Mr. Pollard, in his ninetieth year, was a prisoner in a canopied bed, but with a mind clear and logical, and full of memories and interests. Scattered around him were newspapers and books, and one of the books a contemporary of Borrow himself. “A very strange, wild person,” was his introductory description of Borrow; “a very tall, upstanding man, wiry and lithe, with a strong face and snow-white hair. He looked fit for anything, and I believe he was—that he feared no man nor devil. I remember the first evening he came here. We had tea in the parlour, and, farmhouse fashion, we had some roast beef on the table, which my father carved. After tea, somebody suggested that he should sing a song. He did sing it, and a weird, wailing, outlandish song it was. No—not a gypsy song. . . . Maybe it was the song of Swayne Vonved. He got up and waved his arms as he sang of his hero’s adventures, he fought an imaginary foe, and finally, as he worked himself into a fervour of passionate song, he seized the carving-knife from the table and swished it round his head. We all drew back, and some of us were glad when the song was over and he dropped that carving-knife and sat down. His voice was tremendous—‘as big as Tregeagle’s,’ as we say in Cornwall.”
Not only the legendary lore and the ancient language of Cornwall interested Borrow; he was equally attracted by the physical characteristics of the peninsula, and impressed by the great wealth lying dormant in the incalculable masses of granite on the moors. “If I were a rich man,” he exclaimed, “I would buy up all this granite; it will be wanted one day.” The demand for Cornish granite in various great public works and the present activity of the quarries at the Cheesewring illustrate his foresight.
The Woolston people were particularly struck by Borrow’s intense enthusiasm for the legend and the poetry of the North. He himself relates how, on a walking tour farther west, he faced eight dreary miles on a rainy evening, solacing himself by singing:
“Look out, look out, Swayne Vonved!”
the Danish ballad he had translated more than thirty years before. At Woolston he made the Vikings live again for them. “He gave us Odin and Thor without ceasing.” There never could have been so much Norse mythology in that part of Cornwall before. Some of the ladies seem to have fallen in love with his hair, but could not summon up courage to beg a lock; and one of them saved his combings and preserved them in tissue-paper for years.
The keen, almost boyish, delight which Borrow took in everything he saw and heard in the hills, and his complaisance towards the company he met, are remarkable in the man whose odd misanthropic fancies and wretched, paltry miseries we have been watching during many pages. The contrast is vivid indeed. In Cornwall Borrow was both pleased and pleasing—with occasional outbursts such as the display of spleen against “Uncle Tomfools”—whether he were riding with “the gallant girl” over the snowy country, listening to her superstitions about magpies—
“One for sorrow, two for mirth;
Three for a wedding, four for death” [174a]
—or visiting patriarchal villagers at Tremar to hear their stories of pixies and foxes, [174b] or attending rural dinner parties, with all the neighbourhood beaten up in his honour. Some of the pixy stories have been given. The attitude of the countryside towards the fox in that day was shockingly unorthodox. He was vermin to be destroyed whenever and wherever discovered: did he not wreak incalculable damage in the farmyard by various and subtle devices, such as taking his brush in his teeth and whirling round like a teetotum under the poultry perches, till the unhappy fowls, rendered dizzy by the unaccustomed spectacle, fell an easy prey to his rapacious appetite? How a fox was shot and the murderer brought his victim for admiration both of the brush and the deed, is related without the turning of a hair. The crime was so common as to be merely a habit; Mr. Baring-Gould, in his story of Parson Jack Russell, has given a similar account of the ethics of certain districts in Devonshire about the same period.
Borrow revealed his curiosity and enthusiasm in many ways. On one occasion a young lady named Every was of the party at Woolston. Part of the conversation turned—as it inevitably would where Borrow was concerned—on Cornish names and their derivations. The girl asked him if he could tell her anything about her name. His mind flew at once to the one Every or Avery whose career was familiar to him, that Captain John, of Plymouth, the fierce pirate of the Eastern Seas, the mortal enemy of John Company, who was reputed to have become a king in Madagascar—one of the choicest villains in the history of the world. “I said that the most celebrated person who ever bore it was a buccaneer, whereupon she informed me that her grandmother had told her that she was descended from a famous pirate.” And he adds the suggestive commentary, “Very pleasant party!” [176]
One of the most interesting gatherings arranged for him, of course, was the family dinner party at the old farmhouse of Tredinnick, where his father was born. According to Berkeley, who was among the guests, nearly all the Borrows of the district were present, and George was highly excited, with his mind constantly running upon the father whom he had worshipped. The circumstances of the feast and the memories it aroused were too much for him; he ceased to be merry and talkative, and closed up his store of song and story; instead of exerting himself to amuse his friends, he sat with restless glance wandering around the rooms in which old Captain Tom had spent his boyhood; his eyes were moist. Suddenly he left the party and burst into the open air—meeting with an ugly tumble over a low wall into the yard. “Well,” said he to Berkeley as they parted for the night, “we have shared the old-fashioned hospitality of old-fashioned people in an old-fashioned house.” He was overwrought to an extraordinary extent, and the excitement, together with the shock of his little accident, brought on an indisposition that kept him laid up all next day.