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Illegitimate Freedom

Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940

is the first study of informality in modernist literature. Differentiating
informality from intimacy in its introduction, the book discusses the
informal in relation with sensory experience, aesthetic presentation,
ethical deliberation or action, and social attitudes within modernist
works. It examines these works for particular nuances of the word
“informality” in each of its chapters in the following thematic sequence:
informality that offers humour, interpretive freedom, and promiscuity as
counters to self-absorption in works by Virginia Woolf; rebuttals to male
priorities in liberalism through “feminine informality” in several short
stories by Katherine Mansfield; contempt for colloquialism and intimacy,
tinged with class-anxieties and crises of attitude, in T. S. Eliot’s poetry;
resistance to disgust in James Joyce’s novels; and the fusion of irreverence,
protest, and praise in W. H. Auden’s writings before 1940. The book’s
conclusion considers the risks of informality through a discussion of
what it calls “inverted dignity.” The theoretical aspects of the book offer
insights into Lockean liberalism, the ethical dimensions of what Hélène
Cixous termed “feminine writing,” relations of sublimity and domesticity,
Sigmund Freud’s arguments on humour and melancholia, and recent affect
theory’s—as well as Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s—views
on disgust, linking these with modernism. This wide range of engagement
makes this study relevant for those interested in literary studies, critical
theory, and philosophy.

Gaurav Majumdar is Professor of English at Whitman College. His

publications include the book Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in
Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and
culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological,
and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists.
Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates
and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations
and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification,
decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism,
the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities,
transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between
the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to
the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also
be considered.

Music and Myth in Modern Literature

Josh Torabi

Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction

Lived Things
Laura Oulanne

Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories

Conversations with the Nineteenth Century
Anne Besnault

Illegitimate Freedom
Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940
Gaurav Majumdar

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge

.com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035
Illegitimate Freedom
Informality in Modernist Literature,
1900–1940

Gaurav Majumdar

Unknown, “James Joyce with Nora, seated on wall in Zurich.” Image from
the UB James Joyce Collection courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the
University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2022 Taylor & Francis
The right of Gaurav Majumdar to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
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explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-44462-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-11548-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00989-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003009894
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Publishing Services, Chennai, India
To Chetna Chopra
Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Informality as Illegitimate Freedom 1

1 “Intoxicated Sense”: Humour and Promiscuity in To the

Lighthouse and Orlando 28

2 Marking Absence: Mansfield’s Feminine Informality vs.

Lockean Liberalism 54

3 Eliotic Contempt 78

4 Joyce’s Challenges to Disgust 99

5 “Inverted Hypocrisy”: Auden’s Informal Pedagogy 122

Conclusion: Openness to Misreading: The Risks of

Informality 145

Works Cited 155

Index 165
Acknowledgments

I have benefited from many kinds of help during the writing of this book.
Invaluable suggestions and encouragement from Enda Duffy, Benjamin
Boysen, Vicki Mahaffey, Gerri Kimber, and Aimee Gasston helped me form
and reconsider its arguments. I am very appreciative of the patience, sen-
sitivity, and courtesy of Michelle Salyga and Bryony Reece, the editor and
editorial assistant for the book at Routledge.
I received financial assistance for this project from the office of the Provost
and Dean of Faculty, with particular help from Associate Dean Helen Kim,
at Whitman College, where I also received friendship and solidarity from
Shampa Biswas, Bruce Magnusson, Jonathan Walters, David Schmitz, Paul
Apostolidis, Libby Miller, John Cotts, and Tim Machonkin. My thanks to
them and to my colleagues at Whitman’s English department. I would like
to thank Elizabeth Vandiver and David Lupher, especially, for generous
gifts that helped this project.
The warmth, verve, and brilliance of Nicole Simek and Zahi Zalloua
have transformed cautious collegiality into longstanding familial rela-
tions for me—that’s a startling recognition, N. and Z. Similar recognition
extends to other dear friends, whose generosity and hospitality have been
crucial during the composition of this book: Siddhartha Mukherjee, Vivek
Ramachandran, Sarah Sze, Siddhartha Sivaramakrishnan, Prabha Nagaraj,
Krishna Nagaraj, and Jim Harder.
Several exceptional, dear students have buoyed me during my work
for this project: I would like to acknowledge, with particular pride, Bryn
Carlson, Tess Carges, Josh Tacke, Catherine Fisher, Philip Stefani, Chelsea
Kern, Hayden Cooper, Peter Feehan, and Rohan Press.
Carmen Truyols, Anuj Majumdar, Kirti Chopra, and Amarjit Chopra
have given me strong, idiosyncratic support and, more unwittingly, insights
into dynamics of the informal. Vijay Chopra remains a model of affection-
ate informality for me.
 Acknowledgments ix
Pinaki Chatterjee has gifted me beautiful, if sometimes beautifully exas-
perating, friendship. Chetna Chopra has gifted me love and support for this
project that I could not have imagined.
The frontispiece image appears courtesy of the UB James Joyce Collection
from the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo,
The State University of New York.
Introduction
Informality as Illegitimate Freedom

Informal expressions flicker. They point to fluctuations in relationships, lan-

guage, emotions, bodies, conventions, perspective, and the very possibili-
ties of association. They mark colloquialism, camaraderie, curses, taunts,
festivity, flirtation, repose, and intimate or intensely personal sensations.
When recognized, their instability and evanescence signal the instability of
existence itself and unsettle us. When not, they can lull us into a sense of
familiarity and comfort. We face them in our daily negotiations with forms
and norms, as both are shaped and reshaped in these encounters. Jostling
norms, informality reminds us of the limitations and instability of norms, if
not of life itself. As Marlow tells us in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1902), “We live in the flicker” (106).
Modernist literary works embrace, and recoil from, informality in
complex responses to it. In particular modernist forms of writing, philo-
sophical strains, or tendencies, the informal is a condition of openness: a
gambit for self-fashioning, as well as relations of various kinds. In other
works, its inclusion signals class-anxieties, contempt, and melancholy, if
not a Freudian melancholia. In all forms of literary modernism, it provides
a means for cultural criticism. As it explores literary engagements with the
informal, this book considers both support for informality and resistance
to it in modernist works, studying informality as an aesthetic, social, and
political model. I will mainly address the following questions here: How
does literary modernism depict and theorize attitudes, relations, and socia-
bility in its depictions of behaviour and situations at odds with norms? To
what kinds of socially and discursively dominant conditions does modernist
informality respond? What are the implications of modernist radicalization
of aesthetic, social, and personal relations? What means of interaction does
such radicalization give us?
Informality is a crucial—but neglected—aspect of modernist poetics.
In the last two decades, theoretical work on affect—strong instances of
which include Lauren Berlant’s work on intimacy and “national fantasy”;
Sianne Ngai’s work on ugly feelings and the affective shaping of aesthetic
categories; Adam Phillips and Leo Bersani’s dialogue on intimacy; and
Sara Ahmed’s inquiries into the role of emotions in cultural politics—has

DOI: 10.4324/9781003009894-101
2 Introduction
catalyzed the humanities’ interest in affective processes and structures that
define the intimate. Although several scholars have produced critical and
theoretical studies of intimacy, the relations of informal attitudes with mod-
ernist literature itself have not received book-length attention. (I will dif-
ferentiate informality from the more widely discussed notion of intimacy,
below.) Broadly defined, informality is a condition that does not accord
with standardized form or prescribed behaviour. It remains a topic explored
only by implication in modernist studies and one without an essay-length,
much less book-length, examination.
If informal conditions contrast or challenge norms, they resist normalcy.
As such, they are not generalizable into uniform rules or states of behav-
iour. Dismissing the word “generalization” as “worthless” for its “military
sound” alone, the narrator of Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall”
(1917; revised version, 1921) expresses her objection to generalizations as
follows:

Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday after-

noon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead,
clothes, and habits—like the habit of sitting all together in one room
until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for eve-
rything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they
should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked
upon them … Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths.
How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these
real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and
tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the
damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of
illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I won-
der, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman;
the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the
standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has
become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and
women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin
where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer
prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxi-
cating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists ….
(86; italics mine)

Sharing the view from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) that “our
failure is to form habits,” Woolf argues against habituated life, numbed by
formal domestic routine, early in the passage (236). Standardization and
the masculine point of view (“What now takes the place of those things I
wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman
…”) are the forces of propriety and a normalization of reality in the passage.
Woolf’s solution to them is an “illegitimate freedom”—liberation from the
 Introduction 3
appropriate, non-standardized expression, a perspective that does not seek
the sanction of the proper.
Her text hints at its own preferences early, when its narrator recalls a
moment when the prior owner of the house in which she sits

was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind
it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to
pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
(83)

This enumeration of frequent intrusions by the very movement or “rush”

of the train offers a covert view of modern violence, protesting the struc-
tures of perception and thought that modernity forces upon us: It protests
distraction, the narrow sensory perimeters of selfish interest that modernity
induces, and the delimitation of association (in this case, through conversa-
tion) by the privileging of speed. However, it also rehearses the paradoxical
conditions of modernity. As it turns rapidly from topic to significantly dispa-
rate topic, the text itself seems to be reflecting and exploiting speed: “There
will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks,
and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour dim
pinks and blues which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become I
don’t know what …” (84). The kaleidoscopic refractions of the unconscious
here dilate thought in an apparently uncontrollable wave of impressions.
The wafting sentence conveys shunted conventions or presumptions about
our agentive formation of thoughts and argument, as anticipated in a sen-
tence earlier on the page, which offers a clearer, if more jarring, version of
such movement:

To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an

accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation—let me just count
over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems
always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat
would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools?
(84)

Soon after, the narrator thinks, “Yes, that seems to express the rapidity
of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard …”
(84). Echoing the concern with “waste and repair” in the conclusion of The
Renaissance, Woolf’s digressive syntax performs the following argument
from Pater’s text:

What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of

natural elements to which science gives their names? … Our physical
life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the waste
4 Introduction
and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of
the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science
reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.
(233)

Protesting the “rapidity of life … all so casual, all so haphazard,” Woolf’s

narrator chafes against both time and space around this point:

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the
cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light.
Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, help-
less, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of
the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and
which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one
won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so.
(84)

This, too, is a series of suggestive protests: against the enclosure of meaning

and the limitations imposed upon us by our place of birth. The informality it
seeks, then, would practice both linguistic and social freedom of association.
Offering a description of free association in On Flirtation, Adam Phillips
paraphrases Sigmund Freud: “Free association itself is the psychic act of
relinquishing, as far as possible, one’s slavish devotion to internal censors.
It is one of the advantages of flirtation that it can protect us from idola-
try” (xii). The comment suggests candour itself is a mark of strange conflu-
ences between scepticism and promiscuity, both evident in the irreverent
attitudes and formal variety that modernism displays. Irreverent modern-
ist literature (not the only kind, of course, as my chapter on Eliot makes
clear) bristles against the mimetic self-capitulation demanded before models
of “great men” by Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero-Worship.1 In her
quick sketch, “Carlyle’s House” (1909), Woolf records a worse formality in
the Carlyle residence than she had anticipated when she visited it: “I don’t
know what I expected to find—something at any rate less cold, and formal”
(3). Against the formality of both cold domestic décor and the limp decorum
that accompanies deference to heroes, modernist works seek new models of
personality, relations, and association. The modernist fascination with for-
mal associations announces a paradoxical fecundity in secular strains of lit-
erary modernism (among them, Joyce’s, Woolf’s, Mansfield’s, and the early
Auden’s): On the one hand, it is against the proper as the unquestionable,
stable, and mythified. As reported by Richard Ellmann, Joyce issues perhaps
the most notorious modernist riposte to hero-worship with his reminder to
a star-struck student, wishing to “kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses,” that the
same hand had engaged other matters; Auden repudiates self-satisfaction
through notorious revisions of his work; Woolf wonders at “how instinc-
tively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling
 Introduction 5
that could make it ridiculous” in “The Mark on the Wall” (Ellmann, 110;
Woolf, 85).
However, Woolf’s remark about self-protection suggests another dimen-
sion to modernist informality: the obverse of the paradox is the importance
of form (rather than formality, alone) through the need to protect, pre-
serve, refine, and even promote the self in modernism, as evident in the
many displays of self-consciousness, fastidiousness, and vanity in mod-
ernist writing and modernist writers, themselves: Any easy reading of the
Bloomsbury group’s famous distance from repression is severely qualified
in descriptions of the uneasy self-consciousness of the group’s prominent
members in Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness; Auden was, in
Chester Kallman’s dotingly paradoxical description, “the most dishevelled
child of all disciplinarians”; Joyce augmented his cool on the photographic
record by standing for a famous portrait with his back to Carola Giedion-
Welcker’s camera (Zurich, 1938) or adopting dandyish postures, such as
the one flaunted by his statue in North Earl Street, Dublin (Kallman, quoted
in Arendt, 528; my italics).2 The stances are not mutually exclusive. These
writers’ will to shape and reshape the self cooperates with self-questioning,
introspective self-demythification collaborates with self-mythification in a
sustained critical exercise to stage (or veil) versions of the self with a kind of
illegitimate freedom—a capacity to refine or remake an identity normatively
taken to be essential or permanent. This marks the self in much modern-
ist literature as an emblem of restlessness, an overt informality. Informal
language and behaviour mark a modern response to demands for inventive-
ness, to new arguments for sexual expression, to global crises, to dominant
figures from the past, and (almost as a direct consequence in the traumatic
history of racial relations) to engagements with race. Informality’s ambit
includes space for the kind of humour that Sigmund Freud considers not
to be “innocent”—the hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness,
satire, or defence) or the obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure)”
(Jokes, 140). It does so by unshackling us from the phantom ownership of
appropriateness, giving our interactions an elusiveness and critical elasticity,
both often gained through the illegitimate freedom of jokes. In his critique
of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as a socially permitted ver-
sion of boisterousness, Terry Eagleton quotes Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:
“There is no slander in an allowed Fool” (Walter Benjamin: Towards a
Revolutionary Criticism, 81). But the strategic deployment of, or challenges
to, figures of disgust and the “disgusting” through humour or comic devices
in Joyce’s work keeps it from the innocuous scandals accommodated with
liberal ease in a lot of contemporary fiction.
Modernist writers not only depict informality in “plot-events” or poetic
images, but in specific theorizations of informal tendencies. Joyce stresses
the importance of an informal aesthetics in his essay “The Day of the
Rabblement” (1901), when, within a critique of Yeats, he declares that
“an aesthete has a floating will” (OCP, 51).3 T. S. Eliot celebrates dynamic
6 Introduction
intertextual association over formal historical linearity in “Tradition and
the Individual Talent,” arguing famously and counterintuitively:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His sig-
nificance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead
poets and artists … I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely
historical, criticism … [W]hat happens when a new work of art is cre-
ated is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art
which preceded it.
(38)

(Eliot increasingly represses this thought in his poetic practice, but that is
a discussion I will defer till my chapter on his work.) As signal modern-
ist arguments, Woolf’s essays champion informality, overtly and implicitly.
In these theorizations, informality reflects a modern attitude—ways of see-
ing, style, or behaviour that reflect the dynamism and agitations of moder-
nity, precisely because they do not obey formal injunctions to capture and
freeze such restlessness into still wholes. Such disobedience is evident in
Woolf’s differentiation between “spiritualists” and “materialists” in one of
her most-studied essays, “Modern Fiction” (1925). The “materialists”—H.
G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy—“write of unimportant
things” because, in their writing, there is a dilution of life through literalism:
The complexity of life “escapes” such work, in which the “enormous labour
of proving the solidity, the likeness of life” constrains the writer “to pro-
vide a plot” and impeccably “embalming the whole” of life (160). Fealty to
such constraints amounts to prostration before dictatorial formality: “The
tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn” (160). What Wells, Bennett,
and Galsworthy do not record about perception and mental processes, in
Woolf’s view, is that “a myriad impressions” on the mind make of life “not
a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged”, but, instead, “a luminous
halo, a semi-transparent envelope” (160). In her repudiation of symmetry
and the edicts of a prior, external organizing agency (both implicit in the
passive-voiced phrase “symmetrically arranged”), Woolf questions norms
and the stability of forms—the very formality—that they seek to enforce,
as she asks, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity
it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possi-
ble?” (160–61). For Woolf, the “uncircumscribed spirit” that informality
contrasting “those we have called materialists” makes James Joyce a “spir-
itualist,” significantly because Joyce “disregards with complete courage
whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coher-
ence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to
support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he
can neither touch nor see” (161).4 Instead of the repression of imaginative
or suggestive fecundity, the challenge before “the novelist … is to contrive
 Introduction 7
means of being set free to set down what he chooses” (162; my italics). I
will give larger attention to the importance of such preference, over that of
norms, in my chapter on Woolf’s novels.
Woolf endorses informality emphatically in the conclusion of “Modern
Fiction,” when she famously refutes literary propriety by declaring, The
proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction
(164). Alongside she collapses the boundaries of Russian literature’s focus
on pain and English literature’s focus on humour, felling the fences between
tragedy and comedy, well before Samuel Beckett gives Waiting for Godot
the subtitle of “A Tragicomedy in Two Acts,” and before she, herself, com-
poses a sophisticated mingling of humour and pain in Orlando. With this
negation, Woolf attempts to liberate fiction from normalization, privileging
illegitimate freedom, instead.

Informality vs Intimacy
In her introduction to the special issue of Critical Inquiry that has spurred
much scholarly interest in intimacy in the last twenty years, Berlant writes:

To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures,

and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But
intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something
shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a
particular way.
(281)

The intimate and the informal do, indeed, have some overlap, but they differ
in crucial aspects. While informality often shares the former set of attrib-
utes that Berlant describes (spareness, eloquence, and brevity), it does not
hinge aspirations for shared narratives “that will turn out in a particular
way.” Such shared hope for a particular outcome is neither a prerequisite
nor a common feature in many forms of informality. There is not necessarily
either the presumption or performance of trust in informality. Informality
can affirm and negate, without propriety and an intimate, private affective
charge. Irreverence, for instance, can be a form of informality that need not
be privately expressed. When Joyce adds blasphemy (“You’ll need to rise
precious early … if you want to diddle the Almighty God”) to the “The
Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses (1922), or when the speaker of the
young T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Triumph of Bullshit” (likely, 1910) answers
rebuffs with a refrain of “[S]tick it up your ass,” the retort in each text is,
of course, informal, but not intimate—they transgress even the illusion of
joined hopes in shared narratives.
At the same time, informality is not the equivalent of all transgres-
sion. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White quote the anthropologist Barbara
Babcock’s definition of “symbolic inversion” as an equivalent for the sense
8 Introduction
in which they use the word “transgression” in The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression: “‘Symbolic inversion’ may be broadly defined as any act of
expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fash-
ion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and
norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, or social and politi-
cal” (Babcock, quoted in Stallybrass and White, 17). This definition cov-
ers many of the nuances of the word “informality,” as I employ it here.
However, after citing Babcock, Stallybrass and White acknowledge that
the word “transgression” has another use “which arises in connection with
extremist practices of modern art and philosophy; these designate not just
the infraction of binary structures but movement into an absolutely nega-
tive space beyond the structure of significance itself” (18). Informality does
not involve the absolute negation or the violence of absolutes: Murder or
rape is not an informal act, though, in legal terms, each falls under the cat-
egory of “transgression.”5 Instead, informal acts involve behaviour that has
degrees, actions that are relative, and therefore forms of relation (affirma-
tive or negative, but relative, nevertheless). Informality frequently marks
beginnings, opening paths to the destabilization of hierarchies, gesturing
to the possibility of trust, but not signalling its promise. Informal moments
are moments when normative pressure eases, when interaction intensifies or
lightens, when affect turns. Informality destabilizes prescriptions and hier-
archies of thought, action, feeling, and expression. But it does not guarantee
trust or “trustworthiness.” It puts into question our assumed safety from
the opposites or variants of “good” emotion. It is an unpredictable, ambiva-
lent form of sociability, of affective reception and transmission, offering
ease in its more positive forms and disappointments, if not shock outright,
in its negative versions. Nor is the informal, unlike the intimate, necessarily
something assumed to be restricted to personal or private experience, or
strongly related with it even in publicly “intimate” settings, such as bars,
speakeasys, sex-parlours, and so on.6 Unlike transgression, informality is
not only “an act of expressive behavior.” It is as much a part of attitude
as it is a matter of action that transgresses norms. It informs “structures of
feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s famous coinage in his book Film (1954),
where he uses the phrase briefly. Williams first addresses the phrase at length
in The Long Revolution (1961), clarifying that it both conveys structure of
cultural, political, and especially conventional attitudes that make us feel in
particular ways, and refers to the different ways of thinking vying to emerge
at any one time in history (51– 65). Of course, informal attitudes are more
closely associated with the latter. They are functions of the physical, politi-
cal, and gendered conditions for association within spaces: The scope of
analysis in each chapter of this book will shuttle to and from the personal to
the social or public dimensions that modernist literature portrays.
T. J. Clark reminds us, “Modernism is our antiquity” (2). The restless-
ness shaping the peculiar travel of modernist narrative—its straying, its non-
linearity, its employment of impressions and resonance—marks informal
 Introduction 9
attitudes that artists continue to negotiate, today: The obsessive play with
form flexes formality in its social, attitudinal, and physical manifestations. I
do not read informality as a lack of form, but as a contrast with formal or
attitudinal standardization, normativity, or compliance.

Nuances of Informality
Informality gains intellectual and ethical inflections through the philosophi-
cal investments of the writers who employ it—in modernist works, it is an
index of both the irrational (in the hands of, say, Joyce or Woolf) and the
“great good sense” with which Hannah Arendt credited Auden (531).
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “informality” as fol-
lows: “The quality or fact of being informal; absence of formality; (as a
count noun) an instance of this; an informal act or proceeding.” Suggesting
the variety of inflections and nuances in the word “informality,” the dic-
tionary’s definitions for the word “informal” include “1. Lacking form;
formless. Obs. rare.”; “2. a. Not done or made according to a recognized or
prescribed form; not observing established procedures or rules; unofficial;
irregular”; 2. e. “Econ. Designating unregulated commercial activity which
takes place outside the official or mainstream economy, and is carried out on
a small scale and on a self-employed … or irregular basis[;] Typically used
to refer to any form of economic activity which goes unreported in official
statistics, including illegal activity”; “3. a. Characterized by absence of for-
mality or ceremony; casual, relaxed. b. Designating the vocabulary, idiom,
and grammatical structures suitable to everyday language and conversation
rather than to official or formal contexts. c. Of dress: casual; suitable for
everyday wear.” Further, the OED defines the transitive verb “informal-
ize” as “To render informal.” It is definitions 2. a. and 3. a.–c. that I will
most frequently evoke in this book, though other inflections listed above
will influence my arguments, sporadically. Add to these an inference from
Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s definition of “affect as potential”:
“a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected” (The Affect Theory Reader,
2; italics Gregg and Seigworth’s). If, at any given moment within the literary
works I discuss here, informality conveys “a body’s capacity to affect and
to be affected,” it indicates that body’s ability to influence and its respon-
siveness. In other words, informality signals both behaviour and sensitivity.

Redistributions of the Sensible

In modernity, such behaviour and sensitivity are shaped by various disorien-
tations, which Karl Marx evokes when he cracks wise on the psychological
reconfigurations of rapid train-travel: “production not only creates an object
for the subject but also a subject for the object” (quoted in Schivelbusch,
164). Discussing another instance of such adjustment of “reality to the
masses” and the “masses to reality,” Walter Benjamin writes in “The Work
10 Introduction
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), “[U]nspectacu-
lar social changes often promote a change in the receptivity of the masses
which will benefit the new art form” (250). What does this do to sensual
immediacy and its disturbance of hierarchies?7 Modernist works interrogate
the hierarchies that inhere in the formalization of where we are allowed to
sense what we are allowed to sense, and where the registration of particular
experience is expressible. Woolf examines the restricted “distribution of the
sensible” (to borrow Jacques Rancière’s phrase) within formal domesticity
in To the Lighthouse, where the Ramsay children have sensible freedom
restricted to “their bedrooms, their fastness in a house where there was no
other privacy to debate anything, everything” (8).8 Textual indications of
the distribution of the sensible are also indices of the location of rational-
ity or reasonability in moments of communication, formal and informal,
rational and irrational, spoken and unspoken. Closing “Sex and Talk,” her
essay in the special number of Critical Inquiry on intimacy, Candace Vogler
writes:

The problem Kant addresses in his popular and pragmatic work isn’t
really that the self has margins, nor even that we share something that
could be called animal nature; it’s rather that adults try to claim as or
for self more territory than belongs to the business of well-tempered,
rational selfhood.
(365)

This is the problem that blocks dialogue for the couple that T. S. Eliot chill-
ingly portrays in the “A Game of Chess” section of The Waste Land. The
absence of informal ease within that scene is a function of frustrated claims
to “well-tempered, rational selfhood,” with the mutual frustration of the
woman’s repeated demands for a rational solution to their impasse—her
exhortation to “Think”—and (presumably) of the man’s silent, supposedly
rational refuge in the mind, leading to the verdict, “I think we are in rat’s
alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” (ll. 115–16). The text indicates
that the response is unspoken, not only through its beginning—“I think”—
but also by signalling withheld speech through the absence of quotation
marks around his thoughts (and thereby reflecting the OED’s definition 2. a.
for the word “informal”: “Not done or made according to a recognized or
prescribed form”). The informal evocation of lexical convention points to a
crisis in personal communication and—if we are to read the scene as symp-
tomatic of a culture-wide impasse—a crisis in cultural practices that gives
the scene its eeriness.9 Alongside (and, I would suggest, unwittingly), the
scene evokes the absence of informality, in the sense of “easy interaction,”
as a cause for the crisis. As I will suggest in my chapter on Eliot, The Waste
Land’s reluctance to see informality as a valid mode for interaction keeps
it from seeing that this absence itself produces much of the cultural paraly-
sis that occupies its attention. Among the modernist writers whose work
 Introduction 11
I examine here, T. S. Eliot is the aberration, not for an absence of experi-
ments with informality in his work, but for the ways in which his well-doc-
umented conservatism sits with those formal experiments, repressing or (at
least) obstructing their subversive capacities. Keeping this in mind, I will
structure this book’s arguments around what I call “parrhesiastic modern-
ism” or “candid modernism” (as manifest in the writings of Woolf, Joyce,
Mansfield, and, more particularly, the early Auden), on the one hand, and
Eliotic or repressive modernism, on the other. This is not to suggest that the
former renders scandalous intentions, desires, and psychology transparent
or that the latter keeps them entirely opaque, but it is to signify a resistance
to formality in the former that the latter debilitates.

Genealogies of Formality and Informality

Several factors encourage or dissuade artistic informality in modernism:
discourse, tradition, cultural and national priorities, among them. To sug-
gest attitudes to the informal from the century immediately before “High
Modernism,” let me offer a dual nineteenth-century intellectual genealogy,
which I will keep very brief because many others have discussed its ten-
sions amply and brilliantly (though not so much for those between formality
and informality).10 I will investigate, as the genealogy’s first part, discur-
sive demands for formality, propriety, and morality from Thomas Carlyle,
Matthew Arnold, and John Ruskin, which spur modernist restlessness with
their arguments against ornament, flourish, individualism, frivolity, fusion,
and easy or unrestricted association. I will contrast this set of prohibitions
with the other part of the genealogy: the legacies of Thomas Hardy, Walter
Pater, Oscar Wilde, and some versions of socialism, as they shape calls for
language and social attitudes to be less restrictive.
Noting the absence of attention to women in memoirs from “the last
century and a half,” Woolf writes in Three Guineas (1938) that, though in

page after page, volume after volume[,] you will find their brothers
and husbands—Sheridan at Devonshire House, Macaulay at Holland
House, Matthew Arnold at Lansdowne House, Carlyle even at Bath
House, the names of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot
do not occur...
(17–8)

The dominant Victorian men whom Woolf names in the list provoke diverse
responses from modernist writers. The chasm between Carlyle’s views on
hero worship and those of several modernists that we have already noted
widens with his exegeses on morality, its production, and its guidance.
Expositing on the role of language in democratic morality, Carlyle writes in
Past and Present, “Speech is the gaseous element out of which most kinds
of Practice and Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance,
12 Introduction
condense themselves, and take shape; as the one is, so will the other be”
(417; Vol. VI). To lead such moral performance in speech, first, a culture
needs, in the logic of Carlyle’s commentary on “captains of industry,” “a
noble Master” who employs moral thought as basis for self-control and
resistance to raw profit-seeking (334; Vol. XIII). For Carlyle, such a “noble
Master” would lead England out of crises of both labour relations and
morality through the specification of a right moral trajectory:

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his find-
ing out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon.
To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for; and then
by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing of
the same.
(264; Vol. XIII)

Emphasis on adherence to a “right” moral path recurs, though with a larger

emphasis on aesthetics, in John Ruskin’s The Two Paths.11 Seeing perfect
art as an expression of an artist’s self as a whole, Ruskin maps out the
course for perfect art to follow: “Thoroughly perfect art is that which pro-
ceeds from the heart, involves all the noble emotions;--associates with these
the head, yet as inferior to the heart; and the hand, yet as inferior to the
heart and head, and thus brings out the whole man” (54). The emphasis on
“wholeness” propels Ruskin to declare unity the goal of art—“for true art
is always and always will be one … There is but one right way of doing any
given thing required of an artist … only one complete and right way”—the
one specified above (56, italics Ruskin’s). Further, “not only is there but
one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them,
and that is seeing the whole of them, without any choice, or more intense
perception of one point than another, owing to our special idiosyncrasies”
(57, italics Ruskin’s). Invoking the Aristotelian principles of the Beautiful
(Order, Symmetry, and the Definite) as foundations for his views, Ruskin
tries to demonstrate the failings of too literal a view of these principles as
expressed in an eighth-century icon representing an angel (29–31). Ruskin
claims that the angel’s lack of a mouth, its excessively rounded eyes, and
stylized, sharpened hands reveal “the wilful closing of [the artist’s] eyes to
natural facts,” adding censoriously that “whenever people don’t look at
Nature, they always think that they can improve her” (31). Clearly, while
stating an opposition to a literal application of Order, Symmetry, and the
Definite, Ruskin produces an endorsement of it—his objections to the styli-
zation of the icon found themselves on these very categories.
For a few pages after his examination of the icon, Ruskin advocates the
importance of interpretation—“the great collateral necessity”—for the pres-
entation of the truth, but his restriction of interpretation and his priorities
are clear when he stresses repeatedly the formula, “Truth first—plan, or
design, founded thereon” (43, 46). Ruskin does not present any means of
 Introduction 13
accessing the truth, apart from a recognition of the “natural.” The Two
Paths has already warned that, if the artist departs from what Ruskin calls
“the stem of life” found in “natural form,” and prefers

the designing of ornamentation, either in the ignorant play of your

own fancy, as the Indian does, or according to received application of
heartless laws, as the modern European does … there is but one word
for you—Death—death of every healthy faculty, and of every noble
intelligence.
(46, 47)

Playful ornamentation translates to “pleasure first and truth afterwards, (or

not at all,) as with the Arabians and the Indians,” and is offset by “truth
first and pleasure afterwards, as with Angelico and all other great European
painters” (66). The text adds that the perception of nature “is never given
but under certain moral conditions” (70). These moral conditions are
reflected in contrasting forms of ornament. Ruskin identifies the contrast
to offer the artist two crucial choices, the “two paths” of his title: “[I]t is
required of you to produce conventional ornament, and you may approach
the task as the Hindoo does, and as the Arab did, without nature at all,”
or “as Sir Joshua [Reynolds] and Velasquez did, with, not the chance, but
the certainty, of approximating your disposition … to the disposition of …
great and good men” (70). While the former displays promiscuous changes
and a combination of forms, the latter redeems ornament from such friv-
olous association. Insisting on the alignment of one’s “disposition … to
the disposition of … great and good men,” Ruskin’s arguments extend the
Carlylesque goal of mimetic obedience to virtuous, heroic character.
Pointing to difference from such mimesis as a threat to culture, Matthew
Arnold’s main anxiety in his essay “Democracy” is one about modernity
itself as a force of individuality and change that operates at the expense of
the state. Arnold warns:

A … difficult change—to reduce the all-effacing prominence of the

State, to give a more prominent part to the individual—is imperiously
presenting itself [as] one irresistible force, which is gradually making its
way everywhere, removing old conditions and imposing new, altering
long-fixed habits, undermining venerable institutions, even modifying
national character: the modern spirit.
(25; italics Arnold’s)

Arnold’s later work makes clear his belief that the variety and transforma-
tive energy that the modern spirit emblematizes diverge from the best aspects
of our selves. Underscoring this belief as it states its “faith in the progress
of humanity toward perfection,” the conclusion of Culture and Anarchy
espouses a goal “to make the State more and more the expression … of our
14 Introduction
best self, which is not manifold and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious,
and ever-varying, but one and noble, and secure, and peaceful, and the same
for all mankind” (181).12 Arnold’s view of the homogenized formality in
“our best self” not only refuses change, but also circumscribes aesthetics:
Vulgarity is to be rejected not merely as a matter of aesthetics, but (here and
always) as a sign of inferior character.
Offering a potentially scandalous alternative to the models that Carlyle,
Ruskin, and Arnold seek, Walter Pater describes intense registration of
experience in a protean, ever-changing self as an aim in his most celebrated
statement from The Renaissance: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like
flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (236). The quantum of
experience for such ecstasy is not only evanescent but elusive, “gone while
we try to apprehend it[,] constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a
single sharp impression, with a sense in it,” and it is to this phenomenolog-
ical dwindling that “what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this
movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensa-
tions, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange,
perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (236). This metaphor of
identity’s textile manufacture in relation with the world—this continual
weaving and unweaving of personhood—asserts a radically informal view
of the self. In his preface to the book, Pater asserts that what is important
for a critical temperament “is not that the critic should possess a correct
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of tempera-
ment, the power of being deeply moved” (x). Dispensing with unwavering
absolutes as a goal for inquiry, he replaces it with the “power of being
deeply moved.” Movement is as much an emotional or sensorial mat-
ter as a physical one, here—and in modernism. This requires not merely
responsiveness, but an active seeking of difference. Instead of aspiring to
a Ruskinian-Carlylesque-Arnoldian mimetic fidelity or stabilization of the
self, Pater writes in the conclusion to The Renaissance, “What we have
to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new
impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel,
or of our own” (237). In other words, the ecstatic, gemlike burning of the
self is not only a response to the sensations of the world—it is not a passive
matter, but a process of curious “testing.” It requires both a welcome to
difference and critical consideration of it. The power of moving to the new
and testing it mutually intensifies the “power of being deeply moved.” At
the same time, this motile power is not an exercise in experiential exits or
“moving on”: Pater makes clear in his essay on Coleridge in Appreciations
that “[s]earching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on
its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that what
must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once” (65). Rather,
in the incessant engagements of the self and the world, our elastic relations
with the past gift us experiential storage, “the reserve of the elder genera-
tion exquisitely refined by the antagonism of the new” (65).
 Another Random Document on
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ferret up by the string. We must have a piece of strong light supple
cord, marked by a piece of red cloth drawn through the strands at
every yard, so that one can tell exactly how far in the ferret is; and it
is as well to have a second shorter cord for work in stiff heavy
ground, where the holes are never deep. Next, we must have two or
three dozen purse-nets, which are circular, about two feet in
diameter, with a string rove round the outside mesh fastened to a
peg. These are for covering over bolt holes to bag a rabbit when
driven out by the ferrets. The nets should be made of the very best
string, so as to be as light and fine as possible. The mesh should be
just large enough to allow a rabbit's head to pass through.
Like the postscript to a lady's letter, the chief item I have saved till
the last, and I fear it will be some time before the ordinary rabbit-
catcher will be able to afford it. I refer to long nets, which are used
for running round or across a piece of covert to catch the rabbits as
they are bustled about by the dogs. A rabbit-catcher in full swing
should have from eight hundred to a thousand yards of this, for with
a good long net he will often kill as many rabbits in a few hours as
he could do with the ferrets in a week.
I myself keep no special dog for rabbit-catching, chiefly because I
have a neighbour who will always let me have a cunning old lurcher
that he keeps, which is as good as gold, and as clever as a lawyer,
and desperately fond of a day with me and my dogs.
I have three male ferrets, real monsters, strong enough to trot down
a burrow and drag five or six yards of line after them with ease.
Having described all the tools, etc., necessary for work, I will now jot
down, as an exercise for you students, a nice easy day's rabbiting
that actually took place a few weeks ago—a sort of day that quite a
young beginner might work with success. There had been a sharp
rime frost in the night, which still hung about in shady spots at eight
o'clock in the morning, as Jack and I marched off with my dogs and
ferrets, accompanied by old Fly, the lurcher. By nine a.m. we began
working field hedge-rows and banks, where rabbits were pretty
plentiful and had been established for years in every description of
burrow. There had been a lot of partridge and other shooting going
on over this farm for the last month, and most of the rabbits had got
a dislike to sitting out in the open, and were under ground, so we
began at the burrows at once, the dogs driving every rabbit that was
sitting out in the hedge back to their burrows as we walked along.
We began work in a stiff clay bank far too hard for the rabbits to
make deep holes in, and here we got on fast. I took the ditch side—
in fact, I took the ditch itself—with a big ferret with a short line on,
and I ran it into each hole I came to. Jack on the other side looked
out for the bolt holes, and always laid down a little to one side, as
much as possible out of sight, but with a hand just on the bank over
the hole ready to catch a bolting rabbit. Fly and the other dogs took
charge of the other holes, and all kept as quiet as possible. In went
the ferret, slowly dragging the line after him till I count two yards
gone by the red marks on the line; then there is a halt for half a
minute, then a loud rumbling and the line is pulled fast through my
fingers. Jack moves quickly, and the next instant a rabbit is thrown a
little way out into the field with its neck broken. Jack says, "Ferret
out," then picks it up, draws the line through the hole, passes the
ferret over to me, and we go on to the next, having filled up the
entrance of the hole we have just worked. Hole after hole was
ferreted much in the same way. Sometimes Jack bagged the bolting
rabbit, sometimes the dogs, and now and then one bolted and got
into the hedge before it could be caught and went back, but it was
little use, for the dogs with Fly at their head were soon after it, and
in a few minutes Fly was sure to have it, and would retrieve it back
to Jack.
As we worked round a big field, we got into softer ground, a red
sand and soil mixed; and here the holes were much deeper and
often ran through the bank and out for yards under ground into the
next field. Here Jack and I changed places, Jack doing the ferreting,
and I going to his side with the garden spade. One, two, three, four,
five yards the ferret went and stopped, and all was quiet. I listen,
but not a sound. Jack pulls gently on the line and finds it tight, and
for a minute we wait, hoping a rabbit may bolt from the hole the
ferret went in at. But no such luck. I take the small ratting-spade,
and with the spike end feel into the ground at the foot of the bank,
and at once come upon the hole; this I open out and clear of earth,
and Jack, who has crept through the hedge, kneels down and finds
the line passing this hole in the direction of the field and going
downwards. At that moment there is a sound like very distant
thunder, and the line is pulled quickly four yards further into the
hole, and the marks show six yards are in. I go about this distance
out into the field, lie down and place my ear close to the ground. I
shift about in all directions listening intently, and at last hear a faint
thudding sound. I shift again a few inches in this direction, and lose
it; in that, and recover it; again a few inches, and the sound is
directly under my head, but pretty deep down. I take the big spade
and open out a hole a yard square, and dig down as far as I can
reach. I get into the hole and sink deeper. I have to enlarge it a foot
all round to get room, and then I dig down again till only my head
appears above ground when I stand up. Then I take the long spade,
and with that sink two more feet, and plump I come on the top of
the hole, and the ferret shoves a sand-covered head up and looks at
me. I reverse the long spade and catch the line with the hook and
pull the ferret up, and then calling Jack, I send him head first into
the well-like pit, holding on to one of his feet myself as I lie flat on
the ground to allow him to go deep enough. In a minute a dead
rabbit is taken out and two live ones, whose necks Jack breaks as he
hangs suspended, and then I pull him up with his plunder, and he
rights himself on the surface, very red in the face, very sandy,
spluttering and rubbing his eyes. Then the ferret is swung down
again by the line, it goes a little way into the hole and returns, and
so we know we have made a clean sweep. The big hole is filled up
and stamped down, and after filling a pipe and resting a few
minutes, on we go with our work.
On the high sandy part of the field we have several deep digs like
the above, with varying success, and we rejoice when we reach the
last side of the field and get into clay again, where holes are short
and most of the rabbits bolt at once. During all the day we only
stopped once for half-an-hour to get a snack of bread and cheese,
and by the time the cock partridges began to call their families
together for roost, and the teams in the next field to knock off
ploughing, we are all, man, boy, dogs and ferrets, fairly tired, and
are glad to tumble seventeen couple of rabbits into the keeper's cart
that has been sent out for them, and trudge off home ourselves.
Now for another day's sport that was quite different. No dogs with
us, only a bag of ready-muzzled ferrets, a bundle of purse nets and
a spade. Success will depend on perfect quiet, and even the patter
of the dogs' feet would spoil our sport, so they are at home for once,
and Jack and I are alone. It is one of those soft mild dull days that
now and then appear in mid-winter, a sort of day to gladden the
heart of foxhunters and doctors, and to make wiseacres shake their
heads and say "most unseasonable." It is a good day for Jack and
me, and we feel confident as we steal into a plantation of tall spruce
firs, placed so thick on the ground that beneath them is perpetual
twilight, and not a blade of grass or bramble to hide the thick carpet
of needle points. Softly we creep forward to a lot of burrows we
know of in the corner of the wood, and then I go forward alone and
spread a net loosely over every hole, firmly pegging it down by the
cord. This done I stand quietly down-wind of the holes, and Jack
comes and slips the six ferrets all into different holes, and then
crouches down on his knees. All is quiet; only the whisperings of the
tree-tops, the occasional chirp of a bird, or the rustle of a mouse in
the dead leaves. Five minutes pass, and then out dashes a rabbit
into a net, which draws up round it. Jack moves forward on tip-toe,
kills the rabbit and takes it out of the net, and covers the hole again.
While he is doing this, three more rabbits have bolted and got
netted, one has escaped, and a ferret has come out. The captured
ones are killed, the ferret sent into another hole, and for an hour
this work goes on, and during all the time neither of us have spoken,
for we know there is nothing that scares wild animals more than the
human voice, unless it is the jingle of metals, such as a bunch of
keys rattling. They dread the human voice because they have had
too much experience of it, and the rattle of metal because they have
not had experience enough of it, for it is a sound they have never
heard, and nothing like, in the quiet woods and fields. On the other
hand, animals pay but little attention to a whistle, for in one shape
or another they are constantly hearing it from their feathered
companions.
But to go back to our netting. An hour over, we pick up the ferrets as
they come out and bag them, and then I go off to some fresh holes
and spread the nets again, and we repeat the same performance;
and during the day we kill, without any digging or hard work, about
twenty-two couple of rabbits. In the above account I have written of
a day's sport that took place in a fir plantation in a little village in
Norfolk, where it would have been madness to work the ferrets
without muzzling them, for they would have been sure to kill some
rabbits in the holes and then have laid up; but I should mention that
I have killed many rabbits in the same way on the Cotswold Hills in
Gloucestershire, and I was much astonished when I first got there to
find men who thoroughly understood their business working their
ferrets under nets without muzzling them. I adopted the plan myself,
and have rarely had a ferret kill a rabbit underground. For some
reason that I could never find out, a Cotswold rabbit will always bolt
from a hole with a ferret in if it can. It is well known in Norfolk that
if a rabbit is run into a hole by dogs, you may ferret it if you like, but
it will never bolt, and it must be dug out. But in Gloucestershire I
have seen the same rabbit bolt out of a hole, get shot at, be run by
dogs, go to ground, and again bolt at once from a ferret. Few
professionals ever use a line on a ferret on the Cotswold, one reason
being that the burrows are nearly all in rocky ground, and there
would be danger of the line being caught in the numerous cracks;
besides it is not required, for a rabbit there is sure to bolt, and for
this reason it is twice as easy to kill rabbits in Gloucestershire as it is
in Norfolk, especially in the sandy or soft soil of the latter county.
Let me here beg of all my readers, especially students, never to
keep a poor rabbit alive in their hands a second. I don't suppose any
who read this book could be so unsportsmanlike and brutal as to
keep a rabbit alive to course and torture over again with dogs, or for
the fun of shooting at the poor little beast. Such ruffians should
never be allowed a day's sport on a gentleman's property. They are
only fit to go out mole-catching. No, directly you have a live rabbit in
your hand, take it by its hind legs with your right hand, and the head
with your left, with two fingers under its face; with these fingers
turn the head back, and give the rabbit a smart quick stretch, and in
an instant all its sufferings are over. Never hit it with your hand or a
stick behind the ears: first, because you are not quite sure to kill it
with the first blow; and secondly, if you do, half the blood in the
rabbit will settle in a great bruise at the spot where it was struck,
and make that portion unfit for table.
That is sufficient for this morning, and you may now turn to a little
lighter work with some algebra.
 CHAPTER VIII.
Fortunately I don't live by the sea. I say fortunately, because I look
upon the sea as a swindler, for it robs one of just half one's little
world and upsets all calculations by forcing one to live in a mean
semicircle. I actually know a rat-catcher who is stupid enough to live
in a village on the east coast, and half his time he and his dogs are
at home in idleness and are half starved, because the ever-restless
tiresome sea rolls about and disports itself over all that is east of the
village, so the poor man can only go rat-catching in one direction.
Now and then I go to the sea-side, but when I go there it is on
business—not in my Sunday clothes and with a "tripper's" return
ticket, but with my dogs, ferrets, nets (the long ones) and the boy
Jack; he and I dressed in our well-worn corduroys, gaiters, and
navvy boots; and instead of choosing a town to visit with Marine
Parade, Esplanades, Lodgings to let, Brass Bands, Nigger Minstrels
and spouting M.P.'s, we go to a little village unknown to "trippers,"
and put up at a small inn for a week or ten days. We sleep in a room
not unlike a hay-loft, and take our meals and rest in the common
kitchen, with its rattling latticed windows and sanded floor.
We go there twice each winter to kill rabbits on what are called the
"Denes," which are great, wide, down-like lands on the top of the
steep earth cliff, partially covered with the ever-flowering gorse, a
cover dear to rabbits and all sorts of game. We reach the inn in time
for an early dinner; and after we have housed the ferrets in a big
tub and the dogs in a warm dry shed with heaps of straw to sleep
on, Jack and I despatch our food and then start off to inspect the
field of our future operations. We have not far to go. First down the
street, past two or three dozen flint-pebble cottages; past the
church, with its square tower so high that it makes the really big
church look small in proportion; past the rectory; past the schools,
where some forty or fifty future fishermen and sailors have just
finished their tasks for the day and come rolling out, dressed all alike
in dark, sea-stained, canvas trousers and thick sailor jerseys; past
the low one-storied cottage where the old retired naval captain has
lived for many years, and then up a sandy lane between high
crumbling banks and out on to the open Denes. We take a path that
runs close along on the top of the cliff, mounting a steep hill as we
go till we reach a spot half a mile further on, where the sea cliff is
four hundred feet high and nearly perpendicular; and here among
the ruins of an old church, part of which has fallen with the slipping
cliff into the sea many years ago, Jack and I halt and take a look
round. We are on the highest spot within miles, and spread out in
front of us, as we face inland, are, first, the down-like hills, dotted
over with patches of gorse and with turf between as fine and soft as
a Persian carpet; then cultivated fields intersected by thick hedges;
and in the distance we could distinguish a clustering village here, a
homestead there, an old manor-house in its well-kept garden and
park-like grounds, and in all directions the square, solid, picturesque
towers of village churches peeping from among the trees, that
became thicker and thicker the further the eye travelled from the
sea. Close to our left, just under the shoulder of a hill which protects
it from the keen east wind off the sea, is a tiny village of some ten
cottages, all different, all neat and snug-looking, each in its own
garden. There is a stand of bee-hives in one, a honeysuckle-covered
porch to another, and, though it is mid-winter, there is a warm
home-like look about all. Then there is the one farm-house, well
kept and well cared for, but old and belonging to other days, as its
gables and low windows denote; and from our high hill we look over
the house into a garden and orchard beyond, both enclosed by grey
lichen-covered walls. On either side in front of the house are the
farm buildings, all, from the big barn to the row of pigsties, thatched
with long reeds, which give the whole a pleasant English home
appearance.
There are big yards filled with red and white cattle up to their middle
in straw, others full of horses or young calves; cocks and hens are
everywhere, ducks and geese swim in the big pond by the side of
the road, and turkeys, so big and plump they make one long for
Christmas, mob together in the yard, and the turkey-cocks "gobble-
gobble" at a boy who is infuriating them by whistling. A man crosses
the yard with two pails on a yoke, evidently going a-milking; and
another passes with a perfect hay-stack on his back, and a dozen
great heavy horses come out of the stable in Indian file and stump
off to the pond to drink. Beyond the farmstead, in a field on the
right of the road, is a double row of heaped up mangels and
swedes; and a little further on are a number of stacks, so neatly
built and thatched that it seems quite a pity they should soon be
pulled down and thrashed, but all showing signs of prosperity and
plenty.
Beyond this stands a tiny church, with reed-thatch roof. It is all,
church and tower, built of round flint stones as big as oranges,
cleverly split in two and the flat side facing outwards; and from the
dog-tooth Saxon arch over the door one knows it has seen many
generations pass away and find rest from the buffets and storms of
the world in the peaceful, carefully-tended "God's acre" that
surrounds it. If one passed down the red gravel churchyard path,
and on in front of the south door to the far corner, under the big
cedar, a small door would be found, which would lead through a
well-kept, old-fashioned garden to the Rectory: a good old
Elizabethan house, covered with thick creepers up to the very eaves,
the model of one of England's snug homes—homes that have turned
out the very best men the dear old land has produced, to fight,
struggle, conquer or die in all professions, in all parts of the world;
men who in such shelters learned to be honest and true, brave and
persevering, lions in courage, women in gentleness; who could face
hardships and poverty without a moan, and prosperity and riches
without swagger; and through all the difficulties of life thought of
the old home, and when success arrived, be they ever so far away,
packed up and came back to finish their days in just such another
home and such surroundings.
Turn round now, Jack; turn round and take a look at the restless sea
rolling its big waters on the smooth strip of sand there below on this
side; and on the other, Jack, far, far away over there in the south, on
the other side of the world, laving the roots of the palm and the
mangrove, beneath the burning rays of tropical suns; and away
round here, Jack, far in the north, dashing its storm-driven waves
against the face of frost-bound rocks and treacherous icebergs.
There on the dancing waters, with all sails set, chasing the lights
and shadows as they flit before it, sails a boat bound south to sunny
climes. There on the horizon, against wind and wave, steams a
collier, taking fuel to lands where the snow lies deep on the ground
for four months in the year; and right and left, outward bound or
coming home, are various white sails dotting the waters. But, Jack,
how about supper? I ordered eggs and bacon for supper, and those
chimney corners at the inn looked as if they might be snug and
warm to smoke a pipe in afterwards before turning in. Step on, Jack,
and have supper ready in half an hour, while I go round by the
Rectory and see if the two young gentlemen are at home. They are
the right sort, and as keen as Pepper after the rabbits, and they
always have half a dozen good terriers as fond of the sport as they
are.
At the Rectory I received a kindly welcome from Miss Madge
Ashfield, the rector's only daughter and the sister of the two lads I
came to enquire for; and I was told that they were not yet back
from school, but were expected in three days, and that only that
morning a letter came from them asking when I was likely to come
and work the Denes. I comforted Miss Madge, who at first feared
the pick of the sport might be over before her brothers arrived, by
telling her that for the next four days Jack and I should be busy
"doctoring" holes, and that during that time we could not "away
with" boys or dogs, as both were too noisy for the work.
Miss Madge took me round to the kennels to see some rough wire-
haired terriers, old friends; also three new ones, all supposed to be
wonders; and she told me she would arrange for her brothers to
bring one day five small beagles belonging to a friend.
Jack and I did our duty by the ham and eggs that night at the inn,
and the pipe in the old-fashioned chimney corner was very sweet;
and if the beds were a bit hard and knubbly, we did not keep awake
to think of them, for we had both been up since day-break. By eight
o'clock the next morning we had finished breakfast, given the dogs a
few minutes' run to stretch their legs, fed the ferrets that were not
wanted, and were on our way to the Denes, each with two strong
male ferrets, a spade, and game-bag with cold meat and bread in it.
We were on our way to "doctor" the burrows, and this is done by
running a muzzled ferret that has first been smeared with a little
spirits of tar down every hole, with a line on it. It is necessary to
keep very quiet, so as to get the rabbits to bolt. We don't want to kill
a single rabbit, but only to disturb hole after hole, bolt what rabbits
we can, and leave a nice sweet smell of tarred ferret behind us. No
time is lost. Jack goes one way and I another, and every hole is
visited till evening shades stop us; then back home to supper and
bed, and at it again in the morning; but on the second day we begin
by visiting each hole we ferreted the day before, stopping them tight
down with sods, and sticking a piece of white paper on the top of
such stopped holes. No fear of shutting in a rabbit, as the smell of
the tarred ferret will keep them out for days; and no fear of their
opening the stopping, as the paper will drive them away. For four
days this work goes on, and we are ready to wager there is not a
hole in the cliffs or Denes that is not doctored, and not a rabbit that
is not above ground.
It was Wednesday night when we had finished, and that evening the
two boys from the Rectory came down to the inn to see us and get
instructions for the morrow; but I was glad they did not stay long,
for we wanted to go to bed early, so as to get a good night and yet
be up betimes. By eight o'clock next morning, Jack and I were
already back from the Denes, after having run out one thousand
yards of long nets. The nets are in lengths of about one hundred
yards, and two feet six inches high, made of fine string, and each of
the top and bottom meshes knotted on to a cord that runs the entire
length. To set these nets, they are threaded on to a smooth stick,
four feet long, and the stick with the nets on is thrown over a man's
shoulder. The man walks off with the nets along the border of the
piece of ground to be enclosed, while another, after fixing the end of
the first net fast to a starting stick, follows behind. As the man with
the net proceeds, he lets the net slip slowly off the stick on his
shoulder, piece by piece; and, as it comes down, the man behind
picks up the top line, gives the net a shake, and twists the line round
the top of stakes previously placed in the ground about fifty yards
apart, taking care as he goes that the bottom of the net lies for a
few inches on the ground. In this way squares of gorse of about two
hundred yards can be entirely enclosed, and every rabbit inside
them surrounded like sheep inside a fold.
Our breakfast over, we were soon out again with all our dogs (except
old Chance, who had been left at home on account of her age, and
also on account of her trick of always liking to go up to the carrier's
each night to sleep), and we had also two real good lurchers. At the
foot of the Denes we met the boys from the Rectory, with a friend
about their own age, and the curate of the next parish with a
business-like ash stick under his arm; and among them they had
mustered a pack of ten terriers, some of which wanted to begin
work by a fight with my dogs; but it takes two to make a quarrel,
and my dogs knew better than to waste their strength in fighting
when there was a day's work in front of them.
In a few minutes we were at the first piece of netted gorse—a real
tearer, close, compact and a mass of thorns; but what dogs or boys
care for gorse thorns when rabbits are on foot? So it is, "Over you
go, boys!" "Hie in, dogs! Roust them out there!" and the old dogs
spring the nets and are at work in a minute, while the young ones
blunder and struggle in the nets, and have to be lifted over. The
curate, Jack and I, and the man who drove the cart with the nets,
and who will carry off the dead rabbits, stand at the nets and take
out and kill the rabbits that get caught; and for the first hour we
have as much as we can do, and work our hardest. Many rabbits do
get through the nets, and others go back, and these latter it is
difficult to get into the nets a second time, and they are killed by the
dogs in the thick gorse. Yap! yap! yap! "Hie in, good dogs! hie in,
young ones! Ah! back there! back! no going over the nets! Would
you? Look here! hie there! in you go!" Yap! yap! yap! all scurry, rush
and bustle; and the Rectory boys and their friend are all over the
square at once, and in ten minutes so tingle from innumerable pricks
from the gorse that they are benumbed and feel them no more. "Go,
Fly, go!" and a big hare dashes out, with Fly after it, and both jump
the net and make for another clump of gorse; but Fly has never
been beaten since she was a puppy, and soon returns with the hare
in her mouth. "Hie in, dogs! hie in!" There are more yet, and we are
bound to make a clean sweep; and so the work goes on.
First one patch, and then another, till lunch-time, which said lunch,
according to a long-standing custom, comes up in a cart from the
Rectory; but after snatching a hurried bit, the man and I have to
bustle away to shift the nets, a work that keeps us hard at it for an
hour and more; but long before we have done, the boys, parson and
dogs are at it again in one of the first patches we have surrounded,
and it is night and the moon is up before we have finished and
picked up the nets. We find on counting the bag that we have two
hundred and seventy rabbits, and feel content with our day's work.
On Friday and Saturday the same work, and when we turned
homewards on this last night, it was as much as man, boys or dogs
could do to drag themselves along; but we had killed six hundred
and fifty rabbits in the three days and were well content.
 CHAPTER IX.
Sunday was to us all a real day of rest, and we enjoyed every
minute of it, and for once listened to a very long sermon without the
fidgets. The Rectory boys came up for a chat in the afternoon, so we
let the dogs out and went down to the beach and strolled quietly
about, neither dogs nor humans indulging in anything like play—all
were too stiff and sore to think of it.
We were all out again early on Monday morning, but without nets
and taking only sticks; and we spent a short day, with a long lunch,
looking up outlying rabbits in the hedges of the farm at the foot of
the Denes; and here the two lurchers, who during the days at the
nets had taken it easy and refused to face the gorse, had the chief
of the work, for directly a rabbit was started by the other dogs, it
made straight off across the open for the gorse on the Denes, and
the lurchers were the only dogs fast enough to catch them. We
finally had to give up work because the dogs of all sorts were too
tired to move, and also because the weather, that had been fine and
calm all the previous week, began to break, and before we reached
shelter there was half a gale sending big green waves thundering on
to the beach and carrying the salt spray far inland.
That night, after Jack was in bed and asleep, I put on my hat and
went out, called by the noise of the waters. I joined a group of
weather-beaten hard-featured men dressed in thick blue jerseys and
"sou-wester" hats, who stood with their hands tucked deep into their
trouser pockets, watching the sea from behind the shelter of a boat
stranded high up on the beach. I got a civil word of greeting as I
came up, and then we all watched in silence, for by this time the
"half gale" had become a storm, and it was only by shouting we
could have made each other hear. It was a wild weird scene, awe-
inspiring, but intensely attractive—at least I found it so; but then
such scenes did not often come before me, and I daresay my
companions, who were well used to being out on such a night, only
felt thankful they were safe on shore, and thought with anxiety of
those of their friends and neighbours who were out battling with the
storm. The moon when I reached the beach was nearly at the full
and high up in the heavens, but it shed a fitful light, as each few
seconds dark clouds and veils of mist flew across its face. One
moment the sea lay before us a dark black mass, only marked along
the beach by a broad strip of breaking, foam-crested waves; and the
next it was a dancing, tossing, roaring sheet of ever-changing liquid
silver; or far away we would see the spray like pearls rising high in
the air before the storm, and at our feet the waves curled up like
huge furious monsters, dashing at the sands and shingle as if bent
on destruction, and then with a swirl sliding back, a mass of foam,
to meet and join the next wave, and with its help again come on to
the attack.
Over and over again I fancied I could hear the shrieks and groans of
people in distress, and I turned for confirmation of my fancies to the
faces of my companions; but all remained unmoved, but bore the
quiet determined look that assured me that, had any unfortunate
beings called for help from the midst of those wild waters, at the risk
of those men's lives it would unhesitatingly have been given. Once
for a moment, when a thin mist swept before the moon and made
the light on the waters appear more like day than night, I clearly
saw on the horizon the upper part of a ship's masts, with some sails
bent to their yards, and all heeled over as if the ship were then
about to founder, and I gave a loud exclamation; but an old sailor
put his hand on my shoulder and called in my ear, "All right, master,
all right! We have watched her for a quarter of an hour trying to
make the point of the sands yonder, and she is now past them and
has an open sea. She is as safe as you are now, thank God; but it
was a near shave, and we thought she and all in her were gone."
Often since then in my dreams I have seen that wind-tossed sea,
and heard the roar of the waters and the screams of the storm, and
seen those masts and sails heeling over, and have awoke with a start
and dread fear in my heart.
I had been tired when I came in from work, and I had a snug warm
bed waiting for me, and moreover I reasoned that watching a storm
in the dead of night was no part of a rat-catcher's duty; but I was so
fascinated I could not tear myself away, and I stood with my
companions behind the boat till long after midnight. Then two other
figures dressed like my companions joined us, and it was only when
they spoke that I recognised one as the parson of the parish, and
the other as the young curate who had helped us with the rabbits.
Both asked a few questions of the sailors, who seemed eager to give
them information; and then the rector, turning to me, said: "You will
be perished by the cold if you stand here longer. Come with me, and
I will show you a picture of a different sort, but yet one that I think
will interest you." I readily accepted and followed my friend, who,
though far from a young man, bore the buffeting of the storm
manfully; and he led me up through the village street, and then
turning down a short steep lane brought me to a little cove that was
partly sheltered by a spit of rock that jutted out into the sea. There,
such as it was, was the harbour of the village, and by the fitful light
I could see some dozen fishing boats drawn up high on the beach
above the force of the waves; and beyond, a cluster of low, one-
storied cottages and sheds, with small boats, spars, timbers,
windlasses, etc., all denoting the home of fishermen. From this cove,
early that morning, two boats had sailed with their nets for the
fishing grounds out beyond the sands, and it was for these my
friends behind the boat were patiently watching, and it was to say a
few words to cheer and comfort the wives and families of these men
that the old rector had now come.
From a latticed window just in front of us a bright lamp shed its rays
over the cove, and the rector took me straight to the door of this
house, and having knocked and been told to come in, he lifted the
latch and ushered me inside. The room was like hundreds of others
along that coast, the homes of the toilers of the deep, and bore
evident signs of being made by men more used to ships than stone
or brick buildings. It was a good large room, very low, with heavy
rafters overhead, which, with the planks of which the walls were
constructed, had doubtless been taken from boats and ships that
had served their time on the sea. The open fireplace at the end, with
its wide chimney, was the only part of the building not made of old
ship timbers and planks, and there was a strong smell of tar from
these and from sundry coils of dark rope that were stowed away in a
far corner. The long table down the middle of the room was of
mahogany and had seen better days in a captain's cabin. The
benches round the walls had served as seats on some big ship's
deck; and there were swinging lamps and racks hung overhead from
the rafters, with rudders, boat-hook, snatch-block, belaying pins,
and various things I did not know the use of; but all were neatly
arranged. There was a large arm-chair made out of a barrel set
ready by the side of the hearth, on which were spread clean flannel
clothes to warm and air, in readiness for the home-coming of the
wet and tired husband.
In front of the fire, attending to it and to three or four pots and
kettles that simmered on the hearth, stood a woman about thirty
years of age—just an ordinary fisherman's wife, strong and well
shaped, without beauty of feature, but bright and intelligent looking;
and when a smile lit up her face, it shed such a kindly ray that one
felt that the husband in the little fishing boat on the storm-tossed
deep might have his eyes fixed on the lantern burning in the
window, but it would be the light of the wife's smile that kept his
hand steady on the helm and guided the boat, and made him long
to round the point and come to anchor.
On the other side of the hearth was another arm-chair, also made
out of a barrel, but much smaller; and in this, packed tightly and
snugly round with cushions, half-sat, half-reclined a boy about ten
years of age; but, alas! a pair of crutches leaning in the corner
beside him at once told a sad tale. I know the points and beauties of
all sorts of dogs, and always admire them, but I am not much of a
hand at the good points and beauties of men and women, and as for
boys, it is rare I see anything but mischief written in their faces; but
somehow I could not take my eyes off the boy in the chair. I
suppose because it was so different to an other young face I had
ever seen, and so different to what one might expect to find amid
the surroundings of a fisherman's cottage.
It was a dark, delicate, oval face, like a girl's, with finely cut
features, and a complexion as fair as the petals of an apple blossom;
but it was his great brown eyes and long eyelashes, black as night,
that held the attention, together with a look of deep patient
suffering, mingled with gentleness and love that lit all up, and filled
even the heart of a rough old rat-catcher like me with a feeling of
deep pity and an intense desire to protect and befriend a small
creature who looked too fragile, too beautiful, and too good for this
old work-a-day world of ours, and as if he were only tarrying for a
short while before going to his eternal home, where his features will
be beautified by perfect love, and will lose the look of suffering and
pain.
The rector, taking off his "sou'-wester" as he entered, turned to the
woman with a cheery voice, and said, "Well, Mary, how are you and
the boy?—how are you, my man? I happened to be passing" (just as
if it were quite a common thing for a parson to be out on the loose
at one a.m. on a winter's night), "and I thought I would just call in
to say that the men at the boats tell me that the bark of this gale is
far worse than its bite, and that it is a fair, honest, rattling gale that
such good sailors as your husband care nothing for, and that we may
expect the boats in with the daylight, so you may keep the pots
boiling. But why isn't that youngster snug in bed and asleep? Oh! he
can't sleep when the wind howls, and Jack is away! Why, my boy,
Jack will laugh at you when he comes home, and say he don't want
such big, tired-looking eyes watching for him! Well, it will be
morning soon, and, please God, Jack will be here, and will have
popped you into bed himself before most of the world are up and
about." At this Mary smiled; and the little boy, with a low laugh,
said: "Jack knows Mary and I are waiting for him. Jack says he can
often see us, and all we are doing, when he is out at sea in a raging
storm, and the night is ever so dark; and he'd feel bad, Jack would,
if I was not up to see him eat his supper; and besides, Mary could
not sit here alone and listen to the wind and sea, and I am never
tired and sleepy when waiting for Jack. Besides, Jack says he must
tell someone all he has done and seen while he gets his supper, and
Mary is too busy after the nets and things, so I sit here, and Jack
tells me of such wonderful things: it is just lovely to hear him."
The rector would not sit down, and soon hurried me off to another
cottage, much such another as the first; but instead of Mary and the
boy, we found a great, tall, gaunt old woman, sitting up before the
fire, waiting for her two grandsons, who were away in the same boat
with Jack; but to the rector's cheery, hopeful words, the woman
answered with a bitter, sharp, complaining tongue: "I don't want no
stop-at-home idle chaps to tell me what a storm is. Danger! who
says there's danger? Danger with a little puff of wind like this? Not
but what both of those boys will be washed ashore one day as their
grandfather and father were. It's in the blood, and trying for a lone
woman. Drat the boys! I told them not to go off with Jack. I could
see plain for days that it was coming on to blow; but oh, no! they
know better than me, who have lived to lose their father in such a
storm as this, and to see his boat with my own eyes go to pieces on
the Point as she came in, and not a man saved, and me left with
them boys to keep. God only knows how I did it, and now they are
that masterful they won't pay no attention to me." And then, as a
hurricane of wind dashed at the door and windows and sent the
smoke from the wood fire far out into the room, the poor old thing
started and turned to the night outside with a look of terror; and, as
the storm rushed on, and then there was a lull, she threw her apron
over her head and sobbed for fear and deep anxiety for her
grandsons.
The rector comforted her with gentle words and praise of her pluck
and nerves; and as he and I returned to the beach, he told me that
the old woman had once been the prettiest girl for many miles
round, that when her boys were far too young to help her the father
had been drowned by the upsetting of his boat on the Point, and
from that day she had worked and toiled, mending nets and selling
fish in fair weather and foul, often weary and half-starved, but
succeeding in the end to keep her old cottage over her head, and to
bring her boys up respectably and turn them out two of the smartest
fishermen along the coast.
As we left the cottage the first tender light of the morning was
paling the eastern sky far out to sea, and hastening on to the Point,
we could just make out a distant sail appearing now and then out of
the departing darkness of the night, and before half an hour was
over the rector declared it to be Jack's boat coming in fast before
the wind. All the village was astir in a minute, old men and young
women and children hurrying to the cove and making ready for the
home-coming; and in a few minutes the boat, with Jack holding the
helm and the old woman's boys sitting crouched low down, dashed
past the Point, turned sharp into the cove, and down in a moment
fell the sail and the anchor-chain rattled out of the bows. There was
no cheering or noisy welcome or rejoicing, for such scenes were the
daily incidents in the life of the village; but everyone lent a helping
hand, and in a few minutes Jack and his men were on shore. The
old grandmother was there, but took no notice of her grandsons,
who marched off to the cottage laden with oars, etc., where the old
woman had just preceded them to put out the breakfast.
The rector and I turned to go home, and as I passed the cottage
where Jack lived I glanced in and saw him standing on the hearth,
tall, massive, weather-beaten and rugged, with the lame boy high
up in his arms looking hard in his face, and both man and child had
such a happy contented smile on their faces that it did me good to
see, and I think may have rejoiced even the angels above.
When parting from me at the inn door, the rector said that if I liked
to step up to the rectory that evening after my supper he would find
me a pipe of tobacco, and tell me all that was known of the history
of the little boy who had awakened such an interest in me, for, he
added, "it is a very curious story."
 CHAPTER X.
At eight o'clock, having fed my dogs and ferrets and left my boy Jack
chatting in the harness-room with the rector's old coachman, I found
myself in a snug arm-chair, pipe in mouth, my feet on the fender,
and the rector sitting opposite me in his study, he also enjoying an
after-dinner pipe; and after a chat over the events of the day and of
the storm of the previous night, the rector began the history of the
poor lame boy at the cottage thus—
"I dare say you remember that about eight years ago the Irish
question was giving the authorities much trouble and anxiety owing
to the active turn it had then taken. Hideous murders were of daily
occurrence in that unfortunate country. Dynamite was being used in
London to destroy our public buildings, and many of our statesmen
were being tracked by paid assassins. Strict orders had been issued
by the authorities to watch all our ports to prevent the landing from
America of arms and infernal machines, and both the police and
Customs officers were on the alert; and yet, in spite of all,
bloodthirsty, cowardly dynamiters and assassins succeeded in
sneaking into the country, and every now and then perpetrated
some hateful outrage. Well, it was during this time that one
November morning a queer-looking yacht-like vessel appeared in the
offing, and for two days kept standing about. During the day-time it
was well out in the offing, but once or twice at night it was noticed
by the coastguard and sailors to have come close in to land, and
altogether its movements were so mysterious that our suspicions
were fully aroused, and the officer of the coastguard telegraphed to
the captain of the gunboat stationed at Brockmouth to put him on
the alert.
"For some days after this nothing was seen of the yacht, and our
suspicions were lulled, and life in our quiet little village had settled
down to its usual routine, when early one stormy morning the
strange vessel was again seen close off the land, and a boat manned
by six men put off for the little harbour; and just as it rounded the
Point and got into smooth water, a dog-cart, that we all recognised
as one let out for hire in a town ten miles inland, drove down to the
beach. Beside the driver sat a tall, thin, dark man, but the few
people on the beach had only time to observe this and that he had
the dress and appearance of a gentleman, when he sprang from the
cart and hurried to where the boat lay, and without hesitating a
moment or speaking to anyone he waded out through the low surf
to the boat, which at once left the harbour and made the best of its
way to the yacht, which as soon as all were on board hoisted all sail
and was soon out of sight, driven along by a storm that became in
the course of the day as fierce a one as that of last night. There was
much talk on the beach among the fishermen and in the village
among us all as to what the yacht could be and who the stranger
was; and we gathered from the driver of the dog-cart, who had put
up his horse at the inn to rest, that he had been called by the porter
at the railway station to drive the gentleman over; but that he had
not heard his name, or what business brought him here. The driver,
who was a sharp old fellow, said the gentleman had chatted with
him as he came along, but kept pressing him to drive faster and
faster, and gave him five shillings above his fare to use his best
speed, and he added: 'I don't know who he is, or what his business
may be, but I know one thing—he is an Irishman. I can tell it by his
tongue, and by his queer-looking blue eyes and dark hair.'
"Four and twenty hours passed, and during that time many people, I
among the number, did not go to bed, for the storm which had
sprung up with the departing yacht had blown itself into half a
hurricane, and there were fishing boats out, which made us all
anxious. As we did last night, or rather this morning, I went round to
a few of the fishermen's houses where there were anxious wives and
mothers waiting for the absent, and chatted with and cheered them,
and I was leaving the two cottages that I daresay you noticed close
under the rock towards the Point when the first streaks of morning
began to appear in the east. I love to see the day break at any time,
but I especially like to watch it over a stormy angry sea; and
therefore sheltering myself a little behind a boulder, I stood gazing
for a while, when presently, like a thing of life, came plunging and
driving from the very gates of the morning the same yacht that had
so puzzled us. On and on it came, close-hauled to the wind, straight
for the narrow rock-bound jaws of the cove; and I saw at a glance
that, if it kept its course, it must strike on a group of rocks some
half-mile out at sea; and, parson as I am, I knew, should she strike
them, no human aid could save the lives of those on board.
"I hardly know what I did, except that I took off my coat and waved
it frantically, and mounted the highest pinnacle on the rocky point to
make myself seen by the fated crew; but though at last I could
actually distinguish two men at the wheel holding the vessel close to
the wind, yet they took no notice, and came on and on, leaping
waves mountains high one minute, and lost to sight the next in the
trough of the seas. Scores of fishermen soon joined me, and even
their wives followed and crouched near, behind the rocks; and so
fully was the ship's danger realized, that from time to time a deep
groan, half of despair, half prayer, went up from all. There was but
one hope—could the yacht be kept close enough to the wind to lead
those steering her to believe they could make the entrance of the
harbour? or would she be carried far enough to windward to make
this impossible, and so force those in charge to alter her course to
avoid the stiff cliffs beyond? Ah, no! We saw as we watched that she
was too good a vessel to fall off to leeward, and those handling her
too good sailors to allow her to do so, for she flew over the waves
like a beautiful bird for the entrance of the harbour, and the sunken
rocks were in her direct line!
"Suddenly as we watched, with every sense strained to the utmost,
and our eyes rivetted on the doomed ship, we heard away out to sea
the boom of a big gun, and then another, and presently we saw
emerging from the fast diminishing darkness a low, long steamer. At
first we thought it was a ship also in deep distress, making signals;
but the old sailors soon saw this was not so, and declared it was a
gunboat firing at the yacht in the hope of driving her on to the rock-
bound coast, and also to attract the attention of the coastguard, so
that, should she reach the harbour, those on board might be
prevented from escaping the hands of justice. It was a cruel service
for British sailors to be employed on, however necessary, and hard
to witness. Man hunting man to his death, when the wind and waves
already held open the portals of eternity before him, and little short
of a miracle could avert his doom!
"A few minutes, a few hundred yards, and the yacht is on the rocks!
Gallantly she glides along the side of that green wave and dashes
the foam from her crest ere she plunges deep into the sea. A
monster wave rolls fast upon her as if to swallow her quivering form.
High, high she rises, till half her length is in the air over the crest of
the wave, and then down she sinks; then the crash comes. Waves
dash over her, her masts fall, her boats are wrenched from her sides,
and the next minute we see her, a tangled mass of wreck and
cordage, firmly embedded on the pitiless rocks. Don't suppose our
fishermen had been quietly watching this and doing nothing to help.
From the first, preparations had been made. Our friend Jack, and a
score of other active young men, had shoved off the only boat on
the beach that had the faintest hope of living in a storm like this,
and had been waiting in it close to the harbour mouth some minutes
before the yacht struck. But so small was the chance of that frail
boat living in such a sea, that many of the most experienced of the
sailors made signals to prevent the men starting off to meet what
they thought was certain death. Others thought it might be done,
and waved contrary signals; and it was then that one saw what sort
of women our sailors' wives are, for though many standing there
with us had near and dear ones in that boat, and were suffering
tortures of anxiety, not a word was spoken, but all was left for the
men to do as they thought right.
"As the yacht struck, a deep, wailing shout went up from all on land,
and those in the boat knew what had happened, and the next
moment we saw the boat plunge into the green waves at the
harbour mouth. For a moment it seemed to stagger and quail, and
then, impelled by those hands and muscles of iron, it was driven
forward through the blinding spray into the angry sea beyond. Shall
I ever forget how we watched that boat, now mounted high on the
top of a wave, now for moments lost to sight, the men all straining
at their oars to the utmost, and always creeping forward yard by
yard? All this time, we on the Point could see, with increasing fears,
that the hope of the yacht holding together till reached by the
rescuers was but a faint one. Each monster wave that rolled in lifted
it from the rocks and left it to fall back with an irresistible force midst
spray and foam, that constantly wholly hid it from our sight; and
even before the boat started, portions of the wreck were being
tossed about on the sea, making its passage even more precarious.
At one time a group of human beings was seen on the deck clinging
to some cordage; but when the next wave passed, most of them
had disappeared, and we knew they had perished before our eyes. It
was difficult to distinguish objects midst the turmoil, but it soon was
whispered among us that some one or more persons were crouching
behind the bulwarks, probably lashed there for safety, and from an
occasional flutter of a red scarf or garment, we feared there was an
unfortunate woman among them; and once, as the waves receded
from the deck, we distinctly saw a man rise up from the group and
look for a moment towards the approaching boat, and then sink
again beside his companions, just as the incoming wave swept high
over the poor shelter the stout bulwark afforded.
"If the yacht could only hold together a few minutes longer! But no!
once more it rises from its bed like some agonised, dying monster,
and then as it falls back it parts in two, and half of it is a drifting
mass of planks and timber, washing forward as if to meet the boat
and destroy it. A portion yet remained fixed on the rock, and now
and then we could still see the group crouching behind the bulwark.
On and on fought the boat, now a little out of the direct line to avoid
the wreckage, till it was close behind the wreck and partially
sheltered by the rampart it formed against the sea; but at that
moment all that remained of it was again lifted high in the air and
dashed forward; and when the wave had passed by, there was only
the frail boat with its brave crew to be seen on the surface. We see
it pause for a moment, and then the oars all dip together, and the
boat dashes forward. Someone leans over the bows, and there is a
moment's struggle; but the mist and foam prevent our distinguishing
clearly what is going on. After a while they evidently find there is
nothing further that can be done; the boat is put before the waves
and comes dashing back towards land.
"All on the Point hurried down to the entrance of the harbour; and
many of the men, with coils of rope in their hands, stood ready to
give assistance. As each wave rolled under the boat, it flew through
the water, and then sank back again hidden from our sight; but
nearer and nearer it came on, till at last on the crest of a wave it
darted sharp round the Point, and lay tossing in comparatively calm
water. Steadily its crew rowed it up the little harbour, and as it
approached the beach scores of ready hands seized it and ran it high
up on to dry land, and a cheer rang out above the roar of the wind
to welcome those snatched from the jaws of death. But this was not
responded to by the men in the boat. They all looked stern and
anxious; and then we saw that Jack, who was crouched in the bows,
was supporting in his arms the slight form of a fair young girl, with
long, soft, tangled hair falling around her and forming a frame to the
most beautiful saint-like face my eyes had ever seen. Her lips were
parted in a smile, and her eyes looked down on a small boy about
two years old, who was bound in her arms by a red scarf. At first I
thought she was fainting or falling asleep, but the next moment—
merciful Heavens!—I saw that the back of her sweet young head
was battered in and bleeding, and that she was already beyond the
storms of life and the cruel raging of the destroying elements.
"Hard horny hands of rough women tenderly and deftly unwound
the scarf from off the child; and Jack's wife, Mary, pressing him to
her bosom, hastened with him to her cottage, while the fair dead
form was carried to a fisherman's house close by, and a few days
later was laid in its quiet grave in the old churchyard, within sound
of the ruthless sea that had so cruelly beaten the young life out of it.
"You may easily find the grave, for the fishermen out of their deep
pity had a plain cross put over it, with just the words 'Jack's mother'
and the date of her death carved upon it. To this day, and I fancy for
ever, the only name she will be known by is 'Jack's mother,' for all
connected with that ill-fated yacht remains a mystery. Not a living
creature escaped, except that frail little child. Many bodies were
recovered during the next few days, and among them the remains of
the man who had arrived the previous day in the dog-cart; but
neither on any of the bodies, nor among the wreckage that came
ashore, was anything found to lead to the identification of the yacht
or its owners; and though the account of the disaster appeared in all
the papers and was the talk of the county, yet no living soul has ever
come forward to claim connection with the child or with any of those
drowned.
"It was thought at the time that the owner of the yacht was one of
those desperate ruffians of Irish extraction that have from time to
time arrived here from America, and that when he so hastily joined
the vessel he was in fear of detection and was about to sail for
America. Anyhow the yacht was sighted by the gunboat sent to look
after it, and chased and driven through the storm back to our little
harbour, it being doubtless the intention of the fugitive to attempt
his escape by land if he could once reach the shore. How miserably
it ended you now know; but you don't know quite all, for I have not
told you that, on reaching their cottage, Jack's wife found that the
little one breathed. I have told you of the storm, and I have told you
of the wreck; but words would fail to tell of all the love and care and
attention that was bestowed for weeks—aye! for years, up to this
day—on the little one. Only the recording angel can note such
things, and only the God of love can reward them. Not that either
Jack or his wife think of rewards either from earth or in heaven, for
their love is wholly unselfish and all-satisfying; and were only the
boy well and strong, I am sure that in all these realms there could
not be found a more perfectly happy trio than Jack the fisherman,
little Jack, and his adopted mother. Unfortunately it was discovered
that in some way the child's back had been injured in the storm. For
months he lay between life and death, at last to recover partially
only in health, and without the use of his poor legs.
"Many friends have come forward with help, and great London
doctors have seen and attended the boy. Till lately they gave little
hope, but, thank God, there has been during the past year a slow
but steady improvement, and they now think in time the boy may
grow strong in health, but there is no hope of his ever walking
without his crutches.
"Fortunately nature has bestowed many gifts on the poor child that
compensate him somewhat for his loss—first, an intensely loving,
unselfish nature; and secondly, a perfect voice and passionate love
of music. Already he is carried each Sunday to church by his father,
and his voice in the choir is celebrated for many miles round, and
has so impressed the organist at the cathedral at Marshford that he
either comes himself, or sends one of his pupils, to give the boy a
lesson once a week, and there is not a better violinist within the
bounds of the county than our little Jack is. His father is so proud of
the boy's gifts that I have known him, when wind-bound in a
harbour down the coast twenty miles away, walk over the whole
distance on a Sunday morning and back at night rather than miss
carrying the little fellow to church and hearing him sing there. But it
is eleven o'clock, and we were up all last night. What, no grog? Well,
good night! Come and see me when you can, and come and watch
the sea with me in another storm, and we will see if I can't rake up
another story of the doings of the rough heroes of our
neighbourhood who go down to the sea in ships. Good night, good
night!"
And so one of the pleasantest evenings I had spent for a long while
was over.
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