From a Cornish Window Part 21

(3) "Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so and family spent a fortnight here.

The lady complained that the town was dull, which we (who would have the best reason to complain of such a defect) do not admit.

She announced her opinion in the street, at the top of her voice; and expressed annoyance that there should be no band to play of an evening. She should have brought one. Her husband carried about a note-book and asked us questions about our private concerns.

He brought no letters of introduction, and we do not know his business. The children behaved better."

(4) "Mr. Blank arrived here on a bicycle, and charmed us with the geniality of his address. We hope to see him again, as he left without discharging a number of small debts."

It is, I take it, because the Briton has grown accustomed to invading other people's countries, that he expects, when travelling, to find a polite consideration which he does not import. But the tourist pushes the expectation altogether too far. When he arrives at a town which lays itself out to attract visitors for the sake of the custom they bring, he has a right to criticise, _if he feel quite sure he is a visitor of the sort which the town desires_. This is important: for a town may seek to attract visitors, and yet be exceedingly unwilling to attract some kinds of visitors. But should he choose to plant himself upon a spot where the inhabitants ask only to go about the ordinary occupations of life in quietness, it is the height of impertinence to proclaim that the life of the place does not satisfy his needs. Most intolerable of all is the conduct of the uninvited stranger who settles for a year or two in some quiet town--we suffer a deal from such persons along the south-western littoral--and starts with the intention of "putting a little 'go' into it," or, in another of his favourite phrases, of "putting the place to rights." Men of this mind are not to be reasoned with; nor is it necessary that they should be reasoned with. Only, when the inevitable reaction is felt, and they begin to lose their temper, I would beg them not to a.s.sume too hastily that the 'natives' have no sense of humour.

All localities have a sense of humour, but it works diversely with them.

A man may even go on for twenty years, despising his neighbours for the lack of it. But when the discovery comes, he will be lucky if the remembrance of it do not wake him up of nights, and keep him writhing in his bed--that is, if we suppose _him_ to have a sense of humour too.

An aeronaut who had lost his bearings, descending upon some farm labourers in Suffolk, demanded anxiously where he was. "Why, don't you know?

You be up in a balloon, bo." A pedestrian in Cornwall stopped a labourer returning from work, and asked the way to St.--'. "And where might you come from?" the labourer demanded. "I don't see what affair that is of yours. I asked you the way to St. '--'." "Well then, if you don't tell us where you be come from, we bain't goin' to tell you the way to St. '--'" It seems to me that both of these replies contain humour, and the second a deal of practical wisdom.

The foregoing remarks apply, with very little modification, to those strangers who take up their residence in Cornwall and, having sojourned among us for a while without ever penetrating to the confidence of the people, pa.s.s judgment on matters of which, because they were above learning, knowledge has been denied to them. A clergyman, dwelling in a country parish where perhaps he finds himself the one man of education (as he understands it), is p.r.o.ne enough to make the mistake; yet not more fatally p.r.o.ne than your Gigadibs, the literary man, who sees his unliterary (even illiterate) neighbours not as they are, but as a clever novelist would present them to amuse an upper or middle cla.s.s reader.

Stevenson (a greater man than Gigadibs) frankly confessed that he could make nothing of us:--

"There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish: for my part, I can make nothing of them at all.

A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.

Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel--that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home."

This straightforward admission is worth (to my mind) any half-dozen of novels written about us by 'foreigners' who, starting with the Mudie-convention and a general sense that we are picturesque, write commentaries upon what is a sealed book and deal out judgments which are not only wrong, but wrong with a thoroughness only possible to entire self-complacency.

And yet . . . It seems to a Cornishman so easy to get at Cornish hearts-- so easy even for a stranger if he will approach them, as they will at once respond, with that modesty which is the first secret of fine manners.

Some years ago I was privileged to edit a periodical--though short-lived not wholly unsuccessful--the _Cornish Magazine_. At the end of each number we printed a page of 'Cornish Diamonds,' as we called them--sc.r.a.ps of humour picked up here and there in the Duchy by Cornish correspondents; and in almost all of them the Cornishman was found gently laughing at himself; in not one of them (so far as I remember) at the stranger.

Over and over again the jest depended on our small difficulties in making our own distinctions of thought understood in English. Here are a few examples:--

(1) "Please G.o.d," said Aunt Mary Bunny, "if I live till this evenin'

and all's well I'll send for the doctor."

(2) "I don't name no names," said Uncle Billy "but Jack Tremenheere's the man."

(3) "I shan't go there nor nowhere else," said old Jane Caddy, "I shall go 'long up Redruth."

(4) "I thought 'twere she, an' she thought 'twere I," said Gracey Temby, "but when we come close 'twadn't narry wan o' us."

(5) A crowd stood on the cliff watching a stranded vessel and the lifeboat going out to her.

"What vessel is it?" asked a late arrival.

"The _Dennis Lane_."

"How many be they aboord?"

"Aw, love and bless 'ee, there's three poor dear sawls and wan old Irishman."

(6) Complainant (cross-examining defendant's witness): "What colour was the horse?"

"Black."

"Well, I'm not allowed to contradict you, and I wouldn' for worlds: but I say he wasn't."

(7) A covey of partridges rose out of shot, flew over the hedge, and was lost to view. "Where do you think they've gone?" said the sportsman to his keeper. "There's a man digging potatoes in the next field.

Ask if he saw them."

"Aw, that's old Sam Petherick: he hasna seed 'em, he's hard o'

hearin'."

(8) _Schoolmaster_: "I'm sorry to tell you, Mr. Minards, that your son Zebedee is little better than a fool."

_Parent_: "Naw, naw, schoolmaster; my Zebedee's no fule; only a bit easy to teach."

[I myself know a farmer who approached the head master of a Grammar School and begged for a reduction in terms: "because," he pleaded, "I know my son: he's that thick you can get very little into en, and I believe in payment by results."]

Here we pa.s.s from confusion of language into mere confusion of thought, the cla.s.sical instance of which is the Mevagissey man who, having been asked the old question, "If a herring and a half cost three-halfpence, how many can you buy for a s.h.i.+lling?'" and having given it up and been told the answer, responded brightly, "Why, o' course! Darn me, if I wasn'

thinkin' of pilchards!" I met with a fair Devon rival to this story the other day in the reported conversation of two farmers discussing the electric light at Chagford (run by Chagford's lavish water-power).

"It do seem out of reason," said the one, "to make vire out o' watter."

"No," agreed the other, "it don't seem possible: but there,"--after a slow pause--"'tis butiful water to Chaggyford!"

It was pleasant, while the Magazine lasted, to record these and like simplicities: and though the voyage was not long, one may recall without regret its send-off, brave enough in its way:--

"'WISH 'EE WELL!'

"The ensign's dipped; the captain takes the wheel.

'So long!' the pilot waves, and 'Wish 'ee well!'

Go little craft, and with a home-made keel 'Mid loftier s.h.i.+ps, but with a heart as leal, Learn of blue waters and the long sea swell!

"Through the spring days we built and tackled thee, Tested thy timbers, saw thy rigging sound, Bent sail, and now put forth unto the sea Where those leviathans, the critics, be, And other monsters diversely profound.

"Some bronzed Phoenician with his pigmy freight Haply thy herald was, who drave of yore Deep-laden from Bolerium by the Strait Of Gades, and beside his city's gate Chaffered in ingots cast of Cornish ore.

"So be thou fortunate as thou art bold; Fare, little craft, and make the world thy friend: And, it may be--when all thy journey's told With anchor dropped and tattered canvas rolled, And some good won for Cornwall in the end--

"Thou wilt recall, as best, a lonely beach, And a few exiles, to the barter come, Who recognised the old West-country speech, And touched thee, reverent, whispering each to each-- 'She comes from far--from very far--from home.'"

I have a special reason for remembering _The Cornish Magazine_, because it so happened that the first number (containing these hopeful verses) was put into my hands with the morning's letters as I paced the garden below this Cornish Window, careless of it or of anything but a doctor's verdict of life or death in the house above. The verdict was for life. . . .

Years ago as a child I used to devour in that wonderful book _Good Words for the Young_, the _Lilliput Levee_ and _Lilliput Lyrics_ of the late William Brighty Rands: and among Rands' lyrics was one upon "The Girl that Garibaldi kissed." Of late years Rands has been coming to something like his own. His verses have been republished, and that excellent artist Mr.

Charles Robinson has ill.u.s.trated them. But I must tell Mr. Robinson that his portrait of the Girl that Garibaldi kissed does not in the least resemble her. I speak with knowledge--I the child who have lived to meet and know the child whom Garibaldi kissed and blessed as the sailors were weighing anchor to carry him out of this harbour and away from England.

Wild horses shall not drag from me the name of that young person; because it happened--well, at an easily discoverable date--and she may not care for me to proclaim her age (as certainly she does not look it).

"He bowed to my own daughter, And Polly is her name; She wore a s.h.i.+rt of slaughter, Of Garibaldi flame--

"Of course I mean of scarlet; But the girl he kissed--who knows?-- May be named Selina Charlotte, And dressed in yellow clothes!"

But she isn't; and she wasn't; for she wore a scarlet pelisse as they handed her up the yacht's side, and the hero took her in his arms.

"It would be a happy plan For everything that's human, If the pet of such a man Should grow to such a woman!

"If she does as much in her way As he has done in his-- Turns bad things topsy-turvy, And sad things into bliss--

"O we shall not need a survey To find that little miss, Grown to a woman worthy Of Garibaldi's kiss!"

Doggrel? Yes, doggrel no doubt! Let us pa.s.s on.