When everything in your little world goes wrong; when you can do nothing right; when you have cut yourself while shaving, and it has rained all day, and the taxis have splashed your collar with mud, and you receive an Army notice, post-marked on the outer covering Buy National War Bonds Now—in short, when you are fed up, what do you do?

To each man his own remedy. I know one man who, in such circumstances, goes to bed and reads Ecclesiastes; another who goes on an evening jag; another who goes for a ten-mile walk in desolate country; another who digs up his garden; another who reads school stories. But my own cure is to board a London tram-car bound for the outer suburbs, and take mine ease at a storied sixteenth-century inn.

Where is this harbour of refuge? No, thank you; I am not giving it away. I am too fearful that it may become popular and thereby spoiled. I will only tell you that its sign is "The [Pg 156]Chequers"; that it is a low-pitched, rambling post-house, with cobbled coach-yard, and ridiculous staircases that twist and wind in all directions, and rooms where apparently no rooms could be; that it was for a while the G.H.Q. of Charles the First; and that it is soaked in that ripe, substantial atmosphere that belongs to places where companies of men have for centuries eaten and drunken and quarrelled and loved and rejoiced.

You talk of your galleried inns of Chester and Shrewsbury and Ludlow and Salisbury, and your thousand belauded old-world villages of the West.... Here, within a brief tram-ride of London, so close to the centre of things that you may see the mantle of metropolitan smoke draping the spires and steeples, is a place as rich in the historic thrill as any of these show-places.

But its main charm for me is the goodly fellowship and comfortable talk to be had in the little smoking-room, decorated with original sketches by famous black-and-white men who make it their week-end rendezvous. You may be a newcomer at "The Chequers," but you will not long be lonely unless your manner cries a desire for solitude. Its rooms are aglow with all those little delights of the true inn that are now almost[Pg 157] legendary. One reads in old fiction and drama of noble inns and prodigally hospitable landlords; but I have always found it difficult to accept these pictures as truth. I have sojourned in so many old inns about the country, and found little welcome, unless I arrived in a car and ordered expensive accommodation. It was not until I spent a night at "The Chequers" that I discovered an inn that might have been invented by Fielding, and a landlord who is and who looks the true Boniface.

I had missed the last car and the last train back to town. I wandered down the not very tidy High Street, and called at one or two of the hundred taverns that jostle one another in the street's brief length. The external appearance of "The Chequers" promised at least a comfortable bed, and I booked a room, and then wandered to the bar. I felt dispirited, as I always do in inns and hotels; as though I were an intruder with no friend in the world. I ordered a drink and looked round the little bar. My company were a police-sergeant in uniform, a horsey-looking man in brown gaiters, an elderly, saturnine fellow in easy tweeds, a young fellow in blue overall—obviously an electrician's [Pg 158]mechanic—and a little, merry-faced chap with a long flowing moustache. I scrutinized faces, and sniffed the spiritual atmosphere of each man. It was the usual suburban bar crowd, and I assumed that I was in for a dull time. The talk was all saloon-bar platitudes—This was a Terrible War. The rain was coming down, wasn't it? Yes, but the farmers could do with it. Yes, but you could have too much of a good thing, couldn't you? Ah, you could never rely on the English climate.... Three shillings a pound they were. Scandalous. Robbery. Somebody was making some money out of this war. Ah, there was a lot going on in Whitehall that the public never heard about.... So, clutching at a straw, I opened the local paper, and read about A Pretty Wedding at St. Matthew's, and a Presentation to Mr. Gubbins, and a Runaway Horse in the High Street, and a——

Then came the felicitous shock. From the horsey man came words that rattled on my ears like the welcome hoofs of a relief-party.

"No, it wasn't Euripides, I keep telling you. It was Sophocles," he insisted. "I know it was Sophocles. I got the book at home—in a translation. And I see it played some time ago in[Pg 159] town. Ask Mr. Connaught here if I'm not right." He grew flushed as he argued his rightness. I followed the direction of his nod. Mr. Connaught was the disgruntled-looking man in tweeds. And Mr. Connaught set down his whisky, fished in a huge well of a side-pocket, and produced—?dipus Rex in the original Greek, and began to talk of it.

I sank back, abashed at my too previous judgment. Here was a man who, during the half-hour that I had been sitting there, had talked like a grocer or a solicitor's clerk—of the obvious and in the obvious way. It was he who had made the illuminating remarks that there was a lot going on in Whitehall that we didn't know anything about, and that you could never rely on the English climate. And now he was raving about Sophocles, and chanting fragments to the assembled whisky-drinkers. Tiring of Sophocles, he dived again into the pocket and produced Aristophanes.

The talk then became general. The constable, apparently annoyed at so much Latin and Greek, thrust into the chatter a loud contention that when a man had finished with English authors, then was time enough to go to the classics. Give him[Pg 160] Boswell's Johnson and Pepys' Diary and a set of Dickens written in the language of his fathers, to keep on the dressing-table, within easy reach of the bed, like. The electrician's mechanic couldn't bother with novels; he was up to the neck just now in Spencer and H?ckel and Bergson, and if we hadn't read Bergson, then we ought to: we were missing something. Then somehow the talk switched to music, and there followed a dissertation by the police-sergeant on ancient church music and the futility of grand opera, and names like Palestrina and Purcell and Corelli were thrown about, with a cross-fire of "Bitter, please, Miss Fortescue"—"Martell, please; just a splash of soda—don't drown it"—"Have you tried the beer at the 'Hole-in-the-Wall?'—horrible muck"—"Come on—drink up, there, Fred; you're very slow to-night."

"D'you know this little thing by Sibelius?" asked the merry fellow; and hummed a few bars from the Thousand Seas.

"Ah, get away with yer moderns!" snapped the police-sergeant. "This Debussy, Scriabine, Schonberg and that gang. Keep to the simplicities, I say—Handel, Bach, Haydn and Gluck. Listen to this;" and he suddenly drew back from[Pg 161] the bar, lifted a mellow voice at full strength, and delivered "Che Faro" from Orfeo; and then took a mighty swig at a pint tankard and said that it had just that bite that you only get when it's drawn from the wood.

It took me some time to pull myself together and sort things out. I wondered what I had stumbled upon: whether other pubs in this suburb offered similar intellectual refreshment; whether all the local tradesmen were bookmen and music-lovers; and how to reconcile the dreary talk that I had first heard with the enthusiastic and individual discourse that was now proceeding. I wondered whether it were a dream, and how soon I should wake up. If it were real, I wondered if people would believe me if I told ............