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A Traveller in Little Things

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A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS

BY

W. H. HUDSON




NOTE


Of the sketches contained in this volume, fourteen have appeared in the
following periodicals: _The New Statesman_, _The Saturday
Review_, _The Nation_, and _The Cornhill Magazine_.




CONTENTS

I. HOW I FOUND MY TITLE
II. THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION
III. AS A TREE FALLS
IV. BLOOD: A STORY OF TWO BROTHERS
V. A STORY OF LONG DESCENT
VI. A SECOND STORY OF TWO BROTHERS
VII. A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS
VIII. THE TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY
IX. DANDY: A STORY OF A DOG
X. THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER
XI. A SURREY VILLAGE
XII. A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE
XIII. HER OWN VILLAGE
XIV. APPLE BLOSSOMS AND A LOST VILLAGE
XV. THE VANISHING CURTSEY
XVI. LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET
XVII. MILLICENT AND ANOTHER
XVIII. FRECKLES
XIX. ON CROMER BEACH
XX. DIMPLES
XXI. WILD FLOWERS AND LITTLE GIRLS
XXII. A LITTLE GIRL LOST
XXIII. A SPRAY OF SOUTHERNWOOD
XXIV. IN PORCHESTER CHURCHYARD
XXV. HOMELESS
XXVI. THE STORY OF A SKULL
XXVII. A STORY OF A WALNUT
XXVIII. A STORY OF A JACKDAW
XXIX. A WONDERFUL STORY OF A MACKEREL
XXX. STRANGERS YET
XXXI. THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF
XXXII. A WASP AT TABLE
XXXIII. WASPS AND MEN
XXXIV. IN CHITTERNE CHURCHYARD
XXXV. A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS
XXXVI. THE DEAD AND THE LIVING
XXXVII. A STORY OF THREE POEMS




A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS


I

HOW I FOUND MY TITLE


It is surely a rare experience for an unclassified man, past middle
age, to hear himself accurately and aptly described for the first time
in his life by a perfect stranger! This thing happened to me at
Bristol, some time ago, in the way I am about to relate. I slept at a
Commercial Hotel, and early next morning was joined in the big empty
coffee-room, smelling of stale tobacco, by an intensely respectable-
looking old gentleman, whose hair was of silvery whiteness, and who
wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a heavy gold watch-chain with many
seals attached thereto; whose linen was of the finest, and whose outer
garments, including the trousers, were of the newest and blackest
broadcloth. A glossier and at the same time a more venerable-looking
"commercial" I had never seen in the west country, nor anywhere in the
three kingdoms. He could not have improved his appearance if he had
been on his way to attend the funeral of a millionaire. But with all
his superior look he was quite affable, and talked fluently and
instructively on a variety of themes, including trade, politics, and
religion. Perceiving that he had taken me for what I was not--one of
the army in which he served, but of inferior rank--I listened
respectfully as became me. Finally he led the talk to the subject of
agriculture, and the condition and prospects of farming in England.
Here I perceived that he was on wholly unfamiliar ground, and in return
for the valuable information he had given me on other and more
important subjects, I proceeded to enlighten him. When I had finished
stating my facts and views, he said: "I perceive that you know a great
deal more about the matter than I do, and I will now tell you why you
know more. You are a traveller in little things--in something very
small--which takes you into the villages and hamlets, where you meet
and converse with small farmers, innkeepers, labourers and their wives,
with other persons who live on the land. In this way you get to hear a
good deal about rent and cost of living, and what the people are able
and not able to do. Now I am out of all that; I never go to a village
nor see a farmer. I am a traveller in something very large. In the
south and west I visit towns like Salisbury, Exeter, Bristol,
Southampton; then I go to the big towns in the Midlands and the North,
and to Glasgow and Edinburgh; and afterwards to Belfast and Dublin. It
would simply be a waste of time for me to visit a town of less than
fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants."

He then gave me some particulars concerning the large thing he
travelled in; and when I had expressed all the interest and admiration
the subject called for, he condescendingly invited me to tell him
something about my own small line.

Now this was wrong of him; it was a distinct contravention of an
unwritten law among "Commercials" that no person must be interrogated
concerning the nature of his business. The big and the little man, once
inside the hostel, which is their club as well, are on an equality. I
did not remind my questioner of this--I merely smiled and said nothing,
and he of course understood and respected my reticence. With a pleasant
nod and a condescending let-us-say-no-more-about-it wave of the hand he
passed on to other matters.

Notwithstanding that I was amused at his mistake, the label he had
supplied me with was something to be grateful for, and I am now finding
a use for it. And I think that if he, my labeller, should see this
sketch by chance and recognise himself in it, he will say with his
pleasant smile and wave of the hand, "Oh, that's his line! Yes, yes, I
described him rightly enough, thinking it haberdashery or floral texts
for cottage bedrooms, or something of that kind; I didn't imagine he
was a traveller in anything quite so small as this."




II

THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION


We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle
years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't
know and didn't believe. The process is too gradual to trouble us; we
can only say, at fifty or sixty or seventy, that it is doubtless the
case that we can't see as far or as well, or hear or smell as sharply,
as we did a decade ago, but that we don't notice the difference. Lately
I met an extreme case, that of a man well past seventy who did not
appear to know that his senses had faded at all. He noticed that the
world was not what it had been to him, as it had appeared, for example,
when he was a plough-boy, the time of his life he remembered most
vividly, but it was not the fault of his senses; the mirror was all
right, it was the world that had grown dim. I found him at the gate
where I was accustomed to go of an evening to watch the sun set over
the sea of yellow corn and the high green elms beyond, which divide the
cornfields from the Maidenhead Thicket. An old agricultural labourer,
he had a grey face and grey hair and throat-beard; he stooped a good
deal, and struck me as being very feeble and long past work. But he
told me that he still did some work in the fields. The older farmers
who had employed him for many years past gave him a little to do; he
also had his old-age pension, and his children helped to keep him in
comfort. He was quite well off, he said, compared to many. There was a
subdued and sombre cheerfulness in him, and when I questioned him about
his early life, he talked very freely in his slow old peasant way. He
was born in a village in the Vale of Aylesbury, and began work as a
ploughboy on a very big farm. He had a good master and was well fed,
the food being bacon, vegetables, and homemade bread, also suet pudding
three times a week. But what he remembered best was a rice pudding
which came by chance in his way during his first year on the farm.
There was some of the pudding left in a dish after the family had
dined, and the farmer said to his wife, "Give it to the boy"; so he had
it, and never tasted anything so nice in all his life. How he enjoyed
that pudding! He remembered it now as if it had been yesterday, though
it was sixty-five years ago.

He then went on to talk of the changes that had been going on in the
world since that happy time; but the greatest change of all was in the
appearance of things. He had had a hard life, and the hardest time was
when he was a ploughboy and had to work so hard that he was tired to
death at the end of every day; yet at four o'clock in the morning he
was ready and glad to get up and go out to work all day again because
everything looked so bright, and it made him happy just to look up at
the sky and listen to the birds. In those days there were larks. The
number of larks was wonderful; the sound of their singing filled the
whole air. He didn't want any greater happiness than to hear them
singing over his head. A few days ago, not more than half a mile from
where we were standing, he was crossing a field when a lark got up
singing near him and went singing over his head. He stopped to listen
and said to himself, "Well now, that do remind me of old times!"

"For you know," he went on, "it is a rare thing to hear a lark now.
What's become of all the birds I used to see I don't know. I remember
there was a very pretty bird at that time called the yellow-hammer--a
bird all a shining yellow, the prettiest of all the birds." He never
saw nor heard that bird now, he assured me.

That was how the old man talked, and I never told him that yellow
hammers could be seen and heard all day long anywhere on the common
beyond the green wall of the elms, and that a lark was singing loudly
high up over our heads while he was talking of the larks he had
listened to sixty-five years ago in the Vale of Aylesbury, and saying
that it was a rare thing to hear that bird now.




III

AS A TREE FALLS


At the Green Dragon, where I refreshed myself at noon with bread and
cheese and beer, I was startlingly reminded of a simple and, I suppose,
familiar psychological fact, yet one which we are never conscious of
except at rare moments when by chance it is thrust upon us.

There are many Green Dragons in this world of wayside inns, even as
there are many White Harts, Red Lions, Silent Women and other
incredible things; but when I add that my inn is in a Wiltshire
village, the headquarters of certain gentlemen who follow a form of
sport which has long been practically obsolete in this country, and
indeed throughout the civilised world, some of my readers will have no
difficulty in identifying it.

After lunching I had an hour's pleasant conversation with the genial
landlord and his buxom good-looking wife; they were both natives of a
New Forest village and glad to talk about it with one who knew it
intimately. During our talk I happened to use the words--I forget what
about--"As a tree falls so must it lie." The landlady turned on me her
dark Hampshire eyes with a sudden startled and pained look in them, and
cried: "Oh, please don't say that!'

"Why not?" I asked. "It is in the Bible, and a quite common saying."

"I know," she returned, "but I can't bear it--I hate to hear it!"

She would say no more, but my curiosity was stirred, and I set about
persuading her to tell me. "Ah, yes," I said, "I can guess why. It's
something in your past life--a sad story of one of your family--one
very much loved perhaps--who got into trouble and was refused all help
from those who might have saved him."

"No," she said, "it all happened before my time--long before. I never
knew her." And then presently she told me the story.

When her father was a young man he lived and worked with his father, a
farmer in Hampshire and a widower. There were several brothers and
sisters, and one of the sisters, named Eunice, was most loved by all of
them and was her father's favourite on account of her beauty and sweet
disposition. Unfortunately she became engaged to a young man who was
not liked by the father, and when she refused to break her engagement
to please him he was dreadfully angry and told her that if she went
against him and threw herself away on that worthless fellow he would
forbid her the house and would never see or speak to her again.

Being of an affectionate disposition and fond of her father it grieved
her sorely to disobey him, but her love compelled her, and by-and-by
she went away and was married in a neighbouring village where her lover
had his home. It was not a happy marriage, and after a few anxious
years she fell into a wasting illness, and when it became known to her
that she was near her end she sent a message by a brother to the old
father to come and see her before she died. She had never ceased to
love him, and her one insistent desire was to receive his forgiveness
and blessing before finishing her life. His answer was, "As a tree
falls so shall it lie." He would not go near her. Shortly afterwards
the unhappy young wife passed away.

The landlady added that the brother who had taken the message was her
father, that he was now eighty-two years old and still spoke of his
long dead and greatly loved sister, and always said he had never
forgiven and would never forgive his father, dead half a century ago,
for having refused to go to his dying daughter and for speaking those
cruel words.




IV

"BLOOD"

A STORY OF TWO BROTHERS


A certain titled lady, great in the social world, was walking down the
village street between two ladies of the village, and their
conversation was about some person known to the two who had behaved in
the noblest manner in difficult circumstances, and the talk ran on
between the two like a duet, the great lady mostly silent and paying
but little attention to it. At length the subject was exhausted, and as
a proper conclusion to round the discourse off, one of them remarked:
"It is what I have always said,--there's nothing like blood!" Whereupon
the great person returned, "I don't agree with you: it strikes me you
two are always praising blood, and I think it perfectly horrid. The
very sight of a black pudding for instance turns me sick and makes me
want to be a vegetarian."

The others smiled and laboriously explained that they were not praising
blood as an article of diet, but had used the word in its other and
partly metamorphical sense. They simply meant that as a rule persons of
good blood or of old families had better qualities and a higher
standard of conduct and action than others.

The other listened and said nothing, for although of good blood herself
she was an out-and-out democrat, a burning Radical, burning bright in
the forests of the night of dark old England, and she considered that
all these lofty notions about old families and higher standards were
confined to those who knew little or nothing about the life of the
upper classes.

She, the aristocrat, was wrong, and the two village ladies, members of
the middle class, were right, although they were without a sense of
humour and did not know that their distinguished friend was poking a
little fun at them when she spoke about black puddings.

They were right, and it was never necessary for Herbert Spencer to tell
us that the world is right in looking for nobler motives and ideals, a
higher standard of conduct, better, sweeter manners, from those who are
highly placed than from the ruck of men; and as this higher, better
life, which is only possible in the leisured classes, is correlated
with the "aspects which please," the regular features and personal
beauty, the conclusion is the beauty and goodness or "inward
perfections" are correlated.

All this is common, universal knowledge: to all men of all races and in
all parts of the world it comes as a shock to hear that a person of a
noble countenance has been guilty of an ignoble action. It is only the
ugly (and bad) who fondly cherish the delusion that beauty doesn't
matter, that it is only skin-deep and the rest of it.

Here now arises a curious question, the subject of this little paper.
When a good old family, of good character, falls on evil days and is
eventually submerged in the classes beneath, we know that the aspects
which please, the good features and expression, will often persist for
long generations. Now this submerging process is perpetually going on
all over the land and so it has been for centuries. We notice from year
to year the rise from the ranks of numberless men to the highest
positions, who are our leaders and legislators, owners of great estates
who found great families and receive titles. But we do not notice the
corresponding decline and final disappearance of those who were highly
placed, since this is a more gradual process and has nothing
sensational about it. Yet the two processes are equally great and far-
reaching in their effects, and are like those two of Elaboration and
Degeneration which go on side by side for ever in nature, in the animal
world; and like darkness and light and heat and cold in the physical
world.

As a fact, the country is full of the descendants of families that have
"died out." How long it takes to blot out or blur the finer features
and expression we do not know, and the time probably varies according
to the length of the period during which the family existed in its
higher phase. The question which confronts us is: Does the higher or
better nature, the "inward perfections" which are correlated with the
aspects which please, endure too, or do those who fall from their own
class degenerate morally to the level of the people they live and are
one with?

It is a nice question. In Sussex, with Mr. M. A. Lower, who has written
about the vanished or submerged families of that county, for my guide
as to names, I have sought out persons of a very humble condition, some
who were shepherds and agricultural labourers, and have been surprised
at the good faces of many of them, the fine, even noble, features and
expression, and with these an exceptionally fine character. Labourers
on the lands that were once owned by their forefathers, and children of
long generations of labourers, yet still exhibiting the marks of their
aristocratic descent, the fine features and expression and the fine
moral qualities with which they are correlated.

I will now give in illustration an old South American experience, an
example, which deeply impressed me at the time, of the sharp contrast
between a remote descendant of aristocrats and a child of the people in
a country where class distinctions have long ceased to exist.

It happened that I went to stay at a cattle ranch for two or three
months one summer, in a part of the country new to me, where I knew
scarcely anyone. It was a good spot for my purpose, which was bird
study, and this wholly occupied my mind. By-and-by I heard about two
brothers, aged respectively twenty-three and twenty-four years, who
lived in the neighbourhood on a cattle ranch inherited from their
father, who had died young. They had no relations and were the last of
their name in that part of the country, and their grazing land was but
a remnant of the estate as it had been a century before. The name of
the brothers first attracted my attention, for it was that of an old
highly-distinguished family of Spain, two or three of whose adventurous
sons had gone to South America early in the seventeenth century to seek
their fortunes, and had settled there. The real name need not be
stated: I will call it de la Rosa, which will serve as well as another.
Knowing something of the ancient history of the family I became curious
to meet the brothers, just to see what sort of men they were who had
blue blood and yet lived, as their forbears had done for generations,
in the rough primitive manner of the gauchos--the cattle-tending
horsemen of the pampas. A little later I met the younger brother at a
house in the village a few miles from the ranch I was staying at. His
name was Cyril; the elder was Ambrose. He was certainly a very fine
fellow in appearance, tall and strongly built, with a high colour on
his open genial countenance and a smile always playing about the
corners of his rather large sensual mouth and in his greenish-hazel
eyes; but of the noble ancestry there was no faintest trace. His
features were those of the unameliorated peasant, as he may be seen in
any European country, and in this country, in Ireland particularly, but
with us he is not so common. It would seem that in England there is a
larger mixture of better blood, or that the improvements in features
due to improved conditions, physical and moral, have gone further. At
all events, one may look at a crowd anywhere in England and see only a
face here and there of the unmodified plebeian type. In a very large
majority the forehead will be less low and narrow, the nose less coarse
with less wide-spreading alae, the depression in the bridge not so
deep, the mouth not so large nor the jowl so heavy. These marks of the
unimproved adult are present in all infants at birth. Lady Clara Vere
de Vere's little bantling is in a sense not hers at all but the child
of some ugly antique race; of a Palaeolithic mother, let us say, who
lived before the last Glacial epoch and was not very much better-
looking herself than an orang-utan. It is only when the bony and
cartilaginous framework, with the muscular covering of the face,
becomes modified, and the wrinkled brown visage of the ancient pigmy
grows white and smooth, that it can be recognised as Lady Clara's own
offspring. The infant is ugly, and where the infantile features survive
in the adult the man is and must be ugly too, _unless the expression
is good_. Thus, we may know numbers of persons who would certainly
be ugly but for the redeeming expression; and this good expression,
which is "feature in the making," is, like good features, an "outward
sign of inward perfections."

To continue with the description of my young gentleman of blue blood
and plebeian countenance, his expression not only saved him from
ugliness but made him singularly attractive, it revealed a good nature,
friendliness, love of his fellows, sincerity, and other pleasing
qualities. After meeting and conversing with him I was not surprised to
hear that he was universally liked, but regarding him critically I
could not say that his manner was perfect. He was too self-conscious,
too anxious to shine, too vain of his personal appearance, of his wit,
his rich dress, his position as a de la Rosa and a landowner. There was
even a vulgarity in him, such as one looks for in a person risen from
the lower orders but does not expect in the descendant of an ancient
and once lustrous family, however much decayed and impoverished, or
submerged.

Shortly afterwards a gossipy old native estanciero, who lived close by,
while sitting in our kitchen sipping maté, began talking freely about
his neighbour's lives and characters, and I told him I had felt
interested in the brothers de la Rosa; partly on account of the great
affection these two had for one another, which was like an ideal
friendship; and in part too on account of the ancient history of the
family they came from. I had met one of them, I told him,--Cyril--a
very fine fellow, but in some respects he was not exactly like my
preconceived idea of a de la Rosa.

"No, and he isn't one!" shouted the old fellow, with a great laugh; and
more than delighted at having a subject presented to him and at his
capture of a fresh listener, he proceeded to give me an intimate
history of the brothers.

The father, who was a fine and a lovable man, married early, and his
young wife died in giving birth to their only child--Ambrose. He did
not marry again: he was exceedingly fond of his child and was both
father and mother to it and kept it with him until the boy was about
nine years old, and then determined to send him to Buenos Ayres to give
him a year's schooling. He himself had been taught to read as a small
boy, also to write a letter, but he did not think himself equal to
teach the boy, and so for a time they would have to be separated.

Meanwhile the boy had picked up with Cyril, a little waif in rags, the
bastard child of a woman who had gone away and left him in infancy to
the mercy of others. He had been reared in the hovel of a poor gaucho
on the de la Rosa land, but the poor orphan, although the dirtiest,
raggedest, most mischievous little beggar in the land, was an
attractive child, intelligent, full of fun, and of an adventurous
spirit. Half his days were spent miles from home, wading through the
vast reedy and rushy marshes in the neighbourhood, hunting for birds'
nests. Little Ambrose, with no child companion at home, where his life
had been made too soft for him, was exceedingly happy with his wild
companion, and they were often absent together in the marshes for a
whole day, to the great anxiety of the father. But he could not
separate them, because he could not endure to see the misery of his boy
when they were forcibly kept apart. Nor could he forbid his child from
heaping gifts in food and clothes and toys or whatever he had, on his
little playmate. Nor did the trouble cease when the time came now for
the boy to be sent from home to learn his letters: his grief at the
prospect of being separated from his companion was too much for the
father, and he eventually sent them together to the city, where they
spent a year or two and came back as devoted to one another as when
they went away. From that time Cyril lived with them, and eventually de
la Rosa adopted him, and to make his son happy he left all he possessed
to be equally divided at his death between them. He was in bad health,
and died when Ambrose was fifteen and Cyril fourteen; from that time
they were their own masters and refused to have any division of their
inheritance but continued to live together; and had so continued for
upwards of ten years.

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