Windfalls

UNDER THE SYCAMORE

An odd question was put to me the other day which I think I may venture to pass on to a wider circle. It was this: What is the best dish that life has set before you? At first blush it seems an easy question to answer. It was answered gaily enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked what was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “The best thing that ever happened to me was to be born,” he replied. But that is not an answer: it is an evasion. It belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether life is worth living. Life may be worth living or not worth living on balance, but in either case we can still say what was the thing in it that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a dinner on the whole and yet make an exception of the trout, or the braised ham and spinach or the dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and still admit that he has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift and many more, have cursed the day you were born and still remember many pleasant things that have happened to you – falling in love, making friends, climbing mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs, watching the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You may write off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush outside. It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very sad heart who has never had anything to thank his stars for.

But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it grows difficult on reflection.

In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree – sycamore or chestnut for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because their generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade – to sit, I say, and think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball which the Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven near by, sees “spinning like a midge” below.

And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and asked us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play to which we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped away so quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we should make now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will be there) will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer. That glorious contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool million – come now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair to remember your journey by. You will have to think of something better than that as the splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to confess to a very complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser pleasures seemed so important, you will not like to admit, even to yourself, that your most rapturous memory of earth centres round the grillroom at the Savoy. You will probably find that the things best worth remembering are the things you rejected.

I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose pleasures were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of life, after all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers in money, and traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those occupations to hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon under that sycamore tree – which of them, now that it is all over, will have most joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one and a gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the earth as a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the mountains, and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and where season followed season with a processional glory that never grew dim. And Mozart will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and Turner as a panorama of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect, with what delight they will look back on the great moments of life – Columbus seeing the new world dawning on his vision, Copernicus feeling the sublime architecture of the universe taking shape in his mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal mystery of the human frame, Darwin thrilling with the birth pangs of the immense secret that he wrung from Nature. These men will be able to answer the question grandly. The banquet they had on earth will bear talking about even in Heaven.

But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will, I fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we won the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or shook hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our name in the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament. It will be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human comradeship we had on the journey – the friendships of the spirit, whether made in the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or art. We shall remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its affections —

For gauds that perished, shows that passed,

The fates some recompense have sent —

Thrice blessed are the things that last,

The things that are more excellent.

ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE

I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I remembered Walker of

The Daily News

. No, said I, he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the ‘seventies.

“Before that,” said the old gentleman. “Must have been in the ‘sixties.”

“Probably,” I said. “Did you know him in the ‘sixties?”

“Oh, I knew him before then,” said the old gentleman, warming to his subject. “I knew him in the ‘forties.”

I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.

“Heavens!” said I, “the ‘forties!”

“No,” said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better view across the ages. “No… It must have been in the ‘thirties… Yes, it was in the ‘thirties. We were boys at school together in the ‘thirties. We called him Sawney Walker.”

I fell back another step. The old gentleman’s triumph was complete. I had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him – the compliment of astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.

His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked “well set” for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean Inge’s depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time – and it may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood – and he will go far.

But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries “keeping up” with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. “So you’ve got your new boots on, Mary?” she said. “Yes,” said little Mary grandly. “Don’t they squeak beautiful, mum.” And though, as we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. “What for should I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?” said the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of yourself.

And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are like the old maltster in “Far from the Madding Crowd,” when Henery Fray claimed to be “a strange old piece, goodmen.”

“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster in a querulous voice. “Ye be no old man worth naming – no old man at all. Yer teeth bain’t half gone yet; and what’s a old man’s standing if so be his teeth bain’t gone? Weren’t I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? ’Tis a poor thing to be sixty when there’s people far past fourscore – a boast weak as water.”

It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences when the maltster had to be pacified.

“Weak as water, yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”

“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter, and we all respect ye for that gift.”

That’s it. When we haven’t anything else to boast about we glory in being “a very rare old spectacle.” We count the reigns we’ve lived in and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote his “De Senectute,” exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the ‘seventies to those who can remember, say, only the ‘nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about the ‘thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of “W. G.” and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity we are soothed to sleep.

ON SIGHTING LAND

I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. “I offer you a draw,” I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that. “Accepted,” he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was “Land in sight!” And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.

For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious when he said he was “disappointed with the Atlantic.” But now I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception of the sea because “we have in us the glance of the universe.” But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.

The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have “a drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.” You conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs over the sides.

For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.

But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense – in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations – sewermen, lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on – I shall henceforth include ships’ stewards on ocean routes. To spend one’s life in being shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray’s Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, “Land in sight!”

It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and however familiar it may be.

The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example. Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively, comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination. Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal little company of the

Mayflower

 caught sight of the land where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land of hope and promise. It would be