“To school? To Duplessis? Is he to school her, poor wretch? What are his ‘rights?’ Squatter’s rights, you may suppose. So she’s to be a doll for Germain to dandle, or an orange for Duplessis to suck, and betwixt the feeding and the draining a woman’s to be born! Wife, who’s no wife, mistress for an hour—and a pretty flower with the fruit unformed. . . .
“If I bedeck the bosom of England and star it with flowers, do I do better than Germain with his money, or Duplessis with his rights? And if I were to court her bosom . . . Oh, my brown-eyed venturer in deep waters, I could serve you well! Go to school, go to school, missy—and when you are tired, there’s Halfway House!”
That evening under the hunter’s moon he struck his camp. He had told young Bramleigh that he was soon for the West, where he preferred to winter. “I shall be in Cornwall by November,” he had said, “and that’s time enough;” and this being late September, it is clear that he projected a leisurely progress from Northamptonshire, where he now was, to the Cornish Sea. He had indeed no reason for hurry, but many for delay. That fairest of all seasons to the poet’s mind—that “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” was to him foster-mother, whether her drowsy splendours fed him or he felt the tonic of her chill after-breath. He worked out, he said, in winter what he had dreamed in the autumn, and he could afford to lose no hours from her lap.
Loafer deliberately, incurably a tramp, he was never idle—whether mending kettles or painting masterpieces (for he had a knack of colour which now and then warranted that word), his real interest was in watching life and in establishing a base broad enough or simple enough to uphold it all. He was not too proud to learn from the beasts, nor enough of a prig to ignore his two-legged neighbours: but for the life of him he could not see wherein a Lord Bramleigh differed from a ploughboy, or a Mary Middleham from a hen partridge—and it was a snare laid for him that he was constantly to be tempted to overlook the fact that they differed at least in this, that they had the chance of differing considerably. He would have been greatly shocked to be told that he was a cynic, and yet intellectually he was nothing more. He did himself the honour of believing most people to be donkeys: if they were not, why under the sun did they not do as he was doing?
The answer to that was that if they did, he would immediately do something else, and find plenty reasons to support him. He had not worked that out—but it’s true.
It was also true—as he had told Mary Middleham—that he lived from hand to mouth. His father, Alderman Senhouse, J.P., of Dingeley, in the Northern Midlands, was proprietor of the famous Dingeley Main Colliery, and extremely rich. His mother had been a Battersby, well connected, therefore. He had been to Rugby and to Cambridge, just as Duplessis had been, and at the same times; like Duplessis he idled, but unlike him, he cost no man anything. For his needs, which were very simple, he could make enough by his water-colours, a portrait here and there, an essay, a poem. Then—and that was true, too—he had the art and mystery of tinkering at his disposition. He had earned his place in the guild of tinkers—a very real body—by more than one battle. He was accepted as an eccentric whose whim was to be taken seriously—and as such he made his way. He had never asked his father for a sixpence since he left Cambridge and was on very friendly terms with him. His brothers took the world more strenuously; one was partner at the colliery, another in Parliament, a third—the first born—was Recorder of Towcester.
So much for his talents—now for his accomplishments. He was an expert woodman, a friend to every furred and feathered thing, could handle adders without fear, and was said to know more about pole-cats, where they could still be found, and when, than any man in England. He had seen more badgers at ease than most people, and was infallible at finding a fox. All herbs he loved, and knew their virtues; a very good gardener in the West said that the gentleman-tinker could make a plant grow. There’s no doubt he had a knack, as the rock-faces between Land’s End and St. Ives could testify—and may yet. He had a garden out there, which he was now on the way to inspect. But he had many gardens—that was his passion. He was but newly come from one in Cumberland.
He said of himself that he was a pagan suckled in a creed outworn, and that he was safely weaned. There was a touch of the faun about him; he had no self-consciousness and occasionally more frankness than was convenient. The number of his acquaintance was extraordinary, and, in a sense, so was that of his friends—for he had none at all. Accessible as he was up to a point, beyond that point I know nobody who could say he had ever explored Senhouse. That was where the secretiveness of the wild creature peeped out. Nobody had ever said of him that he had loved, either because nobody knew—or because nobody told. Yet his way with women was most effective; it was to ignore their sex. “I liked her,” he would say meditatively of a woman—and add, “She was a donkey, of course.” You could make little of a phrase of the sort—yet one would be glad to know the woman’s opinion. We have seen that he could be a sympathetic listener, we know that he could be more, in moments of difficulty—and there we stop.
Lastly, I am not aware that he had any shame. He seems always to have done exactly as he pleased—until he was stopped by some guardian of custom or privilege. This frequently happened; but so far as I can learn the only effect upon Senhouse was to set him sauntering elsewhere—to do exactly as he pleased. He never lost his temper, was never out of spirits, drank wine when he could get it, but found water quite palatable. He was perfectly sincere in his professions, and owned nothing in the world but his horse and cart, Bingo, the materials of his trade, and some clothes which had not been renewed for five years. We leave him at present, pushing to the West.