On Something (Dodo Press) (6 page)

Then my guide-book will go on to talk about harbours; it will prove how
almost every harbour was impossible to make in a little boat; but it would
describe the difficulties of each so that a man in a little boat might
possibly make them. It would describe the rush of the tide outside Margate
and the still more dangerous rush outside Shoreham, and the absurd bar
at Littlehampton that strikes out of the sea, and the place to lie at in
Newhaven, and how not to stick upon the Platters outside Harwich; and the
very tortuous entry to Poole, and the long channel into Christchurch past
Hengistbury Head; and the enormous tides of South Wales; and why you often
have to beach at Britonferry, and the terrible difficulty of mooring in
Great Yarmouth; and the sad changes of Little Yarmouth, and the single
black buoy at Calais which is much too far out to be of any use; and how
to wait for the tide in the Swin. And also what no book has ever yet
given, an exact direction of the way in which one may roll into Orford
Haven, on the top of a spring tide if one has luck, and how if one has no
luck one sticks on the gravel and is pounded to pieces.

Then my guide-book would go on to tell of the way in which to make men
pleasant to you according to their climate and country; of how you must
not hurry the people of Aragon, and how it is your duty to bargain with
the people of Catalonia; and how it is impossible to eat at Daroca; and
how careful one must be with gloomy men who keep inns at the very top of
glens, especially if they are silent, under Cheviot. And how one must not
talk religion when one has got over the Scotch border, with some remarks
about Jedburgh, and the terrible things that happened to a man there who
would talk religion though he had been plainly warned.

Then my guide-book would go on to tell how one should climb ordinary
mountains, and why one should avoid feats; and how to lose a guide which
is a very valuable art, for when you have lost your guide you need not pay
him. My book will also have a note (for it is hardly worth a chapter) on
the proper method of frightening sheep dogs when they attempt to kill you
with their teeth upon the everlasting hills.

This my good and new guide-book (oh, how it blossoms in my head as I
write!) would further describe what trains go to what places, and in what
way the boredom of them can best be overcome, and which expresses really
go fast; and I should have a footnote describing those lines of steamers
on which one can travel for nothing if one puts a sufficiently bold face
upon the matter.

My guide-book would have directions for the pacifying of Arabs, a trick
which I learnt from a past master, a little way east of Batna in the year
1905—I will also explain how one can tell time by the stars and by the
shadow of the sun; upon what sort of food one can last longest and how
best to carry it, and what rites propitiate, if they are solemnized in a
due order, the half-malicious fairies which haunt men when they are lost
in lonely valleys, right up under the high peaks of the world. And my book
should have a whole chapter devoted to Ulysses.

For you must know that one day I came into Narbonne where I had never been
before, and I saw written up in large letters upon a big, ugly house:

Lodging for Man and Beast.

So I went in and saw the master, who had a round bullet head and cropped
hair, and I said to him: "What! Are you landed, then, after all your
journeys? And do I find you at last, you of whom I have read so much and
seen so little?" But with an oath he refused me lodging.

This tale is true, as would be every other tale in my book.

What a fine book it will be!

"I will confess and I will not deny," said Wandering Peter (of whom you
have heard little but of whom in God's good time you shall hear more). "I
will confess and I will not deny that the chief pleasure I know is the
contemplation of my fellow beings."

He spoke thus in his bed in the inn of a village upon the River Yonne
beyond Auxerre, in which bed he lay a-dying; but though he was dying he
was full of words.

"What energy! What cunning! What desire! I have often been upon the edge
of a steep place, such as a chalk pit or a cliff above a plain, and
watched them down below, hurrying around, turning about, laying down,
putting up, leading, making, organizing, driving, considering, directing,
exceeding, and restraining; upon my soul I was proud to be one of them! I
have said to myself," said Wandering Peter, "lift up your heart; you also
are one of these! For though I am," he continued, "a wandering man and
lonely, given to the hills and to empty places, yet I glory in the workers
on the plain, as might a poor man in his noble lineage. From these I came;
to these in my old age I would have returned."

At these words the people about his bed fell to sobbing when they thought
how he would never wander more, but Peter Wanderwide continued with a high
heart:

"How pleasant it is to see them plough! First they cunningly contrive an
arrangement that throws the earth aside and tosses it to the air, and
then, since they are too weak to pull the same, they use great beasts,
oxen or horses or even elephants, and impose them with their will, so that
they patiently haul this contrivance through the thick clods; they tear
up and they put into furrows, and they transform the earth. Nothing can
withstand them. Birds you will think could escape them by flying up into
the air. It is an error. Upon birds also my people impose their view. They
spread nets, food, bait, trap, and lime. They hail stones and shot and
arrows at them. They cause some by a perpetual discipline to live near
them, to lay eggs and to be killed at will; of this sort are hens, geese,
turkeys, ducks, and guinea-fowls. Nothing eludes the careful planning of
man.

"Moreover, they can build. They do not build this way or that, as a dull
necessity forces them, not they! They build as they feel inclined. They
hew down, they saw through (and how marvellous is a saw!), they trim
timber, they mix lime and sand, they excavate the recesses of the hills.
Oh! the fine fellows! They can at whim make your chambers or the Tower
prison, or my aunt's new villa at Wimbledon (which is a joke of theirs),
or St. Pancras Station, or the Crystal Palace, or Westminster Abbey, or
St. Paul's, or Bon Secours. They are agreeable to every change in the wind
that blows about the world. It blows Gothic, and they say 'By all means'—
and there is your Gothic—a thing dreamt of and done! It suddenly veers
south again and blows from the Mediterranean. The jolly little fellows are
equal to the strain, and up goes Amboise, and Anet, and the Louvre, and
all the Renaissance. It blows everyhow and at random as though in anger at
seeing them so ready. They care not at all! They build the Eiffel Tower,
the Queen Anne house, the Mary Jane house, the Modern-Style house, the
Carlton, the Ritz, the Grand Palais, the Trocadero, Olympia, Euston, the
Midhurst Sanatorium, and old Beit's Palace in Park Lane. They are not to
be defeated, they have immortal certitudes.

"Have you considered their lines and their drawings and their cunning
plans?" said Wandering Peter. "They are astonishing there! Put a bit of
charcoal into my dog's mouth or my pet monkey's paw—would he copy the
world? Not he! But men—my brothers—
they
take it in hand and make
war against the unspeaking forces; the trees and the hills are of their
own showing, and the places in which they dwell, by their own power,
become full of their own spirit. Nature is made more by being their model,
for in all they draw, paint, or chisel they are in touch with heaven and
with hell…. They write (Lord! the intelligence of their men, and Lord!
the beauty of their women). They write unimaginable things!

"They write epics, they write lyrics, they write riddles and marching
songs and drinking songs and rhetoric, and chronicles, and elegies, and
pathetic memories; and in everything that they write they reveal things
greater than they know. They are capable," said Peter Wanderwide, in
his dying enthusiasm, "of so writing that the thought enlarges upon the
writing and becomes far more than what they have written. They write that
sort of verse called 'Stop-Short,' which when it is written makes one
think more violently than ever, as though it were an introduction to the
realms of the soul. And then again they write things which gently mock
themselves and are a consolation for themselves against the doom of
death."

But when Peter Wanderwide said that word "death," the howling and the
boo-hooing of the company assembled about his bed grew so loud that he
could hardly hear himself think. For there was present the Mayor of
the village, and the Priest of the village, and the Mayor's wife, and
the Adjutant Mayor or Deputy Mayor, and the village Councillor, and
the Road-mender, and the Schoolmaster, and the Cobbler, and all the
notabilities, as many as could crush into the room, and none but the
Doctor was missing.

And outside the house was a great crowd of the village folk, weeping
bitterly and begging for news of him, and mourning that so great and so
good a man should find his death in so small a place.

Peter Wanderwide was sinking very fast, and his life was going out with
his breath, but his heart was still so high that he continued although his
voice was failing:

"Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight,
get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men,
horses, ships, and precious stones as you can possibly manage to do. Or
else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these
two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a
wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay at home and hear in
one's garden the voice of God.

"For my part I have followed out my fate. And I propose in spite of my
numerous iniquities, by the recollection of my many joys in the glories of
this earth, as by corks, to float myself in the sea of nothingness until I
reach the regions of the Blessed and the pure in heart.

"For I think when I am dead Almighty God will single me out on account
of my accoutrement, my stirrup leathers, and the things that I shall be
talking of concerning Ireland and the Perigord, and my boat upon the
narrow seas; and I think He will ask St. Michael, who is the Clerk and
Registrar of battling men, who it is that stands thus ready to speak
(unless his eyes betray him) of so many things? Then St. Michael will
forget my name although he will know my face; he will forget my name
because I never stayed long enough in one place for him to remember it.

"But St. Peter, because he is my Patron Saint and because I have always
had a special devotion to him, will answer for me and will have no
argument, for he holds the keys. And he will open the door and I will come
in. And when I am inside the door of Heaven I shall freely grow those
wings, the pushing and nascence of which have bothered my shoulder blades
with birth pains all my life long, and more especially since my thirtieth
year. I say, friends and companions all, that I shall grow a very
satisfying and supporting pair of wings, and once I am so furnished I
shall be received among the Blessed, and I shall at once begin to tell
them, as I told you on earth, all sorts of things, both false and true,
with regard to the countries through which I carried forward my homeless
feet, and in which I have been given such fulfilment for my eyes."

When Peter Wanderwide had delivered himself of these remarks, which he did
with great dignity and fire for one in such extremity, he gasped a little,
coughed, and died.

I need not tell you what solemnities attended his burial, nor with what
fervour the people flocked to pray at his tomb; but it is worth knowing
that the poet of that place, who was rival to the chief poet in Auxerre
itself, gathered up the story of his death into a rhyme, written in the
dialect of that valley, of which rhyme this is an English translation:

   When Peter Wanderwide was young
     He wandered everywhere he would;
   And all that he approved was sung,
     And most of what he saw was good.

   When Peter Wanderwide was thrown
     By Death himself beyond Auxerre,
   He chanted in heroic tone
     To Priest and people gathered there:

  "If all that I have loved and seen
     Be with me on the Judgment Day,
   I shall be saved the crowd between
     From Satan and his foul array.

  "Almighty God will surely cry
     'St. Michael! Who is this that stands
   With Ireland in his dubious eye,
     And Perigord between his hands,

  "'And on his arm the stirrup thongs,
     And in his gait the narrow seas,
   And in his mouth Burgundian songs,
     But in his heart the Pyrenees?'

  "St. Michael then will answer right
     (But not without angelic shame):
   'I seem to know his face by sight;
     I cannot recollect his name….'

  "St. Peter will befriend me then,
     Because my name is Peter too;
   'I know him for the best of men
     That ever wallopped barley brew.

  "'And though I did not know him well,
     And though his soul were clogged with sin,
   
I
hold the keys of Heaven and Hell.
     Be welcome, noble Peterkin.'

  "Then shall I spread my native wings
     And tread secure the heavenly floor,
   And tell the Blessed doubtful things
     Of Val d'Aran and Perigord."

* * * * *

  This was the last and solemn jest
     Of weary Peter Wanderwide,
   He spoke it with a failing zest,
     And having spoken it, he died.

The nation known to history as the Nephalo Ceclumenazenoi, or, more
shortly, the Nepioi, inhabited a fruitful and prosperous district
consisting in a portion of the mainland and certain islands situated in
the Picrocholian Sea; and had there for countless centuries enjoyed a
particular form of government which it is not difficult to describe, for
it was religious and arranged upon the principle that no ancient custom
might be changed.