Part 20

Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for Berkshire, as you might have imagined, but for a slum division of Birmingham. He was very proud of this, and quite rightly too. He said: "I am the one Conservative member in the Midlands." It almost made him forget about his wood. He shut up the Berkshire place and took a house in town, and as he could not afford Mayfair, and did not understand such things very well, the house he took was an enormous empty house in Bayswater, and he had no peace until he gave it up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly; and then his mother thought that looked so odd that he did the right thing, and got into a nice old-fashioned furnished house in Westminster, overlooking the Green Park.

But all this cost him a mint of money, and politics made him angrier and angrier. They never let him speak, and they made him vote for things he thought perfectly detestable. Then he did speak, and as he was an honest English gentleman the papers called him ridiculous names and said he had no brains. So he just jolly well threw the whole thing up and went back to Berkshire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a thing he had never done before: he put a flag up over his house to show he was at home. Then he began to think of his wood again.

The very first time he rode out to look at it he found the paling had given way in places from the fall of trees, and that some leaned inwards and some outwards, and that one of the gates was off its hinges. There were also two cows walking about in the wood, and what annoyed him most of all, the iron spikes were rusty and the varnish had all gone rotten and white and streaky on the palings. He spoke to the bailiff about this, and hauled him out to look at it. The bailiff rubbed the varnish with his finger, smelt it, and said that it had perished. He also said there was no such thing as good varnish nowadays, and he added there wasn't any varnish, not the very best, but wouldn't go like that with rain and all. Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite grumbled a good deal, but he supposed the bailiff knew best; so he told him to see what could be done, and for several weeks he heard no more about it.

I forgot to tell you that about this time the South African War had broken out, and as things were getting pretty tangled, Hermann-Postlethwaite went out with his regiment, the eighth battalion, not of the Berkshire, but of the Orkney regiment. While he was out there, his brother, in Dr. Charlbury's home, died, and he succeeded to the baronetcy. As he already had a V.C. and was now given a D.S.O., as well as being one of the people mentioned in dispatches, he was pretty important by the time he came home, when the war was over, just before the elections of 1900.

When he got home he had a splendid welcome, both from his tenants in Berkshire in passing through and from those of his late brother in the big place in Worcestershire. He preferred his Berkshire place, however, and, letting the big place to an American of the name of Hendrik K. Boulge, he went back to his first home. When he got there he thought of the old wood, and went out to look at it. The palings were mended, but they were covered all over with tar! He was exceedingly angry, and ordered them to be painted at once; but the bailiff assured him one could not paint over tar, and so did the carpenter and the foreman. At this he had a fit of rage, and ordered the whole damned thing to be pulled down, and swore he would be damned if he ever had a damned stick or a rail round the damned wood again. He was no longer young; he was getting stout and rather puffy; he was not so reasonable as of old. Anyhow, he had the whole thing pulled down. Next year (that is, in 1901) his wife died.

I wish I had the space to tell you all the other things he did to the wood. How a friend of his having sold a similar wood on the Thames in building lots at £500 an acre, he put up the whole wood at the same rate. How, the whole wood being 200 acres in extent, he hoped to make £100,000 out of it. How he thought this a tidy sum. How he got no offers at this price, nor at £100, nor at £50. How an artist offered him £20 for half an acre to put up a red tin bungalow upon. How he lost his temper with the artist. How at last he left the whole thing alone and tried to forget all about it.

* * * * *

The old wood to-day is just like what it was when I wandered in it as a boy. The doctor's son is a man now, and is keeping a bar in Sydney; so he is gone. The townspeople don't come any more than before. I am the only person who goes near the place. The trees are a trifle grander. I happen now and then, when I visit this Berkshire parish, upon a stump of a post or an old spike in the grass of this wood, but otherwise it is as though all this had not been.

A solemn thought: How enduring are the works of Nature--how perishable those of Man!

THE CHANNEL

Friends of mine, friends all, and you also, publishers, colonials and critics, do you know that particular experience for which I am trying to find words? Do you know that glamour in the mind which arises and transforms our thought when we see the things that the men who made us saw--the things of a long time ago, the origins? I think everybody knows that glamour, but very few people know where to find it.

Every man knows that he has in him the power for such revelations, and every man wonders in what strange place he may come upon them. There are men also (very rich) who have considered all the world and wandered over it, seeking those first experiences and trying to feel as felt the earlier men in a happier time--yet these few rich men have not felt and have not so found the things which they desire. I have known men who have thought to find them in the mountains, but would not climb them simply enough and refused to leave their luxuries behind, and so lost everything, and might as well have been walking in a dirty town at home for all the little good that the mountains did to them. And I know men who have thought to find this memory and desire in foreign countries, in Africa, hunting great beasts such as our fathers hunted; yet even these have not relit those old embers, which if they lie dead and dark in a man make his whole soul dusty and useless, but which if they be once rekindled can make him part of all the centuries.

Yet there is a simple and an easy way to find what the men who made us found, and to see the world as they saw it, and to take a bath, as it were, in the freshness of beginnings; and that is to go to work as cheaply and as hardly as you can, and only as much away from men as they were away from men, and not to read or to write or to think, but to eat and drink and use the body in many immediate ways, which are at the feet of every man. Every man who will walk for some days carelessly, sleeping, rough when he must, or in poor inns, and making for some one place direct because he desires to see it, will know the thing I mean. And there is a better way still of which I shall now speak: I mean, to try the seas in a little boat not more than twenty-five feet long, preferably decked, of shallow draught, such as can enter into all creeks and havens, and so simply rigged that by oneself, or with a friend at most, one can wander all over the world.

Certainly every man that goes to sea in a little boat of this kind learns terror and salvation, happy living, air, danger, exultation, glory, and repose at the end; and they are not words to him, but, on the contrary, realities which will afterwards throughout his life give the mere words a full meaning. And for this experiment there lies at our feet, I say, the Channel.

It is the most marvellous sea in the world--the most suited for these little adventures; it is crammed with strange towns, differing one from the other; it has two opposite people upon either side, and hills and varying climates, and the hundred shapes and colours of the earth, here rocks, there sand, there cliffs, and there marshy shores. It is a little world. And what is more, it is a kind of inland sea.

People will not understand how narrow it is, crossing it hurriedly in great steamships; nor will they make it a home for pleasure unless they are rich and can have great boats; yet they should, for on its water lies the best stage for playing out the old drama by which the soul of a healthy man is kept alive. For instance, listen to this story:--

The sea being calm, and the wind hot, uncertain, and light from the east, leaving oily gaps on the water, and continually dying down, I drifted one morning in the strong ebb to the South Goodwin Lightship, wondering what to do. There was a haze over the land and over the sea, and through the haze great ships a long way off showed, one or two of them, like oblong targets which one fires at with guns. They hardly moved in spite of all their canvas set, there was so little breeze. So I drifted in the slow ebb past the South Goodwin, and I thought: "What is all this drifting and doing nothing? Let us play the fool, and see if there are no adventures left."

So I put my little boat about until the wind took her from forward, such as it was, and she crawled out to sea.

It was a dull, uneasy morning, hot and silent, and the wind, I say, was hardly a wind, and most of the time the sails flapped uselessly.

But after eleven o'clock the wind first rose, and then shifted a little, and then blew light but steady; and then at last she heeled and the water spoke under her bows, and still she heeled and ran, until in the haze I could see no more land; but ever so far out there were no seas, for the light full breeze was with the tide, the tide ebbing out as a strong, and silent as a man in anger, down the hidden parallel valleys of the narrow sea. And I held this little wind till about two o'clock, when I drank wine and ate bread and meat at the tiller, for I had them by me, and just afterwards, still through a thick haze of heat, I saw Gris-nez, a huge ghost, right up against and above me; and I wondered, for I had crossed the Channel, now for the first time, and knew now what it felt like to see new land.

Though I knew nothing of the place, I had this much sense, that I said to myself: "The tide is right-down Channel, racing through the hidden valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down together and all come up together, and the flood will come on this foreign side much at the same hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay to the east and the ebb tide held her down, and I lit a pipe and looked at the French hills and thought about them and the people in them, and England which I had left behind, and I was delighted with the loneliness of the sea; and still I waited for the flood.

But in a little while the chain made a rattling noise, and she lay quite slack and swung oddly; and then there were little boiling and eddying places in the water, and the water seemed to come up from underneath sometimes, and altogether it behaved very strangely, and this was the turn of the tide. Then the wind dropped also, and for a moment she lollopped about, till at last, after I had gone below and straightened things, I came on deck to see that she had turned completely round, and that the tide at last was making up my way, towards Calais, and her chain was taut and her nose pointed down Channel, and a little westerly breeze, a little draught of air, came up cool along the tide.

When this came I was very glad, for I saw that I could end my adventure before night. So I pulled up the anchor and fished it, and then turned with the tide under me, and the slight half-felt breeze just barely filling the mainsail (the sheet was slack, so powerless was the wind), and I ran up along that high coast, watching eagerly every new thing; but I kept some way out for fear of shoals, till after three good hours under the reclining sun of afternoon, which glorified the mist, I saw, far off, the roofs and spires of a town, and a low pier running well out to sea, and I knew that it must be Calais. And I ran for these piers, careless of how I went, for it was already half of the spring flood tide, and everything was surely well covered for so small a boat, and I ran up the fairway in between the piers, and saw Frenchmen walking about and a great gun peeping up over its earthwork, and plenty of clean new masonry. And a man came along and showed me where I could lie; but I was so strange to the place that I would not take a berth, but lay that night moored to an English ship.

And when I had eaten and drunk and everything was stowed away and darkness had fallen, I went on deck, and for a long time sat silent, smoking a pipe and watching the enormous lighthouse of Calais, which is built right in the town, and which turns round and round above one all night long.

And I thought: "Here is a wonderful thing! I have crossed the Channel in this little boat, and I know now what the sea means that separates France from England. I have strained my eyes for shore through a haze. I have seen new lands, and I feel as men do who have dreamt dreams."

But in reality I had had very great luck indeed, and had had no right to cross, for my coming back was to be far more difficult and dreadful, and I was to suffer many things before again I could see tall England, close by me, out of the sea.

But how I came back, and of the storm, and of its majesty, and of how the boat and I survived, I will tell you another time, only imploring you to do the same; not to tell of it, I mean, but to sail it in a little boat.

THE MOWING OF A FIELD