She described one midnight ritual at the local ‘wise woman’s’ cottage, when a black cock was killed with curious rites and words, and ‘all de time dere was, like, someone trying to come through at ye from outside in de dark. Dunno as I believe so much in such things now, but when I was a maid I — I justabout did!’ She died well over ninety, and to the last carried the tact, manner and presence, for all she was so small, of an old-world Duchess.
There were interesting and helpful outsiders, too. One was a journeyman bricklayer who, I remember, kept a store of gold sovereigns loose in his pocket, and kindly built us a wall; but so leisurely that he came to be almost part of the establishment. When we wished to sink a well opposite some cottages, he said he had the gift of water-finding, and I testify that, when he held one fork of the hazel Y and I the other, the thing bowed itself against all the grip of my hand over an unfailing supply.
Then, out of the woods that know everything and tell nothing, came two dark and mysterious Primitives. They had heard. They would sink that well, for they had the ‘gift.’ Their tools were an enormous wooden trug, a portable windlass whose handles were curved, and smooth as ox-horns, and a short-handled hoe. They made a ring of brickwork on the bare ground and, with their hands at first, grubbed out the dirt beneath it. As the ring sank they heightened it, course by course, grubbing out with the hoe, till the shaft, true as a rifle-barrel, was deep enough to call for their Father of Trugs, which one brother down below would fill, and the other haul up on the magic windlass. When we stopped, at twenty-five feet, we had found a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a worn Cromwellian latten spoon and, at the bottom of all, the bronze cheek of a Roman horse-bit.
In cleaning out an old pond which might have been an ancient marl-pit or mine-head, we dredged two intact Elizabethan ‘sealed quarts’ that Christopher Sly affected, all pearly with the patina of centuries. Its deepest mud yielded us a perfectly polished Neolithic axe-head with but one chip on its still venomous edge.
These things are detailed that you may understand how, when my cousin, Ambrose Poynter, said to me; ‘Write a yarn about Roman times here,’ I was interested. ‘Write,’ said he, ‘about an old Centurion of the Occupation telling his experiences to his children.’ ‘What is his name?’ I demanded, for I move easiest from a given point. ‘Parnesius,’ said my cousin; and the name stuck in my head. I was then on Committee of Ways and Means (which had grown to include Public Works and Communications) but, in due season, the name came back — with seven other inchoate devils. I went off Committee, and began to ‘hatch,’ in which state I was ‘a brother to dragons and a companion to owls.’ Just beyond the west fringe of our land, in a little valley running from Nowhere to Nothing-at-all, stood the long, overgrown slag-heap of a most ancient forge, supposed to have been worked by the Phoenicians and Romans and, since then, uninterruptedly till the middle of the eighteenth century. The bracken and rush-patches still hid stray pigs of iron, and if one scratched a few inches through the rabbit-shaven turf, one came on the narrow mule-tracks of peacock-hued furnace-slag laid down in Elizabeth’s day. The ghost of a road climbed up out of this dead arena, and crossed our fields, where it was known as ‘The Gunway,’ and popularly connected with Armada times. Every foot of that little corner was alive with ghosts and shadows. Then, it pleased our children to act for us, in the open, what they remembered of A Midsummer–Night’s Dream. Then a friend gave them a real birchbark canoe, drawing at least three inches, in which they went adventuring on the brook. And in a near pasture of the water-meadows lay out an old and unshifting Fairy Ring.
You see how patiently the cards were stacked and dealt into my hands? The Old Things of our Valley glided into every aspect of our outdoor works. Earth, Air, Water and People had been — I saw it at last — in full conspiracy to give me ten times as much as I could compass, even if I wrote a complete history of England, as that might have touched or reached our Valley.
I went off at score — not on Parnesius, but a story told in a fog by a petty Baltic pirate, who had brought his galley to Pevensey and, off Beachy Head — where in the War we heard merchant ships being torpedoed — had passed the Roman fleet abandoning Britain to her doom. That tale may have served as a pipe-opener, but one could not see its wood for its trees, so I threw it away.
I carried the situation to the little house in Wiltshire, where my Father and Mother were installed; and smoked it over with the Father, who said — not for the first time; ‘Most things in this world are accomplished by judicious leaving alone.’ So we played cribbage (he had carved a perfect Lama and a little Kim for my two pegs), while the Mother worked beside us, or, each taking a book, lapsed into the silence of entire mutual comprehension. One night, apropos of nothing at all, the Father said; ‘And you’ll have to look up your references rather more carefully, won’t you?’ That had not been my distinction on the little Civil and Military.
This led me on another false scent. I wrote a tale told by Daniel Defoe in a brickyard (we had a real one of our own at that time where we burned bricks for barns and cottages to the exact tints we desired) of how he had been sent to stampede King James II, then havering about Thames mouth, out of an England where no party had any use for him. It turned out a painstaken and meritorious piece of work, overloaded with verified references, with about as much feeling to it as a walking-stick. So it also was discarded, with a tale of Doctor Johnson telling the children how he had once thrown his spurs out of a boat in Scotland, to the amazement of one Boswell. Evidently my Daemon would not function in brickyards or schoolrooms. Therefore, like Alice in Wonderland, I turned my back on the whole thing and walked the other way. Therefore, the whole thing set and linked itself. I fell first upon Normans and Saxons. Parnesius came later, directly out of a little wood above the Phoenician forge; and the rest of the tales in Puck of Pook’s Hill followed in order. The Father came over to see us and, hearing ‘Hal o’ the Draft,’ closed in with fore-reaching pen, presently ousted me from my table, and inlaid the description of Hal’s own drawing-knife. He liked that tale, and its companion piece ‘The Wrong Thing’ (Rewards and Fairies), which latter he embellished, notably in respect to an Italian fresco-worker, whose work never went ‘deeper than the plaster.’ He said that ‘judicious leaving alone’ did not apply between artists.
Of ‘Dymchurch Flit,’ with which I was always unashamedly content, he asked; ‘Where did you get that lighting from? It had come of itself. Qua workmanship, that tale and two night-pieces in ‘Cold Iron’ (Rewards and Fairies) are the best in that kind I have ever made, but somehow ‘The Treasure and the Law’ (Puck of Pook’s Hill) always struck me as too heavy for its frame.
Yet that tale brought me a prized petty triumph. I had put a well into the wall of Pevensey Castle circa A.D. 1100, because I needed it there. Archaeologically, it did not exist till this year (1935) when excavators brought such a well to light. But that I maintain was a reasonable gamble. Self-contained castles must have self-contained water supplies. A longer chance that I took in my Roman tales was when I quartered the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth (Ulpia Victrix) Legion on the Wall, and asserted that there Roman troops used arrows against the Picts. The first shot was based on honest ‘research’; the second was legitimate inference. Years after the tale was told, a digging-party on the Wall sent me some heavy four-sided, Roman-made, ‘killing’ arrows found in situ and — most marvellously — a rubbing of a memorial-tablet to the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion! Having been brought up in a suspicious school, I suspected a ‘leg-pull’ here, but was assured that the rubbing was perfectly genuine.
I embarked on Rewards and Fairies — the second book — in two minds. Stories a plenty I had to tell, but how many would be authentic and how many due to ‘induction’? There was moreover the old Law; ‘As soon as you find you can do anything, do something you can’t.’
My doubt cleared itself with the first tale, ‘Cold Iron,’ which gave me my underwood; ‘What else could I have done?’ — the plinth of
all structures. Yet, since the tales had to be read by children, before people realised that they were ‘meant for grown-ups; and since they had to be a sort of balance to, as well as a seal upon, some aspects of my ‘Imperialistic’ output in the past, I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience. It was like working lacquer and mother-o’-pearl, a natural combination, into the same scheme as niello and grisaille, and trying not to let the joins show.
So I loaded the book up with allegories and allusions, and verified references until my old Chief would have been almost pleased with me; put in three or four really good sets of verses; the bones of one entire historical novel for any to clothe who cared; and even slipped in a cryptogram, whose key I regret I must have utterly forgotten. It was glorious fun; and I knew it must be very good or very bad because the series turned itself off just as Kim had done.
Among the verses in Rewards was one set called ‘If — — ’, which escaped from the book, and for a while ran about the world. They were drawn from Jameson’s character, and contained counsels of perfection most easy to give. Once started, the mechanisation of the age made them snowball themselves in a way that startled me. Schools, and places where they teach, took them for the suffering Young — which did me no good with the Young when I met them later. (‘Why did you write that stuff? I’ve had to write it out twice as an impot.’) They were printed as cards to hang up in offices and bedrooms; illuminated text-wise and anthologised to weariness. Twenty-seven of the Nations of the Earth translated them into their seven-and-twenty tongues, and printed them on every sort of fabric.
Some years after the War a kind friend hinted that my two innocent little books might have helped towards begetting the ‘Higher Cannibalism’ in biography. By which I understood him to mean the exhumation of scarcely cold notorieties, defenceless females for choice, and tricking them out with sprightly inferences and ‘sex’-deductions to suit the mood of the market. It was an awful charge, and anyway I felt that others had qualified as Chief Morticians to that trade.
For rest and refreshment and dearly-loved experiments and anxieties, during the six months or so of each year that we stayed in England, there was always the House and the land, and on occasion the Brook at the foot of our garden, which would flood devastatingly. As she supplied the water for our turbine, and as the little weir which turned her current into the little mill-race was of a frail antiquity, one had to attend to her often and at once, and always at the most inconvenient moment.
Undiscerning folks would ask; ‘What do you find to do in the country?’ ‘Our answer was ‘Everything except time to do it.’
We began with tenants — two or three small farmers on our very few acres — from whom we learned that farming was a mixture of farce, fraud, and philanthropy that stole the heart out of the land. After many, and some comic experiences, we fell back on our own county’s cattle — the big, red Sussex breed who make beef and not milk. One got something at least for one’s money from the mere sight of them, and they did not tell lies. Rider Haggard would visit us from time to time and give of his ample land-wisdom. I remember I planted some new apple-trees in an old orchard then rented by an Irishman, who at once put in an agile and hungry goat. Haggard met the combination suddenly one morning. He had gifts of speech, and said very clearly indeed that one might as well put Satan in an orchard as a goat. I forget what — though I acted on it — he said about tenants. His comings were always a joy to us and the children, who followed him like hounds in the hope of ‘more South African stories.’ Never was a better tale-teller or, to my mind, a man with a more convincing imagination. We found by accident that each could work at ease in the other’s company. So he would visit me, and I him, with work in hand; and between us we could even hatch out tales together — a most exacting test of sympathy.
I was honoured till he died by the friendship of a Colonel Wemyss Feilden, who moved into the village to inherit a beautiful little William and Mary house on the same day as we came to take over ‘Bateman’s.’ He was in soul and spirit Colonel Newcome; in manner as diffident and retiring as an old maid out of Cranford; and up to his eighty-second year could fairly walk me off my feet, and pull down pheasants from high heaven. He had begun life in the Black Watch, with whom, outside Delhi during the Mutiny, he heard one morning as they were all shaving that a ‘little fellow called Roberts’ had captured single-handed a rebel Standard and was coming through the Camp. ‘We all turned out. The boy was on horseback looking rather pleased with himself, and his mounted Orderly carried the Colour behind him. We cheered him with the lather on our faces.’
After the Mutiny he sold out, and having interests in Natal went awhile to South Africa. Next, he ran the blockade of the U.S. Civil War, and wedded his Southern wife in Richmond with a ring hammered out of an English sovereign ‘because there wasn’t any gold in Richmond just then.’ Mrs. Feilden at seventy-five was in herself fair explanation of all the steps he had taken — and forfeited.
He came to be one of Lee’s aides-decamp, and told me how once on a stormy night, when he rode in with despatches, Lee had ordered him to take off his dripping cloak and lie by the fire; and how when he waked from badly needed sleep, he saw the General on his knees before the flame drying the cloak. ‘That was just before the surrender,’ said he. ‘We had finished robbing the grave, and we’d begun on the cradle. For those last three months I was with fifteen thousand boys under seventeen, and I don’t remember any one of them even smiling.’
Bit by bit I came to understand that he was a traveller and an Arctic explorer, in possession of the snow-white Polar ribbon; a botanist and naturalist of reputation; and himself above all.
When Rider Haggard heard these things, he rested not till he had made the Colonel’s acquaintance. They cottoned to each other on sight and sound; South Africa in the early days being their bond. One evening, Haggard told us how his son had been born on the edge of Zulu, I think, territory, the first white child in those parts. ‘Yes,’ said the Colonel, quietly out of his corner. ‘I and’ — he named two men — ’rode twenty-seven miles to look at him. We hadn’t seen a white baby for some time.’ Then Haggard remembered that visit of strangers.
And once there came to us with her married daughter the widow of a Confederate Cavalry leader; both of them were what you might call ‘unreconstructed’ rebels. Somehow, the widow mentioned a road and a church beside a river in Georgia. ‘It’s still there, then?’ said the Colonel, giving it its name. ‘Why do you ask? ‘was the quick reply.’ Because, if you look in such-and-such a pew, you might find my initials. I cut them there the night — — ’s Cavalry stabled their horses there.’ There was a pause. ‘‘Fore God, then, who are you?’ she gasped. He told her. ‘You knew my husband?’ ‘I served under him. He was the only man in our corps who wore a white collar.’ She pelted him with questions, and the names of the old dead. ‘Come away,’ whispered her daughter to me. ‘They don’t want us.’ Nor did they for a long hour.
Sooner or later, all sorts of men cast up at our house. From India naturally; from the Cape increasingly after the Boer War and our half-yearly visits there; from Rhodesia when that province was in the making; from Australia, with schemes for emigration which one knew Organised Labour would never allow to pass its legislatures; from Canada, when ‘Imperial Preference’ came to the fore, and Jameson, after one bitter experience, cursed ‘that dam’ dancingmaster (Laurier) who had bitched the whole show’; and from off main-line Islands and Colonies — men of all makes, each with his lifetale, grievance, idea, ideal, or warning.
There was an ex-Governor of the Philippines, who had slaved his soul out for years to pull his charge into some sort of shape and — on a turn of the political wheel at Washington — had been dismissed at literally less notice than he would have dared to give a native orderly. I remembered not a few men whose work and hope had been snatched from under their
noses, and my sympathy was very real. His account of Filipino political ‘leaders,’ writing and shouting all day for ‘independence’ and running round to him after dark to be assured that there was no chance of the dread boon being granted — ’because then we shall most probably all be killed’ — was cheeringly familiar.
The difficulty was to keep these interests separate in the head; but the grind of adjusting the mental eye to new perspectives was good for the faculties. Besides this viva voce, there was always heavy written work, three-fourths of which was valueless, but for the sake of the possibly worth-while residue all had to be gone through. This was specially the case during the three years before the War, when warnings came thick and fast, and the wise people to whom I conveyed them said; ‘Oh, but you’re so-o — extreme.’
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 1000