Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett

Why it was that my great-grandfather left the village in Somerset in and on which his forefathers, I believe, had lived from the time of Domesday, why he forsook agriculture and cider for the law, married in Shoreditch, settled in Fetter Lane, went back to Somerset to bury his first child, and returned to London to beget my grandfather, be ultimately responsible for me, and break finally with his family cradle, I never understood until the other day when, in good company, I took the road, left the bare hills--how softly contoured, how familiar, and how dear--of South Wilts, topped the great rock on which Shaftesbury lifts, dived down into Blackmore Vale, and so entered my county of origin at its nearest point, namely Wincanton (where I saw, by the by, a palæolithic man alive and walking the world)--to find myself in a land of corn and wine and oil, or so it seemed, such a land as those who love deep loam, handsome women, fine manners and a glut of apples more than most things in this life (and there are few things better), would never leave if they could help it. That is a long sentence with which to begin an essay, but it expresses what I did, and very much how I did it.

In a word, I left Broadchalke and drove to Yeovil, within ten miles of which thriving town the family to which I belong itself throve and cultivated its virtues, if any. My great-grandfather and I were not acquainted; but I remember my grandfather perfectly well, and can testify that he had virtues. He was on the tall side of the mean height, a deep-chested, large-headed old man, with hair snowy white, a rosy face, and cool, extremely honest blue eyes. He was hasty in his movements (and in his temper), trundled about rather than walked. I used to think as a boy that it could not be wholesome, and must be most inconvenient, to have such clean hands, such dazzling linen, and such polished pink filberts instead of finger-nails. I never saw him otherwise dressed than in black broadcloth, with shoes polished like looking-glasses, and a shirt-collar just so starched that it stood up enclosing his chin, yet so little that it took on the contours of his cheeks where they pressed it. He had a deep voice, with a cheer in it. I remember--for he had little else to say to me--how he used to put his hand on my head and murmur, as if to himself, “My boy, my boy,” in such a way that I felt in leaving him, as perhaps Jacob did with Isaac, that it would be impossible ever to do anything wrong again and betray such a noble affection. One other thing struck me, even then, young and ungracious as I was, and that was his extraordinarily fine manners. Since then, whenever I have considered manners, I have compared them with his. He is for me the staple of courtesy. They were the manners which bring a man more than half-way to meet you. He used them to all the world: to me, to the servants, to the crossing-sweeper, to the clerks from his office who used to come for papers when he was too old to go into London. I know now where he got them. They were traditional West Country manners; and sure enough when I walked the village street where, if my grandfather never walked, my great-grandfather did, the first man of whom I asked information met me with just the same forwardness of service, and seemed to know tentacularly what precisely lay behind the question which I put him. I had always been proud of my grandfather; now I was proud of my county. For if manners don’t make a man, they make a gentleman.

Let me call the village Bindon St. Blaise, to give myself freedom to say that I don’t remember to have seen one more beautiful than it looked on that sunny autumn day, drowsing, winking in the heat of noon. The houses are of stone--and that stone saturated, as it seemed, in centuries of sunlight. Yes, I have seen Bibury in Gloucestershire, and Broadway in Worcestershire, Alfriston in Sussex, and Teffont in Wilts; and Clovelly, and Boscastle, and Ponteland, and many another haunt of peace; but never yet a place of grey and gold so established, so decent in age, so recollected, so dignified as Bindon St. Blaise, which my great-grandfather unwillingly, I am sure, forsook in 1780 or thereabouts. Nobody could tell me which of its many fair houses he had forsworn. The fancy could play with them at large. There was a long-roofed farm with gables many and deep, with two rows of mullioned, diamonded windows, each with its perfect dripstone, which I should like to think was once ours, except that it faces north, and therefore has gathered more moss than we should care about now. Perhaps it was ours, and he left it, seeking the sun. But would he have gone to look for it in Fetter Lane? No, no. I incline, however, to a smaller house facing full south, with a walled garden full of apple trees, and a pear tree reaching to the chimney stack, and a portico--whereover a room looking straight into the eye of the sun. There was a radiant eighteenth-century house for a man to have been born in! Could I have brought myself to leave such a nest? Well, we shall see.

After luncheon at the Boulter Arms (let us call it), and an indication where we should find “the Great House,” we went instead to see the house of God, which lay on our road to it, almost within its park. Like all that I have seen in Somerset, it is a spacious, well-ordered church, mainly perpendicular, with the square tower and lace-worked windows which belong to the type. The churchyard was beautifully kept, planted with roses and Irish yews: the graves were in good order, numerous, and so eminently respectable that, at first blush, it seemed as if we had stepped into the Peerage; for if we were not trenching upon a lord’s remains, it was upon those of one who had had to do with a lord. Research was encumbered by this overgrowth of dignities: the great family, like its Great House, overshadowed the Valley of Dry Bones; and plain men, who in life perhaps had been parasites perforce, in death were sprawled upon by their masters. Hannah Goodbody, for instance, “for forty years in the service of the Right Hon. John Charles Ferdinand, sixth Earl Boulter, Viscount and Baron Boulter of Bindon St. Blaise”--had she not earned quietus, and need all that be remembered against her? Percival Slade, “for twenty years Groom of the Chambers to Ferdinand Charles John, seventh Earl”; Matilda Swinton, housekeeper; Peter Wain, gamekeeper; Thomas Duffey, storekeeper--I began to see what had been the matter with my great-grandfather.

Inside, the church revealed itself as a family vault so encumbered with the dead that the living must have been incommoded. In the midst of life they were in death indeed. Earls in effigy slept (like Priam’s sons in the Iliad) beside their chaste wives--flat in brasses, worn smooth in basalt, glaringly in plaster, as might be. A side-chapel was so full of them that the altar was crowded out: and why not? They were altar and sacrifice and deity in one. They spilled over on to the floor, splayed out on the walls in tablets as massy as houseleeks; and on the bosses of the vaulted roof one found the Boulter arms implanted in the heart of the Mystic Rose. O too much Boulter--but we were not shut of them yet. Discreetly curtained off was a Holy of Holies where the shining ones who survived worshipped their ancestors; a noble apartment, a withdrawing room, with a stove, a couple of sofas, some club-chairs, and a deeply padded elbow cushion. Magazines, an ash-tray, a match-stand--one missed them. There is, no doubt, a comic side to all this. “J’ai trente mille livres de rente, et cependant je meurs!” said the Abbé de Bonport. The same amazement might come upon an entrenched Earl Boulter at any minute in the midst of his cushioned ease. Neither coat-armour nor a private stove will ward off the mortal chills. However, I forgive them their quality, but not their oppression of other people’s tombstones.

For we too were oppressed, and not diverted. We were seeking our ancestors, but they were not here. They had fled to Fetter Lane, and I cannot blame them. The doubt about my great-grandfather is solved. He left the village of Bindon St. Blaise because he saw no other way of escape from an Earl on his tomb. He married, his wife bore him a son, which died young. Moved then by piety, he brought down the innocent to be buried, secure that upon that unknown life no great name could intrude. I should have done the same thing, I believe.

“AND NOW, O LORD ...”

“And now, O Lord, permit me to relate to Thee an anecdote”: that was how a minister, labouring with a good story, introduced it into the midst of his extemporary prayer. I ask to be excused a better exordium, if better there be.

Heaven knows what reminded me of it, but a friend of mine had an interesting experience at Hyde Park Corner one day. He had been riding in the Row, and was returning leisurely to Whitehall and official cares somewhere about eleven in the forenoon. At the gates of entry and issue he was held up in common with the traffic of east and west, which at that hour was almost at the flood. Omnibuses throbbed and simmered, dray-horses chafed at their bits, motors and taxis all stood obedient, bicyclists clung to whatever stays they could come by: in the midst two staunch policemen stood with their arms at danger. All that mighty heart was lying still, and there was a lane of emptiness, as if for royalty, from Constitution Hill. Along that presently there paddled a wild duck and her chicks in single file, the mother leading; all necks on the stretch, all eyes wide, all beak a-twitter. Everybody was interested, but nobody laughed, so far as he could see. I would have given much to be there. We are a pretty degraded race, no doubt, yet we have instincts left us which, at our best, betray us for what we were intended to be. I myself, such as I am, once caused a motor to be stopped while a stoat and her family crossed the Blandford Road, and we have a tradition that my father once reined up a phaeton to allow a woolly bear to get safely over. I daresay he did: such things are inherited. I mention them in no spirit of boasting, but rather to show that Londoners, who seem to us here so machine-made, are of the same clay as the children of light.

You may see queer things in London still, though they are rarer than they used to be. Nature persists in spite of the electrification of most things. I saw a battle in the upper air between a crow and a heron one morning early, in Hyde Park. Heaven knows from what regions fair and far they were come--but there they were at it, hammer and tongs. I watched them for a quarter of an hour. The heron got home once, but not a true blow. It glanced off the skull, and the black shuddered and avoided. It was inconceivable how quick the blow was, a very lightning flash; yet the crow swerved in time, and swopped off sideways. The baffled heron turned heavily and gave no chase. More persistent, and with death in it, was a duel watched by a man I knew from a Foreign Office window, between a swan and a pelican. The broadsword there had no chance against the longer reach. The end must have been terrific, for the swan took his enemy by the neck and held his head under water until the battling of his huge wings ceased to churn it into foam, until the great creature itself became like a lump of white froth. Then, said my friend, the swan lifted his own wings until they met above his back, threw his head up and back to rest upon them, and oared away towards the bridge. I would have given a good deal to see that also, perhaps six hours a day at the Foreign Office. There’s no end to the tale of things you can see in London. Why, a lady in whom I have every reason to believe came in to lunch one day saying that she had just seen a hansom drive down Victoria Street with an eagle standing on the horse’s back, balancing himself on outspread wings. What was one to say, except wish that one had been as lucky?