Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James

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      ‘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 believed me to be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?’

      ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?’

      ‘I should think not,’ said Dereham indignantly.

      ‘But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.’

      ‘Gordon is my only link to that dark world,’ I said, ‘and even you don’t object to Gordon. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers’ ink.’

      He laughed. ‘Who are you?’

      ‘The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks,’ I said, ‘and have never yet found an answer. But Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query.’

      This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man’s personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.

      ‘You are an Englishman?’ said Dereham.

      ‘Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,’ I said, using a phrase of his own in one of his books – ‘if not a thorough East Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.’

      ‘Nearly,’ said Dereham.

      And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine ‘Shales mare,’ a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart – an East Anglian dogcart; when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was ‘the glassy Ouse’ of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment we became friends.

      Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.

      ‘It is on sand alone,’ said Dereham, ‘that the sea strikes its true music – Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.’

      ‘The best of the sea’s lutes,’ I said, ‘is made by the sands of Cromer.’”

      These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus described by the ‘Gordon’ of the story in one of the sonnets in ‘The New Day’: —