May 1 6, 191 8 
Land & Water 
17 
see the end of thelblackthorn. Green, . . . real green — not 
this grey stuff, but beautiful tender "bread and cheese" on 
the hawthorns. All the hedges bursting out into a green 
flame. Gorse, . . . miles of almondy gorse tossing on the 
moors. Linnaeus went down on his knees, and thanked God 
for it. And he was a Swede, a Scandinavian neutral. You 
don't deserve to be Enghsh, I'm damned if you do. . . ." 
He said: "I shock you when I say that I hope they 
won't send me tO England. I suppose you've decided for 
yourself that I want to keep clear of the pohce. It isn't 
that. It's because of my last visit. A sort of nightmare. 
The most curious . . . what shall I call it ? . . . spiritual 
cold douche, we'll say, ... a man ever got. And when 
I do tell you, you'll probably decide that I'm mad. . . . 
Oh, well ... I think it was your speaking of the gorse 
on the moors that brought it back to me worst of all." 
"Of course, I'm not a young man. In the ordinary way 
I didn't show my age.' Now, I daresay I look it. Anyway, 
I'm well over forty, and nearly the whole of my life I've 
lived in India. People who belong to the Army don't under- 
. stand that. They don't realise that there are men who live 
in India, men as white as themselves, who don't know the 
meaning of the word 'home.' They hve in India, and work 
in India, and die in India. They've less claims on England 
even than the babu students who go there to study medicine 
and law^ and teach the beautiful mysticism of the East to 
their landladies' daughters or theosopMcal societies in 
Highgate.' It's a matter of money . . . money, and the 
hard line which divides English society in India. 
"My father was a sergeant-major in the Comwalls ; 
married on the strength. I was bom in Cornwall ... or 
. Devon. Devonport, anyway. I Uved there for I don't 
know how many years. I was a backward cliild, and don't 
remember anything about it except the noise that the steam- 
ships used to make with their syrens in the Hamoaze : just 
the noise of bellowing in the sort of misty rain you get there. 
Yes, that's the one thing I really remember. But. what I 
remembered for myself wasn't half as important as what my 
mother told me. 
"At Poona, in the hot season, it was pretty awful. It 
Mas so hot that children couldn't sleep, and the married 
quarters in that cantonment weren't fitted with the latest 
thing in punkahs. She used to sit by my bed and fan me. 
Sometimes she'd sing a song about a mole-catcher. But 
more often she would just talk about Treliske, and the people 
and things she most fondly remembered. The most wonder- 
ful thing of all was a kind of_ catechism which she made for 
me. I dare say it was simply for the joy of hearing me say 
the words. It was just part of the great plan that she had 
made for her own home-coming. I expect, as a matter of 
fact, that my father was really rather a brute of a man. . . . 
"But her catechism. ... It went something like this: 
When you get out of the train at Liskeard, which way 
do you go ? ' 
" 'Down the hill,' I'd say, 'on Hie road to Looe till you get 
' to the gate on the . . .' . 
The gate on the railway. Yes. ... And then you cross 
that, and the brook, and go up the hill. Oh, such a hill, till 
you get to ... ?' 
"'Mr. Fenberthv's farm. . . .' 
" ' Yes. And then .^ ' \ 
You don' I take no notice of the dog, mother, because he's 
an old 'un, and his teeth wore smooth with stones as Jack 
Pcnbertliy's made 'en fetch and carry. . . .' 
•"We'll, then? . . .' 
" "Then there's one field of rough grazing, and one field of 
plough, and don't 'ee tread on the young corn, tuother . . . 
and thenyou keeps the path right over above Herodsfoot. . . .' 
You're forgetting something. . . .' 
" 'Oh, yes . . . The furze. The field where the furze grows 
like a letter " L," where there's two paths. And the one of 
them goes to Duloe and the other to Treliske.' 
"'To Treliske . . .' she would say, laughing and kissing 
me, and holding me close to her as if the ecstatic thing had 
actually happened, and there we were at Treliske, the two 
of us together. 
"Of course, you know, it was really a lot more elaborate 
than that. It was a perfectly definite picture, or series of 
pictures, which made between them an atmosphere . . . I'm 
•no good at words ... a sort of dream atmosphere which 
was a thousand times more real to me than any piece of 
pukka reality 1 ever came across. 
"It >taycd with me. It didn't vanish or even grow more 
tenuous wlien she died. I lost both of them in the same 
week. It was in Bombay ... a terrible place for typhoid 
in those days. I suppose it was as good a starting-point as 
any other for a commercial career. I worked in a shop 
where a Devonshire man named Snell was foreman ; and by 
the time he had left Bombay, with just enough money to 
set up poultry-farming down Plymouth way, he had put 
me on my feet. 
"I won't bore you with a tale of my employments. In 
my own way I prospered. Tea was my hne. I became 
expert in the qujility of tea-leaves and the secrets of their 
blending. AU the time I lived in a chummery near an 
infernal cotton-mill in Bombay ; and I might have stayed 
there till this day if I hadn't happened to go away for a 
week-end to a place called Matheran, over on the coast, a 
Uttle hill-station in the Western Ghats. I went there in the 
breathless days before the breaking of the monsoon, when 
Bombay was like an orchid-house built in direct communica- 
tion with a sewer. You people who sip iced pegs at the 
Yacht Club don't know what Bombay is. I went to Matheran, 
I say, and tasted hill air. I began to wonder why in God's 
name I had ever been content to live down there. I threw 
up my job, and got another, poorly paid enough, on a planta- 
tion in Assam. Moving from one plantation to another, 
I worked for twenty years. That's a long time for India ; 
and yet I can't say I wasn't happy. I was living simply 
and healthily in the open air. Apart from fever, I kept 
pretty fit ; and all the time I was scraping together a Uttle 
money . . . enough to hve on ; that was all I wanted — 
just enough to buy me one of my dreams. 
"PerhajK you can guess what that was ? . . . I wanted 
to go back to Trehske. I wasn't in a tremendous hurry to 
go there. I just thought of it as something always indefin- 
itely before me : something beautiful that would arrive in 
the natural passage of time and bring peace with it. Deliber- 
ately, I wouldn't allow myself to build on it, and yet it was 
always there, sustaining me. 
"One day— it was about six years cigo — I was knocked- 
over by a mixture of fever and sun. t must have been 
pretty bad. I didn't know anyone for five days. When 
I came round, the man who had been nursing me— a good 
fellow — told me that I'd been talking a lot of nonsense. 
'Something about a letter L, ' says he, 'and then Herod's 
foot. I've heard of John the Baptist's head ; but I'm 
damned if I ever heard of Herod's foot. I didn't know you 
were a religious man, Charlie.' . . . And I laughed — -you 
know, in the feeble sort of way one does when one is washed 
out — to think of the way in which this old catechism of my 
mother's went ticking on in my brain. I said to myself: 
'Not yet . . . not yet. Another year or two will do it ; 
and then I shaU never see India again.' The doctor told me 
that it had been a near thing ; but I didn't believe him, for 
I knew that some day in this life I should walk to Treliske. 
What a day that would be ! . 
"It came. I went home by a B.I. boat, second class. 
I wasn't in a hurry. I didn't fret like the pale people on 
board who were already seeing the other end of their leave. 
I had done with India. There was plenty of time. Some- 
times, lying in my cabin at night, and rather cold (for the 
air of the Mediterranean seemed icy), I would look over the 
map, which I knew already by heart. I was determined to 
take it all calmly. If I didn't take it calmlj', it seemed to 
me, something might miscarry at the last moment. I only 
had one pang of dangerous emotion. At a concert in the 
first saloon one nighf a young girl got up and sang a song 
which I hadn't heard before. I'm not musical, I may tell 
you. It was called ' A Little Grey Home in the West,' and 
something in the words — I don't know what exactly — made 
me suddenly emotional. I could have cried, 
"We had a bad time of it in the Bay. I'm not a good 
sailor, and so I spent most of the time below. When I came 
on deck at last, I found that we were wallowing in a pale, 
frosty sort of sea, and people were standing in little groups 
looking at a level coastline of the same neutral colour, very 
low and ihdistinct under a huge sky of clouds streaming 
from the west. I heard the word 'Cornwall.' Coniwall. 
... I just stood there clutching on to the hand-rail that 
ran along the deck-house. I was simply bewildered. It's 
difficult to describe my state of mind. There was exulta- 
tion in it ; and, besides the exultation, something else that 
was nearest to fear. I dared not look at it any longer. As 
a matter of fact, I couldn't, for suddenly 1 felt horribly sick. 
I found myself hanging over the rail, looking at a swirl of 
giddy water — pale and horribly cold. / 
"Three days later I left London in a train they call the 
Riviera Limited Express. I don't remember much of the 
country through which we passed-: nothing, except that it 
all seemed to mc Ijlue — just made of a sort of blue haze and 
very colourless. The train travelled much faster than an 
Indian express ; the carriages were not so comfortable, and 
my feet were icy. I couldn't believe it was spring. In my 
time I had read a lot about the Enghsh spring. I had 
imagined it clear and fresh, like the chmate of the Nilghiris. 
