next year.’
And that was the end of that.
But in spite of this aloofness, he had one friend in Rome whom he visited again and again, and that was the Bambino — the sacred Bambino, the miracle-wrought, the miracle-working, Babe of the Ara Coeli. (Now did not St. Luke’s self return from Paradise, as lately as in medieval times, to paint that little face so finely sculptured in the sacred olive wood by another saint, temporarily restored to earth for that very purpose? Why, of course, yes.)
The Bambino (‘that good little fellow’, Kenneth Grahame would affectionately name him) is just the size of a real infant. He lives in a crystal case sunk behind the High Altar. There He stays save when He is brought out to be seen by His adorers or to heal the sick. For as a curer of illness the ‘good little fellow’ is facile princeps. Accompanied by three priests, He will go in His carriage-and-four to attend the houses of sick people, to lie, for a moment, beside the sufferer and so downstairs again to be driven home to His Church of the Ara Coeli by His respectful ministers. His head is crowned with the tiara given Him by the Canons of St. Peter’s. His dress blazes with gems; His little person drips with gleaming chains of pearls and emeralds and blood-red rubies. Upon His wrist winks, in brilliants, the most adorable little diamond wrist-watch. At His feet lie His letters which reach Him from all parts, letters from the sorrowful who beseech Him for a miracle, letters from the grateful who rejoice that a miracle has been done.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 97