The Joy of Story-Telling

by JOHN MASEFIELD

Now that I am coming to an end, I wish to try to set down what matters have been helpful to me in the work of my choice that has filled my days. That work has been the finding, framing and telling of stories, in verse and prose, according to the tale and the power within me. I have done, and have enjoyed, much other work of different kinds, yet always with the love (and the hope) of story-telling deep within me. as the work beyond all other work, to which my nature called.

One of the very greatest of all the world’s storytellers, (and, indeed, the instinct of much of the world) ranks story-telling low in the scale of human endeavor. Some in the past have thought highly ol it; some parts of the world still rank it high, and hold it in honor. To myself. as it has been the law ol my being, I have followed it, and have given to it whatever effort I could giw and have received for it such helps as have fallen to me from Fortune. There have been difficulties in the way: there have been opposers, thwarters, mockers and dampers, plenty ol all four. Against these, there have come helps and helpers, some of which may be mentioned later.

I have always been willing to take risks in order to do the work of story-telling, or even to have the chance of doing it. Some of the risks that I have taken have been great, and very nearly fatal to me. These and others have put me sometimes at variance with people very well in their way, who felt that their way should be mine. Those who were thus at variance are long since dead. If I ever come to their far-scattered graves, I will lay flowers upon them.

If the way has been hard, it has been worth it: if the difficulties made my life bitter to me, such was my portion: destiny has her justice, men say: certainly. to believe this best suits man’s life.

I was born in or near the little country-town of Eedbury, in Herefordshire. I am in some doubt as to the house in which I was born, and have been told that there is some doubt of the day : but in or near Ledbury, and on, or nearly on, the 1st of June, 1878, should suffice.

From my earliest infancy, certain imaginings or fantasies were in my mind with the reality of the memories of experience. I do not know what these were, but have tried to account for them. At first (and for twenty years and more) I supposed that they were memories of a life that I had lived on earth, in another body, perhaps not long before. At other times, I have wondered if they were not half-memories of picture-books shown to me in infancy, mixed with half-imaginings of my own, based upon what I myself had seen from the various windows through which I had looked upon the world. These, as it chanced, were mostly windows looking westward, in both cases well up above river valleys. In both cases the river flowed from the north, and in both valleys the western limits were distant hills.

Copyright 1951, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

In my imaginings or fantasies, I saw or know as precise memory, a vast valley, mueh-forested, but wiih no indicated compass points, such as I should insist on now. In this valley, a dangerous swift turbulent eddying river raged, between low and rocky shores: the width of the stream was a full hundred yards. Rather to the right, that is, upstream from my usual position when I saw this river, the vast body of water thundered towards me down a cataract from which mists of spray rose. A wet, stony track led along the river-shore on my side of it, towards the foot of the fall. If (as sometimes happened) I chose to go along this track, I found the river-banks rising to rocky cliffs of about 100 feet high, with forest on the tops. Near the fall, the track led into caverns that trended upwards into the rock, to inhabited caves-of different sizes where (in complete safety) men with scanty clothing worked by fires. The glow of the fires, the flickering of the shadows on the rock, and the never ceasing roar of the falling cataract were features of this place. I knew also, that it was dangerous to go into the land above the fall, because there I might be bunted by people who used dogs, or by dogs without the people.

This river and cataract were of a size and turbulence unknown here: the land and forest were tropical.

Such was the scene of the first stories that I told myself. Those stories, like the scene, seemed real to me, so real, that even now I wonder why they should have occurred and recurred. During my travels, I have hoped to conic upon the scene, much as it used to be, and to say “I have been here liefore"'; but it has not happened. At Niagara, the river is much too broad, and the fall not high enough.

I have not seen the Zambesi Falls, nor any other very splendid cataract.

2

As the Herefordshire scene had its part in making me, and profound influence upon my work, I feel that 1 must attempt some brief description of it, adding only this, that to a child’s mind beauty and romance go together with delight, and terror may lurk in many a place where the adult sees no danger.

The Ledburx scene is varied, rich and very beautiful, in a quiet English way. It has fair pasture, feeding a kind of cattle that has gone all over the cattle-raising world. It has matchless orchards for pears and apples, from which the natives make much intoxicating liquor: it has yards for famous hops that flavor other liquor. In many parishes near-by, the place-name “Le Vineyard,” shows that the Norman settlers tried to establish grapes. Many houses there still grow a small white grape in the open air. on vines trained to southern walls: these sometimes bear plentiful fruit. The local sheep were once famous; but perhaps less so when I was young. The cornland is good: the gardens most beautiful in all fair flowers and fruit. There is very much woodland, growing most of the useful trees. There are hills along the eastern side of the town, rising to about 400 feet, and keeping awax the cast wind, Eour or five miles from the town are the nearer Malvern Hills rising to 1400 feet. They are not mountains, but they have a few rocks and old quarries to give something of the effect of crags, Careless climbers max break their bones on these with much ease. The rivers so far as I knew them are deceptive. In the summer, they dwindle down to charming waters, with enough fish to make the King-fishers constant neslers in their banks, and the otter a frequent visitor: in rain, they fill swiftly into raging red torrents that must in the bridgeless past have stopped all traffic and drowned many beasts and men.

The countryside has main fair half-timbered buildings, usually old, but often looking older than they are. “These are made with strong timber frames, filled in with rubble, lath and plaster, brick, and so forth. The timber frames, or purls of them, are usuallx seen from without, and are sometimes decorated with carvings. I sunlly. the fillings (in my childhood) were whiteor cream-washed, and the isible timbers painted black or dark brown. The txpe of building is sometimes called “black and white.” Ledbury had main old houses built in this way, as it still has, most of them dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of these in the main street have been re-faced or otherwise altered, but the main structures are old. The town seems old. Where brick is used, it is of a lively red from the local clay.

The churches are sometimes of great splendor. Manx of them have Norman work in their naves and western doors. Some of them have bell-towers built apart from the body of the church. The bells of many of these churches are exquisite even now, after re-castings and other horrors. In my childhood, the men of the parishes took very great pride in their bells: and the Sunday and feast-day ringings gave great delight. It was the custom then (a very good custom) to use the bells to ring a mechanical chime every third hour of the day and night. Such beauty scattered abroad went far, and never failed to enchant the hearer. In many parishes Curfow was still rung at eight o’clock in the evenings, and still called Curfew, though few knew way.

We considered ourselxes descendants of the Silures. We had amongst us a tall. slow, long-headed race, almost a race apart, that cherished age-old quarrels with the Welsh, and with ihe somewhat different and therefore perhaps hateful people, on the other side of the Malverns and the Severn. We had few or no precise ancestral memories or legends, except that we were for “the King,”never for “Oliver, and that one of “Oliver’s men had murdered the Vicar at Tarrington (Mr. Pralph): that was still remembered, perhaps because he was a very old and very good man. Every year these natives got into trouble with the Welsh til the fairs near the Border. As a little child, I was told by one of them what I ought to say to infuriate a Welshman, and what the Welshman would probably say first, to infuriate me. So far, these pleasantries have not been exchanged.

Even in my childhood I felt that these tall, slow long-headed men were and could only be the product of that soil and countryside: and that they belonged to the soil, in all its fertility and tenacity. Some of them, when they spoke, were like the earth speaking. I cannot remember any of them with any momory or story of “Boney “ and the French Wars. Perhaps only a few ages of ihe world impress such men, brought up in such a scene, and working on the land.

To myself, as a little child, it was a land of beauty and romance. The fields glowed with abundance: even when bare they looked like mighty flesh. There had been a battle in the little town, and a murder at the garden’s end. Four ancient camps were within short walks of my home: nearer still, was a spring so impregnated with lime that all twigs, leaves, and birds’-nests placed in its water swiftly seemed to be turned to fragile fossil. Every April filled the meadows with daffodils: even autumn gave to each farm the strong reek of “pomace. From every hill we could look over miles of orchard, pasture and woodland amid which red farms stood out with white pointed tops of oasthouses; and usually a flight of pigeons. The pigeons were of many kinds and colors: all farmers and many other people kept them then. their flights were among the many beauties of that countryside. Sometimes a great flight of two hundred birds would rise high into the air, and tumble, or half tumble, there, changing to jewels in the light.

One charming mark of the countryside was the broad slow speech, with the ancient use of Thou, I hee, and Be, “ I be; thou beest (or bist): her (or a) be. “Do thee now, tm dear,”and so forth.

3

FROM the first, I delighted in stories, that I contrived to wheedle out of my nurses. Of these early stories, I liked best the chain-stories:

and the famous poem of The House that Jack Built, as illustrated by Randolph Caldecott. This last masterpiece and his Three Jovial Huntsmen, John Gilpin and the Elegy on the Heath of a Mad Dog were all known by heart long before I could read, though I learned to read easily, and early.

Having learned to read, I read with much joy a poem about Dick Whittington and his Cat; a poem about Sir Francis Drake bring a cannon-ball into a church, to warn his lady not to suppose him dead; a poem about the detection of a crime; and a rhymed version, very well told, of the story from the Gesta Romanorum, The Man Born to be King. I also found for mysell, and greatly enjoyed, Southed s spirited version of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury.

It is difficult for me to describe the ecstatic bliss of my earliest childhood. All that I looked upon was beautiful, and known by me to be beautiful, but also known by me to be, as it were, only the shadow of something much more beautiful, very, very near, and almost to he reached, where there was nothing but beauty itself in ecstasy, undying, inexhaustible.

This feeling is probably present in most children: it was strong in me. I was sure that a greater life was near us: in dreams I sometimes seemed to enter a pari of it, and woke with rapture and longing. Then, on one wonderful day, when I was a little more than five years old, as I stood looking north, over a clump of honeysuckle in flower, I entered that greater life; and that life ealtered into me with a delight that I can never forget. I found suddenly that I could imagine imaginary beings complete in every detail, with every faculty and possession, and that these imaginations did what I wished for my delight, with an incredible perfection, in a brightness not of t his world.

Something, I know not what, in the very reality of the joy, told me that this could not be talked about, it was too intense for that: and, indeed, even if I had had a confidant (which I had not) ihe sympathy might have been strained by the tallness of the tale. But from that wonderful hour. I had a life for myself, better than any life of men; and for some years I lived in that life, and could enter it at. will, or almost at will, unknown to any body.

As soon as I could read, I read or looked at all the reading mailer within my reach. My favoritehooks were stories, especially those of Hans Andersen, and next to these, Alice in Wonderland: but f took kindly to verse of many different kinds.

Sometimes I have wondered what were the earliest poems to delight me. One of the earliest must have been The Dying Swan, by Tennyson. Then I came to know many of the charming short poems of William Allinglmm: and almost all the poelrv of Longfellow, especially Hiawatha, Evangeline, and the lyrics and translations. 1 knew much of his work by heart, from often reading, before I was six.

I had read most of Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends by that time, and greatly enjoyed the seven or eighl that I could understand. Three grisly ones enchanted me. Then I knew most of the work of Thomas Hood, and loved best The Haunted House, though that was not to be read late in the day, nor thought of (if possible) at bed time.

I liked all these poems much as I liked new bread, tulips, the chicory flower, salt, white clover, speedwell, moon-daisies and golden flag-flowers. They were all good things: but I had a feeling that The Dying Swan touched a higher level than any. I had read and re-read Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso by this time, and grasped perhaps one line in twenty; and those that I grasped delighted me. The rest of Milton I left alone. Shakespeare I knew only from an illustration to Twelfth Night. I was not to know the power and the rapture of poetry till long afterwards.

1 heard certain stories of real life from my elders. One was about a boy who would go into a field where a bull was loose. The bull was later seen running round and round the field, quite mad, with bits of boy on his horns. I suspect that the tale had been a little touched up by the moralist who lurks in every elder, but it helped to make me very cautious about bulls: that was a cattle country, where bulls were many, and death from a bull not rare.

Then there was the tale of a boy (whom I had seen) who would eat nuts, though somebody had lold him he mustn’t. (I cannot remember why.) He was a grown lad of fifteen or so, a man in my eyes, but he did eat nuts; a bit of nutshell stuck in his gullet; “they couldn’t get it out, and he died, raving.”

These tales gave me some qualms, and yet, they were stories, thev were works of art, wilh beginnings, middles and ends; moreover, they were based on events. That countryside was not barren of terrible events, some of which were told to me, as examples, or overheard bv me while elders gossiped.

The desire for stories grew stronger in me as I grew older. Then the blissful childhood ended Maidenly, and after a while a different life began for me in another home.

4

WE WENT to live at the other end of the town in my grandfather’s old home. Most of his books and other possessions were there, and though I had been in the house once or twice in each week since I could remember, it was very strange to go to live there, and be free to explore all over the house and the big straggly garden, with the shrubberies and abundant fruits.

Perhaps most children can be happy, or can amuse themselves, if left alone. Some of the explorations there were happy enough.

The house was much bigger than the house where we had hitherto lived. Some of the house may have been Tudor, possibly: most of the older part was of the seventeenth century: there were fine old bannisters on the stairs. Modern wings had been built out to the’ east and west of the older building, in a cheerful red brick, then much overgrown with roses, wistaria and jasmine. The upper windows of all the older part of the house were of a thick pale green glass, in diamond panes. From these windows I could see across the roofs of the little town to the wooded hills on which I had looked of old.

Two things were of great importance to me in this new home. Just beyond the big straggly shrubbery that hedged the garden, was the churchyard, in which the church stood, with the bell-tower, topped by its spire and weathercock, just beyond the northern aisle. The other thing was the collection of books.

At a verv early age, I had been sent on Sunday afternoons to the Children’s Service in a Chapel of Ease, (so called) built of galvanized iron. Now, I was excused that discipline, and taken, instead to Morning Service in the church. It was a change for the worse, from one point of view: it lasled longer: indeed, one could never be sure how long it would last. Sometimes the sermon would be long: then, on some Sundays, one or even two, long drearinesses were included: and even a third thing called an anlhem. The attractions were infrequent and could not be counted on. These wore of two kinds, a Church Parade, with band, bv the Volunteer Company, and the coming of birds into the church, usually swallows, but sometimes a cheery jackdaw. However, it is not always May. As the Spanish proverb says: “There are more days than sausages.”’There were more services than attractions.

But apart from the services, cheered or left dreary, there were things about the church that moved me to the marrow. First, there were the bells, a very lovely peal, that delighted me beyond words. At every third hour they chimed Bishop Hebcr’s hymn, “Holy, holy, holy,”to Dykes’s Nicaea, with effects of enchantment. Then, the church itself amazed me. Even I could see that it was an unusual building, of a kind that no man then living either would or could build. In odd places about the church there were carvings done bv the hand of power. I wondered who had made them and why. An instinct told me that they were the work of genius, seen, as perfect in the mind, and then stricken oul of the stone with it cunning skilled hand, seemingly for the fun of the thing and with ease. There came into my heart the knowledge that something very great, a power of hand and soul, had gone out of the world.

’Then, why was the church so big? Who had said “Let us have this vast building, with the tow or outside it. and the spire above the tower? Who had quarried the stone, who had planned the work and done it and paid for it? I thought of the inner ecstasy in which I could perceive stories, and felt that the church must have been perceived in some such mood, but then it had been brought out of the mood, into hewn stone, with tiles, glass and elaborately carven wood by a myriad of men working for years together.

The churchyard was just over our garden fence: the church about twenty yards beyond the fence. Now and again, with luck, and a happy jerk of the wrist, I could fling a flat pebble from a cleft-stick right onto the church roof: and for years used to see a tile the corner of which one such pebble had cracked off. This tile has long since been replaced (and discreetly paid for). A little blue gate led into the churchyard from the garden: three of the church doors were usually open. I took to wandering about both places, and came to know them very well indeed. The church has some notable work in the earlier Gothic styles: this impressed me profoundly.

I was told that the church had been a Collegiate Church, served by a College of Priests. I did not know what the College had done, nor how it had done it, but the idea of a religious community there, getting up at midnight to sing, never failed to thrill me. Then, sometimes, the tower-door was open, and T could creep up the winding stair, past little openings full of jackdaws nests, to the place of bells, where, if the hour and the chimes struck, the tower trembled as I did. Then, I could climb out onto the leads, and look upward at the spire, to the golden Bird of Paradise forty yards above me, or downward upon the chimney pots of the town.

The churchyard gave me peculiar pleasure. I was perhaps one of the very first (or last) to go from gravestone to gravestone reading with delight the epitaphs in verse, i believe I examined every stone in the churchyard. The tombs were all somewhat old, for the dead were then laid in a cemetery elsewhere; and no one had been buried there for years.

I liked much of the hopeful poetry on the stones: some of it I remember to this day, as skillful verse and touched with feeling. I have wondered who wrote it. One sad little tombstone (in prose) affected me strangely, and moves me still whenever I think of it.

An old ruined ash-tree then stood in the churchyard. That, too, was a thrilling thing, because it held a nest of hornets every summer. It was believed in the countryside that three hornet-stings would kill a man. This may not be the fact: but the voung reflected that if it were the fact a much smaller dose might kill them. This gave the hornets a terrible fascination: their beauty and power increased this to awe.

Soon after I first explored the church, in my excitement of thought about the past, I began to tell myself a story about two of the priests in the College. This went on in my mind for years, and was at one time partly written down.

The books in my new home, as I have said, were of much importance to me. Suddenly I found myself free to examine a great many books that I had hardly glanced at. In one room downstairs there were many bound volumes of monthly magazines. In another room were other bound volumes dealing mostly with anliquities. In another there were hundreds of books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Upstairs, in what was called the School Room, were many more that had once instructed or amused my grandfather’s children. Some of the shelves in each room were out of my reach even when I stood on a chair: those could wait: plenty were in easy range; and I was ever a greedy reader.

It must not be thought that the books were the only delight in that old house. They were the delight that made a great difference to me, as a storyteller. At the time, other things in the house seemed as important: for one thing a cupboard in a wall, in which we soon discovered an inner-cupboard, leading further into the wall, but locked, and the key not there. As we were still in the Romantic Movement, we supposed that this might be, or might once have been, the Secret Room. Perhaps, even now, we thought, some skeleton might be sitting there, just as he had died, either by murder, or by slow starvation when the panel failed to work or the faithful friend could no longer bring him food, He might have a paper before him, written in his blood, saying: “I give up hope, now. The Roundheads must have killed Humphrey. The King’s jewels that His Majesty trusted to me are buried in the Little Croft, seven feet from the Holy Spring.” That was the kind of thing one might expect; we therefore asked that the door might be opened, and the secrets revealed. We were told that that was all nonsense, that the door had been opened, and that there was nothing there at all but a little recess too dark to be of use to anyone. This settled the matter of exploration, but did not make the place any easier to pass after dark. Indeed, after dark, all the old part of the house was very full of terrors.

In the room allotted to us as a nursery, there was a wall-cupboard, kept locked; it was said to contain some things belonging to an uncle, who would present ly come for I hem. He did not come for some time.

5

STORIES of some kind were going on in my head whenever I was alone; three or four main stories (none about myself) going from incident to incident and climate to climate. I could at all times imagine varieties of landscape, not then known to me, deserts, forests, crags, volcanoes, snowy peaks, cataracts and sand-storms, cities, camps and harbors with the peoples suited to the scenes. Now in my readings in the books of the new home, I began to know what the past had looked like, according to the artists of old time, and something of what had stirred men in the world only a few years before. Four stories delighted me very much in my early searchings among the shelves. One was about a betting man, who was (providentially) ruined by backing a loser, and then look to geology, (which was a science I myself affected, in that land full of fossils). Another was about two gipsies, man and woman, who were hanged in public for some crime. What they had done I cannot now remember, but I know that I thought it monstrous that they should be hanged for it. The fear of the gallows was always being driven into children, then. If a child retorted “I don’t care,”the elder then always replied: “Don’t Care came to the gallows"; which was supposed to end the discussion.

In the lives of many then still living. Don’t Care and Do Care had come to the gallows for very very little. The fear of the gallows was real, and the memory of the gibbet still clear. I well remember the stump of the upright of a gibbet, under which people hardier than myself used to grub for bits of old highwayman. This tale of what the gallows meant caused me a dreadful joy.

The third tale was Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton, that most children enjoy, in spite of the mocks of elders. The fourth was Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year, that gave me, for the first time, a pleasure in balance and arrangement, in the clever use of suspense and the startling use of surprise.

All these four, however delightful, were as nothing whatever to a discovery that I made in a bound volume of Chambers’s Journal; that gave me for the first time an ecstasy in writing. I cannot date the discovery very closely. I know that it took place when I was about eight years old, on a fine Sunday evening in the summer or early aututmn.

Though I was compelled to go to church on Sunday mornings, I was not yet allowed to go to the Evening Service; I stayed at home, while the elders went. This gave me the house pretty much to myself, with a certain priy iloge of going (o bet I a little later than usual, and also permission to read some illustrated archaeological books not allowed on week-days.

There was always a satisfaction about Sunday evenings. The “lin — lan lone" of the three-bell chime (used to call people to Evening Service) always inclined children to sentiment. Then, the elders were out of the way, and one knew that in a few hours it would be heavenly Monday again. Children did not love the Victorian Sunday.

On this Sunday, a memorable day for me, I took out a bound volume of Chambers’s Journal, and settled into a chair to read. From the window near me I noted the beauty of the evening, and the elders loitering up the path on their way to church.

On two or three occasions, I had tried to read the serial stories in bound magazines, (I had tried thus a Trollope novel) but I had never had any luck with them, except that in the last page of one there had been a sentimental end that seemed to me to be beautiful. On this wonderful Sunday, I found the opening of a serial story called The War Trail, by Captain Mayne Reid. I did not know what a war trail might be; I looked at the beginning: and then suddenly found that I was in a world of beauty and romance, a world that I understood from of old, whore the landscape led on and on, and men rode with comrades seeking, and villainy tried to thwart, and savagery tried to scalp, but how could either triumph over comrades and beauty? I was in an extraordinary world that would be mine forever. I had not then seen the agave and the maguey nor the sweet land of Anahuae: but at once I saw them and knew them and became a wanderer in them, as I have been, ever since.

6

THE story caught me up into the heart of romance: it opened a new world and revealed the Red Indian. When I read that book for the first time, some Indians still went upon the war trail, and sometimes lifted scalps. How could any boy, then, fail to be stirred by the thought of the dusky creature, smeared with war-paint, stealing noiselessly through grass, creeping disguised as a boar, a bear, or a deer, or riding naked upon a mustang, uttering terrible war-cries, taking the scalp or the bride of the paleface, and then galloping over the prairie, setting fire to it as he passed, to the fastness where none could follow or read the sign?

Under that first incentive, I rummaged all the bound magazines in the house for tales or articles about Red Indians. I found a good many, among them three or four more serials by Mayne Reid, all of which I read, but none with quite the rapture that The War Trail gave me: joys so intense cannot well be repeated. I was to know no such joy from books for ten years, when, suddenly, in an American town, I became aware of poetry.

Soon alter I read The War Trad, someone, who had been in the Far West, showed me what he said was an Indian Brave’s robe. It had on its selvage certain tufts of hair that I thought might be scalps. They were nothing of the kind, but when I touched them, I was sure that they were scalps, for they were moist, and I had lately read a Red Indian weatherproverb: “When the scalps are moist on the door of the scalp-house, it will rain.

The Red Indian reading gave me a zest for hidingplaces, or “fastnesses,”where I could be hidden and unsuspected. There were many such in the shrubberies. I had two in the house that wore never known to be haunts of mine. One, the bigger of the two, I called “the tepee"; the other, being snugger, I called “the wigwam.”There was a third, that I called “the arroyo,”but in some game of hide-andseek I was caught in the arroyo and never went there again. It had not the Indian requirement, a way of swift escape.

I soon found that the Christmas Numbers of most of the bound magazines contained Ghost Stories, some of them very exciting. Any tale even resembling a ghost story I read with zest and full belief: at any rate till nearly sunset. Until the sun declined I had no qualms about them: as the eastern half of the house darkened, I began always to wish that I had not been quile so rash: by the time the lights were lit, I was in a state of terror, which continued. more or less, till I fell asleep. In the morning, with fresh courage and foils revived I sought again in the inexhaustible mines.

Most of nn grandfather’s books were in a strange dark study, packed on its western wall with shelves of old books, and having on the south wall presses of bound modern illustrated magazines. No one ever interrupted my reading there.

Long afterwards, I learned that my grandfather had written a little book, and had known, as a young man, one who sometimes met Lamb, Hazlitt, and John Keats. I like to think that perhaps on some occasion my grandfather went with this man to one or other of these three.

Most of the books on the west wall of the study were of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most of those within easy reach were small volumes bound in calf: the novels of Fielding, the Fables of Gay, many of the works of Goldsmith, and strange old books about the wonders of the world, showing the said wonders in copper engravings that my grandfather in childhood had enlivened with water color. Among the bigger books that I rend often, but never read through, was a copy of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. There were some spirited contemporaneous accounts of the Peninsular War, and some shocking old tales of Arctic exploration and disaster to whalers. There was a dreadful account of the finding of a derelict in the far Arctic, All hands on board had been frozen to death; one of them was found on his knees, dead in a vain attempt to light the cabin stove. As I was searching for stories with moving incident, I welcomed this; and one other, shockingly illustrated, of a ship assailed by a giant squid, who held the ship fast with three arms, and picked off the crew with the others.

7

IT WAS thought that I was too much given to reading. Surely anything that takes a child’s mind from the horrors of daily life to horrors that are over, or only imagined, eannol be altogether wrong. In my ease, stories were necessary: to me, most other studies seemed tame or foolish, or a part of the madness of grown-ups.

During the season of discovery among books, my uncle came to unlock his cupboard in the nursery and remove from it the few things that he wished to take. I was present, when he removed these, saying that ihe rest was Only rubbish and might be burned.

“The rest" were piles of old unbound magazines that had been there for years.

Those elders who were present, fastened upon these magazines, pulled some of the upper ones onto a table, and examined them, with expressions of contempt for things so old-fashioned. While they were busy, I looked deeper into the piles, and saw, deep down, well-covered, the serial issues of a story with the most frightful illustrations.

“Here, undoubtedly.”I thought, “is a treasure, and now. if I am not very careful, it will be seen and removed.

I knew. from the habits of elders, that if they saw even one of the illustrations, the whole collection would be confiscated at once, as “quite unsuitable for children,”or “degrading": but I was never quite sure that the elders would not read the things themselves. I judged that I had better leave the things covered, and hope for luck; so I did this; and joined the elders at the table, where they were mocking at what seemed to me a very promising illustration of a ghostly light. My heart beat, while they mocked and examined: but they were not interested in what they saw, nor even moved to look further. Presently, they left the room.

As soon as my tense ears told me that it was safe, I had all those numbers of the dreadful serial out ol the cupboard, and away to my topee, that I well knew to be the safest place in the house.

It was in a spare bod-room, whore the bed lay in a kind of alcove. The bed had a valance that reached to the floor. Any little box who got under the bed was hidden by the valance: if he only straightened the edge of the valance after hiding, and then kept still, the chances of his being looked for or caught there were remote. The hiding-place was improved by having three ways of escape to one who could be swift and silent. It had another good point: the fool of the bed was towards a window, so that in dux time a boy could see to read while hidden underneath it. Daytime was my only reading time: and this serial story was not designed for evening reading: far from it. There was another good point about the tepee. I had loosened the carpet under the bod, and turned back a flap of it, so ns to make a hiding-place within the hiding-place. Under the flap of carpet I covered the pile of serials, and then returned to see what other treasures might still be in the cupboard.

The cupboard contained old magazines, the titles of which I did not notice and cannot now know. I suppose that they dated from between 1860 and 1875. I only saw them for half an hour, on that long distant morning, yet something of them has been in my memory ever since.

Being an eager, swift, gluttonous reader, with not much time, I worked into a serial story that was something as follows: —

The chief characters, a man and a woman, came, I know not how, to an American town that had been deserted. No one was there: the houses had been left with their contents. These were of a rough kind, yet enough to give necessaries and even comforts to the new-comers. This image, of a town without inhabitants, moved my imagination for many years. Alas, during and after the first war, I was to see the reality, too often.

Reading on, I learned, as The two visitors learned, that the town bad sprung up round an oil-well, a kind of pond or big container of oil. Then, the oil dried up, or ceased to flow in sufficient quantity, and the inhabitants went off elsewhere with what they could easily carry.

Hurriedly reading on, skipping whole issues, and not understanding much of what I read, I discovered that the oil-well started to run again, in fact, filled up, and somehow the old inhabitants heard of this and began to come back, to crowd back, with others, so that the two visitors were (in some way) puzzled or incommoded, or given the problem, whether it was desirable that. . . . Alas, I do not know what

the motives were, but as far as I could make out, they went out to the oil-well, or lake, or pond, or cistern, lit a torch, and flung it as it blazed (perhaps the author had a hint of this from Tennyson’s Death of Arthur) far out into the oil, so that the oil caught fire. That was as far as I read (or could understand), and whether they were burned by the oil, lynched by the citizens, or lived happily ever afterwards, I cannot know; for the elders returned and my reading ended.

I have never met anyone who knew the story: I have never been able to find it: though I searched in some likely files many years ago in the British Museum. I read it with romantic excitement on a day of discovery, and had only the one brief reading, for the elders removed the old magazines, and doubtless kindled fires with them as long as they lasted. However, I had saved the grisly treasure: that was safe in my lair, and with that I chilled my young blood for many a dreadful hour, in many days to come.

How this grisly tale bad ever come to be in the cupboard I cannot imagine. It had lain there, perhaps, since my uncle’s boyhood. No doubt it bad been a forbidden joy to him. as it would have been to me. As writing, it was deplorable stuff. compared with the tale of the oil-well, but for terrifying horror. at the age of eight, it was all, and more than all, the heart’s desire.

I will not say what it was. Each issue was shocking: and each was beaded by a coarse and vigorous illustration of a horror beyond my dreams, beyond my nightmares.

1 enjoyed creeping to my tepee and tasting these horrors. I could not always manage this, nor could 1 face that story on all days, nor at all times of day. I could not even go into that room after dusk, from dread of what lay below the bed; and no tale made me suffer more from terror, in that old house, so full of strange noises, and so near the churchyard. It fed mv childish fanlasv with it s shapes of dread, till suddenly someone discovered and removed it. I know not who discovered it: probably one of the maids, who max have thought that it had lain there for years. Simple discretion bade me not to inquire who had found it. I can only hope that the finder did not read it. It cannot have been found by “authority,” for if if bad been, I should have been called to account, and my habit of tepee-going would have been bowsed down for a full due.

8

I HAVE often tried to remember what I then wished to do with my life. From the first, I had a love of stories and a wish to write them, yet thinking it all over caretully, I am sure that I bad an even stronger wish to paint them in colors, as the glorious Randolph Caldecott bad done. With great labor, having no aptitude for drawing, I painied the story of a day in a horse’s life. He was a thrilling horse, who won a steeple-chase and the Derby, and took part in a battle, all on the same day. I later painied another story in a series of water-color panels.

I longed also to be able to cut stories, or lively incidents, in stone, like those that I saw in the church.

Putting discreet questions, here and there, I learned that painting and carving were only done by people with talent “for that kind of thing,” and that that kind of thing was not at all the kind of thing: it might be all right for the people with the talent: but not a thing to be encouraged in anyone: and those who had the talent were, too often, men of excess, free thinkers, wild livers, “as was only too well-known.”

It was not well-known to me, nor have I found it so in life; art needs a steady head and hand. Greatly daring, I asked if I might be allowed to learn to draw. As Mark Twain writes of a famous occasion: “this warn’t good judgment.”

I cannot remember what other crafts or professions I wished to follow. Writing must always have been the chief of these: but this was always made to seem hopeless to me; indeed worse than hopeless, wicked; first, because it was agreed that I had no talent: next, for its too cerlain effect for evil upon human character. I was already far too much given to idle reading, so I was assured, when other boys would be doing other things. For writing, as for drawing, the outlook was not rosy. and soon became blacker. However, I hope to write about the blackness elsewhere: my concern here is with the influences that helped me to be a story-maker. The next happy influence was this:

In September, 1891, I was sent as a new chum to be trained on board H.M.S. Company in the Mersey.

There in the second Hall of my training I was placed in the Class of the Seamanship-Instructor, Wallace Blair. The Seamanship Classes, or Instructions, were held below decks several tunes a week in afternoons when we were not at sail or spar drill. They varied, as the student progressed. Those in their second half year had already learned the elemental knots and whippings: they now began upon more complex workings, made of the strands of ropes unlaid, and then re-laid into knots, often of great beauty. They also did such thing as eye-and short-splices, block-stropping, and the turning-in of dead-eyes.

Wallace Blair, who taught me these things, was one of the last of the Merchant Service Seamen to have served an apprenticeship of seven years and passed an examination as Able Seaman. He had been a smart seaman with a fondness for sailing in clipper-ships, some of them, in their day. very famous. He was proud of this, yet critical of the clipper-ships, as being usually “very wet forward, being sharp and mercilessly driven, and never profitable as carriers because of the fineness of their line’s. As a boatswain in one of these, he had been heard (so it was said) shout ing orders in Liverpool Docks; and had so deeply impressed his hearers, sea-captains on the Conway’s Committee, that they had tempted him to join the Conway as an Instructor. This was the story told and believed by us: it may well be true. Certainly, one who knew him long before I did has borne witness to his wonderful voice. Another (also much senior to me) has told me that when he shouted an order on the Conway he could be plainly heard on Bock Ferry slip. However, when I knew him, the voire had lost all carrying power.

His chief occupation on board was the care of the ship’s lamps: and this was no small task, for the ship was then lighted by oil lamps, mostly swinging from the beams; in the darker monlhs a great number had to burn all night long on all three decks. Besides t his, he had ea re of the ship’s oil, was of ten aloft with us in drills, and away with in charge, with some of our boat’s crews. All this, in addition to the Instruction of the second-half men.

Some, judging by his name, have claimed that he was a Scot : perhaps he was of Scotch parent s settled in Liverpool. He was much liked by all on board. He was known In us ns “Wally, and, more privately, as “Wally with the Stiff Neck.

He told us, that he himself as an apprentice had learned the ropes, their leads, their uses, and the knots, bends and splices in daily exercise, by being deprived of supper till the particular allotted task was known or done. This method (which has much to recommend it) was not practiced on board the Contway, where each man was expected to have too much zeal to need pressure.

Wally was critical of the teaching method in use among us. He had once persuaded a former Captain of the ship to allow his Class to be taught by rigging models. He claimed that this had been a great success, that the men had worked as never before, had made most wonderful models, (all of a simple single-masted kind, such as cutters, ancient or modern) some of which had been shown in Liverpool and had won praise there. There is a proverb among sailors, “other mates, other ways of long-splicing.” The ship’s Captain left: the new Captain did not care for the little, niggling work of model-rigging, but wished the men to learn what they would so soon have to practice in the rigging of sea-going ships.

9

WALLY was a good Instructor to anyone who wished to learn. He was, moreover, a most gifted story-teller, a yarn-spinner of the old dog-watch kind, famous for it throughout the ship, and in all the seas of the world where Old Conways sailed. He had been at sea (perhaps for thirty years) in famous ships, at a time of the world when sailors were a race apart, away from land for months at a rime, and from home, perhaps, for years. In those days, sailors had to invent their amusements or go without. They either sang, or yarned. As they knew fill le of life ashore, they yarned usually of life at sea, which ihey knew thoroughly. In thirty years, Wally had known a good deal and had heard a great deal more, some of it of the nature of folklore, most of it of stirring event, as told by men who had seen or borne a hand in what was told. The tales were not only interesting, they were amazing.

We all knew that Wally had this talent, and at every Class one or of her of us tried to persuade him to indulge it. He was much too honest and shrewd to be caught in that way: we were there to learn knots and splices, and these we had to learn.

But, often and often, some ship tlowing or sailing or coming to an anchor near us would light up some memory, and then an extraordinary tale would follow, of things wellor ill-done, of ships fated or lucky in the fortune of the sea. I have only once met a sailor with a greater range of interesting fable who could tell a story better by word of mouth.

In one Class, something reminded him of a thing that he had seen. He told us this story. He was in a dipper-ship, coming home, running free, under a press of sail, with studding-sails out, making a passage, and no dry spot forward of the gangway. Suddenly a hand fell overboard Irom the weather main-rigging, and was seen by the Caplain as the ship tore past him. The Captain instantly flung overboard his white hat to mark the sea (it was before the days of white life-buoys); he then rushed to the wheel, hove the helm hard down and flung the ship up into the wind. She went up into the wind with a bang, as you may imagine, and while she WAS there (or going) the Captain dropped his quarterboat and picked up man and hat.

So far. id! Mils very fine but one cannot do ihut kind of ihing at that spend without muking whal R. H. Dana calls “a complete HURRAH’S NEST.” Wally WAS very precise* about the cost of (he deed. He said lliat in split sails, sprung booms, snapped ropes and broken blocks “it cosl three hundred and fifteen pounds.” He told us other safer and very much cheaper deevices that might have been used, vet to generous youth it seemed grand to have taken such risk to savee life. We almost longed to hear that he had taken all the masts out of her: and that oven so the underwriters had rewarded him.

He told us many other tales, most of them showing what could be or had been done at sea in an emergency, and wlml mighl. and did. happen, if one tried too much or did too little. lie made me feel that in a ship the spinning of yarns Mas almost a part of the craft. The sea creates slories. Even in my first half year I had seen it create stories. Now, here Mils Wally, a living slore of stories. Every week or so, some men came back to us from the ot her side of the Horn, with a si range or marvelous tale of a thing seen and shared.

I loved listening to Wally: I liked learning to knot, splice and mat-make: but I had once hoped for another way of life, and that, now, seemed shut away, in a world that I could never approach. I had hoped to lie a writer, that is, if you can call wild dreams of some day being able to write, a hope. In formed dreams of the sort had sometimes been in me, had been perceived in me. and had been mocked, with energy and with system: “What.”You a writer. How can you be a writer? Only clever people are writers: and terrible lives they lead, both in this world and the next.”

Well, if I could not be a writer (and the door to t hat garden seemed finally slammed) could I he a idler of stories? Mere was Wally, a born storyteller, delighting all hearers with his stories: why should not I be content to be such another, a yarnspinner, a solace in the second dog-watch.-

I asked myself this, having no other to ask. and the answer came flooding back, that to be a storyteller was only a part of mv want. I had hoped to know a great many books, to know a great deal of knowledge, and to tell all sorts of stories in all sorts of ways. I had longed to know all of my country’s past, and all her ways of writing: yet now I1 was in a world of few books, where only one kind of knowledge maltored, though that was a precious kind and very dear to me, then and now.

Somehow, these longings and want s of mine could not seem absurd to me: yet I was sorely perplexed, because they seemed absurd even to people in whose wisdom I had some belief. Every one. of the few who perceived mv inclination, lold me to put “this writing-rubbish" (that was the chosen phrase) right oul of my head.

Some of these spoke with a wish to screen me from a later disappoint merit, or from the feeling that the moods of boys change and vanish. Some spoke from their fixed conviction that all writers, painters and musicians, with the possible exception of Lord ‘Tennyson, were children of the devil of hell. Some, perhaps, did nol put il quite like that, but felt that every child was naturally a little devil from hell, and that any prompting or urge within the mind of a child was put there by the devil for his and the world’s damnation. To all such, (then as now,) any prompting to do anything was suspect, and to be thwarted, upon social or religious grounds: so the word passed: “Put this writing-rubbish right out of your head.”

Rut. then, it was not in my head alone, it was in myself; and sometimes, even nfler a black month, after a black season, something of my very self would glimmer a little: nol very much: but something.

The old faculty of story-lolling, that had once filled my mind with happiness, seemed dead within me: it was dark there, where once there had been light.

In my last Summer Half on board, I won what was called The McIver Prize for an English Essay. This gave me a gleam of hope, soon to bo dashed. One kind friend in whose judgment I trusted, said “You must not let this be fatal to you. You must get this writing-rubbish out of your head.”

Some years later, when it was too clear that this task had been bey ond my power, or moral sense, or something, he said “Of course, that Prize was fatal to you: fatal.”

(To be concluded)