
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Coloured Spectacles
Author: Niven, Frederick John (1878-1944)
Date of first publication: 1938
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Collins, 1938
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 11 October 2012
Date last updated: 11 October 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1000

This ebook was produced by:
Barbara Watson, L. Harrison, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






COLOURED SPECTACLES




_By the Same Author_:


  THE STAFF AT SIMSON'S
  OLD SOLDIER
  THE FLYING YEARS
  TRIUMPH
  MRS. BARRY
  THE THREE MARYS
  THE RICH WIFE
  THE PAISLEY SHAWL
  A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS
  JUSTICE OF THE PEACE
  ELLEN ADAIR
  A TALE THAT IS TOLD
  THE S.S. GLORY
  ETC.




  COLOURED SPECTACLES

  FREDERICK NIVEN

  COLLINS  PUBLISHERS
  FORTY-EIGHT  PALL MALL  LONDON
  1938




  THIS BOOK IS SET IN FONTANA, A NEW TYPE
  FACE DESIGNED FOR THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF THE
  HOUSE OF COLLINS, AND PRINTED BY THEM
  IN GREAT BRITAIN

  COLLINS CLEAR-TYPE PRESS: LONDON AND GLASGOW
  COPYRIGHT 1938




  TO
  H. M. TOMLINSON




    Some portions of this book originally appeared in _Country Life_,
    _Glasgow Herald_, _Glasgow Evening News_, _Graphic_, _John o'
    London's Weekly_, _Library Review_, _London Daily News_, _London
    Evening News_, _Morning Post_, _Nation and Athenum_, _Saturday
    Night_, _Scots Pictorial_, _Sunday Times_, and to the editors of
    these journals I would make due acknowledgment.

    F.N.




CONTENTS


  PART I
                                                        Page
  _Scotland_                                               9

  PART II
  _Still Scotland_                                        77

  PART III
  _Four Men--and Some Horses_                            103

  PART IV
  _Ships and the Sea_                                    147

  PART V
  _North Wales--and the Old Man at Chester_              163

  PART VI
  _England_                                              175

  PART VII
  _Westward_                                             203

  PART VIII
  _Honolulu_                                             267

  PART IX
  _Splendour in the Grass_                               295

  PART X
  _A Garden in the Wilderness_                           315

  PART XI
  _Maple-Leaf and Thistle_                               339




PART I

_Scotland_




SCOTLAND


I

There is a season of the year in the land in which I am writing this,
six thousand miles or so from the Grampians, when--to speak in the
wild manner of the Psalms, in which we read of the mountains skipping
like rams--Scotland comes to me. Upon most days here (in the Upper
Country of British Columbia) you could, if you cared, count the trees
upon the sky-lines five miles off, but a day arrives when the
distances instead of being set in clear and seemingly magnifying
crystal are empurpled. You only know, you do not see, that the far
mountain sides are clad in pines and firs.

The creeks, tom-tomming in the gulches, clutching wanly at protruding
rocks, delaying in trembling amber pools become, in fancy, Highland
burns in their glens. Kootenay Lake is changed to a Scots loch. A
stipple of rain is on the polished water; the hazed slopes, seen
through that _smoor_, might be of heather, with a birchwood yellowing
here and there. Nothing is asked of imagination save to turn the odour
of wood-smoke to that of peat--and the trick is done. All Scotland is
mine then, from forsaken St. Kilda and the roar and crumble of the
Atlantic on its cliffs to the piping of a piper, on a Saturday night,
by the Broomielaw.

The Broomielaw! When, I wonder, is James Bone going to give us _The
Perambulator in Glasgow_? The voices of Glasgow buddies in exile
demand it. It would be the perfect book for that season here in which
I relive the old Glasgow days, the days when W. Y. Macgregor, Arthur
Melville, Joe Crawhall, Roche, Lavery, Christie and Guthrie,
Harrington Mann, D. Y. Cameron and Walton, George Henry and Hornel had
shown--shown yet again, for they had great painting predecessors
there, though these had appeared more singly than _en masse_--that out
of an industrial city art could come, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh
was making the walls, the ceilings, the floors, the chairs, the
tables, and the very spoons of the tea-shops of Miss Cranston memorable.

There was a small paper-covered guide to "doon the watter" on sale then
at the station bookstalls and hawked on the streets. It was illustrated
with reproductions of pen-and-ink drawings. Was I right in thinking
them works of genius? I showed it to my chosen mentors, trustful of
confirmation, and, "Muirhead Bone," they said at a ratifying glance. I
fancy that must have been his first published work. It is a rarity now,
I suppose. One of the regrets of my life is that my copy has disappeared
from the portfolio in which I kept such treasures. (It was on
sketching-blocks, not writing-pads, that I first thought to appease the
inherent whim to portray, to communicate, what I saw.) There was a
spirit of renaissance in Glasgow then--as now. The very flames of
Dixon's Blazes over our city were as banners of proclamation.


II

Out of these distant years I have a memory of a visit to a house
somewhere near the top of Bath Street--in Blythswood Square, I
think--where a sturdy and rather paternal young man was our host. He
was the eldest of three brilliant brothers, both of whose parents, I
believe, were then gone. He was Muirhead Bone, and James Bone was also
there, dark and eager. The door opened and a lad came in, wearing
brass-buttoned blue, and the eldest brother, as this youngest joined
us, said, "This is the sailor-laddie," by way of introduction. That
was the only time I saw Muirhead Bone and David Bone but James I used
to see, years afterwards, when I was in Fleet Street, silk-hatted,
with furled umbrella, strolling slowly (the best journalists seldom
hurry) under the arch that leads to the Temple where he lived. He was
by that time London editor of _The Manchester Guardian_.

One day I saw him there and, a little further along the street, as if
for contrast, David Hodge in unpressed suit, large and easy, a
cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, strolling into the
ancient cottage (long since pulled down) in which the Glasgow _Evening
News_ had its London office. In that office and, later, across the
street in a modern block, I used occasionally to drop in on Hodge for
the refreshment of his tolerance and geniality and to hear the rich
Scots burr of his voice as, looking up from his littered table, he
gave me welcome, the cigarette waggling at a mouth-corner.

But I run too far on. We are still in Glasgow and I am still a boy
there. Harrington Mann was good to that boy and the boy adored him. I
hear again the clash of brass rings as he draws a curtain in one of
his Glasgow studios, coming out on to the landing to find me there. He
is sorry that he is just going off, he says.

"Going off?" say I. "To Italy?" I ask.

I had somehow the idea that _going off_ meant departure to Italy. He
smiles down at me, says he wishes he was going to Italy, is only
_going off_ for the day, and tells me to come and see him another day.

I cannot place that studio though I recall the clash of the
curtain-rings. It was on the north side of a street, up some stairs
and along a corridor; that's all I remember of its situation. I recall
the whereabouts of another of his studios: it was in St. Vincent
Place--on the south side, and had an ante-room in which he sat one day
tossing a scrap of pencil from one hand to the other and drawing now
with the left, now with the right in an attempt to show me how to do
it. When I said that I thought it was time for me to go he took a
skull from the mantelpiece, wrapped it in brown paper, and told me I
could have a loan of that to draw. I see him again in his people's
home after he came back from what I presume must have been a second
visit to Italy, sitting on a cushion on the floor accompanying
himself, on a guitar, in songs the models sang at Anticoli-Corrado and
in "As Villikins was a-volikin in his garden von day . . ."

I remember him coming once to our house in search of a spinning-wheel.
He wanted a big one, such as is used in Hebridean crofts. Ours was an
elegant drawing-room one (it had belonged once to the Boswells of
Auchinleck--the family of Dr. Johnson's biographer) but it would serve
him, he said, and carried it off. It had served me in earlier years
when, standing behind it, I had spun the wheel to port and starboard,
navigating imaginary ships across the carpet-ocean. When he brought it
back there were whorls of fleecy wool around the distaff. I remember
him also by Loch Lomond side, striding along a hedge-lined road--head
thrown back, eyelids slightly lowered as if focussing the scene--easel
and canvas hanging from a shoulder, on his way to a beechwood to
paint; and the painting I can see still, the sun among the beeches and
a small figure of a girl in it, an inch or two high, in distance, and
recall how I recognised that portrait, marvelling how a few adroit
flicks of paint, so small, could let me call her by name at a glance.

All the members of that family could see. My own eyes, by merely being
with him, or with his people, seemed to be aided; and still to-day for
me (across fifty years) the morning dew-drops remain glistening on an
iron railing round the garden of their country home by Loch Lomond as
I saw them then on a week-end visit. That guide to "doon the watter"
with the pen-drawings of Muirhead Bone I cannot find but still I have
a few pages of a _Scottish Art Review_ of that time with reproductions
of wash-drawings by Harrington Mann done in a village of the Apennines
to which he had gone on winning the first Slade School Travelling
Scholarship.

One of his brothers, Ludovic, well known to-day as an archologist and
anthropologist, used often, in summer-time, to leave the town house of
an evening--after seeing to the garden there, gardening one of his
hobbies--and "stepping westward" through the cool night, street lamps
behind, stars overhead, arrive in the dewy Highland morning at the
house by Loch Lomond in good time for bath and an early breakfast. I
saw him setting out one evening for the tramp in an easy, rhythmic
stride. Perhaps in these tramps under the stars, till the dawn put
them out, there was the beginning of another interest that led to his
astronomical researches and discoveries. I never think of any member
of that gifted and generous family without a sense of gratitude.
Benefits they conferred more often than they knew.

Among the treasures of those days that have survived many packings and
removals, along with the pages of that _Scottish Art Review_, I found,
on my last unpacking, a copy of the _Black and White Handbook to the
Royal Academy and the New Gallery Pictures of 1893_. Easy to realise
why it was preserved. Following a brief history of the Royal Academy
by C. Lewis Hind it contains an article entitled "The Outsiders, Some
Eminent Artists of the Day NOT Members of the Royal Academy," by R.
Jope-Slade, and many short biographies of these--a goodly number of
whom, by the way, later became Academicians.

Among these brief biographies is one on Harrington Mann (the photograph
reproduced above it like enough to what he was in those days as I recall
him), and one on Lavery, and one on W. E. Lockhart whom once when
young--before my School of Art days--I met. He was painting the portrait
of an old friend of my folks in a house from knolls in the grounds of
which the glass top of the Cloch lighthouse could be seen twinkling in
the sun and yachts flickering back and forth and steamers thrashing
along in the broadening estuary of Clyde. I remember a boy of about my
own age who led me away for a while to play, remember sunny gardens,
enclosures of warmth and flowers surrounded by red brick walls. We did
something to annoy a hirsute old man in shirt-sleeves, obviously a
gardener. I remember him bellowing at us in indignation. Vaguely I
recall that our sin had to do with climbing a wall to get into a section
of gardens the gate of which was locked.

I recall a panting return to the house and then that small boy
disappears, and in a cool interior a lady is asking the bearded
painter if the visitors may see the portrait though it is not
finished. I go tagging along behind a rustle of skirts into a room
where it stood on an easel, framed, only some last touches to be done
upon it. The subject's wife, I think, must have doted upon her
husband. She drew the attention of the elders in front of me, between
whose bustles and hips I peered, to this and that characteristic of
her husband that had been discerningly observed and accurately limned
by the artist. He and his wife stood back, and as they did so they
looked one to the other and exchanged a smile which still I can see,
and then looked sharply round on discovering that some one was behind
them--only me, only a youngster.

Then there is a dining-room and our host and Lockhart are on their
feet and I am standing with them, the ladies having just gone. They
sit down again, and I sit down, and these two bearded men, after some
chat about this and that over my head, turn to me. Our host asks me if
I have begun Latin and I say Yes, and the painter asks if I can
decline _Columba_. I marvel at the appropriateness, for I have a
pigeon-house--a "doo-cot"--at home and am then what Scots boys used to
call, and no doubt still call, "doo-daft." I decline _Columba_, the
two men listening soberly. Our host of the portrait remarks that the
manner in which I do it is slightly different from the usage when he
was a boy, and asks of the painter, "Is that not so?" Lockhart nods
and smiles. I know what they mean--only too well I know; for I did my
declension, for ease, not as I would have done it in school. I did it
as if I saw a page in columns and read down instead of across. I began
by chanting, "Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative,
ablative," and then, with the ground thus rapidly cleared, started. By
the time I came to the third column I was winded, or flustered, or
diffident. I had it all clear enough in my mind, all the way down to
"by, with, or from a pigeon," but I let translation go. "Plural," I
had announced, and plunged on.

The painter continued to smile on me after his nod of agreement that
that was not how it was done when he was at school. And there they are
still, in that dining-room, for me. It was a fine evening. The
sunset's brightness was among the trees outside. Not till some years
later, when I got that copy of _Royal Academy Pictures_, did I know
that the painter for whom I had declined _Columba_ had (to quote from
Jope-Slade's thumbnail biography) "tarried long in Spain, making
Fortuny's acquaintance"--Mariano Fortuny who, as you shall hear, had
once brought sunshine for me into a foggy Glasgow night.

Another famous painter of these days was, I believe, in Spain when,
shortly after our return from South America, I was taken in tow to his
mother's house, and one of the first books to come my way--_Robinson
Crusoe_--was given to me by her, the mother of Kerr Lawson. The house
was in Shields Road (I do not suppose it stands now), set back a
little way beyond a lawn, a few trees round it with spring flourish on
them. All that was wrong with the house, I remember hearing, was that
on foggy days and nights the screaming of engine-whistles, and the
explosion of detonators on the railway tracks near-by, were wearisome.
But there was sunshine that day in the book-lined room in which we
sat, and sunlight was in the coloured plates of the _Robinson Crusoe_
I was given to carry home.

It had an additional interest for me because from Valparaiso, where I
was born, now and then parties sailed out to visit Juan Fernandez, the
island of the original Robinson Crusoe--Alexander Selkirk, or
Selcraig--although Defoe had set his island somewhere off the mouth of
the Orinoco. I have that copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ still. Even in
adventurous times later, when many of my books became a movable feast
and passed to the second-hand booksellers in London, I could not part
with it.

Tough days! Tough days reveal to us our friends. When I went broke and
had to sell books and prints, one was memorably disclosed to me. I had
a Whistler etching. It went with the rest. When I was on my feet again
Holbrook Jackson arrived one day with a flat parcel under his arm. "A
little present for you," he said. It was my cherished and sacrificed
Whistler. He had bought it from the dealer to whom I had sold it and
kept it till there would be evidence of my financial affairs having
improved. I have it still also.

Harrington Mann's mother gave me _Treasure Island_. _Robinson Crusoe_
and _Treasure Island_ were none too bad for a start, I think.

The years slipped past. The doo-cot was taken down.


III

What age was I then? Well, the doo-cot had been taken down. I no
longer kept pigeons but I still made my calls at the bird-fanciers' in
Candleriggs, St. Enoch Square and Howard Street to observe the
fantails, black and white, the common pigeons--"blue baurs"--the
pouters and tumblers, the nuns, the ruffs, and the rest. I had gone
upon some stages of youth. Peeries and girrs (spinning-tops and hoops)
were of the past. The lit windows of the Deadwood Dick and Jack
Harkaway and Ching-Ching shop under the roar of the Caledonian Railway
Bridge and the small vivid cave of the Papeterie were also in my past.
I went in at other doors. I had the urge--it was in the air--to "get
wisdom, get understanding."

The Holmes bookshop in Dunlop Street, with its stranger treasures, had
the major portion of my pocket-money and Stephen Mitchell my gratitude
for dreaming, over his tobacco, to give us the freedom of that library
situated, then, in Miller Street. In that street, in an earlier
library, it used to please me to remember, my grandfather, William
Waterston Niven, had been librarian. Before taking over that post he
was in business with his father as a printer which, in those days,
meant publishing also. I have a nice specimen of their work an arm's
length from me now, with the imprint on a finely-spaced title-page:

    Glasgow
    John Niven And Son, Printers
    MDCCCXXXII

Cheek by jowl with that is a volume of essays--doctrinal, experimental,
and prophetical--by my maternal grandfather, George Barclay:

    Printed For the Author and sold by Waugh and Innes, and
    W. Oliphant, Edinburgh; M. Ogle and W. Collins, Glasgow;
    Wightman and Cramp, London; and Maxwell Dick, Irvine, 1828.

I came honestly, evidently, by my interest in printers' ink. But my
father, though a great reader, and that in two or three languages,
had been, to begin his restless life, a manufacturer--of sewed muslin.

In my mother's family, as volumes that have descended to us testify,
there have been many scholars. Inside several of their books were
labels upon them to such effect as: _Literis Grcis in Academia
Glasguensi_ . . . or _Glasgow College_ . . . _Diligenti et Virtutis_.
. . . I wanted to be a painter; I wanted--we had had no Great War
then--to be a war-correspondent. Pen and ink drawings enthralled me. I
went on the quest of reproductions of pen-and-inks in the Mitchell
Library and elsewhere, pored over examples, among others, of Edwin
Abbey, of Blum and Birch, of Sterner, of Pennell, with delightful
discoveries of how their desired effects were achieved, how they
rendered what they saw, and after an introduction to Mariano Fortuny
(of which you shall hear) was led, by reason of his nationality and
friendships, to Vierge and Simonetti.

My folks, sensibly enough, pointed out to me the extremely precarious
existence of a painter--even of a war-correspondent--and compromised:
How about an applied art? Or how would it be if, to begin with, I went
to the Glasgow School of Art in the evenings, on trial, to see if I
had the stuff in me, and was apprenticed to the manufacturing
business? Designers were required in that business. I recalled that
Alexander Smith had been a pattern-designer--which helped to make me
amenable to parental reason, and dutiful. But my mother, I believed,
regretted that I had not followed in the footsteps of her folk, alumni
of the old Glasgow College, never entered its university. I broke a
tradition of her family then--when we humoured each other. That's life.

Art classes were conducted in various schools in Glasgow. Alex Miller,
who sent me, the other day, a photograph of his Atalanta that he carved
in limewood, was then studying at one of these. With a scholarship from
Hutchesons' Grammar School I went to the Glasgow School of Art, a
scholarship that granted me two years of evening classes.

Tremendously though manufacturers interested me, and warehousemen, and
packers, and weavers, I was not enthusiastic about manufacturing. The
intention was for me to pass through the various departments and
_learn the business_. I began with winceys and it was Charlie Maclean,
head of the wincey department, who informed me, gazing at me solemnly
one day, "Freddy, the plain fact is that ye dinna gie a spittle for
your work." He used, tolerantly, to seek occasions to get me out of
the warehouse. "Here's a letter for you to take out," he would say,
"in a hurry. And you can tak' your time coming back." I used to
scamper like a harrier to Mann, Byars', Stewart and MacDonald's, J.
and W. Campbells', or whoever it might be, and then plunge into the
old library in Miller Street, spend a while there (or dive into that
bookshop in Dunlop Street and buy another volume of the Canterbury
Series or the Scott Library, if I had the price), then dash back to
the ware'us like a harrier again. Once a month Charlie would send me
out on a private errand: "Ye micht gang doon tae the Papeterie,
Freddy, and get me ma copy of _The Celtic Monthly_." Old Charlie
Maclean and I, I used to feel, had a quiet understanding about this
and that. Well, he's gone--he's gone over thirty years ago.

Watson, the cashier in the office, was another of the salt of the
earth, a painter in water-colours on summer evenings and on his annual
vacation. His voice was high and husky and when he saw anything he
liked in the way of tones of the day on Ingram Street walls he would
huskily whisper, "Did ye see yon licht on the chimney-tops the day?"

There were always pranks in the place. If any one handed another a
letter there, not at the usual time for letters, it was advisable to
stoop and peer at the underside before accepting it, to see that it
had not been smeared with gum. If any one called another by an
opprobrious epithet and then ran away it was also advisable, if
pursuing, to be wary, chasing from one department to another, for
probably round a corner some pieces of flannelette or wincey had been
placed in a low stack--to be leapt over by the pursued and to bring
the pursuer down, _hurdies ower heid_. That side of the life of a
manufacturer I took to like a duck to water.

By day I was at least ostensibly forging ahead towards being a worthy
burgess in the warehouse of Ingram Street (less, I think, an idle
apprentice than one lacking high seriousness in his decreed vocation)
and by night I was studying at the School of Art, a happy callant.
Then, abruptly, another door opening, I jumped out of the ware'us into
a library--which was no doubt in order if heredity was to be
considered--and in my new sphere no one ever told me that I didna gie
a spittle for my work. The only trouble was that sometimes I would be
lost in a book when I ought to have been attending to a subscriber.

Well do I recall the evening on which Francis Newbery, head of the Art
School in those days, set me a task for the next night and I asked if
I might postpone it till the night after, explaining that on the night
which he was arranging for me I had to read a paper on Keats to a
literary society. He stared at me and, "Who was Keats?" he asked with
a gravity mitigated by a twinkle he could not wholly obliterate. "Was
he a painter? What I mean," he continued, "is that the sooner you
decide whether you are going to draw or write, the better." He was a
great instructor. "I am not here," he would at times remind us, "to
put art into you, only to bring it out if it is in you." He also
taught me to see.

There was stimulation in the smoky air then. There was diversity of
excitement to suit all moods, tastes, temperaments, mentalities.
Religious revivalists, both of the preaching and singing sort, filled
churches and halls in which "penitent forms" were ranged below the
platforms in preparation for those who, saved, would silently testify
by advancing at least so far and sitting thereon. After a further gale
of prayer it might be that they would come up on the platform to be
seen of all men. I attended one or two of these tense gatherings, in
the desire to miss nothing, but my heart, truth to tell, was
elsewhere with other excitements, other affirmations.

Secular lectures drew large audiences eager for expert information on
the planets, or on literature, or on attempts to reach the poles and
penguins. I think it was on the New Woman that Richard Le Gallienne
lectured. I had a ticket for the course in which he appeared but was
abed in the down-beaten soot and fog with bronchitis when he visited
the second city. Israel Zangwill I heard, on Ghettos, in the Athenum
hall. Jerome K. Jerome spoke on humour (the New Humour, I think) in a
church and his opening remark was to the effect that he felt
perturbed, "never having been in a church before--I mean this part of
it." In another church Sir Robert Ball lectured on astronomy. I can
recall vividly the scenes at the doors and on the pavement when that
lecture was over, everybody making exit with head cast back and eyes
gazing up into the darkness above the street-lamps with a new wonder
and curiosity.

There were also heady private gatherings around polished tables in
some favoured howff, devoted to clamant discussion of life,
literature, art, the sense of belonging to Glasgow--or of Glasgow
belonging to us, as in Will Fyffe's song, and that Glasgow would
flourish, lively in the back of our minds.

We must have loved our city. In retrospect the stickiness of the
streets in winter and the smoke-laden atmosphere, pernicious to the
bronchial tubes, seem as part of its charm. And that is no sentimental
saying. Did not smoke and grime make more couthie the interiors for
our for-gatherings?


IV

Though electric tram-cars took the place of horse-drawn ones in those
distant days (one of the first on its trial trip, I remember, left the
rails and crashed into a florist's on the corner of West Nile Street
near which MacLehoses' library used to be, with a protest of
shattering glass), never have I returned on visits to my old city
without missing the group of trace-boys and trace-horses clustering at
the foot of the brae of Renfield Street. How adroitly did they slip
alongside the cars! There was the click of a chain-end on a hook, the
boy swung on to his perch, the trace-horse lunged into the collar to
help in the drag uphill to Sauchiehall Street.

Those tea-shops of Miss Cranston's that Rennie Mackintosh was
beautifying were part of that era. There was one in Ingram Street
close to the place of business where I was ostensibly busy. In its
basement smoking-room I used to filch time from my employers--who
deserved better of me--making secret sketches of the customers or
trying, and failing, to write verses.

One day--it was the week that the darkening news of the death of
Stevenson was in all the papers--I sat alone there during the city's
busiest and the tea-shop's slackest hour, in an atmosphere of remoteness
at the very heart of the hurly-burly. I was looking at a reproduction of
William Strang's etching of him in one of the magazines when the waiter
brought me my coffee and thrust the ash-tray closer. He noted the
portrait and informed me that he had "met that gentleman."

Did he once see Stevenson plain? Why, certainly--when hall-porter in a
hotel at Pitlochry at which R.L.S. had stayed a while. He gave me his
personal recollections, a little different from those of Gosse, but
not without interest. His memories of Stevenson (an early riser, it
appeared) were associated with matutinal shaking of mats at the
doorway before the guests were stirring. Leaning on his broom he had
whiffed a cigarette and passed the time of morning with him while dew
was still on the lawns.

A bell buzzes and that waiter hurries away and leaves me thinking,
musing, spooning up the brown sugar in the blue bowl and absently
watching it sag and cohere. There is a ceaseless drumming outside
along the pavement on a level with the ceiling, the drumming of the
heels of those who are forging ahead--and I dash up the stairs at
last, away from dreams to business.

Where, earlier, I had gone with chums of schooldays guddling for trout
in the little burns of the Mearns Moors, I was then going solitary,
sketching-block, notebook, and some book I was reading, for company,
putting my pockets out of shape. Sometimes I went by the Kilmarnock
Road past the Giffnock quarries where we used to look for fossils and
adventure in the tunnels, sometimes by Waterfoot and Eaglesham.

The name of Waterfoot still flicks a wagtail over blue-grey boulders
for me, and that of Eaglesham brings crowding memories. It was there
that one of our heroes, James Christie, made his sketches for _Vanity
Fair_ that hangs in the Corporation Galleries. The proprietor of a
travelling booth allowed him to stand inside looking through a
knot-hole, sketching. There was a rumour in the School of Art that
when Christie had used all his sketch-blocks he made drawings on the
wall. Did the owner, we wondered, know their value? Would he cut out
the boards on which they had been made and preserve them? Might we
perhaps buy one or two from him? Vain inquiry, that, for some of
us--whatever the price the showman might ask for a sketch. The wealth
of most of us was not in coin.

To the hill of Ballygeoch, that John Buchan put into one of his early
novels, I tramped often in those days. In Fair Week, when the furnaces
were out in Glasgow for their annual redding and the smoke-pall of the
city passed away, half Scotland was revealed thence, slumbering in
summer sun. Turning about and about one looked into the grey-green
storied Borders, into the grim, romantic purple Highlands, away over
Ayrshire with its pattern of fields to the Firth and the ragged ridge
of Arran, and might even pick out the steamer on its way between
Ardrossan and that delectable island. For the sake of Ballygeoch I
tried to read Pollok's _Course of Time_, he having lived in a
farmhouse nearby. The world, it seemed, went very well then; yet no
doubt there was much that was bitter and difficult in those days as in
these, but memory winnows.


V

Alexander Smith, recollection of whose pattern-designing had made me
accept apprenticeship to _the manufacturing_ with filial acquiescence,
wrote a poem on the Tweed in which he told how it flowed through his
imagination "as through Egypt flows the Nile."

The river that most haunts my imagination or flows through my memory I
might say, to adapt Smith's phrase, is Clyde. I have been, since those
days--and more than once--on that haunting river the Yukon, one of the
great water-courses of this planet, that flows north while Mississippi
flows south, Amazon east and Congo west; and have seen the pilots
(Islesmen some of these, with the Gaelic lilt in their voices)
negotiate shoal and rapid, and counted the migrating caribou swimming
across the stream till I reached a thousand, all in an hour or two,
and then lost count; but, even so, Clyde--a little streak of a river
in comparison--flows often through my mind. Though I have an early
memory of it in its higher reaches, rippling west under the cone of
Tinto--and of Tweed too, winding east, with a stationary heron
standing on one long leg among the rushes of a bend--Clyde begins for
me, recalling old Glasgow days, at the foot of South Portland Street.

Very much for me it is Glasgow River. I am tagging along with my
father again, crossing Clyde by the Suspension Bridge, and he is
telling me that when he was a boy a great ploy of youngsters was to
tread close behind their elders on it, leaping and dancing to set it
atrembling, what to elders was a grand new feat of engineering being
as a grand new toy to them. That was the bridge of his early memories.
Mine, I find, are of the lower bridge--the Jamaica Bridge, the old
Glasgow Bridge. I delay again those who have me in tow to see a
_Clutha_ approach beneath, and watch for the lowering of its hinged
smoke-stack. That was a great event.

Later the old bridge gave other happiness. The Campbeltown boats
berthed on the south side of the Clyde close to Glasgow Bridge--the
_Davaar_, the _Kinloch_, the _Kintyre_--but never all together, of
course. The absence of one or two jogged the mind. If _Davaar_ was
there then fancy would go in search of _Kinloch_ and _Kintyre_. I
would picture the _Kinloch_ tied up at Campbeltown and jerseyed men on
the landing alongside below swerving gulls, and the _Kintyre_,
trailing a fallen column of smoke, thrashing across Kilbrennan Sound.

The Campbeltown boats touched at Lochranza and Pirnmill, and going on
upon my way I would be only seemingly in Jamaica Street, or cutting
along Howard Street (past a fish-shop in the window of which there was
often some curious marine monster on view as attraction) and on up St.
Enoch Square past Francis Spite's, only seemingly there but truly--or
spiritually, if you prefer it--in Arran. Swinging open the door of the
old ware'us in Ingram Street a waft of the odours of wincey and
flannelette and shirtings would bring me back from a day-dream of
chuckling burns among heather and the desultory bleating of sheep.

In the earlier schooldays many a Saturday forenoon I spent on the
wharves. My people loved ships--despite some of their experiences of
what the sea could do with them. They had gone to South America on a
sailing-vessel, a barque, the _Aberfoyle_, on her maiden voyage. It
was of nine months, from the Tail of the Bank to Iquique. She was
posted overdue at Lloyds as she lay becalmed in the doldrums or
drifted backwards. For weeks she fought storms off Cape Horn. I have
heard my folks tell of how, hour after hour, they would feel her
settle under tons of water, drop, drop, as all held breath, and then
spring up as with desperate effort. The first mate had a way of
leaping into the state-room (it was entered not from amidships on the
main deck but from the poop by a companionway) for a cup of coffee,
with a shout of, "Prepare to meet thy Goad, Mrs. Neevin. The ship's
goin' doon!" He would gaily quaff half a cup of coffee, the other half
flung out in one of those sudden springs of the barque, and get up
again to the fight. Out of green food, scurvy attacked all on board.
Arrived at Iquique they found they had been posted as missing. All the
crew save the captain and first officer left her there.

The captain came to say farewell to my folks before setting sail for
the homeward voyage, a last farewell. She was badly built, he said; he
had watched her behaviour during those nine months: she did not rise
well to the waves when they pursued her. And the currents, he
explained, west to east round Cape Horn would be worse than any from
east to west. It had been hard to navigate her westward; to wheedle
her round eastward was, he declared bluntly, hopeless.

"I'm taking her out," said he, "to go down with her."

They asked him why, with that opinion, he did not cable the owners and
refuse to go. It was, they pointed out, her maiden voyage and he was
an experienced mariner.

No, he replied, and repeating again his belief that she would
inevitably be pooped, that the seas astern would simply climb over her
because of her lack of buoyancy and shove her down--"as a man slips
under a blanket,"--he shook hands and departed. She was sighted south
of Valparaiso and never again.

The _Aberfoyle_ was a wooden ship. The captain of the _Santona_,
Captain Mellor, on which we came home, hearing the story of that
voyage shook his head. A wooden ship, he remarked, might wallow,
derelict, about the seas a long time but an iron ship, such as his,
would go down promptly with no prolongation of agony. He was a very
cheerful man.

Sails aplenty were still twinkling round the wet curves of the world
then and in the docks lay barques and ships, brigs and schooners as
well as the tramp steamers from the seven seas. When I Was a schoolboy
I had often accompanied my father on his Saturday afternoon rambles
among the sheds and by the docksides. Later, when he was away on
business or upon other pleasures, I went alone among these scenes to
which he had introduced me.

Once in Kingston Docks I saw a barque, an iron barque with grey-blue
hull and black-painted ports. Where had she come from? From Iquique.
Nitrate was her load, so the captain told me--pausing on his way
aboard in the manner of genial Jack Ashore to talk to a hobbledehoy
admiring his ship. And when I disclosed to him that I was born in
Chili and had come round the Horn in a vessel much like her, an
all-iron barque also, with the same painted ports, down I had to go
with him to tread her from stem to stern. Her last resting-place had
been Valparaiso Bay. There she had lain with sails ready to carry her
at a moment's notice out to sea should a sudden Norther swoop into the
bay, while from the mole to the ships great barges came and went with
dark-skinned men hauling on the sweeps, loading and unloading.

"You'll remember that, being born in Valparaiso. Ah, well, there are
two ports a sailor is chary of--and the one is Valparaiso with that
unprotected bay open to all the Pacific west, and the other is
Mozambique open to all the Indian Ocean east. You've always to be
ready to cut and run out to sea and safety from these two ports.
Steward, steward! Bring this laddie some biscuits. He's been round the
Horn on a wind-jammer the split double of this old tub--aye, and with
painted ports, he's been telling me."

Valparaiso, Mozambique: there's the romance of Glasgow docks and
Clydeside.

Enchanting places, these docks and sheds. Dockside police and
shed-watchmen, remembering their own boyhood no doubt, were not too
Dogberryish with us. They knew the difference between youth in quest
of romance and youth, with pilfering intent, in quest of nuts and
oranges. All we had to do was to keep out of the way of the stevedores
charging up and down the iron gangways with their trucks. Donkey
engines, beside the hatches, coughing their loads up and down, added
to the din; but every here and there was an oasis, some shed in which
there was a lull in the uproar. Shafts of old gold sunlight leant from
smoky glass roofs to dusty floors. Pigeons pottered there, picking up
scattered grain, and up in the rafters the cooing of others sounded,
and the scents in the air were of China, of Malaysia, Valparaiso,
Mozambique. Oh, to be a boy again for two hours on a Saturday forenoon
or afternoon in late Victorian or early Edwardian days, the war and
post-war years casting no shadow before them this chaotic age
undreamt, dodging through Kingston Docks!

Clyde may seem sinister on foggy evenings when the reflections of
dock-lights struggle wanly in it and steamer sirens are lamenting. But
that is only one aspect of it. Few cities own a river of such magic.
All in a day it can transport a citizen to communion with quiet, to
haunts more of the weather and the seasons than of men, and back
again. The spirit of rural quiescence under the eaves and in the
kitchen corners of some old farm in a secluded glen, strong-built
against the winter sleets, is still in his mind when he finds himself,
home once more, among the calls of the newsvendors and the city's
clamour in the ochre twilight.


VI

Those foggy nights when sirens wailed up and down the river and the
street-lamps were amber blurs, and even indoors there was an attempt
at nimbus round the chandeliers, had their own charm. There seems,
looking back, to have been some white magic at work in them--granted,
that is, there do exist Powers dark and light, malignant and
beneficent, that there is not merely chaos.

I did not know, a child in a sub-tropic city with the musical Spanish
speech all round me, how the name of Fortuny, Mariano Fortuny, was to
become like a spell, a talisman. For I did not know, any more than any
other, of the future--how I was to be taken aboard a ship, the _Santona_
of the black-painted ports, to see the Andes fade away; from a region of
_maanas_ and _poco tiempos_, purple shadows, tall poplars, and tracts
of yellow sand, be set down in a land of drawling and sometimes even
uncouth speech where the humid atmosphere gets into the bones.

It was in that land, soon after our arrival, on an evening of yellow
fog and sticky pavements, that there came into our home a crate of
cast-off books and magazines, residue from the library of a scholarly
relative--the cast-offs not carried away by the second-hand
book-dealer whom the widow had called in to make an offer for the
"lot." The scholar whose they were I never knew. I can but gauge his
taste from a miniature or two, an old snuff-mull with an inscription
on the silver disc upon its lid, a collet ring, and this residue of
reading matter.

The widow went to her own place and then these books were dumped upon
us. The period is now ancient history, when street cries were more
common than now, not so widely prohibited; and in the distance as I
pored over these magazines a voice was wailing "Ca-a-ler-ooo!" on a
note that recalled to my mind Defoe's _Journal of the Plague_ which
had been retailed to me by a religious nurse who objected to fairy
tales as untruth.

What "Ca-a-ler-ooo!" meant I did not know. It occurred to me, I well
remember, that it might be, "Bring out your dead," in the Doric of
this country. It was melancholy beyond words and I had not by then
come to know the charm of the northern melancholy that is in its voice
and its ballads. I thought that people might well die, drop off like
flies, on those nights of choking yellow fog. But it was explained to
me that the lamentation in the night was only of a man hawking fresh
oysters. As they go round with a bell and cry "Muffins and crumpets!"
in the forenoon in London so, in Scottish cities, were they wont in
the evening to wander forth, these fish men (or should it be bivalve
men?), distressing those who did not know that the tone of infinite
grief in their voices was neither here nor there--distressing even
those who knew, I should think, for though it was only of oysters that
they called the voice was that of a lost soul.

Among these magazines thrown away there was waiting for me a face
looking out of a page with, underneath, a name I had not heard before
but a name that, in those days, sounded far more friendly to me than
the names of total strangers who, I was told, were my blood-kin! It
was a name that sounded different from those over the shop
doors--MacTavish, MacConnochie, and all the others that I was getting
accustomed to.

"Mariano Fortuny," I read.

The fog without was so profound and pressing that the room leaked it.
In that atmosphere I read of Mariano Fortuny how ". . . he mentioned
to one of his friends his childish awe of the great city of Tarragona,
in whose market they played, and his frights at night when, lying
under the tables of the fish-vendors, he heard the discordant 'All's
well!' of the serenos, or night watchmen, or was haunted by a
half-famished dog hunting for a bone."

On reading that I had to look back again at the face of this man. He
knew. The engraving of him was more real and alive than the faces of
many really living people, and as I read on again it was as if I sat at
his feet while he and his friend, Regnault, told me of their coloured
travels, told me in that drab night (a night of glamour by then) that:

    "We are living, as you know, in a little Moorish house, in a
    little palace of the Thousand and One Nights. We have heaped
    above our doors, above the beams of our patio, decorations from
    the Alhambra, and you shall see shortly a picture begun only a
    few days ago--a workroom of Moorish women, which represents our
    patio itself, and in the background the door of our bedroom.
    Each time that we mount our terrace we are dazzled by the light
    of this city of snow which descends from our feet to the sea,
    like a grand staircase of white marble, or a brood of white
    gulls. Upon a neighbouring terrace the negresses stretch carpets
    to expose them to the sun, or Moorish women hang upon lines to
    dry their haiks and their linen, yellow caftans with silver
    embroidery, caftans of rose-coloured silk, of delicate green,
    foulards threaded with gold, etc. My eyes at last see the
    Orient. I believe, God pardon me, the sun which lights you is
    not the same as ours."

That old magazine is still in my possession and when I look at it
again I think what a remarkable storehouse we all have inside our
skulls, what a medley of treasures, what strange juxtapositions of
these--quaint associations, such as a foggy night in Glasgow and
sunlight in Tangier.


VII

Sunlight in South America also that magazine brought me. The ways of
Tarragona were more like those of Valparaiso, in Chili, than were the
ways of Clydeside. Clyde had been invisible the day our vessel
bellowed up it. (We had left the _Santona_ at Cork and made the last
lap of our voyage on a steamer.) No Arran raised so much as a purple
silhouette; the rock of Ailsa Craig was only a warning scream in the
grey, and sleet was falling in the streets when we arrived in the
beloved city of my people.

The child that was I had been puzzled by their ecstasy of home-coming.
The child that was I learnt, even thus early in his life, the cult of
the magic carpet--was a votary of Mnemosene long before he knew her
name.

Valparaiso--Vale of Paradise: I often remembered the mole, or wharf,
along which the locomotives hauled screaming trucks, locomotives that
clang bells as in the United States and Canada. A long grey-painted
tank steamer, like a torpedo boat, used to bring drinking water to the
city then. Little tip-tapping burros, with panniers holding
water-bottles, came round to the doors, and the brown drivers gave
their cry of, "_Agua fresca! Agua fresca!_" Shipping people were
agitating for a floating dry-dock to lie in the middle of the bay.
They have it now; they have had it a long while.

A great sight was that bay when full of shipping. The P.S.N.C.
steamers came and went from and to ports that have (for west-coast
folk) music in their names, from Panama to Valdivia. Steamers from
Lisbon, London, Cherbourg, lay off shore. South Sea schooners, ships
and barques, wooden and iron, many of the old clipper type, lay there
with the sailors' washing fluttering on the fo'c'sles, a blue-peter
here and there rousing wanderfret and the house-flags and national
flags tempting ramblers on the mole to consideration of the
criss-crossing traffic that goes on upon the high seas. Great scows
like Thames barges plied to and fro, loading and unloading, half-naked
men swinging and straining on the sweeps.

Up in the town the stranger from colder latitudes noticed the great
umbrellas over the drivers, the little straw sunshades tilted over the
horses' heads. The people all walked on the shady sides of the
streets. One pavement would be nothing but blaze of sun and indigo
shadow under the blinds stretched over the warm shops; the other--one
could hardly say it was in shadow so much as that there was, on that
side, a tempering of the bright day. And there passed in that mellow
blueness natives and aliens, Chilanos and Gringos, white, pallid, and
brown. Paris fashions touched the seoritas; but the mantilla was
still their usual head-covering. I used to enjoy seeing the peons at
the hour of siesta, backs against a shady wall, hats tilted over eyes,
little ear-rings glinting, with luscious yellow water melons between
their knees.

On the magic carpet I returned often to the English Hill, beyond the
hospital and Mackay's school. _Tio_ Mackay the young ones called
him--Uncle Mackay. He is gone these years but we saw him on his
occasional visits to the land of his birth and loved him as greatly as
of old. The town of his birth, by the way, was Campbeltown in
Argyllshire. Again I saw the bullock-trains coming down from the blue
space beyond the sandhills, and heard the creaking of their massive
wheels, the lowing of the bullocks that hauled them. The smell of
their transit I whiffed again, felt the grit of the sand-cloud that
accompanied them, saw the poncho-wearing peons walking alongside,
their brown faces powdered grey with dust, brown cigarettes hanging
from their lips, watched them prod the big beasts with their poles.

Valparaiso lived thus in the memory chiefly as a sunny place, a place
both busy and gay--dotted with priests and nuns, for local colour.
Darwin, voyaging there in the _Beagle_, found everything _delightful_,
the climate _delicious_, the heavens _clear and blue_. Thus it chiefly
remains in the mind, though of course there is a rainy season. But the
rains were also memorable. When it rained, it rained. That was no
Scots drizzle. The deluge hissed down for days. In the _quebradas_
(the gulches, where the less affluent lived) the people were often
washed out. In the middle of the sloping streets were orifices, the
lids of which were opened at such times to aid in giving the brooks
escape into sewers and thence out to sea, below the mole.

Sundays were sacred in the forenoon, but the afternoon was for sport,
for going to the races, masses over for the day, or to excursions to
outlying pleasure resorts, such as Via del Mar and Concon. In the
evenings, as everywhere in which the Dons dwell, the band played, the
plaza showed the rise and fall, like fireflies, of leisurely cigarettes
and the twinkle of ringed hands wielding fans. With their fans they
talked, these woman, and the men with their eyebrows and the shoulders.

The "Norther" I would sometimes remember--the wind that springs up
with great abruptness, sets all the tall and hardy poplars swinging
and the palms in the plazas rattling and the eucalyptus trees
flurrying, slams all the doors in a house from front to patio, from
patio to rear, like a discharge of musketry, and whirls up whatever
papers are lying on the desk without a weight atop. It keeps on
vigorously for a spell--and then people find that they are shouting
instead of talking: the "Norther" is over.

But perhaps the chiefest memory is of waking at night and wondering
why--wondering if it was a gentle earthquake, perhaps, that had
interrupted slumber, for the quality of the air told me that the night
was not half-run. All slept with bedroom doors open, just in case of
earthquake, so as to be able to get out if necessary: doors jamb
sometimes in a _temblor_. But it was not an earthquake, and all was
silent. Then there was a weird wailing of dogs. Yet that did not seem
to be a repetition of what had awakened me. Again the pariah dogs,
prowling in the streets, gave voice; and--yes, that was undoubtedly
what had awakened me before--a far-off faint clatter of steel, and a
voice hailing with a mournful note, eerie in the darkness, making the
night seem bigger and the glimpses of purple sky and of stars under
the stretched outer blind more silent and aloof. It was a sentry, a
_sereno_, over at the prison on the next hill, or perhaps at the
barracks, intoning, as they intoned at intervals all through the dark
hours, "All's well!"

There is another reason, clearly, why that article on Mariano Fortuny
in the old volume of _The Century Magazine_ was so intimate a find to
me in the days before Glasgow ceased to be strange, the days before I
understood how my folks could love the place. At Tarragona, in Spain,
he had heard in the dark night that same intoning of the serenos and
the wailing of pariah dogs.


VIII

Occasionally old friends of my folks, from Valparaiso, looked in upon
us and sometimes stayed a few days. Mr. Mackay, of the English school
there, came twice in a few years. I remember going with him one day to
the station to see him off and, a minute late, seeing the train glide
away. He smiled after it and remarked easily, "Oh, well, there will be
another one!" That, however, was not a boat-train. He was only going
visiting for the day and was to be back in the evening.

On the day of one of his departures he moved about leisurely after
breakfast and anon said that perhaps he had better pack. Off to his
bedroom he went to the packing. Time passed. He did not appear. The
cab was at the door to take him to the boat-train. Still he delayed.
We had better, it was suggested by some one, go and help the old man.

We entered his room and there he was on his knees with paper and
pencil. Neatly, all over the floor, were stacks of shirts, stacks of
pyjamas, of underwear, suits of clothes perfectly folded. A row of
suitcases stood along one side of the room, all open but empty.

"The cab is at the door, Tio," we told him.

He smiled up at us.

"I am just tabulating," he explained.

What a packing that was! Everybody helped, and off he went with a
beatific expression on his face as though easefully considering that
there is always another boat.

Tio Mackay one night, in Valparaiso, being waukrife (in the old Scots
word), unable to sleep, rose and went down without a light to the
pantry and fumbled out a handful of biscuits from a canister. He
began to eat them as he walked back along the airy gallery and
upstairs to bed. He must, he thought, have passed through a spider's
web. He brushed his cheek with a sleeve, but more than web, it seemed,
was on his face. He brushed again and then, coming into his lit
bedroom, he discovered that ants had got into the tin. They were on
the biscuits in his hand; they ran in his beard.

Talking of ants--I remember going across the patio in our home in Calle
Abtao (all changed by now, I suppose) and looking in at Manuela, the
Chilean cook, dark-eyed and copper-hued, who was clambering up from a
chair to a table, a brush in hand. I wondered what she was doing. A
flitch of bacon hung from a rafter. Up one wall was a dark line that
continued along the ceiling to the bacon and then on to the opposite
wall and down it. She drew the brush--it had been dipped in
paraffin--across that band and promptly a space showed in it. It was of
ants. They were going methodically up one wall and across the ceiling to
the bacon, then on to the further wall and down it. At the smear of the
brush that broke the line those approaching the flitch turned about and
the ones behind them turned about also, and all returned by the way they
had ascended. Beyond the bacon the streak of ants moved on its way,
along the ceiling, down the wall. Manuela smeared the top of the twine
by which the flitch hung and then, content, descended panting and,
upturning a bucket at the kitchen door for a stool, sat down there to
light her little pipe and have a whiff of tobacco.


IX

When living in Glasgow we used often to go down the river. The island
of Arran, in the broadening estuary, the firth, we all loved. I set my
heart once on walking round the island that now motor cars, whisking
round it, have changed as they have changed practically the whole world.

We were at a house at the south end during the summer in which I had my
desire. The sea broke on Pladda and smashed ceaselessly against Bennan
Head. On the flat-topped hills above the coast-road to right a wind
piped thin and shrill in the long tufted grasses. Four hard-boiled eggs
and the quarter of a loaf, that were my provender for the day, made my
pockets bulge and caused my arms to swing in semi-circles that made me
feel like a swaggering stage bully. To carry the eggs and the quarter of
loaf inside seemed a simplification of the only hitch in the day; so,
although I had but started out, I sat down and ate.

Then, my pockets bulging no more, I swung upon my way. An occasional
farm twinkled a window-pane in a fold of the hills above. An
occasional thatched roof peeped up, half-hid by twisted trees in some
dingle below the road when it left the shore and swept inland over a
promontory. In occasional fields the grain ripened in the sun and
wind; the heather-slopes basked in the warmth. Now and then a sheep
rose and paced along a narrow trail in the heather, like a granite
boulder come to life. Kilmory, Lag, Sliddery and the butt end of Glen
Scorradale I came to and left behind, and still the road was deserted.
Ever and again it seemed a Jacob's ladder passed between field and
moor into the blue of sky; then, at the summit and the bend, it showed
another stretch twinkling ahead. The wind in the trees, as I write
this, might be the lingering sound of the sea in Machrie Bay as I
heard it roar on that distant day.

The Isle of Arran was to me then and on many subsequent visits, and as
still in memory it seems, an island of enchantment. No myths of
kelpies, or of fries, no legend of King Robert the Bruce in "King's
Cave," are necessary to enhance its glamour for me. The romance of
its reality suffices. The heather, the winds, the dancing waves
weaving in and out of themselves in Kilbrennan Sound, and ever and
again the sudden desolate yet moving outcry of gulls at their fishing,
the flashing of white as they rise--these are enchantments enough. And
as for the place-names: to speak them over is to some of us almost as
good as chanting a ballad. Kilbrennan Sound might serve as a refrain
to one with the sea and the heather in it.

The eggs and the loaf having shaken down, and my legs having got into
the steady pacing as of an automaton, there came upon me the ecstasy of
the open road, hackneyed phrase of many a lyric, many an essay--and
anthology. After a dozen miles or so of that steady plod I was suddenly
seized by the feeling of being looked at. Self-consciousness on such a
road as that, an open road twining over the ends of falling hills,
swerving round their bases, sweeping round bays, seemed ridiculous. It
was an emotion out of place. A man may well be pardoned (honoured and
respected, indeed) for feeling self-conscious when standing at attention
awaiting decoration; but on a vacant highway between a hurrahing sea and
the leisurely roll of coloured moors, great clouds, white and gold,
high overhead, self-consciousness calls for inquiry.

I felt so strongly that sense of being looked at that I sat down on a
boulder of the road-side to dissect myself. I was determined to discover
the reason for that unreasonable feeling. Was it the four eggs and the
quarter of loaf? No. Had I been drinking too much strong tea or smoking
too much? No. I felt very fit. As I sat there considering the matter a
tall tuft of sere grass swayed on the crest above the road and I thought
that perhaps out of the corner of my eye as I swung along engrossed on
the colours of the sea and the contours of the bays, that grass had been
responsible for the emotion. All along the crest as the wind ran by the
tufts rose and fell like people spying down.

The explanation did not entirely satisfy; and just as I had told
myself so, and that I must inquire further, there did come up over the
hill a man's head, shoulders--the whole man. On the ridge he halted
and two dogs that had followed stood taut beside him, rigid as he. I
would not have been astonished if man and dogs had suddenly
disappeared. I gazed up at them and they down at me. The man did not
smile but frowned heavily. When he decided to be no longer as a statue
on the skyline and came down toward me I felt a sense of relief.
Perhaps he had only been examining me to discover whether I was a
native or a summer visitor, so as to know if he should proffer his
good-day in Gaelic or English.

Having given me a greeting in the latter tongue he asked where I had
come from and whither I was going; and on hearing that I was walking
round the island, he smiled and asked if I had sworn to walk every
step, or if I would care for a lift. I told him I had made no resolve
against accepting a lift.

"You're tired already?" he asked.

"No," said I.

"You're sitting down," he remarked.

"That's only because I felt as if some one was looking at me round
this bend," I explained, "and I sat down to think out the reason for
that queer sensation."

On hearing that, he frowned again as he had frowned down from the roll
of hill above. His dogs crouched close, looking up at him ever and
again in canine anxiety.

"So you felt like that, did you?" he said, and gloomed, opened his
mouth as if to speak, then fell silent.

It was at that point there came to us the sound of plodding
horse-hoofs and the lumbering roll of wheels. Round the bend from
southward (the direction in which I had come) a horse and cart swung
into view. The horse was a great heavy beast, but it reared and
baulked like any high-strung cayuse. The driver's face had a look on
it not far from terror. Up reared the horse again, snorting; the metal
disc, below the collar, flashed wildly to and fro.

"Is it afraid of the cliff here?" I asked the man with the dogs, but
he seemed not to hear, intent upon the carter's horsemanship. Then:

"I don't know," he replied, without turning his head.

The dogs at his heel whined and cowered close. The cart came rattling
nearer.

"Give this lad a lift, will ye?" he hailed. "There ye are. That's all
right. When it gets round the curve it will quaten, whateffer. Jump in
ahint. That's it--up wi' ye. Good-bye."

Clambering over the tail-board I called my thanks and farewell.
Cannily, and with many a "Whoa!" and a "Steady!" and admonitions
bilingual, the driver guided the frightened horse round the bend near
which I had sat down to play psychologist upon myself because of the
inexplicable sense of being looked at where there was no one to look
at me. Over my shoulder I had a glimpse of the man with the dogs as he
turned about to watch us, still frowning and puzzled, the collies
cowering close. Then we took the curve and by degrees the horse
overcame his terrors.

"He's in a lather," I remarked to the carter. "What took him?"

"I don't know."

The man spoke in a tone that I thought surly and explained to myself by
thinking that perhaps he was an independent fellow who would rather have
offered me a lift himself than have been ordered to give me one. Being
in too fresh a mood to be snubbed silent and let the amenities of
conversation lapse, I voiced aloud a thought that had come into my head.

"Did you notice," I said, "that those two dogs seemed frightened as
well as the horse?"

The carter did not look at me, still intent upon the horse's ears.

"You saw that too, did you?" he replied.

His manner was much like that of the man with the dogs when he said,
"So you felt like that, did you?" In his turn the carter then
(dismissing the subject I had broached), asked me where I had come
from and where I was going. Those questions duly answered, I said:

"I had a funny feeling back there that I was being looked at and sat
down to try and puzzle it out."

He turned his head and, gazing upon me with a deep interest in his
grey eyes, gave a brief ejaculation in his chest. On we rolled and
anon, still pondering my remark evidently, he gave another grunt.

"It is a queer thing," he said, and looked over his shoulder; "a queer
thing," he repeated. "I am interested at you feeling that way. Dogs
and horses and sheep all feel something queer there. I was driving a
flock of sheep round that road last year, the idea being to tak' them
by the shore road easy during the night, to Lamlash Fair. But when we
came to that place"--and again he glanced over his shoulder--"they
would not go farder. I tried to get the dogs on the outside, thinking
maybe the sheep were feart of the drop below; but the dogs wouldna
leave me. I tried to get the dogs to turn them. It was nae use,
whateffer. They tried to stop the rush, but even that they did
half-he'rted. I tell ye what--they dogs sympatheesed wi' the sheep."

He looked over his shoulder again and reined in. The horse stopped
without any terror, seemed indeed glad to halt and rest.

"They ran back helter-skelter as far as here," said the man, "where we
are now. And then the dogs worked again and gaithered them--but back
they wouldna go, sheep nor dogs. The upshot o't was that I got them up
there"--he pointed ahead towards a glen--"and into that fauld there
for the nicht, and in the morning I drove them across the island over
the hills instead. But this is what I stoppit for to show ye, seeing
ye felt like that. Look. Ye see the ruins of a house there?"

Below the cliff where I had felt as though gazed upon, where the horse
had shied and the dogs had trembled (which I had seen for myself), and
where the flock of sheep, as I had heard, succumbed to terror, I could
just pick out the low ruins of a cottage on the shore.

"It looks as if it had been between low and high tide," I said, for I
saw a line of seaweed trailed through the toppled parallelogram of
stones that had once been cottage walls.

"Oh, that's just the spring-tide mark, or the remains frae some unco
storm," he replied, and continued, "I don't know if it's any
explanation at all, but there used to be an auld wife lived there her
lee lane and ae nicht a ship was wreckit there. Naebody kens anything
aboot it. Two of the sailors were found exhausted a mile doon the
coast, and anither in Machrie Bay lashed tae a spar. They were the
only ones alive; the ithers were a' drooned. But in the morning after
that wreck the auld wife was found--just aboot where ye climbed intae
the cairt--wi' her throat cut."

I was about to ask, for he appeared to be at an end then, if there was
any suspicion that the wrecked sailors had had a hand in the atrocity,
when he went on:

"Naebody kens anything aboot it. I don't see that any of these sailors
that was picked up could have done it. One had lashed himself tae a
spar and hadna strength to loose himself. He was a' but by wi't. The
ither twa were lying exhausted a guid way south o' where she was found
wi' her shawl blown over her heid and her throat cut."

We were twisted round in the cart looking back at the place, which we
could clearly see from there, having passed into the curve of the bay.
All round the horseshoe sweep of the shore the waves rolled in with
foaming crests and that sound as of cheering.

"Get up," he said to the horse. He drove on a little way, then he
stopped. "Well, I'll have to drop you here," he said. "I go up the
glen."

Thanking him for the lift, I put foot to hub and leapt down to the
white road. Up the track to farm he went. As I tramped on I could
hear his voice now and then, with an encouragement to the horse, and
the roll and jolt of the cart over stones. Trudging on, I glanced back
at the point behind, across the curve of sand and pebbles where the
sea came shouting in. I felt a sense of relief, even on that day of
blazing sun, when the road took me over the next promontory. For a
long while as I walked I heard a dreary note in the sea-wind that had
escaped me earlier in the day, and when suddenly a cloud of fishing
gulls volleyed up, twinkling off-shore, mewing and calling, there
seemed something sinister as well as desolate in their voices.


X

The other day I met a lady who deplored that I do not play bridge.

"What will you do in your old age," she asked me, "if you do not play
bridge?"

I left it at that, trying to look doleful about my old age. I shall
probably, in memory, row a boat out of Millport till I arrive at that
glint upon the face of the waters, off Fairlie, that signifies the
sandbank there, and fish for flounders again; or climb Goatfell with
the heart and wind of youth, tack a lug-sail in Kilchattan Bay and
often visit, propping my old head with a withered hand, a certain
little seaport on the Clyde.

The _Queen Mary_ could not have come within a mile of the harbour. The
ships that lay by its old wharf were of a draught not much deeper than
that of the vessels in Columbus's fleet. There were a couple of
comparatively modern derricks, and there was a highly modern
contraption for loading coal into the gobarts, or the vessels that
were in direct descent from the coal-gobarts, a great steel fist that
opens as it drops into trucks, closes there and swings up full, with
just a sifting of black dust between the knuckles.

But there was also much loading and unloading done there by devices as
simple as those the Phoenicians knew. A rope, a pole, a pulley, and a
basket served the turn of the sailors of most of the smacks, men who
looked as though they belonged less to any given country than were
simply descendants of sea-rovers. Some wore little gold ear-rings.
Their sheath-knives, on hip, might have been bought of some
water-front ship chandler at Greenock, some little quay-side
_fournisseur de navire_ at Quimper, or in one of their own little
dusky stores across the cobbles.

Before the railway came it had been one of the chief ports of Glasgow,
ships from Jamaica and Virginia unloading their sugar and tobacco
there, and the carriers' carts coming and going. Ghosts of my ain folk
trod its planestanes. My mother's father and his father before him
(with John Galt's pawky eye on him) had expounded the gospel in
sermons--doctrinal, experimental, and prophetical--preached from
pulpits in that port. To see my great-aunts there--Janet and Margaret
Barclay--Daniel Macmillan (who founded the Macmillan publishing house
in London) often went, a hundred years ago. "I say all manner of
out-of-the-way things," he wrote to his brother Malcolm, "just to
pester them. Is that not amiable? It is such fun to see them open
their eyes." They often played to him as he lay on the sofa in their
drawing-room. "This does me more good than all the doctors," said he.

Edgar Allan Poe went to school there, strange though that might seem.
He, I am sure, would be aware of the rooks, before sunset, cawing
overhead from the foreshore to their tree-top villages inland.

With aeroplanes crossing the Atlantic, and liners like hotels (on
which one feels inclined to say "waiter" instead of "steward" at
table), and the cargo boats of to-day like liners of yesterday, doing
their fourteen knots, fitted with wireless and all modern
conveniences, my little seaport seems very near to Homer's sailors, to
Jason, to Odysseus. The men I saw there were very definitely in the
succession from Hakluyt's originals. Fishing boats, with their shining
load, tacked in and lay alongside, and the fishermen peddled their
catch through the town in barrows.

Much of the basic simplicity and directness of life remained. Along
the water-front the marine stores displayed iron bolts and nuts in the
windows. Seamen's boots and yellow and black oilskin coats hung
gleaming at the doors. The interiors were dark, with flicks of
brasswork reflecting light--ship's lanterns, gimbals with their
screws, or the locks on sea-chests. The smell was of tar, of ropes, of
tarpaulins and paints, of seaweed and the light off the sea flickered
over the houses facing the wharf.

Two streets away was the railway station, and beyond it the town had a
different feeling. Farmers' traps stood at hotel doors with pigs or
hens under nets behind the seats. Herds of cows went scliffing and
joggling past, driven by red-faced lads in corduroy or moleskin. The
men in the blue jerseys seldom came so far inland from home. Even
those who were old lived where they could see the little ships come
in, see, from the window, a red sail or a pointing bowsprit. They must
be able to hear a "yo-ho," or the clatter of a capstan, or the
chirping of blocks (that seaside sound so quaintly in tune with the
shrill piping note of a herring-gull) that tells of the tide being at
turn and the smacks preparing for sea.


XI

In a mustard-coloured dusk of gas-lit Glasgow (much like that one in
which I was introduced to Fortuny) my father brought home to me, from
the Athenum Library, Catlin's _North American Indians_ and McLean's
_The Indians of Canada_.

Thereafter was a change in the neighbourhood of my week-end
playground. The hill of Ballygeoch was no longer the knob of rock on
Robinson Crusoe's island whence I searched an imaginary sea for a
sail. Ballygeoch became a butte of the Western plains where I looked
out over the domain of Blackfoot and Cree.

That I might have more data for my play I begged for more books to a
like tune. Thus Ballantyne and Butler--of _The Great Lone Land_--came
my way. A serial story in a _Boy's Own Annual_ of that period, called
_The Silk-Robed Cow_ (which was a buffalo cow), helped. The old family
atlas made me conversant with the whereabouts of the far-scattered
trading-posts--from the frontier posts of Millbrae, by way of the Bad
Lands of Giffnock Quarries, to the Mearns Moors--which were the
rolling prairies of the far west.

According to accounts that I read of that company known as The
Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's
Bay it seemed that they had their adventuring done for them chiefly by
Scots; and the annals of their rivals, the North-West Company and the
X.Y., were starred with such names as Findlay and Fraser, Stewart and
Mackenzie, Livingston and MacDougall, Angus Shaw and Donald McTavish.

In my late teens, at the urge of a restlessness both national and of
my family (all my folks, on both sides, were world wanderers), I got
leave of absence--deaving them near to death till I got it, I
fear--and within two weeks of dropping Rathlin astern (not without a
gulp in my throat) I saw a camp of veritable Blackfeet, saw the
smoky-topped tepees, the herds of their horses, blacks and greys,
roans and pintos, sorrels and blues.

For a year or two I wandered in the West, no settler, working in
lumber camps and railroad camps--arduous work, enough to make or break
one. Briefly I ran a store for a man too lazy, or too fond of beer and
skittles and sitting around with the boys, to run it himself. The
confinement between walls was irksome, however, so again it was roll
and go. I went into the hills on old Indian trails and had my
introduction to the odour of red-willow smoke.

Then, homesick, I suppose, I turned east. At Montreal I shipped in a
cattle boat which sprang a leak in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and
helped to comfort frightened long-horned steers and perturbed bulls
while a steamer, fortunately sighting us (for that was before the days
of wireless) stood by, and another, called out of the horizon by the
blasts of our duetting sirens, went for assistance.

At last it came. Tugs towing enormous salvaging scows thrashed down
the gulf to us. On one of these (with the steers and the bulls) I
returned to Montreal. Back there, I reconsidered the notion of
returning to the Old Country, tossing a coin for a decision; and on
another cattle boat (laden with steers and bulls, stallions and
sheep), with a return ticket guaranteed, I saw, for the second time in
my life, the land of my forefathers loom up through mists.

It was not till some years later that I tried, in my book, _The S.S.
Glory_, to give an account of life on these old cattle boats that
brought meat on the hoof instead of in refrigeration across the
Atlantic; but immediately on my arrival in Scotland I wrote a series of
sketches dealing with those youthful stravaigings and it seemed that the
editor (of the Glasgow _Weekly Herald_) who accepted them was, unaware,
to cancel what my father had set agoing--for the publication of these
sketches led to the offer of a job on the staff of a newspaper. So I
remained in Scotland instead of returning to the West, and journalism
carried me from Glasgow to Edinburgh, to Dundee, to London. That hegira
of my teens was of the past, almost as dream-like as my hobbledehoy
flights to the Blackfoot country of the Mearns Moors.

A few years later I was offered a roving commission through Western
Canada--that I had not even expected to see again. Of course I went,
and what changes I found! Wheat was ousting cattle. The great lone
land had become the great loan land with real estate men more in
evidence than Hudson's Bay Company factors. The buffalo-wallows (those
dimples in the prairies in which once the buffalo took their
mud-baths) were ploughed under. The buffalo had gone before my first
visit; the wallows were gone on my second. But there was still romance
in reality there for me. And still, from lieutenant-governors in the
land to brakesmen on the trains rolling through it, name after name
was of the heather--such as Bruce and Wallace.

I have met visitors to that region who complain that it has "no
history," but I had read some of its history, had read it in the old
Mitchell Library in Glasgow, and in the British Museum in London. In
the Public Library of a changed Calgary I read more on that return.
Human history, I grant, does not go back there so far as in the Old
Country, but in relatively brief time it is packed and rich, and to a
Scot especially so. The Douglas firs were named after a young gardener
of Perth who went to Kew Gardens and there was asked to go West to
make a collection of the flora. From old Fort Colville in Washington
(that used to be Astoria) to the middle of British Columbia (that used
to be New Caledonia) he wandered alone with his vasculum, a
buffalo-robe for bed. Fraser River, Mackenzie River lapsing north,
received their names from Scots explorers paddling their canoes,
cutting their trails, into unknown land. Place-names there, instead of
mossy walls, hint of history--and that history continued to fascinate
me. My hobby was the collecting of volumes on it and on what the
booksellers' catalogues style Amerindiana.

After the war, free again, much as when I used to tramp out to the
Mearns Moors, I returned to the West. I went to a country fair in
Saskatchewan where kilted pipers opened the proceedings; attended a
Hogmanay celebration in Alberta at which fiddlers played for us
strathspeys and reels, schottische and petronella; was asked, the year
after that, to "say a few words" at a St. Andrew's dinner, and wished
I had some Gaelic, for the Gaelic speech was round me, though those
who spoke it had never seen Scotland--sons and daughters, born in
Canada, of those cast out during the Clearances.

"What do they know of England who only England know?" Kipling once
asked. Scotland, thought I, is a kingdom of the mind. I thought so
again, a year or two later, at a Highland gathering at Banff--the one
in Alberta, not in Scotland. When Robert Burnett gave us his rendering
of the ballad _Edward_, and Jeanne Dusseau and Mary Stuart sang
(although it was Bow River, not Deveron, that rippled outside the
windows in the moonlight), Scotland was with us.

I went to a Burns' nicht gathering. Pipers piped in the haggis. I
talked with old men who remembered the days of the buffalo, who
remembered the Red River cart brigades and how the screaming of their
wheels sounded over the horizons before they appeared in the still
immensity, elderly men who recalled also how the Hudson's Bay Company
factors donned the kilt--the garb of old Gaul, jabot, ruffles, and
all--on days of celebration in the heart of the wilderness.

What a cavalcade! What a pageant! Alexander Ross with his Okanagan
Indian wife, who became quite the _grande dame_ when they retired at
Fort Garry; Macaulay at Jasper House with his library; Mackay at Fort
Ellice; Colin Fraser at St. Ann's; William MacTavish, governor of
Assiniboia; Colonel MacLeod, coming West with the Red-Coats to save
the aborigines from the whisky peddlers and naming his fort Calgarry,
later to be called Calgary, after his birthplace; an engineer of the
name of Fleming surveying the railway route; Scots foremen from Bruce
County and Glengarry, Ontario, bossing the track-layers.

But I have wandered far from that happy fog-enfolded and entranced
evening in Glasgow when my father brought home for me, from the
Athenum Library, Catlin's _North American Indians_ and McLean's book.




PART II

_Still Scotland_




STILL SCOTLAND


I

Regret over the removal of my folks from Glasgow, where I had many
friends, to Edinburgh, where I had none, was eased by what I knew of the
capital's past. You can touch the walls, there, brushed by Dunbar's
sleeve in passing, hear your voice echo in closes where Johnson boomed
as he _sir-ed_ his correction to some remark by Boswell, go your way
forgetting the present with ghosts, at ease with all, even those of the
most troublesome or dangerous men, they being no longer harmful, merely
as characters in an old story, names in an old song.

I had to admit, even though the admission seemed slightly traitorous
to Glasgow (a city I had learnt to love) that the paving-stones of
Edinburgh had an average appearance of cleanliness not the norm in
Glasgow. There was something very pleasing in the sight of these,
bone-dry and bleached after rain.

Yet the name Edinburgh conjures up for me less the city than the
Pentland Hills. They undulate south-west, through Midlothian and into
Peebleshire east and Lanarkshire west, mounting over eighteen hundred
feet and fanning to a breadth that wavers between a little less and a
little more than four miles. From their summits you may see, northward
over the carse where Edinburgh lies veiled in smoke (the castle
protruding on its crag), the Forth, blue or grey as the day decrees,
and across the Forth the "Kingdom of Fife," the contours of the Ochils
and, in purple distance that is the Highlands, call by name Ben Aan,
Ben Ledi, Ben Voirlich, Ben Lomond, fifty miles away. For a humid land
that is fair visibility.

Such is the landscape from Allermuir or Caerketton, with startled
swallows (that have their half-yearly homes along the cliff-fronts
there) like rial dolphins overhead. From Scald Law or Carnethy, looking
south and west, the view is down heathery slopes and over the tops of
copses and the roofs of Penicuik (the film of smoke at Leadburn only a
trifling smudge) to far fields backed by streaks of green and purple,
and the swell of other hills--the Moorfoot Hills and Lammermuir:

      "I saw rain falling, and the rainbow drawn on
          Lammermuir. . . ."

As with most parts of these islands historical associations are on all
sides, even when there is nothing to be seen but bracken-filled dips,
knolls of heather, brown shoulders of hill, and nothing to hear but the
bleat of sheep, the bubbling of a morass, the curlew's whistling call,
and the "pee-wee!" of the crested lapwing. Monk's Burn tells,
presumably, of an old-time rest-house for Cistercian monks from Glasgow.
When one comes to details in such matters it is advisable to say
_presumably_, for there are as many opinions regarding details of past
history as on the history we are making to-day. On the hill above Monk's
Burn (a little to south from the right-of-way through the pass from
Bavelaw to Nine Mile Burn) is a rough font-stone, filled by the rain.

Temple Hill perpetuates the memory of the Templars, once powerful in
the neighbourhood. Causewayend is believed by many to mark the end of
a Roman way; and against those who doubt their belief they bring the
evidence of coins of Vespasian and Marcus Aurelius unearthed near by.
Colinton is, of course, the Colintoun near which Cromwell's army
camped, whence they marched after the Scots towards Corstorphine:

    ". . . but because the English feared it was too near the
    castle of Edinburgh they would not hazard battail there;
    wherefore both armies marched to Gogar . . . and played
    each upon other with their great guns."

Men have played each upon other with great guns in many places round
the Pentlands. It was at Rullion Green, over the fanning base of hill
near Glencorse, that the Covenanters, numbering nine hundred horse and
foot, were routed by Dalziel's forces of six hundred horse and two or
three thousand foot in the year 1666. Some in their flight were killed
by peasantry toward Penicuik; others, taking to the hills, were caught
in bogs and perished in them. One was succoured by a cottar on the
Medwin Burn but would not stay there, pushed on along the hills
determined to win home to Lesmahagow. A mile from the cot his strength
failed and he lay down and died. There the cottar buried him, and a
hundred and six years later his body was disinterred from the
preserving peat, reburied on the Black Law, and a stone was set up
over him to tell his story.

On September 15th, 1745 (the hills would be tawny and the grouse
chirring), the long exhortation from the pulpit of Glencorse Church
interrupted by news of the coming of the "wild heelandmen." Farm
produce was commandeered by them from the crofts nestling at the hill
foot. Inns were looted of their ale and usquebaugh. Protests were
lodged and the Prince promised punishment upon the thieves. And
sometimes farmers found small parties of the invaders--twos and
threes--and looted them of their loot. Ever and again, since the
ice-fields slid away northward from the hills, leaving their
hieroglyphics scrawled on the rocks, men's voices have been raised
loud there. Many volleys have been fired for the hills to echo a
moment. The shouting has gone past; the old quiet has reigned again.

When last I walked from Eddleston by West Linton, the melodious
chatter of Eddleston Water for company, and up through the Cauld Stane
Slap, motor cars had come but had not conquered, and no one, thought
I, descending the western slope of Pentlands above Harper-Rig, however
little blessed (or cursed) with a feeling for place, but must feel
there as though he walked into an earlier century. He would not have
to be told, looking down over the ridges, that the ribbon below was of
a turnpike road. He would hardly be astonished to bear in the keen air
the sound of a post horn, to see suddenly, across the distance, the
speeding bulk of the stage-coach from the Grassmarket for Clydeside,
to hear a clatter of pails come from the yard of the inn below. Little
Vantage, Bol o' Bear--these names and their like, quaint to our ears,
belong to other days. They are the names of ghosts of inns. The
turnpike road was falling into the state of the old drove roads then,
these roads that spasmodically show, winding green among the heather,
lost, glimpsed again. Only so, in patches, can we see the past. Yet
for those who are alive to-day it is less, perhaps, what men have done
along the flanks of these hills than just the hills that matter, with
their quiet, their odour of wild mint, the drumming of their burns
that were before the drums of Cope and Cromwell.

One day of a phenomenally dry summer I tramped out from Edinburgh to
Colinton and over the saddle to Glencorse reservoir. Because of the
heat the sheep crouched anxiously in the shade of bushes. Even the
mauve butterflies (or day-moths), no bigger than your little
finger-nail, seemed languid in their flutterings. Everywhere was the
odour of scorched grass and heather stalks. The hills had the quality
of old tapestries. What lurks in Robert Reid's _Ballad of Kirkbride_,
in Wordsworth's _The Solitary Reaper_, in Lady Nairne's _The Rowan
Tree_, in Violet Jacob's _The Gean Trees_, was everywhere that day--a
spirit on the basking rolls, an influence in the blue air, an
emanation from the soil.

The sheet of water there is really a reservoir. In that parched August
the Logan and March burns had shrivelled, the chapel of Saint
Katherine (or all that was left of it), usually submerged by the
reservoir, was disclosed for the first time in many years. I traced
out the place of the walls and, scraping the sun-dried mud from the
chiselling on a great tombstone, read the date, 1623. Some lettering
on it I could not decipher, but a man like Old Mortality whom I
encountered later in the saddle of the hills toward Currie, and with
whom I chatted a while, assured me it was _Blessed are the dead who
die in the Lord_.


II

Further afield than the Pentlands I often went. There was, for example,
that June day on which, just before the church bells of Edinburgh began
to ring for morning service, I _took the gate_ for Peebles.

There were still more sparrows than people on the pavements round the
Register House. I had crossed the Bridges and was well out beyond the
university and the blank blinds of Thin's before the iron clamour
began in the air overhead, and the rustle of Sabbath gowns and squeak
and tip-tap of new shoes filled the streets.

The sun made a promisory patch of brightness on the shoulder of
Arthur's Seat, glimpsed down side streets and over roofs that trailed
films of blue smoke. The din of the greater church bells turned into a
solemn roar, and the lesser jangled on rapidly. I thought of minnows
squirting about among carp. I began to be my own pacemaker.

"Thus far shall I get before the bells stop," I thought, and legged it
out, and I had sighted the Braids and the dome of Blackford Hill
Observatory by the time quiet again descended on the city.

For a moment I felt lost and thought of Adam cast forth, but the
climbing of the steep last hill out of town gave me hope; I seemed
more like Bunyan's Christian on the way. I made up on a young man in a
Norfolk jacket as he was pushing his bicycle up the last lap of that
climb--and he made up on me a little later (where the hedgerows began
on either side), pedalling easily and sitting erect. The loose
flapping belt of his coat flickered away ahead on a long straight
stretch and just as he took the curve he free-wheeled, then glided
from view. A thrush (or, in the Scots, a mavis) tossed a roulade from
the hedge, showed his speckled breast and flew away.

Three cyclists went by as I reached the curve of the road. Of the
Norfolk jacket there was no sign ahead. It had taken the next distant
bend. Birds were singing, eddies of wind fluttered, leaves danced in
the light. I passed a heavy man who sat on a gate smoking and
spitting, and had tramped on not many yards when I heard a volley of
profanity and sculduddery from ahead. Looking to the road, instead of
into the copses and across the fields, I saw a couple of whippets
coming like small racehorses towards me. Behind them ran a group of
men of the same genus as he who sat on the gate. As the dogs went by I
looked over my shoulder to watch their amazing movements, and noticed
that the man behind had come down from his perch and was in the middle
of the road waving a flag.

The backers of the dogs passed, all giving tongue with scant
vocabulary but, clearly, with one or two pet and inappropriate
adjectives. A cyclist male and a cyclist female overtook me with a
flurrying of rubber tyres in the dust, and to judge by their
voices--which had the tone of making conversation--and by a glimpse I
had of the expression on their faces, they had come upon these men
during the height of the argument regarding which whippet had won. But
their embarrassment over what they heard may be condoned, I think, for
that was years ago.

Above, with a creak of wing and a sudden upward swerve, went a
lapwing, and called. As the smell of balsam that comes aboard when
nearing Nova Scotia; as the first smell of peat-smoke that subtly
enters the railway compartment when travelling into the Highlands; as,
nearing London, the first gigantic cow made of board, standing in the
fields and announcing So-and-So's tinned milk--so was that bird's cry
to me. It promised an arrival. It promised that soon I would come to
the moors. The Pentland Hills bounded the view westward--crest after
crest (of Castle Law, Turnhouse Hill, Carnethy--like a great brown
bear-skin spread to the sun--Scald Law) and base after base into the
blue of the country toward which I journeyed.

Quietly these ranges almost undid my resolve to go to Peebles for I
knew how the Logan Burn would be drumming down the gorge above
Glencorse, the tall grass waving along the ridge above Nine Mile Burn;
but neither the hills nor the invitation at the cross-roads made me
depart from my original intention suddenly conceived in Auld Reekie
over breakfast. The road to Carlops, the road to West Linton invited;
but I held on to Leadburn, where the cultivated fields fell back on
either hand and whence the Pentlands had the appearance of marching
off at a tangent under high pink clouds that towered into vaporous
snowy Alps. Streaks of ochre and purple and green filled the wide
prospect to the Moorfoot Hills south-east. The wind blew keen, chill,
despite the sun, and up and down, and to and fro with their leisurely
flapping and sudden swerves, abrupt as butterflies, the lapwings
wavered and called. It was the cry for the scene, lonely yet happy,
somewhat tinged with melancholy, yet ecstatic.

The ecstasy of the day was with me when, Eddleston passed and the
roofs and steeples of Peebles ahead, the sound came across fields of
church bells ringing for evening service there. Then, cycling toward
me, I saw the young man in the Norfolk jacket whom I had overtaken
when he was pushing his bike uphill where Edinburgh ended and who had
left me behind where the first hedges began. Somewhat weary he looked,
and I wondered how far he had been. To Yarrow and St. Mary's Loch
perhaps, I hazarded. He, on his Side, by the way in which his glance
showed sudden recognition, recalled where he had passed me in the
morning. He considered the dust on my shoes as he pedalled by.

With all the bells for evening service ringing I came into Peebles
High Street.


III

Among the best of all leisurely occupations is to lean on Peebles
Bridge and watch, and listen to, the stream flowing past.

Andrew Lang loved that sound. There seems to be a cult of detraction
of his work, in these days, among some of his compatriots. Beyond the
border it is otherwise. Max Beerbohm, though he wrote an account that
was not without malice of his meetings with Lang, has recorded his
superlative admiration for the translations from Theocritus, Bion and
Moschus; and H. V. Morton in his _Scotland Again_ wrote:

    "It has always been a mystery to me why Scotland . . . has
    extended to Lang only a lukewarm admiration. He was a genius
    who--with the possible exception of his book on St. Andrews,
    the town he adored--illuminated every subject that attracted
    his fertile and questing mind."

E. V. Lucas recently wrote of Lang that "he truly possessed all the
talents," and added, with his bent for anthology and selection, "I
wish that we could have one of these new omnibus books containing his
best works."

That would indeed be a fat volume, but I hope some publisher will
consider the suggestion.

Manifold were his interests; anthropology, history, fishing (somewhere
he tells us that on Tweedside a "fish" means a salmon), the origin of
religions, the Greek anthology, golf, ballads and ballades, curling,
and much else from Homer's wine-dark sea to the last crinkly fresh
carnation such as we see in his buttonhole in Alvin Langdon Coburn's
photograph of him.

One's thoughts roam back, leaning on Peebles Bridge: Andrew Lang,
Veitch, Shairp (of _The Bush Aboon Traquair_), Mungo Park (sometime a
medical practitioner in Peebles), Alexander Smith, who heard:

      ". . . something more in the stream as it ran
            Than water breaking on stones."

At the cross-roads for Traquair and Yarrow is the Gordon Arms, one of
those "inanimate objects that have participated." On its walls once
drifted the shadows of the Shirra and the Ettrick Shepherd as they
walked slowly down the road, the ageing hand of Scott heavy on Hogg's
shoulder. These two had in common a great love of the borders--the
land, the place, the scene.

          "'And what saw ye there
          At the bush aboon Traquair:
      Or what did you hear that was worth your heed?'
          'I heard the cushie croon
          Through the gowden afternoon
      And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale of Tweed.'"

Far beyond Scott and Hogg the mind goes probing when leaning on
Peebles Bridge, the sunset golden above the red plantations and
Neidpath, and red and gold coils of light in the river pools. The
cross of Peebles was erected before the days of Bruce. From Cademuir,
that hump of hill above the stream to south, the Romans looked down on
the winding river. The Beltane Sports of May, held in Peebles,

      "At Beltane, when ilk bodie bownis
      To Peblis to the Play,
      To heir the singin and the soundis,
      The solace, suth to say. . . ."

have their origin in very ancient days, are in direct descent from
pagan festivities before Baal.


IV

Once upon a time there were no motor cars in Scotland. My memory of
those days takes me to Aberdeenshire, a shire I did not ever revisit
after the motor car age arrived. It remains for me, thus, honkless in
memory.

The train I travelled in from southward was late. All the vehicles at
the station seemed to have been engaged in advance. I walked up to
Union Street, where, instead of a vista of lit windows, there was just
the diminishing perspective of void pavements under the kerb-side
lamps. To be sure a door here and there, with dull glass panels
illuminated, told of the interior warmth of a hotel where perhaps a
sleepy waiter was sitting up to greet a delayed guest, but it was my
hope--it had been all day since the train glided out from under the
glass roof of the London terminus--to complete the journey in one
swoop; and the city of Aberdeen was not my goal, only the "jumping-off
place" for it.

The last cab was gone from the rank in Union Street. I put my plight to
a policeman, monumental in his greatcoat, stolidly breaking the keen
draught at a corner, and he directed me to a livery stable--but no
answer came to my knocking or my hail except the kicking of a horse's
hoofs. Under the gas-jet that fluttered in its glass globe over the
entrance to the mews I stood on the cobbles and quoted to myself:

      "I have been here before,
      But when or how I cannot tell."

Was this a case of inherited memory and the memory very dim indeed?
No, I did not think so. Once at an exhibition in Edinburgh in which
there was a house set up in the style of some old house of years past
I essayed the tirling pin on its door and had the emotion suddenly,
with the thing in my hand and hearing the noise it made, that there
were corpuscles in me from far beyond bell-pushes, bell-pulls, and
knockers. It seemed I had, long ago, in circumstances forgotten,
tirled a tirling-pin. This was different from that. There was no
suggestion of the possibility of pre-existence or the probability of
inherited memory.

The memory, I decided, was only of many a tale of romance. Standing
among these wavering shadows--for the gas-jet in the big glass globe
overhead was got at and agitated by the eddying night wind--I realised
that I was as a character all ready for Chapter One of a long Scott
romance. Then a window sash creaked and a head showed in the wall of
the wynd above me.

"What are ye wanting?" a husky voice inquired from aloft.

There was no doubt about it. It was Chapter One. Would that Andrew
Lang and A. E. W. Mason were lurking in an entry looking on, thought
I, before I answered that question, for here and now they would
receive the jog toward another _Parson Kelly_. The creak of that sash,
the dim projection of that head, the kicking of the horse's hoofs
within, the interchange of dim light and shadow in that alley. . . .

I explained that I was wanting a conveyance. The voice at the window
informed me that it had no connection with the deserted stables. From
what I could see of his tousled head, I decided that I had got that
character for a new Jacobite romance out of bed, so apologised for the
din I had created. He mumbled an acceptance of my apology and told me
that he didna ken where I could get a conveyance. By his humming and
hawing I had a suspicion that some one should have been there, and
that the man at the window had a private guess where that missing one
was to be found. Despite the fact that he had "nae connection" with
the stables he yet asked me abruptly where I might be going. I argued
that the inquiry came less from empty curiosity than to help him to
decide whether or not I was a customer for whom the people who ran
that livery stable would be grateful at so late an hour.

When I replied that I wanted to get to Echt that night there was a
long pause. The fare was not exactly to be sneezed at, Echt being
about twelve miles or so from Aberdeen. I awaited his next remark, but
when he broke our silence it was to advise me to try elsewhere. I
surmised that he had come to the decision that it was better to lose a
client for a friend than to run the risk of being damned by that
friend for being kept out of bed. He gave me full directions by which
to find another livery stable. The creak of the window responded to my
thanks and, thinking of the Shirra, and of Andrew of the brindled hair
and his clean-shaven English friend, I came back to the main
thoroughfare from which I had gone fumbling into that mews, to find
that the policeman had strolled after me. He was standing at the
corner of the alley talking comfortingly to a cold cat that leant
atilt and rubbed against him.

"Nae luck?" he asked.

"No, not there, but I have been advised to try So-and-So's."

"Aye, that's richt. Ye might get a machine there," said he, using
_machine_ in the Scots sense as applicable to almost everything on
wheels except a perambulator.

Following the directions of the man at the window, which were ratified
and amplified by the policeman, I came to another wynd with another
flickering gas-jet set in a glass case and more Mryonesque shadows.
One window was lit and the interior glow made plain the legend
thereon--_Vehicles for Hire_.

I opened the door and found a clerk in attendance in a little office
that consisted of a telephone receiver (telephones had arrived though
no motor cars), a speaking-tube, a tall stool, some tall ledgers and a
counter. All was ready for business, exactly as if I were in some
wide-awake new mining town of America where _Open Day and Night_ is a
proud motto. The clerk was reading in an evening paper and smoking a
blend of stationery and tobacco, the acrid fumes of which got into my
lungs and set me coughing, newly out of the good, keen air. He nipped
off the red end of his smoke with thumb and forefinger, and asked what
he could do for me.

Within a quarter of an hour a great-coated Jehu thrust his head in at
the door to announce that all was ready. The horse was fresh, tossing
his head to the tangling night outside. The dog-cart lamps burned
cheerily and sparkled on the harness. I climbed to a seat and the
driver tucked us both up. Then we were off.

In Union Street I looked for my constable to shout to him, "It's all
right now," but there were only the dead windows in the blank walls
and the rows of street lights. The whole place was like a stage scene
awaiting the players.

The rhythm of the horse's hoofs was excellent but very loud and sharp.
The stones of Aberdeen are hard. Hearing that reverberating clip-clap I
realised that I was truly in the Granite City. I imagined a trail of
awakened sleepers in beds to left of us and beds to right of us. When we
passed a dim-lit window I wondered if we disturbed at his construing
some student of the old university (founded in 1495, by the way), or
perhaps a nurse, worried for some "sick body" even more than the "sick
body" was disturbed, for those who are very ill seem often hardly aware
even of noises, our raucous actualities all remote from them.

The perspective of the lamps stretched before us in converging lines.
With a shocking abruptness, as we came near the last, the clatter of
the shod hoofs ceased. The sudden cessation of the clatter was really
so--shocking, shattering. To the horse, there was dual cause for
amazement; the loud sound dwindled and under his hoofs was earth
instead of stone. He snorted and reared, jibbed; but being ably and
kindly pacified he suddenly swung valiantly forward again and fell
once more into his rhythmic stride. The beat of his hoofs was the
merest pianissimo to the earlier clatter and we all--horse and driver,
and I--were as ghosts in a world not realised.

The city lamps having been left behind, our eyes were no longer
blinded to what was above us. The little stars grew larger and others,
unseen before, were suddenly created. The cold, high, dark-blue and
velvet-like cavity of the heavens was glittering with them. There was
Orion atilt with his belt and sword; there was the Plough with its
pointers. The trapeze of the Pleiades was clearer than I have seen it
anywhere, save at sea in the tropics or on the high plateau of the
American west. Cassiopeia was a great W, or an M, as in some stellar
pyrotechnic display.

I leant back, cast my head back, the better to see all that--and had
the experience of a lifetime. Aberdeen does not mean to me woollen
goods, or such ballads as _Cauld Kale in Aberdeen_, or even granite,
so much as stars and the whirl of the Milky Way. The beat of the
horse's hoofs went on in perfect rhythm, without a slur, so muffled
that it was more like the sound of wings. It seemed that we had left
the solid earth and were urging along through space. I think we must
have had the pick of the livery-stable steeds for that drive. For many
miles, with the exception of the one jib at the beginning where causey
and earth met, and another when something ran in the hedge, that
gelding went at a steady and swift gait that gave the impression of
being tireless. Our destination might have been Jupiter. We were
surely heading that way, between Taurus and Andromeda, when the driver
said, "Here we are!"

Yes, there we were--back to earth. I looked ahead and saw by the
roadside a black bulk of a house, a splash of light from an open door
stretching over a space of frosty gravel. There were lights also in
the windows. A faint odour of hot scones and oatcakes came to me. I
had never been to Echt before, it was as new to me as Jupiter would
have been, but all it was to me then was a dark base for a dome of
glittering and distant worlds. But the room into which I was ushered
was clearly on this planet by evidence of a portrait of Queen Victoria
and a large photograph of a Highland gathering with some one
performing a sword dance.

It is, perhaps, not so wonderful as driving between the planets but
there is a great charm in arriving thus at any place for the first
time, without any conception of what it looks like. It was imagined
that my delay was due to the fact that I had dined in Aberdeen and so
no dinner awaited me, only something "to warm ye after the drive."
Having sampled buttered scones--those with a sift of flour over
them--and oatcakes, and drunk a cup of tea and nibbled a piece of
cheese (for still, as the grumbling Johnson found on his travels, the
Scots "pollute" tea with cheese) I went to the bedroom that awaited me.

Before turning in I raised the blind and looked out. Nothing was to be
seen so far as this world was concerned. All was quiet. Orion had
moved a little way and the Plough had taken a fresh tilt. Only the
frosty air sent me from the window to bed.

I seemed for some time still to be coasting the solar system on the
winged horse--then poised, Mohammed-like, in the midst of immensity.
Pigeons on the window-sill woke me in the morning upon the planet
called Earth.




PART III

_Four Men--and some Horses_




FOUR MEN--AND SOME HORSES


I

    "Richard Bullock, the original 'Deadwood Dick,' has died in
    a Californian sanatorium, at the age of 75. He was of Cornish
    birth."--_Daily Paper._

Anatole France once said that he proposed to speak of himself apropos
of Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, and Goethe. I would somewhat adapt the
phrase and say that I here propose to speak of Deadwood Dick apropos
of us all. My _moi_ will surely serve for many men.

When I was a boy there was a great wave of objection to all save hard
facts. At its height it caused even _Robinson Crusoe_ to be barred to
some boys. They had to plead that he was founded on Alexander Selkirk
(or Selcraig) of Fife before his bonfire on a rocky ledge and his
coloured parrot could be theirs. The yearnings for picturesque romance
were responsible for many young people's knowledge of Borrow's _With
the Bible in Spain_. To the well-intentioned elders the title was
that book's passport. To the young people, as they read, the title
seemed as what, during the war, we called camouflage. Sometimes,
indeed, the young enjoyed it so obviously, pored over it as they could
not pore over _Ministering Children_, that suspicions were aroused. As
for Jules Verne: he must be mentioned in spite of those who, missing
the point, may say that here is a lumping together of names without
"critical faculty." As for Jules Verne, then, he was looked upon too
often not as the great author of that trilogy _Dropped from the
Clouds_, _Abandoned_, _The Secret of the Island_, but as--I do not use
the phrase in any but the literal sense--a Damned Liar.

In those days there arose to our succour a firm called the Aldine
Press, which published the "O'er Land and Sea Library," the
"Ching-Ching Library," (for once I am moved to obey the advertisements
of a certain typewriter firm and put the force of emphasis into my
typed matter) AND the "Deadwood Dick Library."

One day in Glasgow years ago I espied a brightness among the
schoolbooks of one of my fellows, and the brightness lured me.

"What's that?" I inquired.

He produced a slim booklet, which he handed to me. I held it, I gazed
upon it, I felt a wonderful--how shall I call it?--something deeper
than thrill. That bibliophile, my grandfather, William Waterson Niven,
must surely have smiled down on me from Elysium. He would understand.
My parson grandfather on the other side of the house may even have
done so too.

On the cover of this find in the realms of print was the glamorous
picture of the head of a man. He wore a big hat and a mask was over
his forehead and cheek-bones. The eyes looked out splendidly. Over him
was written:

    DEADWOOD DICK

(I should like the printer to put his name in the centre of the page),
and underneath were the words,

    THE OUTLAW OF THE BLACK HILLS

"You can have it if you like," said my schoolfellow. He told me part
of the story but only enough to whet my interest. "I won't tell it
all. I don't want to spoil the reading for you," said he.

I have forgotten how it was that I knew I had to keep my possession
secret from the adults in whose care I was at that time and it is
scarcely worth while to fidget over a _rsum_ of the possible
collection of reasons. The possible reasons are obvious. I recall that
sometimes I urgently desired to communicate the stories for the
benefit and delectation of those very adults who condemned such form
of bookishness. From the brink of that self-exposure I retired, on
such occasions, holding my peace. The only way to communicate, if
communicate I must, would be to say that a boy had told me the yarn!
But such a method might have led to complications and I realised that
silence was best. I recall that when I was at home with my folks and
my propensity for penny dreadfuls was discovered, my father did not
larrup me for it. On the contrary he gave me pennies to buy the
things, dipped into them himself, heels on the mantelpiece in his
reading pose, and discussed with me their merits--or demerits. Looking
back on those adventures in criticism I suspect he was probably trying
to wean me from them in a man to man fashion.

How I cherished my Deadwood Dick! Well do I remember the shop under
the Caledonian Railway Bridge in Argyle Street with a bright window
full of him and his fellows. But even in fiction his terrestrial life
could not last for ever and his son (_Deadwood Dick Junior_) lacked
some of his sterling qualities, although bringing other sterling
qualities that the father lacked. Dick junior was a detective,
retrieving the family honour, the father having been a hold-up man. _A
chacun son gout_--mine was Deadwood Dick. I have forgotten exactly how
he robbed the stage-coach that ran from the Platte through the
sandhills of northern Nebraska and on into the Black Hills and
Deadwood. I have forgotten even if the express messenger was killed by
him, but I have never forgotten the country into which he led me. I
think, though it is long since I conned these classic volumes, that
the descriptions of the mining camps must have been well done. I know
that the first mining camps I saw, when I went west, reminded me, in
the most insistent way, of those cherished booklets.

When I was a boy and could travel only on the atlas, Deadwood Dick
took me up winding roads between scattered bull-pines into
quick-rising hills. The trees were very tall. The forest glades were
very quiet. I sometimes wish I had a complete set of the stories in my
library now to turn to occasionally from some of the discoveries of
the coteries which are thrust at us with an intolerance worse than
that which accompanied the advocacy of _Ministering Children_. What
are these compared with Deadwood Dick donning his mask and riding down
the North Platte road in the golden light of youth?

His flights into the hills were tremendous. They atoned a hundredfold
for the egg-like weals upon our wrists delivered by a soulless
mathematical master for deficiencies in trigonometry. By the valour of
Deadwood Dick I learnt how to take a trouncing from that callous
teacher. It was, by the way, only a literature master, I remember, who
had any sympathy with our affection for the Outlaw of the Black Hills.
Finding us at our devotions he used to tell us of books that would
delight more, seeing we liked these, instead of robbing us of them and
chastising us for possessing them.

To return to Deadwood Dick: he led me through the mountains, they
drawing closer and wildly dark. He turned aside from the wagon-road
where a trail led off. That trail was fairly clear. Here and there
between tree-tops was a glimpse of a mountain wall beyond. Shafts of
sunlight swept down into these hushed "mountain fastnesses." From that
trail again he went on, after stopping and listening in the silence a
moment and breathing his horse. _Breathing his horse, watering his
horse_: what good phrases they are! No boy and no healthy man but
should be moved at the sounds. I followed Dick through the solitudes
of tall timber awash with the scent of balsam, on into the thickest
forest, on into a caon. Caon is another great word. It is one of the
_open sesames_.

Up this caon, then (the stairs up to, and the corridor of the top
flat, leading to my bedroom, used to be the caon), Deadwood Dick
guided me. He went over a "divide" (at the top of the stairs), and
came down into a "pocket" in the hills, a grassy little valley (where
the passage widened), and there, having unsaddled, he left his horse
free to graze. My rocking-horse, which I had grown beyond, stood there
and had not, at that time, passed to a little pensioner of my people.

Deadwood Dick strode to some bushes and breasted into their midst. I
strode to my bedroom door and breasted against it, having first turned
the handle. The bushes whipped back into place and right ahead was a
precipice and a cave--for Dick. I presume he kept his treasure trove in
the cave but I have forgotten the details of his loot, what he gave me,
to last for ever, was a horse, big timber, and silent mountain paths.

In my cave (my little room) was carefully _cached_ in different places
my treasure trove, and that trove was various numbers of the Aldine
and kindred publications. There were one or two other heroes there.
One I recall was "Always on Hand, the Sportive Sport of the
Foot-Hills." He was a wonderful fellow, for ever arriving in the nick
of time. His Colt was a forty-five calibre one and he rested the
barrel of it on his left forearm, the left hand being turned towards
the people whom he caused to leap round when he exclaimed, "Ha-ha!";
and on that palm was the word _Always_ printed. But Deadwood Dick was,
to my mind, more of "the goods." He was the touchstone. By him I
measured "Always on Hand," Jack Harkaway, and the rest.

I shall never forget my joy when once the bell-pulls went wrong and a
man came and felt along the walls of the attic rooms, then, with a
look of satisfaction, bent down and made careful incisions into the
wallpaper with a penknife, disclosing a little door about eighteen
inches square, that led on to the rafters under the eaves. He crawled
through and mended the wires, came out, and went humming away with his
tools on his shoulder--leaving me hopeful that the wall would not be
repapered. The good fates were with me. The slits in the paper round
that door were not considered unsightly and nothing was done.

So I took my Deadwood Dicks from under the carpet and climbed on a
chair to cull others from the top of the wardrobe. Then, slipping open
that little door, I crawled in over the rafters with a stump of
candle. There I kept my library. There was my real cave. The bedroom
thereafter became the grassy pocket in front of it. There I kept my
heaven-sent library, thence I educed such volumes as the little boy
next door had not read. He preferred _Deadwood Dick Junior_, _Deadwood
Dick Junior at Galveston_, and the like.

Those were great days. They had their pathos and their misery,
doubtless, but they had also great joys. And among the greatest of
these was Deadwood Dick--in fiction.


II

I feel sure, from words he wrote on the reading of boyhood, that
Andrew Lang would take no umbrage but rather find a certain pleasure
in here following Deadwood Dick.

I saw him only once--and that was in Edinburgh, thirty-seven years
ago. He had just arrived (as I heard later from one who knew him, and
to whom I announced with youthful joy my glimpse of him) from St.
Andrews, had been examining the bookshops, book-dips, in the
neighbourhood of the University and, with an armful of volumes, was
returning from the auld toon to the new one on his way to Mackay and
Chisholm's in Princes Street to buy an opal ring.

That was a Mind coming down from the auld toon to the new. I
stared--and recognised him from the portraits I had seen: nut-brown
skin, silver hair, jet-black eyebrows and moustache. He made me think
of Thyrsis of the abstracted, meditative air. Knowing that few,
visiting Auld Reekie, could be as well aware as he of the history in
its every wall and entry I fancied, by his mien, that he might be
musing, as he strode along, upon that history, walking with the ghosts.

That was a splendid moment for me. I was then just twenty and a
hero-worshipper--as young men used to be in those days--and he was one
of my heroes. I had many of his lyrics, his sonnets, his ballades by
heart. Across the years I recall the impression he conveyed: I saw him
as one who might as readily know the feel of a fishing-rod or an oar
in his hand as of slim duodecimos, "Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs." All
day I went about in a heady and beatified state because of that glisk
of the man who had written the sonnets on Homer, the man who had
written "Twilight, and Tweed, and Eildon Hill," the _Ballade of his
Choice of a Sepulchre_--"where the wide-winged hawk doth hover"--the
_Letters to Dead Authors_ (my copy was the old original small square
blue volume with the initials _A.L._ thereon), in a heady state such
as the young Henry James used to feel after meeting Turgenieff.

At the school to which I had been sent to be educated in Glasgow (a
city I learnt to love but that seemed a dusky place to me at first in
contrast with the South American city of my birth) scholars had to
choose, or more accurately their parents or guardians had to decide
for them, _Classical_ or _Modern_. The former meant Latin and Greek
and one modern language (French or German), and the latter Latin (as a
philological base, I suppose), French and German. A decree of
modernity being made on my behalf all the Greek I know came to me
after schooldays, chiefly in such editions as those of Bohn and Loeb;
but my first cicerone and interpreter through the Greece of Homer and
the Sicily of Theocritus was Andrew Lang.

Born at Selkirk on March 31st, 1844, Andrew Lang was educated at
Edinburgh Academy, St. Andrews University, and Balliol College
Oxford. Then he took a Classical First Class and was elected Fellow of
Merton. He was made LL.D. of St. Andrews and elected first Gifford
Lecturer there. His collection of fairy tales are still read by the
young people, I notice, not yet entirely ousted by books on aeroplanes
and bombing. His biographical and historical volumes and his studies
in the origins of religions and folklore are still, by their research
and clarity, read and quoted. No anthology of the sonnet may well omit
his _Homeric Unity_ or _The Odyssey_, and his rendering of _The Burial
of Molire_ may not be forgotten. In collections of light verse he, as
surely as Prd, must be present and his _Alm Matres_, with its sound
of surge and driven spray in the street, I feel certain the poet of
_The Forsaken Merman_ would not have disesteemed. One of Lang's finest
essays, by the way, is upon that poet.

There are many legends about Lang's manner. It has been called
lackadaisical, supercilious, superior, affected, even insolent--all
that--and his accent provoked annoyance in many. Joseph Pennell, who
worked with him (himself sometimes cranky in converse) was able to
overlook Lang's manner and utterance, get behind these, and like the
man--despite the unfortunate little incident of Lang giving him,
instead of a letter of introduction to a friend, the one that should
have gone direct to that friend; it contained a warning that Pennell's
accent was "wonderful," which Pennell, reading, did not like.

That drew from him a tirade upon Lang's vocal style: "Accent, indeed.
If any one had a more perfect Oxford accent than Andrew Lang, with a
bit of a Scotch burr thrown in, I never heard it. And the squeaking
scream in which he talked beat any Middle West schoolma'am's cackle."

Max Beerbohm, who met him twice, could not abide either voice or manner
and had to indite an essay upon his antipathy. "No man," he wrote, "can
easily be popular who has the Oxford manner in even a rudimentary
degree: the perfection of that manner is a sovereign charm against
popularity. Oxford I have never ceased to love; but its manner--as
exemplified not in writing but in social intercourse--I began to abhor
very soon after I went down." But "the incomparable Max" did, elsewhere,
happily inspired--as was mentioned earlier--pen his admiration for Lang
the writer, unreservedly pronounce his pleasure in the prose of the
translations from Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps the words _aloof_, _detached_, might not
be as fitting as those I have quoted--lackadaisical, supercilious, and
so forth. Detachment is not, of necessity, impudence. If there were
more detachment in the world to-day, if a certain sort of detachment
were a possession common to the majority of humanity, would not Europe
be a happier place? Sir Sidney Colvin wrote of Lang that his
abstracted air was sometimes looked upon, especially by women, as
rudeness, but towards his friends, said he, "there was no man steadier
in kindness, or more generous in appreciation, as I for one can
testify from more than forty years experience." And Professor Grierson
in his lecture entitled _Lang, Lockhart and Biography_, comparing him
with Lockhart, remarks that both were considered difficult, prickly,
rude, but adds that "Lockhart, or so Lang was convinced, like himself,
hid under this prickly and repellent surface a depth of loyal
affection for his friends and a sincere regard for moral worth."

The man who wrote sympathetically of Sir Walter Scott's obvious love
of the servitors in his romances, and of how he permits them
frequently to rise up and steal the play from their masters, the man
who in his preface to his translation of _Aucassin et Nicolete_
commented on a sudden touch of sympathy with what is called "the
people," the folk, expressed by the unnamed _jongleur_ despite the
fact that he was singing to the idle rich was, by these and similar
pieces of evidence, whatever his utterance or manner, not arrogant at
heart, not inhuman.

This alleged "rudeness" of Andrew Lang interests me. It is possible
that he founded his manner, as some do, consciously upon the manner of
another. Of the works of that great predecessor at Balliol--Matthew
Arnold--he was a devoted admirer. May he, in hero-worshipping youth,
have studied the kid-gloved "Mat Arnold's" manner? There is a tendency
for imitation to produce travesty. Or must we inquire otherwise for
the explanation of the deportment that irked many? There is sufficient
evidence in his work to let us know him a highly sensitive man. His
"rude" behaviour may have been as protective moat and drawbridge. In
view of the affection of his friends I fancy these _few remarks_ are
not far from the heart of the matter. I tender them at least as
possible explanation.

But enough, perhaps, on that head. Before another decade has gone we
shall be celebrating the centenary of his birth, and it is his work
that matters. The personality in that is lucid, wise kindly, lovable.
There was surely not much amiss with the inner man, the man behind
that barrier. He is distinctly one of those in whose work the native
spirit of place has had a part. He is national and international, of
the soil but not of the parish pump. His work has racial qualities
without being provincial. It is far from that. He belongs to Selkirk,
and to the world.

In the preface to his translations of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus,
he speaks of a passage of Theocritus regarding the sheep bleating on a
hillside and the cows coming home at dusk, and is led thereby to an
aside on the personal vision evoked for him--"a memory of a narrow
country lane on a summer evening, when light is dying out of the sky,
and the fragrance of wild roses by the roadside is mingled with the
perfumed breath of cattle that hurry past on their homeward way." That
takes me back to the lanes about Selkirk on summer evenings. Lang,
like Theocritus, was coloured by his native place. The dawns and the
moons and the twilights by Tweedside went into his work, and the music
of his loved Tweed. But he was not, any more than Theocritus, though
both lived great part of their lives upon islands, insular.

Beyond the borders of his own land he has long had appreciation. Early
in his career he had found honour in America, was a leading
contributor to _The Critic_ and other journals of those days, and is
still frequently referred to and quoted by critics there. Brander
Matthews, when _Letters to Dead Authors_ was published, hailed it as a
"minor classic," and Time, by the evidence, is proving Professor
Matthews not in error.


III

Most of us, sometimes, I suppose, observe some small boy engrossed
upon his youthful affairs and wonder what he will become, what he will
make of himself or what life will make of him, what sort of man he
will be to look upon after forty years. W. E. Henley has left us a
self-portrait of himself when young, topped by a broad-ribanded
leghorn, "antic in girlish embroideries" and wearing "silly little
shoes with straps," carrying home a great treasure--a Book with
"agitating cuts of ghouls and genies:" and, for background to that
picture from memory of the boy he was, are the docks of Gloucester
thronged with galliots and luggers, brigantines and barques that came
in those days "to her very doorsteps and geraniums."

There are still many alive who knew him as a man grown and can speak
of him from personal recollection. And we have various glimpses of
him, the man grown, in books. We can hear him puffing up the stairs to
the Pennells' flat in Buckingham Street, off the Strand. We can see
and hear him, in the office of _The Art Journal_, in conference with
the editor, Marcus Huish, and the assistant editor, Lewis Hind, and
the proprietors, the partners of the old firm of Virtue and Company.
His shock of hair (that passed speedily from red to grey, from grey to
white in the fifty-four years of his life) is disordered, his beard
rumpled, and he gives vent to bellows of laughter--but at what, the
others do not know. We have evidence regarding the man's hat as well
as the boy's, for William Nicholson not only made a portrait of him
with it on but a still-life painting, called _Henley's Hat_, in which
it lies on a table (brigandish of crown and brim) atop a clutter of
things of diverse texture, the sort of still-life for which Nicholson
has a penchant.

To judge by photographs and by that Nicholson portrait, W. E. Henley
had a powerful frame. But a physical disability, result of a mishap
in youth, forced him, for example, when wanting to consult a book out
of reach on his table, to lay hold of the table's edge and haul
himself up and round, as was once described to me by one who saw him
often and dared not, in the incident I cite, get the book for him lest
so doing he annoyed Henley and brought upon himself a volley of abuse.
And in his walks abroad Henley laboured with a crutch and stick. This
disability, it seems, gave him days of testiness, patience slipping
from him. He could be more than testy, would curse and swear to beat
all cursing carmen, and use phrases of opprobrium regarding those he
disliked that were violent and inaccurate, as that part of him that
was devotee of _le mot juste_ must surely sometimes have realised. A
sort of thwarted viking of a man ones sees him, labouring along, his
head defiantly cast back,

      "Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody but unbowed,"

and his bright blue eyes puckered, trailing a wisp of cigarette smoke.
It may well be that on a hard day of bitterness over his burdens,
physical and financial, and dark musings on the tough time he had had
in life, the Balfour biography of his old friend Stevenson (who had
made money and gained sympathy for his disabilities, and laud for his
courage, and conducted family prayers in his middle years--disgustful
to Henley) came into his hands. Anyhow, he made his attack on it, or
rather on Stevenson through it, in _The Pall Mall Magazine_--a
Christmas number too.

There were those who, irked by what seemed to them excessive adulation
of Stevenson, were willing to condone it and others--Stevensonians who
were also admirers of Henley--who regretted it greatly. For it was
splenetic. It was malicious. It imputed. And for one such as Henley,
with his manner (or pose) of a downright fellow, his air of being
honest John Blunt, its innuendoes made it additionally unhappy. G. K.
Chesterton, apropos of that deplorable affair, told us of the strong
man who can crack the shell of an egg, set upon a table, with a swing
and a tap of a twenty pound hammer, and of the other man who, swinging
the hammer to show that he also can do it, that he too is strong,
smashes egg and table. Henley, in fact, was more he-man than man at
times in his manner and more justly might he, instead of Stevenson, be
cited as an example of those in whom invalidism creates excessive,
somewhat hectic, admiration of robustiousness.

At the time that Henley launched his tirade at the book and the dead
Stevenson my friends were almost all painting, etching, drawing, or
book-illustrating instead of book-writing young men, for I had been
recently studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Henley, though not a
painting man, though sitting at a desk instead of standing at an
easel, was one of our idols. He knew about art--our art! He had edited
not only _The Scots Observer_ (afterwards _The National Observer_) but
also _The Magazine of Art_ and had been called in as Consulting Editor
of _The Art Journal_ to give it life. As editor of _The New Review_ he
was not only publishing Conrad but giving us, each month, a Nicholson
print, and Nicholson was one of the Beggarstaff Brothers. He and the
other "brother," James Pryde, we raved over.

We regretted that article on Stevenson. We wished that Henley had not
done it. He disappointed us there. We were not taken with, "I read that,
included in the plenishing of his [Stevenson's] ideal house, were 'a
Canaletto print or two,' and I recall the circumstance that his taste
for Canaletto prints, even as his Canaletto prints themselves, came
through and from me." Too much of that sort of thing and worse, much
worse, was in the article. It savoured--nay, it reeked--of envy and
uncharitableness. We read what _The Saturday Review_ had to say of it in
an article entitled _Literary Leprosy_ and left it at that. For Henley
loved the visible world. He had kinship with Claude Monet in his eye for
the play of light, and not Mryon was more aware than he of the magic of
tones on spire and wall and chiaroscuro under city eaves and sills, and
how doorways might be sinister.

The volume entitled, simply, Poems (containing _A Book of Verses_ and
_London Voluntaries_) was first published in 1898. My copy, taking the
place of an earlier one lost, is dated 1917 and is the seventeenth
edition in these nineteen years. From 1917 till now I don't know how
many printings there have been. It is interesting to note the demand
for it in view of some words--words of bravery and acceptance typical
of Henley--in the preface:

    "The work of revision has reminded me that, small as is this
    book of mine, it is all in the matter of verse that I have to
    show for the years between 1872 and 1897. A principal reason
    is that, after spending the better part of my life in pursuit
    of poetry, I found myself (about 1877) so utterly unmarketable
    I had to own myself beaten in art, and to addict myself to
    that journalism for the next ten years."

No doubt there is money in writing, as the many advertisements of
correspondence schools for teaching how to make it by writing tell us;
but on inquiry into the lives of many eminent writing men it would
appear that they took no such courses, if such existed in their day.
Bills bothered them. Only their devotion to their craft made them
continue in its practice. Even in journalism Henley did not become
wealthy. Yet surely he had a happy life. Books and pictures and music
and scenes in the real world, urban and rustic, stocked his mind. His
_Views and Reviews_, in two volumes--one subtitled _Literature_, and
the other _Art_--divulged something of the rich lading of his mind. He
had a knowledge not only of English literature and art but--as is of
course essential for a critic--of the literature and art of other
lands and wrote, as Oscar Wilde said, the prose of a poet.

In talk he was vociferous with contempt for those he dubbed decadents,
but there was an article by Arthur Symons in an old _Harper's
Magazine_ (for November, 1892, to be precise), entitled _The Decadent
Movement in Literature_, in which Henley was given a leading place.
There he looked out from the page, in the company of Maeterlinck and
Mallarme and Verlaine, with tousled locks and rumpled beard in a
photograph by Hollyer; and no one said, _Que diable allait-il faire
dans cette galre?_ It seemed right he should be there. We were glad
to see him acknowledged as a poet who mattered, however labelled--and
the label, mark you, was not, to most, objectionable then. Of the
_Hospital Rhymes_, that had once gone abegging, Arthur Symons wrote:
"The poetry of Impressionism can go no further, in one direction, than
that series of rhymes and rhythms." And Henley was in that galley by
reason of his "sincerity and the impression of the moment followed to
the letter," which was a phrase adapted by Symons from Verlaine to
describe what he meant by "the decadent movement in literature." There
was no shame then in "decadent"--_fin de sicle_. These terms stood
for being in the swim, or in the van, rather than being in at the death.

There was a small volume in those days often in my pocket. I got it, I
remember, in Holmes' bookshop in Dunlop Street, Glasgow--_Ballades and
Rondeaus_ in the Canterbury Series. On a preliminary turning of the
pages there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of Henley; but on
reading the preface by the anthologist (Gleeson White) that was
explained:

    "In a society paper, _The London_, a brilliant series of these
    poems" [ballades] "appeared during 1877-8. After a selection was
    made for this volume it was discovered they were all by _one_
    author, Mr. W. E. Henley, who most generously permitted the
    whole of those chosen to appear, and to be for the first time
    publicly attributed to him. The poems themselves need no
    apology, but in the face of so many from his pen, it is only
    right to explain the reason for the inclusion of so large a
    number."

Henley, for me, is one of those poets on whom it is hard to write
impersonally. This is something that all must have felt of certain
writers: they are part of our lives. Among my first expeditions on
going to London was one to the crypt of St. Paul's to see Rodin's bust
of Henley and another to Richmond, thence to walk by the riverside to
Kew for the sake of,

      "On the way to Kew
      By the river old and grey . . ."

My first lodgings were in Pimlico. A Cockney friend told me I should
say East Belgravia, but I liked the name of Pimlico. Sir John Squire
had not made it comic then with his parody of Masefield. A step or two
from my diggings brought me to the River of which Henley wrote:

      ". . . See the batch of boats,
        Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung beam!
      And those are barges that were goblin floats,
        Black, hag-steered, fraught with devilry and dream!
      And in the piles the water frolics clear,
        The ripples into loose rings wander and flee."

In those days there was hardly a motor car in all London. Its music
was of drumming horse-hoofs and the steely, the silvery, jingle of
harness, unforgettable. Those who came too late to hear it have lost
something. There were things before our war worth remembering--yes, I
sometimes think worth going back to, if only we could! The turning
into Great Smith Street from Victoria Street was always romantic, the
orchestration dying away behind, and the arrival there always
so--coming out of that quiet tributary to the roll of the drums and
the chiming of the triangles.

Sometimes I went home from Fleet Street late at night. City cleaners
with their hose would be making the wood-blocks of Broad Sanctuary
gleam like gun-metal under the lamps, and Big Ben would be booming,
high and remote, as the last bus for The Monster, Pimlico, swerved
into Great Smith Street. We would come to Vauxhall Bridge Road and a
wind, with a slight freshness among its staleness, running there, a
draught from the river; and then, the brake of the old horse-bus
sprung off, we would waggle on again--to the region of pillared
porches beyond broad, shallow steps, and of little iron balconies and
occasional passages of piano-music coming from some open window; and
there would be the area railings, and Henley's

      ". . . rake-hell cat--how furtive and acold!
      A spent witch homing from some infamous dance--
      Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
      Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!"

It was that vision of his, and that way of portraying, that caused
Symons to place him among the "decadents"--the impressionists of
those days, such passages as that and such similes, no doubt, as the
one he used to convey a sense of the abomination of spiritual
desolation and abandonment by happiness:

      "Like an old shoe
      The sea spurns and the land abhors."

We have all seen that old shoe. I remember (on a visit to Edinburgh to
see my "folks" who had moved there from Glasgow) walking once, by the
Firth of Forth, from Granton to Cramond, and the sight of one put
secondly in my mind the shimmering sands and the eddying of the gulls
and the distant huzzaing of the tide far out, sent me on my way musing
on the work of Henley, less upon any special example of it than just on
its aroma as it were, its quality, its texture, the quintessence of it.

Wilde once wrote of him, "He is never forgotten by his enemies, and
often forgiven by his friends." Often forgiven by his friends! Well,
we Stevensonians, I think, have all forgiven him his attack on
Stevenson. They share the same shelf in our book-cases. Perhaps, were
they to know, that would please them both.


IV

The name is arresting, like the personality for which it stands:
Cunninghame Graham. Lavery painted two portraits of him, one (somewhat
reminiscent of Raeburn's _Sir John Sinclair_) showing him afoot, the
other--an equestrian portrait--with a remarkable effect of movement in
it. I never see it even in reproductions but I have the impression
that in another moment horse and rider will be gone beyond the frame,
leaving only the background of the empty pampa.

The words that follow I wrote before he had gone from us and I shall
let the present tense stand. In a sense he is not gone.

He has a passion for horses and has written many an essay in which
they are leading characters and one book devoted to them--_The Horses
of the Conquest_. William Rothenstein has recorded him in lithograph
and in oils and in _Men and Memories_ includes a reproduction of a
painting of him in fencer's garb. Belcher did a charcoal drawing of
him--it appeared in _Punch_--with a lightly-indicated background of
Hyde Park Corner and a horse or two, in a dexterous mere line or two,
clipping past. There is a word-picture of him in the epilogue to
Bernard Shaw's _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_ and another in George
Moore's _Conversations in Ebury Street_. Writer, Scots laird, Spanish
hidalgo, South American ranch owner, he has ridden and bivouaced in
Texas and Patagonia and may be found this month in Morocco, next month
in London, or in Venezuela, or enjoying a braw day (or a snell day for
that matter) in Perthshire.

R. B. Cunninghame Graham is a Figure. Once seen he is not forgotten.
It is told of him that a lady once asked him if some rumour she had
heard of his royal lineage was true and he replied, "Madam, if I had
my rights I would be king. And what a six weeks that would be!"

It really did not need the lighting effect of my first sight of him,
some years past, to make him remain always in my memory as he does, as
clear as though seen only a moment ago. There was a ceiling-light in a
corridor smashing down heavy shadows and a glare, and a plain wall was
backcloth to the hidalgo carrying a silk hat and gleaming cane. He
stood at the corridor's end--it was at the Court Theatre in Sloane
Square--talking to W. B. Yeats who had come round in front to see how
the play went. They parted. Yeats drifted away into the Celtic
twilight behind a curtain and Cunninghame Graham, raising his head so
that his beard seemed to point the way, and with his cane held in
advance like a rapier, charged back up the slope of that corridor into
Sloane Square as though he were going to swing into the saddle of a
horse waiting there eager to step up as his foot touched the stirrup
and send the sparks flying from the causey, clattering home. But there
was no causey--there were only the wood-blocks, lustrous and dark in
the rain and street-lamps of that London evening--and no horse. The
interior of a taxi received him and I stood in the portico of the
theatre with a medley of thoughts.

All who read this no doubt know moments when a whole swarm of thoughts
or images, diverse yet linked, rise together in their minds. I
thought, all in a moment it seemed, of Barbey D'Aurevilly and Count
d'Orsay, of Buffalo Bill and Chief Crowfoot, of the way to Valparaiso
via Mendoza, the Andes rising beyond the pampas as do the Rockies on
the verge of the prairies of Alberta, of the magic of the arrangement
of words, and of "The style is the man." I had quite definitely seen
the author of _Mogreb-El-Ackra_, of _Progress, Faith, Hope_, and the
rest. Once again I saw him, passed him in Rotten Row to the muted,
muffled rub-a-dub of hoofs on the red tan of that course, and rider
and horse abide together in my memory from that occasion.

Years later, with half the world between us, we began to correspond and
one of my chief treasures now is a bundle of letters from him, letters
on many themes--on Indians and the Indian sign-language, on horses
(criollas and cayuses), on horse-breakers and their methods, on saddles,
on painters he met--Leslie Hunter, who did some sketches of him, one of
these--and old frontiersmen. In one letter he mentioned: "Hickman of the
Texas Rangers was over in summer and rode with me in the Park, complete
with Stetson and two guns." Many of these letters bore, besides his
signature with its Spanish rubrica, a drawing of his ranch brand,
registered in the _policia_ of Gualeguaychu, Entre Rios, Argentina.
"That brand, I am sorry to say," he commented in one of them, "was not
registered yesterday. . . . It is my best coat of arms (or crest) and is
the only thing I want cut on my grave." It may be seen, though
unexplained either on the dust jacket or in the introduction, stamped in
gold on a corner of the cover of the selection from his work called
_Rodeo_ that A. F. Tschiffely gathered together.

He gets down what he wants to get down and for all his clear love of
words, plangent and coloured words, is occasionally wildly careless,
at times indeed slightly cavalier towards laws of grammar, though
winning his effects. I note his tendency to the excessive use of _just
as_ and _as if_ and a sort of flaunting ever and again into _just as
if_. They splash the pages of some of his books, perhaps verbal
evidence of a mental idiosyncrasy or _slant_, or perhaps just surface
mannerism. Stevenson once wrote to Henry James in appreciation of one
of his novels--_Roderick Hudson_--but begged him "the next time it is
printed off to go over the sheets of the last four chapters, and
strike out 'immense' and 'tremendous.' You have simply dropped them
there like your pocket-handkerchief." _Just as_, _as if_, _just as if_
are the dropped handkerchiefs of Cunninghame Graham. And I surmise he
would but say, were his attentions drawn to that addiction of his,
"Well, what of it?" I would be willing to agree--well, what of it?--so
much else there is.

There is a passage in one of his early books that I often reread. It
deals with a spot he visited upon the southern pampas that was also
visited by Darwin, and the gualichu tree there--in Darwin spelt almost
phonetically, walleechu tree. If ever I compile, for those who might
care for it, the anthology that is but in my mind so far for my own
private delectation (every man no doubt has his own anthology), the
passage from Darwin's _Voyage of the Beagle_ and the one from
Cunninghame Graham's _Success_ will be in proximity.

    "You in the future who, starting from Bahia Blanca pass the
    Romero Grande, leave the Cabeza del Buey on the right hand, and
    at the Rio Colorado exchange the grassy Pampa for the stony
    southern plains, may you find water in both wells, and coming to
    the tree neither cut branches from it to light your fire, or
    fasten horses to its trunk to rub the bark. Remember that it has
    been cathedral, church, town-hall, and centre of a religion and
    the lives of men passed away; and, in remembering, reflect that
    from Bahia Blanca to El Carmen, it was once the solitary living
    thing which reared its head above the grass and the low thorny
    scrub. So let it stand upon its stony ridge, just where the
    Sierra de la Ventana fades out of sight, hard by the second
    well, right in the middle of the travesia--a solitary natural
    landmark if naught else, which once bore fruit ripened in the
    imaginations of a wild race of men, who at the least had for
    their virtue constancy of faith, not shaken by unanswered
    prayer; a tombstone, set up by accident or nature, to mark the
    passing of light bands upon their journey towards Trapalanda;
    passing or passed; but all so silently that their unshod horses'
    feet have scarcely left a trail upon the grass."

He is no sentimentalist. He can see the steel edge of life, as witness
that story of the old German couple, settled on a wide plain of
huisache and mesquite scrub who, on Christmas Eve, in the old German
usage of such simple and credulous folk as they, put a shoe outside
the door with hope and in the morning opened to see what Santa Claus
had left them. "Something was in it of a truth, for Santa Claus, who
never disappoints people who trust in him, had filled it up with snow.
As they stood looking at it ruefully, the long-drawn howl of a coyote
sounded far out upon the plain." He is no sentimentalist, but he does
not suffer the callous gladly. He does not consider that men should be
ruthless though nature, on occasion, is as cruel as kind. Hugh Walpole
recently made the comment, in an article on contemporary literature,
to explain the coldness towards the work of Galsworthy he had
discovered in some quarters (whether representative or not), that
humanitarianism is out of fashion. Whether in fashion or out of
fashion, humanitarianism remains in Cunninghame Graham. He may seem
somewhat fiery at times for a pacifist but when he blazes it is over
injustice or callousness. There are writers with peccadilloes that we
condone as we condone the peccadilloes of a friend. And if now and
then he launches a gibe that some others might withhold, we let that
go but as part of the intrepid quality of the man. That fiery spirit
has capacity for pity--and for tenderness. Not _Beattock for Moffat_
only (which appeared in the volume called _Success_ and was later
included in another entitled _Scottish Stories_) informs us of that.

There is a kaleidoscopic quality in his work. It is vivid. Tangier has
coloured it. Fortuny and Regnault I think of often when reading his
north African sketches. There is a phrase of the western plains that
obtains from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande. It survives even in
these days of petrol. When you ask a man if So-and-So knows about
horses he may reply, "Horses are where he lives," or it may be,
"_Horses_ is his second name." Horses are where Cunninghame Graham
lives. And though no Rosinante is his mount there is a touch of Don
Quixote about him, in the finest sense (his intimates call him Don
Roberto), in the sense that makes the word _Quixotic_ one not of
derision but of tribute, or even of affection.

When these words first appeared in print--in _Library Review_--he
wrote in a letter to me: "Yes, my second name is horse! There is no
doubt about it, 'that is where I live.' Thanks for pointing out 'just
as' and 'just as if.' I am aware of it, but cannot cure myself. There
is a Spanish saying, 'a perro viejo, no hay Tus, Tus.'" And he went on
to tell me that if the _justs_ were dropped handkerchiefs he could
still pick them up from the saddle--and he was then eighty years of age.


V

There have been too many famous horses in the world to get them all into
one round-up, or remuda, famous horses both in the flesh and in paint,
and in bronze, stone, verse and prose. Bucephalus, the horse that
Alexander the Great rode into India; the horse of Achilles; the too
magnificent charger of General Prim (in Regnault's picture that visitors
to the Luxembourg may recall); the horses of Boadicea's chariot rearing
up on Westminster Bridge as though startled by the passage of some
top-heavy lumbering County Council tramcar; Dick Turpin's horse, Black
Bess; the horses that brought the good news with onomatopoeic hoof-fall,
thus: "I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;" the horse
with the lavender eye, which was a horse on a merry-go-round: to mention
these is only to make a scrambling beginning.

My own first was a rocking one. He lived in the attics' corridor of a
house in Glasgow. His name was Charley, after a horse ridden by George
Catlin, one of my boyhood's heroes. Another personally memorable
horse--more recent in my life--was a cayuse behind which I rode once
up a pass in the Rockies. To see him, at some place where canted trees
made a dubious letter A over the trail, joggling a little this way to
slip the pack upon one side through, joggling a little the other way
to slip the other through, and then with a snort of satisfaction
striding on, was to realise he had intelligence. His solicitude for
the safety of the load was remarkable. Not but what, one day, his
intelligence was otherwise manifest. Weary of the burden, he walked
into the woods and bucked and rubbed it off against low branches. The
annoyance of the packer was dispelled when, gathering up the
parfleched boxes strewn over the scene, and looking into them he found
that not an egg was broken. Some packing! Some packer!

But I must tell you about Baldy, whether you believe me or not. We
were companions on many a long trail but he seemed, on the first day I
rode him (on my way to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers in the
Selkirks), to be a practical joker. He found amusement in stepping
abruptly off the trail when he saw a stump nearby on which, by his
sidestepping so, I might stub a toe. Once or twice, in fact, I had
evidence that he had a gay notion to crack my knee-cap on a
tree-trunk. Suddenly, in the late afternoon of that first day out,
when I was wondering how long I should be affable over his fun, he
found himself in a cloud of wasps. After the performance of some
thrilling gyrations on the brink of a caon he obeyed my orders to be
still and let me dismount and with my sleeve clutched down over my
wrist sweep the demented and dementing wasps off him.

After that his attitude to me was entirely changed. His chief aim in
life (even ahead of eating blueberries) appeared to be to see that I did
not crack a knee or stub a toe, moving clear of obstructions without any
guidance from me. I can almost hear the throat-clearing of the
incredulous but there are those who will not doubt my veracity in the
matter--such, for example, I think (should he happen to read this), as
Mr. Tschiffely, he who rode two criollos, the South American relatives
of the North American cayuse, from Argentine to Washington, ten thousand
miles, and told of his experiences in _Southern Cross to Pole Star_.

Sometimes these cayuses I have mentioned come to melancholy ends. During
the last years, in the grassy secluded valleys among the eastern
foothills of the Selkirk Mountains, there has been much rounding-up of
the wild herds, driving of them down to corrals by the railway tracks
and shipping them away to become tinned meat in France and Belgium.
Trickish work it is and often dangerous, and that not only because of
the abrupt ups and downs of the country and the wild stampedes, the
right-about turns on hillsides, the sudden crashings through belts of
woods. I know of one young man who, helping to round up a bunch, had a
snorted warning from a stallion and, ignoring it, was grabbed by the
challenging beast and hauled bodily from the saddle. The stallion had to
be shot and left there for the coyotes to devour.

In these herds driven in from the ranges are often such fine beasts
that horse-fanciers watch for their coming and frequently for but a
dollar or two more than the price paid by the tinned-horse contractors
gain possession of an animal that, carefully broken to bit and saddle,
may be their favourite mount. And just a year or two ago the Indians
in the Nicola Valley of British Columbia--to raise a sum of money for
the fighting of a dismal case for them in the courts--were rounding up
wild horses and selling them at seven dollars each for dog-feed and
feed on fox-farms.

Talking of Indians reminds me of the horse, the performing horse, that
Buffalo Bill presented to Sitting Bull after that chief had toured
with him through the States and Canada (Sitting Bull never went to
Europe) in his Wild West Show. From brass bands and the arena he went
to one of the Sioux reservations in Dakota--Standing Rock--where he
was greatly prized by Sitting Bull. Then came the day--it was during
the Ghost Dance trouble of 1890-91--when the government ordered that
Sitting Bull was to be arrested. It is common belief that it was hoped
by the powers that were that he would resist arrest. It is common
belief that ways of arresting him less likely to create disturbance,
less likely to be resisted than the one finally ordered, were vetoed
by the powers that were, in the hope that he would resist and thus
give opportunity to get that unbroken chief out of the way.

Be that as it may, a few moments after Sitting Bull had come out of
his cabin in answer to the summons, shooting began. There was the
crack of a rifle--and another--and volleys of firing followed.
Suddenly, from a corral nearby, came galloping into that arena the
performing horse that Buffalo Bill had presented to his Indian friend;
and, as the old unbeaten chief fell, there, among the fusillades, the
horse sat down on his haunches, raised a foreleg and waved it to the
audience, raised the other and saluted, and bowed and bowed again--and
wondered, perhaps, why the usual ovation of clapping hands and
laughter was absent.




PART IV

_Ships and the Sea_




SHIPS AND THE SEA


I

On a certain Saturday and Sunday I was in Glasgow--having come north
from London to have a look at it again. On the Monday afternoon and
early evening I had a long tramp beyond the tram terminus at the Braid
Hills, in Edinburgh, taking a final sniff at the Old Country scenes,
hearing for the last time (that year, at any rate) the sweet plaintive
call of lapwings across the fields beyond Fairmilehead.

On Wednesday evening we had dropped the pilot where the Solent becomes
the English Channel and the coast lights were blinking or waving
horizontal columns to us. A wonderful old world! I turned up my coat
collar and, leaning on the taffrail, watched the channel lights flick
one to another and to us.

The hiss of the sea, the throbbing of the engines, the vista of deck
planks, the deck lights, the old familiar ship-smells and sounds, the
striking of the bell on the bridge and the response forward from the
crow's nest: these filled me with a sense of elation and freedom. I
found it hard to turn in. When I woke at morning, felt the easy and
buoyant lurch, heard again the rhythmic creaking as of a basket and
through the brass-bound port saw the South Tors of Devon dropping
astern and a tramp steamer with a pother of foam urging ahead of her
bows, the ecstasy was renewed.

Going on deck I was told that we had lain-to during the night,
tinkering some engine-trouble. Thus it was that England gave me a
second adieu on that voyage--with a scent of narcissus flowers blown
out from the Scilly Isles through a pink haze. It was good to be
aboard ship again.

I do not suppose a man can ever unreservedly love the sea. It is a
suggestion that, if I remember rightly, Joseph Conrad (that Pole who
did such wonders with the English tongue) scouted while agreeing that
a man may easily love ships. The sea is too terrible for perhaps any
to love it, but its allure is known to many.

Out of sight of land, Ireland dropped astern, the great Atlantic waves
swinging in and out of each other, it is easy to realise that we are
living our lives on an amazing globe spinning round the sun, and that
life is not a little parochial affair of rates and taxes, of the price
of coals, or the scarcity of sugar, or of chicanery passing for
politics.

There are always one or two world-wandering stewards or old salts with
whom we can get into a corner when they are not on duty or in their
bunks; and from them we can hear the stories of those who go down to
the sea in ships and see the marvels of this world. One old seaman
told me of a voyage out of the Mexican gulf on an oil-tanker that took
the green seas like a breakwater, of how on only certain parts of the
ship could the men smoke because of the safety-valves emitting the
gases generated. Another told me of landing for a day in a bay of the
Bight of Benin and seeing a fish that walks on the land from one
stream to another, of trying to catch it and suddenly finding a
witch-doctor making incantation round him, the fish that can walk
being sacred there. I had read of this fish, but here was the first
man I had met who had seen one. He interested me as men from the sea
with strange stories interested Herodotus and Hakluyt. He also told me
of how he wandered on through the jungle and found a black man whose
trade was making calico breeches for a tribe that wore no other garment.

"And there he was," my informant ended, "sitting in front of a grass
house like a bee-hive, nothing on but a loin-cloth, a-making loin
cloths and a-hemming them with a Singer sewing-machine!"

There were several Canadian lads, blinded in the Great War, returning
home. They laughed much and were, apparently, very gay when together.
When one sat, unattended, listening for the coming of his comrades, he
seemed to be very solitary. On landing they would part company with
valedictory merriment, the war finally over for them, even to its
camaraderie, all over. There were Canadian mothers on board who had
been over to France to see where their sons lay far from the joyous
song of the western meadow lark, far from the robust scent of balsam
and cedar. There were all manner of men and women aboard, as always;
and, as always, all were interesting. We came among flocks of Mother
Carey's chickens in their scurrying flight, a thousand miles from
shore. We saw a porpoise school and a shining iceberg, bigger than St.
Paul's. A haze fell upon the sea and suddenly the iceberg showed in
duplicate, one on the water, one sailing in the sky, causing us to rub
our eyes and wonder what had happened to our optic nerves or muscles,
till we realised that what we saw was a mirage.

We sailed through the Strait of Belle Isle with an unforgettable view
of the desolate end of Labrador, reminiscent of many parts of
Scotland's west coast, and by reason of its desolation (it was as if
the spirit of loneliness lived there) seemed like intruders going into
that strait. Then came the long, exquisite voyaging up the St.
Lawrence with the spring, a little later than in the Old Country,
tossing the blossom in the orchards of Quebec.

By the time we reached Montreal the ship was a home to me. There were
times when I felt that I could go on for ever, with the pulse of the
engines under foot as little distracting as the beat of my heart. All
too soon I found myself on the wharf, ashore again, standing by my
trunk near the pillar bearing my initial, ready for the customs
officer's inspection. My heart was still in the little berth aboard,
the trig white berth in which I went to sleep in the English Channel;
in one week I had grown to know it better than houses I had lived in
for years ashore. My coats had hung from its pegs by the docks at
Southampton, had slithered against its white wall in mid-ocean, hung
motionless again as we lay in dock at Montreal, the voyage over. I was
haunted by my farewell glance round that cabin. It was an empty shell
of a place, the trunks gone from under the bunks, the coats gone from
the triple steel hooks.

A wild desire took me to stay with the ship, to go upon it wherever it
might go, to make its sea my sea, its wanderings my wanderings! Very
compelling is the lure of going down to the sea in ships, both for
landlubbers and for seamen. One of the officers on board told me he
had tried to live ashore but could not; he could only feel at home on
the high bridge. It is easy to understand those ship's captains who,
when age compels them to leave the bridge, find a house to live in not
far from the shore and come down, with rolling gait, to sit upon a
bollard of the wharfs and smell the ropes, hear the chirp of
pulleys--a sound tuned to the call of a sea-mew--and watch the ships
cast loose, sidle into the fairway under an eddy of gulls.

"Well," said the captain, saying good-bye, "we have been lucky--having
no fog."

That reminded me of an earlier crossing when we crawled for days
through murk.


II

Under the bridge, peering down, were dimly discernible two look-out men
in the bows, craning forward, muffled, hands deep in coat pockets,
staring into the nipping grey vapour. They looked like a new kind of
figurehead. Up in the fore-crosstrees, in the look-out barrel, were two
heads dimly seen, one on each side of the mast, each in the attitude of
a short-sighted man peering into a small-print time-table on a wall.

The deck thrilled so that one's feet tingled as the siren roared out
its plaintive note that rose into a melancholy crescendo. We had seen
nothing but fog for two days and two nights; but all the while the
siren let loose that halloo to somebody or nobody, as might be. What
was that? The captain's head moved as he gave attentive ear. He turned
and said something to the effigy behind him and the deck rumbled
again, the siren making its complaint--"like a god in pain." The
pauses between the blasts were briefer then.

That sound in between our bellows was possibly an echo on some
fog-shrouded iceberg's cliffs. It was cold enough for ice. And we were
hardly moving. The propeller whirled and desisted, whirled and
desisted; the siren shouted almost continuously. Then, away off in
that vapour, a Sad, long bleat came to us. No doubt about it
now--another siren. After crawling through the fog two days and two
nights, nosing carefully toward Canada (careful as a man in a dark
corridor who does not know whether there are, or are not, steps in it)
we had met some other fumbling vessel.

"Yes," came a voice behind, "didn't you know? It's the _Columbia_. We
have been in touch all day by Marconi. Booh! It's cold! Let's get
below again."

The unseen was on the port bow, booming close, and we replied. She
wailed again and we answered with our moan and groan, crescendo, dying
fall as of remorse. She was astern, roaring like the lost, and our
siren responded. Fainter, fainter, a far bellow; fainter, fainter, a
distant bleat as she crept out over the Newfoundland Banks seeking for
the open Atlantic--with men reading, yarning, card-playing, smoking in
her smoking-rooms, women sewing, talking, reading, card-playing in her
drawing-rooms, look-outs at her bows, crosstrees, bridge; and we did
not see her.

Longfellow's "Ships that pass in the night" is hackneyed and when one
has passed one's teens one is slow to quote it, but it occurred then.
Ships that pass in Atlantic fog, crying thus to each other, are
memorable. I did not seem able to forget that ship all day. "Yes,
didn't you know? We've been in touch for hours by Marconi . . ." did
not make me dismiss it. I could not even take the wireless for
granted! It crackled and crackled overhead and down the slender wire
out of the coiling greyness that we could stir up as if it were soup.
I could not consider it casually. "All steamers fitted with wireless"
seems equivalent to saying that magic is on board.

There, we had stopped! We roared again and again with hardly any pause
between; and then came the weakest, most pathetic little toot as if
from a tin horn on the end of a kitchen bellows, and very dim and
ghostly there soared up on a wave and slid down in a hollow a
Newfoundland cod-fisher.

No--I do not like fog at sea, but it is a great experience to pass
through it. And pleasant it is to come out of it when the first bugle
blows for breakfast and go in to loaded tables and warmth and lights,
give and take placid, "Good-morning!" with the steward, who looks at
us quickly to see if we are afraid--or hungry. We are thankful that he
clearly sees that we are feeling fit and hungry!


III

Ice and fog together that captain would have called bad luck. In fog
there may be ice. If one were asked, "Which would you have if it were
given you to choose--ice or fog?" the reply would be, "Ice."

One afternoon on still another crossing, a sunny afternoon, as the
ship surged through the North Atlantic heading for Newfoundland, we
saw, along the northern horizon, a thin line of radiance. Looking at
it, wondering what it might portend, what caused it, we began to see
twinkling points in it here and there. Within an hour of first being
aware of that glitter we discovered the cause. We came upon the
advance scouts of that long white line--and it was ice, hummocks of
ice, varying in size from perhaps three feet across to as many yards,
with here and there little pieces no bigger than the square that is
brought to your door by the ice-delivery man, and others much
exceeding the average, like small cottages afloat, hummocks of ice by
the hundred advancing upon us.

As each rose buoyantly in the water its wet part shone as the hull of a
rising ship shines, but more wonderfully; for, as it rose, all the
colours of the rainbow showed, dazzling. Then down it plunged, was
merely a white block again. I said they came by the hundred; we soon saw
that they must be wallowing towards us by the thousand. And as they rose
and fell irregularly, blazing and going white, it was more than our eyes
could stand. The eyelids came down willy-nilly, sheltering the eyes; all
those on deck could only peer painfully at the display.

Along our sides the sailors fell into order with fenders at the end of
long ropes, and as we steamed slowly on they kept alert for the larger
islets of ice, to fob them off. A man near the bows would see one
menacing our hull, and, hanging over the rail, guide his fender to
meet it, take the impact so, and the lump of ice would go spinning
round, joggle sternward, to be passed away from man to man.

I had been watching them at this work for some little time and when I
looked round again I saw that the ice was not only on one side of us.
It stretched almost from horizon to horizon. Only far off, in the
direction whence we had come, was a thin strip of blue sea. On all
sides the ice-chunks rose and fell in a blinding heliographing. An
hour later there was no open sea visible anywhere; and the effect,
looking down from the upper deck, was of a tessellated and unsteady
pavement with curious veins scrawled through it.

When the sun set there was quiet on board. The gorgeous colours that,
though they had almost seared our vision with excess of light, had also
given us a great sense of elation, suddenly went out. The ice had gone
dead and our hearts felt it. Melancholy came aboard. Quiet and
depressed, we looked at that ghastly expanse through which our vessel
steamed--that white wavering plane, broken and cracked, stretching from
east to west, from north to south. Still the sailors fended off. We went
a trifle more quickly, not because the ice-blocks were any smaller, but
because the captain was eager to get through before darkness came.

I stayed on deck half the night, leaning on a rail, watching the grey
legions go past (for I might never see such a sight again), stayed
there till, after midnight, away north-westwards a blackness showed
beyond the leaden grey. It advanced on us, we on it. The chunks of ice
thinned out; the main army had passed. That belt of black ahead was of
the sea. There came a cling-clang from the engine-room; the captain on
the bridge had given a turn to his indicator. The throb of the
propeller came more quickly; the pulse of the ship went back to
normal, the old travel-beat broke out again.

I looked astern. There, wan and grey in the night was the ice. When I
looked ahead once more I found that to either side we were in open
water. There was no moon that night to be reflected in it. There were
reflections only of a few dim stars that our bows shattered with a
hissing sound.




PART V

_North Wales--and the Old Man at Chester_




NORTH WALES--AND THE OLD MAN AT CHESTER


I

North Wales is a haunted land. Although mountainous it is not all
precipices or rock. Sheep can pasture to the summits and up to a
little way below the peaks the land can be tilled.

From very ancient times people have been there, to judge by
indications of habitations on all sides. The ruins of the castles that
Edward the First built when shaking the mailed fist at Wales are
youthful in comparison with other remains. Some of the stones of
Conway Castle (erected originally by Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester, and
rebuilt by order of Edward the First) were appropriated, on a
neighbouring hill, from a castle in ruins there in those days; and
that castle of Conway, and the Tudor house (Plas Mawr) in its
excellent preservation, are hardly elderly in contrast with the hut
circles on Conway Mountain above the town. Even Plas Mawr stands on
the site of a former dwelling.

The spirit of antiquity broods over the land for any visitors who have
natural sensitiveness to the proofs of predecessors in the world. The
old wall of Conway still stands, though topped now with waving grass
and spattered over with wall-flowers in crannies. Tourists in the
motors from Llandudno, on their way to Llanberis for Snowdon, pass
under arches--the old "gates" in the wall--under which Llewellyn's
people must have passed. There is an enchantment in the place. Only
six hours journey by train from London, it is like a foreign country
to the Londoner.

The Welsh speech is spoken in all the upland farms and in the villages
in the valleys; and in the little old towns the people are bilingual.
That feeling of being abroad there doubtless comes as a surprise to
the visitor from over its borders, and has its charm; but for all,
native and visitor, there is that impression of antiquity. It dwells
there like the scent of lavender and mint in old gardens.

You decide, perhaps, in the hotel breakfast-room, looking out of the
window as you munch your toast and marmalade, to climb a peak with
which the sun and the flying clouds are playing tricks as you gaze.
You start out in its direction upon a macadamised road, with
instructions where to turn aside into tributary lanes or where to
climb a stile to circumvent a shoulder of foothill by a field-path.
Your object is, perhaps, only to climb a mountain for the fun of the
thing, the inflation of your lungs, and the pleasure of a wide
prospect. But before you reach your peak you will have many surprises.

The bridge you espy from the modern road may seem oddly simple,
sufficient, and somehow different from other bridges. While you are
still wondering why it strikes you as unusual you come, following the
advice given at the hotel, to a grass-grown lane into which you turn.
It seems, grass-grown though it is, highly purposeful. Then the truth
dawns: you cross a Roman bridge and are walking on a Roman road. A
thin trickle of smoke from a chimney stack almost hidden in a crease
of the hill marks a lead-mine, still being worked, that the Romans
worked--and possibly, very possibly, others before the Romans came.

Higher up, with only the bleating of sheep round you, you blunder upon
what at first you take for a fold. Wisps of fleece, fluttering on the
rough wall, aid toward that belief; yet it is not like most
sheep-folds you have seen. Approaching it you find that the entrance
is low. Crawling through you discover a great stone--a great slab of
stone--lying on the earth within. It is the old door of an ancient
British hut. You stand quiet, looking round the place, tiptoe up and
gaze over the wall into the next circle of stones, or bend down and
peer (like an Eskimo, in Arctic pictures, entering his ice-house)
through the low entrance to that next apartment that now has only the
sky for a roof. The sensation of being in a foreign country dwindles
before that of being upon a visit to your ancestors of two thousand
years ago. The wind whistles over the walls that once their thatches
covered. You feel that their ghosts may come home at any moment from
the surrounding hills or that they may be watching you thence.

That is a haunted land and yet without any suggestion of the sinister.
I could camp for the night to lee of the wall there without a childish
dread or barbarian's inclination to devise an incantation against
evil. On the crest of the slope above the winds of years have sifted
the earth from a dolmen. The cromlech stones, many tons in weight (one
wonders by what simple, yet forgotten trick they were raised), stand
warm in the sunshine.

It must always have been a countryside thickly inhabited. It is
dappled with ruins of historic and prehistoric homes, burial mounds
from battles or from long settled occupancies. A little butterfly,
green and brown, like the grass and the soil, sits pulsing its wings
on a monolith. What sites they chose, these people, for their circles
of standing stones--or I should say for what the standing stones are
the remains of. The butterfly flutters away, knowing itself observed
or because the shadow of my hand passed over it, and blends with the
grass. The stone is warm to my palm and I wonder what the hands were
like that raised it, and what thoughts were in the minds of the
toilers here.

I answer myself that they were thoughts very much like mine: they too
saw the sun in the blue sky and were grateful for its warmth, for the
white and gold of clouds. They too, knew the smell of summer-scorched
bracken and found it good. They saw, as we see to-day, the flying
arrow of mallard duck overhead and the shadow of the covey skim the
hills. When they lit a fire the smell of wood-smoke gave them a sense
of home, and a sense also of unrest. They too, wondered as the smoke
was dissipated in the summer air what life was for (apart from the
feuds of kings and the lust for lead, or tin, or gold), where they had
come from, where they were going. And this wonder in their hearts, for
some of them, was exploited by medicine-men and priests (the Druid
Circle still stands within sight of the chapel of Saint Somebody or
Other who laid the foundation stone in the sixth century); but others
preferred to dream their own dreams of the mystery that could both
raise the tranquil crest of Talyfan and invent violets and shelter
them in the grass.


II

Coming back from Wales we stopped at Chester where an old man, old and
gnarled, with white hair and clear eyes, entered the compartment. He
chatted to two young people who called him Uncle and had come to see
him off. His valedictory remark to them came to me like the refrain of
a bright ballad. As the train moved away, he said:

"I've enjoyed myself very well, and it's a nice place is Chester."

It is a phrase that would serve as epitaph for most of us. The use of
the word _nice_ in the sense he intended is no doubt open to censure;
but we know what he meant. And for Chester could be substituted the
world--signifying the world that exists apart from our little wranglings
over passing causes, the arrangements of seats at table, and so forth.

"I've enjoyed myself well, and it's a nice place is Chester," was the
refrain of the whirling of the wheels as we bowled down through hot
scented Stafford and Northampton and Warwick (where cows stood in
shallow meandering waters under alders, and the roads were white and
dusty, and wild roses were in the hedges, and yellow irises among the
green grass beside ponds in field corners) and picked up the swell of
the Chilterns in Bucks, and rattled into Willesden where the request
of "Tickets, please!" announced that we were near journey's end.

"I've enjoyed myself well. . . ."

I have indeed; and so have many others. There is an inner life,
responsive to the splendour of the world and communicating with it
even over the barriers of financial worry that most men know, or
across intruding bickerings. I have never been able to agree with
those who are of the opinion that Hazlitt's death-bed speech--"Well, I
have had a happy life!"--was spoken in bitter or sarcastic accents.
The man who wrote _On Going a Journey_, and had such memories as that
indicated in the passage, "It was on the 10th of April, 1798, that I
sat down to a volume of the _New Eloise_, at the inn at Llangollen,
over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken," had enjoyed his life.

When I was five years of age my father took me one day to Via del
Mar, which is on a point of Chili facing the South Pacific. It must
have been one of the many feast-days for the trains wore bunting, and
garlands of flowers were hung round the locomotives. I remember how he
stopped at a black, cavernous building, and said, "Listen to this.
We'll chance it," and stuck in his head. I remember the halved door,
the lower part closed, the upper open; and inside machinery moving
perfectly, wheels revolving, and a shaft of steel swinging up and down
like a gleaming metal forearm from a fixed polished elbow.

What he called into the twinkling gloom was, "Hallo, Jock! Hoo are ye
the day?" I did not know that language then, but my father knew many
tongues and did not surprise me by springing a new one on me. From the
interior promptly came the reply, "Ah'm fine, man, and hoo's yersel'?"
and a man who had originally been white came to the door with a
sweat-cloth in his hand, and they talked a little while. I remember the
twinkle in my father's eyes afterwards when I asked him who the man was.

"I've no idea," he said. "He comes from Glasgow."

"But when you called didn't you know he was there?"

"No. It was just chance. I saw a pumping station in the sand and
thought I'd see what it would bring forth. It is always worth trying."

I walked on with him, rather puzzled, though asking no more
questions--trying to think it out for myself. But the conundrum was
relegated to limbo when he took me into a vineyard, after tendering a
silver coin to a dusky woman in a blue print gown, and for the first
time I saw grapes growing and the sunlight in them. I have never
forgotten those grapes, almost transparent, lit like jewels. "I've
enjoyed myself well, and it's a nice place is Via del Mar," I might
have said.

When my father took me to that vineyard by the sea he was doing (aware
or unaware) the best that any one, generation by generation, can do
for those of the next--though I could not conceivably, thus early,
realise how much that best is. Grapes in sunlight; green trees against
blue sky; water plopping under the counters of boats, anywhere, from
Iquique Bay to Duror in Appin, from Bideford in Devon to Juneau
harbour in the pan-handle of Alaska, and the reflections like small
flames wavering along the painted hulls; phosphorescence spinning in
a steamer's wake; winds running in fields of corn; the leaves of
aspens showing their silver sides among the green, twiddling before
thunderstorms, and a wild light over all; the twinkle of herring-gulls
in a summer sky--I've enjoyed myself well, seeing all these sights and
responding to these sounds.

There is a life of the mind, there is an aumbry in the mind (of
"Infinite riches in a little room . . ." of "All things that move
between the quiet poles . . .") and, having that, it's a nice place is
the world despite--despite many things! The simple eulogium of the old
man at Chester must have significance for many, so I pass it on.




PART VI

_England_




ENGLAND


I

Out in the rural night of Kent and Essex one can hear London growling
under its glow in the sky--or its filmy smoke canopy.

The noise of London never stops. Carts going to Covent Garden, the
horses' hoofs plod-plodding, motor wagons going to Covent Garden with
rattling of the exhaust, take up the task in the early hours before
late taxi-cabs and drays and trucks have renounced. By the time the
Covent Garden carts are going home comes the clatter of tall milk cans
at the stations and throughout the city and suburbs. The dust-carts
are also then rumbling at their work to and fro in the streets. Refuse
tins are trundled, long-handled shovels knock on the edge of the cart
after shovelfuls are flung up, the milkman and milk-boys come down the
street with their jangling little hand-pushed floats and the cry of
_He-ho!_ (nominally _Milko!_) is everywhere.

Newspaper boys begin their deliveries, running up and down stairs and
whistling shrilly in the streets. They emulate the milk-boys, crying
_Pay-ah_ as they thrust the daily sheet in letter-boxes and clash
knockers. Postmen are hurrying to the sorting offices, the newsboys
and the boys with the first milk-cans shout to each other from corner
to corner, the length of a block, factory sirens shriek, tramcars buzz
and clang and joggle at crossings, the daily tramp and patter to
offices and shops is on the bridges, the motor-omnibuses are rattling
their mud-guards and destination-boards and tin advertisements
everywhere. The blent silver sound of harness-chains and drumming of
hoofs on the wood-blocks is of the past. Triangles and muffled drums
have given up as to a massed band of demons. The music of London is
for most of us gone to-day--giving place to discord.

Sparking plugs plop. There are altercations, as of old, between
drivers, or cheery shouts. The calls of street-hawkers begin,
melancholy plaints, "A rag 'r a bone! Any old bot-tles!" and there is
the pensive cry of, "Water-cree-ses!" Mothers gossip at their doors
and laugh, bending double, mat in one hand, the other making gestures
in air, thumb over shoulder--models for Mr. Belcher by the thousand.
Names of children are shouted, fortissimo, double fortissimo--thus:
"Peggy . . . Peggy, do you hear me call? . . . Get out of that
puddle, Peggy! I'll shake the life out of you if I come." In the parks
is the laughter of nursemaids with other children.

The second delivery of milk starts and the baker's boy is shouting in
between the whistling of mixed bars of noise. That, in the near
suburbs and residential districts, and in the city the din is rushing
up to what seems a final crescendo--but is not. It will go on for
hours. At the doors of open-fronted shops in Camden Town, Kentish
Town, Islington, Whitechapel, Deptford, Battersea, Hammersmith,
Shepherd's Bush--all round, everywhere, butchers, grocers, and
fruiterers call their wares: "Buy--buy! Buy--buy!" A fish-stall man
pipes, "Fresh fish! Buy fish!" and the wag at a provision store near
by tunes up with, "Fresh eggs! Buy eggs! What did the great Doctor
Johnson say? Eggs is more nourishin' than fish." Passing by we add our
laughter to the net of uproar. In the shopping districts where the
wares are not shouted the lift spins up and down with cries of, "First
flaw! Second flaw! Going up! Going dowahn!"

Typewriters clatter, telephone bells ring, people yell into the
receivers in the hope of being heard at the other end of the wire and
are heard at their own end over a wide radius. The Boy Scouts' band
goes past. Motor bicycles volley along. Pekinese pups yelp. The
children in the gutters shriek, "A aeroplane! A aeroplane!" London
life is in full swing. In the afternoons in those streets where
markets are permitted the hucksters' cries rise shrill and more
shrill: "'Ere's a bloomin' fine bit of turbot." By the time the lamps
are lit the fish occasionally bleed instead of bloom from Goldhawk
Road to Deptford High Street, and there is a note of distress in the
hucksters' voices.

The evening papers are out and boys charge down the streets shouting,
the placard they carry fluttering against them as they run. Bus
conductors are ringing their bells thrice and announcing, "Full up!
'Op off!" The whirr of rivers of taxis that swirl round the
music-halls and theatres, the changing of gear, the honking--it all
continues with the hauling down of iron shutters, slamming of
pillar-box doors by collecting postmen, crash of dishes in the
tea-shops, banging of rear doors on delivery vans by irate men aware
of much work still ahead of them. The buzz of electric trains is
ceaseless over the Thames bridge from Victoria, the buzz is ceaseless
underground. Turner's sunset crumbles over Chelsea Reach, gold and
pearl and grey, and the blue haze of evening is peaceful among the
arc lamps over the streets, but the orchestra goes on.

As in response to the flick of an unseen conductor's baton break forth
gramophones, pianos, and wireless sets from a million parlours, dogs
bark welcome to their masters, children cry refusal to go to bed,
hobbledehoys sing, and giggle, and shout, "Goo'-night, Alf. . . .
Goo'-night, 'Erb. . . . Goo'-night, Sis." At last the basic din
slackens a little and more piercing seem the basso hoots or soprano
screams of locomotive whistles. Then the street-sweepers come and the
Covent Garden carts roll on again.


II

I think what I chiefly like in London, which is a congeries of
villages clustered round a small but magically rich focal town, is
what it can give me that is not merely of London but of the world. Its
fascination for me is that the ends of the world come to its centre or
report to it. London tells me not only of London but of the provinces
and the further provinces, the "desert beyond Hyde Park." In big ways
and little ways I am constantly having cumulative evidence given me
for this theory to explain the liking I have for the place among my
dislikes for certain aspects that are simply hopelessly horrific.

It is London the reporting-bureau that enthralls me, London the
repository for treasures of all the world in its National Gallery,
Tate Gallery, Wallace Collection, South Kensington Museum, British
Museum (where we may see the hand-writing of Defoe, or of the author
of the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_), treasures from ancient Greece, Egypt,
Babylon, London of the plaques, _Here lived_ . . . _Here died_ . . .
Even Judges' window on Ludgate Hill used to halt me and delight me
more than St. Paul's, with photographs not only of the crush of
lumbering autobuses in Fleet Street, or the trees in Staple Inn to
carry away as a souvenir, but with photographs of Welsh mountains,
Yorkshire moors, Auld Reekie under its reek.

The topical films in the smallest towns everywhere let us see how prime
ministers raise their hats, or the way in which royalty rides past from
Buckingham Palace--and that without waiting in a crowd for hours. London
becomes to me, and I fancy to many, more and more a place just to plunge
into and get out of again. The motor buses have almost ruined it. Yet no
one who has any sense of mercy toward horses, but will be glad to see
the last one depart from its streets. When all vehicles were
horse-drawn, horses had not a worse time in the great city than horses
in any city, but now that the motor has come to stay the horse should
go. We need not have our hearts broken as well as our ear-drums, and it
is heart-breaking to stand at a busy crossing toward which automobiles
crawl a few feet and halt, another few feet and halt and to see, among
them, some horse strain into the collar and, no sooner than it has set
the wheels of the cart behind rolling, have to halt again--and again
lurch into the collar on a fresh start, on and on. I have seen horses
fall dead on Ludgate Hill following upon a sequence of such torture at
the end of Fleet Street. The look on the faces of their unwilling
drivers was usually of agony. They knew that no horse should be asked to
do such things. Rotten Row, and perhaps the rides round Hampstead Heath
and Battersea Park, are the only places in London where any man with
feeling for the beasts cares to see one.


III

Sophistication is one of the dangers of a great city, more insidious
than is decivilisation in any wilds, but as for the question of
whether to live in London or in the country, much depends on the
person who is puzzled. The sense of mental activity--of Living--that
is known to the dweller in London may be as greatly spurious as the
dread of vegetating in the country unnecessary. The stir of the hive
can delude a town-dweller into the belief that he is travelling,
alive, going somewhere, doing things, when actually he is only one of
a throng of shop-gazers in a coma.

To be sure, in London there is a very pageant of humanity. Faces,
faces, faces go past stamped with their emotions and, sometimes,
thought. They inveigle the imagination. All the jostle of individuals,
glimpsed and gone, sets one a-thinking not only of them, but of the
chain of life stretching back far beyond even that half-truth called
history, and wandering forward too into the other end of Eternity.
Eternity can touch us moving through the hum of the Strand, as well as
in considering the fields and the hills with clouds passing over.

There is a sense of security in London, if one excepts that sense of
insecurity due to being told (whether in sincere prophecy by our
well-wishers or with an ulterior motive by those who would instigate
dread in us for their own profit) that in the next war London will be
swooped over by soundless aeroplanes and its populace snuffed out in
a twinkling with a spraying from the sky of lethal gas. To get into a
taxi and, sitting still, be driven to a dinner lit by shaded lamps, is
very different from cutting a way through wilderness with an axe and
patiently stalking supper, very different from shooting rapids and
sweating, burdened, along portages. The sybarite in us does delight in
those aspects of London that make it kin with Sybarus.

If a man must live in a town, one beside the sea is more likely to
keep him balanced, restrain him from quidnuncial coteries, from
fluttering about in quest of cults, from parrotting the platform of
ephemeral movements, or one on a hill-top looking down on a spacious
carse. To turn out of Princes Street in Edinburgh and walk up Hanover
Street, or any of the parallel streets, and see suddenly, from George
Street, the trees of Wardie, and the Forth, the hills of Fife beyond,
is valuable. Or to live in a town the windows of which peep at a great
mountain range, a town like Calgary, Alberta, is good.

The streets of London are not all of London, any more than the slums are
all, or the members of the fickle--rather than progressive--coteries are
all. London has its river, and it is a tidal river. That helps. The
tugs come up with a wave at the bows and a boiling of water under the
counter, bluff barges tucked up astern. They blow sirens that are short
lyrics of travel. The smoke eddies from the smoke-stack on blustery
days, and steam and smoke swirl round on either side--even as they eddy
and swirl from smoke-stacks on the boisterous high seas. There are also
the coastal barges with masts and red sails--and, in these days,
auxiliary petrol engines--to be seen there. In the heart of the
metropolis they go past between Lambeth and Westminster, between the New
Cut and Whitehall.

Wild duck often alight on the old river and can be seen from the
bridges even by people on the trams. When autumn comes, seagulls beat
all day into the wind above the grey-green stream, or let the breeze
flick them back within dipping reach of some scrap of food. They give
their low, shrill mews, or even their loud cries at times, as they do
round every coast from North Cape to South Cape. Gulls veering over
Blackfriars Bridge can hint to us the world in its entirety, a mighty
little miraculous globe swirling in space.

Walking on the Embankment, or pausing for a moment with elbows on the
parapet, there is always an offering for us. London River helps to
keep us in touch with the world--the world that includes every little
metropolis, the world of ebb and flow of tides, of hurricane and
avalanche, of dropping acorns, of wolf-packs and caribou herds, of
glaciers and the renewal of roses.


IV

Somewhere in the eighties, the eighteen-eighties, Henry James first
arrived in London, sat before the glow of a fire in the coffee-room of
the old Morley's Hotel at the corner of Charing Cross and Trafalgar
Square on a wet Sunday night and next day bought a pair of gloves at a
glover's by the entrance to Charing Cross Station, dropped in at
Rimmel's, found his way about and anon--becoming at home in the
overwhelming city--was writing of what he called _a purely rustic walk
from Notting Hill to Whitehall_. "You may traverse this immense
distance--a most comprehensive diagonal--altogether on soft, fine
turf, amid the song of birds, the bleat of lambs, the ripple of ponds,
the rustle of admirable trees."

Admirable trees! It is not only the trees in the park that are
admirable, however. Here and there in squares and corners are others
that sigh as if in drawing tired breath in the glare of street-lamps
on burnt-up summer evenings.

Trees are alive, although with a different life from ours. I do not
suggest that I cherish any love of gush about them, nor do I endow
them with personality as we know it or with human attributes and say,
as did a young sthete to me once, that elms are malicious and like to
drop branches down on the heads of unworthy people. I don't suggest
that I have ever met hamadryads in the beeches of Jules Hill, or that
Wilberforce's Oak has ever talked to me about Wilberforce.

Yet many trees I recall as I recall people I have affection for. There
are two poplars on the road to Latimer, in Buckinghamshire, not far
from Chenies, where Matthew Arnold and Froude used to go for quiet,
that I often remember. They are like reveries by the roadside.

In cities there is a tendency for trees to be solaces. The great plane
in Staple Inn, a noble prisoner, the firs on Hampstead Heath, the
cluster of planes in Sloane Square--that make shadowy arabesques on
the pavement--are in that category. The trees of place and plage and
plaza, the little trees in tubs round the cobbled Flemish
marketplaces, lone trees dropping leaves on Murger's folk in
Montmartre courts; these also seem like exiles or people taken
captive by invaders. The conference of our thoughts and their
rustlings is at times as the conference of fellow-captives.


V

One Saturday just before the deluge--I mean the war, after which much
was changed for good and all, or for bad and all in England--I took a
day off from Fleet Street, slipped away to Bromley in Kent, and there
boarded a bus for Westerham Hill. As it rushed out of Bromley (about
two-thirty) we, the roof passengers, were astonished to hear a fine
booming _Cuckoo_! Amazement and elation were expressed on each face.

"An extraordinarily early season," I heard some one say on the seat in
front of me. "And look at the buds. They are bursting already . . . pay
for it later . . . well, perhaps not . . . almost all the gulls have
left . . . that's a weather sign . . . but still, early March . . .
cuckoo!"

"Cuckoo, cuckoo!" rang out full and bell-like in the air.

I looked round in quest of the oddly hawk-like bird with long tail and
wings set well forward, but the conductor interrupted, coming up for
our fares. He was very gay indeed. One cry of the cuckoo seemed to be
making us all kin.

"Cuckoo!"

It was following us. I looked round again and there, all alone on the
back seat, was a very sedate old gentleman whom I caught in the act.
He raised his head and with a beatific expression--"Cuckoo!" he
pealed. He did not look as one who had been too patriotically helping
to support the brewers. He looked to me as one drunken only with joy
of having left Throgmorton Street behind until Monday.

I trust that when I am seventy (he looked quite seventy) I may have
the inclination, whether I placate it or not, sitting on a bus top, to
chant _Cuckoo!_ to the first sifting as of green dust among the black,
cobwebby tangle of the hedgerows. It was not till we had left Trinity
Church behind, and were chirring along toward Keston, that every one
on that bus had traced the cuckoo-call to its source. We spun on to
where the sign of The Two Doves stands atop a pole by the roadside and
as we stopped there to deposit a lady with a basket a bird trilled.

"Do you know what bird that was?" the old gentleman inquired of a boy
near him.

"No, sir."

"Do you?" he asked of me.

"A robin," I replied.

"Right," said he. "And that? You heard that one?"

I was uncertain. I listened and shook my head.

"Another robin!" he announced, beaming.

Whether it was or not another robin that benign old gentleman sent
waves of mirth all over the roof of that bus. Anon he asked, "What is
the name of that tree?"

Nobody answered.

"Now, my boy--the name of that tree? You don't know? Why, it's an elm.
Ah," he admonished us all, "there is something wrong with a schooling
that does not give us the names of birds and the names of trees."

He rose, shaking his head, and went down the steps as we came to a halt
at The Mark. The last I saw and heard of him he was pottering along
towards Keston village singing, "Cuckoo!" and swinging his stick easily.

When he had gone I considered how many birds and trees I know, and yet
do not know the names of them. That very day I plucked a twig from a
tree that was nameless to me and carried it away to have it
identified. It is a fine big tree, buxom all the year as a beech is in
midsummer. The evergreen leaves are dark, and grow in clusters
drooping along the twigs. I asked a gardener over a laurel hedge what
its name might be and he did not know. I asked a grave-digger over a
church-yard wall and he did not know. A stern-faced but smiling old
dame, hearing our discussion, paused to inform us that it was an
evergreen, and in duet we thanked her. I asked a ploughman. He did not
know. But he was working with a motor plough and behind him, instead
of a string of rooks, he trailed a pennon of gasoline exhaust smoke.
Petrol has brought a new ploughman. Not but what the film of blue
being dissipated in air over broken ground had its own fine effect.

Having dropped the old gentleman, the bus chugged on past Keston Ponds
to right and later, to left, gave a glimpse of the green path that led
to the Wilberforce Oak, a gnarled old tree on a woody slope whence may
be enjoyed, on good blue days, a pleasant English vista of fields and
further woods under framing branches. By the old tree is a stone seat
and on the seat is cut, for the information of the passer-by:

    "From Mr. Wilberforce's Diary, 1788. 'At length I well remember,
    after a conversation with Mr. Pitt in the open air at the root
    of an old tree at Holmwood just above the steep descent into the
    Vale of Keston, I resolved to give notice on a fit occasion in
    the House of Commons of my intention to bring forward the
    abolition of the slave trade.'"

At Leaves Green a cloud of rooks went floating over our heads giving
their strident, leisurely caws. In a roadside field many birds lifted
up their heads, then their crests, ran a dozen steps, halted, ran
again, and then suddenly rose. So far so good. I know the black rook
and I know the full-crested lapwing. I know starling is the name of
the sharp-beaked chattering bird that fussed, as we went past, on the
chimney of The King's Arms at Leaves Green. I know both the English
and the Scots name of the bird with the speckled breast who mounts
into tree-tops before sundown as to a minaret and, having called many
times, _Hewey_, _hewey_, _hewey_, breaks into song. The thrush, the
throstle, the mavis--we all know; he is as great a friend as the robin.

Birds and trees--all the way to Westerham Hill. That might well have
been--have been--the touting call of the autobus conductors. The scene,
I hear, is changed. The desire of people to live out in the country has
taken the city into the country, but at least the commons must remain
much as they were--Bromley Common, Hayes Common, Keston Common.


VI

I cannot subscribe, any more than did Hazlitt for all his love of
London, to the view that beyond Hyde Park all is desert. What do they
know of England who only London know?

There is, for example, _Down Along_--which is the Devon men's phrase
for their country, the country, as they say, of "the red earth, the
red apples, and the red-cheeked maidens."

A certain quality in the air to-day took me in memory to Devon--down
along--and I saw again, by the grace of Mnemosene, the sea-wall of
Appledore. Blue-jerseyed men, with tiny ear-rings, clustered along it,
chatting and watching the bluff coasting barges putting out over
Torridge Bar. I saw the foam and the sea-birds blown up together by a
gale off the Atlantic, over the cliffs by Hartland Head. I saw again
Coombe Martin, the two tall mooring piles in the diminutive bay and
two gulls sliding over it take a turn that they might alight up-wind,
one upon each.

I saw again Charles Kingsley's town of Bideford, Bideford in Devon.
People on their way across the ancient bridge paused to look over at the
froth and swirl of the tide-rip under the arches. The boats did not lie
long in the mud, depressingly aslant. Before I well knew the water was
aplopping and aplashing along the causeway, the black smacks were level
with the streets. A ship's pup yelped at me, sprawling and slipping and
playing at being a watch-dog, on a tarpaulined hatch. Yet another few
minutes and there was the chirping of pulleys in the blocks, the
coughing of a donkey-engine on one of the larger vessels. The tide had
turned. There they went, drifting down to sea with a blend of the bluff
and the stately, like ducks--smacks and "London barges."

To be sure the hobbledehoys may sing, and the market day piano-organs
may proffer the latest music-hall song, but your true Devonian takes
deep pleasure in songs that are as much of his quarter of the globe as
the red cows, the red apples, the red-cheeked maidens, the red earth
to which they all come, as the cider, the cream, the twining
lanes--lying deep between high banks that are overgrown with berry
bushes until every lane has a kind of primeval forest or jungle, three
feet wide or so, ribboning along on either side of it, the wild beasts
whereof are hedgehogs and voles.

One man jeers at what he calls "ballad music" another fears for its
extinction and with emotion in eyes and voice pleads for its revival.
I may be a Scot moved readily by many a song of his land from "The
Flowers of the Forest" to "Over the Sea to Skye," but that does not
close my ears to "Tavistock Goozey Fair," or "Widdicombe Fair," or to
that other song--words by R. Monro Anderson, music by Armstrong, which
is the pen-name of Robert Radford who often sang it--which tells of
the winding roads and the fields and into which there comes,

      ". . . an old gull stabbing worms
          In the red loam. . . ."

These songs belong to down-along as surely as do "The Twa Corbies" and
"Helen of Kirkconnel" to the "vacant wine-red moor" of the Scottish
border. They belong to a certain corner of the earth and, at the same
time, to all the earth. We hear much about national song, national
literature, national art--but the national need no more be parochial
than patriotism need be a hole-in-the-corner emotion. Visiting the
Highlands, I always hear the Highland accent with a certain pleasure;
and hear it far from there (in the pilot-house, for example, of a
Yukon River sternwheeler) with another sort of pleasure, that is near
pain. In Devon I like to hear the cooing _oo_ and the _s_ turned to
_z_, thus, for example:

"I zee a vine barrel acomin' in this mornin' but the tide turned avore
her came near enough to lay hold."

It was a man like Pew out of _Treasure Island_ who said that to me one
day as I came upon him slithering over seaweed in an angle of beach
where one has to watch how the tide sets so as not to be cut off. Nine
men out of ten, unless born and bred down-along, would never dream of
trying to scale that apology of a path going up from the bay unless
they were caught by the incoming tide between cape and cape, and had
no choice but to climb or drown. They are descended from the old
wreckers, these lads who to-day are the lifeboat men. I saw Pew again
upon the return of the tide. His keen eyes had detected his "vine
barrel" coming in, by some fluke, a couple of miles or so further
along. I saw him clinging to it with one hand, to a rock with the
other, fending off his precious flotsam, next swinging agile to avoid
being cracked between boulder and barrel.

There are always vagabondish poachers that one can chum with somewhere
in the sanded inns (better fellows, it seems to me, a long way, than
those other shrewd ones who are sidesmen for the sake of trade),
fellows with a twinkle instead of a glitter in the eye; a twinkle is
always much to be thankful for. There, as elsewhere, you can always
find the good sorts; and there are always the apple orchards with
blossom breaking on them in the spring, the moors purple in autumn,
the sea, ebbing and flowing, smashing and roaring on the cliffs. Winds
carry a rumour of it into the old cob-walled farm rooms, miles
inland--a haunting sound, like the murmur children listen to, holding
a shell to their ears.


VII

Every now and then, with a sudden rush as of a hurricane, memories of
England come to me, half the world away. These rouse a poignant emotion
similar to that aroused by certain ballad lines, or lines of verse--such
as, "Visited all night by troops of stars," or "The wind doth blow
to-day, my love, and a few small drops of rain." They come that way,
these memories, ecstatically, with the ecstasy of poetry, even when the
cause of their coming is not that I have been reading the English poets,
Edmund Waller or Edmund Blunden, John Keats or John Drinkwater.

Sometimes suddenly in my mind's eye I see England, not necessarily,
not always, outdoor England--apples in a gnarled tree or sheep in a
lushy paddock--but as often as not some indoor corner. Simply a bend
in the stairs in an old cottage in Kent has a way of coming thus into
my mind. The roof is low overhead and I have to stoop going up, and
there hangs there an odour of the day's cooking. A fly bounces up and
down at the little stair-top window. That is not an outdoor scene yet
it is essentially England to me. The sound of a reaping machine echoes
under that low roof like the voice of corncrakes.

I discover that England--as well as Scotland--has a very warm place in
my heart. I look out of that window, stooping under the steep ceiling,
and see George Bourne's Bettesworth in the garden pottering with bent
knees at the bean rows, strengthening the stakes, a loose coil of bass
trailing from the pocket of his rusty coat. The visions throng.

Associations, literary and historical, crowd my mind. I see the old
duck pond at Leaves Green, all clear even to a duck's waddle and
wiggle of its tail. I see the signs atop the poles of the wayside
inns--the "Warranted Entire" that stuck in Pinkerton's mind in San
Francisco. I see the gipsies in a side-lane off the road from old
walled Chester into Wales, attired in clothes as bright almost as the
garments of North American Indians. Then I am thinking of Matthew
Arnold's _Scholar Gipsy_ and his _Thyrsis_, and thought of Arnold
leads to Chenies--and the two poplars near there--and all the hum of
the bees in English gardens, under what is left of lattices, is in my
memory and I know again the delight of sweet-williams, and anemones,
and stocks, and I think of sunflowers raising their golden discs high
in air above almshouse walls.

John Clare (poor, crazy John Clare) well knew England. I think of his:

      "The snow has left the cottage top;
        The thatch moss grows in brighter green;
      And eaves in quick succession drop,
        Where grinning icicles have been,
      Pit-patting with a pleasant noise
        In tubs set by the cottage door;
      White ducks and geese, with happy joys,
        Plunge in the yard-pond, brimming o'er."

The old char-a-banc with its load of Londoners and baskets of beer
under the seats may come into my mind, or the motor omnibuses, with
names of East London on their fronts and backs, oddly adrift between
the hedges of Essex and Surrey. But my reveries go beyond their rural
termini. I have visions of that southern end of the island with its
relics of pagans and priests, a font stone on the Welsh border,
fragments of Roman road, Cesar's Well, beside Keston Ponds. Buses out
of London pass that. Selborne I think of as a sacred place because
there an immensely interested young man once noted the age of oaks and
the gathering of swallows, jotting all down.

I think more of the poets than of the makers of what is generally
considered English history. I muse rather on past painters than past
prime ministers. I think of Crome instead of Peel, of Constable rather
than of Pitt. I think much more often of some interior with horse-hair
arm-chair and shells under a glass case, geranium pot in the window,
than of the interior of Westminster Abbey. My old England is not of
Elizabeth's court and political intrigues but rather, as E. K.
Chambers writes:

      "I like to think how Shakespeare pruned his rose
      And ate his pippin in his orchard close."

I think more of fishermen putting out from Clovelly, more even of the
gulls soaring and screaming over the clots of foam blown up against
Hartland Point, than of Hartland old church.

When I muse on England it is some cob-walled cottage of Devon, or some
turn of a road under lit chestnut trees in the Cotswolds I think of
rather than of Park Lane. The heart of it does not seem at the Bank of
England but perhaps where, in a cart filled with hay in place of
hearse, some last peasant of the Peak goes slowly past the fields he
slowly tilled to rest under the lichened stones. The blackbirds sing
there, the robin perches on the gravestones and trills, there is a
cawing of rooks overhead.




PART VII

_Westward_




WESTWARD


I

It is no wonder that the servants of the Governor and Company of
Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay came to be greatly
drawn from the Orkneys and from the Hebrides. Ceaseless memories of
Scotland come to me here in Canada, but it is not the Scotland of town
and gloves and cane. It is the Scotland of the tweed suit and the
fly-hooks in hat. It is the Scotland of the twining roads that keep
lonely company with the winding border streams about the headwaters of
Tweed and Clyde, the Scotland of climbs on rocky-crested Goatfell, on
Ben Ledi and Cruachan, of fishing off the rugged loneliness of Jura
and hearing the gruff bark of a seal in Charsaig Bay. What is to me
(and I believe, to many) the essential British Columbia in many ways
is very much like Scotland.

Have you ever been aboard some Hebridean steamer, leaning on the rail
to watch the bouldered slopes glide past, and the beaches and the
fir-plantations, then come into a little bay, half a dozen houses
scattered on the heathery slope behind it, seen a boat pulling out to
meet you dropped into the boat and gone ashore to feel yourself in a
new world, suddenly cut off from the dining-saloon and the menu cards,
your ears filled with the brawling of the burns, your heart glad with
the ruffling of the alders in the glen behind the clachan, the smell
of peat-reek in your nostrils? If so, you would not, in many parts of
Canada, feel lost, but as one living an old delight over again with an
added zest.

The prairies have, of course, no counterpart in Scotland, but league
after league of Ontario, league after league of British Columbia and
the great north woods, are as Scotland touched by another magic.
Exchange, in summer-time, gnats for mosquitoes; exchange the mists of
late autumn for the colour and tranquillity of Indian summer; exchange
the wet and the gales of winter for snow, sun-lit snow, and you have a
fair conception of British Columbia in many parts. In place of the
gipsies encountered by the roadside substitute a people somewhat like
them, fond of bright raiment, of yellow and blue and green, a people
with something of the same lure for our imagination, inviting our
curiosity, as little accessible and with something of the same dash of
wildness in their eyes.

The more I think of it, and the deeper I go into British Columbia,
"off the map" (away from the street, the book-and-drug store, the
soft-drink saloon, the barber's emporium with the revolving pole, the
cafs, the hotels), the more I feel that the innumerable Sandys and
Anguses who left Auld Scotland for the unkent north-west, to serve
that trading company with the exciting name, must have been at home
here. If they did not smell the peat-reek they had the unforgettable
odour of the red-willow smoke of the Indian camps and of their own to
strike the same chord, if one can speak of smoke striking a chord!

I know a score of little towns throughout British Columbia that are
very much like Arrochar on Loch Long. I know many a river-bend that is
like the bend of Tweed below Neidpath--but without the castle, with
perhaps a great lone tree in place of it and fish-hawks perched atop.
I know many trails that oddly recall rights-of-way over Pentland
Hills, though we cannot travel those longer and lonelier trails on a
Saturday afternoon and be back to town in time for dinner. We have to
camp on the way; but there is the similarity. The call of a moose
breaks, and accentuates, the quiet, as well as the heron's cry.

Thousands of immigrants come to Canada annually and the cities swallow
them up. Thousands go through all the way to Vancouver and have only
the glimpses the train offers of what is the essential Canada. They
sit and stare with wide eyes at the woods through which the track runs
round the north shore of Lake Superior. They say, "Isn't it
beautiful?" but they pass on. They seem somewhat terrified by that
serene and silent beauty. They take up a light magazine in the
observation car and dip into its pages as though for the consolation
of the trivial. They bend their heads low in the car going through the
Rockies, and crane to see the high peaks--and then go through to the
dining-car to eat, relieved to find white tablecloths and stewards in
white jackets still in the world.

I cannot but think those are wiser who leave the towns alone, who
accept the invitation of the other Canada that has been awaiting them
for ons. It is easy to understand, of course, that in a way its
bigness appals the city man; and the Canada of up-to-date stores, of
the opera-house and the movie and talkie house, the pretty bungalows,
the side-walks with their mown grass borders, the rotary sprayer, and
the electric-lit streets, is very charming. But that is, in a way, an
artificial Canada. The Canada of the survey party, the prospector's
outfit, the lumber camp, the pack-horse trail, the canoe and the
portage; that, it seems to me, is the actual Canada.

There is an American coin--five-cent piece, or "nickel"--on one side
of which is represented a buffalo (or, to be exact, a bison) and on
the other the head of an Indian, a typical western plains Indian. It
was done, as a matter of fact, from a Blackfoot, Two Guns White Calf.
Canada should have one minted somewhat after the same fashion, perhaps
with obverse of a beaver, caribou, or moose, and reverse of a
portaging _voyageur_. It would not suggest the Montreal or Vancouver
of to-day, any more than the bison and Indian suggest New York and San
Francisco; but it would similarly recall the history of the land.

For whatever the material base of it, and the many inventions of
men--steam-ploughs on the prairies driving a dozen furrows, throbbing
gasoline threshers, steel hotels in the new cities set up to the
rattle of electrically-driven rivets, the spiritual base of Canada is
not in steel and sky-signs any more than the quintessential England is
only in London, or in my city of Glasgow the heart and soul of Scotland.


II

I mentioned red-willow smoke. It is of the red-willow, whenever
procurable (and it is generally procurable) that the Indian likes to
make his cooking-fire, for its smoke is the least sooty of all. In the
old days there were times when not only for that reason, but because
of its slight visibility, it was used. Red-willow was the wood, on all
counts, for the cooking-fire.

To some of us its very name is in itself moving, a spell. Dry
red-willow flames well. There is nothing voluminous, thick, in its
smoke. It is the antithesis of smudge-fire smoke, a mere ethereal
sifting of blue, a transparent haze that soon is dissipated away into
nothingness whether it drifts upward on a still day, streams out on a
day of steady breezes, or whirls to and fro in a day of veering winds.
If the camp be near the base of tall cedars it would take a practised
eye, from a mile away, on an eminence, to pick out its trickle over
the tree-tops because of the shadows under cedar boughs all day, like
the blue of twilight.

Camping by a secluded lake on a spit of sand fifty yards from the
water I sat on a boulder one day, shortly after my return, free again,
back a bit from my fire, and just looked on it and mused on it. A
wind blew gently out of the woods so that the smoke was blown like a
veil, and by the time it reached the water its life was over. A pot
was set on two large stones with the fire between them, and at either
end of these stones were smaller ones placed so as to make sufficient
draught. I could thus regulate my natural oven by a mere push of my
foot against the end stones, as any chef regulates his stove by
turning handles or moving steel knobs.

Sitting on that boulder and doting on my fire I wished that I could get
a photographer with skill and understanding to photograph for me these
stones, the flames, the forked stick thrust in the sand, the pot, the
strip of bushes beyond with chinks of sunlit lake showing through and
that sift of haze--a pictorial record of a camp-fire without any human
beings, just the fire that innumerable men know from the Saint Lawrence
to the Arctic, from the Ontario woods to where the Pacific boomers crash
rhythmically, after storms, on lonely western beaches.

What a souvenir for days in cities! The odours would be lacking, the
odour of the woods--balsam and resin--the odour, the savour, of
red-willow smoke. It is not a smell, it is a perfume, the perfume of
the comfort of the open air, as the smudge-fire (that drives off
mosquitoes and flies) is that of its discomfort.

The joy of the open I would extol without infatuation. They talk of
_pipe-dreams_. Here is a wood-smoke dream: In it comes Cartier, that
Breton mariner who in the sixteenth century sailed up Saint Lawrence,
comes La Salle, who adventured up the Mississippi in the seventeenth
century, from the Caribbean Sea, past the grass houses of the Osages,
the mud houses of the Mandans, the log houses of the Hurons, to the
land of the Iroquois. David Douglas of Perth is in that dream, a
solitary figure in the narrow avenues of Indian trails. In the odour
of wood-smoke Anthony Hendry (that Isle of Wight boy, outlawed for
smuggling, who became explorer in the service of the Company of
Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay) treks into the
country of the Saskatchewan, and in the blue haze across a hundred and
fifty years Sam Hearne again goes prying, with curious eyes, down the
Coppermine and looks out over the Arctic Sea.

The Sam Hearnes of to-day, the wandering prospectors who "grub-stake"
in the comfortable little towns and go off into the hills, and the
survey men and engineers in search of new one per cent grades for the
stretching railroads (over which shall be transported the produce of
this big land: the furs, the wheat, the cattle and the lumber, the ore
and the bars of silver), through pass and caon burn the same incense
at morning and evening.

Always there is the camp-fire. Always there has been this sifting of
blue among the scrub. Back in the unknown past men, making camp, have
watched it begin and, camp struck, have dashed water on its embers
before departing, looking over the shoulders on leaving and puckering
their eyes to be sure it was extinguished. It is a very ancient
backward glance, that, of man among the unseeing trees and under the
unheeding hills, and still we make it, moving on, to be certain the
odour of wood-smoke is not of a menace--only as it were the clinging
memory of our camp of a day.


III

How fugitive, how immaterial, are often the things we cherish. What
seemingly trivial memories we turn back to--seemingly trivial. There is
a value in them beyond the face value, the superficial seeming. They
have implications connotations. Back in the West again I recalled across
twenty-five years, a freight-train--just a freight-train--I once met
when I was _tramping the ties_ or _hitting the ties_ (which is to say
walking on the railway sleepers) from Savona's Ferry to Kamloops.

The preparation for finding something tremendous, almost awesome, in
that freight-train was of many hours' duration. I tramped on the
railway-track eastward, first of all with nothing but the sage-brush
dotted benches of sand rolling up to right and the gorge of Thompson
River to left. The day was so hot that the blue of the sky had a
shimmering appearance like satin. At Savona's in those days were only
half a dozen houses, one hotel, one store. It used to be Savona's
Ferry, then it was Savona's, now it is Savona.

On and on I tramped, grasshoppers clicking all over the railway track
and the hills and, to all appearance, nothing else alive anywhere.
Suddenly over the crest to right a head bobbed up, shoulders, a body.
A horse stood on the sky-line, then another head, shoulders, and body
bobbed up and two riders came across a slope at a tangent, heading
towards me, the second one leading a spare horse. They rode down in
exhilarating western style and reined up abruptly in a dust-storm of
their own making. They were Shuswap Indians.

"You wanna buy a horse?" said the first.

"No, thank you," I replied.

They wheeled and away uphill they went, over the crest, and left the
world empty as before. On I tramped, hot and weary and happy in the
blazing sun. The heat poured down from the sky and was reflected up
from the sand, so that I had to bunch my silk neckerchief to protect
the underside of my chin.

At last I came to where the high hills (that lie back of the sandhills
all the way from Ashcroft to near Kamloops) creep forward, push ribs
through, one after another, till the sand disappears or only lies in
clefts of rock. Thereafter progress was through a tunnel in a cape,
across a trestle to the next cape, through a short tunnel in that,
across another trestle bridge, into another short tunnel--on and on.

That was a lugubrious tract. The tunnels were almost all so short that I
could see the light at the other end when entering--or, at any rate, a
glimmer of light against one wall if the tunnel happened to curve
slightly instead of being straight. In each there was a tip-tapping of
water from cracks in the rocky ceiling. They struck cold, damp, coming
out of the sun. On the trestles between spur and spur of pierced rib
there was melancholy too. The lake-waters lapped among the wooden piles.

I came at last to a dozen men--an "extra gang"--at work. They were
friendly enough but the boss was a grim person and a brief exchange of
civilities was all that seemed possible. They were not working at a
place likely to make men affable, were imprisoned between two
shadowing rocky promontories in a stretch of country very different
from the open and sunny land round Savona's. These rock-cuttings and
black trestles between would depress anybody.

I was glad when, later on, having given the gang "So-long!" I came out
of the last tunnel and saw ahead of me, once more, rolling
yellow-green hills to right and to left the glittering sky reflected
in an expanse of water, the Thompson river spreading out into the
dimensions of a lake. Along the shore was shingle like the beach of a
sea and below were curving bays of golden-hued sand.

A board on the hillside announced _Tranquille_. To-day there is a
consumption sanatorium there--and splendid work it does. Then there
was only that board at the side of the railway track and a tawny
coyote, skulking on the hill above, looked down at the lone pilgrim.
The real Tranquille was across the river and in earlier days, when the
gold-seekers were coming into that country over Indian trails, there
had been, I believe, a ferry there of the same type that the man
called Savona ran lower down.

The sandy beaches, as I marched on, tap-tap-tap in silly little short
steps on the close-set railway ties, kept luring me. I left the track
and went down over the shingle, threw down my roll of blankets and
bathed and drank, bathed again, and slunged and plunged and "felt
good," as they say out west. A far-off booming recalled to me the fact
that I was not on an uninhabited island. It was very faint but I knew
what it was--a train coming west, whistling before curves.

Again it came to my ears, again, a deep, far hoot, again and again,
drawing nearer. So I dressed and, shouldering my blanket-roll,
returned to the track, stepping out afresh. During the next hour the
booming whistle continued at intervals, each boom nearer than its
predecessor. I began to wish the train would arrive. I accelerated,
anxious to meet it and get the suspense over.

At last a singing in the rails announced it very near and a deeper
roar came from close at hand There was the monster engine with the
cow-catcher fanning before it and the glass of the headlight twinkling
in the sun. I stepped aside to let it go past. It seemed very high
over me. The engineer in his windowed cab looked down, elbow on sill,
head out.

With a splendid whirl the great hot locomotive went burning past,
drivers plunging, piston puffing. With an odour of hot metal and oil
it rocked by, and behind it came a quarter of a mile of empty
freight-cars of all kinds--grain-cars, cattle-cars, flat-cars,
refrigerator-cars, each screaming and yelling with sounds steely and
sounds wooden. It was deafening. It was almost terrible, as if the
cars had entity, personality. Eddies of wind and dust accompanied the
agonised string. A sliding side-door had sprung in one car and it went
by with a clap-clap-clap. Then a sucking draught, a final swirl, and
the train was past.

I stepped on to the track again, looking after it, and saw a brakesman
at the door of the caboose, sitting on a stool there in an attitude of
summer weariness, sleeves rolled up, hat on back of head. I could hear
the wheels, the last wheels of the caboose, go click-click-click over
the joints of the rails. There were round me, also, before and
behind, the little clicks of contracting steel as the rails recovered
after the train had gone over them. The locomotive whistled again for
a curve as I walked on.

Boom after boom came to my ears--fainter, fainter. Except for the
lines of steel it might never have passed at all. It was less real
than the foot-high, shimmering heat-haze that wavered over the yellow
land, and as I was thinking that I was once again alone, and feeling
the ambient loneliness of the country round me again, something drew
my eyes up to the sandy rolls southward--some movement.

There was the prowling coyote padding along, head twisted towards me,
teeth showing in the hungry and cynical grin of his species. Another
joined him, or her, and another. Where scrub grew close to the track
they came close with their flirting pad. Where the scrub lay backwards
they drew off and made semi-circular scampers through it and round the
open places to take up again, close-by, their teeth-bared
surveillance, in the manner of their kind. From far away to west I
heard the last faint _whoo-whoo whoo-whoo_ of the train.

The three coyotes kept me company for miles. Nothing else moved in that
still day except the grasshoppers and a white cloud that came frothing
and boiling over the unutterably still and staring indigo range of hills
beyond the last roll of sandy and grass-tufted bench-land.


IV

I decided, on this return, to make the little town of Nelson (in
British Columbia) my headquarters, my centre for trips into the
mountains. I had arranged, before going out on one of these, for a car
to meet me at the place where I planned to break out of wilderness on
to a road again. We kept the appointment very well. Coming down the
mountainside I threw a shout into the quiet and from far below a
motor-horn gave two blasts in response.

I came out from under the forest-eaves and there was the car. Seated
beside the driver was a man he had brought with him, he explained,
when introducing us, just for the jaunt. In appearance he was ruddy
and vigorous, with a light of great vitality in his grey eyes. His
accent was in accord with his name, but we did not talk of Scotland
that day. We talked, instead, of the changes in the West--of trails
turned to roads, of pack-horses and saddle-horses giving place to
motors--while the car slowed and accelerated as the highway ordained,
purring down to twenty, humming up to fifty in a rush of
balsam-scented air.

Having arrived in town we said good-bye, but that was not the end of
him. He was sitting in the lounge of the hotel when I came out from
dinner and at once rose to meet me and give his invitation--I might
say almost his command, by the ebullient manner of his delivery: "Come
and hae a dram."

At that time there was a sort of Prohibition in British Columbia.
There were no authorised drinking-places. One could import liquor for
private consumption or have it, by doctor's prescription, at the
chemist's--the drug store. That was all. Saloons, as the West calls
public-houses, were abolished and the beer-parlours of to-day were not
installed. Having but recently returned to Canada after the war, aware
of the governmental regulations and restrictions, I thought, in my
innocence, when he led the way into a caf, that we were going to have
what is called a soft drink. But when he put a dollar bill on the
counter and nodded, whisky was at once set before us.

"This is whisky!" I exclaimed.

"Aye, that's whisky," he agreed.

"But----" I began.

"Hoots!" he said. "We maun hae oor dram!"

So that was that. I realised that Canadians could not decently condemn
the people of the United States for their lawlessness, in those days,
in the matter of liquor-laws!

"Ye can get it in hauf a dozen places in toon," he informed me. "Ye
put doon your fifty cents and, obviously, if ye say naething, that
means whisky. What else could it mean?"

Leaning against the bar he plunged into a learned disquisition on
clans and their septs and their tartans, asking me of my ancestors
upon both the paternal and maternal side. What he did not know of
Scots family history, Scots heraldry--and tartans--was trivial.

On Hogmanay I saw him again in the hotel where I was staying. He came
into the bright dining-room, under the gay paper streamers and bells
and the vivid swinging balloons, putting to shame my mere evening wear
of regulation black and white, for he was in the full dress of his
clan. His arrival was like the charge of the Macdonalds at
Killiecrankie. Passing my table he bent over me, and--

"Hoo are ye the nicht?" he asked.

I replied with the refrain of an old song, "_I'm fine and hoo's
yersel'?_"

"Just hangin' thegither like a wat peat," said he, and strode on.

Dinner over, out in the lounge, where the orchestra was coaxing
dancers to take the floor, he sat down beside me for a few minutes and
I took the opportunity to ask him about that "wat peat," suggesting
that it should be "wat peat-divot."

No, man! Did I never hear tell of a wat peat? What sort of a Scot was I?
I explained that I was not asking in a disputatious frame of mind, that
this was an "argument" only in the Platonic sense, that I was seeking
information, an authoritative decision. At that his manner changed.

"Och aye," said he, "fine I ken there are peat-divots, but the richt
and proper phrase is,'hangin' thegither like a wat peat.'"

On the evening of the first of January I was dining with friends at
their own home in the little town, a picturesque place of
bright-painted houses surrounded by lawns and gardens on a steep slope
of mountain. I left their bungalow, which is perched some way up the
slope, about midnight, and on my way down heard the sound of bagpipes.

Whence came the music? The street was empty save for its lamps and the
trees among which they glowed, and the lacy designs of branch and twig
that they cast on the snow, which glittered with points of frost in
the manner of old-fashioned Christmas cards. Then round a corner some
blocks below me there wheeled a solitary piper followed by a solitary
man. Uphill they came, stepping out bravely. Certainly that piper had
a stout heart. He piped steadily despite the sharpness of the ascent,
and as they drew nearer I saw that the man who strutted behind was my
friend of the Scots family history, the tartan lore, the wat peat.

I had just made that discovery when a policeman appeared from one of
the tributary streets across the way from me, and I delayed under a
tree to see what would happen.

Up they came, the pipes in full blast; and the policeman, barring the
way, held up a hand. The procession (if we can call one piper and a
follower a procession) halted. By the appearance of these two they
assuredly felt like a procession. The policeman spoke, though what he
said I could not hear; and at that the piper who, though he had halted
at the imperious signal, had continued to play full in the officer's
face, lowered his pipes. They sent into the night a long-drawn wail
as the bag emptied.

"You'll have to _can_ this," I heard the policeman say.

From behind the piper stepped my acquaintance.

"_Can!_" he expostulated. "_Can!_ What dae ye mean?"

"You'll have to stop this noise."

"Noise! That was 'The Cock o' the North.'"

"Well, Jock," said the policeman, a typical western one, "it's time it
was roosted. It's after midnight. You can't disturb people with that
noise, or music."

"Ah, weel, I think it's redeeculous. But we maun abide by the law--at
least," he added, "in some particulars. Come on," and away they went,
Jock and the piper, uphill.

I heard the policeman, looking after them, laugh to himself. Yes,
there was no doubt about it: without the aid of the pipes there was
something rather teetering in their ambulation up the declivity of
that side-walk, two dark figures against the snow under the
lamp-clusters, one with the pipes under oxter, the other waving an arm
in wide gestures.

Once or twice I met him again in the street or in the hotel and always
it was of Scotland he spoke to me. In place of interspersing his talk
with Latin tags as the manner of some is he strewed quotations from
Burns and drew similes from Scott. To hear him talk was to find the
occidental surroundings turning vague. After a chat with him the
western mountains, the western town with telephone-poles along the
main street, were less real than a memory of even some snell day by
the lochs of Knapdale or Lorne when all is given over to the murmur of
a grey tide among black rocks and a drear wind screaming thinly in the
heather, and mists creeping in the glens, and a man's fingers are
stiff with the chill and the damp, and all he thinks of, splashing
home through pools in the dusk, is the light in a window and a fireside.

So, one day, deeply impressed by the thistle and peat-reek quality of
the man, I asked him what I had often intended to ask before--

"How long have you been out in this country? When did you leave
Scotland?"

"Leave Scotland, is't? Never been in Scotland! I come frae Glengarry
County, Ontario."

He repeated it with sonorous articulation like that of Alan Breck
announcing that he bore a king's name: "GLENGARRY County, Ontario."


V

No matter how far one may travel in Canada from the centres of industry
one finds conveniences and comforts in the wilds. The great department
stores with their specialised postal--or, as they say on the western
continent, mailing--services, send the last invention in bright lamps
into the furthest night. The windows of the log-cabins of the Mackenzie
illumine the snow with the radiance of petrol--which they call here
gasoline. Be not astonished in the back of beyond to find your hostess
appear in a silk dress in the evening to honour your presence.

A new country makes its beginning with the inventions of its day. The
ferry on far Peace River is driven by petrol; and a modern invention
of bull-wheels and cable, at once simple and efficient like most
inventions used on frontiers, chugs it from bank to bank. These
ferries can carry heavy loads of automobiles, drays, people. On many
an out-of-the-way lake and river of the great West the chug-chug-chug
of the gasoline-ferry echoes among the haunts of coyote and bear.

The especial ferry of these pages--which are really about Sam Hing but
may best begin thus--is on the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, British
Columbia.

I often wonder what Sam Hing thinks of it.

He is a Chinaman from Canton and has memories of sampans and
rice-fields and pagodas and temple-bells. I am a Scot from South
America by way of the Auld Country, the dear grimy streets of Glasgow,
the "draughty parallelograms" of Edinburgh. By some trick of memory
that is always how I recall these places: Edinburgh being dried, its
pavements whitened, by a rushing wind; Glasgow in a drizzle, with
gleam of wet umbrellas and twinkle of wet shoe-heels, and the lights
of shop windows, very friendly.

Sam Hing does my washing for me while I am living in a house on the
north shore of that West Arm. In summer he came over from Nelson to
collect my "washee-sack," but when the snows arrived he suggested that
I might walk the mile to the ferry with it and meet him there, on the
Nelson side. So once a week I put my used linen in a rucksack and,
hauling on gum-rubbers, go scrunching off to meet him.

A wind tosses a laden fir and throws a jet of white suddenly turned to
colour, the colour of rainbows. Blue-jays scream to me, worried, it
seems, to see me go, for every day they have a dole of food at my
door. The clusters of the snow-berries on their bushes are like grapes
of alabaster. Flocks of snow-birds, as many as sixty to a flock, sit
in the tops of a twiggy cottonwood. They appear, from a distance, like
leaves overlooked there by the late autumn winds. But, as I draw
nearer, I hear them talking to each other, little birds hardly bigger
than sparrows. I draw nearer still; and then, with a sound like the
opening of many fans at a ballet, the seeming leaves are no more
silhouetted against the bright and cold blue sky but are wheeling and
fluttering in twittering curves and parabolas.

By the time I am half-way to the ferry Sam Hing will be setting out
from Nelson in the tramcar to meet me at the landing-place. Even a
little city like Nelson takes advantage of its water-power and owns
three electric cars--one going up while another comes down, and a
spare one in the car-barn.

What does Sam Hing think of it all? Round about are the white-powdered
mountains glittering in the sun. Little creeks tumble down out of
them, all arched over with snow that protects them and so keeps our
water supply constant for the winter. No burst pipes here as in town!

Sam Hing: I think of Chinese vases and of Matthew Arnold's lines
about the potter of Pekin, the lamp lighting up his studious forehead
and thin hands. A phrase from Joseph Hergesheimer's note on Chinese
poetry comes to mind, regarding how a poem written "by the sixth
Emperor of the Han dynasty perhaps two thousand years ago, is
identical with the present complex, troubled mind; an autumn wind
rises and white clouds fly, the grass and trees wither, geese go south
. . ." I think of Crosbie Garstin's delightful song (in his _Vagabond
Verses_) of a little Chinese lady quaintly adrift in Cordova Street,
Vancouver. Here in the Far West we are almost at the East.

Clerihew, the ferryman, hails me thus:

"Weel, there ye are! Ah'm juist gaun tae start the engine. It's a
graund day." (Here, you observe, is machinery, so here is a Scot
abroad.) "Weel, we'll start."

He climbs up into his tower and I ignore the little cabin with the
stove-pipe thrust out atop. The cold of Canada sounds worse than that
of the Old Country according to the thermometer; but it is blood, not
mercury, that is in our veins and the dryness of the atmosphere makes
it almost impossible to one accustomed to the snell winter days of
Scotland (wet winds chilling the bones over Fife fields in February;
keen, cutting blasts that whirl aside the screaming peewits on the
border moors) to believe that the thermometer is right in registering
two below zero. I lean on the bulwark and watch the green ripples
swirl into the white reflections. And there is Sam Hing on the shore
waiting for me.

"Hollo!" says he.

"Hallo!" say I. "How you do?"

"Velly well. You well?" The Chinese are adepts at inflection.

"Very well, thank you. How you like the snow?"

"Allee lightee. Not too cold. You think him cold?"

"No."

"No. Not me."

I have a copy of Crammer-Byng's volume of translations from Chinese
poets, _A Lute of Jade_, at my lake-side home and in the front of it I
have pasted one of Sam Hing's notes from a "washee" parcel. It looks
good enough to frame to decorate a wall, giving what painters call an
accent there.

We swop parcels and I go back to the ferry thinking of Li-Po, the
courtier-poet of the eighth century, and how he longed to be, instead
of a courtier, a frontiersman. Also I think of his song of yellow dusk
on the city wall and a woman's face looking out over her loom. I
think of Po-Chu-I and his song of the peach bloom; of Tu Fu's bitter
cry in his verses on _The Recruiting Sergeant_. He was another
eighth-century poet of China and knew then what the people of Europe
now know about the true inwardness of war--and yet may not profit by
knowing. I think of his other song, away from affairs (that after all
are generally in the hands of rogues and fools), his song of only a
gentle rain falling in the furrows.

To Joseph Conrad all the East would rise up, with lagoon, and prau,
and palm-tops above the mist, at "the grave ring of a big brass tray."
Sam Hing's washee bill brings up the songs of these, and of Wang
Ch'ang-Ling, a kind of oriental Herrick who wrote of maidens, it
seems, as they were flowers, of flowers as they were maidens.

      "Leaves of the Nenuphars and silken skirts the same pale green,
      On flower and laughing face alike the same rose-tints are seen;
      Like some blurred tapestry they blend within the lake displayed:
      You cannot part the leaves from silk, the lily from the maid."

Often I wonder if Sam Hing knows Li-Po, and Tu Fu, and Po-Chu-I, and
Wang Ch'ang-Ling. He tittups away, chanting, "So-long, good-bye. Next
week allee same. Velly good!" with his bobbing step that looks as if
he learnt it on the treadmill!

Clerihew chugs me back.

"Yon's a cheery cove, yon Chink washee," he comments. "He's been
aroond thae pairts for years. Ah think he must ha' gotten the call of
the West intil him. He's aye laughing. He laughs at the mountains and
at the ferry. Weel, it's a graund way tae feel. We canna be thankful
enough for health and strength and tae be oot and aboot and able tae
enjoy the warld. It's surely graund."

With a handful of waste and an oil-can he may croon, "O but I'm
longing for my ain folk," while Sam Hing hums, waiting for us,
grinning at the landing, I know not what--perhaps the original of:

      "Cold from the spring the waters pass
      Over the swaying pampas grass;
          All night long in dream I lie,
          Ah me! ah me! to awake and sigh--
          Sigh for the City of Chow.

      "Cold from its source the stream meanders
      Darkly down through the oleanders;
          All night long in dream I lie,
          Ah me! ah me! to awake and sigh--
          Sigh for the City of Chow."

Yet neither seems to be in a hurry to go home, either to the sound of
whirring grouse over the heather and the sight of the hump of
Cruachan, or the boom of bronze gongs and vision of porcelain pagodas.
"East is East and West is West," but there is a glamour here that
holds men from East and West.

It may be that Sam Hing has never heard of Li-Po and the rest. And
perhaps as sensible would it be for me, in London, moved by a
sentiment, to stick my charlady's washing bills inside my Keats! And
yet, I don't know--her bills were not so decorative as Sam Hing's. He
makes his out with a brush and jet-black ink on slips of yellow paper.
Perhaps, however, he does know Li-Po. I must have this question
settled. Some day I must inquire of him: "You savvey Li-Po? You savvey
Tu Fu? You savvey Po-Chu-I?"

Let us live in hope. Let us dream that in China the poets are widely
known, are not without honour in their own country, and that my
washee-boy is conversant, in the original, with these exquisite
songs, blown leaves from ancient autumns, that the sight of him,
waiting at the ferry (with his almond eyes and oriental smile), always
brings into my mind.


VI

For some time I made my headquarters there, by that lake-side--in a
settlement composed chiefly of immigrants from Scotland and England.
There, at least, had been my _pied--terre_. There had been a roof
under which to keep my books and such household gods as ordained
wanderers may carry with them.

These Scots and English were not by any means all exiles in the
melancholy sense of the word. Many of them, returning on visits to the
homeland, decided that (in the words of Old Bill) here was a "better
'ole," things being as they are. Yet something of their native
country, even for these, remains perdurably in the mind and heart.

This is a small planet and speed, the celerity of travel, our many
inventions, make it smaller. The day approaches (despite devilish or
witless devices to defer it) on which war between nations will be
less international war than a sort of civil war and, like fratricide,
finally too horrible to contemplate. Or, at least, we hope so. Even
so, for each there is some spot of earth "beloved over all," as
Kipling sang in the Sussex song that tells of "the dim blue goodness
of the weald."

I have been there. I have seen it from a hill above Sevenoaks, sitting
in the garden of an inn with Holbrook Jackson, drinking English beer out
of a gleaming mug that seemed to be fairly descended from Elizabethan
days, resting on the way to visit the Welsh poet, W. H. Davies, in a
cottage among apple-blossom down in that blueness, and Scot though I be
the memory of that day haunts me often so that the wind in the trees
half the world away from the weald seems, at times, remembering, to be
the wind of that past day in the oaks above Sevenoaks.

It was the roulade of a bird one day in the garden that drove me
back--and some way north of Sevenoaks. It took me back to Scotland,
and why that bird was responsible you shall hear in a moment.

The last time I was in Edinburgh I went down by Hanover Street, past
Heriot Row (with a look along it to where Stevenson lived), and on
where the Water of Leith prattles through Canonmills, to Warriston,
from where the skyline of Edinburgh, or the Athenian columns of Calton
Hill, have a special melancholy majesty. I was on a secret,
sentimental pilgrimage to the grave of Alexander Smith--of _A Summer
in Skye_, _Dreamthorp_, _Last Leaves_. A thrush was singing in a
tree-top, tossing ecstatically into the air the same roulade that I
heard that day.

The thrush, the mavis, was one of Smith's favourite birds, and the
common daisy--daisies dotted the grass of his grave--his favourite
flower. Furtively--adread, I suppose, of being called _sentimentalist_
by any chance observer--I picked one. I did not know then (not being
endowed with prevision) what a vagrant life was to be mine; but now,
heedless whether caught in the act I be dubbed sentimentalist or not,
opening my _Summer in Skye_ I take pleasure in that frail bit of
Scotland preserved these thousands of miles away.

Turning its pages that afternoon, jogged by the happy flutings of the
bird in the garden, I considered that it is only Smith's bones that
lie at Warriston. When they asked Socrates how he would be buried, he
said, "You will have to catch me first." Alexander Smith may be caught
in his books, a lovable spirit. It is usual, I believe, to class him
as a minor essayist but the French phrase, _petit matre_, seems more
fitting--and for the Scot in exile, Alexander Smith is assuredly a
classic.

I have tried him on many a Scot abroad, tried him also on members of
that interesting race of Canadian Scots--sons and grandsons, born in
Canada, of both Highland and Lowland folks. Seldom does he fail to
charm.

For the Scot abroad, perhaps not Sir Walter himself can more surely,
by the magic of words, conjure home to their dreaming eyes. Alexander
Smith gives it all, from the old jougs hanging on the wall at
Duddingston to the odour of peat-smoke and of seaweed and the weaving
of gulls along the Hebrides. As I was reading here and there in _A
Summer in Skye_ the wind rose without until there was a subdued
thunder of it in the new leaves of the cottonwoods and in the tall
pines, and I seemed to hear, in that roar, the Atlantic pouring in
between Colonsay and Jura, between Jura and Mull, shouting on the
beaches of Ayrshire and up Kilbrennan Sound.

What with Alexander Smith and that subdued thunder I was sufficiently
transported, but there was more to follow: there came the sound of
bagpipes. Had I gone gyte? Or had the ghost of Smith and my reverie
wrought some magic? Suddenly I realised the explanation: There was
some sort of celebration afoot in the settlement. I had been invited
to attend but forgot about it, wandering through Scotland with
Alexander Smith. I went to the window and looked out. Along the road,
on his way to that celebration, came a piper with his shoulders well
back, his kilt swinging, and under the eaves of my house, thus far
from home, music of home reverberated and passed.


VII

I had again seen great rivers flowing between wilderness mountains,
eddies spinning slowly like strange circular mirrors under the sky,
the ceaseless, polished rush of waters ending in the white scroll of
rapids, with an osprey overhead. I had ridden up through the green
quiet of the forests that flounce the foothills, that quiet broken by
the sweet calls of the varied thrushes and the _quank-quank_ of the
small nut-hatches, and made camps on the edge of timber. I had
wandered in the high country, that haunting elevated world between
forest-top (timber-level) and peaks, mile after mile of heather, or
of heath, and rock-slides where the grizzly bear strolls along with
lolling head. And suddenly I was appalled by the scenic splendours
that had delighted me.

There came into my mind what I had read regarding the thudding of the
Pacific tides on the continental shelf, with a weight of so many
trillions of tons per square mile, affecting (so goes a theory I had
recently read) the semi-liquid part of our globe just below its solid
sheath, and urging certain acids upwards to change one stone into
another--Nature an alchemist. I thought also of the pronouncement of
some geologists that the pulsing of these tides is ever pushing the
Rocky Mountains on to the prairies--at the rate of what? I forget. A
minute fraction of space in a million years.

Of course these recent theories may be proved all wrong, or only
half-truth, to-morrow. In most sciences we have a procession of
inquirers, while finding proof of some surmises of their predecessors
--and by aid of that proof acquiring more knowledge--rejecting earlier
pronouncements. Sense or nonsense, I had read all that; it persisted in
my mind as a bar of music may persist with or without high musical
value, willy-nilly.

Surrounded by these peaks, under the tremendous drifting arrangements
of vapour, grey and grey-blue, and ghostly clouds like threads of
steam, I realised that I had lived too long in the apparent, the
superficial security of houses, walked too much in streets made trig
by the scavenging department, lunched too long in soft-carpeted
restaurants down below, forgetting that the illumination over the
table was but harnessed lightning.

A horrific sense of insecurity rushed upon me. There was some kind of
shrub grew at that place and one side of it, about a mile long, was
neatly cut as though by aid of a measuring tape, making it look like a
trimmed box-hedge such as one sees in suburbia. It was no gardener
topped by a bowler hat who had done that clipping but an avalanche in
Spring, gardening up there where hardly any one comes. I wondered over
the riddle of our days, as men must always have wondered. What is it
all for? Whence? Whither?

Eight thousand feet below, in the dining-car of the Trans-Canada
rushing along to Vancouver, people would be sitting down as easily as
in the Ritz, unfolding the napkins over their knees before
electro-plated covers put in front of them by Waiters (or stewards) in
white jackets. Here was another world and I was glad to be in it, to
see it, to experience it, alone with the tremendous clouds and the
steep miles of avalanche-pollarded brush and the wind rushing down off
a glacier as warm air rose from the valley below.

I strove to exorcise that intrusive feeling of my insecurity among
these vast natural monuments of boulder and rocky crest reflecting a
violet light, so that I could fully enjoy the lunch-time rest up
there; but as I sat on my little knoll and looked down on the tossed
world, range after range marching away into the edge of sky,
forest-top after forest-top below me--and what I knew to be the tips
of thousands of tall trees in distant valleys, looking like moss from
that elevation--it returned.

I could not rid myself of the impression that I felt the thud of the
Pacific breakers five hundred miles away, beyond all these quiet ranges
westward, could not rid myself of the belief that I felt that slow drift
eastward of the Rockies and the Selkirks. I drifted with them! But
no--the throbbing was only of my heart, the drift was optical illusion
(and too quick!) from looking up at the clouds passing over.


VIII

The High Country calls one back with a synthetic spell. Its beauty
calls. Its grandeur calls. Its loneliness even calls. Also it dares us
to come back. I forgot that I was not as young as I used to be--and
refused to remember what the doctors had told me during the war. For
several months I had sat at my table writing and taking no exercise.
The work over, I planned another sortie into the mountains, poring
over maps. Yes--that's where we'll go this time. It was a place into
which we could not ride, could not even take a pack-horse, but often
before I had packed into such places on my own back.

I did it again. I did it once too often. All was as noble, as grand,
as lonely, as beautiful and with the same hint of menace, as ever. We
camped beneath a glacier near a stream the spray of which watered
great juicy clumps of purple pentstemon. We heard the glacier sigh and
moan in the night. Next morning we went round a shoulder of hill so
steep that we were grateful to a bear that had gone that way a little
while before us and left the indentations of its paws for us to step
in. We saw coveys of ptarmigan skim the upland meadow of bryanthus and
become invisible as they passed on over snowfields. We slept on
mattresses of "fir-feathers." We saw dawn hit the peaks and dusk snuff
out the last light on them.

When we returned to Nelson I did not know what was wrong with me but
it seemed that something, undoubtedly, was wrong. I went to a doctor
to ask if he knew. He did. He knew at once. He began, "I do not want
to alarm you but . . ." A physical flaw in me that the medical boards
during the war had whispered over was no longer a mere flaw and I had
to lie on my back for a year, contenting myself with the knowledge
that what was wrong had a fine he-man sound for one who in his life
had worked in lumber-camps and railway construction camps, and
comforted frightened long-horn steers and troubled bulls on a sinking
cattle-boat, and was pleased with himself for having done these and
kindred things--it being _athlete's heart_. That is pleasanter to
consider than, say, crocked heart.

Early in life, years and years before, I had met Mnemosene before I
knew her name. She came to my solace then. With her I wandered here,
wandered there, through streets and forests, heard the waves beat on
Bennan Head and plash on the water-stairs at Iquique. Also--there are
such things as Books.

During that period I read, with horror, Blair Niles's _Condemned_--and
realised that my incarceration was nothing to whimper over. My
enforced leisure was heaven compared with the hell of the penal
settlement in French Guiana that she described. I lay in a room the
window of which framed two pine-trees. Between their boles and lower
branches I could see the curve of a bay and, above the higher
branches, watch the weather on a mountain side.

Chiefly travel-books I read during that period. In our own age there
are travel-books produced (as in past times) that give more than
terrestrial transportation. They open magic casements. Their writers
do not just "go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." We are
richer by their experiences even when these may seem trifling--or
lacking in jeopardy.

W. H. Hudson is one of these. I turned back to my favourite among his
books, _A Naturalist in La Plata_. I read again in Beebe's _Edge of
the Jungle_ of that old Indian woman in British Guiana who loved a
certain plant that was "of no use whatsoever," loved and tended it
because "in months to come it would be yellow and would smell." With
Hergesheimer I was again in Havana, in that book of his that Cabell
called a "multi-coloured sorcerous volume," his _San Cristobal_. . . .
Philip Guedalla told me, in his _Conquistador_, of an awakening in a
hotel bedroom into which he had been conducted too late at night to
have any impression of the view from its windows and how, drawing the
blind, he saw the prune-blossom fill a valley of California. Blair
Niles told of waiting at Latacunga, in Ecuador (a better land than
that of the _transports_, the ironically-named _librs_ and the
_rlegus_) for the mist-cap to lift from Cotopaxi--and how there came
a tap at the door in the morning and the voice of the French exile who
runs an inn there, "Monsieur, Madame, the mountain. It is clear!"

The French, by the way, may not be as great wanderers as Britons or
Americans but when they do travel and also write they give us some
memorable contributions that defy rust awhile, as witness the _Voyage en
Espagne_ (which I re-read during that year) of Theophile Gautier who,
with his keen eyes for seeing surfaces and his limpid and masterly
presentation of them, makes us aware of what lies behind; or, in a
manner very different, Paul Bourget's _Sensations d'Italie_. Dubois,
studying Arabic, saving his francs at the call of the name of Timbuctoo,
magnetic for him, and eventually going there after years of
preparation, should be remembered among romantic travellers, and his
book on Timbuctoo--of which there is an excellent English translation.

We can have what we will at the turning of a page--all times, all
places. We can ride through century-old England with Cobbett or with
Vandercook, in _Tom-Tom_, hear the transported drums of Africa throb
through the secretive forests by the Essequibo. We can go no further
afield than to Salisbury Plain and Winterslow (in the _Travels in
England_ of Richard Le Gallienne) to look for the cottage where
Hazlitt wrote; or we can put out of grey Clyde in a nineteen-ton yacht
with Hildebrand (of _Blue Water_ fame) and sail with him to sunshine
and happiness in the Balearics. We can go with Rockwell Kent, artist
in many mediums and man of his hands, in another small boat to watch
the sea-weed rise and fall on rocky beaches and see the high glaciers
gleaming spectral above misty precipices of South America's indented
tip, or with John dos Passoes through Spain in his _Rosinante to the
Road Again_.

With H. M. Tomlinson (whose sentences have a way of troubling us with
implicit strange inquiries, or exciting us with latent encouragements
when, superficially considered, they might be supposed to be no more
than descriptive) we listen to the jungle by the Rio Caracoles in the
hinterland of Brazil or, homing with him from Malaysia, feel the chill
of the English Channel as the Phoenicians felt it, cutting to the bone
where "the shadow of land to port might have been the end of all the
headlands of the seas. It was as desolate as antiquity by twilight."
Antiquity by twilight! Tomlinson is one who can give us both the scene
and the emotions conveyed by it.

From among the classics we may select the ponderous or the naf--or
have both together, with Johnson and Boswell, touring Scotland. We can
choose whom we will, go back to Herodotus inquiring through Thrace and
Egypt in the fifth century before Christ or accompany that gay cleric,
Laurence Sterne, flirting through France on his Sentimental Journey,
in the eighteenth.

Countless good travel-books there are, the appeal of which is chiefly,
no doubt, to regional specialists. I know an old-timer and trapper
(one old enough to remember the buffalo days) who has a collection of
volumes somewhat circumscribed in domain but greatly interesting to
those for whom the West has an appeal, many of them of a sort marked
_scarce_, _rare_, in booksellers' catalogues--Narratives and Journals
of Alexander Henry, Alexander Mackenzie, Alexander Ross, David
Douglas, David Thompson, Sir John Franklin, the Earl of Southesk, and
so forth. Along the bookcase top are, fittingly, old calumets and
tomahawks, bows and arrows, moccasins of Kootenay and Assiniboine, of
Cree and Blackfoot.

For those in London who, fretting for escape, look East I should think
the gorgeously-named Java Head Bookshop over against the British
Museum, which specialises upon volumes on the East Indies from Ceylon
to the Spice Islands, must be unsettling. There among the books, so
many devoted to the one quarter--their quarter--of the globe, they
must feel that books are not enough and that they must arise and go
now, and go to the Flores Sea.

Some good travel-books, though but of the other day, are, it seems,
unfairly forgotten, such as Norman Duncan's _Australian Byways_. It
appeared first in _Harper's Magazine_, and _Harper's_ did not ever
offer a roving commission to scribe or artist who had not well earned
the invitation. A Writer has to keep on, keep on, it would appear, if
he would be remembered by more than those--well, those who can
remember books without constant reminders. In youth most of us, I
suppose, were inveigled by the sound of "The Great Lone Land," and by
the cuts of spectacled Waterton galumphing through the Amazon
forests; and it is one sign, I take it, that we are not yet moribund,
that there is an invitation for us in such titles as _Going Down From
Jerusalem_ or _Passenger to Teheran_ and that we can be engaged by
photographs of a windjammer doubling the Horn for England out of Sydney.

There are travellers (like Bates and Belt) whose passion is for
countries where snakes may at any moment wriggle down out of the
thatch with stealthy design upon their lives and where, when they get
up in the morning, they have cannily to shake their shoes before
putting them on lest poisonous creatures are ambushed in them. There
are travellers (such as Shackleton and Scott) whose partiality is for
void Antarctica along the edge of which only penguins await them to
flap a welcome. Because of the diversity of travellers' tastes and
minds, we can have what we will in the realm of journey-books, whether
our desire is but to forget awhile the tussle to keep receipts level
with bills, or for something more on our journey.


IX

I toyed again, as I lay there, with the notion of preparing an
anthology of the open air. I had pondered it many times, in fitting
surroundings, coughing in the smoke of smudge-fires, or breathing deep
of balsam when riding the trails. Packing in to mountain lakes up
steep inclines, camp equipment on my back, I had paused for breath and
moaned to myself, "Never again! Never shall I do this again!" wiped
the sweat from my eyes and gone on, made camp for the night, fished a
mess of trout, tossed the flapjacks in the pan, fried bacon and fish
and, sitting by the crackling fire, exclaimed, "This is great!"--and
pondered the anthology.

Remembering, recumbent, those days and nights I toyed again with the
notion. No doubt Thomas de Quincey would be in it and "on a heavenly
day of July," tramping on his way to Chester, see that "elaborate and
pompous sunset hanging over the mountains of North Wales," and Borrow
also would be of the company, though Petulengro's "There's a wind on
the heath, brother," would come in as much for the sake of Petulengro
as for the sake of Borrow. The excerpts, not the names appended to
them, were to be the chief consideration.

Homer would be quoted from but not where he nods. Chief Salatha's
answer to the priest (who had told him of the glories of Heaven)
regarding the glories of the Barren Lands would be included because in
that speech, by the stress of his thoughts and feeling, Salatha had a
voice like Homer:

    "My father, you have spoken well; you have told me that Heaven
    is very beautiful; tell me one thing more. Is it more beautiful
    than the country of the musk-ox in summer, when sometimes the
    mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and
    the loons cry very often? That is beautiful, and if Heaven is
    still more beautiful, my heart will be glad, and I shall be
    content to rest there till I am very old."

Any description of a hill "curved like a woman's breast" would be
barred. The Paps of Jura is fitting, but usually better simile--even
anatomical--could be found for the curves of a hill than that one. It
is writing of that kind that causes some people to be dubious of
poetry, does harm to the cause. Any account of a storm that speaks of
the "kisses of the rain," or of a scorching desert that speaks of the
"kisses of the sun," would also he barred on the ground that
osculation is foreign to both rain and sun.

To give an example of what is essential for this collection: There
would be that passage by John Muir in which he tells how, on a day of
great winds in the high Sierras, the ecstasy of the tumult entered
into him and he had to climb a tall tree the better to survey and
enjoy the scene. We would read of the waves of wind and Muir at the
top of his tree, clutching tight, swinging in arcs "like a bobolink on
a reed." There's a simile! There would be that account of the lone
gualichu tree by Cunninghame Graham (from his volume called _Success_)
and the other account of the same tree by Charles Darwin from his book
on the voyage of the _Beagle_.

The volume must contain an account of the sighting, by Christopher
Columbus's men, when their hope was almost gone, of that "branch of a
haw tree with fruit on it" adrift in the Caribbean Sea, and of the
light "like a candle," seen after dark, of which it is told that "Don
Christopher did not doubt that it was a true light and that it was on
land." Also would we read of how there came to be written upon a cliff
fronting the Pacific in North America, by aid of vermilion and
grease, "Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, 22 July, 1793."

Part of the account of Shackleton's boat journey from Elephant Island
it will be essential to include and very definitely there must be that
scene where he and his fellows arrive at the door of the whaling-post
in South Georgia, unrecognised (as was Odysseus on his homecoming),
ending with:

"'My name is Shackleton,' I said.

"'Come in,' said he . . ."

Tales hard to believe by some, perhaps, yet true, would be quoted from
the logs of those who participated. Thus we would read of a certain
expedition across the Siberian tundra, of how, when the food supply
was ebbing, a discovery was made of mastodon carcases embedded in ice,
and of how on the flesh of these ancient monsters, preserved as it
were in a refrigerator of ages, the sled-dogs were fed.

Again in these pages would "Master Chanceler, being withal nothing
dismayed," salute the Emperor of Muscovy and deliver unto him the
letters of King Edward VI.; and certainly would there be store of such
direct and poignant notes as men, facing death in desert or
wilderness, leave beneath a cairn of stones, such notes as marooned or
wrecked explorers, in the uttermost uncharted seas, thrust in bottles
and commit to the waves.

Let us give an example in that vein. It must not be omitted, though the
man who wrote it (after the death by cold and scurvy of sixty-one of his
fellows) was miraculously saved with the remaining two men of the party:

    "As I have now no more of life in this world, I request for the
    sake of God if any Christians should happen to come here, they
    will bury my poor body, together with the others found, and this
    my journal forward to the King. . . . Herewith, good-night to
    all the world, and my soul to God. . . . Jens Munck."

Some polished cadences of Raleigh should be culled; also an account of
his bitter and noble end at home, after all his wanderings, and in
that book must still cry out the voice that cried from the silent
crowd when his head was shown to the people: "We have not such another
head to be cut off."

Balancing the phrases of the scholarly wanderer and courtier there
would be that colloquial narrative by the taxi-driver--from William
Beebe's _Galapagos_--of his shipwreck on one of the uninhabited
islands of the group with its meaningful repetition that _nights was
the worst_; also the verbatim report, taken down by Dr. Hudson Stuck
from the lips of an Alaskan prospector Jack Cornell, of his journey,
undertaken alone and with no hope of financial reward, over hundreds
of miles of the great north-land in search of two men who had been
gone so long into the wilderness that the people of the settlement
where they had outfitted grew anxious regarding their fate. Of how,
despite the fact that the snows of two winters had fallen on their
track, he traced their route and found the body of one, you would read
in such sentences as these:

    "Hit was the rainiest summer ever I seen, and the mosquitoes was
    a terror. I had a veil, and I honestly believe them mosquitoes
    eat it up, for it went to pieces all at once. I honestly believe
    they eat it up they was that thick and that venomous. The only
    chance to sleep was to travel so long and so hard that I fell
    asleep as soon as I stopped. . . ."


X

My enforced rest was in a climate very different from that of French
Guiana. Winter: the snowflakes falling, falling, and lying on fanning
evergreen branches and staying there in big white puffs. Two days,
three days, perhaps, of snowfall (beginning about mid-November),
deliberate, insistent. That is accompanied by a sense of utter
tranquillity. All is over for the year. There is a snap in the air and
in the blood. The old people say, "Well, winter has come," and the
young ones get out toboggans and skis, and the lumbermen go to their
work in the woods. This is the season, according to one's leanings, of
reading, or dancing, or bridge, and of surprise parties.

Snow comes much later in the year in this part of Canada than many
persons in the Old Country, over-accentuating, perhaps, the
significance of entertaining film or story of the six-gun hero in the
blizzard, seem to imagine. (My typist typed that six-gun as sex-gun
and almost I let it stand so!) For two and a half months I watched the
winter coming. Living in autumn, I looked up every day to the slopes
and crests of the mountains and saw the two seasons before me, winter
on the peaks, autumn on the slopes and, in the valley, a lingering
summer. Amazing how straight is the line of demarcation between winter
and autumn along the ranges.

Not until the end of December did the snow creep down that year to
the lower lands. Then I woke one morning to a great quiet and a white
light. It had been snowing all night. The sky was emptied. It was
cloudless and blue and against that blue the trees on the ridges were
shining stalks of silver.

Spring: the lake had frozen in February. From where I lay I could see
people skating. When I closed my eyes, so long I watched them, they
still skated under the closed lids. In March there were resounding
cracks in the ice like whiplashes. By the end of March there was a
sound of trickling outside. The ice had gone. Spaces of grass showed
round the bases of the trees and I heard a chickadee pipe--not
_chick-a-dee-dee_, which gives him his name, but his earlier call, the
call of two notes that is interpreted as _Spring's here_! I heard the
wild duck honk, passing overhead, and after that the reports that were
brought in to me were, "The varied thrushes are here . . ."--"I saw a
kingfisher to-day." And one blazing day of late March, all the snow
gone from the valley, I heard a quick tapping in the woods up the hill.
"There's a woodpecker!" I shouted my news.

At an angle of thirty degrees I looked up through the first sift of
new birch-leaves to the still snowy peaks. Every day the snow crept
higher and, as it melted, the mountain torrents widened and foamed
down. Through my open window I could hear them roaring.

Summer: Bees were abroad. They were buzzing past in the genial lower
lands by May. Flowers bloomed. The scent of wild syringa was in the air.
A pair of vireos nested over my window and sang there and I could watch
redstarts popping up and down in the pines. At night, with the curtains
drawn, I watched after a sultry day the Aurora Borealis swirl its lights
to the zenith and send its searchlights across the sky from behind a
mountain northward. The Northern Lights do not belong to winter only.

Autumn: the firs and pines threw down their cones and streamers of
leaves blew all day past the window from a clump of birches near-by.
Nature was at work carpeting the earth with leaves and needles, reds,
pale greens, yellows. Says the dictionary:

    "Indian summer: in America, a period of warm, dry, calm weather,
    in late autumn, with hazy atmosphere."

For these parts the words "with hazy atmosphere" should be deleted
from the definition and a phrase could be added somewhat thus, "with
morning mists that evaporate rapidly before the sun, leaving
everything as if newly washed." The redstarts departed and the vireos,
the thrushes whistled and went, the green-backed swallows were with us
one day and all gone the next. Then mists clamped down, melancholy,
inert, along the mid-mountains for days on end. The rain came, falling
through tinted mists that crept along the slopes and drifted on upper
currents into high ravines, and when the rain stopped the heights were
revealed powdered white. Squirrels had much to say about it.

      "The squirrel's granary is full,
      And the harvest's done."

Rain again, with flakes of snow in it. Then a clear day and windy, the
slim birches and young cotton-poplars creaking, and bending, and
returning, like fishing-rods, and streamers of crinkly leaves whirling
away from all the deciduous trees. At night I would wonder if it was
raining again or if the sound I heard was just of the leaves ruffling,
ruffling past.


XI

At last I was allowed to get up, at last I could write again, and one
morning I awoke with a resolve to commit to paper an essay on Stevenson.

It had been in my mind in a nebulous state for several days. I had
been thinking of the Tweed, of Symington, Broughton, Stobo, Peebles,
and had recalled that he, rambling through Neidpath Castle as a boy,
had picked up there in a deserted room a glorious penny dreadful
entitled _Black Bess, or the Knight of the Road_. Perhaps that
recollection was what made me ponder a paper on Stevenson.

Rising, I continued to arrange the effort in my mind. I went in to
breakfast still perpending the proposed attempt, and over breakfast
recalled a day long past when I was tramping in Argyllshire, Jura the
colour of ripe plums across the Sound, and came to a ruined clachan
among the heather and an elderly man in the brass-buttoned attire of a
ship's officer investigating among the stones. He gave me good-day,
and then said he, "Yes, here's where I was born." He explained his
nautical garb. He was an officer on the _Pharos_, the steamship of the
Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses, had risen from the deck he
told me, and been on that boat all his days.

"You must have known Stevenson," said I.

"R.L.? The son, you mean?"

"Yes."

Why, yes, of course. He had met him often. And how he ever fell ill of
his complaint he could not understand, for he was a robust-looking
lad. He remembered him at Skerryvore, always out in a small boat
rowing in the tide-rips. That was where, no doubt, the lad got the
idea for _The Merry Men_. A wonderful description, that, of the Roost
of Aros. My seaman was of the opinion that perhaps Stevenson had got
"his sickness" by camping out in France--"that's not a country for
camping out in . . ."--when he travelled about there with a donkey and
slept in woods and behind dykes. "Ye have no doubt read the book."

I recalled all that, half the world away from the sight of purple Jura
across the Sound, half a life away from that past day of sun and
seagulls and the Atlantic uproar. I decided, then, not to tackle my
article. Why should I add my little stone to the cairn in his memory?
Stevenson had meant much to me in youth. He was part of my life. The
article would be too intimate. As definitely as I had decided, on
waking, to begin the article I then decided to leave it undone and
sat down to await the arrival of Eric Dawson who was going to call for
me in his car to give me an airing.

Eric, by the way, though not a Scot, was born in Glasgow. During the
war he served in the motorboat patrol and wrote a book about his
experiences in that branch of the navy, called _Pushing Water_. His
beat was from Stornoway and Cape Wrath to Oban. He came to see me one
day when a copy of Iain F. Anderson's _Across Hebridean Seas_ had just
arrived. I handed it to him to look at, and saw him lost among the
photographs and turn to the map and drift into the text and turn back
again to the map, unaware whether people were talking in the room or
not. There he sat with his forefinger following the indented
coast-line and, by his aspect, beholding again Loch Broom and Loch Ewe
and Loch Torridon. He came back to us, his forefinger on some special
spot, to remark, "There's a beautiful place!"

Well--I had just made my decision to let the article on Stevenson go
unwritten, when I heard the approaching hum of the car. It stopped at
the gate. There were Eric and Ella and their adorable children--Derry
and Sheila.

We were going to Forty-Nine Creek where, because of the depression
(which was everywhere), many men were at work placering for gold,
content if they washed out, in the clean-ups what averaged a dollar's
worth or two dollars' worth a day. Better than being on relief, they
said It was a creek that had been worked with great profit in the very
early days of gold excitement in British Columbia, named so because
those who began the search for "colour" in it were old Forty-Niners
from California.

Our destination linked us with Stevenson again. I thought of him,
another Scots exile, in California, mounting up from Calistoga to the
deserted mine of Silverado. The scenes through which we passed were
much the same. We twined through hollows of ruffling deciduous trees.
Above were the tall conifers and the odour of them filled the air. We
passed under an aerial tramway that led up to just such a mine-dump as
that on which, at Silverado, Stevenson used to sun himself.

Along the crests was "that pencilling of single trees," the forest
sky-line as he described it: ". . . each fir stands separate against
the sky no bigger than an eyelash." Down the ravines mountain streams
turbulently hurried. We came to Forty-Nine Creek and lunched, sitting
in the car, looking out at thin rain (a Scots mist) that was part of
the whispering quiet of that forest.

We got out of the car and passed to the bridge, twenty feet from which
we had stopped, and there I leant on the wooden rail and looked down
at the water. The others left me there, for I was unable to walk
uphill and they were going up the creek-side trail a little way, with
a pan, to find a place at which young Derry might have the fun of
washing at least a few grains of gold from the gravel or sand.
Stevenson was still in my mind. Often, I thought, in his California
days, he must have leant elbows on such rough wooden parapets, dreamt
over such creeks. And odd, thought I, that my mind should be on him
all day although I had decided not to attempt an article on him.

It was very beautiful there and I was happy in being out and about
again, though perhaps somewhat homesick for Scotland because of the
trend of my thoughts that day, aware of how far off it was, yet
intensely glad with falling water and those ruffling woods of peace. I
thought of the cobbles of Irvine, of the rattle of traffic in Union
Street, Glasgow, of the Forth seen from the corner of George Street
and Hanover Street in Edinburgh, of Swanston, of Stevenson in
California. I do not ask you to infer anything esoteric, psychic,
supernatural in what follows--though, to be sure, one can ponder the
climax from many angles, these among them, if so desirous.

I had been looking up the gulch in which the creek pours, and down
into the water. In the midst of all these reveries in and out of
which, though I had dismissed the earlier intention to write an
article on him or his work, Stevenson moved, haunting my day, my
glance dropped to the rail. I had my elbows resting on it, and in the
V formed by my crossed wrists I saw--you may imagine with what manner
of emotion and with what sense of strangeness--these initials carved
into the wood:

    R.L.S.




PART VIII

_Honolulu_




HONOLULU


I

An opportunity of the kind called heaven-sent came to me after those
months of incarceration for more than an easy outing of a few miles by
motor car. A sea voyage again was in my line of life, and my
unexpected destination was Honolulu.

The voyage thither and the sojourn there had the quality of a dream
for me. Homeward bound again, Hawaii was as a dream remembered on
waking. The man who reclined on the deck-chair next to mine was not
reading his book. Open, but back up, it lay on his knees and he was
deep in reverie. Suddenly he turned his head.

"The arrival at Honolulu, and the departure from Honolulu," said he,
"are enough, alone--were there nothing else--to make a visit there
memorable."

I thoroughly agreed and when he lapsed again into reverie I meditated
on my arrival there. I had sailed for Hawaii from Vancouver, the
ship's orchestra playing us out with "Auld Lang Syne" and "Will ye
no' come back again?" Five days later we sighted land, revealed first
as a smudge beyond the blue undulations of the Pacific. Soon, rising
higher and flashing greens and rust-reds to the sun, it began to
disclose capes and bays. On a languorous wind odours of flowers were
wafted to us.

Diamond Head I recognised from many a photograph. Then, as always at
such landfalls, small swift craft of important aspect came out to meet
the arriving ship. Over our hull an accommodation ladder was being
draped to receive those who came to inspect us.

The colloquy in the lounge with courteous immigration officers and the
scrutiny of a genial doctor being successfully over, I was employed on
the business of seeing that my baggage was ready for the landing when
I heard music. Very different from "Auld Lang Syne" and "Will ye no'
come back again?" it seemed to me, strange, exotic to my ears, though
later I was to consider it was closer to these than it sounded at
first. When the preliminary splendour of brass softened and singing
voices rose clear, said I to myself, "Here is the sort of singing that
Odysseus once heard, tied to his mast, while his seamen's ears were
stopped, passing the Isle of Sirens."

I left my baggage to take care of itself and looked out through a
port-hole. We had arrived. We were moored. There was the wharf and in
a niche of it brown folks were welcoming us with these haunting airs.
Sudden shocking realisation that my friends would be awaiting me
ashore while I dallied, thralled by that music, these voices, took me
back to my luggage. A steward had it in his care and I was relieved to
find that the gangway for disembarkation of passengers had just been
set in place.

Down the gangway I went and there indeed were my friends. They were
standing beside the barrier round the customs officers' domain,
wreaths of flowers in their hands. Not only of the music, perhaps, was
my neighbour of the deck-chairs thinking when he made his remark
regarding the sufficiency--even were there nothing else by which to
remember Hawaii--of arrival and departure, but of the _leis_, these
tropic-scented garlands that were looped round my neck.

Wreathed in blossom, I answered the inquiries of customs officers. I
unlocked trunks and opened suitcases aware that there are two sides to
life, two worlds in one--and who shall say, I pondered, keys in hand,
which it is the more fitting to call the real, the world of the scent
of jessamine and ginger blossoms, of hibiscus, of carnations, and
tuberose, or the world of declaration to authority? Authority was not
arrogant on that wharf. But how could it be aught but genial, even in
the exercise of duty, among those scents and to that music. _Aloha,
Aloha!_


II

Once upon a time the name Pacific Ocean used to mean to me a wide disc
of gently swaying azure, palm trees suddenly sprouting on the
horizon--the works of Herman Melville, Louis Becke, Stevenson,
Nordhoff and Hall. But now, at that name, I have a vision of long,
leisurely, hyaline undulations receding to the base of unsubstantial
cloud mountains and of a glass sphere afloat, a glass globe shot with
opalescent hues of a summer day, riding buoyantly on its way. Not of
cork nor of wood do the Japanese make the floats for their fishing
nets but of glass, and often one of these goes adrift. A friend of
mine, a yachtsman, in a small sailing craft bound from Honolulu for
San Francisco, saw one when half-way across, encrusted with barnacles.
No knowing how far it had come. All the way from Japan, perhaps, or
perhaps no farther (far enough) than from Hawaii, where are many
Japanese fishermen.

Sometimes these floats are of clear glass, sometimes they are shot
with green, sometimes tinted ultramarine as though blue Pacific days
had faintly dyed them. When things of utility are also things of
beauty there is a special sense of rejoicing in us, beholding them.
These floats are in that category. Even over coral reefs, as by some
special providence attending fragility, they ride unscathed on the
crests of the rollers. I have one on my table now, set in a
gold-lacquered bowl. It looks in the light of this fugitive moment
like a great soap-bubble on the point of bursting, all the windows
twinkling in miniature in it. On a beach of many a Pacific isle these
lost spheres, that might delight a crystal-gazer, come to rest--on
Midway Island, Wake Island, the Ladrones, on Guam and the Fannings, on
the beaches of the Hawaiian Islands.

Strange are some of these beaches to folks accustomed to a pebbly
foreshore where the pods of seaweed pop under their tread and limpets
cling, or to rocky promontories on which a seaweed fringe rises and
falls to every crash and return of the waves. That sense of
strangeness I experienced first on the beach of Kahuku, seeing no
swathes of seaweed between foreland and wave, but flotsam of broken
bamboos and sugar-cane stems.

There is a dream-like quality in existence there, at least for the
visitor on vacation. The residents work. They are not idle
lotus-eaters. They do more, by the evidence, than precariously hold
the wolf from the door. They have their worries and anxieties, no
doubt, as all have, no doubt, everywhere; but even so, with so much
beauty round them, I think they cannot ever be unaware of the
Hesperidean quality of their sea-girt home, that quality which charms
the transient guest on holiday.

The diversity of hue in the leisurely-moving populace gives a ceaseless
sense of the exotic to that visitor. Apart from the native Hawaiians and
the white inhabitants (many Portuguese among these) there are here
immigrants from the Philippine Islands, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, some
Samoans, some immigrants (much darker) from the West Indies. Certain
blendings of blood provide at times an arresting aberrant beauty. To
motor slowly through the streets is to dip into many ways of life. You
observe that there are Chinese here who still wear their wide-sleeved
blue tunics. You hear the flip-flap of Japanese sandals on the
sidewalks. The brightly coloured disc of a Japanese oiled-paper
umbrella moves along over a piece of daintiness in kimono and
slippers--but think not, because of this umbrella, that the day must
needs be dark. There is a rain there that they call liquid sunshine. Out
of a clear blue sky it comes, a drizzle of broken rainbows. A Hawaiian
passes by with a wreath of flowers round the crown of his hat. He is not
going to a festival; he is merely being himself. In the evening, in the
Hawaiian quarter of the town, you see a group under a tree and hear them
singing quietly to a light thrumming of guitars. They are just being
themselves in the balmy and scented night.

Along the water front I had the expected pictures--saw dusky,
lightly-clad sailors leaning against a wall in various attitudes of
ease, the drooping fronds of a palm over them, and beyond--for sails
have not yet gone from the sea though auxiliary motors are there--a
schooner's masts and trig hull, the flames of reflected sunlight
flickering under the stern knuckle. Over a shed-roof the vast
smoke-stacks of liners showed, halted between the American coast and
the Orient or the Antipodes.

There were moments when I was reminded--perhaps because of that feeling
of being by no means cut off there from the world's activities and
cultures, but in a lively metropolis, of foreign lands as they are
presented at expositions. There came a fancy at times that round the
next corner I would arrive at a turnstile under a sign reading _Exit_.

During the length of my visit I retained a feeling of having come into
a different world, another world, yet with no sense of being lost, cut
off, in a backwater. One may, indeed, on that island of Oahu,
Honolulu's island, have understanding of the remark of a certain
philosopher that wherever you are there is the centre of the world.
While California was still but the west of the gold diggers of Poker
Flat and Roaring Camp, many children were sent hither from that wild
west for their education--and on past laurels neither the schools nor
the university rest content. On the theory that demand creates supply,
by the evidence of its library and its book-stores there are readers
of breadth and discernment in Honolulu--and one does not have to add
the saving clause "for its population" or "for a place of its size"
when lauding its Academy of Art, founded and endowed shortly before
her death by a generous lover of art of these parts, the Mrs. Cooke
whose portrait, a fine piece of palette knife work by Charles W.
Bartlett, hangs in one of the galleries. The same may be said of its
museum, the Bishop Museum, where you can study the handiwork of all
Polynesia, and beyond. Its exhibits range from the boomerangs of the
Australian black-fellow to the polished surf-boards of Hawaiians.
Malaysia, Indo-China and Japan are represented there. The mortuary
feeling that one experiences in many a museum is not felt in that
charming building.

Having once or twice visited the Academy of Arts you have not seen it
all. During my brief stay, in several of the rooms exhibits were
changed from time to time, and with diversity--a one-man show, for
example, of water colours by a Californian artist giving place to a
collection of lithographs and engravings from all parts of the world.
On each of my visits, about to enter one or another of the rooms, I
found groups of young people from the schools were being inducted into
the history or ways of other lands by aid of lectures and lantern
slides, and the exhibits. The place is used. Reminiscences of Spanish
America came to me when, having seen enough in the galleries for one
day's delight and meditation, I came to a quiet court with a patio
effect--and there sat down to enjoy tranquillity. Round a series of
such courts the Academy of Arts is built.

With the Bishop Museum and the Academy of Arts, with their library
and their book stores and their educational centres, the folks of
Honolulu are certainly not isolated mentally. Liners to and from the
Orient, liners to and from New Zealand and Australia, stop there. Many
famous musicians--singers, pianists, violinists--in the course of
their world tours have been heard in Honolulu, not only on gramophone
records or on the radio.

Talking of music; there was a time, let me confess, before I had been to
Hawaii, when I was not greatly enamoured of what I presumed was
typically and essentially Hawaiian music. A sad lassitude, it seemed,
was in the airs offered to me as Hawaiian. Much of what I had heard,
friends resident in the islands assure me, was Hawaiian with a
difference, not the real thing. Certainly now I can say--though to be
sure all this is but a personal impression--that hearing Hawaiians sing
in Hawaii I was reminded of that line of Keats, "Dance, and Provenal
song, and sunburnt mirth!" There is much of sunburnt mirth and less of
melancholy than I had imagined in the music of these islands.


III

One evening our friends (Linda and Alfred Castle) had a feast prepared
for us of native foods cooked in native fashion. The table was covered
not with cloth but with ti leaves. Our only transgression of ancient
custom was that we sat at a table instead of round a ti-strewn strip of
sward. Knives and forks and spoons were provided lest we wished further
to transgress by using these, but we did not. Individual dishes in small
calabashes were before each guest in a semi-circle and from time to time
a servant came to the elbow of each carrying a large calabash in which
was warm water lest he or she might be in need of a finger-bowl. There
was little of Laughton as Henry the Eighth about that feast.

While we dined a Hawaiian orchestra played for us and often I found
myself neglecting the sickle of dishes before me to give all attention
to their strummings and their voices. In memory I see again the
smiling faces of the musicians, the dark and merry eyes, the white
teeth gleaming as they well-nigh laugh forth some of the refrains. Not
music "after the Hawaiian manner" or "inspired by the Hawaiian" were
we given but the traditional airs; and easily, as I gave ear,
imagination served me with these islands before any white man came
that way, Captain Cook or another. The breakers crash on the reef, the
night is flower-scented, the world is kindlier than we thought.

When the feast was over we sat in the _lanai_, a large coral-paved
room lacking one wall--one side of a _lanai_ is always open to the
garden, the island air. There they gave us a love song of old days,
one singing close beside us, others answering from distance. At the
evening's end we had a song in translation, a song of good-night that
began with a loud volley of twanging strings and high voices and
finished with a diminuendo, a whisper of "Good-night," the singers
moving away from us to be lost in the shadows of the trees in the tops
of which the steady trade wind ran with a sound as of a river in a
placid dream.


IV

The quality of a beneficent dream is assuredly felt here by the
visitor from climes that know hail and sleet and blizzard. From the
island of Oahu one has to go to the island of Hawaii and climb
mountains there to know what cold is. In Honolulu you are wakened at
morning by the cooing of doves. For an hour before the sudden pounce
of night you have the fuss and clamour in the wide-spreading
monkey-pod trees of mynah birds going to roost--birds as fiercely
loquacious as starlings.

During the first few nights of my stay sleep was interrupted by sounds
without that were strange to me. It seemed that nocturnal gardeners
were at work. I could hear a sound as of shovels rasping in gravel.
One afternoon, out in the garden, a sudden wind came flurrying along,
agitating a clump of tall closely-set bamboos. I had explanation then
of the noises that had wakened me on these nights: the brittle
clashing of their stems one against the other.

A mountain range, very steep and steeply cleft, of volcanic origin
though now most luxuriantly and verdantly clad, raises its erratic
ridge along one side of the island. Through a gap in that ridge round
a sheer cliff--Pali--a motor road passes. I drove up the Pali road one
day when all was still in Honolulu. Beyond the last homes, glimpsed
among gardens, it curves upward through what is practically a belt of
tropical wilderness, for the city reservoirs are situated there, and
all trespass is prohibited.

As we ascended, coming nearer to the Pali, we could see trees on the
steep slopes wildly gesticulating. A stream that dropped over a cliff
among the tangles of herbage was caught in that wind and torn into a
mere tatter of mist. Here was a change from the still day below in the
streets of Honolulu. We reached the gap and there the car shivered.
When a gale comes in from east over the Pacific against that range the
wind pressure is something to remember. I was reminded of tide-rips
among the islets of a rocky littoral. That wind off the sea must have
been viewlessly undulating and banking and scrolling along the face of
the mountain range as an incoming tide on a day of storm along a
resolute cliff, seeking for a passage. At the Pali the wind found it.
It roared through to us. We roared to it and with a sense of
exhilaration passed through the gap, a back-wash of the gale off the
high cliff to right assaulting us. A newcomer, on such a day, is
gripped there by two emotions, one of amazement at the vigour of the
compressed sea-wind, the other of admiration of the view suddenly
revealed of beach and promontory far below, the lines of surf along
the reefs, the explosion of breakers on rocks off-shore.

From a day's motoring on Oahu you return with many impressions of the
island life: of flooded rice fields in which water-buffaloes and
bare-legged folk are at work; of the cone-shaped hats of Koreans
showing and disappearing as they rise and bend, tending the
pine-apple rows and the sugar-canes; of the naval base; of military
posts, and aeroplanes swerving and banking overhead; of sugar mills;
of little villages where the children coming home from school and the
groups gathered at the garage doors or round the gas pumps are all
dusky-hued; of unkempt corners, too steep for tillage, where wild
cactus flaunts; of houses almost hidden in a mass of bougainvilla;
and--amazing sight for those who come from a land the coasts of which
go abruptly down into deep water--of bobbing heads far out, as it
seems, at sea. As such an one watches, astonished, the distant swimmer
rises and walks among the foam. He is mounting a reef. A moment later
there is again just a bobbing head and the flash of a bare arm to
indicate his whereabouts. They are amphibious, these folks, looking
for squid out there. Nowadays, to aid them in sighting and spearing
their ocean prey, they usually wear glass goggles or thrust before
them glass-bottomed boxes. Often at night, late at night, you may see,
as far out as you saw the bobbing heads by day, Jack-a-Lantern gleams
moving to and fro as they fish by torch-light.

Close view of the strange fish of these parts you may have by a visit
to the city's aquarium. Fish like clippings of richly dyed satins and
silks and patterned damask you see there, fish rainbow-coloured, vivid
fish, a fish with a fin like a bright trailing feather. As they
sinuously steal about in their tanks and waver through crannies of the
rocks placed in studied disorder in their tanks to make them feel at
home there they seem less to be considered as food than as
bric--brac, _objets d'art_! The Pacific Ocean shells are in the same
category, and even one long past childhood may spend a charmed hour in
looking over the collection of some conchologist of these parts.

In the curio-shops of Honolulu are many beautiful things, made as
though to match the fish and the shells. Here is an ash-tray that it
seems profanation to strew with ash; here is a cigarette box of no
more than unpolished sandalwood, with sanded lid and one shell atop
for a handle, charming in its simple beauty; here is a box of polished
koa wood with an engraving of a poinsettia flower on its lid; here is
a bowl of copper with a teak lid that has a blue crystal for handle;
here are lovely things of lacquer, of porcelain and jade, of pewter
and papier-mch, and pieces of Chinese wrought iron, perhaps of no
more than half a dozen rushes and one bamboo in a black frame.


V

Passing down to one of the beaches on a narrow path that led through a
belt of knee-high shrubs, I noticed a flower among the leaves that was
only, according to the norm of flowers, half a flower. Some insect, I
presumed, had devoured the missing petals. Then I noticed another in
the same condition, a mere semi-circle to one side of the stalk. It
was about the size of an English field daisy, with one half nipped
off. Odd coincidence, thought I, and curiously examining the bushes
found that all its blooms were alike in that respect.

What manner of blight, I wondered, takes but half a flower? Then and
there my host overtook me, and I turned to him, evidently with wonder
and inquiry clear enough without speech, for he explained before I
questioned. Yes, yes, he must tell me about these segments of blossom.
There is a Hawaiian legend regarding them: a young prince in distant
years, setting out in a war-canoe, plucked one of the flowers when
they grew complete and broke it in half. One piece he gave to his
sweetheart, the other he kept; on his return each would show the other
the frail treasured memento and they would be wed. But he did not
return. He was killed in battle. Ever since that day the flower has
grown so--only half a flower.


VI

So much to see--so short a time to see all. That was my thought as the
day drew near for me to leave Oahu. Through the lively but orderly flow
of Honolulu's business and shopping area I went on my concluding
affairs, halted at a corner to watch a Hawaiian policeman regulating
traffic with a finished grace of authority, admired again a side-walk
within the kerb of which palm trees rose, admired again, also, the
drifting--too quickly drifting--stencil of their shadows on the faades
of airy office blocks; saw again the statue of King Kamehameha, and
noted the hour (my hours there near an end) on the clock of a tower on
which is the word _Aloha_--the Hawaiian word of friendly salutation. I
passed on and halted again to look at the moored row of brightly painted
sampans of the Japanese fishers, buoyantly bobbing to their wharf on the
last reef-restrained Pacific swell.

There is a law, I was told, by which any vessel of sixty-five feet or
more in length must have a navigator aboard who holds at least a
third mate's certificate. So they build these sampans a foot shorter
and away they go a thousand miles out to sea to their fishing, able
seamen apparently though uncertificated. A friend of mine, discussing
their methods of navigation with one of them, was informed that "the
chickens" are a great aid on occasion. "We follow the chickens home,"
the fisherman said. The chickens, my friend explained to me, he being
conversant with the pidgin-English of these parts, were the seagulls.

It is hard to leave Hawaii. Once or twice during my visit regret was
expressed that I was not there in the time of flowers. I had
difficulty at first in assuring myself that I had heard aright, for
all the while that I was there I was aware of the scent of flowers and
of the colours of them everywhere. They wished, they added, that I
might see their trees that put on blossoms like flames. One flower, by
the way, or one flower cluster, I often especially recall, but the
name of it I do not know. To sight and touch the outer petals seem as
though of fine porcelain, a porcelain sheath over the inner loveliness.

Much I shall often recall, great and little, from wide vistas of the
Pacific seen between a eucalyptus tree and a monkey-pod tree on the
mountain called Tantalus, to a little green lizard on a garden wall;
from the waves being shattered and leaping in foam over islets between
Koko Head and Kahuku Point to the colours of a cowrie shell. The
avenues of royal palms, the hau trees, the mango trees, the guava by
the roadsides, the great banyans I shall not forget.

To that one known as Stevenson's banyan, I made a pilgrimage on a
fitting day. I was sitting in the coral-paved _lanai_ of my friend's
house hearing the doves cooing in the recesses of the garden, watching
the cardinal birds fluttering through the hibiscus, when a diminutive
Japanese servant (a winsome animate puppet in a gay-patterned kimono)
arrived with the day's paper. On opening it the first words that
caught my eyes were these: "Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday."

It has been my experience to find much graciousness among Americans
and I need not have been astonished that the birthday of the wandering
Scot, who stayed a while in their midst there, is not forgotten. In
San Francisco is a very beautiful memorial to him, the "golden
galleon" that may remind one of the _Hispaniola_ in _Treasure
Island_--three feet or so long, atop a granite shaft at the base of
which is a drinking fountain. Bravely the ship shines there in
perpetual gold leaf.

On that anniversary of his birthday I made my pilgrimage to his banyan
tree at Waikiki, a changed Waikiki from his days, a place now of many
bungalows, each individually pleasant enough, no doubt, but close set.
Extraordinary trees are these banyans. One of them, by the way they
grow, may seem like a small wood. On his especial one there is now a
metal plate to his memory (placed there by the Daughters of Hawaii) and
in memory of the Princess Kaiulani. She was the daughter of a Scots
father and Hawaiian mother. On that plaque are the verses he wrote for
her (they are in his _Songs of Travel_) when she was leaving the island
to go to her father's land for her education, these verses ending thus:

      "Her islands here, in southern sun,
      Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone,
      And I in her dear banyan shade
      Look vainly for my little maid."

Stevenson is not forgotten in Honolulu. His first arrival there (on
the _Casco_, with a following sea that sent a mill-race of water along
her lee scuppers) was on January 24th, 1889. His second visit was in
the nature of a flight, it would appear, from the boredom of politics
in Samoa, in the year 1893. He brought with him then a Samoan servant
who, soon after they landed, developed measles, and master and servant
were quarantined at the old Sans Souci Hotel.

With a charming elderly lady I sat chatting one day of the old times.
She had stories of the whaling era. She had reminiscences of the
missionaries. There was one about a bishop who, in his eagerness to
preach to his flock in their own tongue, attempted it before
efficiency had come. Quaint bloomers he made, some of such a sort that
the congregation would suddenly break forth in joyous laughter. Many
of his sermons were thus accidentally merry.

Through her dreaming eyes, as she spoke, I saw old Honolulu. What a
change, said she, the motors had made. People walked in the old days.
She and her friends would often walk to Waikiki beach to swim and
surf-ride there, walk back to Honolulu again, and think nothing of it.
She spoke of a Mr. Stevenson, who had stayed at Waikiki--"Mr.
Stevenson, the writer, the author; yes." Mr. Stevenson is still
remembered by many of the elder folk.

Several excursions he made while there, one to Molokai, as his readers
know. There was another that was to have been to the Kilauea volcano.
I do not know why, but for some reason he did not go all the way,
went ashore at Hookena and there, in a house facing the beach,
remained till the steamer returned. To that short stay at Hookena he
must have been referring, I think, when he wrote: "Alone on the coast
of Hawaii, the only white creature in many miles, riding five and a
half hours one day, living with a native . . . a lovely week among
God's best--at least, God's sweetest--works, Polynesians." For the
Polynesians he had a warm heart. "I love the Polynesian," he wrote.

Mr. W. F. Wilson of Honolulu (in an article he contributed to the old
_Scots Pictorial_ in 1897) expressed the view that it was very likely
while at Hookena, "watching the different crews paddling to land with
their loads of opelu and akule, that the idea of 'The Bottle Imp' came
into his head." That may be so, but it was not till he settled at
Samoa that he wrote that story. I know the human desire to claim all
we may for our specially loved corners of earth. To a statement that
Stevenson had once visited Canada I clung tenaciously, even in face of
much testimony to the contrary, clung tenaciously, no doubt,
because--with a soft corner for Canada--I wanted it to be true. That
the statement was erroneous I have now little, if any, doubt, but in
self-defence I would add that it did, despite much negative evidence,
have the ring of truth and was presented to me with some impressive
circumstantial evidence by one who clearly believed it. It was
certainly at Honolulu (we have his own letters to inform us of it)
that he finished _The Master of Ballantrae_ and wrote what he called a
"lark," _The Wrong Box_.

Many were the Scots in the Hawaiian Islands during those visits of his.
Many are still there, some with such a burr in their speech that with
but twa-three words spoken one need not ask their country of origin. One
of these told me--but Scots have a way of telling stories, veracious and
otherwise, against themselves--that sometimes in the law courts there,
when a Scots witness is called, an interpreter is called also!

On Stevenson's second visit he delivered a lecture to the Thistle
Club. The club rooms were reached up a flight of stairs in Market
Street. Across the landing, fittingly, were the printing works of the
late Mr. Robert Grieve, "a kindly Scot," says a _kamaaina_ (which
means an "old-timer") of Honolulu. The lecture--informal--was on what
Stevenson called "that long-drawn-out brawl entitled the history of
Scotland." The names of Wallace, Bruce, Queen Mary, Prince Charlie
inevitably sounded in that lecture, which was a somewhat merry one.
But when the speaker came to the name Knox said he, "John Knox I
should never presume to mention in a jocular manner."

For another lecture arrangements were made. It was to be a public one
and tickets were to be sold towards raising a fund to aid the club
library; but when the day came for that one a doctor interdicted it.
Stevenson's remark, with a twinkle in his eye, reports Mr. Wilson,
was, "It would never do to kill myself in giving a two-bob lecture."
Two bob: fifty cents, I take it, was the cost of tickets for that
lecture which was not given.

Before he left Honolulu, at the close of that second visit, the club
presented him with one of its badges, a silver thistle, which he
always wore. It was in the lapel of the coat in which he was buried.
He remembered Hawaii, and in Hawaii he is graciously remembered.

Partly for Stevenson's sake I went out to the lighthouse at Diamond
Head. There it was, in _The Wrecker_, that Loudon Dodd sat chatting
with the light-keeper and a seaman from a man-of-war who inadvertently
gave him some information regarding a mystery of the Pacific in which
he was involved. Out beyond the reef, on the inner side of which the
heads of fishers bobbed, an inter-island steamer trailed a pennant of
smoke. On the horizon, looking enormous against the edge of sky, a
liner Asia-bound seemed for long while motionless in distance. Then,
overhead, came a massive craft of a kind that Stevenson did not see in
his days there, the _China Clipper_ on the last lap of her
trans-Pacific flight, soaring from Hawaii on her way to California.

Many changes these islands have seen since Captain Cook's day, but the
tides still rise and fall as of old; the waves crash from emerald and
cobalt into sun-bright foam on the reefs; the trade wind sweeps
through the palms; the hula-girls dance to the old rhythms; oleanders
scent the air.

Wreathed again with _leis_, as on my arrival, the flowery adieux of
island friends, I knew the dream was over. The mooring hawsers were
loosened from the bollards. The voices that had welcomed me on my
arrival sang me away, singing _Aloha_ as voices of a dream.




PART IX

_Splendour in the Grass_




SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS


I

Many people must have felt--perhaps most people, in fact, have felt--a
sense of arrangement or of pattern in their lives at times. When
Lafcadio Hearn, for example, put down his pen for the day in his home
in the Orient, and allowed himself to meditate a spell on his own life
instead of concentrating on his interpretations of Japan, he must
often have recalled a house in Bangor, North Wales, where, as a boy,
he saw a collection of Chinese and Japanese curios and timidly tapped
the notes out of a gong like a golden moon. Bangor and Tokio,
childhood and manhood, would be linked in a design of ramping dragons
and cherry-blossom.

Of an experience of that sort I once had I should like here to tell
you. As already I have indicated, like many boys--like most boys,
perhaps, who have a chance in that direction--docks, and ships in
docks, had a great fascination for me in my early days in Glasgow,
those old blue-grey nitrate-barques with their black-painted ports,
from Chile lying in Kingston Docks, the smaller orange boats from
Spain near-by, Spanish sailors with bearded lips, and the beauty and
mystery of the ships. But there was other romance of reality also, for
the boy that was I.

Whether by accident or in divine plan (here is a question for the old
Free Will or Foreordination ghosts), sticking in the wrapper of a fine
American broom that came into our house when I was a small boy there
was an advertisement of Richmond Gem and Straight Cut cigarettes.
Fifty reproductions of cigarette cards (even over fifty years ago
there were cigarette cards), coloured portraits of Fifty Celebrated
Indian Chiefs were dotted over a sheet of glossy cardboard round a
picture of a buffalo-hunt, to hang on the wall.

I remember some of them still--Young Whirlwind of the Southern
Cheyenne tribe, Black Hawk of the Sac and Fox, Mountain Chief of the
Blackfeet, Spotted Tail of the Sioux, Always Riding, a Yampah Ute.
That garish thing arrived aptly at the time that my father had
presented me with Catlin's book on the North American Indians; and
Egerton Young, a missionary to the Crees, being in Glasgow at the same
time on a lecture tour, played his part.

The River Cart at Millbrae became the Missouri River. The old Giffnock
quarries (as I mentioned earlier) were the Bad Lands of Dakota. The
knob of Ballygeoch was a butte of the western plains. And when we went
down into Renfrewshire the Gryffe was the Saskatchewan and Misty Law
was a peak of the Rockies. When I went exploring through the Great
Lone Land of the Mearns Moors I did so in peril of attack from the
Blackfeet and in my boyhood's play, determined to get over that
anxiety, made friends with them and visited their camps, invisible to
all but me. The pipe of peace I smoked one day with the great chief
Crowfoot within hearing of the trains whistling on their way beyond
Bridge-of-Weir.

A little while after that came, inevitably, the realisation that life
is real, life is earnest, and make-belief was no longer its goal. The
bitter truth was forced upon me that what, apparently, we have been
brought into the world for is to pay the income tax. But thanks to the
nitrate-barques from Chile, the orange boats from Spain, and to the
advertising manager of Richmond Gem and Straight Cut cigarettes I had
a fairly happy boyhood as boyhood goes in Glasgow. I had known Young
Whirlwind, a Southern Cheyenne, and Always Riding, a Yampah Ute.

There are people who vigorously and what is called rationally decry
all those who ever speak of Escape from Life. Life, they say, is to be
lived, not escaped from. In the other camp are those to whom Life is,
actually, in the escaping from life--without capital letter. For a
while to exist was, apparently, more demanded of me than to live. In
Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, London, as a working journalist I hunted
for the news that by common consent most people want to know,
interviewed notorious criminals and brave--often boastful--life-savers
(who had saved lives in coal pits or off the coast in storms), famous
(or notorious) musicians, and politicians who can go without any
qualifying adjectives. The Fifty Celebrated Indian Chiefs on the
cigarette cards of that advertisement that hung its life away,
slightly fly-spotted, in the kitchen of my early years, were of the
past--Red Shirt, Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull, Always Riding, Young
Whirlwind, and the rest. The Cart was just the River Cart and the
Gryffe, when I visited old scenes, was no longer Saskatchewan. The tax
collector had put an end to all that. A primrose by the river's brim
only a primrose was to him.

But the other day it all came back to me--Life as the boy knew it.
Some work upon which I was employed--relating to the history of
western Canada--took me to the little station of Gleichen, on the
Canadian Pacific Railway, about sixty miles east of Calgary. That is
where one alights to visit the Blackfeet Indians. A considerable part
of my work had, obviously, to do with the Indians and, to aid me in
it, I had learnt the sign-language--that talk of the hands by which
tribes of totally different language can converse from the
Saskatchewan to the Gulf of Mexico, and that not only about concrete
matters, but about the abstract. Outwardly I was working journalist
and novelist with an introduction from the Department of the Interior
(Indian Affairs). Inwardly--well, a bit of the boy-that-was remained
in me somewhere, as I was to discover.

I had permission to move about on the reserve collecting the data for
my job; and suddenly one day I felt that all I was about was unreal. I
was dreaming, surely. I was a small boy in Glasgow making up stories
for myself out of Catlin and Ballantyne and Fifty Celebrated Indian
Chiefs on cigarette cards. In a world of telephones and electric
light, radio and motor cars, I was again escaping from life, the life
of the tawse.

There is that about the western prairies which provides the most
notable Rodinesque studies from life. The world there is just a base
for the great cope of the sky--with the Rocky Mountains like a ragged
edge to west. I had sat down to talk to an aged Indian who had no
English, and to help me (in case my sign talk was not enough) I had a
young Blackfoot interpreter with me. We were on an edge of the prairie
where Bow River, in course of ages, has split it deeply. It was a
beautiful day. Down in that twining valley of the plains--where, as a
saying goes, there are no mountains though there are valleys--the
leaves on the river-side cottonwoods were so many spots of light
shaken by the wind, and the whole dome of the sky, resting on the
distant edges of the plain, was a rare piece of lacquered blue with
not one flaw of a cloud.

The old man was telling me queer stories--legends of his folk. Once
upon a time, he said, long before white men were there, long before
they had horses even, the Indians knew the speech of the lower animals
and could talk to the prairie-dogs and coyotes, the antelope and the
buffalo. The interpreter was a young man who had been to white men's
schools and, when repeating these stories in English, would
occasionally throw in, as a personal aside or comment, "You may find
this difficult to believe . . ."

Suddenly the old man rose to point out to me the whereabouts of one of
the queer incidents he recounted, and at once the whole world seemed
to be a plinth for a living statue. He stood on that segment of earth
against the sky. The heavens were his background. With a very Indian
gesture, indicating the sweep of Bow River down in its gorge, he told
the story of a charmed buffalo that, though full of arrows from the
hunters, had not died but had gone down over the bank there and into
the river where it simply disappeared--a ghost buffalo! (You may find
this difficult to believe.)

It was his last legend. He sat down again and turned, doing so, from a
statue representing all the neolithic men who once ruled these acres, to
an old Indian of to-day living on a reserve with dreams of the past,
surrounded by white farmers and stock-raisers, oil wells and natural-gas
workings, grain elevators. There the whistle of railway trains on the
horizon blends at night with the hoot of the prairie owls and by day
aeroplanes ponderously zoom overhead above the lightly veering hawks.

We had got along pretty well. Apparently he wished to signify his
appreciation of a white man who could listen to his stories, his
myths, without looking at him with a "That's a lie!" expression. He
had a gift for me and gave it to me then--one of the old pipes, with a
bowl of carved stone, a stem of pierced wood two feet long. He gave it
without a word, only with the sign-talk--the old sign-talk that all of
the young men know of, but that some have not troubled to learn. I was
his friend, he signed, and this was a gift, a gift for which he
desired no return; but he wanted us to be _shot at_, he signed, he and
I together, _shot at to make a picture_. He wanted a photograph to be
taken of us together--he holding the pipe to me and I with a hand on
it--as a souvenir of that day.

You will realise that I was deeply moved. I inclined my head. I made
the signs, _You put the day into my heart with this gift. This that
you give me will always be close to my heart_; for the sign-language,
even as their talk, is greatly metaphorical, like that of the Old
Testament and of Shakespeare. Then we sat silent a while on the
prairie there beside the gash of Bow River. What he was thinking I do
not know. I was thinking of the days before I knew that life was real,
life was earnest, before the income-tax collector had my name
irrevocably on his books, when as a small boy I visited the camps of
the Blackfeet--invisible to all but me--in Scotland, and smoked the
pipe of peace with a viewless, imagined Crowfoot. The sound of Bow
River below us, flowing shallow (for the month was September) through
the Blackfoot Reservation in Alberta was, for a few minutes, the sound
of Gryffe, in Renfrewshire, rippling over its stones.


II

Some years before that visit to the Blackfoot Reserve I met, in
British Columbia, a mining man who may be called MacNair as that was
not his name. I have lost trace of him, and so am unable to have his
sanction for use of his name here. But from A to Z what I have to tell
will be as accurate a report as I know how to give of the matter to
which it relates--one that must be of interest not only to
ethnologists but to many others.

MacNair and I were talking of the aborigines of the continent, and he
made the remark that ethnologists need not wonder, over the craniums of
primitive folk and the signs of their ancient occupancy, what manner of
people they were, what sort of thoughts once moved inside their skulls.

"There are still, even on this continent," said he, "neolithic men who
can divulge to the right kind of civilised or sophisticated person the
thoughts, the minds of those of distant ages."

He gave me an example. He had been in Alberta eastward of the Rockies
and had gone along Bow River from Calgary, examining geological
formations. Just on the edge of the Blackfoot Indian Reservation he
had left his horse on prairie-level at the top of one of the cliffs
known as _cut-banks_ in these parts, and descended to the lower level
where the river flows. The place had obviously been a _piskun_ (a
Blackfoot Indian word) or a _jumping-pound_ (the white man's phrase);
that is to say, it was one of those places at which, before the
Indians had horses, they were accustomed to drive to the slaughter
herds of buffalo--as the bison of this continent is generally called
in concession to an early error--an error due perhaps (this is only my
suggestion--I have not heard any one else make it--and it may not be
correct) to the French voyageurs' _Les boeufs_. The system was to
surround a herd and, by waving robes and yelling, stampede the animals
so that they plunged violently down over the steep bank one atop the
other. Descending after them at places less sheer, the Indians then
killed the beasts not already killed by the fall and proceeded to the
gralloching, as Scots deer-slayers would say, and the skinning and
cutting up. The buffalo, as every one knows, of course, supplied the
Indian with tipis (tents), robes, spoons, forks, needles, glue, and so
forth. At the base of that cliff MacNair found there was an odd
formation. He described the rocks as being "like flies in amber" in
some spots. Fragments of bone, fragments of pelt, stray hairs were
mixed with earth and stones under a glutinous veneer.

From a scrutiny of the scene he happened to look up to the prairie rim
above and saw an Indian on the cut-bank's edge sitting on a horse,
motionless, apparently paying little attention to him. His survey of
the ground at the cliff-base over, MacNair clambered back to the
prairie level, got his tethered horse and rode along to the Indian to
speak to him. Though the _piskun_ was on the edge of the Blackfoot
Indian Reservation he tried Cree, that being the only Indian tongue he
knew, and he was aware that some of the people of the plains tribes
can speak not only their own language but that of a neighbouring tribe.

This Indian spoke fluent Cree in response. MacNair asked him what he
was doing there, why he was sitting motionless on the rim of that
cut-bank, and Napoosis Ogemaw (to give him his name, which signifies
Boy Chief) explained. He had no English at all and probably it was the
fact that MacNair spoke Cree that caused him to divulge all he did
divulge. For the Indians appreciate an interest in them that goes the
length of making those who feel it take the trouble to learn an Indian
tongue. I have found that even to be conversant with the sign-language
is a great aid toward getting close to those very interesting folk.

He was there, Napoosis Ogemaw explained, to relive the past. Ever and
again, he said, as he sat there the old days would come to life--the
dead men would come back. He would hear them, hear their voices as
they stampeded the herds over the _piskun_.

"You can call it what you will," said MacNair to me, "explain it how
you will. Perhaps my sympathy with the old fellow made me tap his
thoughts. It may have been telepathy. All I can say is that that was
one of his lucky days for getting the past back again, and that I also
suddenly heard whooping voices, and the frantic bellow of the buffalo,
and felt the plain, on the edge of which we were, shaking with the
coming of a stampeded herd. My horse began to tremble. I felt that in
another few minutes the herd would be on us and then I looked round,
pulling myself free of the spell, and of course there was
nothing--just the empty plain."

That's the first part of it.

On my first visit to the Blackfoot Reservation, so much was there to
see, so much to do, that it was not till the night I was leaving that
I remembered MacNair and Napoosis Ogemaw. The agent--George
Gooderham--was on the platform (Gleichen) to see me off and we were
having a final chat. Suddenly I recalled all this that I have related
and began to tell it to him. Mr. Gooderham stared at me.

"Well, there is a Napoosis Ogemaw on the reserve, an old man, but very
fit," said he.

I mentioned that MacNair had talked to him in Cree. Mr. Gooderham
replied that that might be so for Napoosis Ogemaw was either a Cree
who had been adopted into the Blackfoot tribe or a Blackfoot who, in
his earlier years, had spent some time with the Crees. Some such story
there was in that Indian's past, but he had not definite information
regarding it. When I saw him a year later I had so much else from him
to interest me that whether he was Cree or Blackfoot--and if Cree how
he came to be living with the Blackfeet, or if Blackfoot why he had
lived some years with the Crees--I did not inquire. Some day I may. It
has at any rate, nothing to do with this narrative.

The locomotive whistle roared close and the train came in, putting a
closure to that last moment talk. But I had a letter from the agent a
week later to tell me that he had mentioned it to Napoosis Ogemaw and
that the old man had said that if ever I came back he would like to
meet me.

The following year I returned to the Blackfoot Reservation. There had
been a fair at Brooks, a little prairie town near the reserve, and
some of the Blackfeet had been invited to present a few of their
old-time dances and to take part in the horse-races there. Napoosis
Ogemaw had been one of these. His riding horse had been taken home in
a bunch with others, and he had come direct to the agency in the wagon
of another Indian--or it may have been in a motor car, for some of
them now have cars.

It was a payment day at the office with all the colour that such days
provide--cars, wagons, buggies parked along the fence, and horses of
all hues, from blacks to pintos, hitched to the rail. Indians old,
middle-aged, young, were in picturesque groups before the door or
sitting on bench and floor in the outer waiting-room, filling it with
the blue haze of tobacco and kinnick. Among these was the Indian who
wanted to see me, whom I was eager to see, and we were introduced.

I looked upon a man of powerful build though not tall. His breadth of
chest was magnificent. He was not fat--simply largely built. We
"talked" a little in the sign language till Mr. Gooderham had some
business attended to, and then the suggestion was made that Napoosis
Ogemaw should be given a lift home to his cabin, which was several
miles away, in the agent's private car and that I should go with him.
An interpreter would be provided for our aid lest my sign-talk broke
down under the strain of so intricate a narration--and certainly in
sign-talk it would have taken me a long time to communicate it all
and, no doubt, considerable intent patience on the part of Napoosis
Ogemaw to follow it. So off we set, the driver and my wife in front
and, behind, Napoosis Ogemaw (half-filling the seat and worried that
he could not give us more room) the young Blackfoot interpreter and
I--the interpreter between us.

"Well," I began, "Napoosis Ogemaw wants to know about that white man
he met long ago at the _piskun_ and what he said to me."

"All right," said the interpreter. "Go ahead, please."

As the car spun along I unfolded it all, sentence by sentence,
Napoosis Ogemaw making no sound save the occasional Indian grunt of
attention. The prairie undulated past us. Riders in distance grew
larger, came close, and passed with eddies of dust at the heels of
their loping mounts. We met not only Indian horsemen going to the
agency but Indian wagons crunching and dusting along, beside some of
these a leggy foal of a mare in harness tittupping in the wonted
western way. We seemed to be heading straight for the verge of the sky
in that land where earth is but a base for the enormous dome. I came
to an end of recounting what MacNair had told me of his experience and
closed, in the Indian fashion, with: "That is all. I have finished."

The interpreter gave a little laugh of acknowledgment of my knowledge
of the ritual before he translated that. When he had done so, Napoosis
Ogemaw turned his head toward me and bowed; and there was the end, it
seemed. The car ran on and not a word did he speak.

The prairie stopped before us. There was a broad gash in it, the gash
of Bow River, and below were the cottonwoods and willows turning
yellow--the month of my visit being again September--on either side
of the river that, shallow at that season, rippled on its way. It was
very beautiful there.

I thought that Napoosis Ogemaw was pondering the wording of his reply
to all I had told him, much as I had once or twice had to ponder a
phrasing before speaking to the interpreter. So I gave him time. I did
not realise then--which was no doubt foolish of me--that there was no
comment necessary, that all I had repeated of MacNair's experience was
perfectly normal to this old man, nothing to make a fuss about, and
that he could not imagine inside that head of his that I might want
ratification of the story, be incredulous of anything so credible.

Perhaps I did wonder if MacNair had invented the story though Boy
Chief (sitting there massive in that car) he had not invented. I
belonged to the steel age; he belonged to the stone age. Recounting
that story I had found it, again, supernatural. Napoosis Ogemaw,
listening to it, found it commonplace, but was no doubt gratified that
a white man was able to hear once what he heard often, feel often what
he often felt--and had remembered it all and told it to another.

"What has he to say about it?" I asked at last.

The young man who sat between us translated that and got a brief
reply, in a casual tone, which he passed to me with the formal
beginning of _He says_ to all sentences.

"He says that is so. That is right. That is how it was."

There was no more to be said, and hardly need to say that. MacNair had
told me the truth--and I had again met a neolithic man.




PART X

_A Garden in the Wilderness_




A GARDEN IN THE WILDERNESS


I

A certain commission that has nothing to do with this book, so need
not be entered into here, carried me a thousand miles northward from
Vancouver to Skagway, noting, nightly, the Pole Star drawing nearer.
We journeyed on beyond Skagway (the "Gateway of the North") up the
spectacular White Pass and heard, when the train stopped to let us
look down on the great gorge of it, the roar of all its cataracts. We
saw, mounting onward, fragments of the trail of '98 in the steep gulch
alongside, a foot-wide scar between the rock-slides that have
descended over it in the years--as though Nature would fain wipe out
the memory of it.

At the boundary between Alaska and British Columbia we remarked other
evidence that we were indeed more than entering, that we had entered
the North, seeing on a blackboard on the wall when we halted there the
imperative command that all _mushers_ must report. We were _going
in_. Men and women of the North speak of _going in_, _coming out_, not
just _going_ and _coming_. The phrase was inevitable. Here was a far
cry from Vancouver.

Here was a far cry even from Skagway as we rolled on by Lake Bennett,
that twisted under cliffs and round the butt-ends of rock-slides, with
only the rufflings of passing winds on its surface and the twinkling
pin-points of sunlight, though in '98 as many as four hundred rafts
were counted at one time on it, rowed by sweeps, sculled by sweeps,
aided on their way by blankets rigged up for sails on lopped trees for
masts. Going in--indubitably were we going in. There is a feeling as
of having come to another planet up there on the divide. And at
Carcross, sixty miles or so north of Skagway (that once had a name
more vocal of the land--Caribou Crossing--changed to Carcross because
of muddles with the mail caused by the existence of the district of
Cariboo in British Columbia's far interior), one is aware of the
ambient silence and vastness of the Yukon. It has a quality like that
of a little village on the shore of a great sea. It is a jumping-off
place for that wilderness the peaks of which keep watch on it, the
twisting waters of which come to its doors.

Aboard the _Tutshi_ (pronounced _Tooshy_), thrashing out of Carcross
to investigate that silence, the realisation must come to many that
the old phrase, _the Lure of the North_, is not just nonsense. Most, I
think, must be aware of it and to some of these it comes as a call to
be answered, to some as a warning; better to be gone, they feel,
before it has them in thrall. Of the lady whom I was to see later I
heard nothing at Carcross. Here was a land that seemed as empty as the
sky. A gaggle of geese passed overhead and, dropping beyond a range to
the southeast, left an added sense of emptiness. A flight of
ptarmigan, piebald, white and brown, strung across the blue bloom of
the dwarfed spruce trees and there was the impression that this was
more rightly their domain than ours. We were intruders among mystery.
Beyond that silvery blue of the spruce trees were staring cliff's,
mutely, heedlessly watching us. Beyond and above the cliffs were
obdurate peaks with snow in their lower creases and glaciers lying in
their upper hollows.

From Tagish Lake to Taku Arm we churned on, the uninhabited shores
slipping past. The reflected silvery light off the water touched, as
with a veneer of unreality, the white-painted boat, the high
pilot-house--and the faces of those who clustered on deck looking at
this austerity of desolation. Valleys that we opened up seemed vast
as Old Country shires. The mountains that hung along their far ends
might have been of stationary clouds. On we went southward on that
waterway, and passed out of Yukon territory with British Columbia's
extreme north. The aeroplane, I considered, will make a great change
in this land. I spoke the thought aloud and a man who stood by me had
a story to tell of adventure and fortitude of the pilots of these
planes that are indeed changing the Northland's life.

But this is of a garden in the wilderness, and of a lady in the
wilderness, and I would merely prepare the stage for her entrance as it
was prepared for us going in, going on. When we had dropped Engineer
Mountain astern and the little cluster of the houses of the Engineer
Mine dotted along its base had dwindled to the value of crumbs----

"Where are we going to now?" I asked the first officer, having been
invited by them up into the pilot-house.

He glanced over his shoulder, surveyed me for a moment, and then
replied that he was not going to tell me: I was to see for myself
without any preparation and so have my own uninfluenced impression. I
accepted the decree and sat mute behind him, his robust figure, as he
stood at the wheel, blotting out a section of the everlasting
mountains. I looked down at the water that came rippling toward us, as
if for ever; I looked at the shores, and the blue-sifted spruce trees
slid past on either side--as if for ever.

The captain came up, the first mate departed. We took a bend and at
last I saw what seemed to be the twisting water's end and caught there
the gleam of a few roofs, very small in the immensity. Yes, we were
indeed, at last, at the end. But even though these sternwheel steamers
of the inland lakes and rivers are of shallow draught to make landings
on beaches, we could not land at the apex there, shelving as it did
into seepage and quagmire. We slowed down and crept close to high
cliffs along the base of which lay what I can but describe as a
floating sidewalk. It disappeared round a projection and as we drifted
alongside a dapper Oriental--I say dapper advisedly, for he wore a
white shirt and his trousers were creased--appeared at the cliff's
base as if by some magic of the land. He caught the rope thrown down
and tied us to a knob of rock.

With the other creatures of my dream--or the other incredulous mortals
(on each face was an expression as of incredulity)--I went down the
gang-plank. With them I passed round the base of the cliffs to where
that floating side-walk touched land and with them, speechless,
followed the path beyond. It brought us to a garden, to sweet-peas,
delphiniums, asters, fox-gloves, snapdragons, columbines, pansies,
peonies, and many other flowers besides--a pool of colour under the
sheer precipices.

At a small gate stood a lady to welcome us. Would we care to walk
round the garden before we met Mrs. Partridge? she suggested. We
passed on, quiet, spellbound, for we had expected nothing like
this--wilder wilderness, perhaps, but not a garden in it. And, finding
it, the contrast with the scene round us made it all the stranger.
Having walked through that oasis of colour we came to a house beside
which was a small conservatory. There we clustered, looking back at
that tended and multi-coloured enclosure, looking up at the
contrasting severe summits, deeply aware of the quiet ashore here, the
throbbing of the steamboat's engine and thrash of her sternwheel no
longer sounding in our ears.

It was then that a little white-haired woman in velvet and lace came
to the door--our lady of the wilderness--and bade us enter.

"You must introduce yourselves," she told us, "for you know me now
but I don't know you."

It was a large main room into which we moved, with space for all.
There was a salver for our visiting-cards on a table to one side,
cards of our hostess beside it; and a book lay there also for us to
sign our names as her guests. The servant who had appeared round the
cliff to meet the boat, and another, carried trays among us laden with
glasses of home-made wine. When we had all drunk to our hostess she
began to speak. She told us that this was a place far off to most and
that it had been her husband's custom to keep open house for all
comers. He had recently died, she said, but she was here to carry on
the tradition; and would we, to commence the evening, sing our two
national anthems? Here, where all the boundaries were so
close--Alaska, Yukon Territory, British Columbia--it had been one of
Mr. Partridge's aims, it appeared, to work towards friendship between
the English-speaking peoples.

"You see," she pointed out, "he had the two flags side by side on that
wall."

In a corner-niche was a little old harmonium--it had been in the
country close on fifty years, I heard later--and sitting down before
it she played, a frail figure in velvet, white-haired, with lace at
her throat and wrists. But soon she was prevailed upon by her friend
and companion (who had met us at the gate) to lie down. Before she
obeyed, however, she had to make another little speech, one of
apology. She said that she had known a lot of trouble recently and
that very morning she had been upset. A murmur of condolence passed,
and she went on to explain that there was a moose she was trying to
tame. It had been coming very close to the door but that morning, just
as it drew near, an aeroplane roared overhead and frightened it away.

The wilderness with its moose and its caribou and its wolves; the
wilderness, this garden, and aeroplanes: that is the North to-day.

There were new odours in the room and the servants brought among us
trays of tea, coffee, cakes. I need hardly tell you that before we
left we all trooped past that couch where our hostess lay, to give her
our adieux. And then I stole off beyond the house, up the slope a
little way (past a cluster of trees, the very boughs of which seemed
to hold the hush), to look at the place where she lived. I got beyond
the voices. I felt the enfolding silence, the silence one reads about,
the silence of the Yukon. The sense of all being but a dream within a
dream caught me; the strangeness caught me; the silence caught me. In
fact what I felt there was perhaps that spell of the North of which I
had often read. I realised that, for better or worse, it might easily
take hold of one--till death do us part, as it were--and it was a
spell, it seemed, at one and the same time tranquil and sinister,
beneficent and terrible. I understood the Lure of the North, that Lure
other than the one that is in the hope for sudden fortune in the gold
of its rocks and sands. These phrases one reads, "Come and find me;"
"What lies beyond the ranges?"--and so forth--are not mere nonsense. I
tore myself away from that arresting and detaining quiet, that spell,
and joined the others below. Our heels sounded muffled on the floating
side-walk as we returned to the boat.

It was then well on in the evening by the evidence of our watches but
day lingers long in these high latitudes in summer, and even after we
had cast loose and backed away from the cliff the sky above us was
full of bright memories of day--and would hold them almost till a new
day dawned. In the water through which again we thrashed the day had
not gone. It clung there, beautiful and a little sad. But in the place
we had left, under the towering precipices, lights were being lit. It
was real, it was true, and we were leaving it alone there as the night
of the valleys brimmed round it. I watched the lights diminish in
size beyond our grey wake in the spectral water, watched till they
were eclipsed at a bend, and then climbed again to the pilot-house in
that queer drizzle of lingering day through the gathering night.

The first officer was there. He looked at me as I entered, raising his
eyebrows in an inquiry. But somewhat as he had wanted to give me no
word of preparation for what I was to see, I felt unable to say
anything to him in reply to that lift of his brows. And I think he
understood. Of course he understood. I shall never, so long as I live,
forget that lady in the wilderness, the lady of Ben-My-Chree.


II

Her husband, Otto Partridge, was born in Hertfordshire, England, in
1855, and when he was but a boy his people removed to the Isle of Man.
The college at which he was educated was the well-known King
William's, which is about a mile from Castletown near the south end of
the island, and ten from Douglas, facing the bay. From the headlands
there one can see the deep-sea steamers that have come through the
North Channel rounding the Calf of Man, lurching on their way to
Liverpool, or heading for the Atlantic, outward bound. He was not the
first King William's boy to hear the call of the sea and respond. In
many an engine-room and on many a ship's bridge over the seven seas
are old King William scholars.

At fourteen years of age he was apprenticed in the mercantile marine and
when nineteen he sailed, with a younger brother, to San Francisco,
having heard from an elder brother at that time resident there of an
opportunity in a schooner trading to the Farallones and coast ports.
Arrived at San Francisco they found that their wandering elder brother
was off and away to New Orleans. There was at that time trouble between
the States and Mexico, and what had these two young men to do but join a
sloop of war under Commander John Phillips, special dispensation being
granted them from Washington to sign on for three years.

That little flutter out into the world over, they returned to England.
Mr. Partridge then fell heir to a legacy, married the woman who was to
share thereafter all his romantic life, and set sail for California
again. In the Santa Clara valley they set up their home on a
fruit-farm and there it was that Otto Partridge's interest in
horticulture began. That was understandable. There he could see the
whole valley when the foam of spring broke upon it, and would know the
view from Mount Hamilton looking over to Los Gatos when the prune
orchards were in blossom.

In the year 1897 all the west was excited over the gold discoveries in
the far north. Everybody was saying, "Klondike, Klondike. . . ." It
was like a refrain. One heard it on trains and one heard it in
hotel-rotundas and in the clubs. It was in music-hall songs: "the
Klondike." Skippers of ships putting into west-coast ports could not
let the seamen ashore because of the lure of it. If but one of the
sailors were allowed to scull a boat to a wharf on some business, the
boat did not come back. French leave was the vogue then. "The
Klondike, the Klondike. . . ."

A friend of Otto Partridge's in Victoria wrote him a plea for his
partnership on an adventure into that mysterious north and in 1897 he
was off. Those were wild days on the new frontier. Soapy Smith was very
much alive in Skagway with his gang of desperadoes. Otto Partridge was
carrying with him twenty thousand dollars in currency and the stories of
the notorious Soapy Smith of Skagway did not sound good to him, so he
got permission from the captain to pay a secret visit to the hold.
Among his "not wanted on the voyage" effects was a bale of oakum--for
ship-building was in his mind as one of the means of _making good_ in
the North. Transport, he realised, would be wanted there. Into that bale
he put his ready cash. Soapy Smith's gang did some desperate things but
the looting of cargo was not among them. Arrived safely up the trail at
Bennett, Otto undid his bale of oakum and had his twenty thousand
dollars again. With a little group of men he looked for opportunities
and floated the Bennett Lake and Klondike Navigation Company. The _Ora_,
the _Flora_, the _Nora_--three of the first steamers on the Yukon--were
Bennett Lake and Klondike Navigation boats.

Mrs. Partridge had come only as far as Victoria with him from the
flower-scented Santa Clara valley, and was waiting there while he went
on to spy out the land. But the following year she "went in" after
him--over the famous Trail of '98, the old scar of which you see
to-day from the train as it twines up White Pass. Few were the women
then in the land. In the old souvenir volumes of photographs of those
days a woman in any of the groups is a rarity. She went over that
trail on foot.

The White Pass railway was being built and with its completion along
the shores of Lake Bennett from the town of Bennett to Canyon City
(which are now little more than names by the track-side) the
Navigation Companies' activities there came to an end. Further into
the North went Otto Partridge and his wife. He took over a sawmill at
Milhaven, a little to the south of Carcross where to-day you go aboard
the sternwheel steamer for Ben-My-Chree and for Atlin. For a home, Mr.
Partridge built a house-boat on the lake.

With the history of the North the lives of the Partridges are blent.
Bishop Bompas was then in the Yukon on missionary work among the
Indians, and it happened that an old-country friend of Mrs.
Partridge--Miss Dalton--came out from London to assist him in his
labours. Finding Mrs. Partridge there on the house-boat she decided,
instead of going in for missionary work, to join the Partridge mnage
and keep her friend company. It was at this period that they began
their expeditions into the hardly-known wilderness through which the
waterways twine in their lonely fashion.

Mr. Partridge built a yacht, for the navigation of these waters, which
he christened _Ben-My-Chree_, Manx for Girl of my Heart. All through
his life was this romance of his love for his wife and devotion to
her, a devotion reciprocated. They were always together. They knew the
life of settled lands but the invitation of these wild and secret
regions was in their hearts. That yacht careened with them over Lakes
Bennett, Tagish, and Marsh. They went upon hunting expeditions into
the further recesses, getting meat for their winter supply.

It was in those days that a prospector, Stanley McLennan, came to Mr.
Partridge with news of a gold discovery at the end of West Taku Arm.
He had found gold and silver in the rocks but had none in his pocket.
He had to be grub-staked, and Partridge grub-staked him. Not only that
but, with his yacht, he helped in the transportation of supplies.

It happened that just then Lord Egerton arrived from England, looking
for a virgin hunting country. Otto Partridge was a man after his own
heart. They shared that love of the remote. The camp beside the lost
lake, the aurora shaking the sky with its plumes, the sense of
escape--these they shared. One day they climbed to McLennan's prospect
away above the high cliffs, and Lord Egerton became excited over it
all. The scene is impressive in its austerity and, for those who can
be moved by wilderness as well as formal garden unforgettable. But not
only the grandeur of the scene excited Lord Egerton. The mineral
showings, unearthed by Stanley McLennan, he felt, warranted financial
backing for development work. All that was needed was capital. So Lord
Egerton, Mr. Partridge, and Miss Dalton (who all this time had been
accompanying the Partridges on their expeditions) pooled a sum of
money to allow of the working of the property. The house-boat was
towed away from Milhaven to the end of West Taku Arm and cabins were
built ashore there for a mining crew, and the work began in earnest.
Lord Egerton went home to England and all was going well when old
Nature took matters in hand.

One spring, when the thaws came, an avalanche began to slip on that
mountain and in its progress started a rock-slide. The timbers of the
trestle-towers of the gravity tramway that had been built up the steep
slope were snapped like matches, the mine workings were buried under
tons of dbris, and several members of the crew were overtaken and
killed. Did you ever see a rock-slide? That is no little run of scree
for a few yards. The rocks, big as houses, are undermined by the
melting of the snows. The slide comes down and thrusts its weight
against them. There is cataclysm, havoc. There is a roar as of the
tipping of a thousand trucks of steel rails. The boulders roll down
and roll not straight, being not, of course, complete and polished
spheres but monstrous and jagged things. They roll a little way in a
straight line and then, as if endowed with individual and erratic
life, leap sideways. Cannoning into other rocks they send these
trundling and bouncing downwards. With the most appalling divagations
they descend, and in the momentum they may roll on uncertainly across
the flats at base of the mountain from which they have been loosened.

That disastrous slide stopped the mining labours at the head of West
Taku Arm. One might think that it would have put a period even to the
occupancy, that they would have left the place to Nature then. But no.
In the course of all these labours they had come by an affection for
the land. They were identified with it; it was theirs. And besides,
Mr. Partridge was not of the sort to accept defeat.

They left the boat-house that had been their home. They went ashore
and began the building of the houses I saw there. To open up the mine
again may have been in Mr. Partridge's mind all the while, but in the
making of the home he worked on. He made of it a place fit for a
woman to live in. He laid out vegetable gardens and flower gardens.
Talk of the desert and the sown! In that wilderness they built their
home and tended their gardens. The sweet-peas, the delphiniums, the
enormous pansies of the long northern summer days, the columbines were
strange contrast to the hard, the implacable cliffs. And that they
might not be cut off from the outer world Mr. Partridge appealed to
the transport company (the White Pass and Yukon Route), asking them,
when the steamer came up the lake to the Engineer mine, some miles
below, to send it on to Ben-My-Chree; he called the place by the name
of the yacht he had built to explore these waters.

When visitors inquired of them if they did not feel "cut off" there,
No! they said, not they. There is such a thing as the international
postal service, and they had many correspondents. They had books; they
had, in winter, their dog-team and their sledge should there be any
call to "go out"; they had the beauty of winter--a beauty as great as
that of summer--and with the winter's cold they knew how to cope. The
frost drew its white flowers on the pane, lovely as these summer
flowers flaming in the garden.

Twice a week through the summer the steamer churned on to the end of
that inland fiord and tied up to the cliffs. I never met Otto
Partridge--he died just a few months before I saw his garden--but as a
story-teller I believe he was enthralling, a gifted raconteur. Ask him
of the old days of the North and the yarns would come forth,
extraordinary, whimsical, wild. And there was much to see--from the
beavers at work in their colony to the glass-houses where the
Partridges had their vegetables in season and out of season. Yes, and
mushrooms in February, he would say.

Those who visited them in those days tell that to see Mr. and Mrs.
Partridge together was to be aware of the harmony of their minds and
outlook. Each was the complement of the other. Their devotion was
palpable without parade.

This place at the back of beyond became famous. All the world over
were travellers who, when in the mood of remembering, would be back in
spirit there. The voice of their host would be again in their ears.
His personality they would recall. Early in 1930, just when navigation
opened on the lakes, he was suddenly taken ill. Years of clambering in
that upended country had told upon his heart. They got him out to
Whitehorse and there, shortly after his arrival, he died.

To his wife there was but one duty left, one labour--a labour of love
and remembrance. There she remained, at Ben-My-Chree, keeping open
house as he had done, for all who came. But with all her charm we had
the feeling that she had another wish, unspoken, the wish to be with
him again. It was at the back of her eyes, despite her kindly
attention to her guests. Her friends, it appeared, thought it would be
better if, for the next winter, she "came out," and she told my wife
that perhaps she might go out. That, thought my wife, presumably meant
Vancouver, Victoria--or at least Skagway.

"Oh, no!" was Mrs. Partridge's response. "I might go out to Whitehorse."

So, with the last boat, before the winter claimed the lakes, she left
for Whitehorse and there, worn despite her rare spirit, with her
secret loneliness, the end came in 1931. Otto Partridge had not long
to wait for the company of his life's companion in the further travels
of the spirit if such there be.

What, I wonder, will become of the old harmonium in a corner beside
the stairs? It is an old-timer too. It is more a souvenir now than a
musical instrument, but in the old days it led the singing, Mrs.
Partridge playing, when the guests from outside, loath to go,
lingered on. Miss Dalton, who had some time earlier gone back to
England, expressed a view shared by many--one may say shared by all in
the North who knew these two: that the old place might not be left to
Nature to obliterate. It had become a point of pilgrimage during the
Partridges' lives. Why, just because they were not to be seen there in
the flesh, should it be forsaken? So, round that house in the heart of
the hushed wilderness, for these two whom even death kept but a little
while from each other, is the garden that they loved, for a memorial.
Queer to remember that lonely water where the moose come down to
drink, and how when one strolled alone up the slopes to get an
impression of the scene the clumps of trees were as wicker nets to
catch the quiet. Queer to remember all that in the midst of the bustle
of affairs in the world's centres.




PART XI

_Maple-Leaf and Thistle_




MAPLE LEAF AND THISTLE


Far from Hawaii, far from the Grampians, far from Valparaiso and the
Andes, from Glasgow--for

      ". . . little did my mother ken
         The day she cradled me,
      The lands I was to travel in . . ."

--in this house by the shore of Kootenay Lake, in British Columbia,
another magic carpet carried me over many leagues. Little did my
mother ken of that magic carpet either or, to be precise, that magic
box. _Radio_, _wireless set_ were not words she knew.

But before coming to that wireless set I must tell, preparing the way
for it, tell briefly, of a summer's journey over many miles, an outing
in the world as unexpected as that dip into Honolulu, the sight of the
palm trees, the whiff of those tropic blossoms. One never knows what
to-morrow has in store. Another commission carried me again up the
indented coast of British Columbia, through the "pan-handle" of
Alaska, over the White Pass and on, northward, to Dawson City and the
gold fields of the Klondike. At table one evening on the coastal boat
I had to say to the chief engineer, because of his voice, "You come
from Glasgow."

"From Govan," said he.

The steamer also was from Govan as I had discovered on taking my first
constitutional round her decks. There was the legend--definite as the
Chief's accent--on a brass plate, _Built at Fairfield Shipbuilding
Yards, Govan_.

I left her at Skagway and boarded a train that twined up that pass
through which the men of the gold rush went afoot and sometimes, when
their packs were heavy, at the more precipitous parts, on hands and
knees. At Whitehorse, the northern terminus of that railway, a hundred
miles or so from Skagway, I went aboard a vessel of a different sort
from the coastal ones, a shallow-draught, stern-wheeled steamboat. The
warning whistle blew and was answered at once by all the dogs--dogs that
do not bark. Throughout the town they raised their voices in a canine
keening, answering the siren. By the noble look of them these animals
should bay basso-profundo, or should have bell-voices like that of the
Great Dane. But no; there are even notes at end of their reply to the
siren like the high shrill ululation of coyotes. The volume of it
subsides and a dying fall of peevish whimpering makes an end of it.

On the wharf the people watched those trooping up the gangway as
though they were going on a long voyage into strange lands. The
captain mounted up into the pilot-house and thrust the window open, a
monarch of the river looking down on the final bustle. Ropes were cast
loose. She hooted again and away she went, churning upstream, for she
has to do so to turn. Sweeping round, her speed increased as with a
bound in the pull of the current. Back she surged past the wharf and
the crowds, her siren crying a parting "whoo-whoo!" and all the
loafing dogs of Whitehorse (out of work for the summer) raised their
great heads and answered.

Away we puffed through the nightless summer of that weird northland,
down Yukon River.

On the way to Dawson I saw little of the pilots, for that is a tricky
stream and navigation downriver takes up all their attention. Guests
in the wheel-house, going down, fuss them. There are places where the
river swings like Mississippi, swing after swing. The Indians, in
giving a direction to any one in these parts, tell him he has so many
"looks" to go. The pilot up in the wheel-house and the engineer on
the main deck are in constant touch. In a phrase of the river, the
engineer is "on the bell." Approaching one of these "looks," just
before the bend, just at the right place, the pilot rings for full
speed astern, and immediately the stern-wheel responds. But that
merely puts a brake upon the ship to allow of the pilot swinging her
round into the next "look," where again he rings for full speed ahead
and away she goes with the current and her engines. Once upon a time,
because of an accident downstream, word of which had been telegraphed
to Whitehorse, a captain took his vessel down without any ring for a
brake from the engines, and that trip was a series of gasps for all on
board. There is a place at which, on the way up, you can go ashore,
walk leisurely through the forests and be ready to get aboard again
before she comes in sight.

Butting up against the current, except at such places as the Five
Finger Rapids, the pilots can be sociable--at least, over their
shoulders--and so, coming upstream, I was invited to mount to the
wheel-house. On entering I was greeted thus:

"Sit ye down. This iss peautiful weather, whateffer."

I am not making fun of that accent. I would not make fun of these
pilots on any account. Men who can run that river from the breaking of
the ice to the freeze-up are men to respect. Moving it was, somehow
exciting, to hear that lilt on Yukon River, six thousand miles or so
from Mallaig. For the Hebrides I had come, as the years slipped along,
to have great affection, though born abroad. Such names as Appin,
Moidart, Morven, were as music to me. So was that voice!

It was the season when the caribou herds migrate from the seaward
ranges and the St. Elias wilderness of Alaska to their summer pastures
by the head-waters of Stewart River and the banks of the
Macmillan--both good Scots names, by the way. As we came quaking up
against the deliberate pouring and eddying of that great waterway we
sighted herd after herd. They swam, hurrying, across our bows, or trod
water to let us go past and then swam valiantly through our wake. Talk
of the ways of these beasts led to talk of the red deer--and red deer
gave me opportunity to ask the pilot, "What part of the Highlands do
you come from?"

"I'm an Isleman," was the reply.

So then our conversation--as the boat foamed up against the flow of
Yukon--was of Skye and of Mull, and of the Minch. From the top of the
ship, that high-perched wheel-house, I was invited to descend to the
main deck to see the engines.

"From Govan?" I asked the engineer there.

"Aye," he replied, "and the engines too." And he pointed to the brass
plate on them.

On the way back to Skagway from Dawson, my work there finished, I
turned aside at Carcross. It is just a store or two, a house or
two--some of logs, some of sawn lumber--a wharf, a railway station, a
few people, and many sledge dogs lying about in the summer sun, the
long day of summer, off duty till the snows come and the long night
lit by the aurora borealis. On another lake steamer out of Carcross I
made the inland voyage (lakes and rivers the chief highways there) to
that hinterland of blue-spruce forests, stark mountains draped with
glaciers and an ambient silence almost palpable--Atlin Country. Up in
the wheel-house on Tagish Lake, shutting my eyes and hearing the
captain and mate talk together, I could imagine that the next landing
would be at Tobermory or Stornoway. A young man named Dan Mackay was
at the wheel; the captain was a Macdonald from the Isles.

Back again at Vancouver the business upon which I was engaged took me
next far inland to the country about the head-waters of the Columbia.
Riding there one day over the benchlands, sunshine golden on one area
of the wide view and a thunderstorm rumbling and seething at another
so that the mountains there turned to cloud and the clouds to
mountains, and which was which the eye could not decide--I was stopped
by one whose voice made me wonder whether I should say, "From
Glasgow?" or "From Govan?"

"From Glasgow?" I asked, and he was.

I must bide a wee, I must come in the hoose and "ben the hoose" and
meet his wife, who was born in the Island of Arran. There is a room in
that house that I shall never forget. It was his workroom and along
one wall was a novel frieze--a folding map, done in the
bird's-eye-view fashion, issued by a shipping agent of, I believe,
Renfield Street, or it may be Jamaica Street. He had unrolled it to
full length and tacked it to the wall.

"Sometimes," he explained, "I sit here and have a trip or two. I go to
the Broomielaw and sail all the way doon, past the rock of Dumbarton
and the Cloch, away doon here by the Cock of Arran and away across to
Campbeltown. Or I'll take train to Greenock or Gourock--or
Ardrossan--just as I fancy. I'll land in Arran and climb
Goatfell"--and he jabbed a finger on it--"or I'll go fishing at
Blackwaterfoot." And he made the motion of casting a fly toward the
long map. A cheery old soul, he was, not homesick at all, he solemnly
informed me, "but no' forgetting hame, ye understand."

I could see that. Among my baggage (not forgetting home, either) I had
certain books. William Power's _My Scotland_, George Blake's _Rest and
Be Thankful_, H. V. Morton's _In Scotland Again_, and a copy of a new
edition of that old classic by Alexander Smith, _A Summer in Skye_, I
left with him, realising that for him these had been written.

I had to go on to the prairies, to one of the Indian reservations. I
had been there before. One of the men I wished to see, the agent for
the tribe told me very regretfully, was in hospital recovering from
delirium tremens in which he had gone on a lone war-path. For despite
the law against supplying alcohol to the aborigines there are those
who will do so. I was informed, however, that he was much better and
would like to see me, so I went along.

There was a rumour that he was not a full blood. There was a suspicion
that, Indian though he looked, he was a half-breed. He had,
nevertheless, been brought up--_raised_, as they say there-away--as an
Indian. He was proud of being Indian, apparently, cherished old Indian
ways. He made the bowls of his pipes out of pipe-stone and from
choke-cherry made the stems, and smoked _kinnick_ instead of tobacco. He
knew the old myths of his people and he "spoke," as well as his Indian
tongue and English, the old sign-language of the tribes. He knew their
rituals and their dances that have come down from the stone age.

I sat beside his cot in the clean-smelling and shining ward, his squaw
to the other side of it rolling and smoking cigarettes, saying not a
word but smiling at the right places and now and then turning her head
toward us at some part of our talk specially interesting to her.

"Whether he is a full blood or a half-breed," I considered, glancing
at her, "their children will be Indian enough, with no evidence of a
drop of white blood."

We got on very well together, so well, indeed, that after my business
with him was over, all my questions asked, and answered with great
interest and intelligence, he did not want me to go. It was his turn
to interview me. What nationality was I?

"I'm a Scotsman," said I.

"Me too!" he replied promptly.

So he was, then, as some suspected, a half-breed. Having been brought
up as an Indian by his Indian mother, having lived as one with his
mother's people, he looked very Indian--and that "Me too!" came as
what I can best describe as a whimsical shock.

Well, there had certainly been plenty of Scotland in my western
journeys and voyages that summer--taking meals with an engineer from
Govan all the way up the coast of British Columbia and through the
pan-handle of Alaska, listening to the voices of Skye and Mull on
Yukon River, Tagish Lake, and Lake Atlin, claimed as a compatriot by a
half-breed Indian with a full Indian name, a wearer of moccasins, a
smoker of _kinnick_. And then the climax, the grand finale:

The cottonwoods and the tamaracks and birches were yellowing with
warning of summer's end when I came back to this house by Kootenay
Lake where I had to sit down and marshall all the notes I had been
taking and get the jobs done for which I had been gathering these.
There was a radio in the house--a wireless set--and one morning I was
urgently called to come and listen.

There was a voice telling us that crowds were gathering, the voice of
George Blake at the shipyards telling us, over five thousand miles
away, of the launching of a new Cunarder. From where he stood, he
informed us, he could see both sides of the Clyde, and rain was
coming on and umbrellas were going up. I heard Queen Mary's voice and
a crisp tinkle of shattered glass, heard the ship slide away, and then
George Blake again letting us know how the vessel looked as she went.
I heard the cheering beyond it. But what took me home, as on a magic
carpet, was that touch about the rain.

I saw the Clyde. I saw the umbrellas darkly gleaming. I saw the
streets, the doorways, the grey light on wet slate-roofs, the steeples
in the rain--aye, even the sooty city pigeons cowering, hunched in
their niches--sitting on a sunny morning in a house by the shores of
Kootenay Lake in British Columbia. In another decade, no doubt, there
will be more than a voice out of a magic box for us. We shall both
hear and see--truly see, not figuratively--across these miles.

The love for the Old Land must be considerable, after all, I think, in
one who, hearing of rain on umbrellas in Govan--rain on umbrellas in
Govan!--felt that he would like fine to see auld Glasgow again. Scotland
is a place in the sun and rain, but it is more than that. I have said it
before and I will say it again: it is a kingdom of the mind. Wherever a
Scot goes Scotland goes with him, inside his cranium, inside his
heart--which need not at all imply any chauvinism. The old love for it
endures, whatever his reason or necessity for living elsewhere.


  THE END




Transcriber's Note


  * Hyphenation and spelling inconsistencies left as in the original

  * Pg 32: "ash-try" to "ash-tray" located in "... thrust the ash-try
           closer."

  * Pg 110: "chat" to "that" located in "... tell us of books chat
            would delight ..."

  * Pg 139: "usuage" to "usage" located in "... in the old German
            usuage of such ..."

  * Pg 150: "ryhthmic" to "rhythmic" located in "... heard again the
            ryhthmic creaking ..."

  * Pg 287: "nagivation" to "navigation" located in "... discussing
            their methods of nagivation ..."

  * Pg 313: "ripplied" to "rippled" located in "... shallow at that
            season, ripplied on its way."




[End of Coloured Spectacles, by Frederick Niven]
