And thinking of those happy days, coming as they did after so much storm and stress, I still hold the same opinion. I know that many wise folk with their flats in town and their nightly symposia at the club will sneer at me, but let them. I was getting closely on for fifty and I had never known joy; now it lay all about me, and though my income was never very much, I had the priceless reputation in the village of “the gen’l’man as allus pays everybody soon’s they asks him.” My heavenly Father, I would rather that were engraved upon my tomb than that I had commanded troops that conquered half the world.
My friends knew where to come, and they always found open house, they never wore out their welcome. How could they? I had known the want of welcome, they never should. And I know to-day that none of them that are alive will refuse me the meed of being a hospitable fellow, nor did I do my hospitality at any poor tradesman’s expense.
I have said that the soil was a cold and hungry one. Well, so it was, and my old gardener toiled over it in vain very often; but it did produce many things, and especially did it bring forth the two things I liked best in the way of eatables—green peas and new potatoes. Food as a rule is to me an appalling nuisance. I don’t know which is worse, taking it in or the process of assimilation, but I must make an exception in favour of green peas and new potatoes and mint. And these we had at Millfield in such profusion as I have never seen before or since. True, I paid top price for seed, true, I spared nothing in their production, but here in Bournemouth to-day I must needs pay more directly, and never, no never get anything like the satisfaction that I did then. Oh ye fat and greasy citizens, know ye the joy of gathering green peas that ye have watched from the germination? Know ye the delight of shelling them and of passing them into the kitchen (with appropriate comments anent the cooking), and then the supreme joy of digging the spoon down deep in the piled-up dish and ladling them out to your chums with much dish gravy—not hot water? Then you know nothing at all of the joy of the table; and as for the Frenchman and his petits pois and butter, etc., bah! I’ve no patience, he doesn’t know anything about it. I speak an alien tongue to him.
But the garden was a perennial delight. I could not do any gardening, I couldn’t stoop, though of the thinnest, because my constitutional ailment of the lungs wouldn’t let me, but I was death on superintending; also I loved to patrol the garden and the hedges before breakfast in the morning and watch the birds at their work, as well as the little things growing. Oh yes, I have no pretensions to scholarship; I cannot express myself like the late R.L.S., but I did enjoy that most blessed time. And when I come to die I hope I shall remember it just as well, for indeed we should all think gratefully of the happiest time in our lives. If I wanted to fill many pages I could easily do so with happenings down there that have never been noted before—how could they? I dare say the village annals contain them, but they are not published, thank God—none of my friends have written them down—they were too happy to do more than enjoy. And if they ever missed me, and they sometimes did when an article was due, one of them would say, “Oh, he’s gone to write another novel, don’t disturb him. Let’s have another.” And so the happy hours wore on.
But now I come to the point when I must confine myself more strictly to the lecture reminiscences and leave my beloved Millfield for a while. Though I would have you remember that every return was but a renewal of ancient delights.
CHAPTER III
MY FIRST LECTURES
Perhaps this heading is not strictly accurate, and I should go back another dozen years to the time when in response to an irresistible call I first opened my mouth to speak in public. It was a memorable occasion too. I lived in one basement room in Hazlewood Crescent, Kensal New Town—I beg its pardon, Upper Westbourne Park—and sitting one evening by my first baby’s cradle reading, my wife being absent on an errand, a large piece of granite crashed through the window and fell in the cradle. I was full of energy in those days, and although I had no boots on I rushed out and up the area steps into the street in time to see the young miscreant who had flung the stone scampering off. Of course I caught him, I went like the wind, and equally of course I landed one soul-satisfying clout on his head which sent him sprawling across the road and into the kennel opposite.
It was enough, and I returned, panting but quite happy, to forget the incident. The next evening at the corner of the Crescent I made my debut as a member of an open-air band of preachers and was duly called upon to testify. My knees knocked together, my mouth seemed filled with dust, and when I did get a word or two out I did not know my own voice. But I had a kindly tolerant audience, such as I am grateful to say I have ever found, and I was beginning to gain confidence when a grimy urchin, squeezing through the ring of listeners, gave one searching glance at me and yelled to some unseen comrade:
“D’yer, Bill, that’s the bloke wot clouted my ear lars’ night.”
A great burst of laughter went up and I retired, feeling as if sudden annihilation would be a great boon. I wonder now why I was not entirely discouraged, but I only know that from that time forward my appetite for open-air speaking grew until it was a passion with me, and, had I known, became a splendid preparation for the lecture platform. Common gratitude compels me to say here that this practice of speaking in the open air speedily became to me a great and perfect compensation for the sorrows and drawbacks of my daily life. The more so perhaps because I stuck to it in spite of the most effective opposition of all, an opposition which never weakened or failed and embittered the whole of my home life. Yet I never—as far as I know—consciously preached or uttered platitudes in an unctuous voice such as I have often heard and sickened at. I gave my auditors the best I had, the results of extensive and varied reading, common-sense outlook upon life, and a totally unorthodox Christianity. I had a good though untrained singing voice and an excellent memory, so I sang to my audiences, never using a book; I recited chapters of Scripture without the Bible, and had the untellable gratification of seeing masses of men and women, often running into the thousands, swayed by my voice as the wind affects the corn.