Nineteen impressions

Front matter

IMPRESSIONS

BY

J. D. BERESFORD

Introduction

Introduction

The Other Thing

THE mesh of the net is very fine; so fine that even when the eye of the would-be observer is pressed close to this apparently impervious web, nothing can be seen. It is true that the scientist who habitually adopts this method of peering is occasionally visited by an impression of something bright beyond, something that shines. But he hardly ever records that impression. It is so elusive; and it comes only at those times when he is not deliberately seeking it. This impression of something elusive that shines cannot be counted as a contribution to exact knowledge.

Other methods of observation, all the tricks and devices of the impatient to penetrate this veil about us, are little more successful. Nevertheless we are stirred now and again by exciting reports of discovery. Some mystic, or poet, or philosopher, or it may be a professed researcher into the immediate mysteries beyond the net, comes to us with news. He claims to have seen or heard or experienced—occasionally even to have touched!—this commonly invisible, inaudible, intangible other thing. There is no news more wonderful than this, and our senses are stirred by strange thrills and ecstasies of hope. But always, after a little while, doubt returns. The great news appears on reflection to lack the authentic touch. At the moment we receive it, we respond without reservation. For a time we believe that we, too, have had a vision of the other thing. And, then, it is as if the tiny opening had drawn together again, and we find—an explanation. Nothing in the world is more depressing than an explanation. It is like dull, drab paint on what was once a shining surface. It hides the mystery of those half-seen depths that do reflect something, even if we cannot see clearly what the image is.

My metaphor has slid away from nets to mirrors, but I make no apology for that. The metaphor is of no importance. Any one will do, and the more you mix them the better chance you have to catch a passing impression of that elusive brightness. If you fix your thought on a single figure, on the net, for example, you will presently see the net and nothing else. And if you wish to look out, it is obviously useless to keep your eyes fixed on the sash bars or the deficiencies in the glass. Even this metaphor of "looking" will not hold for long; nor indeed any metaphor that belongs to the senses.

The best method of learning about the other thing is to keep all your senses employed, and your inner self free from any preoccupation with what your body is doing. This may appear to be a very difficult undertaking; and it is, as a matter of fact, impossible, if you deliberately try to set about it. Concentration, for example, is instantly fatal to success. What you want to achieve is dispersion. All these tiresome senses of ours must be amused, treated as little children, so that they may occupy themselves quietly and not come worrying us; and then for a moment or two we may find opportunity to leave them to themselves.

Genius through all time has sought desperate physical measures to distract the exigencies of these child senses. Alcohol and opiates and despairing excitements have been constantly used to evoke once more the opportunity for a released mind to seek the ultimate vision of inspiration. For when once that has come, no other satisfaction can take its place. It is a supernal joy that can find no equal in the acts and sensations of physical life. And all these desperate measures are but a means for escape to the deeper enjoyment that may follow them.

Another means that we do not consciously seek is that of pain. It seems as if that suffering inner being of ours could be goaded at last to separate itself. The perpetual nagging of the children becomes unendurable, and for a moment or two the mother closes her eyes and stops her ears and attains the peace of separation.

But perhaps the commonest means whereby we obtain an instant's separation, is through literature. Something in us responds, we forget our bodies, and for one fugitive moment it is as if there had come an opening and we had looked out. Or it is as if we crouched under a high cliff, driven by the pressure of a tempest, and that through the crashing, roaring tumult of wind and sea, we heard the mellow trumpet of a distant bell.

No enunciation of splendid maxims nor subtle turns of thought will bring these moments to us, through literature. Nor can I find them by reading the careful mysteries of those who write of fauns and naiads; the stories of those authors who appear to think that mystery died, if not with ancient Greece, at least in the Middle Ages. Indeed, I think that when we are reduced to seeking this other thing in the past, we have lost our ability to find it. This association of our delight with any such solid fantasy as the various we call fairies, is a denial of its true reality. This other thing of ours is not phenomenal, and once we give it a shape, however whimsical, we have given it a spatial, temporal substance.

There is, indeed, no one type of story that achieves the passing magic of our instant's separation. I have found it in poetry, and in prose, and in every kind of subject. Once I found it in an account of the chemical discovery that had sought to probe by laboratory methods the secret of the ultimate constitution of matter; and for one ecstatic moment the secret was revealed to me. So nearly had my author brought me to the verge of truth. …

And I am hoping that perhaps here and there a reader of these "impressions" of mine may find an instant's separation. In certain of the items that make up this collection, there are two motives. The first is undisguised, and is displayed as the distraction of a common story; the movement of modern life in an ordinary setting. The second motive is never explicit. It does not represent the actual discovery of separation, nor attempt any indication of what that moment might reveal. For anything approaching definition is completely destructive of a vision of the other thing which is in its nature indefinable. No, all that the second motive stands for is the hesitating suggestion that the other thing is there, the essential reality behind every expression, the immanent mystery of life independent of space or time. …

I have written this introduction because some of my friends who read these stories of mine when they appeared in some weekly journal or monthly review, have come to me and asked me to explain what I meant by such efforts as "The Little Town" or "The Empty Theatre." They appeared to think that I must know. And in a sense, their sense, I did not know. There was no careful allegory that I could interpret, no definite analogy. If I had said that the old man up in the flies of the Kosmos Theatre represented God, I should have grossly satirised my own idea. At the best I could only say that if the story meant anything at all—and I was not the least sure whether it did or not—it meant that under the stress of such an excitement as the discovery of an unknown town, a man might be moved to dream of the shadow of some relation between himself and the impersonal; that he might, in fact, achieve the moment's separation which reveals the apparently commonplace as a vision of wonder.

Lastly, these visions are personal mysteries, and as various in their manner of revelation as the modes of art or religion. We touch them here or there, according to our individual equipment. Any one of the five senses may be the immediate means of communication, conveying the sudden stimulus by which the inner self finds its brief eternity of release. And there are some who cannot find their ecstasy in any book; there are others who find it in a few books, but will not find it here. To them I offer an apology, and ask in return that they shall not write and ask me what I mean. I have done my best to explain, although, as I have said, an explanation is the most depressing thing in the world.

Cut-Throat Farm

CUT-THROAT FARM

"AH! Us calls un coot-thro-at farm," said my driver.

"But why?" I asked nervously.

"Yew'll see whoy when yew gets there." And this was all the information I could get from him. So, finding excuse for the driver's ill-temper in the sodden weather, I shielded my strained eyes from the onslaught of the rain and relapsed into silence.

For two miles or thereabouts after leaving Mawdsley we had followed a decent road, but now we were jerking warily down a rutted lane that appeared, so far as I could see through the blur of rain, to creep downwards into a dark, tree-clad valley, the depths of which were obscured in a mass of soaked, depressing verdure. Still the track fell and fell, and on my left I could see a dark slope of trees rising higher and higher above me—a slope that, seen thus dimly, appeared gigantic, overpowering. Then the lane plunged, dipping ever more steeply, into a black wood, and I clung to the side of the swaying cart, expecting catastrophe every moment. I tried desperately to combat the gloom that was overpowering me; I repeated to myself that this was England, that I was within a hundred miles of London, that I was going to spend a delightful summer at the "Valley Farm"; but, despite my efforts, a horror of the place gripped me; I found myself absurdly muttering "The Valley of the Shadow of Death."

The wood ended abruptly, and we came out on the very keel of the valley. "That's un," muttered my driver with a nod; and, shaking the rain from my cap, I discerned a hunched, lop-sided house that crouched in a clearing at the foot of the opposite slope. I pictured it as having slid down the interminable wave of trees that reared its dim crest into the sky beyond, as having slid till brought to a too sudden standstill in the place where it now remained, dislocated, a confusion.

Such was my coming, my first sight of "Cut-throat Farm." If my subsequent experience seems morbid and unaccountable, my final cowardice indefensible, excuse must be found in that first impression which tinged my mind with a gloom and foreboding I could not afterwards throw off.

It was a starveling place. The stock was meagre: a single cow, whose bones were too prominent even for an Alderney, a scatter of ragged, long-legged fowls, three draggled ducks, an old loose-skinned black sow. This was all, save for "my little pig," as I learned fondly to call him, the one bright, cheerful thing in all the valley; a whimsical creature of quaint moods, full of an odd humour that had in it some quality of sadness. Looking back, I see now that his fun was an attempt, largely successful, to make what he could of his short life, to jest in the face of death. … My host and his wife were an awe-inspiring couple. He was short and swarthy, the hairiest man I have ever seen, bearded to the cheek bones, with hair low down over his strip of forehead, and great woolly eyebrows. His wife was tall, predatory, with a high-bridged, bony nose and wistfully hungry eyes; she was thinner, more angular even than the emaciated cow: that hastily covered skeleton who stood mournfully ruminant in the dirty yard.

My first morning at the Valley Farm was marked by an incident, not in itself unduly disconcerting, but typical, an incident surcharged, as I see now, with warning. I had had breakfast. I remember that at the time I considered it scanty (later, it became a memory of plenty) and insufficient even for the standard of thirty shillings a week, a sum that covered the whole cost of my entertainment, I considered this price very reasonable when I answered the advertisement.

After breakfast I stood by the window, which was open at the bottom, the top sash being fixed. Outside were clustered the half-dozen gawky chickens, clamorous and excited, straining their stringy necks to look into the room over the low sill. "The poor brutes are hungry," I muttered with some feeling, and I fetched a fragment of crust and threw it to them. Lord! how they fought for those few crumbs! I turned back into the room to get the remainder of the bread left from my breakfast, and, as I turned, a lanky young cockerel, inflamed by a desperate courage, hopped over the sill and followed me. I heard him come, and, interested to note to what lengths he would go, I retreated further into the room. In an instant he was on the table and had seized the chunk of bread from the platter; then, with a frightened squawk, he was out and off across the yard, sprinting away with impetuous, leaping strides, outstretching his fellows, who had immediately set off after him in hot pursuit. On his way he had to pass my little pig (my first sight of him, and how typical), who was sauntering casually in the direction of the yard gate. An inveterate jester, my little pig; he slewed round suddenly as the straining bird came up to him and made a well-timed snap which startled the rooster, intent only upon the hungry crowd behind, into dropping his booty, a morsel something too large for his gaping beak. I can still see the merry twinkle in my little pig's eyes as he ate that piece of bread. It seemed to me that he was unduly deliberate in the doing of it; maybe he chaffed the resentful but intimidated young cockerel, in some Esperanto of the farmyard, as he ate. … Nothing else of any account happened that morning; I remember I saw the farmer sharpening his knife, and wondered what he could find to kill with it. …

The next morning the young cockerel was not among the expectant group of five that waited under my window; but I met him again at dinner, and as I essayed to gather nourishment from his ill-covered bones, I smiled again over my recollection of his encounter with my little black pig. He is such a neat, quaint little creature, that pig; we have become friends over a few scraps of food, though he allows no liberties as yet. …

Among my notes of that stay at the Valley Farm I have found the following; they seem to me so full of suggestion that I append them just as they stand:

"The stock is disappearing; only one old fowl left—the one that has twice provided me with an egg, or so I judge from her ululations. I suppose she will be kept to the last. … I was right; there are only two ducks this morning. … The ducks are all finished at last (thank Heaven!), but I have a horrible fear upon me. The cow has disappeared! The farmer's wife says they have sold her. Did she buy the suspiciously lean and stringy beef I now live on with the price of her? … The sow has gone, and the farmer's wife has bought pork with the money obtained. I may be wrong in thus associating the meat I am given with those vanished animals. Can it be possible that there is some superstition or sentimental affection in buying the flesh of animals similar to those they have just sold? I see points about this theory, but why is the farmer always sharpening his knife? … I cannot believe it! He is not there this morning, and yet, surely, no Spanish Conquistadore of the sixteenth century could have had the brutality to kill my little pig, my whimsical, wayward, humorous little companion, the one living thing in all this accursed valley that could smile in the face of doom. … More pork! It must be the remains of the old sow; but why has she become so suddenly tender? How is it that she has furnished me with the first satisfying meal I have had for weeks? I cannot believe it, and I dare not ask the farmer's wife. I will not believe it until the pork is finished. He must have been sold. I am convinced of it. I hope he has found a happier, less hungry home, poor little chap. … I had an egg this morning that went off with a pop when I cracked it. I had a curious sensation when it happened. I have not hitherto been a believer in metempsychosis, but an intuition came to me at that moment that the soul of my little pig had entered into that egg. It would have been so like his whimsical, joking way to go off pop. And I was so hungry. … I have been writing a story of two men cast away in an open boat, with very striking patches of what one may call local colour. They suffered horribly from hunger. … The old hen has gone at last, and the farmer is still sharpening his knife. Why? Is he going to cut vegetables for me? I don't know where he will find them. In my story of the men in the open boat, one of them, driven to desperation … Bread and cheese for dinner. Is this the lull before the storm? I surprised a curious expression in the farmer's eye this afternoon. He was sizing me up with an appraising look. I can't help feeling that he was mentally going through the process I described in my story after the stronger man had … The farmer brought me my breakfast of bread and butter this morning. He says his wife is ill, that she is not getting up, that—I don't know what he said. No! Definitely and finally, I cannot, I will not. …" (My notes end here.)

After that last breakfast I went for a stroll in the yard, and in an outhouse I saw the farmer sharpening his knife. With an assumed nonchalance worthy of my little pig, I strolled carelessly to the gate; then, with tediously idle steps I sauntered towards the wood. And then—I ran. God, how I ran!

1909.

The Power o' Money

THE POWER O' MONEY

I

IT was in the year of the first Jubilee that old Joe Baker had his wonderful stroke of luck. It was not the first blessing that Fate had bestowed upon him—there was, for instance, Mrs. Baker—but it was most certainly the first time that Providence had ever opened its hands and poured down upon Baker a great shower of gold.

In a sense he had deserved, if not earned, this sudden accession of riches. He had displayed, however unwittingly, a certain foresight by selecting the cottage in which he now lived. When Mr. Jacks pensioned Baker after his accident—one of the old sort was Jacks—he offered him ten shillings a week and this cottage rent free, or twelve shillings a week and no cottage. Baker chose the cottage, although it was a mile from the next house, and neither he nor Mrs. Baker could manage that distance without great effort.

On the other hand, the situation of that strip of garden was unique. It ran straight down to the railway, and it was actually on a level with the metals. The down expresses came drumming out of the tunnel under Bleak Hill a mile away, crescendoed through the falling depth of the cutting, and at the bottom of Baker's garden went roaring by on the level, to be swallowed up by the further cutting beyond, which grew deeper and deeper until the entertainment was concluded by a despairing scream as the express was engulfed in the black hole that had been bored into the huge mass of Silent Hill. The up expresses, of course, reversed the process, but the effect was much the same. In either case you sat on the rail and post fence at the bottom of the garden and waved your hat as the flying procession whirled hammering past into the unknown.

"You don't think you'll find it lonely at that place?" Jacks had asked—a kindly, thoughtful man, Jacks.

"What, with them trains?" replied Joe Baker.

There had been moments of exaltation when Baker had blessed the accident which had given him the trains. The whole two-mile procession from tunnel to tunnel had so much the effect of being conducted entirely for the benefit of the person who sat on the rail and post fence. From no other point could you witness at such advantage that splendid tear past from the first faint drumming at one end to the last shriek of farewell at the other. Old Baker always waved his hat once more in response to that last farewell shriek.

But the luck, though so intimately connected with those magnificent expresses, entered through the front door which gave on to the lane. It came in the person of a wonderful individual in a vast overcoat that broke into a luxuriant growth of curly black hair all over the collar and lapels and cuffs. The remarkable individual inside had hair to match and an exuberant moustache that had the same crisp tendency. He drove up to the Bakers' in a high dogcart.

He told Baker at once that his strip of garden had unique advantages, a fact already known to Baker. But the individual, who was the agent of the agent of a great financier, told Baker another fact of which that simple, uncultured person had never dreamed—namely, that unique advantages were worth money, especially advantages of position.

Baker never clearly understood what he called the "rights" of what the individual called his "proposition," but the basis of the proposition was that in the unknown, unrealised country that really existed beyond Bleak and Silent Hills, great erections of brick and stone, called hotels, were being built, and that other people besides Baker were ignorant of the splendid advantages of these hotels. These ignoramuses, it appeared, were in urgent need of enlightenment, and the plans, extensive and costly, which the financier and his agents were laying were designed solely to facilitate the spread of knowledge.

And just at one infinitesimal point of the whole vast scheme the plan involved old Joe Baker. His garden was one of the few spots in all that hilly country on which could be erected a great sign that would lift the weight of ignorance from the travelling public and would tell them, not of the gorgeous possibilities of the hotel at Freshmouth—there was no time for that—but of the essential fact that there was such an hotel.

The Astrakhanned individual was in a hurry. He overwhelmed Baker with a flood of words. He did not bargain—money was plentiful, and promises even more so, just then—he announced that that strip of garden was what he wanted, that he would pay five pounds a year rent for the sign that was to be erected upon it, and he did actually, as evidence of his bona fides, leave a real half-sovereign by way of deposit in old Baker's astonished hand.

"What's he want?" asked Baker of his wife when the superb individual had remounted his dog-cart and gone—cursing the ruts—back up the lane.

"I dunno," replied Mrs. Baker, who had been present at the interview.

"I ain't agoin' to have no 'otels built in oor garden," decided Baker doggedly; and doggedly he repeated that observation many times in the course of the next few hours.

Ten days later, however, an unprecedented letter arrived. The postman was, of course, invited in, a cup of tea was made for him, and the astounding document he had brought was given him to decipher.

It was partly in "print," but a few blank spaces were filled in in a neat handwriting, and at the bottom was a hieroglyphic which even the postman, scholar as he was, could not make head or tail of. But the plain message of the thing was that "the Imperial Palace Hotel Co." was to pay Joseph Baker, Esq., five pounds per year for the rent of an advertising station.

There was much wonder and argument in the cottage of Joseph Baker, Esq., that morning, and the postman was very late in finishing his round.

There was even more wonderment when the marvellous sign arrived. It came by degrees, and foreign workmen followed to fix it in its ordained position. It was fifteen feet high, it was most solidly and permanently constructed, and it bore in huge, wood, gilded letters this firm announcement:

PALACE HOTEL, FRESHMOUTH.

"'Ope no one 'ull think it means my little place," was Baker's comment. In two years the comment had matured into a perfectly sound witticism. …

II

For many months that sign was the great show of the neighbourhood. Everyone came to see it, including the Rector and Mr. Jacks. And the scholars of the place all tried to read the announcement backwards from the cottage door, although it was not one of those legends—like TUO YAW—that do equally well either way. But despite this defect the sign stood up in grand silhouette against the sky.

To old Baker it was a never-failing joy; and if he were sitting on the fence with his back to the line, enjoying the prospect of this beautiful announcement, he would not turn round to greet anything less than an express; the slow trains and the luggage trains went by, forlornly, unhailed.

It was in October that the sign was fixed, and at the end of twelve months old Joe and his wife held a quiet festival to celebrate the fact that they had earned five pounds—"a power o' money," as they both agreed. It did not trouble them at all that the money had not yet been sent to them. They had it in print that that sum would be paid, and it was perhaps just as well that the great and rich hotel company should keep money safely for the Bakers, who would have been terrified to have had so large a sum in the house. They had no urgent need for the money just then; indeed, Mrs. Baker had nearly eleven shillings "put by, come Christmas."

Nor did it worry the Bakers when October, 1889 came round, and still there was no further letter from the Imperial Palace Hotel Co. They did not expect a letter, and it came to old Joe sometimes as a terrifying thought that the Astrakhan gentleman might one day drive up in his dogcart and pour out ten golden pounds on the table. Aye! It was ten pounds now. Joe looked at his Missus with an awed face. "Dunno what us 'ud do wi' such a power o' money," he said.

Mrs. Baker agreed.

So the years rolled on, and the sign still stood firm as ever. The gold letters had long ago turned black, it is true; but the legend was as plain and substantial as on the day it had been erected. …

In 1898 the second "I" in Imperial was blown off in a gale; but that made little difference.

In 1901, however, Mr. Jacks died. That was a tragedy in any case; but the full force of it was borne in upon the Bakers when they found that young Mr. Jacks was of different stuff from his father, and that their pension of ten shillings a week was to be stopped.

It took old Joe, now grown rather decrepit, a day or two to realise the inner meaning of this great change; but when it was made quite clear to him that the time had come for his removal to the workhouse, he quavered into a thin laugh.

"Work'us? Me and the Missus?" he piped. "Why, us is rich. Us is worth a power o' money." And from the bottom of the best tea-caddy was produced, after much fumbling, the evidence of wealth; a document grown weak in the joints, but still plainly legible.

Young Jacks laughed, and left the cottage saying that he would believe in that wealth when he saw it in cash.

Old Mrs. Baker spent a day in a journey to the Rectory, and took the priceless document with her. The Rector was sympathetic and helpful. He promised to write and make formal application to the company for the amount involved—no less a sum than seventy pounds.

Joe and his wife had never worked it out, and when Mrs. Baker returned in the Rectory pony-cart and informed Joe of the sum that was due to them he was smitten to speechless amazement. Seventy pounds was a sum beyond the reach of their imagination. It seemed quite impossible to them that any company could be rich enough to pay out such a horde of wealth in one transaction.

"Us'll get it bit by bit, like," they agreed.

The Rector wrote to the address given on the agreement, and in the Government's good time his letter was returned to him, marked "Not Known." After that the Rector made inquiries, and discovered without much difficulty that the Imperial Palace Hotel Co. had been wound up and forgotten some twelve years before, and, incidentally, that the Imperial Palace Hotel at Freshmouth had never been completed.

The Rector was not unprepared for this awful news, but old Joe Baker was. …

For some hours after the Rector had gone, old Joe sat and tried to realise that he was no longer a potential millionaire. That effort was too great for him, but he did realise that the magnificent sign had in some way lied to him. When he had firmly grasped that idea, he found the wood-chopper and went out into the garden.