Leaves in the Wind. Gardiner Alfred George
of that legend, much of mysterious letters from prisoners in Germany who had seen a very tall and formidable-looking man and hinted that that man's name was – well, whose would you think? Why, of course… But here was the popular legend in all its naked simplicity and absoluteness. It did not rest upon fact. It defied all facts and all evidence. It was an act of tyrannic faith. He was not dead, because the mind simply refused to believe that he was dead. And so he was alive. And there you are.
No doubt there was much in the circumstances of the great soldier's end that helped the growth of the myth. He filled so vast a place in the public mind and vanished so swiftly that his total disappearance seemed unthinkable. No living man had seen him die and no man had seen his body in death. He had just walked out into the night, and from the night he would return.
But, apart from the mystery of circumstance, the legend is a tribute to the strange fascination which this remarkable man exercised over the popular mind. It endowed him with qualities which were supernatural. In a world filled with the tragedy of mortality, here was a man who could daunt death itself. And when death stabbed him suddenly in the dark of that wild night off the Orkneys and flung his body to the wandering seas, the popular mind rejected the thought as a sort of blasphemy and insisted on his victory over the enemy. "Stands to reason." That's all. It just "stands to reason."
It seems a childish superstition, and yet if we could probe this belief to the bottom we might find that there is a truth beneath the apparent foolishness. It is that truth which Whitman, in his "Drum Taps," expresses over his fallen comrade —
O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
Nor the bayonet stab what you really are!
There is something in the heroic soul that defies death, and the simple mind only translates that faith in the deathlessness of the spirit into material terms. Drake lies in his hammock in Nombre Dios Bay, but he lies "listening for the drum and dreamin' arl the time of Plymouth Hoe."
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when your powder's running low —
"If the Dons sight Devon
I'll leave the port of Heaven,
And we'll drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago."
And so the legend of Drake's drum lives on, and long centuries after, in the midst of another and fiercer storm, men sail the seas and hear that ghostly inspiration to brave deeds and brave death. The torch of a great spirit never goes out. It is handed on from generation to generation and flames brightest when the night is darkest. And that I think is the truth that dwells at the back of my companion's obstinate credulity. Kitchener has become to him a symbol of something that cannot die, and his non-metaphysical mind must have some material immortality to give his faith an anchorage. And so, out in the vague shadows of the borderland he sees the stalwart figure still at his post – "laying by," it is true, but watching and waiting and "listening for the drum" that shall summon him back to the field of action.
As the train slowed down at a country station and he prepared to go out into the night, he repeated in firm but friendly accents: "No, I can't never believe that he's dead… Stands to reason." And as he bade me "Good-night," I said, "I think you are right. I think he is living, too." And as the door closed, I added to myself, "Stands to reason."
ON TALK AND TALKERS
The other day I went to dine at a house known for the brilliancy of the conversation. I confess that I found the experience a little trying. In conversation I am naturally rather a pedestrian person. The talk I like is the talk which Washington Irving had in mind when he said that "that is the best company in which the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant." I do not want to be expected to be brilliant or to be dazzled by verbal pyrotechnics. I like to talk in my slippers, as it were, with my legs at full stretch, my mind at ease, and with all the evening before me. Above all, I like the company of people who talk for enjoyment and not for admiration. "I am none of those who sing for meat, but for company," says Isaac Walton, and therein is the secret of good talk as well as of cheerful song. But at this dinner table the conversation flashed around me like forked lightning. It was so staccato and elusive that it seemed like talking in shorthand. It was a very fencing match of wit and epigram, a sort of game of touch-and-go, or tip-and-run, or catch-as-catch-can, or battledore and shuttlecock, or demon patience, or anything you like that is intellectually and physically breathless and baffling. I thought of a bright thing to say now and then, but I was always so slow in getting away from the mark that I never got it out. It had grown stale and out of date before I could invest it with the artistic merit that would enable it to appear in such brilliant company. And so, mentally out of breath, I just sat and felt old-fashioned and slow, and tried to catch the drift of the sparkling dialogue. But I looked as wise as possible, just to give the impression that nothing was escaping me, and that the things I did not say were quite worth saying. That was Henry Irving's way when the conversation got beyond him. He just looked wise and said nothing.
There are few things more enviable than the quality of good talk, but this was not good talk. It was clever talk, which is quite a different thing. There was no "stuff" in it. It was like trying to make a meal off the east wind, which it resembled in its hard brilliancy and lack of geniality. It reminded me of the tiresome witticisms of Mr. Justice Darling, who always gives the impression of having just come into court from the study of some jest book or a volume of appropriate quotations. The foundation of good talk is good sense, good nature, and the gift of fellowship. Given these things you may serve them up with the sauce of wit, but wit alone never made good conversation. It is like mint sauce without the lamb.
Fluent talkers are not necessarily good conversationalists. Macaulay talked as though he were addressing a public meeting, and Coleridge as though he were engaged in an argument with space and eternity. "If any of you have got anything to say," said Samuel Rogers to his guests at breakfast one morning, "you had better say it now you have got a chance. Macaulay is coming." And you remember that whimsical story of Lamb cutting off the coat button that Coleridge held him by in the garden at Highgate, going for his day's work into the City, returning in the evening, hearing Coleridge's voice, looking over the hedge and seeing the poet with the button between forefinger and thumb still talking into space. His life was an unending monologue. "I think, Charles, that you never heard me preach," said Coleridge once, speaking of his pulpit days. "My dear boy," answered Lamb, "I never heard you do anything else."
Johnson's talk had the quality of conversation, because, being a clubbable man, he enjoyed the give-and-take and the cut-and-thrust of the encounter. He liked to "lay his mind to yours," as he said of Thurlow, and though he was more than a little "huffy" on occasion he had that wealth of humanity which is the soul of hearty conversation. He quarrelled heartily and forgave heartily – as in that heated scene at Sir Joshua's when a young stranger had been too talkative and knowing and had come under his sledge hammer. Then, proceeds Boswell, "after a short pause, during which we were somewhat uneasy; – Johnson: Give me your hand, Sir. You were too tedious and I was too short. – Mr. – : Sir, I am honoured by your attention in any way. – Johnson: Come, Sir, let's have no more of it. We offend one another by our contention; let us not offend the company by our compliments." He always had the company in mind. He no more thought of talking alone than a boxer would think of boxing alone, or the tennis player would think of rushing up to the net for a rally alone. He wanted something to hit and something to parry, and the harder he hit and the quicker he parried the more he loved the other fellow. That is the way with all the good talkers of our own time. Perhaps Mr. Belloc is too cyclonic and scornful for perfect conversation, but his energy and wit are irresistible. I find Mr. Bernard Shaw far more tolerant and much less aggressive in conversation than on paper or on the platform. But the princes of the art, in my experience, are Mr. Birrell, Lord Morley, and Mr. Richard Whiteing, the first for the rich wine of his humour, the second for the sensitiveness and delicacy of his thought, the third for the deep love of his kind that warms the generous current of his talk. I would add Mr. John Burns, but he is really a soloist. He is too interesting to himself to be sufficiently interested in others. When he is well under way you simply sit round and listen. It is capital amusement, but it is not conversation.
It