My harvest

Chapter I

LIFE has been called a scene of adventure tempered by a little philosophy on the way. It is not exactly my view, but the majority incline to it as the only one that reconciles the rule of thumb to self-respect. Hence, I suppose, the fascination of pure romance in The Arabian Nights, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, or even at a distance from these, the egregious Roderick Random with the due subservience of its hopes of immortality. The earlier romances are mostly of this cast ; and I should be glad to get the benefit of it, if only I could plead their license of invention. Happily the adventure being sometimes in the nature of spiritual experience, does not always involve shipwreck and the shooting of lions. But it is invariably events and incidents first, and the moral, if anywhere, only at the end of the journey. The old masters at any rate usually began with a birth as the greatest of all accidents, and never stopped till they had got their hero married at least, and not seldom comfortably entombed.

I was born, alas ! as far back as 1840 ; and there is still so much to see. My father held a modest place in the Inland Revenue Office at Somerset

House. He was of a stock of Yorkshire farmers whose tombstones standing to this day mider the shadow of Beverley minster — usually bore the word " yeoman " to show that they were tillers of their own land. They had everything proper to their rustic state including a family Bible dated 1639, and still extant. My sire seems to have been the first of the line to make the great venture of London — walking all the way and carrying his own rations to keep the little hoard in his pocket intact. My mother — well, if I had the genius of Barrie, she should have a book all to herself. When I lost her fostering care, the lonely man was lucky enough to find rooms suited to his means in what was then the classic land of the London lodging - house, Norfolk Street, Strand. The fine old street has been rebuilt : it is all stately offices now ; it was then a double line of Georgian fagades, where you had to lodge, if you wanted to do so in a certain style. Hotels were few, and most of them dear and comfortless with unpleasant suggestions of the public-house. Mr. Spectator, it will be remembered, had rooms in Norfolk Street as far back as the reign of Queen Anne. Peter the Great once stayed there ; and since then the place had had time to rise from its Hanoverian ashes and still to mellow into the beauty of age in which I knew it as a boy. It sloped towards the river, without meeting the embrace ; and the only way of getting out of it was to retrace your steps to their starting point in the Strand. From a lofty terrace, its railings rusty with years, you looked down on Thames, sweet or otherwise as the case might be, and needing no poetical apostrophe to induce it to take its course softly to the sea. There was usually something to look at — a Lord Mayor's procession, a boat race, rowed in topper hats, an old-fashioned man of business on his way to the City in a boat pulled by a nice ruffianly sort of waterman — on gala days perhaps in coat and badge. And where these failed, there was always, moored right in the line of the street, the very ship in which Captain Cook circumnavigated the globe, picking up continents on his way. It was now a floating lock-up for the rascaldom of the river — we are matchless among the nations for pleasantries of this sort. No inscription proclaimed its great achievements in every clime, no flourish of trumpets, nor even a bo'sun's whistle sounded a Whitmanian salut to the seas of the world from its timbers steeped in their brine. For most of us who gazed it was a question, not of what feet of Argonautic heroes had once trod its deck, but only of what variety of river scum had taken their places.

Within, as without, the old street was all beauty of domestic architecture, with a suggestion of retirement and of perfect peace. There were four stories to the houses, counting the garrets, cavernous subterranean kitchens importing a bridge over the well in which they lay, and beneath these, regions of impenetrable darkness where the coal was stored, and where an adventurous infant sometimes went to look for ghosts or listen for rats for the fearful joy of successful flight. The back garden of my own particular house of dream had disappeared save for one big surviving tree that threw a welcome shade over the whole place in summer time. In the winter it dripped what I must still call cosy desolation over a clean paved yard, to urge you indoors for the comfort of a hobbed fire-place and a footstool. This yard, with an old summer-house to keep it in countenance, was all that was left of the floral associations of the past ; but its type, in pictorial presentation forever, is to be found in some of the Dutch works at the National Gallery. The style came to us with William of Orange, and it was but a copy of a copy in the Georgian time. The rich West Indian or American planter went to Norfolk Street for all he wanted in substantial comfort as it was understood in that day — a spacious reception room overlooking the street, wherein also he dined at four o'clock. It was the fashionable hour, as it gave him time to sit over his wine before starting for the theatres, nearly all in a bunch within a stone's throw, or for the wilder dissipation of the Cider Cellars, with Evans's supper-room to follow for the wind up. The wealthier people brought a servant or two with them. But there were all sorts, from these swells of the drawing-room to the single gentleman class, like my father, who had but a bedroom to his name, and who took his meals, by arrangement, with the landlord and housekeeper in their private room. The perfect suite for the nabobs included a bedroom leading out of a sittingroom, and beyond, a dressing-room that might hold a bed at a pinch. What more could you have, or at any rate what more did you get in that age ? It was the height of dignity and dash. They took your orders in the morning for the meals of the day, bought the provisions in accordance, cooked them, stored the remains to your credit as the dishes were removed. It imported much cold mutton for customers of a thrifty class, but the remedy was at hand in the shape of a whole shopful of pickles and sauces in the neighbouring Strand.

It was really a fine thing to be born at such a time, because it marked the opening of that Victorian period which marks a most significant parting of the ways of English social life. It was all so delightfully new as we saw it. The cry was " our young Queen and our Old Constitution," as succeeding the shibboleths of the immediately antecedent William and the Georges, most of whom never had a youth of hope. We were all going to turn over a new leaf and be good under the benignant influence of a virgin monarch to whom any sort of moral imperfection was simply a thing unknown.

But I couldn't live at a loose end, in even the best of lodging-houses. There was my education to think of. I was rising eight, I fancy, ere I attacked but the second of the three R's. I could not shape a pot-hook, and had never handled a pen except to break it. It was to be school, and boarding school at that ; the lonely man could think of nothing better. Behold me then, not without tears from the housekeeper and the maids, on the way, under parental convoy, to Bromley -by- Bow, then just out of range of the London smoke.

I had given no tears in return, being full of pleasurable delight in a new school box, mine, and its new outfit. All had contributed something — the old lodging-house keeper a new hat, a topper in real beaver, as they wore them in that day. How the father had come to his choice of an academy for young gentlemen I know not, perhaps by advertisement, but he had been wisely led. Bromley-by-Bow was dotted all over with fine old buildings, and one of them was a palace ancient of days. Mary Stuart's son, James the First of England, and the Scottish Sixth had come south to unite the warring crowns, and being fond of hunting he had begun in a kingly way by making a sylvan solitude for himself with its starting point at Bromley, and calling it a chase. Bromley was then a lovely village, and it remained so to the time of my first acquaintance with it. The old palace, the private school to which I was taken, was the loveliest thing in it, not of course in conscious realization to me, but simply in beauty of illusive suggestion — all I wanted at that age, perhaps all one wants at any. Imagine then the old gabled building all wainscot down to its meanest rooms, and in its great hall a glory of rich carving, arabesqued ceiling, and fire-places as elaborate to scale as a cathedral porch. It stood in its own grounds, and nothing ugly was there, or mean, within sight or sound of it. The playground was a clearing in the forest with still many of the oldest trees in their place. The light that never was on sea or shore was to be identified at last between them and the skies in a chiaroscuro of sunshine seen through the leafage of spring. The schoolmaster's walled garden was of the peace that passeth understanding, with a mulberry tree in the garden that was our tree of life too when it yielded pie as an extra on days of festival. Beyond our bounds it was all loveliness still — on the one side an orchard where an old-fashioned farmer raised fruit for the London market, on others the plough land where he raised corn. He was no doubt unfortunate in his neighbours of the orchard boundary, but what he lost in that respect was our gain. For, according to all the rules, a boy's education ought to include the pilfering of apples as a preparation for the adventurous work of life. From them the hero proceeds to islands, and to empires later on. The practice has grown into disuse in our day, but the girl queen was as keen for it as any of her predecessors. An orchard to rob, and no questions asked, would be a positive recommendation for a seat of learning in our spiritless time. Nothing ugly, I said, or mean anywhere within reach of us. For, again beyond bounds, it was but the old Seven Stars Inn gabled and wainscotted like the rest, or a tuckshop with bull's-eyed window-panes that played fantastic tricks in optics with the items of the stock.

And then for the dignity of age in the associations, if we had either known or cared, think of the neighbouring church to which we were marched for the Sunday services. The very hunting lodge was nothing to it in that respect. For here we were on the site of Chaucer's convent-church " scole of

Stratford atte Bowe," not to be confounded with the other Bow church, but a bowshot from it, in the main road — a first offence in punning that shall also be the last. Still less to be confounded with the one in Cheapside. Everybody goes to these, guide-book in hand, few carry the pilgrimage as far as my old church — mine and Chaucer's, in regard to the identity of the sites. I am right glad of it. I give it away in writing indeed — for how resist the temptation ? and yet inconsistently I want its memories all to myself. The convent was venerable for its antiquity even when Chaucer knew it as part of a Benedictine nunnery founded by the Conqueror. The present church now calls itself St. Leonard's, after the name of its parish; but St. Mary's it was, and should be, for all time. Fragments of the old building were walled into the new one when it was rebuilt in 1842 — perhaps as we now lace concrete with steel to make it last to the crack of doom — among them a slab of Purbeck that marks the resting-place of a knight and his wife buried there in 1336. Witness, too, another really exhilarating tombstone of a later date.

As nurses striue

theire Babes in bed to lay

When they too ly-berally

the wantons play

So to preuente

his farther growinge crimes,

Nature his nurse

gott him to bed betimes.

For nigh eight hundred years end on end they have closed evening service on that spot with " Lighten our darkness," either in the English liturgy or in the Roman original. With its cadences, said or sung, and worthy alike of the end of a day or the end of a life, it was, I think, about the first bit of " established " religion that got fairly into my soul.

I don't mean to say we were fully sense-conscious of all this delicate perfume of time in church and school, but still something of it was there. More might have been found in the former case, if they had not contrived to associate the morning services with a fine of pudding for the offence of going to sleep during sermon — and, worse luck, Sunday was the only pudding day. A wretched usher surveyed all the file for this lapse, which I daresay he was only prevented from repeating by having to make a note of the names. These were called over after the joint, and their owners had to rise and march out. The bigger boys pretended that it had its compensations, as, once outside, you might swear without risk of detection. All, I think, would have preferred the chance of the pudding.

Our " Head " was the mildest mannered Church of England parson that ever ruled an urchin mob. His name was Stammers, and he bought the school of the widow of a Mr. Safe, who, to this day, has his tombstone near the door of the church. He is in good company of celebrities dead, gone and forgotten — worshipful citizens whose worship ended with their lives, a sprinkling of Huguenot exiles, and no doubt many a golden lad and girl long since gone to dust, with the local chimney-sweeper. Some of the tombs have been shifted, but on the whole the old place is pretty much as it was in my time. Mr. Safe was a stern disciplinarian. Mr. Stammers was of quite different stuff. He, and his maiden sister to match, were all beaming benevolence and goodness of heart. I doubt if ever he laid violent hands on any fellow-creature in his life. On taking charge, he publicly proclaimed from his desk that he had the strongest objection to flogging, not, as he assured us, on humanitarian grounds, but only because he was naturally of a nature so ferocious that he shrank from the very thought of the consequences to the offenders. It was understood that his blows would be death or maiming for life, and he implored us for our sakes, and his own, never to put him to the proof. We had only to be reasonable in misdoing to be sure of every consideration for our persons, and meanwhile he would be content to chasten by impositions. We were much impressed, myself in particular, yet it fell out that I was the first to put myself beyond the means of grace. I had wantonly launched a speculative stone, in the nature of a bolt from the blue, through the window at which he and his sister sat at tea. He harangued us on the incident to the effect that he had to draw the line at utter depravity, and he gloomily ordered me to follow him to his room. I did so with the feeling that I was making premature acquaintance with the end of all things, and my sobs rent the air. Yet these were nothing to my roar as the cane fell on my shoulders from a dizzy height that threatened annihilation. I am bound to say I was agreeably disappointed in the result. It was what I afterwards learned to recognize as a stage blow, and it fell with almost the softness of a caress. It was the same with the few that followed, though I roared on by way of payment in advance for what was sm'c to come. In fact nothing happened, not even a cloud of dust from my jacket. The dear old chap !

But we were soon to be stirred by fiercer excitements, almost imperial in their scope. Suddenly London began to loom large on the sight of our sylvan retreat. It was the year of the Chartist rising of the '48. What a year ! It thrilled all Europe with terror and wrath. It gave the impulse that peopled America : the great emigration set in with — " To the West, to the West, to the Land of the Free," sung under the silent stars specially benignant in their watch over the boats that carried the hungry horde. And what a day of all its days when the Chartists called their meeting at Kennington Common. Kennington was then to London proper what Brooklyn was to New York, a sort of glorified village " on the other side of the water " where old-fashioned people led leisurely lives. The London mob was to march there for a great demonstration in furtherance of the demand for a charter of popular rights. Anything might happen on their return, primed with oratory, desperate with the sense of wrong, wild with the sense of opportunity in a luxurious capital lying at their mercy. That was all we knew about it in forecast, and most of our betters, the grown-ups who formed public opinion, were in the same plight of invincible ignorance. It was a lurid programme. "Mein Gott, vat a city for to pillage," said old Blucher, when he drove through the London streets after the peace of 1814.

So on the great day we had our special messenger to the capital to examine and report. The dear old Head, self-chosen, was naturally the man. He set off in the morning as to an heroic adventure, and with us, of course, sleep was out of the question till his return. We discussed his mission in the dormitories, squatting on the beds in our night gear, not unlike Indians round the camp fire. Our room, and every other I daresay, had its tactician and its politician, as leaders of the powwow. The politician was severe on the rabble — boys are mostly born snobs — and he made the running for the tactician who undertook to show how they were to be massacred to a man. The Duke of Wellington, " conqueror of Napoleon," was in command of the troops, and our military adviser, being apparently deep in his counsels, assured us that he knew his plan. The insurgents were to be prevented from getting to Kennington at all costs, and to find themselves penned in their tracks by horse, foot, and artillery, and reduced to mincemeat. Mincemeat it had to be : nothing less would content us. In imagination we listened like the dwellers in sacked cities seen in dreams, breathless, cowering behind closed doors for the first shrieks of death. Yet we would not have foregone those shrieks for all the world. We wanted our thrill. Imagine our disgust then when we had to learn from the home-coming parson that there had been nothing of the sort. The Duke seemed to have entirely missed his opportunity. He allowed the enemy a free crossing to the side of the river where there was no mischief to be done, but when they came back at night, angry, hungry, footsore, they found the bridges barred and the sullen cannon between them and the palaces, public offices, banks, and what was still more of a hardship for the poor creatures, their miserable homes. They were filtered over in detachments at last, and kept on the run till they reached their hovels dead beat, and the day of doom ended in their utter discomfiture without the firing of a shot. The dear old Head called it a greater victory than Waterloo, and suggested prayers for the merciful victor. He had them all to himself.

It was impossible to quiet down after such excitements. There was a fight in our dormitory next morning, what about I forget. The principals were a leading politician and your humble servant, both in nightgowns — such was our ardour for the fray. I won — by a fluke, and I make no boast of it. In one of those wrestles for the fall, then fashionable in contests of this sort, my opponent's head struck the floor. The hoUowness of the sound seemed to preclude all possible danger of concussion, but he gave in. I don't know why, but something prompted me to kiss him. My second frowned.

" Stash it, little 'un ; that sort of thing isn't done here."

The victim himself seemed to submit to it only as he might have submitted to a poultice. It was my first anti-climax and I took it to heart.

In due course I heard from my father how the day had passed with him. As a Government officer, he was, so to speak, pressed for the service of the special constabulary. It was a Falstaffian army, though in broadcloth instead of rag-tag and bobtail, and everybody who had a character or a position to lose was expected to join. The Government issued truncheons and a badge for the arm ; old soldiers improvised a rough drill. Somerset House was guarded by these old employees, mostly the cankers of a long peace, men who had never struck a blow in anger since they left the playground. They were useful no doubt as a moral example, but they would probably have been a terror to their own side if it had come to the touch. Cowardice had nothing to do with it ; it was simply the lack of the habit of strife. Their office was now their guard-room, and they roystered there in true military style. A generous administration supplied provender and moderate potations, and here and there a blade who felt he had missed his vocation rollicked in a song, " A soldier's a man ; a life's but a span ; why, then, let a soldier drink." As a variant, yet still on a military motive, another gave " The Banks of Allan Water." Though an officer of the department, this one had been excused from attendance because he was a dwarf , but he had insisted on remaining, with the result that my father never forgot this song. He said that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and he bought it in broad sheet, as they sold songs at that time, for his delectation in old age. He had many projects for the period of his retirement from the service : one was to learn to smoke.

I think he shed tears over the song, though he would never own to that. He had the English horror of the display of emotion. In the gravest event of his life, I saw him giving way, not at the eyes, but only at the chin. The latter was crumpled up in corrugated folds, and seemed to shrink for shelter within his ample stock, saving his face in the upper part, and hiding its loss in the rest. But he was tender in his own way on visiting days. Perhaps, as to demonstrations, he was a little checked by the majesty of the surroundings. Such meetings took place in the state room of the old palace, parent and child sitting by a fireless fire-place, cavernous, vast, as measured by the proportions of a small boy. They talked only as freely as they dared, with a surmounting Royal Arms — as one might say life-size over the mantel to keep them on their good behaviour. Once, when he thought nobody was looking, he took me on his knee. But he soon set me down again — perhaps as having caught the eye of the unicorn.

I sometimes go to look at the fire-place now, not in situ in its palace, but at South Kensington Museum, where fragments of it were providentially intercepted on their way to the house-breaker's yard. Years and years after I first knew it, the old place had to die the death to make way for a highly developed slum, with rows of mean houses effacing the glorious playground and the orchards, and in their midst a barrack-like School Board building to make weak amends. The details of desecration were shocking, but the County Council was able to save something at the eleventh hour, and to preserve the memory of the rest in a monograph on " The Parish of Bromley-by-Bow," with which I have but one fault to find, that it is not printed in letters of gold.

As I stand by the old fire-place in the public museum, I seem to be once more in that dim Victorian abysm of time. Then in a leap I am back in fancy to a still earlier day, with Mary Stuart's son — and perhaps Steenie and Baby Charles to keep him company — slobbering his hunting jokes at the feast that followed the death of the stag and the curee in the courtyard, with all the Georgian ages and their festivals between. To think of that, and then of M. Bergson's placid assurance that there are no yesterdays and no tomorrows, but only one river of Now in everlasting torrent — pa-ta-tra !

Chapter II

BUT presently I was taken from the old school. Somebody, perhaps a nebulous aunt in faraway Yorkshire, had given my father a good talking to on the subject of my need of " mothering." Truth to tell I was a bit too young to be without a woman's care, for the change came shortly after the '48. Behold me then transferred to St. John's Wood, to the house of an old sailor, retired on his laurels as an ex-Navy man, and on his savings as a jerry-builder after his discharge. His wife was warranted capable of the mothering, though the couple had no children of their own. I was a sort of plaything for them, and they made much of me, insisting on my calling them ' father ' and ' mother,' and generally getting all the benefit of having young life in the house. They were nearing their sixties. The old man was one of few words, but I think he liked to have me near him, pulling his things about, and generally giving him the excuse for administering what he called the rope's end, in the shape of a cuff. He was a product of the old press-gang system. The gang had swept down on him one fine day when he was leaving his work as a bricklayer, and carried him aboard a man-of-war to go and fight the c 17

Americans in the war of 1812. It was astonishing how Httle he had to say about that contest, or anything else in hfe. He was one of the taciturn sort, and was, moreover, afflicted with asthma, which is a great promoter of that frame of mind. I have sometimes wondered whether he knew what the war was about. He made no boast of his share in it, he said nothing depreciatory of the enemy : he just grunted " takin' o' Washington in America, 1814," and left it there. On the rare occasions on which he took a drop too much — once a quarter or so, when he broke out for a day — he was more expansive. But it was not in the Pindaric vein. He loved ditties of sentiment — " On the Banks of the Shannon when Sheila was nigh," such is my perhaps poor recollection of the opening line. His wife, who could be tuneful without the aid of stimulants, sang " Arms and the Man," to the theme of General Wolfe and his glorious death at the taking of Quebec. She was aware of it as a real live issue, having learned it, and little else, of her mother who lived to a great age. Between them I got my first notions of the epic theme of history. Meantime, as I gradually improved in my reading, I picked up anything that came in my way, among the rest notably Uncle Tom's Cabin when it reached us in England — I think in 1852. So, after a fashion, I became aware of some of the most decisive events in American story, ranging from Montcalm to Mrs. Stowe as the precursor of the great Civil War.

I have often thought how little in this way would serve to carry us back to the remoter past. If we imagine a succession of ancestors of ninety giving their recollections to infants of eight, who passed them on, with the accretions of experience, at the same advanced age, we should soon have a human chain of very few links to the latest events of our own time. I am too lazy to work it out, but ten, or at most eleven, of these oral chroniclers should bring us right back to Senlac and Norman William, with his all-compelling mace that gave the Saxon peasant a sort of hereditary headache in presence of his superiors, from which he suffers to this very day. The written chroniclers, with their huge superfluity of detail, give an impression of distance which is wholly illusory : a garrulous grandfather or two would soon carry us back to the Mayflower.