Lavengro | Page 9

"and even you don't
object to Hake. 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 Hake
agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any
such troublesome query." This gave a chance to Hake, 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 Borrow, who stood waiting to return to

the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.
"You are an Englishman?" said Borrow.
"Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman," I said, using a
phrase of his own in "Lavengro"--"if not a thorough East Anglian an
East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good."
"Nearly," said Borrow.
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 the "Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore" was complete, and from
that moment we became friends.
Hake meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned
and asked Borrow 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 Borrow, "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."
I have read over to my beloved old friend Dr. Hake, the above meagre

account of that my first delightful ramble with Borrow. He whose
memory lets nothing escape, has reminded me of a score of interesting
things said and done on that memorable occasion. But in putting into
print any record of one's intercourse with a famous man, there is always
an unpleasant sense of lapsing into egotism. And besides, the reader
has very likely had enough now of talk between Borrow and me.

X. THE FUTURE OF BORROW'S WORKS.
He whom London once tried hard, but in vain, to lionise, lived during
some of the last years of his life in Hereford Square, unknown to any
save about a dozen friends. At the head of them stood Mr. John Murray,
whose virtues, both as publisher and as English gentleman, he was
never tired of extolling.
Afterwards he went down to East Anglia--that East Anglia he loved so
well--went there, as he told me, to die.
But it was not till one day in 1881 that Borrow achieved, in the Cottage
by the Oulton Broads which his genius once made famous, and where
so much of his best work had been written, the soul's great conquest
over its fleshly trammels, the conquest we call death, but which he
believed to be life. His body was laid by the side of that of his wife at
Brompton.
When I wrote his obituary notice in the Athenaeum no little wonder
was expressed in various quarters that the "Walking Lord of Gypsy
Lore" had been walking so lately the earth.
And yet his "Bible in Spain" had still a regular sale. His "Lavengro"
and "Romany Rye" were still allowed by all competent critics to be
among the most delightful books in the language. Indeed, at his death,
Borrow was what he now is, and what he will continue to be long after
Time has played havoc with nine-tenths of the writers whose names are