Why we should read Part 14

"You ought to have kept your daughter safe at home, Bellwood. Why, good gracious, a dog-fancier could have taught you better wisdom in the matter than you seem to have shown."

Meanwhile Fondie hears and fells a man who jests about Blanche's delinquency.

"There are those who affirm that Fondie grew into a man from this hour."

Leonard D'Alroy doesn't answer Blanche's letters and her last hope is wrested from her. She meets Fondie, who tells her at last what he has always felt for her:

"I've never had but one feeling for you, miss, since day I was old enough to have any. You know now what that feeling is, without one having to name it, in case it isn't to your approval.... I should be prouder wi' you, Miss Blanche--than any other man in England is wi' all pride he can muster."

But she won't let him make that great sacrifice for her: she goes off and drowns herself.

"Who knows, Blanche, save you whose icy lips retain the secret safely locked behind them--who knows but that Destiny led you well and wisely, and that her cruel hand was kindest after all? For now you can never grow old: age can haunt you with no terrors.... Death? Upon your pillow you have lain dead and dreamless many an hour: by the sedgy margin of the muddy pond itself, often on summer afternoons have you laid your face upon your arms, turned from the unbearable brightness of the sun and sky, and tasted a few brief minutes of irresistible, sweet death.

And of the darkness never were you yet afraid.... G.o.d's hand, be sure, is gentler than a child's: there is no thunder on G.o.d's lips, nor dreadful lightnings in His eyes. If Fondie were G.o.d you would not fear him. Fear G.o.d, then, less, nor think G.o.d's infinite mercy will suffer to be put to shame by the finite compa.s.sion of a wheelwright's son."

And we leave Fondie as ever thinking upon whatsoever things are true, honest, just, lovely and of good report. Fondie has a soul for his inheritance, a soul that was swiftly, wholesomely alive.

Mr Booth has written other books than these two, but they represent him at his best in the vein of rich comedy and in the vein of real tragedy.

That they are worth reading ought to be obvious even from the extracts alone that I have quoted ... they leave one with a feeling that here is a rare artist with a finely developed sympathy and sensitive soul, capable of appreciating and loving all manner of men, sunny-tempered, magnanimous, one who glorifies all such things as are of good report. We read Mr Booth because he makes us love him, and not all authors, not all good authors even, are lovable.

IX

FORD MADOX HUEFFER

We read Mr F. M. Hueffer's work because it shows a versatility that is quite out of the common in modern authors.

He is successful with _vers libre_ (which is decidedly uncommon) and even with rhymed _vers libre_ (which is more uncommon still).

"_Vers libre_," he says, "is the only medium in which I can convey more intimate moods. _Vers libre_ is a very jolly medium in which to write and to read, if it be read conversationally and quietly."

"What is love of one's land?...

I don't know very well.

It is something that sleeps For a year--for a day-- For a month--something that keeps Very hidden and quiet and still And then takes The quiet heart like a wave, The quiet brain like a spell, The quiet will Like a tornado; and that shakes The whole of the soul."

His poem _On Heaven_, which he afterwards wished to suppress as being "too sloppy," contains these lines:

"Nor does G.o.d need to be a very great magician To give to each man after his heart, Who knows very well what each man has in his heart: To let you pa.s.s your life in a night-club where they dance, If that is your idea of Heaven: if you will, in the South of France; If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night; Where you will, how you will; Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall: He would be a very little G.o.d if He could not do all this, And he is still The great G.o.d of all."

But it is not as a poet, a taste of whose quality I have just given you, that he would be judged.

It is as the novelist who wrote two of the most interesting novels of our time, _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ and _The Good Soldier_.

The former is the best historical romance that I have ever read.

Mr Sorrell, a mining engineer who had taken up publis.h.i.+ng, is travelling up from Plymouth to London when the train goes off the line and he wakes up to find himself living in the fourteenth century possessed of a twentieth-century brain and filled with twentieth-century ideas. He is in possession of a sacred talisman which all the people he meets want to deprive him of: incidentally the fact that he has it causes everyone to treat him with great respect.

With every regard for detail even to language Mr Hueffer builds up a picture for us of life in 1326 in a Hamps.h.i.+re castle:

"A great many sounds of trumpets came from the castle below to proclaim that supper was about to be set on the boards. The sun was just down below the hills, for at that harvest time of the year, when all men and women were wont to be in the fields helping to get in the oat crop and the last of the hay, supper, which was usually at four, was not partaken of till after sunset.

"It was not really dark, but blue shadows had fallen over the long valley of the Wiley, mists were arising amongst the heavy foliage of the trees. The castle of Tamworth, farther down the valley, showed enormous and purple, as if it blocked up all the pa.s.sage way, and the houses of the little town of Wishford, which was beyond the bridge, being visible from that high place, showed their white mud sides all pink in the light reflected from the sky. From the top of the Portmanmote Hall, the gilded effigy of the Dragon of Wiley turned slowly in the capricious air of the evening, sending forth now a stream of light, and again being obscured.

The cavalcade of the Lady Dionissia had reached the foot of the green knoll, and her trumpeter blew a turn of notes to demand admission to the castle of Coucy."

We are given every detail of the lives of these mediaeval people right down to the odours that pervaded the court.

We see Mr Sorrell sitting down to a first course at dinner of fourteen dishes, eating a piece of dark-looking meat, both salt and sweet and tasting of nutmeg and cinnamon, having the consistency of soft jelly. He finds even his wines spiced with cloves.

The first dish of the first course was a compound of the tongues of rabbits, hedgehogs, deer, geese and wild boars, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of partridges and the livers of pheasants. It contained, moreover, forcemeat b.a.l.l.s made of honey, cinnamon and flour boiled in wine, and the same was made of honey, nutmegs, cloves, garlic and mint. Next he had to taste a panade of herring boiled in white wine, covered with a sweet sauce compounded out of cherries, which seemed to Mr Sorrel to be a mixture of strawberry jam and oysters.

"The pages carried away the plates and emptied them into a great tub with two handles which served for the broken meat of the poor waiting outside the castle gates. This was done to the sound of trumpets. And whilst the second course was being brought, a man came in with a bear that danced in a sort of horseshoe formed by the two tables along the wall and the small table on the dais. This man had with him a girl who danced upon her hands with her feet in the air."

Conversation ran on exploits in the Holy Land, strange happenings in the Adriatic and miracles, amid a din of knives, teeth, crying out for more wine, more ale, more metheglin, so that Mr Sorrell could neither hear others nor make himself heard. When he complained orders were given and a man armed with a long stick like a hop-pole began running down the tables striking people on the heads and hands, "upsetting drinking vessels and sending platters of meat skimming on to the rushes, where they were devoured by the many and large dogs that lay beneath all the tables."

In the next part of the book we are shown the young knight of Egerton with his leman, a fifteen-year-old girl who sulked because she had no velvet gloves set with stones, no hawk from Norway, no white horse of her own with trappings of silver, no monkey, or collars of pearls, or a weekly allowance of five pounds of sugar. She had to pour hot water over her capricious master as he sat in his bath and bear with all his queer tantrums.

"In the room in which she had to live the walls were all of bare stone and the young knight was accustomed to lock her in there for days at a time, so that she knew every stone and every patch of damp.... The bed was of walnut wood gone black and very huge, so that it would hold four persons: the hutch at its foot was of a rough oak gone grey." The young knight in the midst of his ablutions suddenly notices spots of rain upon his armour and leaps out of his bath on to his page. "His mantle, blazing red and white and clasped at the neck with a buckle of gleaming beaten gold weighing three ounces, whirled out all round him; the water dripped from his wet and hairy limbs that, white beneath the scarlet and all knotted and distorted, fell like the sails of a windmill about the page's ears."

Gertrude the leman taunts him and he rounds on her, and yet he could not "raise his hand against this insulting atomy, he, who had been famed for having in ten years seven of the most beautiful lemans in Christendom.

There had been Isabelle de Joie, with hair like corn; Constance de Verigonde, with teeth like pearls; Bearea la Belle, with b.r.e.a.s.t.s like mother-of-pearl; Bice de Carnas, with arms like alabaster; and Jeune la Ciboriee, whose breath was sweeter than the odour of pinks...."

We are even shown the Queen Mother and the little King.

"The Queen was a fat matron, with a cunning, determined face. Her eyes were small, brown, and keen. Her dress was of purple velvet, all of one piece, and sewn with thick gold thread that glinted in the seams. About her waist she had a rope of amber beads that was twisted before her and fell in two ropes at her feet. The King was all in scarlet, a boy of fourteen. Upon his yellow hair was a small circlet of gold; round his knees were two garters of solid gold links; the ends, pa.s.sing through the buckles, fell down to the top of his shoes that were very long and gilded."

In the next part of the book we see Mr Sorrell riding in the narrow streets of Salisbury. "The houses were all very low; they were all built of mud and they were all raggedly thatched, house-leeks growing from many roofs, and on others great tufts of flags. The houses were set down at all angles to the road. Sometimes it was very narrow, so that they could hardly pa.s.s, ... and the geese fled shrieking at their approach.

Sometimes it was so broad that ... the great pigs would continue to wallow undisturbed in the pools of mud.... He observed noise, dirt, nauseous smells, and great crowds of importunate and ugly people. They were nearly all in ragged clothes of a grey home-spun. Some had capes, some hoods with long tails like funnels; most of the men had leather belts; most of the women went bare-legged, and were very dirty ... most of the children ... were crooked, distorted, or bore upon their faces pock-marks of a hideous kind."

Nearer the cathedral were houses of stone, bales of cloth set out to attract customers, men weaving at looms, and great joints of meat upon hooks, in huge cellars below. Over these cellars were suspended signs of gilded suns, boys painted green and brown, swans and unicorns. Men emerged from the cellars in green jerkins or red surcoats furred with white lamb's-wool. Having accompanied Mr Sorrell to the door of the cathedral, his hostess, Lady Dionissia, went back to the town to buy some juice of fir-trees "said to be sovereign for hardening and strengthening the hands of warriors." Meanwhile Mr Sorrell entered the new, brilliantly coloured building, the interior roof of which was gra.s.s-green, picked out with bright golden images of angels, queens and grinning fiends. Everybody round was talking loudly, some drinking, most of them selling cherries and eggs; the monks were painting, the chapter clergy whispered and laughed, for it was blood-letting day. Mr Sorrell performs his mission with the Dean, which is to secure the Church's sanction for the Lady Dionissia to divorce her husband (the young knight of Egerton) and marry him: this is an inimitably humorous piece of satirical writing on bribery and corruption in the Church.

"'It is neither decent nor in order to desire to marry a lady who is already married,' said the Dean.

"'I desire to do it,' Mr Sorrell said, 'with the sanction of the church.'

"'That, of course,' the Dean said seriously, 'is another matter.'"

Mr Sorrell finds himself slipping all too easily into his new life and suffers periodic twinges of conscience.

"'Surely it is pleasant,'" he says to his paramour on the return ride of this visit to Salisbury, "'but I cannot see that it is well, and pleasantness is not the whole of life ... are there not such things as duties, ambitions, and responsibilities?'

"'I do not know what these things are,' answered the Lady Dionissia. 'In the spring the moles come out of the woods and the little birds sing, and we walk in the gardens and take what pleasure we can. And then comes the winter, and shuts us up in our castles so that it is not so pleasant; but with jongleurs and ballad-singers we pa.s.s the time as well as we may.'

"'It is just that that is so fatal,' Mr Sorrell said. 'It is just that that I am slipping into. You dress me up in these scarlet clothes, and I take a pleasure in it; you ride a-hawking, and it seems to me the whole end of life when your ta.s.sel strikes down a heron or a daw....'

"'When I first set eyes on you,'" she replies a little later, "'I knew that I loved you, and what more is there to ask or to say?... Gentle friend, is it a new thing that a great knight, putting upon himself the garb of a minstrel, and accompanied by a page or two and a few men of arms to give him sufficient state and respect, should journey through the world and sing of the high things of love, or of great adventures in arms?... We should travel through the great forests and along the broad streams and over the endless plains.'