I am going to give you some peasant biographies.
In the ten years from 1894 to 1903 I was hardly at all in London. I had buried myself in the country and for three or four years hardly saw anyone but fieldworkers. These years were passed firstly at Bonnington, a lonely village in the Romney Marsh and then at the Pent – a lonelier farmhouse at the foot of the North Downs. It was in 1897 that Mr Edward Garnett persuaded me to come to Limpsfield but, as I have said, I returned very soon to the Pent. There Conrad came along.
I suppose that for seven or eight years we hardly passed a day and certainly not a month without meeting and discussing our joint and several works. For a number of years longer we remained on terms of the closest intimacy and community of interests. That was only interrupted by my frequent visits to the continent of Europe or to the United States. In Belgium we spent some time together when we were working on Romance. On the publication of that book we went to London where I occupied a house on the top of Campden Hill. Conrad had lodgings round the corner.
I give so much of autobiography though these are reminiscences. In that form the narrator should be a mirror not any sort of actor but the reader may like so much of chronology.
The people that I saw daily until the advent of Conrad and for long after that were all working farmers or farm labourers. There were Meary Walker and Meary Spratt and Ragged Ass Wilson and Farmer Finn of Bonnington Court Lodge and Parson Cameron and Mus Rainer of the Corner and Mus Diamond who still wore a smock frock and a white beaver top hat and Shaking Ben who had been ruined by the bad gels of Rye. And there were a whole countryside more.
Of course from time to time I was visited by persons from the outer world – relations, connections, members of the Garnett family, and most often by the Portuguese Consul General Señor Don Jaime Batalha Reis who seemed to enjoy my society and whose lovely daughter Celeste sat unconsciously for Seraphina, the heroine of Romance. Batalha Reis was a bearded person with the most extravagant gestures I have ever met and I am afraid he sat for Tomas Castro in the same book. He became, after the Portuguese Revolution, Minister – of the Navy, I think. Certainly if caution is desirable in marine affairs he must have filled his job well. I remember at the very outset of our acquaintance he wanted to buy a torpedo boat. Apparently for the purchase of a torpedo boat a solicitor is necessary and the agonies that poor Mr Reis went through in engaging one were such as in a lesser man would have accompanied at least a change of religion. He was of opinion that all lawyers are of the most desperate scoundrelism concealing themselves in the garments of admirable fathers of family and behaving with righteousness for years in order in the end to bring off some atrocious coup. Finally I got him to engage one of the Garnetts who had long represented my own family. Mr Garnett must have done his job well for I think he is still buying torpedo boats for Portugal. But after that terrible mental strain Mr Reis had to spend a prolonged holiday in Portugal. I met him at Dover when he came back and to my astonishment, as soon as he had got into the carriage reserved for diplomats, he took from a Gladstone bag and buckled round his waist an enormous revolver. He said that London on account of blackmailers is the most dangerous city in the world. I daresay it is but I should hardly have thought that anyone as full of precautions as Mr Reis could have come across them. Similarly he never went anywhere even in the City of London or to the top of Primrose Hill without an ordnance map which he searched for the dash dot dash sign which means standing water. He had suffered from malaria. So that his coming down so near the Romney Marsh was an act of friendship that truly resembled heroism. But in spite of his fears, all bearded and piratical in appearance as he was, he was very humorous and fantastically good tempered. He got on far better with my peasant friends than anyone else and once, when he put on his preposterous Portuguese diplomatic uniform to please Mrs Walker, he created a sensation in Bonnington that that village can never have got over.
Upon the whole, apart perhaps from Reis himself, those brown, battered men and women of an obscure Kentish countryside come back to me as the best English people I ever knew. I do not think that, except for the parson and the grocer, any one of them could read or write but I do not believe that one of them ever betrayed either me or even each other. If, as I undoubtedly do, I love England with a deep love, though I grow daily more alien to the Englishman, it is because of them. Here are some of them:
About twenty-five years ago I wanted some mushroom catsup. Bonnington was in a scattered, little-populated village of the South of England. The village stood on what had formerly been common land; running all down the side of a range of hills. But this common land had been long since squatted on, so that it was a maze of little hawthorn hedges surrounding little closes. Each close had a few old apple- or cherry-trees, a patch of potato ground, a cabbage patch, a few rows of scarlet runners, a few plants of monthly roses, a few plants of marjoram, fennel, borage or thyme. And in each little patch there stood a small dwelling. Mostly these were the original squatters’ huts built of mud, whitewashed outside and crowned with old thatched roofs on which there grew grasses, house-leeks or even irises. There were a great many of these little houses beneath the September sunshine and it was all a maze of the small green hedges.
I had been up to the shop in search of my catsup, but though they sold everything from boots and straw hats to darning needles, bacon, haricot beans, oatmeal and British wines they had no catsup. I was wandering desultorily homewards among the small hedges down hill, looking at the distant sea seven miles away over the marsh. Just beyond a little hedge I saw a woman digging potatoes in the dry hot ground. She looked up as I passed and said:
‘Hullo, Measter!’
I answered: ‘Hullo, Missus!’ and I was passing on when it occurred to me to ask her whether she knew anyone who sold catsup. She answered:
‘Naw! Aw doan’t knaw no one!’
I walked on a little farther and then sat down on a stile for half an hour or so; enjoying the pleasant weather and taking a read in the country paper which I had bought in the shop. Then I saw the large, stalwart old woman coming along the stony path carrying two great trugs of the potatoes that she had dug up. I had to get down from the stile to let her pass. And then seeing that she was going my way, that she was evidently oldish and was probably tired, I took the potato trugs from her and carried them. She strode along in front of me between the hedges. She wore an immense pair of men’s hobnailed boots that dragged along the stones of the causeway with metallic sounds, an immense shawl of wool that had been beaten by the weather until it was of a dull liver colour, an immense skirt that had once been of lilac cotton print, but was now a rusty brown, and an immense straw hat that had been given her by someone as being worn out and that had cost twopence when it was new. Her face was as large, as round and much the same colour as a copper warming pan. Her mouth was immense and quite toothless except for one large fang, and as she smiled cheerfully all the time, her great gums were always to be seen. Her shoulders were immense and moved with the roll and heave of those of a great bullock. This was the wisest and upon the whole the most estimable human being that I ever knew at all well. Her hands were enormous and stained a deep blackish green over their original copper colour by the hops that it was her profession to tie.
As we walked along she told me that she was exactly the same age as our Queen who was then just seventy. She told me also that she wasn’t of those parts but was a Paddock Wood woman by birth, which meant that she came from the true hop country. She told me also that her husband had died fifteen years before of the sting of a viper, that his poor old leg went all like green jelly up to his thigh before he died and that he had been the best basket-maker in all Kent. She also told me that we can’t all have everything and that the only thing to do is to ‘keep all on gooing’.
I delivered up her trugs to her at her garden gate and she said to me with a cheerful nod:
‘Well I’ll do the same for you mate, when you come to be my age.’ She shambled over the rough stone of her garden path and into her dark door beneath the low thatch, that was two yards thick. Her cottage was more dilapidated than any that I have ever seen in my life. It stood in a very long narrow triangle of ground, so that the hedge that I walked along must have been at least eighty yards in length, while at its broadest part the potato patch could not have measured twenty spade breadths. But before I was come to the end of the hedge her voice was calling out after me:
‘Measter! Dun yo really want ketchup?’
I replied that I really did.
She said:
‘Old Meary Spratt up by Hungry Hall wheer ye see me diggin’ – she makes ketchup.’
I asked her why she had not told me before and she answered,
‘Well, ye see the Quality do be asking foolish questions, I thought ye didn’t really want to know.’
I learnt afterwards it wasn’t only the dislike of being asked foolish questions. In Meary Walker’s long, wise life she had experienced one thing – that no man with a collar and a tie is to be trusted. She had had it vaguely in her mind that, when I asked the question, I might be some sort of excise officer trying to find out where illicit distilling was carried on. She didn’t know that the making of catsup was not illegal. She had heard that many of her poor neighbours had been fined heavily for selling bottles of home-made sloe-gin or mead. She had refused to answer, out of a sense of automatic caution for fear she should get poor old Meary Spratt into trouble.
But next morning she turned up at my cottage carrying two bottles of Meary Spratt’s catsup in an old basket covered with a cloth. And after that, seeing her rather often at the shop on Saturday nights when all the world came to buy its Sunday provisions, and because she came in to heat the bake-oven with faggots once a week, and to do the washing – in that isolated neighbourhood, among the deep woods of the Weald, I got to know her as well as I ever knew anybody. This is her biography:
She was the daughter of a day labourer among the hopfields of Paddock Wood. When she had been born, the youngest of five, her own mother had died. Her father had brought a stepmother into the house. I never discovered that the stepmother was notably cruel to Meary. But those were the Hungry ’Forties. The children never had enough to eat. Once, Meary cut off one of her big toes. She had jumped down into a ditch after a piece of turnip peel. She had of course had no shoes or stockings and there had been a broken bottle in the ditch.
So her childhood had been a matter of thirst, hunger and frequent chastisements with the end of a leather strap that her father wore round his waist. When she was fourteen she was sent to service in a great house where all the maids slept together under the roof. Here they told each other legends at night – odd legends that exactly resembled the fairy tales of Grimm – legends of princes and princesses, of castles, or of travelling companions on the road. A great many of these stories seemed to hinge upon the price of salt which at one time was extravagantly dear in the popular memory, so that one princess offered to have her heart cut out in order to purchase a pound of salt that should restore her father to health.
From this house Meary Walker ran away with a gypsy – or at least he was what in that part of the world was called a ‘pikey’ – a user of the turnpike road. So, for many years they led a wandering existence, until at last they settled down in this village. Until the date of that settlement Meary had not troubled to marry her Walker. Then a parson insisted on it, but it did not trouble her much either way.
Walker had always been a man of weak health. He had what is called the artistic temperament – a small, dark, delicate man whose one enthusiasm was his art of making baskets. In that he certainly excelled. But he was lazy and all the work of their support fell on Meary. She tied hops – and this is rather skilled work – she picked them in the autumn; she helped the neighbours with baking and brewing. She cleaned up the church once a week. She planted the potatoes and cropped them. She was the first cottager in East Kent to keep poultry for profit. In her biography you could find traces of great benevolence and of considerable heroism. Thus, one hard winter, she supported not only herself and her husband, but her old friend Meary Spratt, at that time a widow with six children. Meary Spratt was in bed with pneumonia and its after effects, from December to March. Meary Walker nursed her, washed and tended the children and made the livings for all of them.
Then there came the time when she broke her leg and had to be taken against her will to the hospital which was seven miles away. She did not want to be in the hospital; she was anxious to be with Walker who was then dying of gangrene of the leg. She was anxious too about a sitting hen; one of her neighbours had promised her half a crown for a clutch of chickens. She used to lie in hospital, patting her broken knee under the bedclothes and exclaiming: ‘Get well, get well, oh do get well quickly!’ And even twenty years afterwards when she rehearsed these scenes and these words there would remain in the repetition a whole world of passionate wistfulness. But indeed, she translated her passion into words. One night, driven beyond endurance by the want of news of Walker and of her sitting hen she escaped from the hospital window and crawled on her hands and knees the whole seven miles from the hospital to her home. She found when she arrived in the dawn that Walker was in his coffin. The chickens however were a healthy brood. Her admiration for Walker, the weak and lazy artist in basket making, never decreased. She treasured his best baskets to the end of her life as you and I might treasure Rembrandts. Once, ten years after, she sat for a whole day on his grave. The old sexton, growing confused with years, had made a mistake and was going to inter another man’s wife on top of Walker. Meary stopped that.
For the last twenty-six years or so of her life she lived in the mud hut which I had first seen her enter. She went on as before, tying hops, heating ovens, picking up stones, keeping a hen or two. She looked after, fed and nursed – for the love of God – a particularly disagreeable old man called Purdey who had been a London cabdriver. He sat all day in a grandfather’s chair, grumbling and swearing at Meary whenever she came in. He was eighty-two. He had no claim whatever upon her and he never paid her a penny of money.
So she kept on going all through life. She was always cheerful: she had always on her tongue some fragment of peasant wisdom. Once, coming back from market, she sat down outside a public-house and a soldier treated her to a pot of beer. Presently there rode up the Duke of Cambridge in his field-marshal’s uniform and beside him there was the Shah of Persia. They were watching a sham fight in the neighbourhood. Meary raised her pot of beer towards these Royal personages and wished them health. They nodded in return.
‘Well,’ Meary called out to the Duke, ‘you’re only your mother’s son like the rest of us.’
Once, Batalha Reis amiably told her that, in his language, bread was ‘pom’. She expressed surprise, but then she added:
‘Oh well poor dear, when you’re hungry you’ve got to eat it, like the rest of us, whatever you call it.’
She was sorry for him because he had to call bread by such an outlandish name. She could not think how he remembered the word. Yet she knew that Brot was the German for bread and Apfel for apples, because, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Hanoverian Legion had garrisoned that part of the country and there remained till the accession of Queen Victoria. One of what she called the jarman legions had murdered his sweetheart, who had been a friend of her mother’s, and when he was hung for it at Canterbury he asked for Brot and Apfel on the scaffold. She saw him hung, a pleasant fair boy, and when she looked down at her hands she said they were white as lard.
So she worked on until she was seventy-eight. One day she discovered a swelling under her left breast. It gave her no pain but she wanted to know what it was. So she put a hot brick to it. She knew that if it was cancer that was a bad thing to do, but she wanted to get it settled. The swelling became worse. So she walked to the hospital – the same hospital that she had crawled away from. They operated on her next morning – and she was dead by noon. Her last words were:
‘Who’s going to look after old Purdey?’
She was buried in the workhouse cemetery. The number of her grave is 1642. Mr Purdey was taken to the Union that night. And there, the last time I heard of him he still was, a disagreeable old man.
Meary Spratt was much more like the average woman of fiction. She was decidedly emotional, she was certainly not truthful: she begged, and when she begged she would scream and howl and yell in the highest of keys, pulling her gnarled, rheumatic fingers into repulsive shapes and screaming like a locomotive to show how much they pained her, or sobbing with the most dramatic emphasis when she related how Meary Walker had saved her six little children from starvation. On the other hand she would relate with a proper female virtue the fact – I fancy it may have been true – that, at some portion of her career, Meary Walker had a daughter by somebody who was not Walker and that the daughter was in service in Folkestone. She would also say that Meary Walker was an arrant miser who had saved up a large fortune in banknotes which were quilted into her stays. She said she had heard the stays crackle.
Meary Spratt had never had a child by anyone but a husband. But then she had had four husbands as well as nineteen children, all of whom had lived. She was quite a small woman with an appallingly shrill voice and her tongue never stopped. In the early morning among the dews you would hear her voice. She would be picking what she called mushrooms for her catsup. You would hear her all the while like this screaming quite loudly while you listened from your bedroom window, she being in the field beyond the hedge and it being four o’clock of a very dewy morning.
‘He! He! He!’ she would scream, ‘here is a nice little one! A little pinky one! Now I’m going to pick you! Up you come, my little darling! Ah, doesn’t it hurt!’ And then she would give a shrill yell to show the pain that the mushroom felt when it was being picked. And then she would continue: ‘Oh, oh, oh Lord! Oh my poor shoulders! Oh! my poor legs! They do fairly terrify me with rhumatiz! Oh, oh, Lord!’
And you would hear her voice seeming to get shriller as it got fainter and she went over the marshy grass, into the mist, until she came on another little pink one. She was seventy-six and it was cold out on the marshes in that October weather.
Yes, she was decidedly feminine. She had only been married three years to Mr Spratford. Mr Spratford was eighty-two when they married. Between them they had thirty-one children. And they lived in a little brick cottage not much larger than a dog kennel. When you asked Mr Spratford why he married – Mr Spratford was a most venerable-looking peasant, like a Biblical patriarch, with very white hair curling round a fine bald head and with noble faded blue eyes; and when he spoke he always gesticulated nobly with one hand and uttered the most edifying moral sentiments. He was extremely dishonest and had three times been to prison for robbing poor old women. Indeed, when I first made his acquaintance he did a week’s work for me; charged me double prices and begged me not to tell anyone that I had paid him at all because he was on his club – and this is about the meanest crime that any peasant can commit. It was an offence so mean that even Meary Spratford – who you will observe was a woman and who would have had no scruple at all about pilfering from any member of the quality – even Meary Spratford was outraged and made him pay back his club money for that week. She could not bear to think of the members of the club being defrauded, because they were quite poor people. It is true that she came to me afterwards, and, groaning and sobbing, she tried to get the money out of me to make up for her noble act – but when you asked Mr Spratford why he married he answered:
‘Well, you see, sir, in a manner of speaking us do be very poor people and us bean’t able to afford more than one blanket apiece, and one small fire for each of us, coals do be so dear.’ (He got all his coals for nothing from the poor old parson and so did Mrs Spratt.) ‘So if we do marry we do have two blankets atop of us at night and we have one big fire and sit on either side of it.’
So said Mr Spratford. But when it came to his wife she would scream out:
‘Why did us marry? Why I, I like to have a man about the house and a woman looks better like among her neebours if she do have a husband.’ So that no doubt Mrs Spratt was feminine enough, just as Mr Spratford was undoubtedly masculine. He died raving on the mud floor of his hut. His wife had not the strength to lift him into bed and the four men who had held him down during the night had had to go to work in the morning. He tore his bald head to ribbons with his nails and Mrs Spratt for years afterwards could make anybody sick with her dramatic rehearsals of how he died. When she was really worked up over this narration she would even scratch her own forehead until it bled. So perhaps she was really a more womanly woman than Mrs Walker. She kept on going just the same. But she made much more noise about it. That, I believe, is what is demanded of man’s weaker vessels.
But even in the village Meary Spratt was regarded as unusually loquacious, whereas Meary Walker attracted, as I have said, no attention at all. It was as if Meary Walker was just a woman, whereas Meary Spratt was at least a super-woman, or, as if she were a woman endowed with the lungs of a locomotive whistle. Indeed, I am certain that anyone there would have told you that Meary Walker was just an average woman.
The most faithful soul I have ever known was Ragged Ass Wilson. His nickname was given him because of the frailty of his nether garments. His Christian name I never knew. He was singularly handsome, dark with a little beard like Shakespeare’s and that poet’s eyes. He was slow, soft spoken, very gentle: I never knew him run or lose his temper. And, for sure, he kept all on gooing.
I never knew that man not working. Even after supper in his great stuffed chair between fire and lamp, with his pipe going he would be netting onion bags, making rabbit snares, fashioning axe helves. Twenty years after – in 1917 – I got a singular shock. I had been taken to the Opéra Comique by a staff officer, the French Foreign Ministry showing me the attention because of some work I had done for them. Major B —— was then doing staff work for the French Territorials and was very enthusiastic about them. He showed me a photograph of an old Territorial in the parados of a trench. The old man had been cutting the entrance to a dug-out in the chalk of the parados. He had fallen asleep, sitting spread-eagled – his hands and arms raised above his head the right holding a great cold-chisel, the left a hammer, the legs stretched out before him. At the time in the crowded foyer, I felt the singular emotion that we all know – of having seen that scene before. Now it occurs to me that that must have been a sudden remembrance of good Ragged Ass.
I had taken him over to the Pent.
All my life I have had a singular complexity of possessions or have been singularly occupied in getting them ship-shape. I seem to have leased, bought, inhabited, mended, extended, patched up, cleaned out, more houses, households of furniture, carts, harness, waggon-sheds, plots of ground, than there are years to my life or than would have sufficed for the lifetimes of ten other men. One of these properties was the Pent, the old farmhouse to which I went after living at Bonnington. This old place I pulled about for years, restoring it on the most approved lines to its original antique condition of great rafters and huge ingles with rackets and crocks. In all these activities poor Wilson was my abettor. There was nothing he could not do, patiently and to perfection. He was a wonderful gardener; he could make a stake and binder hedge better than any other man; he could get out of underwood more of the fourteen kinds of woodcraft produce than any other man in the Weald of Kent, or Sussex too… Hop-poles, uset-poles, stakes, binders, teenet, faggots, wattle-gates, field gates, clothes-props, clothes-pegs, gate-posts, kindling … there was nothing he could not work up out of his or your underwood and brush. He was an admirable thatcher, a careful waggoner, a wonderfully good shepherd. He could lay bricks, cut out rafters, plaster, hang paper, paint, make chairs, corner-cupboards, fish, poach, snare, brew, gather simples, care for poultry, stop foxes’ earths. He could keep tallies and the most complicated accounts on notched sticks, cutting with a bill-hook I II III IIII V VI VII VIII VIIII X as fast as you could write them with a pen and adding up quite as fast. There was nothing he could not do but write and late in life he taught himself to read – after he discovered that with the aid of a pair of my old spectacles he could tell a great A from a bull’s foot.
I had taken him over to the Pent then. He did all the odd jobs attending on settling into that old place that had been allowed to run to rack and ruin. All daylight he worked in the orchard and gardens; when the lamps were lit he came into the house and did carpentering. He had his meals with me: where he slept I never knew – I suppose on some straw and sacks in the corner of a cow-house. One evening, after supper, he started to disinter an old ingle-nook that had been bricked-up by previous farmers. I went to bed.
In the morning I came down and there was Wilson asleep on an old coffin stool in the opened up ingle. His arms were above his head, one hand holding a great hammer, another a cold-chisel, his legs were extended before him. It was of that that I was reminded in the foyer of the Opéra Comique in 1917.
I think he was happy. In fact I think all those people were as happy as they were wise and unlettered. They made good money; thirteen and sixpence a week with a cottage and garden for eighteen-pence. They would have a pig in the pen, a chicken or two, a poached rabbit, a hare when they were in luck, hopping money to pay the bills with at Michaelmas, a cant of underwood to work on for their own profit in winter when farm work was at a standstill. And American beef was fourpence a pound in Ashford market and fresh butter fivepence at Grists on the March. And you did not want for junkettings; there were Fairdays and Wood Sale dinners and excursions got up by Parson for the whole parish. Every year a party went from Bonnington to Boulogne. You could see it from Aldington Knoll on a clear day. One and threepence return to Folkestone Harbour, five shillings return Folkestone Harbour to Boulogne and twelve hours among the Frenchies. You could take yourself, the Mistress and a daughter there and back for a pound, and have fivepence apiece left to buy shell boxes with views of the sea for the three other children.
No; it was not a bad life; I daresay it was as good a life as the world had to show – in the ’nineties in the English countryside, when food was so cheap that even Shaking Ben got his bellyful twice a day from one cottage or another on his beat.
The village was full of sociability; you chattered over the hedgerow or from orchard to orchard. There was always plenty to talk about and plenty to do. You are not to think that Ragged Ass Wilson bemoaned his lot. He worked all daylight and all candle light hours. But it was merely turning from one handicraft to another. Everything that he did interested him and everything that he saw – from the ice breaking up on the dykes to the green of Lenten wheat and the chaffinches nesting, the bees swarming, the apples ripening, the hopping, the October brewing, the wood sales, the work in the wood, and so round to Christmas and the New Year frosts again. I daresay Wilson, fashioning his axe helve by the firelight, was happier than any Wall Street operator in his box at the Metropolitan Opera or than I, with such cares as I have, sitting writing here. He was singularly care-free.
You would have believed that if you could have heard them up at T’Shop at Aldington Corner on a Saturday night. T’Shop was the village Club, the Emporium, the news centre, the employment agency, the bank. It ran away, back, back, from the mellow oil lamps in its two narrow windows, back into sheds, stables, cellars. From its rafters and the rafters of all the out-buildings hung a mysterious inverted forest of unassorted objects – boots, buckets, ploughshares, strings of onions, flasks of olive oil, red herrings, corduroy trousers, baggin-hooks, billhooks, tool baskets, cradles, hams. There was no imaginable thing that you could not buy there – even to books. I once bought off the counter Dostoievsky’s Poor Folk.
And when Saturday’s dusk had settled down on the fallows and ridges and the dykes and the great Marsh and the high downs, then tongues wagged in T’Shop. Everyone stood there, an immense market basket or a potato trug on the arm – stood and stood and stood and talked and talked or, into deaf ears, shouted. Farmer Borden had had a stroke: a judgement on him! Fifty years ago he had taken advantage of Dan Hogbin’s gel an’ tried to palm the child on to his waggoner’s mate to make the illegitimacy ’lowance less. A judgement on him! Dan Rangsley down to Coppin’s he was the fellow. Keeper Finn and Policeman Hogbin they bursteses into his place when the smoke was coming out of the chimney. There sat Mistress Rangsley rocking the baby to and fro an the crock bibble-babbling from the hook on the fire. There set Mistress Rangsley rocking the baby to and fro, to and fro. Powerful keen eyes they has Keeper Finn and Peeler Hogbin. Sees a pheasant’s feather on the floor by Mistress Rangsley’s foot and a hare’s foot on the gun-rack. They pounces on the pot and what does they find boiling? Tater peelings. You see? Tater peelings for the peeler… They had thought to find a pheasant or a hare of Earl Sondes. Powerful ashamed they were. Show a tater to Policeman Hogbin and he’ll clout you over the head or slope away round the corner according to the mood that is on him. How did Rangsley contrive that? – Picked up the feathers and the foot in game-dealer Vidler’s shop up to Ashford market when he’d bin to sell his mistress’s duck eggs. Heard the quality had it in mind to git him out of his cottage. You Know Who wants it for his doxy – her with the painted cheeks and don’t you dare look at me manner. But they won’t catch Dan Rangsley. – So in the warmth and scent of sugar, spices, leather, onions, coffee and woollens the talk goes on and on, list after list of weekly supplies being filled by the grocer’s men.
Outside, silhouetted against the lights that gleam away, away for miles over the low country round Smeeth Paddocks, stands Shaking Ben. He holds the stump of his pipe to his toothless jaws, shrugs his shoulders incessantly, his straw basket dangling from his wrist. Sometimes he gives an eldritch shriek, sometimes a low chuckle. As you come out to go away down into the Marsh you say: ‘There Ben, you hain’t no call to shriek. There’s for you.’ And you give him a couple of onions, or a handful of apple rings, or a bit of pork, or a screw of baccy, according to your means or generosity.
There being no squire for many miles round the community centred on the parson. An old man with a long light, white beard that blew away over his shoulders, you would see him striding over the fields in black shiny leggings, his black Inverness cape streaming out behind him. He had a way when he talked to you, holding the side of his spectacles and pushing forward his face which you might have called poking his nose into things. But nothing was further from Parson’s habits. He let his flock alone – and was continuously consulted by them. His charities in the winter were very considerable. How he got along I could never understand: he had three large marshland parishes at a stipend of less than £250 a year. And he had several children and a parsonage that was falling to pieces. He was a most extraordinary preacher on occasion though usually his sermons were above the heads of his congregation. But the country people would consult his children at T’Shop on a Saturday night and when the word went round that Parson was going to preach a stinger next day his tiny church would be packed, with people listening in at all the windows. I sat under him once or twice on these occasions. I have seldom been more uncomfortably moved. He had a low voice, hardly more than a whisper. He held the side of his spectacles and uttered intimacies of every day life that made the farmers and their wives around him groan spasmodically. On special occasions he would be invited to Canterbury to preach ‘before t’Archbishop and Sir Edward and they Lords’ his parishioners said. But he never got promotion. On the death of his first wife he had married his cook, the only recompense he could make her for devoted nursing during an illness lasting for years. But you must not marry your cook – not though you be St Chrysostom of the golden words – if you want a house in a Cathedral Close among deans and minor canons.
A feature outside the country-communal life of that village was Grocer Rayner of T’Shop. Though he organised and ran that complicated place with a hand of iron he was stone deaf. So he read. He read Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane. He had had no outside guidance to these authors. He read them with the passionate engrossment of a man in deep isolation. When I once went into his parlour I saw that he had complete sets of the first editions of those authors. He had bought them as they came out. They would have driven New York auction rooms mad a year or so ago. When Crane and Conrad came into his shop one day Rayner’s emotion was so great that he was ill for some time – a dour, bearded, Scotch-looking grocer.
It is a great pleasure of the literary life to come thus right out of the blue on figures like that of the Aldington grocer. Writing books as far as the great public is concerned is rather like throwing them into a well. You write and publish – and nothing happens. That literary, or literarily inclined people, should here and there salute you is all in the day’s journey. You think cynically that the salutation is interested in one way or another – because of hope of return, or boredom, or desire of social advancement. But one day to come across a village grocer, or a bank-president, or a railway porter or a doctor, accidentally to find that they support what you stand for – your friends, your point of view, your Movement: that is a great encouragement. It has happened to me once or twice. Thus at Aldington, in a railway train, on board ship or in a Turkish bath. Once indeed, coming home on leave during the war, I was followed into the compartment of the civilian train by a dark man who was carrying some of my own books. I was a little annoyed – I thought he intended to scrape acquaintance. He didn’t. Just before the train started a South African with the gilt antelope on his wide awake, jumped in. The civilian began reading my collected poems. The South African began animatedly to tell me how he had travelled three thousand miles by canoe to join up. He had not heard of the war till six months after it started and then only knew of it because his black boys came rushing in to tell him that German troops were burning their huts. He had started at once.
Suddenly he turned on the studious civilian and exclaimed:
‘You ought to join up too: a lusty young man like you. Why aren’t you in khaki?’
The young man rolled agonised dark eyes and exclaimed:
‘I’m a P – P – P – P – P – ,’ grasping at his throat in the struggles of a hopeless stutterer.
‘I don’t care what you are,’ the South African shouted, ‘you may be a Pacifist, or a Papa, or a Potato-grower but your king and country need you.’
The civilian repeated:
‘I’m a P – P – P – P –’; and the South African:
‘Come now – you get out at the next station and join up. A young man like you! With civilisation at stake! – Look at that old fellow there –’ meaning me! ‘with his service stripes. Doesn’t it make you blush – ’
They continued like that until a stop at which the South African got out. The other turned to me and with all the signs of agony and an explosion of P’s like the unsilenced exhaust of a motor bicycle at last brought out,
‘I’m a P – P – Peruvian!’
It appeared that, being a neutral, he had come to England to take a course in modern English Literature at London University. I presume my books had been prescribed to him but I did not ask him. I didn’t even ask him how he liked them, but recommended him to read the South American books of W. H. Hudson and Cunninghame Graham.
I wonder if that country group was happier for being unable to read. I fancy not. Imagination must be served or it feeds on itself: then superstitions come creeping in. And superstitions run like underground root-stocks throughout most countrysides – queer superstitions that the Quality neither hears of nor suspects. I had glimpses of them now and then. Once I was digging at Aldington in a bed near the corner of my cottage. Wilson and I were getting out a tree that was undermining the foundations. I dug up a small china doll and was about to throw it away. Wilson said with a queer dry manner:
‘I wouldn’t throw that away, Master. You’ll be throwing away your luck. Us chaps buried that there when you bought this place.’
I asked him if they always did that. He blushed shyly and at last said:
‘Us allus does it if us likes the governor … Buries a maiden or a doll or a horse’s skull if us can get it.’
That of course was an unsuspected survival of the human sacrifice when men buried a slave or a captive beneath the corner-stone of a new house. ‘Maiden’ is the Kentish for the mell doll of other counties – the last sheaf home of the harvest, tricked out with ribbons and given the place of honour at the thanksgiving dinner.
Once on the face of the cliff we dug up two very large skeletons in a burial niche. They faded away as the air got at them – all except the bright white teeth. Whilst they were crumbling Wilson looked at them pensively and said:
‘Those be Denes – the gentry that jumps on your back like boo-boys and strangles you to death. In Aldington Knoll woods after dark.’
The Denes were the unforgotten and still dreaded Danes. The skeletons were those of men who had fallen on that spot in a tenth century battle between the sea-robbers and the Anglo-Saxons. In much the same way the inhabitants of the hinterland of the Riviera and the Camargue dread the revenants of the Saracens. As the Danes ravaged the South shores of England so the Saracens landed on those of the Mediterranean and burnt and slew and led away captives. And just as the South Wind which brought the Algerines is still endowed with mysterious evil qualities on the shore of the one sea, so the East Wind in Essex and Kent is accounted the root of all evil. It is best not to be born with those winds blowing. You may have the evil eye. And it is worst at night.
Indeed the night sheds terrors over some countrysides and many, many were the woodland paths and roads that Wilson and Meary Walker, and Meary Spratt and Mus Diamond and the others absolutely refused to take after sundown. Still more singular were the taboos that existed – the things that for indefinite and unstatable reasons you must not do – and the mascots! But these do not come into this book. Nevertheless, originating in the pre-historic days of the Great Trade Route from the Wall of China to the Scillies, they were still strong in the Kent of the ’nineties. And they crossed the water and obtained still in the United States when I first went there as a very young man.
One of the most curious instances of taboos in America I came across a little later in Philadelphia. I was then in a year that I won’t specify – working on a small farm in the outskirts of Philadelphia. I did not want to work on that farm because though I was interested in American agriculture that was a type of farming with which I was very familiar – small mixed farming which might just as well have been carried out in England. The farmhouse and buildings went back to the early eighteenth century, the title deeds dated back to Penn’s day and were of wampun executed by an Indian chief. The owner who was farming it was a direct descendant of the original settler and it had never been out of the hands of the family. It boasted a pasture lot, a field of corn, a punkin patch, a potato patch and a small neglected orchard. The owner was of what they call in England of the county family class. He was, that is to say, until misfortune overtook him, one of the most prosperous professional men in the city and kept his farm in hand for pleasure and the sake of sentiment.
The misfortune that overtook him had its grotesque side. He was swindled out of the greater part of his money by a confidence trickster. This happened in London. He had gone to England to buy a county property where he intended to settle down. He was an Anglo-maniac who found even the Philadelphia of those days too bustling for him. I will call him Peter Dundee. That is not his name but he is still living.
He had returned to his native city. His unlucky star had let him be induced by the London police to prosecute the swindler. This did him no good. His money was gone. But that case was widely reported in the English and American papers and poor Dundee on his return found himself laughed at as the foolishest man in Philadelphia. He found the place still more unbearable. Being very impoverished he settled on his farm which he intended to hold until on the spreading out of the city he could restore his fortunes by its sale as building land. But he could find no hired man. All the hired men of that day went west to the bonanza farms and, never making enough money to pay their car fares back, there they remained.
I met Dundee whose family I had long known in a bar on Chestnut Street. He was extremely downcast and to comfort him I offered to work for him until he could get help. We started at once cutting his corn. This we did with machetes – long bladed Cuban knives.
The sun has a peculiarity in Pennsylvania when you are cutting corn. It jumps straight up to the zenith and there remains until you have finished work. You have not even the meagre shadow of the cornstalks. We worked usually in a temperature of 117° Fahr. The papers put it at merely 106°. They were anxious for the credit of the local climate. But we knew.
Every quarter of an hour whilst we worked the sheep got out of the pasture into the punkin patch. We would run out and drive them back and then go into the hall of the farm and hack pieces of water melon with our machetes. Then back to work, then after the sheep again and then back to the water melon. And so round and round and round again.
This grew monotonous. One morning I got up before sunrise and started to mend the snake fences. I had been working ten minutes when the long shadow of the farmer in the rising sunbeams came to me over the dew-wet grass. He contemplated me mournfully and said:
‘You can’t mend fence or build wall before Thanksgiving.’
I said:
‘I damn well can.’
He repeated mournfully:
‘You can’t mend fence or build wall before Thanksgiving.’
I said:
‘We shall be a twelvemonth cutting your corn.’
But he would not let me go on. I said:
‘Look here, Peter, you’re such an unlucky man, you might as well chance the evil eye or whatever it is.’ But that taboo was too strong.
Whilst I was there the Seventh Day Adventists raised a tumult amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch. They declared that an immense balloon would come down from Heaven. The occupants would let down ropes. Such men as could hold on to them would be dragged up to Heaven. The rest would be lost. When you drove through the Dutch villages you saw hefty men practising for the ascent. They were swinging from ropes in their shirt sleeves from elm boughs or the gutters and waterpipes of their farms. The women were not invited.
Whilst I was working there I was asked by Miss Mary Moss to a dinner at her house on Chestnut Hill. Miss Moss in those days was the Literary Dictatrix of Philadelphia so I suppose I was invited rather as a man of letters than a farm labourer. I sat after dinner on the stoep between a daughter of Lee and a daughter of General Sherman. I heard from the former a story of Marshall Ney in New Orleans which afterwards formed the basis for an unfinished collaboration of Conrad and myself. What the story was I shall tell later when I write of that collaboration. It was told by Lee’s daughter. And it seemed to me a romantic episode of my then young life to sit there looking into the black night and listening to the katydids – and in that company, to stories about the old South. It perhaps seemed romantic to others than I. For when I at last published the story, two years ago, I prefaced it with a note as to where I had heard it. By a slip of the pen I made the lady who sat on my right Sherman’s niece. I received a little later a letter from the right lady who said she was in truth the daughter of the General and remembered the occasion – and me! – very well. That was a quarter of a century after its occurrence. So the daughter of a federal commander in chief had more of the royal gift of memory than the ex-Kaiser!
I don’t know why I should have been treated as a literary celebrity in Philadelphia of those days. I was certainly being enormously boomed in England for books which now seem to me to be trivially suave. None of them had been published in the United States. But the Quaker City certainly opened its arms to me. I was most amazingly dined – coming out of the heat of the cornfields to go into the city and eat enormous quantities of planked lamb or chicken à la Maryland.
Philadelphia was then in the throes of a municipal Reform. The streets were full of Reformers, mild young men, much like the English Fabians. They marched about with drums and banners and were intensely moral. They succeeded in electing their own district attorney and in putting one of their opponents in prison. Both the Reformers and the Clover Club gave me dinners and lectured me ferociously on their respective virtues. At the Clover Club festival I had my first experience of public speaking in America. I shan’t forget it.
I had come in hurriedly to the city and taken an hotel bedroom. I did not know whether or not to dress for dinner and could find no one on the phone to ask. I adopted a subterfuge. I had a velvet dinner jacket. You wore them for informal dinners in England then. I put this on over the rest of what used to be called immaculate evening dress. I calculated that, if no one else was dressed, I would keep it closed and, with a black dinner tie, pass for nothing worse than an undertaker. If others were dressed I would open it and there would be the correct plastron.
Some were dressed and some were not. The table was in the form of a horse shoe. Political speeches – of an anti-Reform eloquence – were made from the floor during the meal. We ate, truly, planked lamb, whole on the plank. It was admirable. The liquor was very good. A distinguished lawyer – the one who afterwards defended Mr Thaw for killing Stanford White – made an impassioned appeal to us. He wanted his client, a politician, brought to speedy trial. The client was languishing on bail. The lawyer, in the height of his passion went down on his knees in the space between the tables. He implored us to have his client brought to trial. As it was the Reformers who were persecuting his client his eloquence seemed useless. The Clover Club was the headquarters of the then Philadelphia equivalent of Tammany.
I was seated on the right of the chairman. When the dinner was finished I tried to slink away behind his throne. But I was caught and brought forcibly back. The audience who had heard at least twenty speeches were insatiable. They were yelling: ‘English Novelist. We want the English Novelist.’ Then they began to shout a short chant in unison, repeatedly. I made out that they were shouting: ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy.’ That was because of the velvet jacket.
The Reformers’ dinner was more sober. The Reformers were of course elated over their success at the polls. But their elation took the form of cold boiled salmon and coca-cola. I have seldom seen such virtue except at dinners of the Square Club, a similarly virtuous English coterie. I told them all about the Fabian Society. They didn’t listen. They told me all about purity of elections. I don’t think I listened much. The Mayor was there. He was an Englishman who had been pitchforked into the job as being the only man in the Quaker City who could be expected to act impartially. He slapped them on the back and they him and everybody everybody else.
What happened to the Mayor in the night I don’t know. The salmon or the liquor disagreed with him. In the morning he issued a pronunciamento accusing those mild Reformers of bribery. In order to elect their uncorrupted district attorney they had bribed every inhabitant of the 13th Ward. They admitted it. They said there was no other way to secure political purity.
Shortly afterwards my employer found a hired man and I rested from my labours. I was sitting on the stoep stopping up a wasps’ nest. The hired man was on the roof fixing the shingles. I heard him call:
‘I’m coming down now.’
I said: ‘Wait while I fetch a ladder.’ When I came back he was lying on the ground.
He said: ‘I’ve bruck me leg.’
I said: ‘What did you jump for?’
He answered: ‘Wal, I thought I’d see.’
I told poor Peter Dundee that I could not go on working for him any longer. He was so persistently unlucky, that I was afraid of his ill-luck rubbing off on me. I went back to England. Dundee, however, is now a rich man with property in the Shires. Perhaps if I had stuck to him I might also be that.
I shall add here a postscript for I cannot see where else I shall get the matter in. I have suffered from many injustices and slights. There is one only that I cannot stomach. That is in the appropriation and mangling of the stories that I tell. At the dinner of the Clover Club to which I have referred I told the spinach story. By next morning it had been cabled not only all across the American continent but all round the world, reaching Australia two days after I had told it. It had come into my head at that dinner because, whilst talking very vigorously to someone next me I nearly took some fish handed me by a waiter – with my fingers. My story was:
‘An absent minded man took a lady into dinner. Soles were handed round and he took one with his fingers. Seeing the lady look surprised he said:
‘“Oh, I thought it was spinach.”’
Now that story has been related to me in almost every large city of two continents. Worse. It has always been mangled so as to turn it into nonsense. And invariably it has been attributed to almost everybody else under the sun.
Again there is my tango story.
Just after the tango – it was really the cielito – had reached London, it excited enormous controversy as to whether it was or was not shocking. I was at a dance given by Mrs Ina Matthias – one of the three beautiful sisters of Sargent’s Misses Wertheimer. Mrs Wertheimer, who was then a very old lady, asked me to take her to see the tango danced. We stood in the doorway of the ball-room and she looked long and earnestly. She sighed and said: ‘Yes, I suppose it is very shocking… But does it matter if they really love one another?’
Now I considered that story to be the prey of my bow and spear. What was my astonishment to see it next day in a morning paper over the signature of the regretted humorist ‘Saki’. When Mrs Wertheimer made the remark it was already two in the morning; the paper had already gone to bed. Saki had not been to Mrs Matthias’s party. And, almost more extraordinarily, at lunch that day I met Saki for the first time. And he told me my own story.
Yes. I have suffered. In all sorts of ways. Conrad – as I shall later point out – took one of his stories from a story in a book of mine published in 1903. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. My story was not fiction but a record of a grim fact that happened to the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the Romney Marsh which was then my home. I happened to mention the appropriation with no ill thought in my head, in the book I wrote on Conrad just after his death. At once all the world that concerned itself with Conrad seemed to go mad. A writer in the London Times abused me to the extent of half a column for having made the impious claim. Another in the New York Times took up the burden to the extent of nearly three quarters of a page. He has returned to the charge twice yearly ever since in the same journal and at much the same length. I can’t help it. Was it Damas or Daimas that was the unrepentant thief?
Let me pull another shower-bath string.
In a book of mine published in 1926 there appears the story of a lady who kept the cloakroom in a Paris theatre. Now last year, five years after my story first appeared in serial form a charming lady who, as Mr James used to say, unites to considerable literary gifts an enviable, a world-wide, popularity – , Miss A—a L—s, then in a work called G—n M—y B—ttes, reprints my story all over again.
Oh dear: what are the London and New York Times and the Temps, and the Secolo, and the Welt Am Mittag and the Literary Bulletin going to do to me now? – And Miss A—a L—s?