A Bohemian in Exile

A Reminiscence

When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of
Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were
found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the
fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the
swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet
retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the
princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and
file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in
thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and
learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those
faithful commons I would speak, narrating only ''the short and simple
annals of the poor.''

It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom
as a United States -- a collection of self-ruling guilds,
municipalities, or republics, bound together by a common method of
viewing life. ''There once was a king of Bohemia'' -- but that was a
long time ago, and even Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign
it was. These small free States, then, broke up gradually, from
various causes and with varying speed; and I think ours was one of the
last to go.

With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. ''Just
for a handful of silver he left us''; though it was not exactly that,
but rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider
horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.

So they left us for their pleasure; and in due time, one by one --

But I will not be morose about them; they had honestly earned their
success, and we all honestly rejoiced at it, and do so still.

When old Pan was dead and Apollo's bow broken, there were many
faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to
the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned
desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind,
a remnant of the faithful. We had never expected to become great in
art or song; it was the life itself that we loved; that was our end --
not, as with them, the means to an end.

We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory we;
Give us the glory of going on and still to be.

Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible; the old order had
changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives as best might be.

Fothergill said that he, for one, would have no more of it. The past
was dead, and he wasn't going to try to revive it. Henceforth he, too,
would be dead to Bloomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man's
death, said ''he changed his life.'' This is how Fothergill changed
his