Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James
till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim, having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.
We all went out of the house and looked over the common. It chanced that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the sunken road opposite to Gordon’s house. These same gypsies, by the by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared in the ‘Graphic.’ Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but basket-makers. After passing this group we went on the common. We did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.
After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham’s suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the ‘Bald-Faced Stag’ in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the special glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I remember – a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Dereham’s special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away. Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in connection with the rainbow – how, by making a ‘trus’hul’ (cross) of two sticks, the Romany chi who ‘pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the sky,’ etc. Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the ‘Spirit of the Rainbow’ which I, as a child, went out to find.
Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true ‘Child of the Open Air.’
‘Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?’ I murmured to Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said in a dreamy way, ‘Old England! Old England!’
It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham’s arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the trees, ‘Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?’ And then, calling to mind the books he had written, I said: ‘He went into the Dingle, and lived alone – went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.’
‘But the most damning thing of all,’ said Gordon, ‘is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.’
‘Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,’ said I. ‘So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never. No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story finds himself able to realize from Dereham’s description the misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion,’ I said to Gordon, ‘that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the Nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.’
‘Ambition and the green gamp,’ said Gordon. ‘But look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries; and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light.’
But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind which the ‘Child of the Open Air’ must needs lack.
Knowing Dereham’s extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why Dereham should at once take to me – reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon Dereham’s character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had their nests. By the expression on Dereham’s face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
‘Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?’ I said.
‘I should think so,’ said he dreamily, ‘and every kind of water bird.’
Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, ‘But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?’
‘You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.’
‘I don’t mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,’ he said.
‘No,’ said I, ‘but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.’
‘Then you know Whittlesea Mere?’ said Dereham, much interested.
‘I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,’ I said, ‘and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.’
I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper – as he, Dereham, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
‘The gypsies,’ said Dereham, ‘always