The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque German I began a conversation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was!
Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn") found them very amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a country tavern in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excellent homely aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the valley, the women with bright red jackets working in the fields, and the dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's niece when they essayed the native idiom. "Sie arbeiten immer!" she used to say; "Sie werden krank!" ("You're always working; you'll be ill!")
There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those happy days two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans. On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, and played games with Ingo.
Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent, self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner what he was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing smile: "Von den Sternen!" ("Of the stars.")
The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task. "Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself hung!" and he would laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo.
The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages, then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom.
After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite bookTill Eulenspiegel, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth. His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way, "Gott! wie er freut sich!" The progress of our reading was held up by these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo explaining.
Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of 'Treasure Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! I read the tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo's eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read of the dark doings at theAdmiral Benbow: and how his face would fall when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the quickclop, clopof the mail-man's horses.
I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty, sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons withTill Eulenspiegelon the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen, and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook.
And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Märchen" that I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them, they ran like this:
For Ingo to learn English will very easy beIf someone is as kind to him as he has been to me;Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes—Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend:To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend.
For Ingo to learn English will very easy beIf someone is as kind to him as he has been to me;Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes—Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend:To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend.
If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate.
After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for something more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous evenings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight—these were the things that made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in the suburbs like a tame cat!
Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took it quite calmly.
"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an evening with your friends."
A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go.
"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be lonely."
This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars who never stir from the house at night.
On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room shining with firelight and the shabby armchair.
"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked.
"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you."
He kissed her and went off.
When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway.
At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing, shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran.
He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly.
At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street and had almost entered his gate when he paused.
Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and masculine comradeship—why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and tiptoed away.
That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a box of crackers.
At last—it seemed years—the church chimes struck ten and he saw the lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering with weariness and cold, he went home.
He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.
"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?"
"One o'clock," he lied bravely—and just then the dining-room clock struck half-past ten and supported him.
"Did you have a good time?"
"Bully—perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with the boys now and then."
I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine. He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety—improvising verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.
That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with energy, hospitality, and wit: theenfant terribleof English letters for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's verses is very welcome.[C]His introduction is charming: the tribute of an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is.
[C]
Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.
Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.
Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother was wounded at Waterloo.
His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Père la Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an English wife.
The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870—the "Terrible Year" it was called—until 1914.
Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts.
In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period:
"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School—some time in '83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series of triumphs during his whole school career."
In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that book—everyone should have six copies.
After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford—admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.
Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's. It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek. But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority.
Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:
"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in his judgments—who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears."
No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind.
TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICAYears ago when I was at Balliol,Balliol men—and I was one—Swam together in winter rivers,Wrestled together under the sun.And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol,Loved already, but hardly known,Welded us each of us into the others:Called a levy and chose her own.Here is a House that armours a manWith the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,And a laughing way in the teeth of the worldAnd a holy hunger and thirst for danger:Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,Whatever I had she gave me again:And the best of Balliol loved and led me,God be with you, Balliol men.I have said it before, and I say it again,There was treason done, and a false word spoken,And England under the dregs of men,And bribes about, and a treaty broken:But angry, lonely, hating it still,I wished to be there in spite of the wrong.My heart was heavy for Cumnor HillAnd the hammer of galloping all day long.Galloping outward into the weather,Hands a-ready and battle in all:Words together and wine togetherAnd song together in Balliol Hall.Rare and single! Noble and few!...Oh! they have wasted you over the sea!The only brothers ever I knew,The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.* * * * *Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,Whatever I had she gave me again;And the best of Balliol loved and led me,God be with you, Balliol men.
TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA
Years ago when I was at Balliol,Balliol men—and I was one—Swam together in winter rivers,Wrestled together under the sun.And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol,Loved already, but hardly known,Welded us each of us into the others:Called a levy and chose her own.
Here is a House that armours a manWith the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,And a laughing way in the teeth of the worldAnd a holy hunger and thirst for danger:Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,Whatever I had she gave me again:And the best of Balliol loved and led me,God be with you, Balliol men.
I have said it before, and I say it again,There was treason done, and a false word spoken,And England under the dregs of men,And bribes about, and a treaty broken:But angry, lonely, hating it still,I wished to be there in spite of the wrong.My heart was heavy for Cumnor HillAnd the hammer of galloping all day long.
Galloping outward into the weather,Hands a-ready and battle in all:Words together and wine togetherAnd song together in Balliol Hall.Rare and single! Noble and few!...Oh! they have wasted you over the sea!The only brothers ever I knew,The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.
* * * * *
Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,Whatever I had she gave me again;And the best of Balliol loved and led me,God be with you, Balliol men.
Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two of his volumes.
There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen—it did not take England long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration."
Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important contribution?
What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous Examination Schools at Oxford—that noble building consecrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an hour and a half—or was it three hours?—with flashing extempore talk about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.
Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs!The gospel of exuberance—that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?
Rabelais came from Touraine—the heart of Gaul, the island of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included.
Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us "literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of 'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."
In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds. Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense rhymes—all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His passion for places—roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage—these are the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant. Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe.
Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food, companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight—in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind":
A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.
A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.
And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music:
I never get between the pinesBut I smell the Sussex air;Nor I never come on a belt of sandBut my home is there.And along the sky the line of the DownsSo noble and so bare.A lost thing could I never find,Nor a broken thing mend:And I fear I shall be all aloneWhen I get towards the end.Who will there be to comfort meOr who will be my friend?I will gather and carefully make my friendsOf the men of the Sussex Weald,They watch the stars from silent folds,They stiffly plough the field.By them and the God of the South CountryMy poor soul shall be healed.If I ever become a rich man,Or if ever I grow to be old,I will build a house with deep thatchTo shelter me from the cold,And there shall the Sussex songs be sungAnd the story of Sussex told.I will hold my house in the high woodWithin a walk of the sea,And the men that were boys when I was a boyShall sit and drink with me.
I never get between the pinesBut I smell the Sussex air;Nor I never come on a belt of sandBut my home is there.And along the sky the line of the DownsSo noble and so bare.
A lost thing could I never find,Nor a broken thing mend:And I fear I shall be all aloneWhen I get towards the end.Who will there be to comfort meOr who will be my friend?
I will gather and carefully make my friendsOf the men of the Sussex Weald,They watch the stars from silent folds,They stiffly plough the field.By them and the God of the South CountryMy poor soul shall be healed.
If I ever become a rich man,Or if ever I grow to be old,I will build a house with deep thatchTo shelter me from the cold,And there shall the Sussex songs be sungAnd the story of Sussex told.
I will hold my house in the high woodWithin a walk of the sea,And the men that were boys when I was a boyShall sit and drink with me.
He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.—GEORGE HERBERT.
He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.—GEORGE HERBERT.
He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
—GEORGE HERBERT.
Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S.Fernfieldin Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one more proof of the surprising power of the written word?
For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print. The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote about him, brought (so he naïvely told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent, simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to help theFernfieldcarry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your "round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes."
"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more bread for supper—that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top of his class are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only slouchy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands.
Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils given the privilege of learning an extra language in the evenings. He chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his great ambition was to be a seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy's chance soon came.
After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates, and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running to him.
"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on theQueen Eleanor!"
It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard theQueen Eleanor, a British tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly.
"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away—we sail at four o'clock."
"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!)
The chief roars with laughter.
"Too small!" he says.
Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward.
"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and come back again. Then we'll see how you look!"
Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to theQueen Eleanor. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds five a month.
Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water would overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy.
"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still.
Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A.B. was on theFernfieldin 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer. This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and Tommy's guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster.
One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important rôle!
The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about the world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yachtAlvina.He was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral in those days) signed on to take a millionaire's pet plaything across the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there still was one then!)
Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the window a picture of the Scotch engineer—his best friend, the only man in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English transport. He scanned the poster with amazement.
Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a practical seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the shop and bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, who had read the book. He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for years they had served together on the same vessels at sea. He told how the writer, who was the former second engineer of theFernfield, had done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at sea. Then came another surprise.
"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the bookseller.
It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, William McFee, who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that Hoboken and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" under his arm.
Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing my interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that one of the characters in the story was in New York. I wrote to Tommy asking him to come to see me. He wrote that theAlvinawas to sail the next day, and he could not get away. I supposed the incident was closed.
Then I saw in the papers that theAlvinahad been halted in the Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it that she was on her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island, pending an investigation.
Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in the very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I overheard another member of theAlvina'screw asking about "Casuals of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he, too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one's friends walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor who had been there a few days before.
So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my way to see Tommy and theAlvina.
I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a plausible excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion in the breast of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a meeting of the Authors' League when one can know the sights, sounds, and smells of West or South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the West-Street piers to give them to captains and first mates of liners, and get them to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how I met Captain Claret of theMinnehaha, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape of theOrduña, Mr. Jones of theLusitaniaand many another. They knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes of Conrad in the officers' cabins on theLusitaniawhen she went down, God rest her. I know, because I put them there.
And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—theJames L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges;Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; theComancheoutward bound for Galveston (I think); theAscalon, full-rigged ship, with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit snugging the canvas. And who is so true a lover of the sea as one who can suffer the ultimate indignities—and love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy Hook....
At the quarantine station I had a surprise. TheAlvinawas not there. One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was duly taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for nothing? Then another came to my aid. "There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed his gesture, and saw her—a long, slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel with a graceful rake; the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman wanted three dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get into trouble with "39"—"39" being a United States destroyer lying in the Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering we compromised on a dollar and a quarter.
That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's reader! Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water of a "bight"—surrounded by ships and the men who sail them—I might almost have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long Island commuters are nurtured to a tough and perilous his, and I clambered theAlvina'sside without dropping hat, stick, or any of my pocketful of manuscripts.
Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He introduced me to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the arrival of a stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, thoseDioscuriof seamen, had been at work. The skipper was ashore. He owns a saloon.
TheAlvinais a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they told me, and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany throughout; the staterooms all have brass double beds and private bathrooms attached; she has her own wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable. But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck was cumbered with sacks of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in January is likely to be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons.
I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical Dutch lad—round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me all his treasures—his certificates of good conduct from all the ships (both sail and steam) on which he has served; a picture of his mother, who died when he was six; and of his sister Greta—a very pretty girl—who is also mentioned inCasuals of the Sea.The drunken fireman in the story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet of letters from Mr. McFee.
I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to this Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they were. Tommy is one of his own "casuals"—