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_Title:_ Mother
_Date of first publication:_ 1925
_Author:_ E. F. Benson (1867-1940)
_Date first posted:_ November 9, 2026
_Date last updated:_ November 9, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20261116

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                          [Cover Illustration]




[Illustration: _Photo: H. Walter Barnett & Co., Ltd._

MARY BENSON.
 (Aged 75.)]




                                 MOTHER

                                   BY
                              E. F. BENSON

                          HODDER AND STOUGHTON
                        LIMITED          LONDON




                        _First Published, 1925_



                  _Made and Printed in Great Britain._
          _Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._




                                 MOTHER


                                PREFACE

For many years my mother regularly kept a diary in which she recorded
matters of public and domestic interest, the comings and goings of her
family and friends, appreciation of people and of books, and often very
caustic criticism of both. But she kept also a more intermittent and far
more private chronicle, contained in half a dozen casual notebooks of
various shapes and sizes, the earliest of which deals with her
childhood, and was written some years later. She was married at the age
of eighteen, and with her married life the account becomes contemporary
with what it records. There are gaps in it, some of which extend over
many years, and it deals entirely with intimate and personal affairs.
She tabulates certain rules of life which she set up for herself with
regard to her devotions, her exercise, and so forth, but it is chiefly
concerned with the problems, the darknesses and illuminations, which
came to her soul.

I brought these little books down here one spring, and, reading and
re-reading them, learned more than I had ever known about her joys and
sadnesses, her fears and her courage. Much therein was too private ever
to be published; of the rest I have made considerable use. Should any
reader think that I have exceeded the limits of due discretion, my
excuse must be that I believed it could only benefit him to learn
something of the inner history of a life so beautiful as hers.

She, then, is the central figure of the following pages, which comprise
the years from my father’s death in 1896 to her death in 1918.

                                                              E. F. B.
LAMB HOUSE,
  RYE.


                               CHAPTER I

At the moment when, as he knelt in the church at Hawarden, my father’s
spirit went forth without struggle or any pang of parting, the ship of
my mother’s purposes and activities in life slipped its moorings. It
slid away from the busy quay-side and, as if grounding on some remote
and barren shore, left her to disembark on an emptiness, a nothingness.
All those who loved her and were loved by her with all the force and
fire of her humanity were for the time but phantoms in the mist; nobody
else but he was real to her. She carried with her nothing except the
lantern of her trust in God, but that she kept trimmed and burning. Even
if it only showed her an impenetrable darkness, no ray of it was
quenched.

In spite of her eager devotion to her children and her intimacy with her
friends, in spite, too, of her vivid interest in life as such, no one in
those days, except him, had any real existence for her, and it could
hardly have been otherwise. She was now fifty-five years old, and since
her marriage at the age of eighteen, she had dedicated herself and all
the activities of her life to him. That dedication, in fact, had been
made seven years before her marriage, for when my father first knew her
(she being of the mature age of eleven) he had absolutely made up his
mind that she was to be his wife, and had written her a poem which
clearly told her so.

The sketch of those seven years before her marriage, as recorded by her
in certain reminiscences, which, sharp as a newly etched plate, she put
down some twenty years later, reads like some extraordinary and
imaginary romance of a child. But it was the actual story of her life
which she there recorded, the faithful prelude to the forty years which
followed. My father, who was her second cousin, was at that time a
master at Rugby, and lived with her mother and her and her three
brothers, William, Henry, and Arthur Sidgwick. There was he,
twenty-three years old, masterful and convincing and convinced, writing
his first love-poem to his cousin of eleven, sure in his own soul that
Minnie was to be his wife as soon as ever she was old enough, and
carrying that conviction through both to her mother and her. My
grandmother heard of the love-poem from one or both of them, and very
properly put a veto on his carrying his courting any further at present,
but that seemed to have been a very ineffectual bar to his ardency, for
my mother records how, though he had been forbidden to speak to her on
any such subject, till she was old enough to realize what he was talking
about, there was soon another interview when he held her hand and kissed
her, and embarked again on the forbidden topic. It is quite clear that
he was entirely to blame for breaking this very proper prohibition, but,
ever so characteristically, she blames herself for it, not him, and
tells how she felt that she had been guilty of disloyalty to her mother
who had forbidden what we must call such “goings-on.”

It is delightful to linger over this picture of herself, these
compromising confessions and her criticisms on her own character. She
allows rather grudgingly that she was of a sunny and merry nature, but
deplores the truth of her mother’s account of her to a friend, when she
said that “Minnie is more volatile than the other children.” She loved
pleasure and hated pain, but found the pain of others more unbearable
yet; “I always longed to take it away and make them happy _at once_.”
All these seven years of my father’s waiting for her were full of
“resolves” dictated by the supreme longing to be worthy of him. One
“great resolve,” it seems, came to her as she returned home after her
confirmation, and she made the elastic band round her prayer-book the
witness thereof, so that whenever her prayer-book was in her hand, she
would be face to face with her resolve. That was very like her: the
unrecorded “resolve,” to the end of her life was never sufficient; it
had to go down in her diary, signed and dated, with the penalty of
confession often attached to the breaking of it. . . .

Glimpse by glimpse in this intimate mirror of herself there becomes
manifest a background of shadowy misgiving. She became aware that though
(accepting her coming marriage as something augustly and inevitably
preordained) her main desire in life was to please Edward and not
disappoint him, she surrendered herself to his influence rather than to
the instinct of her own love: she had not chosen him as he had chosen
her. “I was happiest,” she says, “when I knew Edward to be happy, and
yet wasn’t with him,” and she records her dread of displeasing him at
her lessons with him in architecture, physical geography, and German;
she did not feel towards him the love that casts out fear. All her
energies were bent on the desire “to be worthy of him, to please him,
not to disappoint him,” dedicating all that she knew of her own nature
to his service and his love. Her mirth, her charm, her eager desire “to
make people happy at once” were his.

On the other side was my father, a volcano of physical and mental
energy, twelve years her senior, choosing her with ardent affection, and
at the same time seeing in the gaiety and sweetness of her someone to
educate. He longed for her to be put into his hands that were as strong
as they were loving, to mould her into a noble womanhood. He had no such
notion of self-surrender as she had, and though he had never probably
put it to himself that it was he to whom she was to conform, he
certainly saw himself as the instrument which, in God’s hands, should
fashion her. He never imagined himself fused in her; he saw her fused in
him, and his passion for her, furiously sincere, had not in it that
incense of worship, out of which is begotten the supreme tenderness,
whereas in her nature that tenderness was the chief emotional
ingredient. He intended that his love should sweep her into his view
which regarded life as an arduous splendid battlefield in the wars of
God, that by her marriage with him she should consecrate herself not to
him only nor to him mainly, but to the species of service which his
nature demanded of him, without realizing that thus she would have to
cease being herself altogether and to become someone entirely different.
But he could no more have changed that instinct of hers to make things
pleasant for other people and take away their pain, where a sterner
moralist would have let them remain uncomfortable if by that means the
sufferer might be induced to learn some bracing lesson, than she could
have made him dilatory in duty or indulgent to a fault. That was not his
way: he pounced on a fault (quite rightly) with a view to its
correction; she (quite rightly), without condoning the sin, would set to
work to comfort the sinner.

So, when she was just eighteen, they were married, and she tells how she
instantly saw not her mistake (for if her marriage was a mistake, what
marriage since the world began was a success?), but the quality of his
love, and, with nothing but pity for him, her own poverty. “An utter
child,” she writes, “I danced and sang into matrimony with a loving but
exacting, a believing and therefore expectant spirit, twelve years
older, much stronger, much more passionate, whom I didn’t really love.
But let me try to realize how hard it was for Edward. He restrained his
passionate nature for seven years and then got me, this unloving, weak,
unstable child. I know how disappointing this must be to him, how
evidently disappointed he was. How hard for him, full of all religious
and emotional thoughts and yearnings. They had never awoke in me. . . .”

Directly after her marriage, her contemporary diaries, reminiscences no
longer, begin. This dominant desire to please him, not to fail him, not
to disappoint him, was the standard she at once set herself to live by
in the early days of her marriage; his approval was the measure of her
success. She mentions, for instance, a small dinner party at which “in
the drawing-room afterwards, feeling it was rather dull, I actually was
bold enough to sing! Miss Wickenden helped me, and we got through
‘Willie, we have missed you’; ‘Wait for the waggon’; and ‘Long time
ago.’ . . . I don’t know whether it was wise of me or not, but certainly
I did not vex Edward, and I think that is as good a criterion as I need
have. . . .” Next day she records how “Edward has talked to me so
lovingly and gently lately. He said not long ago with such an earnest
eager look and his eyes full of tears, ‘Minnie, if you will only try, I
will never be cross with you again.’ I, instead of answering him as he
deserved, said, ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, sure,’ he replied, ‘but you must
remember that your promise will be as hard to keep as mine.’ I can never
doubt his love. Oh, to think of really being a true wife to him! God
help me! I believe I shall persevere this time. If I can only stir up my
apathy I can do a great deal.”

She records occasionally “jarrings and bickerings” (no doubt what I have
just quoted was the sequel to one of them), and always she scans them to
see where she was to blame, and if she does not succeed in her quest,
she still longs to do better, to take all the burden of such “jarrings,”
which to one less entirely loving would have been a source of grievance
against him, on to her own shoulders. “Edward,” she writes, “was very
low this evening with neuralgia, and spoke but little and seemed easily
irritated. But he was evidently suffering so much and feeling so unwell
that my heart yearned for him. But I have not yet deserved the privilege
of being his comforter: I never feel my own want of womanliness so much
as when he is in trouble or ill. However, I wait and hope. I know it is
all my fault, and the flattering tongues of my friends are very painful,
as they don’t suspect what a weight of guilt is under my amiable
exterior. . . .”

And sometimes she had great rewards, for two days afterwards she tells
how “Edward called me to pay me the money for the monthly bills of May,
_which I had neglected till now_—he paid me also my own allowance,
increasing it to £60. I was quite taken aback by his generosity, when I
had been behaving so badly, so that I could scarcely thank him. . . .
After chapel that evening Mr. Martin came in, and referred a little to
going abroad. I should like it so much that I can hardly dare to think
of it for fear of being disappointed, for I don’t at all deserve such a
pleasure. Edward spoke to me before him about something I had neglected.
I almost said something about it at night, but restrained myself. I am
so glad I did so. I drew out a plan this evening of daily duties! . . .”

But however sorely undeserving was this miscreant of such a pleasure,
she got it, and a tour in France down to the frontiers of Spain took
place, the voyagers being two friends of my father, himself and my
mother, who, clearly at his wish, kept a special and stupendous diary
which she prefaces with a dedicatory note. “I write this diary,” she
says, “in the hope that it may record an improvement in my life, of
which, God knows, there is only too much need”; and in it she puts down
with incredible care all that interested not herself, but my father.
Their sight-seeing was practically confined to churches, and under his
guidance she made the most amazing series of architectural notes: you
would have thought she was qualifying for a clerkship in the firm of
some ecclesiastical builder. It was “churches, churches all the way”
from the moment they set foot in Boulogne, where she notes the “fine
Corinthian columns in the nave,” having, I am sure, been instructed that
very day as to what a Corinthian column was. St. Wolfran’s at Abbeville
follows, “flamboyant and consequently of a very rich appearance with
open parapets and curving tracery.” Then comes Lisieux with Norman
windows in one tower and lancet windows in the other, and then this
insatiable appetite for architecture devours the windows in the
Cathedral of Le Mans, which (with a touch of jubilation) “puzzled even
Edward to make out. The pillars round the choir with their wonderful
height and the rich foliage on the capitals and the tall, pointed,
stilted arches over them, with the jewelled windows above them, were one
of the most striking parts of this magnificent place.” Then followed the
church of Notre Dame de la Couture, with no aisles, but arches spanning
fourteen yards (cannot I see my father pacing them, and my mother taking
down these magnificent dimensions!), and then the château at Blois. From
the château they fly to the cathedral “arranged Basilica-wise,” and go
on to Nantes, where she and my father went out before breakfast for a
“cursory view” of the cathedral supplemented by a “closer survey”
directly after. But then at last, though the spirit was willing, the
flesh was weak: “I was so tired and knocked up that I could not look at
anything, and what I did see I could scarcely remember, so I rested all
day till nearly evening, when I went to see a new church with Edward
(transition between Norman and early French),” and immediately
afterwards they started for Angers.

The next morning (being Sunday) they attended mass in the cathedral,
went back to an English service in the hotel, and forth again to Nones,
Vespers, and Compline in the cathedral, “while Mr. Walford and Mr.
Martin went off by themselves” (clearly to rest). But on the way to
Nones, Vespers, and Compline they “darted” into the Prefecture (Norman
arches and cloisters), and after service proceeded to catalogue the
sculptures on the doorway, and “then there was just time before dinner
to run down to the bridge and have a look at the Loire.” Next morning,
“as there was a good deal to see,” a fine early start was necessary, and
they paid a third visit to the cathedral, as they had missed a
“bénitier,” “which King René brought from the East, and is made of
Porphyry,” and went on to the church of the Holy Trinity and the
cloisters and chapels of the Hospice of St. Jean, “a very curious and
interesting place which I will not attempt to describe. Edward made a
minute plan of the vaulting.” Then they visited the wards of the
hospital, and on to the museum, the art-section of which was not open,
and so after a visit to the Natural History Department they went off to
the Pont de Cé, four miles distant, where, as she records with a nuance
of relief, “there was nothing to see but the bridge.” On their return,
the art-section of the museum was open, and they inspected statues and
croziers and pictures. They dine at the hotel, and then leave by train
for Tours (already visited), but there was just enough light to see the
bridge, and go to bed in anticipation of an early start next morning to
Poictiers and Bordeaux, where in the cathedral “the triforium windows
were larger than those in the clerestory.”

It is for the purpose of showing my mother’s triumph of surrender to my
father that I have extracted these notes from the first fortnight of the
French tour. She obliterates herself altogether, and is concerned only
with throwing her whole energy into appreciation of all that my father,
not she, enjoyed. She was but twenty-one at this time, though already
the mother of two sons and expectant of a third child, and in herself
(her own private self, now hermetically bottled) she cared no more for
aisles and triforiums than she cared for algebra. But he did, and so
every day, when the sight-seeing of this Herculean holiday was closed by
the impenetrable shades of night, she sat down to record what she _had_
to be interested in, in order to render herself more worthy, and advance
“the improvement in her life,” to which the dedication of her diary
aspires. That absorbing desire to be interested in what he loved was her
hourly and daily aim, and these dull and touching pages are the
expression of her longing to share in his appreciations. Just once or
twice Minnie, the volatile one, whom she was so anxious to suppress,
pops out, and with gusto but in parentheses, she records how French
fisherwomen dig for eels, and how she listens to a “long quaint sermon
on Patience, which was very appropriate.” And I cannot acquit her of a
certain demure glee when she tells how Edward fell asleep while sitting
on a wall in the middle of sight-seeing. They were all dead-beat that
day, but he recovered first, and went off to “catalogue” in the
cathedral.

Next spring (_æt._ 22) she records a trouble about bills dated, in the
depth of despair, “Ash Wednesday.”

“This ought to be (and to all appearance will be) a time of great
trouble and sorrow for me. I have most woefully neglected my bills,
having, in spite of Edward’s constant requests and my own most wretched
sense of duties undone, gone on from day to day, always deceiving myself
and imagining that _this_ day had its own peculiar duties, and that
to-morrow I would do them. The truth is, I believe, that I dreaded them.
It is cowardly, I know, and now that I have done them and am going to
give them to Edward this afternoon, I find they amount to over £200.
What he will say I scarcely dare think, and to crown all Mamma is here,
and it will grieve her terribly. If we were alone, I could bear these
hours better, but to have Mamma as witness and make her so unhappy is
almost intolerable. I know she takes my part, and that makes it worse
still. Also of late Edward has been persuaded to take a horse on trial,
and I fear that he will simply and at once throw it up. . . . What I
fear most is that he will punish himself by denying himself things, and
this is worse to me than anything. But I deserve it all, and must bear
it. Anyhow, I never again will let my accounts get the least crooked.
This I trust is final. And now I am going to keep a regular diary all
through Lent, hoping that I may be able to have some true Easter joy and
Easter happiness. That confidence between us may be restored, it seems
as if I had to go through the valley of the shadow of death, but I have
no hope without that of getting into the region of calm and peace
beyond!”

She put off this confession for a couple of days yet, and with it the
promised “Lenten diary” which shall make her worthy of Easter joy comes
to an abrupt end. But her agony at causing him annoyance was there, and
later a crystallization of her eager adaptation of herself to him. “He
thinks more of little remarks, is more sensitive, more easily wounded
than I am. Therefore I must not think of being at ease, but of suiting
my ways to his feelings, and this without a shadow of thinking that my
ways are better than his, though I like them better. . . .” Her utter
abnegation of herself in the conduct of her life must have led her to
precisely that conclusion. Another way would have been to have withstood
him when she thought him unreasonable, to have moderated him when she
thought him harsh, but with regard to him that never could have been her
way: it would have been that of a totally different woman. With regard
to him her mind had been made up when she was eleven years old. His
work, his greatness, his untiring devotion to his ideals must be allowed
to develop their full horse-power, without let or leakage from domestic
disturbance. It was his way to tear along, sweeping up everything and
everybody into the whirlwind of his own enthusiasms, and this she
accepted and embraced. If sometimes it seemed to her that his touch was
harsh and impatient, her own sweetness and her own patience were there
to neutralize it. That was why they were there.

One thing alone she kept entirely outside the orbit of his influence,
that part of her, namely, which she somewhere calls “the power that lies
behind my will,” the Director of that _vie intérieure_, which accepts no
point of view except that which it dictates. It thus happened that when
some fifteen years after her marriage she experienced a great spiritual
crisis, she did not take her difficulties to him. No doubt, in part,
that was because when she realized that her own faith in Christianity
was tottering, she realized also what an unspeakable grief that
revelation would be to him. But below that there was a more essential
reason: she knew that his avenue of approach up which he must try to
lead her back, was, though it led to the same goal, an alien ground to
her. All his life his road had run on rock; never, I suppose, for a
moment had he felt the smallest questioning as to the verity and
validity of the Christian revelation. His faith, untroubled and fierce
and fiery, could scarcely be tolerant of anything less ardent and sure
than itself: doubt, in his view, partook almost of spiritual
crime. . . . So, at least, I reconstruct the reason of her silence to
him about that which mattered more than all the world to both of them.

My mother, throughout her life, like all very intellectual women, formed
strong emotional attachments to those of her own sex. It was through
friendship, she says somewhere, that love first came to her, and just at
this crisis there entered into her environment a woman with whom she
instantly made one of those intimate and noble friendships, not knowing,
as she records, that she was the messenger. “I played with the human
love I had for her, and she for me, and all the time Thou hadst sent
her. . . .” As the intimacy deepened, she found that her friend knew the
road which she instinctively felt must be her own, and, as by some
splendid illumination, long groped for in dimness, came the light.
Surely no one had ever lived a sweeter and more unselfish life than she,
but all that appeared to her now to have been but a blind stumbling of
steps, a haphazard goalless wandering, and it was with something of the
inspired vision of the mystic that she saw then that which never
afterwards, even in the darkest places (and many were dark) through
which her way led her, ceased to enlighten her. “Only this I know,” she
wrote now, “that it is this innermost ultimate self that is filled with
consuming hunger and thirst for the living Saviour. It seemed first a
famine for God, simply; now I find I need a Way to Him. I linger in the
holy place, and as once, for all mankind, Thou rentest the veil, so
surely for each individual there comes a rending, and seeing Thee at
last for their Saviour, they find that a Holy of Holies is open, yes,
even to the mercy-seat of God. Therefore, Jesu, my joy, I have burned
the incense of prayer before the veil dimly, with eager longing. Surely
the Day of Atonement is near, nay, even is it not here? And is not the
veil even now rending, and the glory of the Lord filling the house of my
heart? . . .”

But if, in this access to the spring of her spiritual life (there all
the time, but now consciously reached by her, and never again quitted),
my mother did not seek my father’s guidance, it was by that source that
she found him in a way that she had not found him yet. He had travelled
there on the firm granite road, which seemed to have been hewn for him
in childhood without effort of his, and which no torment of intellectual
doubt had ever threatened to destroy or render impassable. She obtained
then a far deeper comprehension of him as he essentially was, below his
impatience and censure of frailties and childishnesses, which in her
begot only an added tenderness. She had never been at one with him over
such, and if she had been obliged to criticize these outlooks of his,
she would have called them harsh, and he, from his standpoint, would
have called her weak or over-indulgent. But now the initiation which had
come to her gave her a completer comprehension of him; her fear of him
vanished altogether, and she saw that he looked towards the same centre
as she, though from a different angle. But she did not, because she
could not, share in his method of service. If, on his appointment to the
new See of Truro, for instance, it had been she, not he, whose
enthusiasm had to kindle the county into building the cathedral, not a
spadeful of earth would ever have been turned in the digging of its
foundations. She, to put it broadly, looked on God as a Father, he as an
omnipotent King. In consequence she came to separate him, the man to
whom she gave her heart’s devotion, from the projects to which he gave
his. No one was prouder than she when the new cathedral was consecrated
for worship, but she was proud of it because it was his achievement, not
because it was a cathedral. On the other hand, when Martin, her eldest
son, died at Winchester, she laid him on the bosom of God with a joy
that my father could never feel. His strength, which was here his
weakness, cried out and rebelled: her strength accepted and welcomed.

As the years went on, and in especial when my father was appointed
Archbishop, though her devotion to him could not be increased, for he
had it all, the scope and scale of its working was vastly magnified. She
loved and revelled in her responsibilities as mistress of the great
house, serenely dispensing its hospitalities, and oiling all the
machinery, so that his wheels should run without grit or hitch. She
loved entertaining on a great scale, and being entertained: to meet and
be in the midst of those who carried on the government of Church and
State was a rich pleasure to her. The sights and shows, the debates and
ceremonials, the state functions and ecclesiastical occasions, bishops
and princes and prime-ministers, rulers and those in authority made a
pomp and pageantry that stimulated and enchanted her. To be in the
middle of it all, to know what great things were going on, and to talk
to those who geared and regulated the engines was a romance in her
destiny. But through it all, if my father directly needed her, or if she
could have served him by some sojourn in a remote and desolate fen, she
would have bounced off, in the middle of all the hum and activity, to
the nearest station, and left her luggage to follow her, not with the
faintest shadow of regret at what she was missing, but with an ecstasy
of anticipation as to what she could do for him when she got to her
mournful destination. Two things only remained to her of her own which
were not his: these were her personal relation to God, and her personal
relation to her children and friends. Apart from these she had
absolutely no individual life of her own: she had neither artistic nor
literary taste that absorbed any part of her, and any interruption to
her own pursuits was to her far more important than the pursuit itself.
All her enthusiasm and energy was at the service of others. Yet through
it all, through all the self-abandonment with which she flung herself
into the furtherance of his schemes and ideals for the Church, she cared
primarily not for what they were in themselves, but for the fact that
they were his. She knew that perfectly well: so also with a sense of
loss and incompleteness did my father. But without her there would have
been a void in his life which no one else could conceivably have filled:
without her he would have been maimed and crippled.

There were times when the lights were low, times when the whirling
wheels slowed down and halted, and it was then chiefly that she was prey
to fear, that life-long arch-enemy of her soul. These times were when my
father was evidently overtaxed with stress of work, or when, even more
markedly, the stress was over, and he in holiday-time hobbled out of the
shafts, and felt the reaction from his stupendous activities. Then, more
completely than ever, but with some sort of enslavement, she was his,
for her anxiety and fear chained her to him in his dark places not for
his enlightenment, but for her eclipse. By some sort of nervous
metabolism in the dwindling of elasticity and rebound which even in the
most vital is a necessary limitation of middle life, she made his
depressions hers and converted them into fear. Those glooms, which from
the early years had been a malady of his, were not very frequent, and as
he grew older became rarer and less opaque, but now she seemed to catch
from them some infection, which “came out” in her in an increase of
anxiety about him, which did not wholly lift when he recovered his
strength and spring. Her anxiety about him became chronic with her,
couched in the shadow and ever ready to pounce on her with claws and
teeth, if the smallest ailment attacked him. The acutest observer, I
fancy, would never have conjectured how deep that anxiety was. She
smothered the symptoms which might have betrayed its presence: only very
intimately, as to her diary, she acknowledged it. Even when my father
was well and vigorous, she never quite let herself push off in
confidence, but was always on the look-out for shoals ahead.

During the summer of 1896 this chronic fear and apprehension had become
much more than an external enemy to be bludgeoned into submission. It
had stolen in now and sat by the hearth, and there was no getting rid of
it. But I do not believe that there was anything premonitory about it;
at the most her subconscious self had seen a little more clearly than
her reasonable, conscious self, and drew conclusions from what it
already knew, not from what it anticipated. What appears to be prophetic
is almost always not prophetic at all, but merely derived from a more
sensitive appreciation of the past.

Fear was no new thing to her, but never had the assault of it been so
fiercely beleaguering, and in her diary hitherto, she had done no more
than allude to it with a word of self-contempt at her weakness. But now
she analysed and dwelt on it, as if to fortify herself by facing it, or
at least by direct scrutiny to see what it was. “Fear,” she wrote now,
“my deadliest and most constant foe, coming most as anxiety as to the
health of my immediate belongings. . . . There seems a hastiness and
impatience of mind and heart: it is like panic taking possession of me,
a sort of demon of fright. As I write Dr. Douglas Powell is seeing
Edward, and of course I am rather jumpy. I don’t really at bottom think
there is anything radically wrong, but I fear. . . . One has, I think,
to determine to behave with courage, as if one was not afraid, whatever
one is feeling.”

Now this medical examination of my father was made in view of a terrific
programme that had been arranged for the visit he was to pay to the
Anglican Church of Ireland in September. The report of Dr. Douglas
Powell was that his heart was weak in power, but how lightly both he and
a colleague regarded that may be seen from the fact that they neither
wanted him to give up his tour nor suggested any curtailment of his
engagements. They did not think that the programme would be likely to
overtax his strength, nor did they anticipate any breakdown. They
suggested that he should rest before and after meals, and my mother
notes that “he is furious, and won’t.” The verdict should have been
reassuring, but my mother found no relief from the fear that “lay like
lead on her heart.”

And then there rose high her courage and resource. Her reasonable mind
told her that she was unreasonable, she held tight to that, and easily
conjectured a cause for her apprehensions. Her depression and fears were
due to these August heats following on the sedentary months in London,
and she must diet herself with gritty and unpalatable biscuits. . . .
She deliciously records in her diary the rules she made for herself and
quite as deliciously the breaking of them. How one day she ate what she
liked at dinner, and finished with two strictly forbidden peaches. And
then she gets humorously disgusted, not so much with her “greediness”
(as she firmly terms it), but with her thinking at all about the
privations she has ordained for herself. “I am getting to let my
thoughts _dwell_ on dieting, and of _all_ stupid subjects! Do it, and
leave it behind——” And off she goes (precisely as she did when she was
first married) into a scrutiny of the calls and interruptions, of which
during all these years at Lambeth her life really consisted. At the beck
and whistle of so many for whose summons she would whisk aside whatever
occupation held her, she had in truth no private life of her own, and
yet out of her very self-abnegation, she tries to carve a passage where
a more complete unselfishness can enter. “What I need so greatly is
loving energy. . . . Surely God means me largely to look for and wisely
to see what my real duties are, and perform them greedily, as
opportunities for service. . . . I must be glad of all the calls, and
not silence them as quickly as possible.” And then without pause she
gives a despairing wail over the stupid subject, which she had resolved
never to allude to again. “Scarcely any loss of weight. I AM going to be
rigid this week.”

So in September my father and she went off to Ireland, and days,
prodigious with sermons and ceremonies, and warming and glorious to his
heart, flew by. My mother confided to her diary that the Archbishop of
Dublin was a slave-driver, and that they were being hunted (which from
the list of my father’s engagements seems a well-warranted statement);
she confided to it also that her fear never left her. It grew on her
like a panic; if he blew his nose the cold hands clutched her; a horrid
access of fear seized her because he settled on a day of boisterous wind
to walk back three miles from the church he had been visiting. Yet all
the time my father’s health seemed remarkably good, there was no
question of his not being able to stand the strain of these busy days,
for he appeared to enjoy them hugely, and to gather speed from his
going. And the tour came to an end, and having spent a day at Carlisle
they arrived on a Saturday evening at Hawarden. My father sat up late
that night in vigorous conclave with Mr. Gladstone, next morning he
attended early communion in church, and walked there again for Matins at
eleven o’clock. The service had hardly begun, when he sank forward and
all was over. She to whom, at the age of eleven, he had written his
first love-poem, was beside him still.


                               CHAPTER II

My mother had no moment of struggle or rebellion. She accepted what had
happened as an inscrutable and perfect decree of God, but it stunned
her: she looked out on to an inconceivable emptiness. The object of her
life’s devotion, he who for more than forty years had never been out of
the focus of her service, had passed from the sight of her steadfast
eyes. In all the flood of decisions to be made, urgent businesses to be
done, and in the winding up of the two big houses, she did all that was
required, but in some kind of trance. My father had no private residence
of his own to leave her, for though he had thought of repurchasing a
small family estate in Yorkshire, which in time of financial trouble a
hundred years ago had been sold, nothing had come of it, and it was
necessary to clear out of Lambeth and Addington as soon as possible, not
only for the convenience of his successor, but in order to cut down
without delay the expenses of such upkeep. It was impossible that she
should solve the problem of where her future home was to be at once, and
as my sister Maggie was to spend the winter again in Egypt, it was
settled that my mother and her great friend Lucy Tait, who for the last
six years had lived with us, should go there also. Simultaneously, my
brother Hugh developed an acute attack of rheumatism, which disclosed a
chronic condition below, and he was forbidden to pass the winter in
London, where he was working at the Eton Mission. So Hugh joined the
party, which I was to follow as soon as possible.

[Illustration: MARY BENSON.
 (Aged 19.)]

For the present I was tied here, for my father had only a few months
before finished the work which had been his characteristic
leisure-pastime for thirty years, namely a book on the Life and Times of
St. Cyprian, Archbishop of Carthage. For years on holidays the “Cyprian
box,” with manuscript and mammoth authorities, had travelled with him;
now its rewriting and appendices were done, and the final proofs of it
must be passed for press. These were now being read by his friend Mr.
Alexis Larpent, who had long been working for my father on points of
verification and such, but Mr. Larpent refused to assume responsibility
for the remainder without the sanction of one of the family, and so
night after December night he and I used to sit in some echoing
half-dismantled room at Lambeth, while Mr. Larpent explained to me why
he proposed to omit a reference to Plotinus or insert a passage from St.
Augustine. Of all these things I knew nothing whatever, but I had to
give my decision whether or no this should be done or the other left
undone, and often I felt myself casting a glance of deprecating apology
towards the image of my father at the idea of my correcting his Cyprian
for him. . . .

So for a month after the Egyptian party had left, I continued living in
the huge mournful house so lately humming with central and superb
activities, while such furniture as we desired to keep drifted away for
indefinite storage: the supervision of this occupied the day, until Mr.
Larpent arrived at nightfall. Carpets were rolled up and sideboards
shrouded and a freshness of colour behind removed pictures made squares
and oblongs on the dismantled walls. My mother could not bear to part
with anything that was intimately associated with my father, and shelves
full of folio editions of early Christian saints were stored in the
cupboards of great Victorian mahogany wardrobes, which had formed part
of the furnishing of their first house. Rooms full of sheeted forms and
creaking staircases were no longer lit, and by the illumination of a
candle placed handy by the caretaker whose steps then retreated to an
infinite distance, tapping in diminuendo down the endless corridors, I
used to find my way eerily to bed. Since I was sixteen this had been so
splendid and beloved a home, full of budding interests and ravenous
eagernesses, and now it lay moribund, with the last drops of its
life-blood, as far as our family affairs went, dripping from it.
Everything was over, and nothing new had yet begun.

From that sense of emptiness and desolation, I could begin to guess with
what sense of a full page turned in the middle of a sentence, to find
overleaf the sentence unfinished and the book done, my mother a month
ago had gone forth to meet life again. The space that my father had
filled in the lives of any of us was not a hundredth part of his
relation to her: to him and his life and his service and his needs she
had been anchored for many more years than any of her children had
lived, and that with a tautness of devotion that only her great heart
could comprehend. All that was over, and over, too, when she looked
towards her own life in the future, were the splendours and activities
of her worldly position.

My consciousness of what the break meant to her was but dim and veiled,
much like the bleared light of the morning when I heard the great gate
of Morton’s tower clang behind me, and knew it to be shut for ever on
home. And not with any real knowledge did I appreciate what her
emptiness must have been until, on a windy day of spring at Lamb House,
I read the pages of her diary of those days, which told of that and of
the unquenchable spirit of hers which by degrees rose up again within
her.

It was as if some earthquake had occurred, some elemental upheaval and
tearing, that separated from her an entity which had once been hers. It
made a rending of her personality; part dwelt still on the severed
island, the rest of her on the mainland from which by this cataclysm it
had been severed. Between those sundered parts of her flowed the
impassable sea. By some sort of wireless telegraphy only, through the
medium of the ether which lay over island and sea and mainland alike,
could she establish communication. And the ether was the will of
God. . . .

The first message that came to her, but too intimate to quote, was when
she knelt by my father’s coffin in front of the altar of Canterbury
Cathedral, and by his side on the morning of his funeral received the
Communion. It was a conviction so real that it became to her not a
conviction alone, but an event: she felt herself choosing him out of all
the world to be eternally hers, and spoke of the rapture of his actual
presence with a free heart.

And so in his death she came nearer to him than in all the years before,
full as they were of devotion and dedication. That illumination of my
father’s presence, which never afterwards was quenched, was her
lighthouse. It burned always, though its ray, as could not but happen,
often shone only on an opacity of blinding fog, and there follow, in her
diary, weeks of silence. She had to build again and to wait, in order to
find herself. For there is no illumination of the spirit (except perhaps
the final freedom of it) which is not followed by the darkness which its
dazzling has made, and out of that blindness which succeeds the light,
she was groping in despair, as she regained herself, for the stones of
the structure which had been thrown and disjected in ruin about her, but
which somehow must be fitted into the very foundations of the temple
that was to be built of them. She recorded later on the process of that
rebuilding. But it was long before she broke the silence.

“Lord God, make me strong and of a good courage. All the beauty of our
past life together, the home we made, the dignity and glory of it, the
fellowship, the humour, the conspiracies, the discussions, the beating,
fervent, keen, pulsating life, the splendid web which Thou gavest us to
weave—all this is over. With one touch Thou calledst him home, and it
has fallen to pieces round me. Give me strength and power to be still
and see what Thou wilt do. . . .”

“I seem to have been living in the past three weeks in the land of utter
dreaminess and confusion, and I hope light is beginning to dawn. ‘All
over, all over,’ rings in my ears, and I don’t find anything inside me
except the habits of life. . . . For it is not as if the children were
to be brought up. One might then feel helpless enough, and out of heart
enough, but life would respond to the call. . . . This dull heavy
nothingness, this ceasing of every stimulus, and this terrible inner
sense that all my life, all these years, was derived from and in answer
to distinct, never-ceasing claims seem to kill me. There is nothing
within, no power, no love, no desire, no initiative: he had it all, and
his life entirely dominated mine. Good Lord, give me a personality, a
scorn of small petty indulgences. Let me live to Thy works, and Thee, to
everything beautiful and desirable, and to all interests, to all
knowledge, to all wisdom, and beyond all and in all and through all to
Thyself. Thy love. . . .

“The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit. The offering of a free
heart. . . .

“Now all is over and nothing is required of me but to enjoy, and that I
can’t do. I feel exactly like a string of beads, always on one string,
worn, carried about till they seemed as if they had some real coherence.
In a moment the string was cut; they rolled to all corners of the room,
a necklace for glory and beauty no longer, but just scattered beads. Who
will string my life together once more?

“The Vision of Personality. . . . It seemed like a deep burning fire
down in the heart of God. How to connect this with finding myself? I
feel as if I had led a superficial life so long, not wilfully or wrongly
exactly. But united as I was with so dominant a personality as Edward,
and being, especially of late, so often in such anxiety about him,
combined with the tremendous claims of the position, how was I to find
myself? I don’t say it mightn’t have been possible to a greater or truer
or more virile nature, but to mine so hard that I don’t blame myself
overmuch. But now I must [find myself], and my first despair is that I
have fallen to pieces since Edward left me. I seem to have been only a
service of respondings, and no _core_. But there must be a core, and it
is in God. In quietness and confidence shall be my strength. I think I
must have wanted _my own courage_, now I want God’s strength, which can
never fail, but which cannot be granted to the human spirit unless it
rests on Him.

“I lived hastily through the hours in response to immediate claims, and
in the intervals I did what I liked. I have never had time to be
responsible for my own life. In a way, I feel more grown up now than I
have ever felt before. Strange, when for the first time in my fifty-five
years I am answerable to nobody. No one has a right to question my
actions, and I can do as I like. What a tremendous choice! Little enough
in the eyes of the world how one more widow who has to come down from a
really high position pitches her small tent.

“O God, open my eyes that I may see the beauty and loveliness of this
glorious creation of Thine which Thou hast given me, that in Thy light,
gazing with unobscured vision into the eternal world, I may make the
offering of a free heart and receive from Thy hands that which is my
own. I must wrestle day by day, never leaving off, till ‘through faith I
see him face to face.’

“I can offer my own poor offering, not gifts and powers and influence
and career, but just what comes to me daily: discomforts, anxieties,
fears, disabilities. I believe in my soul that they will be an offering
of sweet savour.”

Here then are the courage and the faith and the humanity with which she
met the break-up of her career of service: no mere description of them,
but the living flame itself in the light of which, looking out on to
nothingness, she faced the featureless perspective of the future. It was
all hidden away out of sight of daily intercourse and intimacy, and in
it there is not one touch of self-pity or hint of resignation, that most
deadly of Christian virtues. She suffered no such to come near her (for
how she hated them!), and to all appearance, even to eyes most
scrutinizing and loving, she seemed to be building and reconstructing
again with eagerness and glee. It is just for this reason that I print
these secret confessions, for they show with how brave a face
“nothingness” can be met. She appeared to suffer no loss of humour, of
pleasure, of entranced interest in life. Was there ever anyone so firmly
rooted, and so sweetly flowering?

I rejoined them at Luxor, and plunged into the exuberance of their
occupations. My sister had started again the excavations which she had
been making for the last two winters, by the horse-shoe lake at Karnak,
and day by day an imposing procession of large white donkeys cavalcaded
to the Temple of Mut. There was Maggie jingling with bags of piastres
for pay-day, with her donkey-boy carrying a tea-basket for picnic on the
site, and my mother, following a little more sedately with Lucy Tait,
would be quite unable to resist the importunities of the sellers of
small antique objects.

“English gentleman, he offer me a pound for this scarab,” called one of
these perjured vendors, “but I said ‘no.’ I keep it for you, lady.”

My mother cast a longing eye at a forged scarab.

“Certainly not,” she said. “Give it to the English gentleman for a
pound.”

“But I give it you for three shillings,” explained the perjured one.

Shrill cries for Maggie, who cantered back.

“Oh, Maggie, isn’t it rather attractive?” said my mother.

Maggie gave it a contemptuous glance.

“Forgery: mafish, mish-mish,” said she severely. “Not a pound nor three
shillings nor a penny. Go away!”

“Then the Princess will buy it of me for two shillings?” said the
vendor, still hopeful, and approaching Lucy.

“I’m not a Princess,” said Lucy. “I’m a plain miss. Take it away.”

And my mother, resigned but yearning, put up her parasol to shield
temptation from her.

Then sometimes as we drew near to the scene of the digging, it would be
clear that some excitement was on the bubble, and cries of “Antica!”
which indicated that some find had been made came across the horse-shoe
lake, and Maggie’s money-bags, as she slapped her donkey into a swifter
canter, jingled more loudly, and the teacups in the basket played
livelier castanets with each other, as Mohammed panted after her.
Perhaps this was a red-letter day, when the Saite head of a priestess,
which now, gravely smiling, watches me as I write, was disinterred in
the trench that we were digging along the temple wall. Beyond was the
outer court where masons were busy with cranes and mortar, raising and
cementing together the pieces of fallen statues of Pasht, and to right
and left of that were the priests’ chambers, which once had guarded the
secrets of some remote initiation, and there was Maggie, priestess of
the new era that unveiled the old, and Mohammed behind her, plying the
flywhisk, as, after a joyful inspection of the new find, the Saite head
or the Scribe of Akenaton, she dispensed the wages of the week, and
refreshed herself with glances at the trove, and sips of tea. . . . And
my mother was there, intent on finding out at once and exactly in her
guide-book who Akenaton was, and being thrilled in ascertaining that he
was a notable heretic who worshipped the orb or disc of the sun rather
than the sun itself, and ready to maintain against all-comers that it
was not at all the same thing. For myself I had undertaken to make a
plan to scale of the temple and was busy with strings and measures and
pegs driven in at corners of walls (the pegs invariably came out, when
for purposes of accuracy you stretched the string, and made pleasant
parabolas in the air). Then the amiable M. Le Grain, director of
excavations, would hear of the find as he superintended the diggings in
the Hall of Columns at Karnak, and ride over to see it, and propose to
remove it to his store-house for safety. Expostulations ensued from
Maggie, who wanted to take it back to the hotel at Luxor and gloat . . .
and M. Le Grain was indulgent, and said that it should certainly be as
she wished. Hugh would join the archæologists of his family, with the
spoils of his day’s shooting, two quail and a jackal, and at sunset the
enriched procession returned to Luxor, for there was the Scribe on a
trolly with the spoils of the chase sacrificially disposed at his feet,
and Mohammed told my mother the strange story of the golden dahabeah
that cruised at midnight when the moon was full on the horse-shoe lake.
Laden it was with pearl and amber, and heaped with jewels, and all the
richness of it was the property of anyone who could set foot on its
ivory deck without word or exclamation. But so rich, sumptuous, and
glittering were its treasures that none could board it without an
ejaculation of delight that its store was his. Then, on his astonished
cry, the golden dahabeah would sink, and he would find himself immersed
in the horse-shoe lake. . . . When Mohammed told that tale to those of
his own sex, the dahabeah was peopled with unveiled houris of seductive
loveliness and of no great moral integrity, but that was not polite for
female ears.

Another day would be given to an expedition across the Nile, with lunch
in the desert or on the terrace at Deir-el-Bahari, and a game of
knuckle-bones for dessert. That was my mother’s despair: the backs of
her small plump hands could never catch the hail of the descending bones
which she had tossed up. “But I will do it,” she said. “I am just as
clever as any of you. Oh, Fred, why am I so stupid?” Then in the
evenings we played the old silly games, making poems, and words out of
words, and drawing each other. Lucy, unable to think of rhymes and
falling fast asleep, would wake suddenly, and say to my mother, “Ben,
isn’t it time for you to go to bed?” And Ben told her that she was still
dreaming, and that it wasn’t time to wake up. . . . Mixed with these
activities was the ineradicable habit of the family to be engaged on
literary production. What Hugh’s work was I cannot remember, but he did
a great deal of writing, and Maggie was busy with notes of her
excavations and stories about animals, and I was romancing about the
Greek War of independence. So my mother’s rôle of General Auditor to her
children’s works was no sinecure. She threw herself into everything, and
her apparent effortlessness and spontaneity of interest were the true
measure of her courage, for all the time there was going on within her,
as her diary recorded, that ceaseless struggle to emerge from
nothingness. Hugh left the party for a tour in Palestine on his way back
to England, having first hoisted a warning flag of what was to come, by
catching a severe feverish chill. But that passed off, and away he went,
and for the next four months life became a mere nightmare. While my
mother was at Assouan for a few days, Maggie followed Hugh’s example,
but instead of getting the better of her chill, it virulently got the
better of her. One lung became affected, and then the other, and before
long she was seriously though not dangerously ill. While she was in this
state, I had a curious psychical experience.

The doctor used now to see her three times a day, in the morning, after
lunch, and in the evening, and I always waited for the mid-day report
before going back to the temple where work still went on. On one such
day I was sitting in the garden at Luxor at the back of the hotel: in
front of me was a broad sweep of sandy path, and beyond that a small
raised terrace on to which the long windows of the dining-room and
drawing-room opened. A flight of three or four steps led down to the
sandy path. After waiting a little, I saw the doctor come out of the
drawing-room, looking pleased and rubbing his hands together. Instead of
walking down the steps he jumped down on to the path, and coming towards
me said, “Well, we’ve found what we wanted.” I then instantly became
aware that his appearance and his speech were a hallucination: there was
no doctor there at all. When, some few minutes later he did come out,
his report was graver than usual, and he said nothing about having found
what he wanted, because he was not looking for anything. The whole
affair was at present quite meaningless.

That afternoon I did not go to the temple, but remained with my mother,
who was in the greatest anxiety about Maggie. In the hope of comforting
her a little, but partly in order to put on record this odd illusion of
mine, I told her of it, and said, “I believe it will happen: it was of
the quality of real things.” But the next day passed and Maggie
developed pleurisy, and the morning after my servant told me, as I was
dressing, that the doctor wished to speak to me. His news was that my
sister had this liquid round her lungs, and probably a tapping-operation
must be done that day. He explained that the tapping in itself was
nothing: the question was what they would find. The liquid might be
clear, in which case it could be drawn off and she would experience
considerable relief; it might, on the other hand, be found to be
purulent, and her condition must then be regarded as extremely
serious. . . .

The tapping took place that day after lunch, and I happened, waiting for
his report, to sit just in the same place in the garden where,
forty-eight hours before, I had seen the phantasmal doctor. Presently he
came out of the drawing-room window, and walked across the terrace,
looking pleased and rubbing his hands together. Instead of using the
steps, he jumped down on to the path, and came towards me. “Well, we’ve
found what we wanted” were his exact words.

For some days after that Maggie held her own. Then quite suddenly one
Sunday morning, her heart gave out, and she had an attack of syncope. We
were all sent for, and as I entered the room the doctor took me aside a
moment. “She can’t recover,” he said. My mother was there already, and
as we waited together by her bed we were witnesses of a soul praying
itself back into life.

Maggie was lying quite flat; the pillows had been taken from under her
head, the bed had been moved out into the middle of the room, and all
doors and windows were wide, so that the maximum of air might reach her.
Her eyes were closed, her face and hands were bluish in tinge. And then
in a voice faint, but perfectly firm, she began to pray aloud. “Father,
make me better. Quickly make me better,” she said over and over again,
“Father, make me better. . . .” After a few minutes she said, “I’m a
little better,” and again and over and over again she repeated that one
sentence, as if she knocked on a door and would not cease till it was
opened to her. Another ten minutes, perhaps, passed, and the door swung
on its hinges. She grew quieter. “I’m better,” she said, “I’m better,”
and thus from the very valley of death she turned back and came to us.

It was already growing very hot at Luxor, and some ten days afterwards
the doctor sanctioned her being moved, and she was carried, mattresses
and all, just as she lay, on to a Nile tourist steamer bound for Cairo.
From Cairo we were all going for a week to Helouan. But already, had we
known it, I had begun to take an active part in this nightmare of
illness, and I did it in very effective manner. During Maggie’s
convalescence, the heat during the day being too great for riding, I got
a canoe, and used to paddle up the Nile to some convenient sandbank, and
spend the afternoon swimming and basking on the sandbank and swimming
again when toasted. From one of these expeditions I came back with a
notable headache, and went to the doctor, who asked me what I had been
doing. When he looked at his clinical thermometer which registered a few
degrees of fever, he very naturally told me that I had got a touch of
sun, which was no more than I deserved, and that for the next few days I
must keep quiet and go slow. I obeyed and did not consult him again, but
noticed that a touch of sun produced a queer feeling of unreality:
sensations and actions seemed to belong to somebody else, not me. All
one saw or heard appeared rather unusual: one evening, for instance, the
night before the departure for Cairo, when my mother and I were sitting
in the garden, a sudden wind got up and set the date-palms in the garden
rattling their top-knots of fibrous foliage. But they seemed far more
like curious gaunt beings, waving their arms in mystical lamentation. I
really was not sure whether they were trees or not.

There were still a few odds and ends to finish up with the packing of
our antiquities from the excavations, and I had settled to remain at
Luxor a couple of days yet, and then take the swifter post-boat for
Cairo, which would arrive there a few hours before the tourist boat; I
could thus pleasantly meet them on the quay at Cairo. The sense of
unreality still persisted; but it was odd rather than disagreeable; I
felt drowsy and light-headed together and wonderfully remote. I did not
feel ill, only odd, and so one day, the ninth after that on which the
sun had touched me, it seemed best to have some curried chicken for
lunch, by way of strengthening my contact with the world. But the
morning after I did feel ill, and stopped in my cabin, but managed toast
and butter for breakfast. . . . And then all at once it struck me that
there was something really wrong, and I telegraphed from some stopping
place to the doctor at Helouan, who was in any case to meet the tourist
boat with my sister on board, asking him if he could meet the post-boat
first. We got to Cairo that afternoon, and he came on board, took my
temperature and, after hearing my history, asked me what I had eaten
that day and the day before. This seemed to interest him very much, but
when I told him about curried chicken and crisp toast he looked worried.
He then announced that I must lie quite still while he got an ambulance,
on which he proposed to take me through Cairo and out to Helouan. . . .
At that I felt vastly intelligent, and asked him if I had got typhoid.
He told me that I must behave as if I had, and wrote a note for my
mother to be given her on the arrival of the tourist boat. Then the
ambulance came, and off we went, and my mother a few hours later was met
with the encouraging news that I had been taken off the boat on a
stretcher and was being personally conducted to Helouan by Dr. Page May.
Typhoid it was, for my guess had been perfectly correct, and I herewith
claim a niche in the temple of fame, for having continued to partake of
ordinary adult diet, curried chicken and toast and all, up to the middle
of the second week of that disease without any disastrous sequel. For a
brief but sensational period then I held the stage, and Maggie who was
making a marvellous recovery became quite a subsidiary character, for
she had only one trained nurse and I had two, and the chart of my
thermometer, which outlined a row of eminent and precipitous summits,
was the centre of interest. Then those peaks began to dwindle into mere
highlands, and the highlands of this admirable chart declined to
sea-level again, and it looked as if the family were awakening from this
nightmare of existence. Not at all! Soon came a day when, after Maggie
had just had her evening temperature taken (we seemed to do nothing but
take temperatures), an idle discussion took place between her and my
mother and Lucy Tait, as to how convenient it was that on a very hot
day, such as this, the clever blood managed not to get heated. To
illustrate this, Lucy proceeded to take her temperature, and the clever
blood said that it was 102°. So she went to bed, and typhoid duly
declared itself, and she became the centre of interest, and my night
nurse, since nobody cared about me any longer, was transferred to her.
She grew steadily and terribly worse: her sister, Mrs. Davidson, and
Bishop Davidson of Winchester were sent for, and for many hours her life
hung twirling on a thread that just did not break. Then she, like
Maggie, wheeled round from the gates of death. One parting shot the
fierce Egyptian gods of destruction discharged at us, for when I went
for a few days of change to the Mena Hotel by the Pyramids, I nearly
stepped on a black cobra, neatly coiled on the floor of the billiard
room.

So the spring of 1897 was not a very recuperative season. We had left
England in search of health for my sister, and in order to get my mother
away from the closing of that book of the past, into fresh scenes and
new interests. New interests there undoubtedly were: these, thrillingly
and absorbingly vivid, had centred round the question as to which of the
party, this child of hers or that, or her dearest friend, was to stop
behind in an Egyptian cemetery, or whether we were all—one after the
other—to do so. But whereas each of us in turn had a remission from
anxiety (for when you are so extremely unwell as we all were, it is
quite impossible to care what happens to yourself or anybody else), she
alone faced for months the stress and tension of the nightmare. Not a
pang of it was spared her, for sixteen consecutive weeks one or other of
those most dear to her, in her stricken bereavement, hung on the edge of
a crumbling cliff. And, as always, when her need was the greatest, her
courage burned the brightest. For four months some cliff toppled towards
collapse, and all the time she watched and she prayed and was steadfast.
. . . Her diary here is almost blank, but one thought touched on six
months before emerges again at the end: “These visitations of God bear
fruit in the soul. But the soul must dwell in peace, and let the fruit
ripen.”


                              CHAPTER III

The plagues of Egypt being past, the Egyptian party composedly tottered
to various parts of Europe. As Maggie had not died of syncope she went
to Aix for rheumatic reasons; I to Athens and, on the way home, to
Capri; while my mother and Lucy returned to England, and pending a
habitation, stayed at Farnham Castle with Bishop Davidson, now
Archbishop of Canterbury, and found Beth among those who welcomed them.
Beth (it is with difficulty that I remember she was Elizabeth Cooper)
had gone as nursery-maid to my grandmother at the age of fifteen, and
after nursing her family, had reverted to my mother and been nurse to
all of us; now she was in her eightieth year, upright and bright-eyed,
and knowing no rule of life except love. And Beth wanted her children to
come home again after these disastrous holidays and “have a bit of peace
and quietness.”

That was precisely what my mother wanted too, and when I got back from
the south in July, she had settled on Winchester as her home. The house
she had taken was early Georgian, spacious enough to hold the family
reunited in holiday-time, and to me, at any rate, who was to be of the
permanent party there, quite adorable. It would be comfortable and cosy
and secure (and none of us just then had much gusto for adventure, after
the Egyptian experiences); there was a sense of humdrum content in the
mellowed bricks of the trim enclosed garden, of permanence in the
pinnacles and towers of the cathedral which overlooked it. After the
hazardous and diseased pilgrimage among the Pharaohs, homeless and
hotelled, here was an _angulus terræ_ again, with the Penates ready to
come out of their storage and the Lares lazily to settle themselves
round a quiet hearth. There were golf-links, there was the river Itchen,
there was a County Club; the æsthetic eye could feast on tiled
house-roofs and green valleys and the surge of windy downs, and all
would be an anæsthetic that produced a pleasant dozing under the guise
of mild and absorbing activities. So, during a particularly hot August
we settled in, and van after van continued to arrive with furniture and
early Christian Fathers, and long after the house seemed as full as it
could hold, a line of immense mahogany wardrobes, and a small billiard
table, and a two-manual organ, and a seated statue of Rameses the Great,
stood in a _queue_ down St. Thomas’s Street insisting on admittance. The
grey parrot (Matilda), knowing that all this pushing and pulling and
growing red in the face was done in order to amuse her, kept on pulling
corks to remind us that we were thirsty, and blowing her nose (rudely
and vulgarly) to indicate that she was well aware that I had a cold in
the head, and the green parrot (Joey) bit the foreman of the Bedford
Pantechnicon for saying “Poor Polly” with a finger inserted in his cage,
and Taffy, the Welsh collie, helped us all very much by lying in the
gangway of the hall and growling, and Maggie’s Persian cat, in this
general reunion, smelled well-known objects with purring recognition.
When the confusion was at its height, and the drawing-room entirely
congested with furniture, a Canon of the cathedral thought it would be
nice to call on us. I did not hear the announcement of his entry,
because I was playing the piano in order to amuse Joey, who was perched
on my shoulder and was loudly screaming. So the Persian cat, which he
had tried to caress, scratched him, and Taffy very rudely bit him. Then
Joey, on my shoulder, began to dance a strange Brazilian minuet, to
indicate that we were no longer alone, and so I came round the corner of
a bookcase and gave the Canon tea. He was a little faint, and I don’t
wonder. . . .

All that autumn it looked as if Winchester was to prove the final berth
into which the storm-tossed family had been towed. How pleasant to hang,
like the ripening plums on the garden wall, till one after the other, in
some uncontemplated future, we dropped softly off the stem! And, in the
meantime, everything was new and queer and small and cosy. Winchester
seemed to combine the advantages of being a turmoil of entrancing,
infinitesimal interests with complete leisure, and the “society,” as a
caller pointed out to my mother, was “so very varied.” “There is the
Close, Mrs. Benson; there is the County; there is the College; there is
the Military. It is quite a centre!” So, indeed, it was: too far from
London to have its life suburbanly sucked out of it, it turned quietly
about on its own axis, like some little independent moon, borrowing its
light, perhaps, from suns that wheeled about interplanetary space, but
conscious of its own centrality like every other provincial nucleus,
mediæval in its setting and middle-aged in its actors. To be sure, there
was no great stir or fermentation to excite the vat and set it bubbling,
but which of us just then desired anything more than to be let alone? To
judge by recent experience, events were invariably disagreeable; a truce
to events!

But better even than the drowsy security of the place was the fact that
at first it seemed to suit Maggie. For six months she got steadily
stronger, and though my mother was conscious of a growing dullness, and
a growing deadness, it was sufficient for her that Maggie prospered, and
negotiations were set on foot to buy the house and settle here, and die
and be buried. . . . After the screwed-up tension of Egypt, mere
eventlessness seemed in itself an exquisite employment, and, besides, we
were already getting busy again in our own ways. Maggie, making the
most, as she always did, of gathering energy, was fathoms deep in
writing an account of the excavations, and every time she went through
the hall there was the stimulus of the rose-granite statue of Rameses
the Great, the cast of the Scribe of Akenaton, which the museum at Gizeh
had claimed, and the Saite head and a limestone Sphinx, and statuettes
of kings and priests to keep her zeal alive. And from Egypt she turned
to “her” philosophy, now very slowly, very carefully, beginning to
record itself in the book published many years later, _A Venture of
Rational Faith_. Lucy Tait had her district in Lambeth to visit every
week, and at home her constant companionship with my mother; while I
seemed to be urgently employed over agreeable pursuits and diversions.
Winchester, in fact, became a rush of pleasant minutenesses, and at
Christmas came Arthur and Hugh, and once more the long evenings saw us
furiously engaged in word-games and arguments and caricatures. And Taffy
used to find so many friends to talk to in the High Street that
sometimes his family was unable to wait for him, and when he came home
the front-door would be shut. So Taffy told his trouble to his special
policeman, who rang the bell for him, and one of Taffy’s servants opened
the door for him, and he came in, still rather agitated, to receive the
congratulations of his family on his cleverness. . . .

But as the spring days began to lengthen, there grew some strange sense
of impermanence and unreality. Nobody talked of it yet; it was like an
unexplained shadow lying across a patch of sunlight, which everyone knew
to be there and pointedly disregarded, and the shadow was this. Such
life as that which my mother was now leading had been to her before no
more than the diversion of her rare leisure: now there was for her
nothing except leisure, and how it wearied her! The economy of this
small establishment was all there was of domestic duty, whereas before
she had the complete control of two very large houses, and even that had
to be fitted into spare fragments and half-sheets of her time, so that
she might be always free for my father’s calls upon her. With his death
had come not only the emptiness caused by his loss, but now, when she
had to make her own life, the emptiness of having nothing that she need
do. It was not that she had any less zest for the affairs and interests
of her family, but that there was no other zest. She had foreseen that
this must be so in the early days, but she had not foreseen—her courage
and her eagerness inhibited it—that it was when she had to set about
making a life for herself, the full perception of the blank would smite
her. Most of all did this burden of nothingness weigh her down when she
returned to Winchester from some stay in London. The old entrancing
life, which for her was over, still foamed and bubbled, and she realized
that she who had been in the very centre of it all must stand aside
behind the barrier that excluded the general public, and at the most
intelligently watch the clashings and the crossings of the loom at the
centre of which she had once sat and served in the weavings of my
father’s work. And she saw with a regret that was unavoidable that her
devotion had been given solely to his convenience and not to his work
itself, the thing for which he lived. She had been Martha, she told
herself, not Mary, and she ached with the sense of her past
inadequacies, not seeing, in her search for an unattainable, that she
had to choose one service or the other. . . . And then came her return
to Winchester (already to her a stagnancy and a backwater, instead of a
peace-pool), and learned our news: the wife of a master at the College
had left cards, and Taffy was quite well, but couldn’t remember where he
had buried his bone two days ago, and had frenziedly dug up all the
dahlias in order to discover it, and I had played golf twice yesterday.
Maggie had gone for a drive, and that was all. . . . It was very nice as
a diversion, a game after dinner, but oh, for the intense and splendid
affairs that had once marched along with banners and bugles. Most of all
she yearned to be wanted, and all of us who wanted her so much and so
much got her, could not conceivably give her the sense of being
instantly and imperiously demanded. She longed to surrender herself, and
in this ceasing of the call for her surrender it was inevitable that she
should find not a victory but a defeat.

Then, too, all her children were now grown up, and, as was natural, we
were all developing on our own lines. She would have been the first to
lament any want of development (that would have been more tragic yet),
but she longed to have someone dependent on her for his work. That could
not be; she could not help Arthur with his boarding-house at Eton, nor
Maggie with her philosophy, nor me with the Princess Sophia, nor Hugh in
his curacy at Kemsing; none of us could urgently want her like that.

Especially she realized this during the spring, when Hugh felt that he
must leave Kemsing and submit himself to some more disciplined spiritual
rule. She could neither help nor hinder: his conscience was adult and
master in its house, and she could only laugh when Hugh, humorous even
in the most soul-vexing questions, sketched the life at Kemsing under
his friend the Rector, in whose luxurious house he lived. The Rector’s
visiting in his parish, Hugh declared, consisted in taking an afternoon
drive in a landau with a pair of high-stepping horses. Sometimes the
Rector would see a labourer working at the road-side, and leaning over
the side of the landau would bawl out to him that he had observed his
absence from church last Sunday, and hoped it would not occur again.
Then he would doze a little as they bowled along, and they returned to
the Rectory for a hot, comfortable tea, after which Hugh would get on
with the pantomime he was writing for the school-children to act at
Christmas: the organist composed music for his lyrics. If a new song was
complete, the Rector faintly protesting, was easily induced to leave the
composition of his sermon, and join in the chorus.

[Illustration: _Photo: Hills & Saunders._

MARY BENSON.
 (Aged 30.)]

After an excellent dinner they played whist, and a glass of whisky and
soda preceded retirement, and loud laughter from the Rector would
indicate that he had found an apple-pie bed. . . . This was all busy and
agreeable, thought Hugh, but not spiritual, and in a great hurry, like
everybody else in the family except Maggie, he made arrangements for
joining Canon Gore’s House of the Resurrection at Mirfield. As this
implied leaving the Diocese of Canterbury, he went to tell Archbishop
Temple about it, who told him to get back to his work, and they both
appeared to have sadly lost their tempers. But my mother induced Hugh to
behave rather more filially to the Head of his Church, and it was
amicably arranged that he should go to Mirfield as a probationer,
without taking permanent vows. Beth disapproved of this step quite as
strongly as the Archbishop had done, for she had realized that the House
of the Resurrection was a communistic body, and that none of the
brethren had any property of his own. So what was the use of her seeing
that Hugh had plenty of vests and socks if the “greedy things” (meaning
the brethren) were to take them away from him? They were monks and
greedy things, and Master Hugh would have to make his own bed, which he
would never do properly, and empty his slops, which he would spill. So
Hugh sent her a series of pictures portraying his arrival at Mirfield
and the “greedy things” in cassocks running away in different directions
with all his luggage. Other sketches showed him ringing a large
dinner-bell to wake the greedy things in the morning, and upsetting his
slop-pail.

Thus, not more than six months after we had settled in Winchester with
such fair promise of content, it began to be clear that it was not
answering. My mother still said nothing about her own view of the
matter, as long as Winchester appeared to suit everybody else, but in
her diary she wrote a few explicit words: “I sicken at all this everyday
life, at the setting of it. Oh, the awful backwater this is! . . .” Just
then I think she would have found every place in England a backwater;
even London, as the scene of her new and more restricted life, would not
have been much better. But now Winchester was failing in other ways: the
spring was raw and chilly, and the temporary improvement in Maggie’s
health and general spirits was arrested by increased physical discomfort
and occasionally deep mental depression. She had not spent a winter in
England for many years, and the mists and damp which hung in this hollow
brought her barometer down to very unsettled weather. She was not in fit
health to move about much, and she unerringly pointed out that the downs
which afforded me such pleasant games of golf were seen by her through
the dirty windows of a hired brougham; “Put the windows down then” made
her laugh, but it was really no laughing matter. She wanted change:
everybody else hopped about while she moped on her perch: there was I,
just going out to Athens again, and oh, the Acropolis. . . .

Hitherto she had accepted her disabilities with the gayest courage,
making the uttermost of what her limitations left her, but now (and no
wonder) her continued ill-health was at last wearing out the stoutness
of her patience. If there was no more Athens and Egypt, could she not,
at least, have the country, fields, animals, the green things, the live
air? She had long and agitating talks with my mother, and then, while
she bitterly blamed herself for complaining, she held on to the fact of
her reasonableness. Each of them, one ill and depressed, the other
unhappy and hopeless, was doing her very best, but those indefinable
frictions which most strongly “rub up” those who love each other most,
and which seem only to be aggravated by affection, made them both ache
with a bewildered sense of estrangement.

It is hard to express another and more vital change that came over
Maggie during this spring of 1898. She lost none of her essential
sweetness of disposition, but there was added to it some sort of
sternness, a new consciousness of responsibility. She was working at the
proofs of a finished, though unpublished, manuscript of my father’s on
the Revelation of St. John, and it had got a great hold on her, not so
much as a treatise in itself, but as a reflection of his mind;
simultaneously she was in constant correspondence with my brother Arthur
on the Life of my father which he was then writing. She was, in fact, as
my mother subsequently noted, “soaking herself in him,” and the effect
of that appeared in her own bearing to her surroundings. She became
markedly more like him in acts and attitudes, each small in itself, but
like a painter’s fine touches on his picture, bringing out an effect.
These things were slight at first, like the unconscious imitative
gestures made by someone who is strongly under the influence of another,
and it was chiefly in her dealings with my mother that she exhibited
them; if she thought she saw a slackness in domestic arrangements, she
would, rather peremptorily, suggest a stricter policy. Insensibly she
laid her hands on the reins, making the household to take its pace from
her. And so eagerly did my mother accept such suggestions. . . . It was
like _him_ to want things done in that way; it was like her to be alert
in such service again.

I went off to Athens soon after this stir and seething became apparent,
with the impression that we should not be plums on the garden wall much
longer. This expedition was no pleasure-excursion, but was undertaken in
order to administer a fund initiated by the Duke of Westminster, and
placed in the hands of the Red Cross for the relief of Greek refugees
from Thessaly, which at the moment was in the hands of the victorious
Turks at the close of the Græco-Turkish war. The Turkish armies, it may
be remembered, had strolled across Thessaly with a minimum of opposition
from the Greek troops, who, ill-organized, ill-supplied, ill-fed, and
ill-led, had trotted away in front of them, until, when the southern
boundaries of the province were reached, the powers which guaranteed the
integrity of Greece bade the victors halt. The rout of the Greeks had
been complete, and never had a war been so military-mild. The Greek
army, to put it briefly, had got away from the advance of the Turkish
line with the utmost possible expedition, and by one of those ironical
happenings, which go far to support the existence of a humorous
Providence, the first Greek soldier who arrived hot-foot in Athens was
he who had won the Marathon race in the Olympic games two years before.
So bravely and swiftly had he then run from Marathon to Athens that the
experts marvelled at the speed of the man, saying that no known runner
could normally go like that: the glory of winning the Marathon race must
have been an inspiration to him, making him super-human in his prowess.
Now he triumphantly vindicated his form: he was inspired to run like
that again.

There was then an armistice, pending future arrangements, and the Turks
observed it with the most scrupulous passivity. In the complete
disintegration of any Greek fighting force, a mere handful of men was
sufficient to hold the conquered province, and the embarkation of
superfluous troops was in progress when I arrived at Volo. That day
certain transports had been expected, which were delayed by a storm, and
regiment after regiment of Turks had marched into the town to find that
they must remain there instead of embarking. Streets and quays that
night were paved with the houseless soldiers, while the Greek
inhabitants of Volo continued to occupy their tranquil abodes. There was
no eviction of these, or commandeering of their tenements; the victors
lay out in the open and the vanquished slept in their beds. Never was
there more perfect discipline, all night long no sound was heard but the
tramp of sentries. The same men would, no doubt, have murdered every man
and ravished every woman in the place, if there had not been an order,
but they had been told to be quiet.

The province was swarming with brigands, almost entirely Greek, who had
warily followed the march of the Turkish armies southward, and in their
rear descended to get the gleanings in the villages of their own
countrymen. I had been authorized in Athens to get a Greek guard, before
going out into the country to distribute relief to the Greeks who were
stranded there, but no such guard was obtainable, and, as I wanted to
get on with my work, I went to Edhem Pasha, Commander-in-Chief of the
Turkish army in Thessaly, to see if he would do anything for me. I
explained the position: I was on an errand of succour to the Greeks, and
he quite understood. Certainly I should have a Turkish guard to protect
me from Greek bandits, whose countrymen I had come to aid. In the
meantime, let us have dinner, and the guard would be ready in the
morning. Edhem enjoyed, I think, this exhibition of cynical benevolence
to his foes. After all, poor things, they had given very little trouble,
and the civilians were in deadly plight, what with the necessary
commandeering of provisions and the violent epidemic of small-pox, and
he was very glad that something should be done for them. He described to
me the famous battle of Pharsala, which had been hailed in Athens as a
triumph of Greek arms. “That is surprising,” he said, “for when we got
into touch with the Greek army at Pharsala, all we had to do was to say
‘Shoo, shoo,’ and away they went. Our men call them the host of hares!”
At parting, he gave me a set of Greek stamps with the Turkish surcharge,
for use in Thessaly, while the province was in the hands of the Turks.

Next morning, accordingly, we started, and found a grim jetsam stranded
in the towns and villages of the conquered province. All the inhabitants
who had been able to secure any sort of conveyance had fled in front of
the advancing Turks; there were left the poorest and those who from age
or youth were most helpless. Food was scarce, the epidemic of small-pox
was severe, and the Greek doctor whom we had brought from Athens soon
had his hands full. He made the best of the filthy and verminous
conditions for those who were down with it, and with a gay and guileful
tongue (as in some story by Kipling) he induced the rest to submit to
vaccination, which they regarded as a perilous adventure not unconnected
with black arts. Various were his blandishments and menaces: to one it
was the King who had ordered that all who would not be vaccinated should
be clapped into gaol: to another it was Queen Victoria who had sent the
vaccine: to an aged crone it was that vaccine was an elixir, which would
make her so lovely that all the young men of Larissa would sigh their
hearts out for her.

Then there were destitute folk to be taken to refuge camps round Athens,
and soup-kitchens to be organized, and Lady Egerton, wife of the British
Minister, set on foot admirable institutions where women who could weave
were given employment. A couple of months’ work relieved the worst
distress and brought us to the end of our funds, and, after a week or
two more in Athens, I turned homewards, stopping on the way with a
friend who had a house on the island of Capri. When I got home I was
told by Lord Wantage, the head of the Red Cross, that King George of
Greece had expressed an amiable desire to decorate with the Order of the
Redeemer two of those who had been engaged in this relief work, and that
my name had been recommended. But from that day to this I never heard a
word more about it, and the mystery as to whether the Order of the
Redeemer was lost in the post, or whether King George, on second
thoughts, considered that it would be too much pleasure, remains
unsolved.

But on that idle visit to Capri a spell wove itself, and it became to me
the Enchanted Island. It was not the first or the second time that I had
been there, but hitherto no magic had stirred there: it had been but a
place of pleasant vineyards and cobbled paths, of warm still nights, of
mornings of pellucid swimmings, and afternoons of walks to breezy
uplands, and returns in mellow dusks. Certainly it had been charming,
but with an external charm only. Now, as by a wand invisibly waved and
by mutterings of incantation, the spell was made, and I found myself no
longer a vagrant traveller, but a home-sick and returning wanderer.
Capri, hitherto lovely but aloof, had without warning made a breach in
my heart, and through it triumphantly tumbled Italy itself. The fact of
Italy got inside me; never since have I gone there without the sense of
homing.

How exquisite is this multiplication of homes which fetter the heart and
thereby enlarge its freedom! I should like to be at home in a hundred
countries, feeling that I was knit to them by some psychical bond as
much thicker than blood as blood is thicker than water. The merely
travelled cosmopolitan may feel at ease in many countries and with many
tongues, and yet be no more than a courier in Babel, but the
cosmopolitanism of the heart transforms the well-equipped traveller into
a native; he lies a-soak instead of sight-seeing. There were the same
lizards (or, if not, their descendants: I do not know the length of a
lizard’s life), and certainly the same stone walls and sea and
olive-trees, the same houses and vineyards, and the same inhabitants;
the same footfalls and snatches of songs and whistlings that drifted in
the dusk by the Villa Ferraro up and down the cobbled ways, but now the
singing was within me, and the footfalls echoed in my heart. The spell
did not arise from any mental perception, from a comprehension of the
Italian or Caprese point of view: it was rather that by some magic of
the whitest they had grasped me. Was it some baptism of water that I had
unwittingly undergone in flashing noondays at the Bagno Timberino, where
the gigantic ruins of the imperial palace have tumbled from the cliff,
and the water of the tideless sea eternally strives to wash the antique
wickedness from them? or was it some baptism of fire, some sacrament of
the sun which I had received, or of glowing cigarette-ends smoked
beneath the stars, or of Naples smouldering on the horizon, or of the
glow of the burning which is never quenched illuminating the wreathed
vapours about Vesuvius?

Since then Capri has never ceased to hold some postern in my heart, at
the door of which, when I enter, I sprinkle myself with the holy water
of Lethe, and at that lustral touch all memories of duties omitted and
deeds committed lose coherence and significance, and become, at the
most, a misty food for Freud. It was only with an effort that I could
realize that I had been among stricken refugees in Thessaly: so long ago
and so far away it was, that probably it did not happen to me at all,
but to some previous incarnation of me, incredibly remote. Even Naples
across the bay was only a streak of light, to be regarded as one regards
through a telescope the star-dust of the heavens, and wonders, with a
sense of fairy-tale, whether, indeed, those luminous atoms are worlds
which have their own inhabitants. All that matters is that one is
dropping down the path which lies between the olive-groves on one hand
and the sunk vineyards on the other, and that at the next corner the bay
of bathing will come into sight, and that for three hours there will be
liquid pilgrimages of coolness and baskings on the beach that quivers
with the stir of heat. Then there will be food and wine, and after wine
the winking of eyelids and their closing, and the waking to the rustle
of the sea-breeze, and a climb up Monte Solaro, where the tawny lilies
lurk in the grass. Soon the sunset will fade and the stars steal from
their celestial lairs, and when picquet and the piano are done, a crawl
to bed, and a waking to another day precisely like the last. And over
all, a balm and an anæsthetic to any restless piece of conscience, lies
the sense of being very busy. That is Capri’s crowning conjuring-trick:
the conviction that the day has been well and strenuously spent hovers
like a benediction by your bedside. “Sleep, weary one,” it whispers.
“Get a good rest: your ardent spirit deserves eight hours of profound
slumber. Remember you have a heavy day in front of you, what with
bathing and siesta. . . .”

I clung to each day as my departure grew imminent, as to the last hours
of a holiday which must be squeezed of the last drop of juice, till the
moment when I should see the white wake of water behind the crazy little
steamer that was bearing me back to Naples grow longer and ever longer,
and the figures on the quay fade to indistinguishable specks: for I knew
from letters I had received that there were difficulties and decisions
ahead in the hyperborean island. When I got home they were still a
little vague, matters for hint not statement, but they quickly became
definite.

“Throughout May and June”—such was the upshot of talks with my
mother—“it was piping hot here, and stuffy. We all felt it rather, and
Maggie was laid flat, and, oh, my dear, how lovely Capri must have been
for them as likes being broiled, and Athens too, though your account of
the small-pox made me squirm. Yes, Maggie! She has been trying so hard,
bless her, but she has had a time of dreadful depression, partly
physical, no doubt, partly the heat. . . .”

And the dear face grew troubled, and piece by piece, with self-blame for
not being wiser, and for being a Selfish Pig, all the tangle and the
uncertainty and some deep-lying, hardly acknowledged uneasiness emerged.
Maggie had been suffering from just such depressions as my father was
subject to (here was another point of resemblance in that curious change
which was taking place in her), and now, just as in the old years, they
had produced in my mother some fettered sense of bondage. She had never,
when they were upon him, been able to proceed normally and
light-heartedly with life (which would probably have been the best thing
to do), for fear that, in all innocence, she might be displeasing him
and vexing him. These darknesses had been like an obsession to him, and
he was in bondage, too, till they lifted. And now the same sort of
visitation had come to Maggie, and what was to be done, and to what did
it point? Hitherto Maggie had taken her ailments with such pluck and
defiance, refusing to let them touch her essentially, but holding them
at arm’s length, as external disturbances. And as for the pitched tent
in Winchester, it was horribly dull for Maggie here: she could not for
ever poke and prowl in this little walled-in garden: she wanted, as with
thirst, a greater spaciousness, and, in her inability to walk much,
something to manage strollingly, pigeons and poultry and flower-beds.
There was no such diversion for her here; when she had read and written
to weariness, there was nothing that refreshed while it occupied her.
Never did advocate speak so convincingly for a cause that enlisted her
own personal sympathy, and yet at that time there was no one to whom
personally country-life appealed less.

She saw another thing, too, in her wisdom. Strangely and somewhat
disconcertingly there was developing in Maggie the trait so
characteristic of my father, the love of organizing, the shouldering of
responsibilities. In our mixed natures (for no man is wholly a man, nor
any woman entirely feminine) some masculine fibre had begun to assert
itself in her.

“In the country she can have her sphere,” said my mother. “Something to
look after. A sphere.”

She loved a catch-word like that: an idea always became more definite
and a difficulty more soluble when she had affixed its label.

And so, by degrees, the fact that we must fold our tents like the
Arabs—as if we had not had enough of Egypt already!—and silently steal
away, began to ooze into the water-supply of domestic life, somehow
hardening it, and producing reticences and changes of subject. Orders to
view houses arrived, and casual airy references to Basingstoke and
Haslemere developed into visits of inspection, and there we all were, my
mother regarding the prospect of exclusive country-life with sheer blank
dismay; Maggie silent and depressed; I, so much disliking the idea of
leaving Winchester that I could take only the most frigid interest in
these “orders to view,” and all of us unsettled at the thought of
another move, and shrinking from discussion. But clearly Winchester
would not do, and the knowledge of that was somehow like a street band
playing at a distance: it did not interrupt, but slightly embarrassed,
conversation. Only if a silence fell, the band became more audible: it
was certainly moving up in our direction, and would come to the
front-door before long. There it would stay until the organ, and the
billiard-table, and the statue of Rameses the Great, and the folio
editions of the Christian Fathers, were all vomited out of No. 9, St.
Thomas’s Street again, and were taken away to Basingstoke or Haslemere
or wherever.

What we all wanted was what in clerical language is termed “a call.” We
were a most united family, reinforced by a devoted and beloved friend of
my mother’s, and we depended on each other and were fond of each other
to a degree rather unusual among a family of adults, so that if it had
been needful for the work of one of us or the health of another to go to
a definite place, we should have played hymns of festival on the organ
till the very moment when the packers seized it. But there was no such
call, except the call to be gone from Winchester, and that was only a
negative one, not, in fact, a call of “Come here,” but only “Go away.”
That autumn in consequence was, from a purely material point of view,
the climax of the effect of my father’s death. Before, we had to be at
Lambeth or Addington if we wanted to be at home, and there were no two
words to be said about it. We were attached to the full orb of his
office, and rolled along the sky as his fixed satellites. But now we
were all adrift, and individual preferences came in, and there was no
reason to be in any one place rather than any other, provided only that
it was not a provincial town in a cup-shaped hollow.

I had begun to think that there would be a long respite before any
further move, for the house at Haslemere wouldn’t do, and the house near
Basingstoke was an abomination, when there was detected, in the fell
pages of _Country Life_, an advertisement with an odiously attractive
illustration of a house with manageable acreage, and an avenue of pines,
standing on high sandy soil within forty miles of London. It was of red
brick, chiefly Jacobean, and seemed a terribly amiable dwelling. But
there was the brief consolation of hoping that it was all too good to be
true, and it seemed most unlikely that there should, either in Sussex or
anywhere else, be a place called Horsted-Keynes. It was the kind of name
that a foreign author writing about rural England would invent.

But there was a Horsted-Keynes: trains went there, and Lucy went in one
of them, and when she returned she was like the Queen of Sheba when she
beheld the glory of Solomon, except that instead of having no spirit
left in her, she had a great deal. _Country Life_, apparently, had not
told the half of the charm and beauty of Tremans. And thus, for the last
time, my mother moved her earthly habitation, and lived at Tremans
longer than she had lived in any of her previous homes.


                               CHAPTER IV

A road sunk deep between hedges and sandy banks slopes downwards from
the village of Horsted-Keynes, and passes on the right a gate leading
into a short avenue of big pines which grow out of a clipped yew hedge,
over the top of which you can see various and fantastic chimneys of
red-brick, a small lead-cowled turret, and the gables of tiled roofs. A
hundred yards within the gate the pines cease, and the road takes a
sharp-angled turn below a great walnut-tree. The house then faces you
across a lawn, enclosed by a low red-brick wall with a gate in the
centre. Here was the original main entrance to the house, as the big
door set on three curved stone steps testifies, but to-day you must
proceed farther round a little wing of Elizabethan building to arrive at
the more convenient access, which lies in an angle between this
Elizabethan portion and a further small wing of grey stone with
mullioned windows. A garden of flowers and espaliered fruit-trees and
vegetables, grass-pathed, and sheltered on the north by a high wall and
on the east by an immense yew hedge, lies to the right, and below it an
orchard of apples and tall pink-flowering cherry-trees. Still moving
round the house you come to a terraced bowling-green bounded by more yew
hedges and the avenue of pines under which you have lately passed, and
the lawn across which you first faced the house completes the circuit.
Below, half hidden behind a row of unpruned shrubs and a herbaceous
border, rise the lichened roofs of barns and farm-buildings, and the
ground slopes gently down across hayfields to a brook that prowls along
the bottom of the valley, among fine oaks and an undergrowth of holly
and hazel, and, making a juncture with two other streams, saunters into
the Ouse and so past Lewes to the sea.

I cannot disentangle from the overlying memories of change and
efflorescence a certain bareness in the garden when first I saw it. But
when last I saw it in 1919, it was difficult to imagine a fairer place,
so sweetly it rioted with the scent and colour of homely blossoms. The
bowling-green, long grown tussocky and uneven, could not have been
reclaimed without complete relaying, and since there was no clamour to
play bowls, it was given a more decorative mission. Young apple-trees
were planted there and thousands of bulbs, a milky way of the stars of
spring. Jonquil and narcissus were there, and speckled fritillaries, and
tulips, white-chaliced and red and yellow, and above all there were
daffodils, daffodils so innumerable that when one day, owing to an
undesired wealth of dandelions, I secretly picked every single
dandelion-head that was in flower, and brought my family to see the
Sisyphus-labour that I had accomplished, they could none of them discern
any diminution of gold, and I had to tell them what I had done. So much
for daffodils.

There, too, on the banks of the bowling-green were bushes of rosemary
and broom and peonies, and round two sides of it a hedge of crimson
rambler-rose, and the new sappy stems of each year were trained back
into it, so that the hedge should not grow too high and hide the
daffodils, but should become thick and very rosey. Below the
bowling-green, round the small lawn that faced the house, there were
flower-beds, and those just below the windows were always, at their
season, tawny with wall-flowers, and their fragrance, redolent of
unrecapturable memories and the dim early brightnesses of life, wandered
in at the windows. Later in the year begonias made a stricter formality,
and later yet dahlias and scarlet salvias. Round the other sides of the
lawn there were beds that were always sanctuaries for blueness, of
delphiniums and cornflowers, and nemesia and gentian and forget-me-not,
and over the stone pilasters and balls of the gateway towards the
walnut-tree pink rambler and purple clematis fought out a championship
for twenty year-long rounds, and at the end both antagonists were still
going strong.

A pergola of small white climbing rose darkened the path that led round
the angle of the house between the bowling-green and the garden of mixed
flowers and fruit. A wall sheltered that acre from the north wind, but
whatever wind it was that blew, the spices of it flowed forth. Under its
protection was a tiled space that caught the sun from morning till the
shadow of the house lay across it, and lemon verbena flanked it and
aromatic geranium: it was a “smellage” of fragrant plants, and in front
was a trellis of sweetbriar, through which in due season came the scent
of the bean flower, and the sun cooked a grill of manifold
deliciousness, and the breeze stirred it. Pear-trees were spread on the
wall, and a morning-glory testified with uncurled trumpets to the night
dew. At the end of this garden rose the smooth green serge of that
astounding yew hedge, and against it burned the yellow flame of broom
and the smoulder of Oriental poppies. Green woodpeckers nested in the
orchard below, and great-tits behind a displaced stone in the wall close
at hand: they had chosen their nursery cunningly, but gave their secret
away by loud scoldings when you approached it. And owls, owls! Tremans
will always be to me the place of owls; the barn owl was always whitely
hunting over the bowling-green in a silence broken by those shrieks so
disconcerting to those who do not love it, and, when its dinner was
done, snoring in the ivy, and the tawny owl was there more elusive and
mysterious, emending his Shakespeare and calling, “Hoo-hoo, whoo-it,
whoo, hoo,” and the little owl was there, the wicked little owl, mewing
according to his wickedness.

Embowered thus stood the serene old house, low-ceilinged, with panelled
parlours, and broad oak staircases and spacious lobbies. Girt with the
green freshness of its lawns, it was cool always in any stress of
summer, and in the winter it had its open fireplaces, each with its
bellows for the brisker burning of the logs, and (be it whispered)
central heating to reinforce their flames. Of ancient oak was its
woodwork, panels and floors and staircases, so seasoned that never a
creak or a crack betrayed an insolidity, and here and there in
third-story rooms and passages the beams of its construction were grey
between the spaces of lath and plaster. It was always faintly fragrant
with the smell of wood smoke (for in winter the fires never died down on
the hearths), even when through the windows in summer there flowed the
scent of wall-flowers, or when the lilacs were in bloom. But something
more fragrant yet was to be fashioned there, and I think that if the
house stood for another thousand years, there would never fade from the
cool dusk of its rooms and passages, or from its sunny garden, the aroma
of the years when my mother was the lamp and the light of it, and its
ruins would be haunted and blessed by her still. . . .

So the stream of vomiting vans which brought Winchester to Tremans,
poured down the avenue of pines, and unladed themselves below the
wisteria that in this hot April was heavy with bunches of blossom. Out
came Rameses and the organ and the early Christian Fathers, and with a
sunken heart I dustily saw to their new bestowal. Once again Taffy lay
in the mid-stream of traffic, and the Persian cat smelt familiar objects
and saw that they were put in places that were satisfactory to her
Oriental Highness, and once again Matilda was convinced with the granite
imperturbability of her Druidical mind that all that was being done for
her special amusement. She had learned everything that was to be known
about life and death and house-moving, and this pilgrimage from
Winchester (so I read Matilda’s mind) was to her no more than the film
or moving picture of a quite familiar scene. Then, even in the midst of
this vain-glorious thought, Matilda’s world-weary ear caught a new noise
coming in through the open window, by which her cage was set. She had
never heard such a sound at Lambeth (Matilda used not to go to
Addington), nor had it ever penetrated into her apartments at St.
Thomas’s Street, Winchester, but now its reiteration proved that it was
no fantasy of her own imaginative brain. It said “Cuckoo, cuckoo,” and
Matilda thought about it in dead silence for three days, and paid no
more attention to our pushings and pullings, but retired into some
remote shrine of abstract meditation. The choicest pieces of banana fell
from her claws, her ear was deaf to the groan of creaking furniture and
the crash of broken crockery, for she knew all about that. Then she came
out of her retreat, cleared her throat like the kitchen-maid, and said
“Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo” for a week.

But what was I to do when the organ was in place again and the folios of
the early Christian Fathers were on the shelves? I had not learned the
wisdom of Matilda, nor had I Matilda’s genius thus to be able to brood
and ponder, self-involved and contemplative, and be calmly content on
re-emergence with having reproduced exactly what I meant to reproduce. I
had my own work to amuse and absorb me, but both during it, and in the
longer intervals when one story was done and another not yet begun, I
wanted two things, relaxation and stimulus, not, be it understood, in
the bullion of love and affection which would gleam here inexhaustibly,
but in small change, in change, indeed, so small that the very mention
of its coinage sounds ridiculous.

But there it was: I wanted golf and games and ease and casual
intercourse with those of my own sex. Just as a woman, if she has any
semblance of intellectual life of her own, demands, though blissfully
married, some sort of female companionship, so, too, a man, especially
if he is not married, and lives a good deal among the conundrums and
portrayals and pictures which he conjures up in his own mind, and
(rightly or wrongly) strives to commit to paper, needs most imperatively
some commerce with his own sex. His enjoyment of it may to an external
view only express itself in grunts and grumblings, in putting his feet
upon a chair and yawning, but it is as necessary for him as for the body
is necessary the supply of some obscure vegetable salt. It gives
nutriment, perhaps, to some ductless gland in which is involved the due
and orderly function of his physical economy. Not every day or all day
does a man want one of his own sex to be accessible, but I doubt whether
a young man can sustain any sort of part in a permanent home, remotely
situated in the country, of which the household entirely consists of
women, unless he has some sort of male companionship.

In that divine month of May which followed, these conclusions became
dimly apparent. The daily problem of what to do after lunch, for
instance, grew insoluble. The morning could be busily occupied, but
could Priapus himself have been content with the garden every afternoon,
or anyone but Mr. Wordsworth have been content to “wander lonely as a
cloud” through these delightful vales and uplands, and perpetually fill
his heart with pleasure and dance with the daffodils? After lunch a
melancholy quiet submerged the house, for all the others “rested,” and I
felt, with Œnone, that “I alone awake.” Seven miles on a bicycle, it is
true, would bring me to the golf-links on Ashdown Forest, but would you,
though you were quite devoted to golf, constantly struggle uphill for
four miles and downhill for three, in order to play a round, and,
returning, wheel your bicycle uphill for three miles, and pedal easily
along for four? Or could you play croquet eagerly and angrily with
someone who did not really care whether she won or not? Games of every
sort must be deadly serious, if they are to be played at all, and no
member of my family, except Hugh, ever understood this. But the real
lack at Tremans as a permanent home was the absence of a male with whom
at ease one could discuss and quarrel and conspire. . . . With what
wistfulness, day by day, did my mother ask me what I was going to do
that afternoon! I had no idea.

It was not that I was idle: for I was deeply immersed in a sensational
tale called _The Luck of the Vails_. The germ of it was a story that
Arthur had told his boys at Eton: this he presented to me with the
rhyming legend which ran round the rim of the jewelled cup which was the
“Luck” and the clue of the tale:

                “When the Luck of the Vails is lost,
                 Fear not rain nor fire nor frost;
                 When the Luck is found again,
                 Fear both fire and frost and rain.”

That uncanny and suggestive rhyme fermented in my brain with yeasty
bubblings, and I enjoyed for months the heavenly illusion which comes
sometimes to scribblers that their puppets and the adventures of them
have an existence more real than that of the folk among whom they live.
The great yew hedge in my tale became the _real_ yew hedge, and the
hedge at Tremans from which I took it was but shadowy in
comparison. . . .

                 *        *        *        *        *

One night, during the writing of it, I vividly remember as spiced with a
pungent and pleasing horror. I was quite alone in the house on that
February evening, for the rest of the family were up in London, and
there was a gale bugling outside which caused the curtains in the
drawing-room, where I worked after a lonely dinner, eerily to stir and
rustle, and their fringes whispered over the floor as they mysteriously
bellied and grew lean again. The wind hooted in the open chimney, making
the blazing logs flare high and die down again, and, as I followed the
villain of the tale, who had quite taken charge of me, through the maze
of his infamies, there came little tappings on the dark panels from the
pictures that stirred in the draught, and more than once I had to cast a
terrified glance round the dim room, to be sure that no stranger
presence had slid in. Then a servant came in with a tray of spirits and
siphon, and I heard her steps die away.

There was then a wicked uncle, Uncle Francis, in that obsolete story of
mine, and he was frightening me. I knew what he was meaning to do, for I
had invented it myself, but the writing of it down vitalized him into
something real and external, and he was horribly present. I wanted to
stop working, but apart from the fact that I was completely unable to do
so, I was wise enough to know that it was a shocking waste not to use
such a mood as I was in, to the utmost final flicker of it. On the other
hand, if Uncle Francis was to get much more dreadful, I should not in
the least enjoy putting out the lights, and going up to bed with a
candle that wagged in the air-currents and cast disconcerting shadows on
the walls. So, very prudently, I resolved to get safely to my bedroom,
shut the door, and have no post-midnight excursion through the very
staircase and landing, on which, in my fiction, Uncle Francis was busy
with his “negotium in tenebris.” So with my pen in my mouth (and my
heart there too), and my manuscript and my cigarettes, I went to my
room, prepared for a harrowing vigil. I must confess that when I got
there I looked in a large wardrobe to guard against surprises, and
examined the alcoves of the windows over which the curtains were drawn.

Uncle Francis (to my mind) was in admirable form, and I quaked as I
wrote. And then suddenly the most awful thing happened. I was meditating
the end of a sentence with my eyes just a little raised from my paper,
when I saw a lighted candle move in front of me, and then another, and
the dark semblance of the figure of a man was seated between them. . . .
I sprang to my feet with a catch in my breath, to find that the door of
the wardrobe, which had a long looking-glass let into it, had swung
noiselessly open, suddenly confronting me with the reflection of myself
and my candles. . . .

In this picture of early days at Tremans I have laid on all my own
shadows first and left the prevailing sunlight to the end. That shone
with a brilliance beyond all expectation, and for the next six years
Maggie’s life blossomed with activity and happiness. Delicate she would
always be, but once again that invincible mind of hers, which had barely
dragged itself along under the weight of infirmities and depressions at
Winchester, shook off the dust and soared. This keen, kind air, which in
the heat was bracing, and brisk in the cold, was exactly what her body
needed, and with no less exactitude had my mother forecast the value of
a “sphere” for her. That late-born instinct, almost reincarnating in her
my father’s spirit, was just as dominant as it had been when first it
awoke in her, but now it had its sphere to dominate, instead of stifling
and struggling in the mire of ill-health. Everything out of doors in
farm and garden was included in that sphere: more flower-beds must be
mapped, more yews must be planted. A sundial: it was an anachronism not
to have a sundial, and the standard of it must be voluted—give me a bit
of paper—thus, to reproduce that twisted chimney. The great granite
head of Pasht must stand somewhere near: his centuries of sculptured
repose would be a counterblast to the shifting shadow, in case we were
inclined to think time too short, and hurry to conclusions. Then the
whole of the bowling-green must be planted with bulbs, not a clump here
and a clump there, as in the foolish London parks, but with something of
the free irregularity of stars in the summer night.

“I’m afraid I should have put the stars in patterns,” said she, “if I
had been asked to arrange them, and it would have been a great mistake.
And bulbs——”

“It would have been rather pretty,” said somebody.

“Yes: rather pretty, and how tired you would have got of it. It’s the
same with bulbs. The right way—yes, I know—the right way will be to
take handfuls of bulbs, throw them into the air, and plant them where
they come down.”

She hastily turned over the leaves of a gardening-book. “The way to
plant bulbs is this,” she said. “You dig a hole four feet deep for each
bulb——”

“Too shallow,” said somebody, with withering sarcasm.

“I mean four inches deep—I said four inches—and before you put the
bulb in, sprinkle some sand in the hole. Oh, there’s the cart come back
from the station. That’s brought the wire-netting for the hen-run. I
must just go and see if it _is_ it. Nettie” (to a friend), “if you
haven’t anything particular to do this minute, you might just start them
laying the bricks for the column for the head of Pasht. Two feet each
way.”

“You told me to read the proofs of your second chapter on the
excavations,” said Nettie, after thought.

“Maggie dear, hadn’t you better go and rest?” said my mother. “Dr. Todd
told you to rest for half an hour before lunch.”

“But he didn’t know the wire for the hen-run was coming to-day. I will
rest longer after lunch: I will really. Oh, bother, there’s Beth with my
medicine.”

“Nay now, don’t say bother!” said Beth.

“I shall. Do you remember when we were little, how you used to pretend
to taste our medicine, and smack your lips and say, ‘Oh, how good!’”

“Well, then, if it made you swallow it up,” said Beth. “And I’m sure
you’ve all done enough work for to-day.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

Then Taffy’s education must be seen to, and a revolving summer-house for
the orchard which could be turned to catch or avoid the sun, and entrap
a breeze or exclude a wind. Its ugly corrugated roof must be thatched,
and some roots of heather anchored there to see if they would grow (they
did), and a dovecote must be erected hard by, for the cooing promoted
meditation, and a pea-hen must be found for the bachelor peacock with
the crumpled foot, who used to run behind the victoria in order to
admire his reflection in the japanned panel at the back. He ran, gazing
at himself, as far as the gate into the pine-avenue, so fascinated by
the contemplation of his own beauty that when the carriage slowed down
to take the corner, he hit his beak against the adorable image of
himself. But he behaved kindly to the white pea-hen, which was somehow
procured (alive) at Leadenhall market, though in her milk-white bosom
there beat a black heart. For when, in the following spring, she laid a
quantity of eggs, she neglected her maternal duty of keeping them warm,
and gadded about. The eggs, consequently, became addled, as anyone could
tell who went near the cold nest, and then, too late, her conscience
pricked her, and she incubated, in that stench, day and night to the
detriment of her health. So in all kindness the eggs were taken away and
buried as deep as Maggie wanted to plant the bulbs, and finding the nest
empty, the white pea-hen saw red, and with hoarse cries rushed down to
the chicken-yard, and killed four hens. She had to be got rid of after
that, and Maggie sold her, without a character, at a staggering loss.

It was not only in the masterly management (apart from pea-hens) of all
these rural vocations that Maggie’s convalescence manifested itself. She
organized and started, quite with my father’s impulsive enthusiasm,
which made those under him devote themselves to his schemes, a society
called the St. Paul’s Association for Biblical Study. It met monthly in
London, for the purpose of hearing an address (followed by discussion)
from some eminent theologian, and presently Maggie started, on the same
lines, another society that held its meetings in the Long Vacation at
Oxford or Cambridge. Not only was her finger on the pulses of these, it
was more her blood which made their pulses to beat, for she kept them
nourished and vigorous. Now, too, before we had been a year at Tremans,
there was also a _pied-à-terre_ in London, for Lucy had taken a tiny
house in Barton Street, Westminster, had added on to it, and it was a
minute caravanserai to which all of us were welcome up to the limits of
its accommodation, and Maggie often stayed there for those full and busy
days of which now she was capable again. Her whole life was a-bloom with
its final flowering.

This resurgence of vitality in my sister, after the years of invalid
life, during which my mother had watched over her and protected her from
all that overtaxed the small store of strength with which she had to
combat illness, necessitated a definite change of relationship between
them. Hitherto the management of the entire family life had been on my
mother’s shoulders: it was she who had oiled the wheels, and held the
reins, and blown the horn, and driven the coach; she had been ostler and
guard and coachman in one. But now, with Maggie’s accession of strength,
and in particular with the growing psychical resemblance between her and
my father, the rôles were to some extent reversed. The male element, the
desire for a “sphere,” which my mother had so clearly foreseen and so
warmly welcomed, required readjustments to be made, and these involved a
profound and delicate point of psychology. Those instincts for
responsibility and management in Maggie did not in any way supplant her
feminine tenderness or dependence on my mother, the two existed in her,
separately and distinctly, but as allies and not antagonists. Eagerly
had my mother leaped to welcome the new development, beholding, with a
pang of wonder and love, that Maggie had passed through a new birth. She
had come forth after that long trance of illness with a changed nature,
her father’s. But the old mind was there as well, subtly mingled with
the new, so that while Maggie took the reins, and managed and assumed
responsibilities, she was still wanting to sit inside the coach with the
windows adjusted to her liking, and the cushions ready, and herself
protected and sheltered. There was my mother, anxious to fit herself
into Maggie’s attitude, but how was that possible? She demanded things
incompatible, for however well you can both swim and fly, you cannot
perform both motions simultaneously. There were debates and
misunderstandings and explanations, for there were engaged two extremely
analytical minds, which had to pierce to the core of the matter. What
made the poignancy of the situation was that between them there existed
an undying love, which at the end, after the storm and the darkness
which were coming, shone out again in luminous serenity.

My own situation, however, in that delicious house, showed no sign of
amelioration, but grew steadily worse. I was already thirty-two, an age
at which most young men have gone out into the world on an independent
footing of their own, with, in the majority of cases, the tie of
marriage, and this shallow life, unnaturally devoid of any initiative or
ordinary companionships, grew impossible. I might with reasonable
geniality have made a much better job of it than I did, but I doubt
whether any one with real activity of mind and body could have made a
good job of it, unless he had been a country-lover of the very highest
grade. Probably it was a mistake to have tried this experiment of living
at Tremans at all, when the prescience of failure had been so strong,
and the only excuse to be made for the error was that I had a very
genuine desire to fulfil the promise I had made at my father’s death to
live with my mother.

But now it became clear to her and to me that the promise could not be
kept in such an environment as she had chosen, for out of her anxiety
and my depression there was coming between us a barrier of some kind, a
sense of isolation and estrangement which was utterly intolerable. For
that I was quite to blame, for I had never really torn up the indictment
against them all that they had gone to Tremans knowing how I disliked
it, and then were disappointed and sad because I did not enjoy it. It
was that which I used as an excuse, if not a justification, for my own
disagreeableness and despair: I kept telling myself that it was their
fault. . . . And in her wisdom and her sweetness all those abominable
months, she watched and sorrowed and forgave, and after a year of it,
she saw that this was no good at all, and it must be stopped. She did
not put her pride in her pocket, for she had no pride, and her pocket
was full of love which would not see itself shadowed or dimmed, and
while I was away on some visit, she wrote me the perfect pearl of a
letter. She said that she had been afraid, before we came to Tremans,
that I should find it an impossible life; it was that which made her of
so divided a heart when the decision was taken. Since then she had seen
that it was so, and we must not let it go on like this. . . . She
remembered my promise, and she thanked and loved me for it, and now she
wished to set me free from it. . . . And so her house ceased in one
sense to be mine for the first time in my life, and I settled into a
small flat in Oxford Street. And in another sense Tremans became much
more “home” than in all the days of my sojourn there.

Then I intensely disliked it, but now, not being rooted there, I began
to love it, and all its sweet ways, with an ever-growing affection. That
sounds, as Beth said when she heard I was going away, “contrary enough”
(“Eh, don’t leave us,” she said. “Pray-a-don’t be so contrary”). But it
was not so contrary as it sounded, for thus the division between my
mother and myself was broken like match-wood. . . .


                               CHAPTER V

Baireuth, as it was when first I saw it, in the summer of 1899, was like
some stupendous comet once for a series of years coming brilliantly
close to the earth, and then never appearing again. It has vanished
utterly, not a gleam of its true glory is left in the heavens, and as
those who saw it at its brightest are few and will soon be fewer, I
propose to recall it in an immense parenthesis. . . .

In that year, Baireuth had climbed to the zenith of its brilliance in
the heavens of music. Before the next festival, two years after, when I
was at Baireuth again, it was a receding comet, and its brightness was
waning. Now it blazed; it was Mecca set on the summit of Parnassus, and
from the musical world of all countries the adoring pilgrims flocked to
the shrine. Wagner opera was supreme: the Wagnerites out-shouted
everybody else, and chanted, with the solemn sanctity of a creed, the
dogma that the Master was the supreme and final incarnation of the
spirit of music (for there had been no true incarnation before, neither
could such come after), and that the supreme expression of music was,
with the single exception of the Siegfried Idyll, opera. The second
clause in the creed, after the definition of the Master, was that at
Baireuth only, and nowhere else, was it possible to be witness of his
glory. The _Festspiel_ at Baireuth was the only true revelation: all
others were heretical. The third clause ordained that you had to leave
the critical spirit behind you when you came to Baireuth, in order that
you might be in a fit state to receive the initiation. Just at this
epoch, then, Baireuth was at its zenith, and even at the next festival,
a certain _Dämmerung_ had fallen on this Mecca of music: it no longer
basked in exclusive effulgence. Already Munich had instituted a
festival, which immediately followed on that of Baireuth, and at Munich
were performed (with the exception of _Parsifal_) such works of the
Master as had not been given there. Thus, if your cycle at Baireuth had
consisted of the _Ring_ and the _Meistersinger_, with a _Parsifal_ at
each end, you would hear at Munich _Tristan_ and _Tannhāuser_ and the
rest, and apostates began to whisper, under risk of the rack, that
really, you know, Munich in some ways was quite up to—and the faithful
looked pained and pitiful, and skilfully changed the subject. . . . Then
at Munich you could hear Mozart as well, and the faithful smiled
indulgently, and kindly said that they had always been told that
_Figaro_ was very pretty.

Then the dusk grew denser, for Hans Richter, the great prop and pillar
of Baireuth, the initiated priest (for had he not received consecration
at the Master’s hands in the matter of conducting _Parsifal_ and the
other gospels?), accepted a post at Manchester, and degraded his
inspired baton with performances at Covent Garden. At that, out of the
darkening and thunderous glow, a flash of lightning smote him, for Frau
Cosima Wagner, widow and priestess of the Master, caused him to be
described in the programme of the approaching festival, as Hans Richter
of Manchester. Why he did not instantly expire at the stroke of this
ironical thunderbolt was never clearly known, but he certainly survived
it, and was not even paralysed, and conducted at Covent Garden quite
efficiently. Indeed, his apostasy expanded into further blasphemies, for
in my own hearing he said that Wagner-opera would one day _return_ to
Germany, not squawled or shrieked, but sung, and that it would return
from England. As Jean and Edouard de Reszke, and Plançon and Ternina,
were doing their best about that time to sing it in London, there was
something to be said for his heresy. But he paid dearly, that supreme
musician, for his friendship and faithfulness to England, for, after the
declaration of war, stories, coming from Germany, were circulated about
him to the effect that he had given the English medals which he had
received, to be melted down into bullion for the Fatherland. Though
widely believed here, there was no word of truth in it: Hans Richter
never did anything of the sort. But it was a thoroughly Teutonic
reprisal for his belief in England, to discredit him with the English.

The two final and extinguishing darknesses that befell Baireuth, more
dense than any yet, were the expiration of the copyright of _Parsifal_,
which hitherto could only be given there, and the outbreak of the
European War. After these, it can never recover the sacred and
sacramental supremacy which it enjoyed before, nor ever again shall we
see, there or elsewhere, that crowd of devout worshippers hurrying into
the dim, huge theatre, when the horns gave out from the roof the leading
motif of the next act, with such expectancy of rapture and initiation as
their cosmopolitan countenances then expressed. So, as that epoch is
dead and will have no resurrection, it is allowable to attempt to
indicate the incredible atmosphere, subtly induced, which encompassed
it.

Baireuth itself is a mean and ugly little Bavarian town, dull and smelly
and sultry. There is nothing whatever of beauty to recommend it, and
apart from some barrack-like sort of palace, the creation of King
Ludwig, the only notable building there is the opera-house, acoustically
admirable, but otherwise an abomination of hideousness, which stands a
mile or so out of the sleepy, bourgeois town, on a fringe of pinewoods.
But during the festival, Baireuth had its court and its queen, all the
more majestic for being uncrowned, and she, of course, was Frau Cosima
Wagner, widow of the Master, and she was surrounded by the princes and
princesses of her marriages. I went out this year with Mary, Countess of
Galloway, who was a bosom friend of the family, and thus, rather
reluctantly, I saw, as from the vestry of the cathedral, the robing and
decoration of the priests and ministers who celebrated the Wagner-mass.
There were several daughters, called after the heroines of the gospels,
Eva and Elsa and Isolde, and one son, Siegfried, whose appearance and
musical talents made one somehow think of his father’s: there was a
family resemblance, they were cast in the immortal mould. He and his
sister Isolde were children of the Master; one of the other daughters
(or was it both of them?) was the child of von Bülow, Frau Cosima’s
first husband, whom she left, at the Master’s wish (and no doubt her
own), to become the Master’s wife. His genius demanded her, and her
obedient husband acquiesced. She became Frau Cosima Wagner, for Wagner,
already married, had got rid of his first wife. Then there were a couple
of sons-in-law, and these comprised the royal family, and lived as in a
royal palace, at Villa Wahnfried.

Far and away the most remarkable of them all, she, in fact, by whose
inspiration and untiring energy Baireuth had become the sacred and
central Mecca in the world of music, was Frau Cosima. _Parsifal_, I
think, had only been performed at one festival during the Master’s
lifetime: _Tannhäuser_ had been booed from the boards in Paris; his
music was regarded in England, even after his visit there and the
concert he conducted in the Albert Hall, as something decadent and
maniacal, and the _culte_, though enthusiastically supported in Germany,
was, at Wagner’s death, only in its infancy. Without Frau Cosima it
could never, in so short a period, have attained to its cosmopolitan
supremacy. She had an inexorable will, a dynamic power of “drive,” of
filling her workers and ministers with the enthusiasm of her own faith,
and just now she was poised on the very attainment and apex of her
life-long mission to convert the whole world to orthodox worship at the
Holy City. There was no limit to her devotion, her absolutism, and her
orthodoxy. One festival would hardly be over before she began working
for the next, and I well remember the indulgent smile with which she
received my amazed wonder at the sheer perfection of stage management in
the apprentice-scene in the _Meistersinger_, as she told me that they
had had over fifty full rehearsals of it. As for her orthodoxy, she,
with Hans Richter at her right hand, saw that everything, down to the
smallest detail connected with the production, was done as _mein Mann_
had ordained it. He had, for instance, allowed applause (otherwise
_verboten_) at the conclusion of the last act of _Parsifal_ on its first
performance, and therefore ever afterwards the whole theatre resounded.
He had permitted laughter at the battered Beckmesser’s limpings and
twinges in the third act of the _Meistersinger_, and thereafter the
whole theatre exploded and rocked and guffawed, with the punctuality of
a set fuse, at the appointed place, and then became instantly silent
again. _Mein Mann_ was her creed, and I have often seen her gently bow
her grey head in reverence as she pronounced the sacred syllables.
Indeed, being with Frau Cosima was like being in some consecrated
building, and, as in church, one had to be very much on the guard
against any hint of the ridiculous that might intrude into the
solemnity, for such reactions are highly dangerous, and I was once, as
follows, within an ace of irremediable disgrace.

The Master, as all the world knows, was buried in the back-garden at
Wahnfried; an iron railing encloses the grave, which is situated in a
shrubbery. Frau Cosima, on one fine, hot, windy morning, said she would
take me to see the spot, and slowly pacing, like Gurnemanz and Parsifal,
we entered a winding path and soon came in sight of the tomb. And then I
thought I must have gone mad, for though it was a sultry August day, the
grave at a distance appeared to be covered with snow. She did not seem
to notice that, which made me more certain that I was in the grip of
some outrageous hallucination. But as we approached, the wind puffed
gustily, and the whole whiteness stirred and fluttered, and I saw that
it was not snow at all, but calling-cards which the pilgrims habitually
left there. There were hundreds of them, there were hundreds and
thousands of them. I did not know that there were so many calling-cards
in the world nor to how acid a test the need for gravity can be
subjected. As we tottered away again, we met a party of pilgrims with
their cards ready in their hands; the men, recognizing her, stopped and
stood bare-headed as we passed, and all with downcast eyes and knitted
brows of sympathetic sorrow, bowed and curtsied profoundly.

Once again, though less crucially, it was difficult to be quite solemn.
I had been permitted to see the mechanisms in the theatre for the
shifting of scenery and stage effects and lighting, and had examined the
swings in which the Rhine-maidens dart and glide and poise as they flirt
with Alberich (the motion of which, I was told, is very trying to the
unaccustomed stomach, and often produces violent sea-sickness in the
tuneful sirens until they get used to it). Then I had seen the cave from
which Grane comes, the trap down which Erda goes, the cardboard Walhalla
high above the rainbow bridge, the counterfeit Valkyries that scour the
storm-clouds, the steam-breathing mask of the Worm, the Nibelungs’
treasure, and Siegfried’s bier. Just as we were looking reverently at
that, Frau Cosima glided upon us, and with her own hand plucked a white
calico rose from it and gave it me, and intoned the words, “I give it
you off Siegfried’s bier.” . . . But this was Baireuth, and she was the
Master’s widow, already old and girt with an imperial dignity derived
from the absolute sincerity of her own devotion, and bountifully
fostered and fed by the incessant homage of adulatory pilgrims.

Most of those, all Germans certainly, who were privileged to be
presented to her, bowed and curtsied and kissed her hand, and there she
stood, handsome and rather horse-like, tossing her head slightly after
she had bent it to a salutation, and it was all for the greater glory of
_mein Mann_. So, indeed, was the entire township of Baireuth, for there
was scarcely a shop-window, be it of plumber or confectioner, which did
not show among its other wares, gilded plaster busts of the Master, and
little Grails, like that in _Parsifal_, of metal or glass, to be
purchased for a mark or two. There were Grails everywhere, some cheap,
so as to be within reach of the poorest, others of more elaborate
construction, made of lovely pink glass with a gold line round the rim,
and fitted with a battery and a button like an electric torch, so that
when you pressed the button a light sprang up in the interior of the
chalice, and it glowed beautifully, just as in the last act. There were
little Siegfried-biers (at which now I could look quite untempted) and
Klingsor-spears, and Parsifal-swans and Brünnhilde-horses, and Tarnhelms
and Rings in such variety that you could have fitted yourself up with
properties for a miniature marionette festival at home. Everywhere there
were books of words, and arrangements of the music for the piano, and
commentaries on the sacred text (for the Master, of course, wrote words
as well as music), and photographs, photographs of the Master and the
_Fest-spiel-haus_, and Wahnfried and the Grave, and Hans Richter and all
the various artists in all their parts from Wotan and Parsifal down to
the humblest Flower-maiden.

Never was there such wealth of suggestion: as you sauntered by the
smelly river of a morning, whiling away the time till the opera began,
you were all the time being hypnotized and made to believe that what you
saw and heard in the _Fest-spiel-haus_ was the final revelation of human
genius (was it human?). The festival was “run” with absolutely
consummate skill: you heard and saw nothing but Wagner, you ate and
drank Wagner, sacramentally almost and at considerable expense, because
you had to dine between the acts at the restaurant outside the theatre,
which, I fancy, was the property of the Wagners, and you rather rejoiced
at the indescribable nastiness of the refreshment, because you felt that
your swallowing of it was part of the treatment. Even your very
uncomfortable lodging and the melancholy sanitary arrangements were
ingredients in the prescription, joyfully imbibed, when at the
conclusion of the opera, you made your way home, battered and dog-tired
and enthusiastic, and stunned with music, and tumbled into a bed with a
high water-shed running longitudinally down the centre of it. The sheet
was buttoned to the duvet, and the slightest movement after you had lain
down, balancing yourself on the ridge of the water-shed, caused your
clothes to roll off on one side and you on the other. . . . But
something of the glory as well as the pain of martyrdom in the sacred
cause accompanied these “fallings from you, vanishings,” and it was
Wagner who mingled in your uneasy hypnotized slumbers.

So, before the rise of Munich and the fall of Richter caused dusk to
begin to gather on the slopes of Parnassus, the hypnotized, among them I
cheerfully reckon myself, surrendered themselves completely to the
spell. We allowed no spark of the critical spirit to glimmer, we firmly
and faithfully shut our eyes to the numerous deficiencies in the
performance. The orchestra was always magnificent, and never shall I
forget a moment of true magic when Hans Richter was conducting the
overture to the _Meistersinger_. It came with revelation and
enlightenment, and while it lasted (a few bars) I was literally unaware
in what terms the beauty of it was made manifest, whether it was a gleam
of transcendent light that poured over the theatre, or the movement of
some celestial, etheric wave that swept us along, or whether it was just
the superb rendering of noble music. Magnificent, too, was the stage
management: the crowds strolled and strayed, the apprentices danced like
boys let out of school, the Rhine-maidens (when they had got used to the
pitching) swayed and poised like mermaids in their own element, the
storm in which the Valkyries assembled on the mountain-top was a miracle
of atmospheric effect.

Again, there were (this year and the next) two or three first-rate
singers there: Van Rooy played Wotan, and Ternina was a peerless
Brünnhilde, but, with few exceptions, the singing was atrocious, and the
appearance and acting of most of the characters unspeakable. Opera, that
strange hybrid exotic art, makes its appeal to the eye hardly less than
to the ear, and the eye was constantly shocked by deplorable sights, the
ear outraged by shrieks, while the overflowings of German sentimentality
revolted the mind. It was no wonder that Parsifal, an obese _roué_,
failed to succumb to the mature charms of a barmaid who, for purposes of
seduction, adopted the strange plan of talking to him about his deceased
mother, or that the opening of monstrous magenta flowers, revealing yet
more monstrous maidens, left him morally impregnable. Again, in the
_Meistersinger_, Walther was not a tenor at all, nor yet a young
impassioned Ritter; he was a bellowing baritone of portly habit,
employed on a middle-aged flirtation with a bulging _haus-frau_. Yet, in
the hypnotic state, you firmly shut eyes and ears to all such blemishes,
and even when Grane, a mild and spavined cob, was led out of his cave by
Brünnhilde, and, refusing to proceed, did what no stage direction
ordained, we sat with grave eyes downcast till Grane was comfortable.
Not a titter, not a tremor was heard, and this unrehearsed effect we
never alluded to afterwards. Entirely hypnotized, we took whatever was
vouchsafed us with a greedy gusto, accepting the suggestion that before
us was It, the Alpha and Omega in the history of celestial music-drama.
Some interior voice, like an _enfant terrible_, occasionally protested
that this was a ghastly goitred crew of gods and goddesses, who could
not sing, who could not act, who could only storm and strut and rage and
melt, but it was instantly silenced, as with a hand laid over its mouth,
by the knowledge that this was Baireuth and that every wooden gesture
and piercing scream, every obesity and rotundity, was as the Master had
ordained. We bowed our heads before _mein Mann_.

Of course, there was a splendour about it, the splendour of the
magnificent rendering of the orchestral score, and of the enthusiastic
conviction which permeated the vast and reverent crowd that everything
was “apparelled in celestial light.” But the splendour owed much to
suggestion, to the tacit understanding that you must no more question or
criticize, if you were worthy to come to Baireuth at all, than a
Christian may dispute the dogmas on which his faith rests, for if he
does, he is no longer a Christian. At the end, I remember being bidden
to a musical party at Wahnfried, at which I supposed we should have
nothing but the Master’s music. But, contrary to expectation, we had not
a bar of the Master’s music: there was Bach, there was Handel, there was
something Italian. Is it fanciful to suppose that this was a sort of
vaccination, administered when we were leaving Baireuth and going out
into the world again, to render us immune in an atmosphere charged with
the poisonous microbes of other music? Wagner’s spirit seemed to preside
over this precautionary concert: almost I saw him hovering in the
shadows, dressed in his broadcloth and loose tie, or, better still, in
his velvet jacket and Tam-o’-shanter, or, best of all, in the flowered
dressing-gown, smiling at the throng of patients who were being made
safe. Rich velvet curtains, with cords and tassels, were drawn over the
windows to exclude any particle of air that was not charged with
Wagnerismos: the opulent wallpaper was gay with mirrors framed in plush
and painted with lilies; there were saddle-bag sofas and gildings, and
shiny brown woods and inlaid mantelpieces which looked like brawn, and a
pair of stupendous porcelain vases presented (and I should conjecture
designed) by the All Highest, and everywhere, everywhere pictures and
photographs of the Master. How scrannel sounded the strains of Handel
and of Bach! We should be safe from infection till we met at Baireuth
again.

I must have been extremely young for my three and thirty years when, in
the autumn of 1900, I set up a flat of my independent own, or else I was
over-ripe for freedom, for the fact of complete freedom went straight to
my head, and life became an orgy, a whirl of enthusiasms and
experiments. My vaccination at Baireuth had not taken very well, for in
music I at once succumbed to an attack of Queen’s Hall measles, and for
a little the Tschaikowsky night, once a week at the Promenade Concerts,
was as delirious as the Wagner night. I am not sure that we had nothing
but Tschaikowsky on these nights, but there would at least be a
symphony, and the Casse Noisette, or the 1912 Overture, or the piano
concerto, and what everyone who claimed to be up to date in musical
taste prized most of all, was the 5/4 movement in the sixth symphony.
For a while, amazing as it sounds, that was the last word, the supreme
utterance, and those who had (and who had not?) the Tschaikowsky
measles, whistled the 5/4 movement, and picked it out on the piano, and
knew that there was no more to be said. And who could conduct the 5/4
movement like Mr. Henry Wood? He made curious dancing movements, as in
some hieratic cake-walk: he made superb side-strokes as in swimming with
one arm, and stabs as with a rapier with the other. He crept, he slid,
he raged, he cossetted and coaxed and cajoled, and the band was one with
the emotion that possessed him. Indeed, it was quite a shock when Hans
Richter gave the same music at a symphony concert, for when he came to
the 5/4 he just collected his orchestra on the end of his baton, gave
one beat, and then turned his back on them and faced the house, while
they played it precisely as they played it when Mr. Wood danced before
them.

Indeed, we who were so fortunate as to be young and much alive in the
nineties, and the year or two before and after, had an astonishing
number of measles to catch, by which I mean this sudden succumbing, as
in mild childish illnesses, to some new phenomenon in art or letters
which seemed at the moment to be a “last word.” From the noble diseases
one is never immune, for the man who ever ceases to suffer, so to speak,
from Bach, is musically moribund. But there are others, Fauré perhaps,
and Debussy, and, I hope, Stravinski, who represent measles, which
infect one for a time, “come out” in a violent rash with fever, and,
subsiding, are afterwards powerless to inflame again the individual who
has experienced them. And in those years there was so much being
produced in many lines that was apt to attack you as with fever; so much
that arrested and challenged you. So many new notes were sounded, so
many mornings gilded the hill-tops, and while some eager adventurers
passionately averred that now at last true day was dawning, others with
equal passion were sure that these strange lights were not of the
wholesome sun, nor even of a borrowing moon, but of fatuous fires in the
marsh of decadence.

It was in the nineties (with the margin of a year or two on each side)
that Mr. Kipling invented India, made poets out of privates, and
revealed to the British the empire of their birthright, that Mrs.
Humphry Ward caused Robert Elsmere to undermine the foundations of
Christian belief, that the Yellow Book appeared with the finest work
which Aubrey Beardsley ever did, and which, when it first appeared,
seemed epoch-making, as no doubt for a little while it was. Then
Beardsley turned author and made the Savoy magazine blush with his tale
of “Under the Hill.” In those lively and experimental days Mr. Henry
James was confounding his earlier admirers, who read and re-read
_Roderick Hudson_ and _The Portrait of a Lady_ with unspeakable
reverence, and was raising up armies of new readers, who took the place
of the old brigades who fell stark and staring beneath the stroke of
_The Wings of the Dove_. Stevenson, in Samoa, was fertile with romances
of Scotland and the South Seas, and to us then _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_ was a milestone of modern realism, which earlier
Victorians passed with averted gaze and with horror to see how far they
had travelled. George Meredith was still writing, and occasionally from
Putney there came melodies in the authentic lyrical voice. Mr. H. G.
Wells was bringing out his first fascinating stories about time-machines
and invisible men, and a hush would fall on polite circles if mention
was made of _Esther Waters_.

Then at the theatre you could see Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Dusé, the
one before the decline from the zenith of her power, the other just
reaching it, and Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were at the Lyceum, and
Mrs. Patrick Campbell was making the earliest of her triumphs at the St.
James’s. Then, too, Oscar Wilde was producing the plays which, however
artificial they may seem now, sent his audiences reeling into the
street, intoxicated by epigram and paradox. None of them had the
smallest spark of immortality, except possibly _The Importance of Being
Earnest_, but they were new, and their audacious nonsense was very like
wit. Wit, indeed, he had, but it was conversational wit, that gleamed
and vanished before the shallowness or profundity of it steadily
revealed itself. Even in conversation he was not the equal of Whistler
for incisive penetration, nor for intellectual charm of Mr. Edmund
Gosse. Then came his sudden and tragic catastrophe; the jury could not
agree at the first trial, and with savage stupidity a second trial was
ordered. The procedure was savage, because he was already completely
disgraced, and could never have continued to live in England: it was
stupid because it and the relentless sentence that followed were
construed into a sort of martyrdom in countries where he could not for
such offences have been prosecuted at all. It was for that far more than
for the intrinsic merits of his achievements in art that the _culte_ for
him as a writer and dramatist began, which has since swelled to such
vast proportions on the Continent. Strauss composed an opera on his
_Salome_, which the censor had banned in England on the eve of its
production by Sarah Bernhardt, and his works ran into as many editions
as before they had sold copies. To that also we owe _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_, which, in spite of its obvious indebtedness to other
poems, is one of the finest ballads in our language.

In those excited days, too, people argued about Mr. Sargent, and said
they would not like to be painted by him because he brought out all that
was “horrid” in his sitter, and Whistler was still largely considered to
be a charlatan or a buffoon, and he, proving himself as subtle with the
pen as the paint-brush, delighted us with _The Gentle Art of Making
Enemies_, in case his amazing libel action against Professor Ruskin
should perish from men’s minds. And if you did not like Whistler’s
prose, you could read a new romance by Miss Marie Corelli, and if you
did not like his pictures, you could go to see the Doré gallery, which
was a little less subtle. And at the pantomime were Dan Leno and Herbert
Campbell, and there was a skating-rink where the panorama of Niagara had
been, and there were beautiful horses and carriages in the Park, instead
of mephitic motor-cars, and, oh, what interesting and wonderful people
sat inside them!

It is very hard to get the present and the past of twenty years ago into
true perspective, if, indeed, there is any such thing as true
perspective. The foreground, the present, in any matter of
reminiscences, is apt to become smaller than it really is, while the
past, the background, tends to become magnified as by some sort of
mirage, and gleam with a more vivid opalescence than it possessed at the
time. It is very hard, in fact, to be sure that you are right, when you
say “there were giants in those days,” and though all those who were
intelligently conscious then are agreed on the correctness of their
measurements, that is no proof that they are right: they may be the
victims of collective hallucination. But you cannot excavate (as we did
in Egypt) for evidence of what took place in the nineties, and
impressions are the only source of information, though possibly a
fallacious one. And it appears to me that even more than in this matter
of art and letters (making due allowance for measles), the significant
public figures of those days were on a larger scale than are the
significant figures of to-day to either the young or the middle-aged.
Loyalty to the throne, for instance, is just as fervent to-day as it was
thirty years ago, but it is idle to pretend that when King George visits
an institution or unveils a statue there is the thrill with which in the
nineties we lined the streets to see Queen Victoria pass. There she sat,
little and aged and huddled, with the black parasol and the tired
bulging eyes, and there was awe. What was it composed of? Perhaps it
partly arose from the rarity of her appearances, and from the fact that
she was so little and so old, and seemed so lonely and was so immense,
but there was something else. Or, when, lately, we saw Mr. Lloyd George,
with the weight of the empire at war on his shoulders, marching to the
House of Commons, distinguished if ever man was by the most perilous
burden man has ever borne, we did not gaze, as we gazed on Lord
Salisbury, in mild and uneventful times, struggling with his tricycle in
St. James’s Park. The crowd does not stand a-gape to see Mr. Baldwin
stepping into his motor-car, with the glow of gratification in which it
beheld Mr. Gladstone storming a hansom-cab. It may be that the new age
has not got the sense of reverence, but why should the older generation
have lost it and cannot find in contemporary phenomena the distinction
of the past?

As for “Society” (to use a dreadful term of which nobody quite knows the
meaning, except, presumably, the people who talk about it), it was
extremely like what it always has been and always will be. For
“Society”—to guess at its connotation—has always been a thing of the
past, something brilliant and exclusive, which has now gone to the dogs.
Or at least the cats have got it. Certainly in the nineties there were
plenty of folk (just as there are now) who moaned that there was no
Society any longer: “Look at the women: look at their dresses! They
would never have got into Society in my day. Why my mother——” But
then, at every epoch since Society invented itself the same cry has been
raised. Compare, for instance, in this matter of women’s dress (which
appears to be much involved in the mysterious term), what Lady William
Wynn (Charlotte Greville) wrote to a friend in 1826, with what the
_Evening Standard_ said in 1920 on the same everlasting subject. Here is
Lady William’s comment: “All the fine ladies have tucked up their
petticoats to _mi-jambe_, and I believe they are still on the ascent. So
true it is that, sometimes at one end, sometimes at the other, Eve’s
petticoat is nearly all that remains unliable to curtailment.”

And here is the _Evening Standard’s_ comment in 1920: “Apparently, to be
fashionable in these days, a piece of material about the size of a
couple of dinner-napkins is considered to be quite sufficient to make a
becoming ball-gown.”

Or take the complaint current to-day that there is no such thing as
conversation, that an after-dinner reception where there is not dancing
or bridge or music is no longer possible. Precisely the same moan was
raised in the nineties when bridge began to take hold. Those who did not
play bridge, said that this infernal game had killed conversation, while
those who did, said that there was no conversation to kill. . . . And
the cigarette habit killed the leisurely discussion of port, just as
port killed the finer appreciation of claret. Society has always just
had its throat cut and is squealing with approaching dissolution. And
then, as now, people bawled across the dinner-table concerning “tips” on
the Stock Exchange (only they bawled about South African gold-fields
then, and Mexican oil now), and concerning diseases and God and
adultery, and other people blanched, then as now, at the demise of
decency. Others, again, turned up their eyes until only the whites were
visible at the invasion of the sacred precincts of aristocratic Society
by the wives of pork-butchers with pearls, who came to London because
they were not received by the élite of Chicago, and of Semites who were
nobodies in Jerusalem, as if on one of the days of creation the command
had gone forth, “Let there be a British aristocracy,” and there was a
British aristocracy, which was both the greater light that ruled the
day, and the lesser light that ruled the night. These purists quite
forgot that the process had always been going on, and that the venerable
and magnificent families of to-day had not so very long ago been
parvenus who had made money as merchants and shopkeepers and business
men, or were the bastards of nobler lines. The process has always been
at work in every century and every decade, and decent Society has always
been in its death-agony.

Then, too, as now, there were precisely the same sets and cliques and
coteries and climbers, and some were intellectual, and some artistic,
and some were supposed to pay a good deal of attention to their souls,
and if they were a little priggish, and mistook priggishness for
profundity and gabbling for genius, they enjoyed it very much, and so
did everybody else; and, of course, there was a Smart Set, so-called by
those who, not being in it, despised it, and then, as now, there were
musical sets who gasped at long-haired Russian pianists, who had never
been heard before and were never heard of again. Probably there was
rather less over-lapping in the nineties than there is now, for there
were sharper lines of demarcation between different sets then, and no
European war had jumbled everybody up together in a macedoine, which
will require a great deal of sorting-out, if the lines of demarcation
are to return.

But, if that happens, there will be found missing in the jig-saw puzzle
of it all, a certain “piece” which in the nineties was the centre and
clue. Behind and below these shifting surfaces, there was then a body of
people who owned land and had nice English names, and were rich and
simple, and were the greatest and most magnificent of hosts and
hostesses. They had large estates in the country (not oil-wells or
gold-mines) where they were kind and considerate landlords, and big
houses in town, where they exercised a national and splendid
hospitality: there was a stateliness, a scale, a breeding, a certain
code of manners. I hold no brief for it, I make myself a looker-on, but
I can assert, without fear of contradiction, that it no longer is the
source from which Society springs.

From a chronicler’s point of view, its elusiveness to definition lies in
the fact that it is impossible to describe it in positive terms, saying
what it was, but only in negative terms, saying what it was not. In the
main, what it was not was a scurry. Women—those who were of it—did not
dine at restaurants, and waggle their hands to friends at neighbouring
tables, and wonder who was she with pearls by the window, and send a
note to an acquaintance to find out. They dined at home, or at the
houses of their friends, and had no need to ask who anybody was, because
they already knew. During dinner they did not, about pudding-time, put a
bag on the table and take out a cigarette-case and powder their noses,
nor did they beg people whom they had never seen before to stay with
them, because they had heard that they were “killing,” nor did they go
anywhere that they were asked in order to get a dinner and a place in an
opera-box and a lift home without expense, and most emphatically they
did not, for value received, launch the unknown rich, crockery-kings and
silver-kings and railway-kings and lavatory-kings, in Society. I do not
mean that in the nineties, just as much as now, there were not many, who
ought to have known better, who did such things, but there was then a
large body of well-bred people in the world that amused itself, who did
not bend the knee to Baal, and were, at the same time, the people who
“mattered.” Of course there were climbers in the nineties, as in every
other age, and they climbed with no less agility than now into the
smartest situations, but there were more places then from which they
slipped back as down a greased pole. The climbers came more
croppers. . . .

The manners of those who belonged to this Society, which was not a
clique, or a set, or anything of the kind, had an appropriate reticence
and restraint. They could be jovial and noisy enough among their own
friends, but they did not squeal in public. Men had a certain
“behaviour” with women, and women with men. There are plenty of men and
women to-day who are of precisely the same breed and distinction as
they: the difference is that they are no longer the leaders and lavish
entertainers of the town. Twenty years of growing taxation and burden to
land-owners have impoverished them, and in any case they were not of the
stuff which competitors are made of, that tough, pushing,
knock-down-the-ladder breed that now crow on the tree-tops. These others
had nowhere to climb to, they were there already.

One evening in particular remains very vivid in my mind as
characteristic of “that sort of thing.” The hostess was the late Lady
Ripon (then Countess de Grey), who perhaps, above all others, was
typical of a kind of hospitality which has vanished. She combined all
the gifts and brilliances with which a woman can be endowed: she was
wonderfully beautiful, she had wit and distinction, and a certain
splendour now completely obsolete. She gave a small evening-party one
night at her little house in Bruton Street, and among her guests, royal
and otherwise, there came Edouard and Jean de Reszke. They had both of
them just sung at the closing night of the opera, and Lady de Grey, just
for fun, said to Edouard “Won’t you sing something?” And he with
alacrity replied, “Certainly I will: I have never sung in so small a
room.” He then sang the “Veau d’Or” from _Faust_ at the top of his
voice, and the windows rattled and the floor shook. This encouraged
Jean, who said, “Now I will sing: I will show you how I sing the
‘Preisleid.’” And he stood in the middle of the room, rather
precariously, on two footstools, and gave the most inimitable parody of
himself singing Walther’s song in the _Meistersinger_. Probably he sang
that more magnificently than it has ever been sung, but now, in his best
manner and his best voice, he made it hopelessly ludicrous. . . . And
then Réjane (just for fun) recited “La Poupée.”

But even then, apart from taxation and its impoverishments, there were
already solvents at work which were disintegrating their supremacy, and,
curiously enough, the most powerful of those solvents came, not from
without, but from within. Most potent of all the influences that
undermined them was that of Edward VII, then Prince of Wales. As a
bulwark of the throne and of the constitution he strenuously upheld
them, but he wanted sometimes to get away from thoughts of throne, and
be a private gentleman amusing himself. Probably they, too, were a
little too conscious of his identity, and, in consequence, they were not
his idea of relaxation when the foundation-stones were laid, and the
docks opened, and his duties done. His close personal friends were not
in the main among them. He liked something a little more ununiformed, so
to speak, when he was no longer impersonating Britannia, something more
unfetteredly festive, a joke that had to be whispered, a game of
baccarat, an informality, a practical joke, in which somebody fell down,
or found an egg in his pyjamas, or experienced other quaint happenings.
These laudable and laughable devices were a reasonable relaxation, an
escape from the burden of his Heir-apparency and its attendant ceremony.
He sought a discreet cosmopolitan privacy for his amusement, when he
need not be dignified, though when dignity was indicated, nobody was
ever more so. There is a story that he was staying once at a great
house, which might be considered a little over-starched, and that on his
arrival in the drawing-room after dinner his hostess frankly told him
that she did not allow cards in her house, but that there was a
gramophone. Like a great gentleman he listened to the gramophone, and
politely marvelled at the strides science had made.

The nineties and the remaining fourteen years that preceded the war
have, probably rightly, earned the distinction of having attained, in
the matter of general extravagance in entertainment and amusement, the
apex of sheer squander. Nowadays nobody English has the same amount of
money to throw about, but, apart from that, the diminished scale is
largely due to the discovery that it is possible to enjoy yourself
equally well on less. Ten people, it has been detected, can amuse
themselves from Saturday till Monday in the country as successfully as
thirty, the air need not be black with pheasants to ensure a good day’s
shooting, and, above all, a sufficiency of delicious food is as pleasant
as an interminable succession of dishes which nobody wants. There is, of
course, nothing ascetic or self-denying in being content without the
things you do not in the least desire, and in spite of the optimism of
those who say that the war has made us simpler and more serious, it does
not need a war to produce a simplicity which only dispenses with what we
have found we do not care about: such a thing might happen without a
war. Acrobatic aspirants to social distinction naturally will always
bait their hooks with pearls of the Orient if they think that by such
enticements they will induce the great fish to swallow them as well as
the pearls, but, apart from these, there would seem to be more sense
nowadays than during those sumptuous years in the paraphernalia of
entertainment and in the diversions of domestic life. It would, for
instance, in these more economical days be difficult to find anyone,
however rich, emulating the ingenious expenditure of Mr. Alfred de
Rothschild, who, when he was quietly at home at Halton, perhaps with one
or two guests in the house, or perhaps with none at all but his
attendant doctor, used often to sit on Sunday morning at a small circus
of his own devising. There was a miniature grandstand, and a stable and
a track, and when all was ready the _écuyer_ would crack his whip and
there trotted in a couple of ponies, which had a friendly little race,
and when it was done looked for a lump of sugar. When the thrill of that
passed off, some dogs, ridden by jockeying monkeys, sometimes cantered
round; diminutive hurdles were erected and a depressed rabbit lolloped
over them. . . . And could we to-day find such a Lucullus as he who once
asked a friend of mine to share his pot-luck? There were just the two of
them, and when a slice of boiled turbot emerged from the pot, a spoonful
of lobster-sauce accompanied it. The sauce seemed excellent, and my
friend politely extolled it. “You shall have the recipe,” said this
amiable Lucullus, and up it came, and was handed to him. It began,
“Lobster-sauce for two. Take seven hen lobsters.” . . . _Ichabod,
ichabod!_

This same Lucullus suffered from a congestion of the liver, for the
hen-lobsters were vindictive dames. His doctor ordered him gentle
horse-exercise, but told him that he ought not to get wet, or to incur
undue fatigue. He, therefore, took mild rides, and sometimes went to
have tea with a cousin of his, riding his horse as ordered, with a groom
in attendance. But the groom could not control the weather, so a neat,
two-horsed brougham followed the groom, in case, after they had started,
the afternoon turned out wet. Nor could the groom control a feeling of
fatigue on the part of his master, who would not, if he felt tired, want
to go home in a brougham when the sun was shining, but would like to
enjoy the air. So a pony-carriage followed the brougham. I was staying
with this cousin of his on one of the occasions that Lucullus thought he
could manage a ride of about two miles, and have tea with her. He
brought over a friend with him, for whom he provided the same equipment,
and thus it happened that when I came back after a stroll, I saw drawn
up at the front-door two pony carriages and two broughams, while two
grooms held the heads of four horses. Allowing two people for each
brougham, and each pony-carriage, and one for each horse, I expected to
find twelve guests within. But there were only two. Sometimes, when in
London, he used to walk in the Park, and then only the brougham followed
him.

But however extravagant England was in those fat years of prosperity, it
never really rivalled the imbecilities of America, nor, though from time
to time our Transatlantic cousins have given us treats in the way of
those “freak” parties which there seem to be the test of social
brilliance, has that particular form of idiotic entertainment taken root
here. Is it that we are lacking in a sense of humour, and do not see how
exquisitely witty it is to turn a house into an Indian jungle, and give
a dinner-party for a hundred and fifty guests, whose wants are attended
to by a host of waiters from a respectable catering establishment, who
have been induced by enhanced pay to wear a species of toga instead of
trousers and to swathe their Saxon heads in turbans? Such bids for
social sovereignty have been occasionally made here, at which, between
the courses of dinner, amazing things have been devised to _épater_ this
_bourgeois_ London: a sedan-chair has appeared, out of which stepped a
skinny young lady, naked except for an exiguous loin-cloth, but gilded
all over from head to foot, who proceeded to dance in a voluptuous
manner. Lottery tickets in another interval were handed round, and
everyone carried away something expensive, or a cake perhaps was cut
which proved to be full of gold cigarette-cases and jewelled ornaments,
and then the young lady came back, without her gilding, and danced
again. . . . But somehow such strokes of genius in hospitality have
never had any great success here: they seem rather to be matters to
which the attention of the Commissioners in Lunacy should be directed.

It was into this world of entertainment and friendly folk that I leaped,
panting in the hot chase of enchanting occupation, and as strenuous in
the pursuit of pastimes as if each was the object of life. If I came
into my flat at timeless hours, that was only a matter between my
latchkey and me, and I invented, if I was aware that it was abnormally
near morning, a most pleasing device to test my self-control. This
consisted in winding up my watch with small and uneven twirlings and a
detached mind, so that I could not guess how near it was to running
down, and in then going to bed without a glance at its accusing dial. No
one who has not tried has any idea how difficult this is to do, so
intense is the desire, either to know the full measure of your shame or
to assure yourself that it is not so late after all. Indeed, the hours
of the day and night alike were all too short for me, so that by day I
would fain have been Joshua to bid the sun stand still, and by night I
muttered Ovid’s prayer, “_O, lente, lente, currite noctis ejus_,” which
in the vulgar tongue means, “It can’t be morning yet.”

For there was so much to do, so much ready and toasted and buttered,
quite apart from the real business of my life, of which I shall
subsequently speak. By day I had to skate so much at Niagara, being at
that time quite sure that life would never attain its full fruition
until I had passed all three tests of the National Skating Association
(English style), and could wear a badge of pure gold (silver and copper
discarded) in my buttonhole. So the whole morning would be spent, like
the aspiring Christian, with “the frequent fall,” and I would hobble
away to lunch with entrancing people and go back for the afternoon
skating session (session it was!) at three, and skate till it was almost
a relief to hear the gong announce closing-time. And then I hobbled
home, and went out to dinner and bridge, and midnight and the small
hours, and an exercise of self-control, sometimes successful. Next
morning, with more self-control, I would perhaps study a novel instead
of skating. That does not sound very serious, but for me it was, owing
to my profession. For I did not read novels casually, with a view to
entertainment, in an arm-chair, but in order to find out how to tell
stories: how it should be done, and how it should not be done.

Then, as if I had not sufficient diversion already, and was not earning
sufficient money to defray the expenses of a reasonably luxurious
existence, I plunged into a disastrous course of optimistic speculation
on the Stock Exchange, and very soon got rid of such monies as I had
already invested in dull debentures and sound stock: “Get poor quick”
seems to have been my motto and device. There was a boom going on in
Australian gold-mines about this time, and thinking that a gift for
finance was one of my undiscovered qualities, I proceeded to prove, by
wild investment in amazing companies, that it was not.

There was a mine called Lady Loch, and another called Lady Shenton, and
I began by loading their seductive ladyships with my devout, though
modest, offerings. Then, launching out a little more boldly, I bought
Golden Links, and Chaffers, and Great Boulder Main Reef, and with a
puckered brow, when the _Financial Times_ recorded a disagreeable lack
of professional confidence in their prospects, I dived into the Oxford
Street tube (for the sake of saving a cab-fare), and burrowing into the
City, I communed with my broker on the causes of this sad scepticism. He
was a circular Dutch broker, obese and optimistic, and not only did I
consider him to have a very remarkable financial gift, so winningly did
he talk about refractory ores, and tailings and assays and the cyanide
process, but he seemed to regard me as a promising nephew whose
abilities he held in great respect, and he was pleased to see me
exercising them so industriously. He gave me attractive reasons (all the
more alluring because they were slightly unintelligible) why Golden
Links were temporarily tarnished and now worth considerably less than
when he had bought them for me, and thought that I could not do better
than buy some more at a lower price in order to “average.” Thus, if I
had originally paid £4 for each Golden Link, and it was now only worth
£2, I had better purchase an equal number at £2, so that when they went
up to £3, I should see my money back again, and any further rise would
be pure gain. This was admirable reasoning, but it left out of the
question where I should be if they went lower yet, which they invariably
did. . . .

The worst drawback about being concerned in such money-making schemes as
Golden Links, was that it resembled being in an express train, for
Golden Links moved so fast (in a retrograde direction) that I never
could summon up the nerve to jump out before the crash. Other wares,
too, my broker had, which might in comparison be called gilt-edged, for
though they always declined in value, they did so quite slowly, and you
had plenty of time to disembark. . . . You may wonder how I could be so
silly, and I am sure I wonder too (perhaps I had better have given a
“freak” party with all that money), but then, if we were wise, what
would happen to all these gentlemen in the City? And, after all, I had
diversion and excitement, for I never ceased to think that I was about
to pull money out of those holes in the ground in West Australia. And
since, when I “averaged,” I had not got to take bright shining
sovereigns out of my pocket, but only instruct my broker to sell out
other and firmer investments, there was no sense of impoverishment. To
lose a couple of pounds at bridge was discouraging, because I had to
part with gold pieces, but the absence of some certificate at the Bank
was hardly noticeable. Besides, I learned the habit of travelling in
tubes on those repeated visits to the City, and that has since saved me
a great many shillings. . . .

Eventually all these vigorous concerns blossomed into reconstructions
involving heavy calls, and then faded away into abysmal dimness and
darkness. They were Snarks: “they softly and silently vanished away,”
and some awakening to the light of common day and common sense,
scattered my feverish financial dreamings. I dabbled no more in that
bright but perilous sea, and snowed all future communications from my
kind, expensive Dutch uncle into the waste-paper basket.


                               CHAPTER VI

Among all these shifting hobbies and distractions I had one fixed
pursuit, that of learning how to write novels, and, with the object of
finding out, I read novels in prodigious quantities to see “how it was
done.” I studied styles and methods, and this account of my study,
therefore, is a chapter of mere shop.

I began with English classics, which had form and technique, and told
their story in an orderly manner (in consequence of which nobody ever
reads them now), and read about half of Dickens through, omitting books
like _David Copperfield_, of which I could already have written a
detailed analysis, and those like _Pickwick_, which would yield none.
While enormously admiring, I thought that his gigantic canvases were too
completely in focus: they were like Mr. Frith’s famous picture of Derby
Day. They were detailed chronicles of the divers lives of many amusing
and terrible characters, whose interests and adventures, it is true,
crossed and were interwoven, but did not contribute to a conflagration,
for which the author should have been piling the fuel all along, and
which at the end would flare into flame. There seemed only one
exception, that of Edwin Drood, where clearly some tremendous climax was
being built from the very first page and with so stealthy a hand that no
one has hazarded a successful guess what that climax would have been.

But then, Dickens did not mean to have a climax in my sense: that was
his way of doing it. I hated the sentimentality of little Nell and Paul
Dombey and Smike and Tiny Tim and Ruth Pinch, and we must have none of
that in the Great Work (which still abides unwritten), nor yet so
heaven-sent a genius as Nicholas Nickleby, who, without having learned
anything about acting, found it perfectly easy to play Romeo to an
entranced audience, and to teach the idiotic Smike to be “the prince and
paragon of apothecaries.” But Nicholas, when greatly moved, spoke blank
verse, which showed an abnormal brain, since most people when greatly
moved become incoherent and ejaculatory. . . . I did not, however, pay
much attention to Dickens’s faults, and, not being a reviewer, what I
was looking for was his merits, and, sure, there were merits enough in
the astounding vitality of his creations. True, you never in actual life
met with any human being who resembled any of his intense personages,
and that was the supreme merit, they were types and distillations, the
broth of inebriated parsons, the elixir of stagecoach drivers, the
brandy of water-rate collectors.

At the other end of the classical spectrum was Jane Austen, any of whose
characters (allowing for the slight change superficially wrought by the
lapse of eighty years) you might meet round the next corner. They were
no less typical than the creations of Dickens, but, by an art elusive
and impeccable, were ordinary individuals as well. Mrs. Gaskell was a
wizard of similar spells, and Trollope (though his spells sometimes
produced only a little milk and water), and George Eliot. But to me the
greatest wizard of all was Emily Brontë: how many times I have read
_Wuthering Heights_ I have no idea, but never, in spite of the
clumsiness of its narration, have I laid it down without the firm
conviction that it stands alone at the head of all novels in the English
language.

I swam ashore out of the classical seas and plunged into the rapids of
recent and contemporary work, where (thoroughly to mix my metaphors) I
caught all manner of measles. I had long been sick with (not of)
Stevenson, and now, still seriously ill, I read his romances and short
stories through, with the exception of _The Black Arrow_, over which I
joined hands with his wife. I read, too, all I could about him; I pored
over the _Vailima Letters_; I devoured every crumb that fell from the
tables of those who had known him: I treasured whatever anybody else
said about him, and what he said about himself, and cordially agreed
when he told Mr. Colvin[1] that if he had only written the story of “Tod
Lapraik” and “Thrawn Janet” he would still be a great author. I would
sooner have heard that the conclusion of _Weir of Hermiston_ had been
found, than that a fourth synoptist had been discovered.

And then my fever, most unexpectedly, began to subside, and I think the
febrifuge must have been contained in the large doses of Mr. George
Moore which I was beginning to take. I found myself less delirious and
able to try to form some opinion of my own about his books, instead of
reading them with the postulate that they were perfect, and, if
necessary, revising my notions of perfection by their standard. The
light of common day and common sense in place of that which never was on
sea or land began to break the spell that held me uncritically captive.

[1] Mr. Colvin, and many of the illustrious folk of whom I make mention,
have since become knights and other sumptuousnesses, but I allude to
them as they then were.

How I clung to my measles and hated to see the rash and the temperature
subside! I repeated to myself long pieces out of _Jekyll and Hyde_, I
murmured as I walked down Oxford Street such sentences as “dabbling with
dishes in a bedroom may make clean the body, but the imagination takes
no share in such a cleansing.” I re-read the flight in the heather out
of _Kidnapped_, and I began more anxiously to consider what Stevenson
had told us and how he had told it. Was there (in a whisper) just a hint
of journalese in that careful and studied style? Would Mr. George Moore
have said “threatened him with corporalities”; would he not have said
more simply and quite as effectively “told him he’d smack his head”? And
would not Mr. George Moore have said “imitated” or “copied,” instead of
“played the sedulous ape”? Was it a literary “score” to say “played the
sedulous ape”? I felt I could safely untie myself from the mast without
fear of throwing myself overboard to the sweet singing of the sirens,
Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. Andrew Lang. I worshipped at this shrine no
longer; indeed, the most robust literary digestion could scarcely
assimilate Stevenson and Mr. George Moore simultaneously. To chew the
one, it was necessary to eschew the other, and now I was busy
masticating _The Confessions of a Young Man_. Mr. Moore contemplated
himself from all quarters, as in one of those ingenious looking-glasses
with adjustable wings, which show you profile, full face, and
three-quarter face. Mr. Moore’s looking-glass was of full length, and in
its magical surface you beheld every bit of Mr. Moore, front and back,
in all possible aspects. The interesting image was unerringly reflected
in the smooth and tranquil art of his style, and I felt that I knew
exactly all that Mr. Moore desired his readers to know about himself,
and what a lot that was! He took you to his bedroom and muttered, “Now I
will show you what I am.”

And then with mounting fever I read _Esther Waters_, and I felt I was
quite right to admire it so much for its simple and economical
craftsmanship, for Mr. Moore has told us that he admired it too. He was
just as wonderful when he fell on his friends Mr. Yeats and Lady
Gregory, and pulled them in front of his magic looking-glass and made
them appear precisely as he wished them to appear. (I think, perhaps, he
wrote about them later on; I am sure I do not remember, but the point is
that sooner or later he did write about them, and I read it.)

It must have been subsequently, also, that I read his memories of his
dead life, which was wonderfully alive. And though I wished that Mr.
Moore had not said to the young lady whom he took to Orelay, “Wilful
Doris! Pretty Puss-cat”; and that when he alluded to Beethoven’s
Appasionata, he did not call it the “Impassionata,” I never really cared
what Mr. Moore said, so long as he went on saying it. And how I wanted
to know whether the literary lady from Texas became a mother. . . .

A golden rule I learned from Mr. Moore, and that was to make up my mind
precisely as to what I meant to say, and then precisely to say it. What
a great writer I should have been if I had been capable of that, for all
sorts of interesting things came into my head, but I could not state
them with precision!

After Mr. Moore, I thought it would be nice to get out-of-doors, and I
plunged into _The Forest Lovers_ of Mr. Hewlett. But to my dismay I
could not see the wood for the trees, and never have I been so
disconcerted. I could not get on: I stuck fast in the mire where no
ground is; I was like a fly that before it has begun to eat the honey
finds that it is no longer able to move.

It was most humiliating, for I felt sure that Mr. Hewlett might have
taught me such a lot about style and method, if I only had been able to
read what he wrote. I tried all the devices: I began first at the
beginning of his book, and then I began in the middle, hoping to find
such gems there that I should make light of the task of mining for them,
and then I tried the end, and then I shut it up. After that I read
something by Mr. Barrie, which made me understand what perfect ladies
and gentlemen the Scotch are, and so sly and witty, and then I read _The
Manxman_ by Mr. Hall Caine. That was a prodigious book, delivered with
Sinaitic solemnity and circumstance. It was full of fire and
thunderstorms and tempests and trumpets, and I quite understood how it
was that, if the people on the Isle of Man are like that, the cats have
no tails, for anything so flippant as a tail could not possibly exist on
the same island as Mr. Hall Caine. I felt that I had gone up Sinai with
Mr. Hall Caine, and had heard _The Manxman_ dictated to him out of the
cloud, and had seen him carve it all on stone tables. He brought them
down with him, not the least staggering under their weight, and
translated it into all the European languages and published the versions
simultaneously with photographs of himself and accounts of how it all
came to him. It was grand, and I was so taken up with the grandeur that
I could never remember what it was about. But I learned from it that it
is possible to produce and arrange and marshal, as in a procession, a
most amazing amount of material, so that it passes before the reader in
a manner as orderly as one of Mr. Louis Parker’s pageants. . . .

And I read some vigorous books by Miss Marie Corelli, and subsequently
visited her at Stratford-on-Avon, where I saw the pen with which she
wrote _The Sorrows of Satan_.

I omitted to read Meredith, because I knew he defied analysis, and went
on to Mr. H. G. Wells, who was then weaving the most wonderful stories
about men from Mars, and men in the moon, and a machine that could push
Time forward through lapses of uncounted æons, and show us the earth
growing cold. Possibly, if M. Jules Verne had never written his
entrancing tales, we should never have had Mr. Wells’s, which only made
me grateful to M. Jules Verne for having done so, and how I revelled in
the direct lucidity of his style: he said just what he meant to say,
like Mr. George Moore. Mr. Wells, in that felicitous period, had not
awoke to any sense of his mission, nor wanted to rearrange the world on
a wholly different plan, nor had he yet discovered God and Anne
Veronica, and I wish he could have gone on dreaming his sumptuous
nightmares. But he awoke. . . .

Indeed, there seemed to be as many methods as there were Masters, but as
I emerged from this sea of fiction, I found that a certain fluid belief
of mine had now been churned by study into the solid conviction that the
only sure method of revealing your characters in fiction is by their
direct speech, and the certainty of that outweighed all else that I had
learned. No amount of discussion or comment or analysis on the part of
the author will ever give any of his puppets the vividness and reality
which the puppet himself can create when he talks. “Out of the heart the
mouth speaketh” has no truer application than in the world of fiction.
Sincerity, pomposity, simplicity, love, honour, rascality, and all the
gamut of qualities, are far more trenchantly conveyed by direct speech
than by action, paradoxical though it sounds, and though it may not be
applicable to the world where conduct is supposed to be nine parts of
life. Yet even action is better than mere analysis, for the more you
only dissect, the more indubitably dead your subject becomes. A large
school of modern fiction is, for this reason, quite unreadable, for its
talented authors are under the melancholy delusion that half-a-dozen
clinical reports from the waste-paper basket of a psychoanalyst, loosely
strung together, are sufficient to give vitality to the corpses which
they mistake for characters.

It follows, as it seemed to me then and seems still, that the novelist
must have two separate sorts of language in his book. The one, which is
uniform and crystallized, is his own style: this he uses for narrative,
for such comments as he needs to make, for description, and all such
pieces of his book as are not speech. In whatever exciting or depressing
or funereal occasions he employs that, he must keep it in the chosen
key, he must in this be tranquil and in tune, and not modulate from key
to key to suit the current or the coming crisis. He is scarcely more
than the man who raises the curtain: he must not pull it up with
laughter and alacrity if something humorous is on the way to his
readers, nor sigh and sob if hearts are to be wrung. He must not
rejoice, in his narrative and comments, with those who rejoice, nor weep
with those who weep, any more than he must write his narrative in Irish
brogue if a man from Tipperary is about to appear, or in cockney if he
is dealing with East London. There must be no patches, even purple ones,
in the perfect narrative.

His other style, instead of being simple and uniform, must be as varied
and multiform as are the personages in his masterpiece. If two of them
talk alike (given they are not intended to be alike), that is a fault in
characterization, and a more serious one than if, unintentionally, he
made two of them to resemble each other in face and bodily mien. Worse
still (but oh, how commonly happening) is it if they all talk alike, and
worst of all if they all talk in the style of the author’s narrative,
for then they become mere dressed-up dolls sitting on the author’s knee,
while he opens their mouths in turn, and by a clumsy ventriloquism, not
altering the tone of his voice, puts his own speech into those inorganic
cavities. Instead, the author must have a vocabulary and a phrasing for
each of them, and though it is wise of him to write good grammar when he
narrates, it is probably a mistake if his characters are all as
immaculate as he. We all of us, for instance, split our infinitives in
ordinary speech, and though in the mouth of the narrator a split
infinitive may (possibly) be an error in grammar, a similar use on the
part of one of his speakers is not an error at all. (I drag in this
little piece of information for the enlightenment of the tutorial
persons who produced the strange volume called _The King’s English_, and
who quote speeches from the books which they pillory, as proof of the
author’s inability to write grammatically.)

This voracious and indiscriminate reading was hugely enjoyable in
itself: I was greedy to know all manners of imaginative visions and, by
study, to appreciate them, and I gulped books down with the thirst that
cannot be assuaged with sipping, but must swill. But behind that was
this insatiable curiosity as to the technique of writing, and even while
I was swilling, I would stop suddenly and begin to sip and taste, if
something of technical value arrested me, and in particular (to mount
the favourite horse again) if some turn of phrase in the mouth of one of
the characters suddenly brought to birth something with which every page
had really been pregnant. I turned back over the pages, when I came to
some such crucial delivery, to find out how this had been subtly
prepared, so that, amazing as it might be, it was also, from the point
of view of construction, inevitable. In a well-composed book there was
no such thing as a surprise for an attentive reader: the climax did not
soar unsupported, like a firework, into the air, it climbed on the solid
stable rungs of the ladder which, all the time, the author had been
quietly erecting. Impulsive persons (in the book), it is true, must be
allowed to do unexpected things, but the unexpected is not a surprise in
such a case, but a logical and reasonable demonstration of their
impulsiveness. It became a literary crime to me that the authors whom I
admired so much should not observe the rules which I had discovered for
them: I could not, for instance, forgive George Eliot for daring to tell
me, in _The Mill on the Floss_, that Maggie Tulliver, exquisite,
delicate, sensitive, fell in love with that bounder Stephen Guest, who
wore a diamond ring, and used attar of roses as a “perfume,” and whose
foppish mind was precisely on a par with his odious personal habits. It
was a lie that Maggie Tulliver fell in love with him: she could never
have tolerated him. And when, by telling us such a wicked falsehood as
that, George Eliot had got her adorable heroine into a tangle that could
not be unravelled, she cut the knot which she had wantonly tied, by
drowning her in a totally incredible manner. Maggie was out in a boat,
you will remember, and though her brother had oars, blocks of machinery,
coming down the stream in which was their boat (presumably travelling
the same pace, without the oars to help), overtook and overwhelmed them,
so I learned that you must not lie about the people you had invented. It
was no use to say that you had invented them, and that you had the right
to make them behave as you chose. Rather, you were in the witness-box,
and, having dared to write a book, were under oath to tell the truth
about them.

I took all this trouble in finding out how books were written in order
to do it myself. The epoch in which these stories were to be set was now
always the same, namely the immediate present, for that was the period
that then and ever interested me most. Indeed, just then I was so
rapturously immersed in it, that any impression or expression of it went
untrimmed into my broth. I had not yet learned any faculty of selection,
I was far too impatient to let my materials simmer and soak, and in
spite of the strenuousness of my reading, there were only two out of all
the errors that can be committed in the writing of fiction into which I
never fell.

The first mistake of which I was never guilty was that of writing
anything that did not immensely interest me. I wrote in a sunshine of
enjoyment, loving the exercise of my craft: never did I return home to
my flat after the second session at Niagara with an anticipation of
better fun, than when there was ahead of me, reserved and designed for
insatiable scribbling, a long, solitary evening. I can still taste the
relish of coming in out of a wet November evening, knowing that “they”
(the characters in my tale) would be waiting in my sitting-room for me,
and presently with “Out” displayed on my door, I would immerse myself
and see what they proposed to do. For, indeed, if the book was, in my
biassed judgment, going well, it seemed as if the persons I was writing
about took charge of their own manœuvres, while I, who held the pen, did
little more than record their independent action. Often I would have
planned, even with detail, what I meant to do with them, only to find
that they had planned and now dictated something else. Of course, it was
really my brain that was doing it all, but, so I imagine, some part of
it, not quite identical with my conscious self, took control. And when
this seemed to be happening, I was careful to distract the more
superficial cells. I gave them cigarettes to smoke, occasionally played
them a tune on the piano; did anything to divert them so that they
should not interfere with what was going on below. And then, incredibly,
there would come a ring from the door of my flat, and lo, it was eight
o’clock already, and my dinner was arriving from the little Italian
restaurant close by, and here was I with the fire half out, unready and
unbathed. On these evenings when the mysterious workman was in
possession, I took pains not to disturb him, and in this interval for
refreshment, forbore to question him about his plans, while I sedulously
amused my conscious self, comforting it with a hot bath and a risotto
and a bottle of wine, so that, diverted and occupied, it should not
meddle. Sometimes it insisted on interfering, and when I got to work
again would make itself so importunate that its ally, always sensitive
and touchy, would shut up altogether and refuse to make any more plans.

On more fortunate evenings I could quite hold the interfering partner’s
attention, and with a box of cigarettes and a whisky and soda
accessible, he would go on smoking and sipping, engrossed in his carnal
pleasures. Swiftly passed those auspicious hours, but at the end the
dictating voice ceased, even in the middle of a sentence, and it was
long past midnight, and there were a dozen sheets of paper covered with
writing on one side of the table, and on the other a half-empty siphon
and an ash-tray piled high with stumps, and I between the two symbolic
remains, tired and sleepy and wonderfully satisfied. I just arranged the
sheets, shuffled off to bed, and slept the perfect dreamlessness of
fatigue. After such a night there was a further excitement in the
morning, for again and again have I cudgelled my brains as I dressed, in
the effort to remember what I had written, and been totally unable to
recollect it, so that I would read it over with surprised interest.
Often these subconscious scribblings required correction and trimming,
for sentences would be unbalanced, and phrases needed the file or called
for recasting, but the substance and general outline invariably met with
the approval of my conscious self, who realized over his eggs and bacon
that he had not and could not have devised the stuff. He might not think
very highly of it, but he always passed it on those occasions when he
had had nothing to do with it.

I must be pardoned for thus dwelling on this little psychological
problem, concerned with creative work, for I think the mechanism
concerned has been misunderstood. For everyone who busies himself in
mental creative work will allow that he works best _on_ something or
under certain physical conditions. One man will get up early, when, so
he says, his brain is fresh: others will do their thinking when walking
about: others, when they are weaving and imagining, will sit in a sort
of dreamy quiescence: others will work on tea or tobacco or whisky or
possibly opium, for they say that these refreshments stimulate them. But
it seems difficult, though one man’s meat is another man’s poison, to
reconcile such various methods of procuring the conditions for creative
work as these.

So let us take a totally different hypothesis, which seems to account
for the diversity of all these procedures. It looks far more likely that
the condition required is one in which the conscious self is quiescent.
A night’s rest has gratified it in one case, a comfortable arm-chair in
another, it is thinking of its cigarette in a third, of its tea in a
fourth. But in all these cases, it is occupied and put out of the way,
in order that it may not play its monkey-tricks and obtrude itself, when
the door of that region of the mind about which we know so little,
swings open, and the images of ideas steal forth. The condition in all
cases is somewhat similar to hypnosis, in which the conscious self is in
abeyance and the subconscious comes to the surface.

This hypothesis fits in with other more transcendental phenomena. The
mystic, by meditation from which all things physical are so excluded
that he is unconscious of heat or cold or time, sets free the higher
powers of his mind, and he “perceives” in supernormal ways. Jacob
Boehme, for instance, in order to attain transcendental perception,
“ceased from thinking and willing, and made the wheel of his imagination
stand still,” and it is clear that this state was some sort of
self-hypnosis, a stunning and an abeyance of his conscious self, for he
tells us that it was accidentally, as he gazed at the bright reflection
of sunlight on a copper bowl, that he began to “perceive.”

Or to take the other end of the scale in the powers that make up the
soul of man, the same thing holds good in physical achievement. Under
strong excitement the conscious self is stunned, so that the pain
normally arising from a severe physical injury may be quite unperceived,
and from somewhere within is let loose a power which enables the muscles
and sinews of the body to accomplish feats of which they are normally
incapable. But to attain such conditions, one requirement is uniformly
essential, the ordinary work-a-day mind has to be diverted: it has to be
got out of the way, and whether it is stunned, stimulated, or soothed
makes no difference.

For all ideas, all imaginings, from Shakespeare’s down to the smallest
scribbler’s, come out of some inner sanctuary of the mind, and from
behind a veil of impenetrable texture, so that we have no idea whether
it is dark within as in the centre of a hive, or radiant with some
unimagined light. The conscious mind never sees what goes on there: its
functions are to trot about and collect materials, and push its
harvestings behind the veil. It will never penetrate beyond: at the
most, by insistence and clamour, it seems able to distract and worry
that which holds control within, which waits till all is quiet again
before it suffers the veil to bulge, and let out some product of its
own. Various are its modes of communication with the conscious mind: to
Boehme it came through some state of self-hypnosis; to Stevenson it came
in dreams, so that while his body was asleep, as he tells us, he
dreamed, for instance, two scenes which are the _clou_ of his _Jekyll
and Hyde_: to de Quincey it was borne on the wings of drugs, but to all
alike it comes, and it comes always, not when the conscious self is to
the fore, but when it is asleep or in abeyance or otherwise occupied.

The only other error which I did not commit in those excited days, was
the attempt to portray any individual as a leading character in a book.
I have never met, nor shall I ever meet (and if I did I could never
learn enough about him), any one person who could possibly bear the
burden of being a leading character in any work of fiction, however
trivial. Individuals, of course, suggest to the writer the gestures, the
appearance, the manners, the flaws and finenesses of character, for,
when all is said and done, everybody draws from life, but to suppose
that any author could hope for the smallest measure of success if he set
himself to reproduce an actual person, in his habit as he lived, to fill
a principal place in his romance, is to misunderstand the process of
imaginative work altogether. With minor characters, those who are
designedly in the background and only incidentally bear on the main
conception of a book (which is an idea), it is a totally different
question: you may “fill in” with any mild and suitable models. But I
early saw and now more fully recognize that the action of a book can
only be entrusted to types, composite figures if you will, for in no
other way can the presentation be solid.

But since you do not meet types walking about, they must first be
internally conceived, and not till then can individuals make their
little contributions, and, in fact, the only individual a novelist is
ever seriously indebted to is himself. He draws from himself, from his
own unsuspected secret hideousness, his own camouflaged meannesses, and
the general objectionableness of his soul a hundred times more often
than he draws from anybody else. And if there appear in his delineations
some gleam of altruism or generosity, or the difficult heroism of the
fireside, you may wager that it has been to his own impulses that he
owes his inspiration. For the rest, in his creation of a type which will
shoulder the burden of his tale, he owes five per cent. to a man, and
four per cent. to a woman, and perhaps six per cent. to a dog. Sex
matters nothing to him, a trait from a woman, a manner from a man, a
piece of a dog’s constancy, and of a cat’s aloofness are shredded into
the stock-pot, with no discrimination of sex or species, in order that
there may issue from it, mixed with the overwhelming percentage of the
author, typical figures who talk in a consistent and ungrammatical
manner. Nothing comes amiss to the author, if only at the end of his
shredding and sorcery he can get the strong broth. And so often it turns
out to be weak broth. “Let the hen walk through the water once more,” as
the disappointed _gourmet_ said when he tasted the chicken soup.

The moral and the connexion, already I hope dimly apparent, now emerge.
It is because the author draws from himself, that the hours in which his
characters seem to take the tiller and steer for themselves comprise the
best of his output. It is he, of course, who is really in command all
the time, but that region or quality of his brain which knows him most
nakedly and intimately is now in charge, and this holds the true compass
and the key to such treasures as he possesses. All that he has ever
experienced is in that store-house, sorted and arranged, and ready for
him if he can only unlock the door and discover his own harvestings. But
how difficult that is: in how arbitrary a manner the door swings back
and excludes him, and seldom does it stand open for long, and few there
are who refuse to write except when the door is open and they have free
access to their best. The most of us want to get on with our book, to
finish it somehow or nohow, and begin on a new and diverting theme. We
let the bright, clever, superficial self take charge, and it turns out
something quite neat and readable, but machine-made and unreal. There
are cracks and knots in the wood, and we fill up the cracks with putty
and put paint over the knots, and apply a coat of varnish to it, and
damn our souls. . . .


                              CHAPTER VII

Friendly and hospitable were those days, and there were a hundred
beacons of welcome burning for me on heights or in lowlier places, which
I am unorthodox enough (in the way of reminiscences) not to specify.
Never a Sunday did I spend in Town, and never did I come back on Monday
without a licking of the lips with the sheer enjoyment of it all.
Gradually I got more constant in visits to one particular house, which
is for ever unique, for I verily believe that there was no house like it
before, and there has been no house like it since. What gave it its
inimitable quality was the personality of its hostess. Park Gate House,
Ham Common, was the scene, and the chatelaine was Lady Charles
Beresford.

She was in a position no less unique than herself. Once upon a time
there had been what we must call a “row,” the nature of which can be
only faintly indicated. There were four people primarily concerned, two
husbands and two wives, of which her husband was one husband, and she
one wife, of character never blotched nor blemished, and they were all
great friends of a man, who, with his wife, occupied a very prominent
position in the London world. When the row occurred, this man, who was
always noted for his inexhaustible good-will towards his friends, tried,
by a personal interview with Lady Charlie, to smooth over this rough
passage, and pointed out what a pity it was to quarrel. But he had
rather misunderstood the situation, and he only managed to convey to her
the unfortunate impression that his interpretation of the row was an
insult to her, and so no doubt it was. She did not pause to consider
whether he meant well or not, but ordered him out of the house, and
instantly proceeded to write a truthful and candid and voluminous letter
to Queen Victoria, telling her all about it with singular directness. Of
course, that was not a usual thing to do, rather it was a unique thing
to do, but then Lady Charlie was a unique and not a usual woman.

This kind-hearted man, already resenting her order to get out of the
house, resented even more this misconstruction of his amiable motives
being recounted to the Queen, and he and his friends, who constituted a
powerful party, made, not so much an attack on Lady Charlie, as an
oblivion of her, a smooth, blank, prodigious wall. So she, with great
wisdom, refrained from recalling herself to the oblivious, but raised a
regiment of new friends, and, with her back to the prodigious wall,
formed a circle which for wit and movement and content and centrality
has never been equalled. Instead of behaving like an exile, doomed to
wander in bitter homelessness, she settled down most comfortably, and
turned the desert into an oasis to which no end of thirsty pilgrims
flocked. She never affected to despise the Paradise from which she was
an outcast Peri, but was thenceforth blankly unaware that there existed
any Eden but her own, and if she came in contact with any of its
unfallen inhabitants, she was more unaware of it than ever. For herself,
she loved absurdity and originality, she was ignorant, blankly ignorant,
of what convention meant and what snobbishness meant, and she was firmly
convinced, after many trying and extensive experiences, that the only
tolerable mode of life was to be amused. If you were not amused, you
were either bored or worried, and she had a great deal that might
possibly have worried her if she had succumbed to such a weakness. Women
without number had been in love with her husband, but she never. So when
he, fascinating and adored and gay and inimitably humorous, seemed to be
inflammable also, her heart never suffered. But she had a sense of
possession, and a perception of trespass. She disliked all women, except
the mature and the plain, and never, if she could help it, saw a girl.

Lady Charlie was at this time on the heights of her amazing and
effervescent vitality, and well-embarked on the sea of middle-age which
can be so placid to women who have enjoyed enormously and have loved
passionately, and have then waved final farewell to the receding coast
of youth; and can be so stormy to those, men and women alike, who have
not acquiesced, and will not relinquish their determination to be young
in however gaunt and grisly a manner. But she, in some inimitable
manner, navigated a sea that was not placid because of her
relinquishments and acquiescences, nor yet a sea that was still stormy
because she would not acquiesce. Her mind was perennially young, and she
was immune from the assaults of temperament: she was as harmless,
temperamentally, as a dove, and could, without a moment’s pause, be
either as wise or as venomous as a serpent. She was often both.

Her diversions and personal appearance, no less than her speech,
admirably expressed her. I often went down there on a Saturday morning,
in order to have a good long talk from (rather than with) her, before
other arrivals, being quite well aware that I was just an ear, which she
conceived to be a moderately intelligent one, and one that delighted to
have poured into it the inexhaustible torrent of her surprising
reflections. Probably she was in the garden, mounted (if no more) on her
tricycle, for her doctor had recommended her to take exercise, “and I
can’t walk, my dear, there’s something odd about my knees.” Sometimes
she trundled herself to the end of the gravel path in the garden, a
distance of some hundred yards, but generally she did not get so far,
for the tricycle stuck in damp places or on the edge of the lawn, and
she dismounted and left it there, for her Pekinese dogs to bark at.

She was shod in very small, high-heeled satin shoes for her exercise,
and pale blue and pink were the hues of her habiliment: her hat was a
wide umbrella, made of muslin and wires, with large blue convolvuluses
trained about it, and she wore a loose gown, suitable for a stout girl
of ten, falling straight from the anchorage of her shoulders and
fastened fortuitously here and there with large turquoise-headed
brooches. There was no pretence about the turquoises: they were enormous
plaques of flawless azure, which defied not detection, but deception.
“Bon marché,” she said, when M. Cambon, the French ambassador, politely
admired them, “eight francs each.” The same scorn of deception declared
itself in her face: a firm eyebrow drawn in charcoal and steeply arched
might be the decoration on one side, and she had, as likely as not,
forgotten to draw the eyebrow on the other side, or had put on an
eyebrow of another species made of an adhesive strip of a sort of fur.
Once when she was cruising in the Admiralty yacht in the Mediterranean,
a small parcel arrived for her which had burst in the post, and all the
eyebrows had fallen out. . . . The powder rose from her face like driven
snow if there was a wind, and when she ate an apple (strongly
recommended by Dr. Yorke-Davis) a wonderful carmine stained the pale
flesh of it. She had puffs and puffs of auburn hair, but no deception
there, for how, if that was so, could she have said to me when I played
an awkward card at bridge, “Dodo, if you insist on playing that card, I
shall take off my hair and throw it at you.” . . . The reason why she
wore the turquoises and the evening shoes and the eyebrows was quite
alien from deception: she wore them in the French spirit, to give her
the mask and the confidence of _maquillage_. She saw herself so, and she
talked like herself and behaved like herself when she knew that she
looked like that. She was forced to have auburn hair and carmine lips in
order to say the things she said: they would have been _macabre_
otherwise.

And what talk it was: shrewd and penetrating and piffling, defying
disentanglement.

“I’ve read the manuscript you sent me,” she said. “Where are my dogs?
Blackie, come here at once, and don’t make nuptials with Orange among
the petunias. I read it in bed last night, and Blackie was lying on my
chest, so that when I giggled he fell off. But I wonder if you ought.
I’m an old woman, of course, and I never go into the world, and I don’t
know what’s going on. But you mustn’t exaggerate: probably you don’t,
and then so much the worse. And do be on your guard against
sentimentality. Sentimentalists are people who want to have the luxury
of emotion without paying for it. The turquoise brooch? No, don’t
bother: they’ll find it. Let’s have lunch. They will see I’ve left the
tricycle somewhere and find the turquoise. A dreadful day to-morrow! I
asked three ambassadors to come down in the afternoon and stop for
dinner, and they’re all coming. Ambassadors! What’s the use of
ambassadors when things are in this state? War, my dear, there’ll be war
between us and France in six months. The French hate us: they hate our
levity and our insincerity and our superficiality: all the faults that
we attribute to them. Blackie, do not eat pansies: naughty! The French
are the most serious and steadfast nation in the world: you will see
when war comes. We think they are frivolous, because we can understand
nothing but frivolity. Did you go to the opera last night? Tristan: such
a bore! And the love-duet! it was time for their golden wedding before
they got to the end. The English fleet? There isn’t any English fleet:
there are a few leaky dinghies which will go to the bottom if they fire
a single gun. Ask Charlie if you don’t believe me. Yes: Tristan! How
marvellous! Why does nobody love like that now? and for heaven’s sake
let us go in out of this awful sun. It ought to be electric light. Where
is Orange? Orange chases the stags in Richmond Park, and I am terrified
that one day she will catch one up, and be kicked or bitten to death, or
whatever stags do to their enemies. I only have baked apples for lunch;
it reminds me of Eden. Is that crab you’ve got there? Give me a small
piece of crab. I will tell Yorke-Davis, I have had crab-apples. Don’t be
so silly!”

So she would eat some crab, and the telephone bell rang.

“Find out who it is, Nicholas,” she said to her butler, “and say ‘no.’ I
cannot bear the telephone. Why should I be at the beck and call of
everybody? You must come to Baireuth with me next year. Whenever I
travel, something extraordinary happens: either the engine won’t go, or
the guard commits suicide, or somebody with whom I am not on speaking
terms claims my sleeping-berth. Why don’t you put the telephone into
your flat, a separate one, I mean? Whenever I ring you up, something
sepulchral moans at the other end and says it will see, and when it does
see, I can’t hear. I couldn’t live without the telephone. Have you seen
Maisie? I am told she has gone into deep mourning over Tim’s death like
a widow. Of course everybody knew, but she needn’t remind them: so silly
to dot the i’s when the man’s dead, and the i’s have all been dotted
again and again already. But crape, swathed in crape, like a crow, and
almost tumbling out of her box last night at the Liebestod. I suppose it
reminded her of him. How like the scene in a novel I couldn’t read—Hall
Caine isn’t it, or do I mean Marie Corelli?—where the marriage service
is interrupted by a female coming out from behind the organ, and
shrieking, ‘You promised to make an honest woman of me!’ Just as if any
man could make a woman honest! What an awful sex we are, and how I hate
all that sort of thing. Dusé is coming down to-morrow: I hope she will
not make a scene with Mrs. Patrick Campbell: aren’t they both acting
Magda? What a play! A country vicarage invaded by the sweepings of
Leicester Square! We must get some fresh blood down here.” . . .

A few habitués probably arrived for dinner that night, but it was not
till Sunday that the party, this wonderful and inimitable party, grew
populous. Always there were weird and curious people among it, and Lady
Charlie wondered why she had asked them, and her husband grouped them
under the head of Tishbites, “Mina’s Tishbites.” On one occasion the
Ambassadors of France and Italy arrived earlier than she expected or
wanted them, and so exclaiming, “They will amuse each other,” she
retreated to the kitchen-garden until a large consumption of
strawberries enabled her to meet them. When she came back her guests,
already numerous, were playing bridge and croquet, as if at a club.
There were large summer-houses scattered about the garden with one side
open to the air, and the others of trellis or match-board: these were
completely furnished with chairs and tables and carpets and books, and
in summer there was bridge going on in one, and tea in another, and
impassioned arguments in a third. Sometimes she played bridge, and even
in the middle of a hand, if she heard the sound of piano-playing from
inside the house, she would depute a guest to finish the rubber for her,
and hurry off to see if it was Paderewski, which it never was. And then
the pianist would be told to play the last act of the _Götterdämmerung_
because it made her ill for a fortnight with emotion, and she listened
for about two minutes, and scolded Blackie for barking, and then plunged
into some obscure and obstetric and confidential conversation.

“She thinks that nobody ever had a baby before,” she whispered. “As if
everyone wasn’t always having babies. I could have a baby to-morrow—ah,
isn’t that wonderful: that’s the Tarnhelm motif, and so Brünnhilde
thinks it’s somebody else. I always tell Charlie he ought to have a
Tarnhelm. Entrancing, my dear, I could listen for ever! Don’t get up,
but play the _Meistersinger_ all through. What, Nicholas? Oh, has Madame
Dusé come? Where is Mrs. Patrick Campbell, or the Italian ambassador?
They will talk Italian together. My Italian is purely operatic. ‘Nobile
sposa’: that sort of thing, and I can’t say that to Dusé.”

The day waned, and there was an enormous dinner out in the garden.
Sometimes everybody stopped for it, and the table lengthened and
lengthened itself, or else nobody stopped but those who were staying the
night, and a dozen people sat down to viands for a City banquet. She
generally asked more guests to stay than there was room for in the
house, and one must sleep in the bath, and another on the sofa in the
drawing-room. Sometimes those who were going back to Town stayed very
late, with Lady Charlie getting more animated and loquaciously amazing
as the hours went by, and well I remember one particular Sunday night,
when the latest to leave did not get off till two in the morning, and
she sent for some more sandwiches and some beer, and insisted on a quiet
game of bridge in one of the shelters. Perhaps there were two rubbers or
perhaps there were three, and she found the nightingales very
distracting and revoked.

“Just when we were getting on so nicely,” she said. “One more rubber:
that was so short. I don’t know what the time is, and let nobody tell
me. People invented watches and then became slaves to them.
Frankenstein, wasn’t it? What a monster! Hughie, do not look at your
watch, but cut. Otherwise you will say you must go to bed in order to be
fresh and bright for the City to-morrow. Hughie lends the Bank of
England a hundred thousand pounds in the morning, and the Bank pays him
back a hundred thousand pounds and one penny in the evening, or is it
the other way about? But that is the basis of finance.”

She gave a loud shriek.

“What is happening?” she cried. “Haven’t we had one moon already
to-night, and why is there going to be another? There’s something coming
up there.”

Of course it was the sun, and she hastily rose.

“And me as ill as this,” she said. “We must all go to bed at once.
Blackie, Orange, my darlings, how bad for you to sit up like this!” And
with the flowers in her hat stirring in the breeze of dawn, she devoured
a strawberry or a caviare sandwich, and shedding turquoises and
handkerchiefs and gloves, she hurried off, with Blackie and Orange
circling madly round her across the dew-drenched lawn.

In the winter Park Gate House was shut up, and Lady Charlie came to
London for a few months, collecting fresh blood for Ham, and virulently
criticizing any Government that might happen to be in power. This year I
began to spend winters in high Swiss resorts, for the achievement of the
gold badge in skating, and started at Grindelwald. But now, more vivid
to me than skating, are certain days, when, if the rink was indisposed,
or I was a-weary of the elusive art, I tied my lunch to a toboggan, and
went off quite alone for the day. There was a mild descent into the
valley along which the stream from the Wetterhorn glacier nosed its way
under lids of ice towards the Lake of Thun, gurgling and chafing below
them, and, where its course was steeper, shaking itself free, and
steaming in the frosty air. Its mist was sneezing-cold to the voyager,
and I hurried across the icicled bridge, and drew my toboggan briskly up
the hill towards the Scheidegg pass. By now, the Bear Hotel and the
clustered village round it had dwindled to the scale of toys, and the
spell of solitude was weaving. To right and left were fields glistening
with silent snow: in front was a pine-wood, capped and caparisoned with
white, against which the foliage was jet-black and the tree trunks
glowing orange, and above that rose the northern precipice of the Eiger,
too steep for more than a powder of snow to lie on it. There was no
human being within sight or hearing: here was the joy of it, and under
the blue crystalline dome, and beneath the amber heights, I would feel
myself shrunk into an infinitesimal atom. That is the magic of solitude:
there is no sense of absorbing it, or filling it with your own
impressions, and glorying in it; the solitude invades and all but
annihilates you, and the consciousness of existence in it, a quickened
and stimulated minuteness, is all that is left of you. . . . Just below
the pine-wood one paused, getting rid of the remains of oneself in full
breaths, dwindling and dwindling into the rapture of conscious
nothingness. In the desert you can thus lose yourself, or by swimming
very far out to sea, but nowhere is the loss so complete as in the
whiteness of snow and the immense azure.

The climb up through the pine-wood recalled me, for there was the
environment of trees; a scale asserted itself again. They were big, but
not so big, and the toboggan grounding on stumps and excrescences was a
clue to identity. But even thus it was wonderfully pleasant to be alive
and hot and hungry, and, in the reaction, I would make a cache below a
pine-root, of a piece of chocolate, and a cigarette and a ten-centime
piece. (Or was that only a function of the spirit of solitude, playing a
secret game, and being silly with seriousness?) And noticing that
mid-day was past, I hurried on again, telling myself that if I was going
to climb the Jungfrau and Monck and Eiger, I must waste no more time.
But then, perhaps, there would be a gentian, bluer than the zenith,
which had pushed a spiked bud through the snow and radiantly flowered,
and the wonder of it, the sense of the colour shouting of beauty in the
whiteness and the solitude, enchained me. The image of Bach improvising
some miraculous fugue in a huge empty church came into my mind.

                 *        *        *        *        *

I came back in this January of 1901 to spend a few days with Regie
Lister in Paris, where he was second secretary in the British Embassy.
He met me at the station with the news that Queen Victoria was dead. I
had known, like all the rest of the world, that she was old and that she
was ill, but I do not think it had ever soberly occurred to me that she
could die. To those who had grown to maturity in her reign, it seemed an
incredible and shattering convulsion of nature. The Queen belonged to
the same order of bodies as the sun and the moon: she had been on the
throne before one’s mother was born, and only Beth (equally immortal)
could remember her accession; majestic and mysterious permanence was her
attribute. One had grown out of childhood, and realized that the head on
current coin was that of the Queen (the whole coinage of the realm was
hers), and one grew out of boyhood and there was the head of the Queen
still, with a new design of head-dress and the face of an old woman,
commemorating (was it?) her first Jubilee, but it was still the effigy
of the imperishable Queen. Once only had I seen her close and quietly.
For one year, towards the end of the eighties, my father had taken a
house on Deeside for August, and we were all invited to Balmoral. And
the diminutive old lady with the prominent blue eyes that looked very
fixedly at you and the really beautiful voice, who was so small and so
significant, was the head of everything, the incarnation of stability
and security, something cosmic. . . . There was, too, something vividly
individual about her, and if, never having seen her before, I had
observed her walking into some very unexpected place, like a small
restaurant in Soho, I verily believe I should have known her for Queen
Victoria: nobody else could possibly be quite like that, nor could she
possibly have been anyhow different.

That one minute of personal and private experience other than the sight
of her in crowds and ceremonials, contributed to, rather than
diminished, the lone dignity in which the Queen was enveloped, and after
that day she, in her lameness and her littleness and her sovereignty,
became to me, more potently than ever, one of the elemental facts in the
world, and it was amazing to see, as Regie Lister and I drove through
the streets of Paris on that cold January morning, that the French
world, not a bit stunned, was carrying on just as before. Even London,
whither I returned in a couple of days, was behaving as usual, and then,
at Windsor, where I went for the funeral in St. George’s Chapel, I saw
the supreme pageant of empire and splendour and simplicity.

She had died at Osborne, and the body was brought across from the Isle
of Wight on the _Victoria and Albert_. It passed through the mourning
capital, and arrived at the station at Windsor much behind the time, so
that there was a very long period of waiting for those in the Chapel.
The robed Knights of the Garter were in their stalls, both Houses of
Parliament were there, but by some mistake a whole batch of commands to
the funeral had miscarried, and a large block of seats in the nave,
close to the entrance to the choir, was empty. Then came the drone of
drums, and the wailing of fifes, faint and distant, from the station,
and you visualized the train from London drawn up there, and the
porterage of what it bore. And again the minutes went by and for a while
the wailing ceased, and somehow in whispers it became known that one of
the horses harnessed to the gun-carriage had shied and tried to bolt,
and that the horses were taken out, and bluejackets of her fleet dragged
the bier up the steep slope from the station and across the High Street.

Then there was some quiet stir round the west door of the chapel, and
though yet nothing could be seen, the black lines of people on either
side of the gangway up the nave, rose to their feet. Outside the day was
grey, with pale glimpses of sunlight, and now in the middle of the open
doors, there appeared, like a shadow across the brightness, something
small and square, wavering and swaying as it was carried up the steps
outside the chapel. On either side of it were little round blots, and
soon, as they mounted to the level of the nave, you perceived that these
were the heads of those who bore the coffin. Up the nave she came, with
that slow swaying rhythm, and there followed her the King of England and
the German Emperor, and the princes who were her sons and sons-in-law,
and her nephews and her grandchildren, and on her coffin, when it came
to rest, there were laid the sceptre and orb and crown of her royalty.
Never had she been so great as now, nor ever her death more incredible
than when for the last time all rose as she passed by. The Garter
King-of-Arms recited who she was, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland,
and Empress of India, and when he had finished he said, “God save the
Queen.” It might be hundreds of years before that was ever said again,
and the whole greatness of her rose to its highest. But higher yet,
immeasurably, rose that for which she stood, and its splendour which she
had upheld. For the Garter King-of-Arms recited the style and titles of
Edward, King of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor of India, and
when he had finished he cried, “God save the King!” . . . It was over,
and by the coffin stood the King of England and the Emperor William II
of Germany.


                              CHAPTER VIII

Many were the backgrounds of life in front of which, in scenes of
security and sense of home, I plied the art of engrossed living, with
extraordinary pleasure. I had not the permanent roadstead of marriage,
but was anchored to many friends, of whom Regie Lister was the chief,
and much at home in many houses, and most of all there was Tremans. If
ever I had a sense of bleakness, here or there, I knew that there were
special sunlights, where I could go for basking. Words cannot convey to
those who do not adultly remember pre-war conditions how secure life
felt. There was, of course, the South African War going on, but serious
and anxious though it was, the sense of distance dimmed it to the
ordinary citizen.

The visit to Baireuth with Lady Charles Beresford, hinted at before,
duly took place, and her assertion that when she travelled extraordinary
things occurred was fully justified. But even more extraordinary things
were in progress at Baireuth, for Siegfried Wagner, son of the Master,
who conducted the _Ring_, was aware that there were more Masters than
one, which never had been the case before. For when I asked him if his
own opera had been performed again, he answered: “No: I have to wait for
recognition: the same thing happened to my father.” There was a
revelation in that simple sentence: he knew that his father had a son,
whereas, two years before, no such blasphemy had ever penetrated into
Wahnfried. Then the son had a father, and the widow had had a husband,
but nothing else was known about them; their glory was but that of the
moon which owes all its light to the central luminary.

The most buxom of the Rhine-maidens, she who swung the highest, and sang
the heartiest, fell in love with Lord Charles Beresford at first sight,
and managed to leave little notes on his cane-bottomed stall, of an
inconceivable amorousness, and written in German, which, as he was
unacquainted with the language, must be interpreted. Lady Charlie used
to hurry to her seat, “pinch” the note that was intended for him, and
(knowing German perfectly) greedily to devour it. He followed with a
broad grin, and said, “Hullo, Mina; been reading my private
correspondence again? What does my girl say? Translate it to me, and
don’t leave out the warmer passages. You listen, Dodo; when you’re over
fifty you won’t find that anyone writes to you like that. Yes: she’s the
one who begins on the left of the stage, and goes full speed ahead like
a boat in a high sea. Well-nourished woman, and comes from Palestine, I
should think. She called me her little partridge yesterday. Spit it out,
Mina: perhaps I’ll be a pheasant to-day.”

All this, though diverting, smudged the traditional sacredness: the
_Dämmerung_, of which I have already spoken, had certainly begun.
Munich, for instance, was spreading its tail like a peacock, owing to
the success of its last season’s Wagner performances, and Mrs. Craigie,
who was of our party, said in a moment of strong moral courage that
Wotan was a bore, and emboldened by these heresies, Mr. George Moore
framed the impious theory that _Parsifal_ was composed by an organist in
collaboration with a choir-boy. But while despising and despairing of
him, one perceived what he meant. It was not that I agreed with him in
the remotest manner, but I recognized that if you happened to hold that
disagreeable point of view, there was something to be said for it, and
Mr. Moore said it. Surely no one had ever such a genius as he for
detecting flesh where you had imagined spirit, for picking at the
splendid until he revealed below it the sordid. In that evocative flash
(as Mr. Hewlett might say) one saw it all, the organist, nodding to the
choir-boy to pull out the _vox humana_, and the light from a stained
glass window falling on their faces. The fact, of course, was that the
glamour was for me a little fading from Baireuth, or else we should not
have paid so much heed to what Mr. Moore said about music.

But the faculty of finding glamour will not permit those who possess it
to inhibit its functions; until the world quite fades into the light of
common day the glamorist will always find enchanted places, and for me
the glamour which had grown pale at Baireuth was beginning to glow at
Tremans. There the adjustment of the new relationship between my mother
and sister had been effected and established, and now the years up to
the summer of 1906 seemed to pass for its inhabitants like some long,
tranquil and yet busy afternoon hour, sunny and softly mellow. There was
Beth, already over eighty, ailing but seldom, and for ever actively
trotting about the house and rummaging in our wardrobes, whenever Arthur
or Hugh or I came home, to find linen and socks which needed mending,
and carrying off all such to her room, where, sitting in the
rocking-chair in which she had soothed two infant generations to sleep,
she darned and patched. There she sat, bright-eyed and eager for visits
from her children, and if Hugh was not to be found, it was because he
was having a crack with Beth, or if Beth was not to be found, it was
because she was sitting with Maggie in the shelter in the orchard; while
for an hour before dressing-time in the evening, there was only one
place in which to look for my mother, for she was reading aloud to Beth.
Dickens was the favourite author, and to see Beth laughing over the
Kenwigses was a lesson in glee.

Then there was Maggie, better in health than she had been for ten years,
directing the affairs of the St. Paul’s Society, and, no less, those of
hens and cats and cinnamon turkeys, and ever so surely and solidly
proceeding with her philosophy. More often than not Miss Gourlay or Miss
Gladys Bevan, those two most devoted friends, would be with her, giving
themselves to her with the completeness with which Lucy Tait was my
mother’s. . . .

And finally and firstly there was she, entering on the period of her
sixties, alert for all kinds of travel. The years of looking back, of
regret, of loss and emptiness which had succeeded my father’s death, had
passed like some cold wind, which had delayed but not damaged the fruit
which the mellow years now ripened. She hated certain physical
disabilities, curtailments of energy, that were incident to age, and
made endless plans for dieting and for mapping out the hours in a secret
book, and therein recorded dismal failures, and set to work again. Her
eyes troubled her sometimes, but with no serious threatening, and if on
a damp morning she was rather rheumatic, she still left all her
occupations on the suggestion of a walk, prefacing it with, “If you
don’t mind a totter with a tortoise.” But when such disabilities
assailed, they were but the beating of waves on a strong coast, and
above it, flaming more lucently than ever, was the lighthouse of her
soul. Not one beam of its illumination was quenched now: it had been
darkened only by some external clouding of its lenses. Privately and
confidentially she might admit certain worries, but the measure of her
light and her strength was that when friends or sons were with her she
utterly refused to acknowledge them. She was not at home to them; they
had come to the wrong house, or, at the most, they might wait by the
back-door, well out of sight. The gods had given her the temperament of
flame and imperishable youth of mind, always vastly interested and
keenly critical, and a marvellous gift of right phrasing. Of one
acquaintance with a childish and immature outlook she would announce,
“She wants a bottle, but she must have beef”; of another, “Her
perplexity is as to whether God can be trusted”; of another (who had
certainly bored her with the efficient but soulless details of some
scheme), “Oh, what water for the thirsty of the accurate and the
intricate.”

But to Lucy Tait, the friend of her heart, she confided all that
secretly worried her: she spoke to her as if to herself, admitting the
mutterings of fear and flesh on which her courage imposed silence
towards others, and she records in her diary, with impatient amusement
at herself, the following tragic scene. “Last night,” she says,
“something prompted me to ask Lucy whether she considered me a grumbler.
She said very promptly, ‘Yes.’ I asked, ‘Let 20 be the maximum grumbler,
what mark do you give me?’ and she answered ‘15.’ . . . There is all
told. She tried to water it down, but it was a facer. Let me think what
she means: I think it is detailed and continual comparing of ‘then’ and
‘now,’ and my mentioning discomforts and disagreeable conditions and
dwelling on them. I see only one way—abandon all expressions of
everything of the kind, and of unfavourable small criticisms. Under
cover of this, the change, please God, may be made. Content and joy for
grumbling and sadness, the garment of Praise for the Spirit of
Heaviness. . . . Maggie’s kind of illness and condition all works in
into this grumbling, which Lucy finds in me. I think I had better not
talk to her about it at all and have no confidant. Be as one who goes to
live in a French family. Be glad not to be natural till the new nature
is born in me. Have advancing years and changed and narrowed
circumstances produced in me a smaller range, and a greater dislike to
be bothered? As age draws on and death comes nearer, am I living more in
the real existence, or less? Oh, do let me think.”

My mother made this entry when a shadow, perhaps the darkest of all that
ever crossed her path, was beginning to fall. She just alludes to it in
“Maggie’s kind of illness,” which belongs to a later date. . . . But the
whole entry is marvellously characteristic of her. She had no doubt
indulged herself to Lucy Tait in what she so magnificently concealed
from the rest of us, and had clearly, in fact, been grumbling. Then,
gloriously, it is a facer to her to know that the friend was perfectly
aware of this and quite candid, so instantly my mother pounces on
herself, all claws and teeth, to tear out this prodigious hideousness
from her nature. Without a hint of resentment at the judgment, she
searches herself to see what it comes from, with all that passion for
analysis which made human motives and weaknesses so interesting to her.
She must not permit herself a single further grumble: dead silence, and
under cover of that wait for the birth of a better nature. . . . For it
never struck her, then or at any other time, that, from the days when
she studied French cathedrals in order to please my father, her life had
been spent in self-surrender to those she loved. But then she analysed
herself always from the standpoint of infinite love, and admitted no
measure of that which she ought to be but the immeasurable.

She began in those years to care about the country in itself, for it was
associated with the health which had returned to Maggie and the peace
that had come to her, and, even if it had been possible, she would not
now have chosen to settle in London. There was always the little house
in Barton Street to which she could go, but she was seldom there for
long, and when, presently, that was given up, she had a home with
Archbishop Davidson and his wife in the old scenes of Lambeth. She still
loved the sense of affairs swiftly and ardently a-stir round her, and
nothing of her passion for live people had abated, but, with the gentle
shower of the years falling on her, she began—just a little—to find a
strain in the continuance and multiplicity of such stir, and preferred
to have intimates, such as her sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick,
Adeline Duchess of Bedford, and her sister, Lady Henry Somerset, with
her at Tremans, where there was leisure to enjoy them, and the household
there was seldom confined to itself.

She had certain early hours set apart for devotions and meditation, and
she had a considerable correspondence, which daily took her some time,
but that was immensely interrupted (even when the rest of the family
were busy, and didn’t imperatively want her that minute) with
entertaining Joey, an extremely vicious green parrot, whose cage stood
at her elbow as she wrote, and who blindly adored her. Joey would be let
out and allowed to walk up her arm and perch on her shoulder, and laugh
hoarsely into her ear. She gave him attractive, hard objects, empty
reels of cotton and small, stiff, cardboard boxes, to play with, his
method of play being to tear them into small shreds. Then Joey went for
a walk on the floor, ready to run at anyone who came into the room,
insane with rage that he and his beloved should be intruded on. Luckily
there was a stand of walking-sticks near the door, and the intruder was
wont to snatch one up, and hold the end of it out to Joey, who could not
resist perching on it, and then you could wipe him off into his cage and
shut the door. There was a shrill penny-whistle for his amusement, and
my mother blew on it, and Joey a-quiver with musical ecstasy whistled
selections from his one tune, “Pop goes the Weasel.” Beth did not like
Joey; she said he was not “kind and loving,” which but faintly expressed
his satanic nature, but whoever came in, Joey would be wiped into his
cage, and the unfinished letter put aside, or the account-book bundled
back into the Italian cabinet, and there she was, interminably ready for
anyone who wanted her to stroll and talk and sit in the garden, or, if
the panes streamed and rattled, to sit over the fire and still talk.

Sometimes she tried to shake herself up into an interest in politics,
national affairs, and burning questions of the day, but no question
concerning collective interests and the affairs of masses burned so
bright for her as those of individuals, and it was concerning
individuals that the affairs of Horsted-Keynes, as a perfectly placid
little community, were a growing occupation to her. An organist, a
school-mistress, a vicar, a monthly nurse, a farmer’s boy, were brisk
and tidal waters to her, though so short a time before she had found
Winchester so unspeakable a stagnation. But the change was in herself:
she would have gloried in “the close and the county and the military”
now, for the fresh tide was sweeping in from the sea with sparkle and
foam and the first rosiness of sunset.

And, presently, the moment she had attained the requisite years, she
inimitably conceived an “Association for women over sixty-five,”
subtitularly headed “The League for the Utilization of Waste Products.”
The Waste Products must put aside certain hours for their spiritual
profit, and, for their physical, must be two hours a day in the open air
and eight hours in bed. Then, having done their best for their bodies
and their spirits, they might do precisely as they liked for the rest of
their time. She records the enrolment of one member (Lucy was not
eligible on account of youth), and there are unmistakable marks of
Joey’s beak on the note-book in which the affairs of the League are thus
set forth.

Meantime, during these years, her sons were getting on with their
businesses. Arthur had left Eton, and was officially employed on
editing, with the assistance of Lord Esher, the stupendous mass of Queen
Victoria’s correspondence, and presently with loaded trunks moved to
Cambridge, where he became Fellow of Magdalene College, Stuart
Donaldson, an old Eton colleague, being Master. Magdalene was then
hardly a college at all; there were not more than thirty undergraduates,
but from the moment of the application of these combined energies, it
began to expand and voluminously flourish, growing in a few years to the
position and prestige of an important college.

And as if all this was but a mild canter for his projection, he brought
out books of such delicate and finished workmanship as _From a College
Window_ and the _Upton Letters_. The wonder of it was, that whereas
anyone would imagine that for such detached and reflective work leisure
and immunity from all practical roughnesses was necessary, he passed
from College meetings and mid-Victorian politics, as with a dive, into
those fragrant seclusions, or, with the ink still wet on his pen, and
dispensing with an architect, drew plans for a house at Cambridge, which
flowered into an admirable residence. Simultaneously, so it seemed, he
would be shooting in Scotland, playing bezique with my mother at
Tremans, and bemoaning the fact that he had never a minute to himself.
“It’s sickening, it’s infernal, the grind of it all,” he said. “Ha!
double bezique. Don’t let us have prayers to-night. Or, if you must,
Fred shall play the hymn on the organ and I will play obligato parts on
the piano! . . .” And Hugh would notice that Lucy had fallen asleep,
while still holding up the evening paper, and made a mysterious
scratching sound on the underside, which caused her to start into
consciousness and fling the paper wildly from her. Maggie, teaching
Taffy his tricks, shouted with laughter, and Taffy, unobserved, put out
a large pink tongue, and stealthily swallowed the portion of biscuit for
which he ought to have sneezed. “Lucy, you _weren’t_ asleep,” she said.
“I swear you weren’t asleep.” And Beth, on her way down to supper, had
to pop in to see what we were all laughing about.

Then there was Hugh; he had gone to the House of the Resurrection at
Mirfield, and there for a time he was intensely happy. Then he began to
wonder if this was his real place, and soon he ceased to wonder, for he
heard in the stillness of his soul the command for its further
adventure. He wrote at that time his first book, _The Light Invisible_,
a collection of short stories strung together on the personality of an
old Catholic priest, and set in the scene of the house and garden at
Tremans. They showed clearly enough how strongly Rome beckoned, and
their publication, while he was still in Anglican orders, was somewhat
anomalous, though for the sake of a faintly veiled anonymity he called
himself “Robert Benson.” Subsequently he grew to dislike the book, but
there are many who think that, artistically, it is the best he ever
wrote, and their reasons for thinking this are precisely the same as
those for which Hugh disliked it. For as soon as he had made up his mind
that he was going over to Rome, he wrote nothing which did not
unmistakably show its propagandist purpose: on the pictures and problems
he presented, on the complications and characters and solutions, there
is painted the undeviating finger and guidance of Catholicism, and the
absence of this in _The Light Invisible_ was, to him, its mortal defect:
it spoke indifferently and neutrally. But just for that reason, apart
from its finished workmanship, others regard it as his best work: it did
not preach, it only presented.

From the first he had taken my mother into his confidence: he had told
her that he felt he might have to leave the Anglican Church, he told her
when the possibility was becoming a probability, and when the
probability became a certainty. At no stage of his pilgrimage did he
leave her in ignorance of his whereabouts. She, on her side, merited
this full confidence, for never once, seeing that the matter concerned
only his conscience, his conviction of the dealings of God with his
soul, did she attempt to bring any counter-influence to bear: she only
wanted to understand, and so she watched and prayed. So deep and so true
to her was this knowledge that he was following what he was convinced
was guidance, that she never felt the smallest touch of real, authentic
regret, for that would have implied that she wished his development
other than it was, and this she could not wish, since she believed that
all the best of him, as far as he knew it (and nobody else could know
it), was acting in accordance with the Divine Will. That was sufficient
for her.

Hugh was at Tremans often and long after he left Mirfield, and before he
was received into the Roman Communion was gaily posting along with that
admirable novel, _By What Authority?_ But already the propagandist as
well as the novelist was busy, a thorn to Anglican noses in the rose he
presented. There was the hint in all Hugh’s stories from this time
forward of rubbing the new Church in and treading on the toes of the
old. In one hand he held a humorous and busy pen, in the other,
skilfully concealed behind his back, a bottle of the strongest, the most
healing R.C. liniment. Sooner or later (usually sooner) he, by some
dexterous sleight of hand, laid the pen down, and pouring the liniment
out with one hand, rubbed it in with the other.

He had all the violence of a ’vert (per- or con- according to taste),
and, as if in the discharge of a duty, he used an incessant pea-shooter
on the faces of the bishops and elders of the flock he had left. To
argue with Hugh on religious topics, always introduced by him with
challenges and defiance, was like playing Rugby football under rules
framed by himself. He might collar (so ran the rules) any of the
opposing side, and kick their shins and hustle them, and rub their faces
in the mud, and stamp upon them, but his opponents must do nothing of
the sort: if they did, it was a “foul.” If you collared a dogma or a
bull on his side, Hugh wore a pained expression and said, “Please don’t
talk like that: you hurt me when you talk like that”; and then, slipping
out, he slapped and pommelled the clergy of the heretic persuasion. When
things got too hot, my mother would quote Mrs. Vincy in _Middlemarch_,
and say, “Dear me, how pleasant it is to hear young people talk!” and
her young people then, with temporary reconciliation, fell on her for
her flippancy. . . .

In the house at Tremans was a small room, licensed as a chapel for the
celebration of the Eucharist, and now, when, within a year of his
“version,” Hugh was in priest’s orders in the other Church, it became
impossible for him to stay with my mother, unless he said daily mass, he
(more Rugby football) collared this room. He had, of course, to make
some little changes: he procured plaster casts of the Blessed Virgin and
a few saints, and grabbing Maggie’s box of oil-paints, he spent a
perfectly happy morning in tinting their faces, and giving them robes of
celestial brightness. There was still a little paint left in some of the
tubes when that was done, so he used it on the windows, and made radiant
effigies of more saints in their leaded panes. The altar was a large
black oak chest with, luckily, two shelves within, and so Hugh allowed
the paraphernalia of the Anglican use to occupy one, but took the other
for his own. Sometimes he would meet Beth on the stairs, carrying up
fresh linen, and he would give her a word of warning, “Now, Beth, don’t
mix their things up with mine. Pray-a-be careful!” He always brought
down some boy to serve him, and in the morning the loud Anglican hymn
from family prayers below went on simultaneously with his office.

There were other offices as well, tierces and quarts and quints (I do
not profess to give their names accurately), and one morning Hugh and I
were playing croquet on the lawn below the window of the chapel, in that
mingled spirit of suspicion, passion, and vengeance which accompanies
and illuminates all serious croquet. At a crucial point, with a
disembodied “rover” prowling about, Hugh suddenly looked at his watch:
“Oh, blow it, I must go and say my prayers,” he said, and hurried
within. From the open window above there came a rapid and confused
murmur, and soon, wonderfully soon, Hugh scurried out again and looked
balefully at the balls. “I’m sure that ball wasn’t there,” he said.
“Fred, do you promise you haven’t moved it?” . . . so little fraternal
trust had quints produced. . . .

But first, soon after he had been received, he went off to Rome for an
audience with Leo XIII. My mother speeded him to the boat-train at
Victoria, alone, as she thought, but even as she ceased waving to him,
as the train went out of the station, she felt a hand take hers, and
found Bishop Wilkinson of St. Andrews, a very old friend of hers and of
my father’s, standing with her. He had learned when Hugh was leaving,
and that my mother was seeing him off, and with a supreme and
comprehending delicacy had left her to make her uninterrupted farewells.
But he guessed what Hugh’s departure symbolized to her, with the
memories of my father so inevitably close to her, and so here he was.
“Hugh is in God’s hands,” he said.


                               CHAPTER IX

There is a Greek legend which, like all things Greek, is drawn from the
essence and not the mere accidents of life. A pair of hapless lovers,
Halcyone and Ceyx, having offended the high gods, were turned into
birds, Halcyons, and, like Paolo and Francesca, were condemned to haunt
for ever the empty air. But the compassion inherent in Greek myth, the
humanity which has pity on weakness, could not leave them thus
perilously and eternally wandering. So every year at the time of the
winter solstice a remission for mating-time was granted them, and they
built a floating nest on the sea, and reared their young. For that
period the waters of the Ægean were calm, no wind vexed its azure.
Boreas held his breath and the south wind folded his wings, while the
nest of the Halcyons floated on the tranquil tide, and these days were
known as the Halcyon days. For the rest of the year there was no peace
for the poor Halcyons; they were driven from coast to coast, and on land
the cunning of man pursued them, and on the sea the white-capped foam of
waves. But when the Halcyon days came round, they built in security on
the wine-dark sea. . . . Ornithology has identified the Kingfisher with
the Halcyon, but it was clearly of some sea-bird, the tern perhaps, that
the legend tells, though, as far as I know, no bird mates in mid-winter,
nor makes a floating nest on the sea. But it is not the species that
matters, it is the spirit of the legend that gives it life.

Everyone who has lived and sinned against the high gods can apply the
legend. Sorrow and regret and fears and fleeing are a universal
heritage, but to all there sometimes comes that season of calm weather,
even in the midst of their winter, and the nest floats on a quiet sea,
and the bitter winds are still, and all the scurryings and disturbances
of the past are dead, and no clouds threaten the clear shining. . . .

Sometimes a little group of persons, though widely differing in age and
taste and temperament, arrives at such a solstice together, and it was
so with the family whose history I am recording. For nearly two years
the five of us, my mother, three brothers, and a sister, with Beth and
Lucy, those inseparable allies of us all, both welded into the family
heart, basked in Halcyon days. Though I can speak authoritatively for no
one but myself, I think we really liked each other, though sharply
disagreeing, better than anybody, and though our lives lay widely apart,
we were strongly and fundamentally united. We three sons, as already has
been recorded, were busy and prosperous in foregrounds of work and
diversion, but to us all the sense of “home” resided behind in the old
red-brick house at the end of the avenue of pines, and in the serenity
and well-being that dwelt there. Never had my mother been so free, as in
those years, from fear, that ghostly enemy of hers, whom she was always
trying to throttle, and who kept raising spectres for her, the grimness
and unreality of which were truly surprising even to herself. They were
always small things, a minor ailment of one of her flock, or some little
risk that another was running, which evoked these bogeys: when great
trouble threatened, and when intense anxiety was justified, her fears
vanished like a frosty breath in the presence of that which made the
sunlight of life to her, namely her unreserved acceptance, more and more
unclouded as the years went on, of the will of God. For of her it is
literally true to say, that the intenser the anxiety, the more
shattering the blow, the more completely the mists dispersed, leaving
her bathed in the radiance of her faith. There was no such attitude
possible to her as resignation or folded hands when trouble was
heaviest: for these great dealings she had nothing but clear welcome for
what God was sending, and hands uplifted not in prayer but in
praise. . . .

But just now, in these two years of Halcyon weather, she neither evoked
her little spectres, nor must call on her faith to meet trouble: she
found, too, great happiness in the knowledge that the very intimate
personal relationship in which she stood to each of her children was
quite unaffected by any divergence of opinion, between her and them, as
to their modes and manners of life, and their employment of their
energies. She would, for instance, have delighted in Arthur’s becoming
Head Master of Eton, and she was unfeignedly sorry when he refused to
stand for it, on the resignation of Dr. Warre, though it had been
clearly indicated that if he did he would be elected. But he chose not
to—and there it was, and his decision did not depress by the downiest
feather’s weight the steady balance of his relationship to her, any more
than did Hugh’s secession to Rome, or (in a minor way) the fact that it
was becoming common knowledge between her and me that she found the sort
of book that I was writing now quite intolerable, though none of us yet
had written anything that gave her any sense of personal pride. She
thought, as far as I can guess, that it was wonderfully clever of us all
to write so many books, and she had a home for them all—such a spacious
home was it growing—in the bookcase in her sitting-room. There was an
Arthur-shelf, and a Hugh-shelf, and a Fred-shelf, and because these
propagating volumes were her sons’, she exercised a savage guardianship
over them, and would never lend her copies. But they didn’t give her
joy, because she did not agree with the standpoint from which any of
them was written. Some struck her as too quietist for the world, and
some too worldly for her own quietism: some were propagandist of beliefs
she did not share, and some were sentimental, and some were crude, and I
feel convinced that she never read twice anything that any of us had
written, nor indeed would have read much of it all once, if it had not
been we who had written it. She liked “bits” in most volumes of this
library, but not one spark of inspiration, not one crumb of the bread of
life, did she find in any of them.

On the other hand, I don’t think she ever found inspiration or reality
in any books, though she read a good deal. She was not a reader at all
in the sense that she ever sought for or found a new world in books. For
what she loved to the exclusion of everything else, apart from her
spiritual life, was human beings themselves, not imagined ones but real
ones, the silly, clever, stupid, talented, spirited, materialistic
people who made life so extraordinarily interesting. She adored knowing
about the oddities and normalities of real people, their frivolities and
splendours, their faiths and their blindnesses, their littlenesses and
their magnificences. These were her constant preoccupations: she wanted
to learn all about them, why they did this, and why, oh! exactly why,
they didn’t do that, and if they didn’t know, she could probably tell
them. . . . And out of these preoccupations sprang her passion which was
friendship, and on her friends she poured the gold of her nature, making
Danae of them all. But the better she loved, the more critical she
became: it was just because her friends were all the world to her, that
she longed for their perfecting, for the best of them. She sought God in
them no less than in her own devotions, and seeking, she always found,
and when she knocked at a heart, it was the best of her friend that
pulled itself together and answered the summons of her love, and so it
was, in the old stock phrase, that everyone felt the better for knowing
her.

There was her charm and her wit as well, but chiefly it was this
rummaging of hers in the ragbag of your mind, this picking out of
anything pleasant, this holding of it up to you, saying, “There! Isn’t
that nice of you?” which produced the sense of betterment. But this
delicious optimism did not inhibit her critical faculty. Whatever she
found that was nice could be made nicer yet: whatever was not nice she
passed by quickly, not looking. And the very fact that she did that made
you ask her to turn back again, and flash the light on to it, till like
a moth it fluttered out of its darkness towards this analytical,
critical, abounding love. . . . I linger on this aspect of her, because
it was that which made the spirit of Tremans, and pervaded the house
like the scent of the wood-smoke and the wall-flowers below the windows.
No one who ever came there escaped the fragrance of it in those Halcyon
days. And when the Halcyon days were done, that flame of hers became,
more wonderfully yet, the steady light above the storm of perilous seas
and the blinding drift.

It was in the late summer of 1906 that the little cloud arose from the
sea, which no one noticed at first but my mother. Maggie had been rather
over-weighted with work and the sultry weather, and was suffering from
some such little gloom as at times overshadow the most equable. My
mother assumed that it was earned and creditable fatigue which had
produced this, but on talking it over with Maggie, she found that she
was secretly and instinctively longing for the old relationship between
them, when my mother protected and she was a child and an invalid.
Maggie wanted, now when she flourished in health and vigour amazingly
restored, to go back to the old sheltered days. . . . Next morning, my
mother, puzzled, but not yet anxious, went in to see her as she
breakfasted in her own room, and found Maggie in the grip of some fierce
depression. She asked what was the matter, and Maggie said, “Oh, I am
killing it!” It was then that she knew that the first skirmish of a
mortal struggle had begun.

From that day, until the crash and the crisis came, when again my mother
swept all the mists aside, and rose to meet the will of God, I do not
think she passed a day when she was not ridden by the spectre of Fear.
In the world she had a face too gay to admit the suspicion of bravery,
but she was inwardly beleaguered and beset with presage and insecurity.
Just that one utterance that Maggie was “killing something,” soaked deep
into those undiscerned regions where the inmost self dwells, and day
after day she cried out, in her private diary, to be delivered from
Fear, always that. . . . There was as yet no justified reason for her
fear: Maggie came back to a serene and active level, but somehow, to the
prescience of my mother’s mind, the firm ground was quaking.

By Christmas, the little cloud was menacingly visible. After one talk
with my mother, in which Maggie spoke of a dread, a darkness, she told
nobody about this sense of interior tumult by which she would not permit
herself to be frightened, but the effort to preserve the stability of
courage became apparent. She would not allow herself to cower before the
approach of this stormy wind and tempest which was driving up: she
occupied herself with all that she had found so wholesomely absorbing in
the Halcyon days. She saw much of her friends, and with a superb
self-control finished her book, _The Venture of a Rational Faith_,
rewriting it for the second time, but bitterly she knew what she called
“these times of just holding on.” Sometimes the menace stood away from
her, but it threatened again not with the lightened pressure of a
condition that was on the mend, but with a deeper grip. She still set
her mind on all things external to herself, and with an eager hope of
recovering quietude and balance through change of scene she went down to
Cornwall for a month. With yearning hands she drew to herself, as a
cloak against the storm that now impended, the magic of the early
southern spring, clinging to the beauty of sea and land and the joyful
creatures of God, always adorable to her: “the colours of the foam and
the freshness, and the shells and the sand!” And she wrote of “this
Cornish garden with palms and citrons and fruiting bananas and
tree-ferns . . . and birds that come round and chide you, if you haven’t
brought cake,” or “the terraces where you can look down on the back of a
seagull, and see his yellow webbed feet paddling through the water.”
Desperately she clung to all wholesome and lovely things, for round her
the cloud thickened, and she acknowledged now the blackness of its
terror. She would still insist that there “was really nothing the matter
beyond strain and fatigue and general depression,” promising that she
_would_ be happy again, and blaming herself for this present eclipse.
But it was a hope she clung to, not a fact, a floating spar that drifted
away from the land into deep water.

Maggie drifted out, still holding this spar, on the dark tide, not yet
submerged, but knowing the depth of it, and its swiftness. She came to
see me in Oakley Street after she got back from Cornwall, and spoke of
terrible depression, quietly and serenely, as a brave woman would speak
of some mortal disease. “I wanted to see you again first,” she said, and
when she had gone, I began to wonder what “first” meant. Why had she
said “first”? . . . And then she went back to Tremans, and recorded in
some letter to me how well Beth was, and how sweet the place. There were
bantams and little cats, and her collie hysterically welcoming her, and
the pink cherry was a-bloom. My mother and Lucy, who had been away,
returned, and then suddenly everything got terrifyingly worse. She slept
ill, the world assumed to her an evil and phantasmal aspect, with the
spirits of dreadful beasts and demons lurking behind mask-faces of men
and women. One morning, my mother telegraphed for her old friend, Dr.
Ross Todd, to come as soon as he could. All that day Maggie was very
quiet and quite self-controlled, so that my mother had not sent for any
of her sons, thinking that perhaps she was disquieting herself in vain.
For Maggie still held on; she sat out in the garden shelter, she read,
she even made some little plans for the future. But as, resting in her
room before dinner, she talked to a friend, the imminence of what was
coming reached her, and she quoted:

                                 “But if I stoop
                   Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
                   It is but for a time.” . . .

And then the train that brought guests down from London in the evening
went by the bottom of the fields, and presently Dr. Ross Todd arrived,
and God knows what might otherwise have happened. He saw her at once,
and persuaded her to act normally, and dress for dinner and come down,
and he promised her to defend both her and others from herself. Before
dinner was over the crash came; violent homicidal mania took possession
of her.

At that moment, tragic and shattering beyond all contemplation, my
mother shook off all the fears that for the last six months had so
closely beset her. More than the worst possible of the imaginings she
had shuddered to picture to herself was there raging, but for her there
was neither shuddering nor fear any more, but she knelt to receive God’s
ordinance, and then stood firm and upright in the presence of His will.
While human effort of any sort might possibly avail, while prayer might
obtain the benefit which was now denied, she had watched and prayed that
the cup might pass from her beloved and from her. And now she took the
cup and drank of it in faith. All that then immediately happened was lit
by that burning flame of her acceptance. Next day in London I got a
letter from her saying, “We are in very deep waters”; she wanted us all
to come. We all met there, and found my mother perfectly tranquil and
without any sense of outrage. Her fears had at the worst pictured for
Maggie some melancholia, and in this infinitely greater tragedy, she was
infinitely great, and in the dark waters she saw the wonders of God in
the deep. All the firmness and stability had returned to the sands which
had so desperately quaked: she trod them now without sinking an inch
into them.

There was a private home for the insane not many miles off, at Burgess
Hill, and there, on the advice of Dr. Savage, Maggie was moved. A few
days afterwards, I went to see her there, and perceived what gulf of
stormy water lay between us. It was unbridgeable and unswimmable, and
she stood on the other side of it. It was still she, but you could not
reach her. She was there still, but so far off, even when hands were
clasped and, with a sudden clearing, momentary as the flashed signal of
her smile, she asked if I had come to take her home.

Soon the fierceness of that first seizure abated, and reports and
interviews were so favourable that we were encouraged to hope that in a
few months she would have recovered. She came much nearer: her distress
and confusion were no longer an impassable waste, but more like some
mist which surrounded her, dense sometimes, but at other times almost
completely clearing. One could realize that her condition was some
physical derangement, some imperfect functioning and no more, akin to
the want of control in thought which accompanies drowsiness. And then
she got much worse.

All this my mother bore without any shrinking of the spirit, and there
was more to come. My brother Arthur, already over-worked with his
unsparing demands on himself, and shocked and shaken with the calamity,
fell into miserable depressions. It was as if some outlying cloud from
the tempest which had engulfed Maggie had driven in through the wide
door of his distress and sympathy, and for two years weariness and
dismal misery lay thick about him. And all the time the flame of my
mother’s faith burned undimmed, and steadfastly she looked on the face
of Christ in praise and adoration. . . .


                               CHAPTER X

The yeast of Italy, implanted years before on a visit to Capri, had
begun to rise and bubble in me. It was not what you did in Italy, what
you ate and drank and heard and looked at and walked on or swam in, that
made Italy so adorable: all these were delectable because you did them
in Italy. And yet there were places in Italy, and those among the most
renowned, which were just themselves, and no more Italian than they were
Russian or Swedish. Venice was emphatically one of these, and though
every year now I spent several weeks with that dearest of friends,
Helen, Countess of Radnor, in her flat in the Palazzo da Mula, I counted
that not as being in Italy, but as being in Venice. Venice
geographically is in Italy, but that is accidental.

Venice has her own spell, one that cannot take effect until you have
ceased to be a tourist there. You must drown your Baedeker in the
Bacino, as Prospero (for opposite reasons) drowned his book, before it
can work, and instead of surging about in a gondola from church to
gallery, and gallery to church, you must learn to stroll slowly through
narrow _calli_ in order to soak. It is not forbidden to look at a
Tintoret, or to visit San Marco (indeed, I think the true Venetian goes
to San Marco every day), but you must sit down in front of the
particular picture you wish to see, and when you have seen it, you must
not behave like a tourist, and look at other pictures, but go away
again. Or, if you sit in San Marco, you must not look fixedly or
intelligently or with any desire to learn anything at reredos or mosaic
or marble column. You must sit and soak like a frog in a pool, gazing
batrachianly about you, and then, without registering any impression, go
forth and lose your way in the Merceria, forbearing, above all, to ask
where you are, or how you are to get home. Indeed, you had better not
get home, but, instead, ensconce yourself in some exiguous eating-house,
and call for a _frittura_ or a _risotto_, or even for _frutta di mare_
(to be eaten, but not to be examined too closely), and however badly you
talk Italian, and however well the waiter talks English, never permit
yourself to drop into your native tongue. If you want something for
which you do not know the Italian equivalent, make shift without it.

Then, heavy with food and the afternoon drowsiness, you may slink home,
skirting your way in strips of shadow, and avoiding short cuts across
open piazzas, and doze on your bed in a chamber darkened by drawn
_veneziani_, until the breeze begins to steal up from the sea across the
lagoon and drip in through the green slats of your shutters. The torrid,
windless heat of early afternoon will have passed in dusk and dozing,
and another day begins at tea-time. Often thus in the coolness of early
evening have I gone out with my hostess in her gondola across the
lagoon, and in the enchantment of sunset, Venice, clustering round the
central point of the great campanile in the Piazza, lay like an opal on
the edge of the waters, pale pink, pale yellow, pale blue, all clouded
lights and smouldering iridescence. Or, lingering later yet, we would
take with us a basket of cold viands, and tying up to some grey-headed
_palo_ that marked the channel, see the deep dusk gather, and watch the
fading of the western fires. The night comes on swiftly in these
southern latitudes, the flames expire, and palaces and quays and sea and
sky fade to the myriad qualities of grey below the starlight. Soon in
the town the lights spring up, and in the sky the light of a moon not
yet risen on the earth: the one oar clucks and gurgles in the water, and
coming near to the public gardens we hear the whirring of the cicalas
and the tinkling of guitars and the rapture of nightingales. Some
bell—in the month of May the bells of Venice are seldom silent—sounds
from church or campanile.

But Italy was calling, and, after three weeks in Venice, sometimes I
went across to the Ligurian coast to stay with Lord Stanmore in the
Castello at Paraggi. A mile on the hither side of Portofino, and on the
coast-road thither from Santa Margherita, a small headland juts out into
the bay, and there, behind the gateway and lofty wall which cuts off the
headland from the road, the sea-girt little castle, with cool, bare
rooms and vaulted ceilings, stands in a garden shaded by pines, beyond
the fringe of which the sunbathed shore of rock plunges sheer into the
sea. Though not so sharply hall-marked as Capri, this was authentic
Italy, with dusty stone-walled roads where the lizards basked, and the
terraced olives climbed the hill. Here, too, for me was born a new
friendship, lighting another hearth of home in Italy, for one afternoon
there came across the bay, in a red-sailed boat, the family from the
castello at Portofino, Montagu Yeats-Brown, late consul at Genoa, and
his wife, and their youngest son, Francis, home on leave from India; and
the tentacles of friendship instantly shot out from his side and from
mine. The art of scribbling was a passion with him, even as with me,
and, no less, the love of the sea and the swimming and the basking, and
presently we spent inseparable days among rocks and sea-caves, or
climbed, perspiring, through the woods of chestnut and laburnum to the
Portofino Kulm, and dropped down again to Santa Margherita, incessantly
constructing stories and planning the great work of his about regimental
life in India which would permit Rudyard Kipling to hand on the Oriental
Torch and take a rest. He had an admirable, natural style, and that love
of words, just for the sake of their inherent beauty, which marks off
the true professional writer from the vague amateur, and later, when in
the European war he was captured by the Turks in Mesopotamia, he wrote
far the most vivid study in the psychology of captive life that has ever
appeared.

Neither place nor persons can, singly, give the sense of home, though
persons make home more than places: there must be some subtle mixing of
the two before that atmosphere is created, but here was the mixing for
me, and, another summer, I settled down with him from May to August in
that enchanted castle of Portofino. It stands, crowning the
olive-planted cliff at the entrance to the harbour, looking down on one
side over the huddled little town, and on the other out across the bay
of Spezia. A wall of ancient fortification, enclosing the garden, tops
precipitous rocks, by the base of which the path from the sea winds
along an upward slope. Just hanging on to the seaward side above the
pines, it joins the steep cobbled way from the village close to the
entrance on the landward, and within are winding staircases in the
solidity of the walls, and stone-floored chambers of coolness which the
fierce heats of the summer cannot fever.

Many years before, Mr. Montagu Yeats-Brown had bought the place, then
ruinous and roofless, while yet there was no railway along the coast
from Genoa to Rome, and only a mule-track and the sea connected
Portofino with the world. For years he went on with repair and
reconstruction, and when it was habitable, he poured into it his
wonderful collections of Italian furniture and porcelain. He had the
curiosity and the omnivorous appetite of the true collector; a bronze
implement, a dinner service from the _fabrique_ of Sir William Hamilton
at Naples, a stone axe-head, an inlaid _cassone_, an altar triptych, an
obsolete centime-piece, were all irresistible to him. But chiefly he
loved china, and glorious was his miscellany which swamped shelves and
cupboards like a tide perpetually on the flow. He brought together, and
eventually presented to the museum in Genoa, the finest collection of
Savona jars ever made, and like all great collectors, he had occasional
strokes of the most stupendous luck, as when, in a small shop in Genoa,
he acquired for two _lire_ a genuine piece of Medici ware, than which
there is nothing rarer, except perhaps the pottery of St. Porchaire. His
interest never flagged, and he must have been close on eighty when it
struck him that no one had ever made a thorough study of china knife and
fork handles, and he proceeded triumphantly to do so.

The dining-room and the paved hall opened into the garden, perched like
an eyrie on the top of the cliff and surrounded with a low wall of old
fortification. At one angle was some sort of sentinel outpost, from
which, after dinner in the summer, you watched the alchemy of light in
the withdrawal of the day and the dawning dominion of the stars. Often
the sea was so calm that the reflection of a planet burned unwaveringly
there three hundred feet below, and far across the bay the lights of
Spezia were beaded along the horizon. The scent of stocks hovered in the
air, and, still though it was, there was always a whisper of stir in the
foliage of the stone-pine. And when this year the time came for my host
and hostess to go back in June to England, Francis and I stopped on for
a week, as originally intended, and after that for another week, and
then, in true Italian fashion, abandoned intention altogether.

Every morning there was the long ritual of swimming and basking, and in
the afternoon a rambling climb through the wooded hills, or if the wind
was awake, a scudding across the bay in the red-sailed boat, and if (as
usually happened) the wind then failed, long labours at the oar
punctuated the perennial discussion of our future masterpieces. And then
came dinner, begun in the afterglow and finished beneath the lights of
stars and fireflies, and afterwards the hours of serious work, in some
cool vaulted room, where, fatigued and exhilarated, we brought out the
quires of scribbling paper, and he embarked on Indian adventures and I
on the current history that engaged me. For two hours or three our agile
pens streamed with creation and erasure, and then the ink began to flow
less swiftly, and the cigarettes of rumination were multiplied. Then he
or I would say, “Can’t do any more to-night”; and after a swift
disrobement we prepared the hammocks in the garden for slumber. These
were slung to two stout branches of the stone-pine at the foot, and to
the limb of a sumac that grew in the middle of the garden at the head. A
rug below and a sheet above turned each hammock into a cool cocoon fit
for summer nights, and the fireflies danced in the shadow of the pine,
and the stars gleamed like minute golden flowers among the branches, and
perhaps we talked for a little, but longer pauses succeeded to shorter
questions, and we slid slowly into the dim regions of sleep. Sometimes
we tried to keep awake in order to prolong the consciousness of
exquisite environment, but part of the spell was the deepening of the
drowsiness: to enjoy consciously was to lose half its magic.

Nature and our own imprudence sometimes played tricks with those
tranquil nights; once in the small hours a thunderstorm stole up behind
us over the sea, holding its breath in order not to wake us, and when it
had got directly over our heads it exploded in a water-spout of rain and
vulgar Wagnerian violence: it was a drenched helter-skelter that we made
to the house. On another occasion we had only ourselves and rotten
timber to blame, for just as I was falling asleep, I heard a muffled
whisper from the foliage of the sumac at my head, and next moment the
limb from which both our hammocks depended broke off short, burying us,
like the Babes in the Wood, in an interment of leaves and branches. But
when we had extricated ourselves from the debris, we found other less
treacherous boughs, and thereafter the thunderstorms passed us by. And
as long as I live I shall bear in my inward heart of happiness that
nightly falling to sleep in the open, with the scent of stocks, and the
drowsy pulse of the sea below, and the stars burning in the boughs of
the stone-pine, and the black shadow of the castello lying across the
white, moonstruck garden, and the sense of a drowsy friend in the
hammock close by.

Another year, when Francis was in India, Venice was succeeded by a
couple of months in Capri, which, years before, after my visit of
alms-giving to Thessaly, had impressed its seal of home upon me. Now the
stamping was to be made more materially secure, for I shared a solid
anchorage with my friend, Mr. J. Ellingham Brooks, instead of floating
on mere hotels and hospitality. At that time he had a nook built on the
ancient wall of the town, with a tower in it, so that it came rightly by
its name, the Villa Mura. A discreet door gave access to one of the
cobbled ways, and within you found a little jungle of a garden that
faced the house, high walled and cool, so that neither the stress of
summer withered it nor would the winds of winter nip it. Fig-trees and
nespoli-trees grew there, and bamboos and gigantic mallows: it was a
forest in a yard. Apart from the tower, the house was a stone bungalow
of one story, and from bedroom or dining-room or sitting-room you
stepped out on to a minute paved terrace, and then plunged into the
paths that led through a jungle fifty feet square. Here, so it seemed,
was the sequestered corner of life which everyone at heart desires, and
together we made plans for our joint ownership of it. Brooks lived in
Capri all the year round, seldom setting foot on the mainland, and this
would now be his permanent home, for hitherto he had moved from house to
house in vagrant picnicking fashion, and I would spend the solid summer
here, with encroachments into spring and autumn. But then, luckily
before we made a fantastically cheap purchase, he had experience of a
winter in the house, and the garden became a mere miasma and
breeding-place of rheumatism, so that even his young fox-terriers limped
and stiffened, and from the north aspect on the other side, so
pleasantly refreshed by breezes in July, the _tramontana_ of December
beleaguered him with regiments of frozen bayonets, which stabbed to the
bone the shivering victims. It was well enough for me who would only be
there in the heat, but for him who had to face the winter there, it was
no abiding-place. No ray of sun came to it, and he crouched over the
fire with fingers too frozen to play his piano or transcribe his
wonderful translation of Heredia’s sonnets. So, during one more summer
there we looked out for a less arthritic habitation, into which we could
move before the agues of the autumn began. The subject was a pressing
preoccupation, and we were conversing about it one evening as we came
down into Capri, about the time of sunset, from the Tiberian palace on
the top of the cliff that faces the mainland.

We were passing along a stretch of level path to the right of which rose
a garden in three terraces, with a pine set in the middle and a pergola
of vines running out at right angles to the house, which, two-storied
and spacious, glowed in the liquid flame of the hour. A plumbago in full
bloom climbed the white-washed façade, a balcony looked westwards high
over the town below. Though I had caught glimpses of the house before
from the more frequented path up the hill, they had been but glimpses,
and I had never seen it from this aspect, with its garden and pergola,
and air of space and sun. But now it struck me that it was here and in
no other house that we were to settle, and I asked Brooks for a précis
concerning it. He knew it: it was a boarding-house kept by an English
widow, and there was about as much chance of our getting it as of
securing the moon, for in her capable hands it flourished with the same
prosperity as did the garden under the ministrations of her brother, who
boarded permanently here. It was no use, he told me, thinking about it
at all, but my obstinate mind remained fixed in its quiet belief that
Brooks and I were to live in the Villa Cercola. Sure enough, when I was
in England again in the autumn, there came a letter from him, saying
that this lady was giving up the house and would I telegraph if I wished
to take a lease of it with him, for there were others desirous of it? In
what suspense did I wait for the answer to my affirmative, and when it
arrived, the lease of the Villa Cercola was ours with option to
purchase.

                 *        *        *        *        *

The years went by since, in 1907, the shadow had fallen over my sister’s
mind, and it had not passed away. A long and very critical period, in
which none of us could see her at all, was over, but she had made no
firm step towards complete recovery. Hugh and I, for some time, were the
only people from outside who saw her at all, for a new and
heart-breaking delusion had possession of her, that it was by plots and
contrivances of my mother that she was prevented from going home. My
mother, therefore, was advised not to see her at all while this was
acute, for sometimes Maggie would not speak to her, and at other times
was bitter and biting, and such interviews, so far from doing good, were
very bad for both of them. My mother used to come back from them,
yearningly and miserably unhappy, but still firmly clinging to the fact
that it was just a bodily ailment, physical as a cold in the head, that
caused Maggie’s bitter ironies, and no shaft of them ever broke through
that impregnable defence which love held. Her visits, however, ceased
for a long period, but she constantly wrote to Maggie, with the news of
Tremans, and just the assurance, serene and unshaken, that Maggie was
under a mistake altogether about her, and that all the love and welcome
in the world awaited her when she was better and allowed to come home.
My mother always kept this before her, not insisting or pressing on it,
but just quietly alluding to it, and though Maggie would often show me
these notes, saying that they were all lies, yet she kept them all,
every one, and sometimes when she answered them, with anger and
flaunting sarcasm, she would say at the end, writing it very small, as
if in whisper, “I wish I could wake up and find myself at home again,”
and those little, tiny words, hardly legible, meant everything to my
mother, and all the rest was a troubled dream, as Maggie, somewhere
within herself, knew: assuredly she would awake. . . .

I saw her at least every week when I was in London: usually I went down
to Roehampton where she now was, and spent the afternoon with her,
strolling about the big garden, and coming back to tea in her room. The
cloud of depression and delusion was always over her, but, either
because I had got to understand the physical nature of it better, or
because she was tending towards recovery, there was no longer the sense
of her being far away and out of eye-shot and hearing: sometimes she was
so close. . . . Her mind, one began to see, was there all the time,
liquid and clear: it was only on the surface of it that this grey ice of
delusion was spread, and in herself she seemed often to know that the
trouble was not real. Her memory was absolutely unimpaired, and by the
hour we talked over detail after detail of the days when as children we
made joint collections of plants and butterflies and birds’ eggs. Always
after a visit I received next day a letter recalling other memories past
which our talk had slipped, the finding of the night-jar’s nest, the
capture of the first “Clouded Yellow”; always, too, she would ask me if
there wasn’t any little thing that I wanted, and if I was unable to tell
her of anything, she would think of something that our conversation had
suggested to her. One day, for instance, mention had been made of the
old poem, “Summer is i-cumen in,” and by next week she had procured a
little monograph about it with the tune to which it had been antiquely
set: or, if she noticed I consumed chocolates with gusto at tea, there
was a box of them for me to take away. She was sad always, sometimes
vaguely blaming herself for all the trouble that had burst upon her:
once only was she cross and disagreeable, and the next morning I
received a note from her saying, “I can’t think what made me say all
those horrid things. I am afraid you won’t come to see me again. . . .”
Then it became possible for her to drive up to London with her nurse,
and she often spent a couple of hours at my house in Oakley Street, or
met Arthur or Hugh and went out with them. But always, when the time
came for her to go back, there was the question, wistful but not
insisted on, “Can’t you take me home?”

Over Tremans there fell another shadow, but clear and tranquil, without
sadness. The beloved Beth, who had come as nursery-maid to my
grandmother at the age of fifteen, years before my mother was born, and
who had brought up the families of two generations, began to fail. She
was now over ninety, and for nearer eighty than seventy years had
performed her ministries of love, and none could remember a time when
Beth was not piece and portion of home, and all that home had ever meant
to any of us. She stepped about the house no longer to find linen that
needed her darning needle, and from her bed she only moved on to her
sofa and back again. She still liked my mother to read to her, but it
was not now for the sake of the book, but for her presence and her
voice. Beth would soon drop off into a doze, and at the cessation of the
reading woke again, beaming all over her beautiful old face at the
knowledge that my mother was with her. She had a nurse to look after her
who for longer than the normal span of life had been nurse herself, but
when any of her “young gentlemen,” Master Arthur or Master Fred or
Master Hugh (we none of us ever became “Mr.” to Beth), was down at
Tremans and came up to her room, as indeed they very regularly did, how
quickly had Beth’s nurse to leave her, so that she might have a talk to
her young gentlemen alone. Another of Beth’s young gentlemen paid her a
visit now, and he was “Master Arthur” too, in spite of his grey beard
and his more than seventy years, for this was Arthur Sidgwick, my
mother’s brother, whose birth Beth could remember. As he rose to go he
kissed Beth, and then she was alert at once, and time rolled back the
pages of more than seventy years, and he was a little baby again as she
took his hand and kissed it. “Eh, and I’ve kissed your feet as well,
Master Arthur,” she said.

There Beth lay, serene on that high peak of life, and all the past was
of one dim and sunny texture. For a little while she would be very
wide-awake when her young gentlemen came to see her, and she talked of
what “your papa” and “your mamma” had done and of a journey—she could
not remember where—“when you were there, Master Fred, and Miss Maggie,
but Master Hugh wasn’t born.”

“Was that the journey to Whitby?” I asked.

“Yes, dear, that’s it, Whitby! And you were two years old and Miss
Maggie was just turned four.”

“I saw Maggie last week,” said I. “She sent her love to you.”

Beth’s face beamed, and got troubled, and then beamed again. I think she
knew only vaguely that something had gone wrong, and that Miss Maggie
could not come in to see her. But she had sent her love.

Then Beth could not get to the sofa any more, and when next I was at
Tremans, she had been in bed for a month. There was no more talk about
Whitby and Wellington: she lay passive in the veiled sunlight which
bathed her face, and whether that sunlight was of dim, happy memories as
she looked back, or came from what lay in front of her, you could not
tell. She had had some sort of stroke, which for a time disabled one
side, but even as she lay sinking quietly away, power came back to her
numbness. She suffered very little, and for six months more lay placid
and content, though scarcely conscious, in the room plastered with
pictures of her children of two generations. All her life she had given
love, and all her life she had received it: there was never so blest and
joyful a sojourning in the world which had never been a vale of woe to
her: she would have scorned such a notion. She had followed one
instinct, and that was devotion to her children; and knew one law, and
that was love. And then, rather suddenly, one night came the final
failure of her force, and the last face she saw and smiled at in the
candle-light was my mother’s, whom, seventy years ago, she had first
taken in her arms. There was my mother by her now, not in Beth’s arms,
but Beth was in hers, and just as Beth had leaned over her, listening to
her first breaths, so now my mother listened to those quiet, final
respirations. There was no struggle at all, nor wrestling with an enemy.
Beth missed a breath and clung a little closer to my mother’s arm, and
then she turned her face towards the beloved of her heart, and
died. . . . And so I said that this shadow over Tremans was without
sadness, for we all gloried in her serene passage. Out of the house
which she had blest with her love she was triumphantly borne, and she
lies now, the little that was mortal of her, in the churchyard at
Horsted-Keynes, Elizabeth Cooper, aged ninety-two, and of a spirit quite
ageless. We were all there but Maggie, and we talked of Beth as of one
who had just gone round a corner on some new adventure.

Hugh, in those four years which intervened between Maggie’s leaving
Tremans and Beth’s death in 1911, had entered on the final and busiest
and by far the happiest period of his life. He had, within a year of his
joining the Church of Rome, become a priest, and had gone to Cambridge,
where he lived in Llandaff House with Monsignor Barnes, who had charge
of the Roman Catholic undergraduates at the University. After a year
there, he became curate at the Catholic Church, and lived for three
years in the Rectory. But parochial work did not suit him, nor did
Cambridge. For him a cold academic frost enveloped it, which for one of
his temperament was far from surprising. In fact the only two things he
liked about it were the river-bathing in the summer and, all the year
round, his companionship with Arthur, with whom he struck up a new and
extremely warm friendship. He was now rapidly becoming a notable
preacher: he was also pouring out first historical and then modern
novels with the furious haste that distinguished other members of his
family. Novel writing was undoubtedly his passion, but with the work of
a parish to do as well, for which he felt himself quite unsuited, he
longed to get away from Cambridge, and order his life on a plan that had
become his aim and ideal, and this was to live in a house of his own in
the country and entirely to devote himself to preaching and writing. He
wanted this with that particular kind of wanting which leads always to
fulfilment, and his almost terrifying fecundity in authorship during
these years was due (apart from the joy it gave him) to his desire to
have enough money to live on, in case of some disaster happening to his
power of earning a good income by his pen. With this end steadfast in
the foreground of his thoughts, he saved every penny he could, rejoicing
in the fact that he had not had a new suit of clothes for five years,
and he made up for his one indulgence of incessant smoking, by buying
the cheapest cigarettes that could be procured. And, indeed, to look at
Hugh about that time was to wonder whether his clothes could be only
five years old: greenish were they and of a reflecting surface, and his
boots were such as you may pick up on the seashore, sticking out of the
jetsam of the waves among seaweed and skates’ eggs. But Hugh did not
mind that, and, after all, he was the person principally concerned.
Frayed cassock and bare buttons, if persevered in, brought him nearer to
the realization of his dream: his books sold well, and increasingly
better, and he began to shape the details of the delectable life. He
made elaborate plans of the chapel he would build in the house of his
dreams, and drew out his rule for the day, with the specified hours for
meditation and worship and exercise and work. It was all in accordance
with what he utterly believed to be, spiritually, the best mode of life
that he could follow, and—here was the carnal joy of it—it was the
sort of life which he preferred to any other.

Then one evening Arthur told him of a house he had seen for sale near
Buntingford, in the course of a motor-drive from Cambridge, and took him
over next day to see it. After a tragic moment of despair, in which Hugh
bitterly lamented that he had ever set eyes on it, since it was exactly
that and no other that he longed for, but would not possibly be able to
afford, he found that he did afford it. It remained for him to get
permission to drop parochial work altogether and devote himself to
preaching and writing, and his hierarchs very wisely decided that it was
the best thing he could do.

And thus, in the summer of 1908, when he settled into Hare Street House,
Buntingford, the happiest and busiest period of his life began. He was
at the height of his physical and mental powers, for, without very
robust health, he had an amazing supply of nervous force, which
propelled him along through seas of bodily and intellectual voyaging
without any grating on shallows or grounding on shoals. In temperament
he closely resembled in many ways R. L. Stevenson, for both alike were
in absorbed and deadly earnest about their businesses, and at the same
time treated life like some game of delightful adventure, playing with
it even while they were so tremendously serious about it. If I had to
put a short speech into Hugh’s mouth which would just then best express
him, it would be, “Oh, isn’t it fun?” The actual writing of his books,
the setting down of the words which had so much purpose behind them, was
such fun, such glorious fun, and each book in turn, as it emerged from
his pen, was, he loudly proclaimed, the best he had ever done: never was
there such a book. If he was at Tremans, he would come hurrying and
stammering into my mother’s room with the new chapter crisply hot from
the oven of his invention: “Mamma, I must read you this,” he said. “It’s
g-g-gorgeous. May I have a cigarette here?” And (crowning convenience),
though he intensely liked his critic’s appreciation, he did not care at
all if she found fault, for a poor benighted Protestant couldn’t be
expected to understand.

The moment a book was finished Hugh never gave another thought to it,
for he was already busy at the loom of some other tale which would
eclipse everything else. It was all such fun, and so deadly serious. The
invariable idea and root-object in them all was to show the dealings of
God with the men and women in the world He had created, through the
Church which He had ordained; that was serious enough, but it was such a
lark to do it, and to receive substantial sums of money as the result of
hours which he could not possibly have enjoyed so much in any other
pursuit. The same keen zest went to the making of his sermons: he set
forth the glory of God, and he immensely enjoyed doing so.

But though the zest and fury of conviction inspired both book and
sermon, the merits of the one cannot be compared to the merits of the
other; in fact, what made the one marred the other. When Hugh preached,
the flood of his thoughts carried you off your feet and swept you along
with it; you could not stop and criticize, because you were for ever in
the rapids, in the grip of his gesture and his eloquence, which were
frankly irresistible, and there his genius lay. But it was a different
matter with the written and printed word, where the reader could go his
own pace and not Hugh’s. The inspiration was there (it was, indeed,
exactly the same inspiration as illumined his sermons), but here it had
hurried him along, while the reader, so to speak, was safely anchored to
the bank, and could watch Hugh’s headlong course, instead of being
involved in it. In his own enthusiasm, and in his knowledge of what he
wanted to convey, he was apt to make a sketch rather than a finished
picture, leaving the reader to fill it in. And that is precisely what
the novelist must not do: a novel is not impressionist (at least, it
should not be) in the way that emotional speech is. The file and the
polisher and the careful brush-work, which often, so far from helping
the spoken word, only hinder it with the chill of academic finish, are
absolutely necessary when the appeal is made, via print, to the
leisurely eye. The setting, the characterization, above all, his
treatment of human love, were often shadowy: all was a little misty till
he came to the central scene, which was the salvation of a soul.

It is in the portrayal of human love, the heart’s need of one individual
for another individual, that there is the sense of something gravely
wanting in his novels, and the reason for that is that Hugh never felt
that need himself. In his sermons he went straight to the marrow and the
pith, namely the human thirst for the love of God, and God’s thirst for
the love of man. Hugh knew that, he felt that, but he did not know the
need of human beings for each other. His charm, his vitality, often
strongly attracted others, but no one ever really took possession of his
heart. He fully recognized this himself, and admitted that he had never
entered into intimacy with anyone. He was always quite independent of
other people, men and women alike (especially women), except as
companions and playfellows. He was not in the least unsociable, but he
never wanted anyone with the sense of thirst. If a friend was there, he
greatly enjoyed his presence, and played croquet with him, but any
friend would do, and if that friend went away, he did not miss him, but
got another. And he thought of women precisely as he thought of men, but
less so: sex, as a bewildering disquietude, never had any existence for
him. Emotionally women meant nothing to him, nor, for that matter, did
men. Of all women, the one he most enjoyed being with was my mother, and
of all men, Arthur. It was not that the love of God so transcended in
him all other emotion, that he had nothing fiery to give to his own
kind, for he had always been like that. It was not either that he was an
egoist, for egoists often love passionately for the sake of their own
self-expression, and neither in that sense, nor in any other, was Hugh
egoistic. It was pursuits of some sort that encompassed and enthralled
him: he was both in boyhood and manhood always doing something with such
fervour (and usually many things together), that he had no energy left
for consciously being something, either lover or friend, still less
enemy: for he never felt enmity towards others, and the enmity of others
towards himself he did not so much despise as disregard to the verge of
ignorance. The mere adventure of life, the fun of it, and the ultimate
meaning of it, were his satisfying daily bread. His lack of strong human
affection did not limit his capacity for compassion, and he had a
limitless courtesy for the tiresome, while the one quality he loathed
like the devil was any form of conscious cruelty. But he was always more
tender to the helpless than to the efficient, and to animals than to
people. He could not bear hurting a cat’s feelings, because the cat
could not respond by hurting his.

He brought his whole power of enjoyment to the exciting business of
acquiring and possessing this house and garden, for never before had
there been a row of bricks or a square yard of soil that was his own.
Now this most amiable dwelling, Georgian-fronted but Caroline within,
and going back to the Tudor period, was his, and so, too, the spacious
garden, and when he was not writing or engaged in his priestly offices,
he was decorating or digging as if his whole energies were involved in
panel or potato-patch. He saw in Hare Street House, for the years to
come, his home and the resting-place of his old age, where, when the
blood beat slower and the sinews were loosed, he figured himself quietly
serene, waiting for the final call. Old age never came to him, and, for
the present, anything less resembling rest or quiet, or the life of a
contemplative or solitary, cannot be imagined. For he was never alone
here: there was always somebody either living with him or staying with
him; and though certainly a “rule” existed which prescribed the set
employment of the hours for mass and meditation, for correspondence and
writing, it was, though serious, still part of a fascinating game.
Silence, for instance, was to be observed from the hour of rising until
noon, but the sporting side of this was that Hugh need not talk at
breakfast, which he always disliked. He, like most highly-strung people,
felt little inclined for cheerful sociability early in the day, and the
rule made it incumbent on him to follow his natural inclination. So he
opened his letters at breakfast, but if there was anything amusing or
interesting contained in them, he did not fail to communicate it.

His leisure was wholly devoted to the embellishment and cultivation of
his house and garden, and when he was in residence at Hare Street, he
hardly ever went outside his front-gate. The first and prime provision
was a chapel, and an old brew-house, which stood close behind the house,
was converted to this purpose. He and Mr. Pippit, an artist friend who
lived with him for a considerable time, constructed a rood-screen, and
distempered the plaster between the beams of the walls: they carved on
the beams the symbols of God’s glory and His sacrifice, they painted the
windows, they sewed the hangings, and Hugh, in some letter, describes
with peculiar gusto the carving of the bracket on which stood the statue
of the Blessed Virgin. Her foot was on the serpent’s head, and beneath
her writhed heresies with closed eyes and open mouths (because they will
not see the truth, but proclaim falsehood), and devils with the heads of
brutes. And on festival days Our Lady wore a fine robe, and round her
neck was a chain of jewels, which lengthened as Hugh acquired fresh
moonstones and topazes. Reverence and religion were the true root of his
labours, but what fun was the execution!

Then, still within doors, came domestic decoration. A border of appliqué
work was fashioned to run round the walls of the oak-parlour where he
wrote, representing the Quest and Attainment of the Grail, and round the
walls of one of the bedrooms, which Hugh gleefully proclaimed should be
reserved for Anglican clergymen, a perfectly ghastly tapestry
representing the Dance of Death, horrible enough to steep the hapless
occupant of this chamber in squealing nightmare. The great folios of the
early Fathers, which twelve years ago my mother had taken from my
father’s library at Lambeth, and which, still augustly unopened, had
followed the various moves of the family, were now carried off by Hugh
from Tremans, as forming part of a suitable library for a priest, and
were duly installed on shelves, and never taken from their places any
more. Arras and panelling decorated the dining-room, and Hugh openly
exulted that never a stitch had been put in all these hangings and
tapestries by a woman’s needle.

Out of doors in the garden there was no less scope for creation, for
everything was neglected and overgrown and weed-ridden, and whoever was
living with Hugh at the time must be ready to drop the needle or the
chisel and cart gravel for the paths and dig the potato-bed. After the
practical call of the vegetable garden, there were flowers to be
cultivated, and a flagged terrace to be laid round two sides of the
house. For other conveniences he had to employ professional artificers,
who erected an engine that pumped water and produced electric light, and
installed a central-heating apparatus. I was down at Hare Street the day
after this last machine had been completed, and though it was tepid and
muggy weather, Hugh had to turn on the full heat in every room, and our
heads buzzed and our pulses grew quick and small. “Oh, isn’t it lovely?”
said Hugh, mopping his face.

At all these tasks he worked harder than anybody, and under the spell of
his energy and enjoyment his guests toiled in his wake with blistered
hands and scraped fingers, and the house and garden were filled with
quaintnesses and delight. He had that wonderful sense of fitness which
is called “taste” and gives charm to its manifestations: even the Dance
of Death was charming, as fitly ministering to the uneasiness of
Anglican clergymen. Never did he get used to Hare Street: up to the last
day that he was there, it was to him a conscious exhilaration. But only
rarely could he spend as much as a solid week there, for there was
hardly a Sunday in the year when he was not preaching, or a span of
week-days on which he was not lecturing, and thus his home was always
new to him, a wonderful holiday-house, a house of dreams. There were
often long absences from it: three times in the six years of his
occupation he went on a lecturing tour to America, and three times he
preached the Lenten sermons at San Silvestro in Rome. But in all
available intervals he fled, like a homing-pigeon, to Hare Street, and
there, amid other inconceivable activities, he poured out a stream of
propagandist fiction.

And it all seemed to suit him so admirably: it is true that he was often
very tired, but in early middle age it is right and proper to be tired
before bedtime, if you have exercised a reasonable activity. After all,
everybody has to go his own pace, and Hugh could no more have gone slow
and avoided fatigue than he could have taken to an invalid life
altogether. It was necessary for him (otherwise he would have been quite
a different person) to fill every minute of the day with some mental or
spiritual or physical exertion: he could not be different. Even his
ailments had to be put in the stock-pot for future use, and when in 1913
he had to undergo an operation, he stored up his experiences, the waking
on that morning, the pilgrimage to the operating-room, the linen cloth
over the surgical instruments, with minute observation, and reproduced
them all in a book he wrote immediately afterwards, dwelling with
literary gusto on passages which at the time he had hated and feared.

But though this operation, in itself of a minor character, gave him
complete relief from his malady, he was never quite the same again after
it. Probably he was living already on the stretched circumference of his
nervous vitality, and there was no reserve left on which to draw. He
could not take a holiday, for he hated holidays, which, he said, always
made him feel self-conscious, and as soon as he was discharged, he went
driving on again, abating no whit of his activities: he never relaxed
the bow, though the bowstring was deeply frayed. And when, less than two
years afterwards, there came a sudden and unexpected call on his vital
forces, there was no response: the frayed string snapped.


                               CHAPTER XI

The family must certainly have been very trying to my mother during this
year 1913, for, after a few months in India, which was a nightmare of
increasing ill-health, I followed Hugh to the operating-table in May,
and was severely but successfully dealt with. But these things passed:
what did not pass was the cloud of confusion and depression which still
hung round Maggie, and her bitterness and hostility. It was this, most
of all, that began to tell on my mother: it was a background of darkness
and of yearning, and though she still threw herself into the microcosm
of village politics, and enjoyed with unbated relish the weeks she spent
at Lambeth, not only did the minor maladjustments of life begin to fret
her more than they had hitherto done, but its entertainments and
pleasures to tire her. The limitations of age, for she was now over
seventy, began to press more hardly, and though her spirit made light of
them, for they were still but flimsy veils before the glow of it, they
vexed the flesh. All her life talk and discussion had been in the very
forefront of her joys, and now a growing deafness, never really serious,
cut her off a little from the speed and precision which necessarily
accompany talk.

She hated missing anything, and at the same time could not put up with
the notion that people were raising their voices in order to bring her
into full and accurate possession of what was going on. Though no one
ever grew old with such skill and sweetness as she, it was a fact that
she was doing so, and she found it a drag on the mental vitality which
never to the end abated one atom of its eager elasticity. She wanted to
see friends, to talk to them, to learn exactly and precisely all they
had been doing and thinking, and how and why, to put them through the
catechism of love just as minutely as ever, but the instruments of
communication were beginning to grow a little dull, and she so much
wanted to be bright and sensitive. She felt and deplored the inevitable
limitations, even while her real mind recognized them as trumpery and in
no way premature: she secretly dreaded disablements that never actually
even threatened her. . . .

But of all this at the time, so bravely did she keep her colours flying,
one saw hardly a glimpse, and it was only from subsequently reading the
diary in which she recorded trivial events and happenings that I learned
how constantly these limitations, which never became serious, irked her.
The lid was firmly shut on them in her intercourse with any of us,
except when she humorously alluded to herself as a tottering tortoise,
and it was impossible at the time to imagine that she was finding that
the wheels “drave heavily.” She chose to consider these difficulties as
trivial and despicable, and she concealed them with such success that we
thought there was nothing being concealed, for on our flying but
frequent visits to Tremans no jot of her vivid interest in our days and
doings was abated. Whether one ought to have guessed that she was not as
keen and confident as she appeared to be, I do not know, but most
emphatically I am delighted that I did not. For she most clearly meant
her private woes to be concealed from us: it was not her wish that they
should have any footing in her life. Even if I had guessed, I should
have been obliged to conceal my knowledge, for the reason that she put
on the gallant face, and behaved as if they were not there. It was her
wish that we should not guess: she did not choose to ask sympathy or
comprehension in their regard.

She knew us all well enough to be aware how we should have leaped to her
had she given the faintest wave of a signal, but she wanted to be
without woes in her dealings with us. These were things she meant to put
away from her: she did not want sympathy with such rubbish. She
preferred—and it was up to her—to be gay and keen, eager for talk,
ready to laugh, to play bezique in the evening, as if nothing else
mattered, and go reluctantly and brilliantly to bed. Then, safely
private, she would confide to her diary how dreadfully she felt her loss
of activity, her deafness, her “stupidity,” and a mental disposition to
criticize rather than enjoy. She talked to her diary, I think, somewhat
as she might talk to her vicious green parrot, saying that she was a
very dull old woman (“Aren’t I, Joey?”). It was a sort of
middle-distance talk; in the great shining background there was love,
love of man and love of God, and all things that were holy and real to
her, in the foreground the host of bright, pleasant details of which
daily life consisted. Only, in the middle distance, was this muddy,
sluggish stream winding wearily along. It bore the burden of increasing
years, the unloosing of eager hands because the joints were stiff, and,
more than all, the sense of the loss of enjoyment which, she was afraid,
was curdling into a more critical tendency. But to us no signs of that
appeared: she was just as deliciously greedy for news of our thoughts
and scribblings, and she rejected in her life what she confided to her
diary. It was a safety-valve, a blowing off of what might have condensed
into discontent. “Get it down and have done with it,” she once wrote,
and when she had got it down, just for her own relief, she was ashamed
of it. “But I won’t go on like this,” she hastened to add, “I WON’T,
WON’T.” . . .

Her growing love of the country also, of its peace and greenness and
greyness, supplied a compensation to her fading delight in continual
stir and movement. Neither in youth nor in middle life had she ever
cared for it: she had inclined to Dr. Johnson’s heresy that one green
field was like another green field, and vastly preferred a walk down
Fleet Street, where she would be in the jostling stream of men and women
who lived and moved and had their beings and their businesses. But now,
like Walt Whitman, she “had business with the grass”: flowers and trees
and sedentary nature, so to speak, engaged her far more than ever
before. Fascinating though people were, strangers and passers-by as well
as friends, the stir of them and the prolonged intercourse with them
fatigued her, and this fatigue she was learning to refresh and dissipate
with the things that required no effort beyond contemplation. This
changed and quickened interest is most marked in her diaries; again and
again she now alludes to the beauty of the woods and lanes she walked
in, whereas before they would have been an unheeded gymnasium for
exercise and conversation: her companion would have absorbed her to the
complete exclusion of her surroundings. It was not that she took any
dimmer delight in people, for human intercourse always, up to the end,
remained to her the supreme vehicle of mental activity, but she got more
easily tired.

And always there was a want in her soul and a great yearning, for
sundered by so few miles, but by such a sea of disordered delusion, was
Maggie, still hostile. Her condition had improved sufficiently to allow
of her being removed from Roehampton, and placed with fewer
restrictions, under the care of a doctor at Wimbledon, but there could
be no thought yet of her coming back to Tremans, where she longed to be,
and where my mother longed for her to be. Once, for a short period, that
hostility seemed waning, and there was an idea of turning a certain
piece of the house into a flat, where she could be with her nurse. But
the improvement faded again, and the doctors forbade the attempt.

But Maggie came back to Tremans once yet. The days passed for her now
sadly, but very quietly, and, though still certified, she had much more
liberty. And one day, when she was resting as usual in the afternoon,
she got up, and, dressing herself to go out, left the house, and before
her absence was noticed had slipped down the hill to the station of the
district railway and taken the train for Victoria. From there she
started again, remembering the change at East Grinstead, and, under the
spell of this irresistible homing instinct, arrived at Horsted-Keynes,
and set forth to traverse on foot the two miles and the steep hills
which lay between her and Tremans. For years past she would not normally
have been capable of such exertion, but now, in some exaltation of
freedom and home-coming, the dusk and the distance did not hinder her,
and she came down the avenue of pines, and out again by the
farm-buildings and the orchard and the Egyptian lion-head, which she had
dug up in the temple of Mut, and so to the door. On that summer evening
it was open, and there was an old servant of my mother’s passing between
the kitchen and the hall. “I have come home, Mary,” she said quietly,
and went on into the house. . . .

Several hours before a telegram, agonizing to my mother, had arrived,
saying that Maggie was missing and suggesting that she might have made
an attempt to get home: meantime the search for her was going on. She
was at home now, serene and composed, having accomplished what in normal
health she was incapable of under this strong yearning and desire that
admitted no obstacle. She spent the night quite quietly, and next
morning, with my mother in attendance, went round the house, penetrating
to every room, remembering all that was there, and pleased to find that
her own room was unaltered. The doctor in whose care she was at
Wimbledon had arrived late the night before, and she was now quite
willing to go back with him, and seemed to know that she could not
remain here. But she had had her will, and she was content, and went
away again in some satisfied sort of triumph. She had seen it all once
more, the shelter and the orchard, and the lion’s head, and her own
room, and after that clear gleam of sunshine, the clouds gathered again.
But she had _got_ to see Tremans again, and now she had seen it.

Then came the summer of 1914, with the ten days of suspense as the great
catastrophe grew no less incredible as it became inevitable, and,
finally, the huge relief—no less—to know that England was at war. For
already, across the tense and bitter years which followed, it is liable
to be forgotten that the one thing, in those days, which seemed more
terrible than a European war, was that England should stand aside and
not be involved in it. France and Russia, our allies, were already in
the maelstrom: at present we were on the bank.

On that momentous afternoon I was at a big party down in Essex: and
there came for our host a telegram from the secretary of a large and
well-informed London club. The Prime Minister’s speech to the House of
Commons was, at the moment that telegram was sent off, still in
progress, and what reached us was the first part of it, in which he
stated that our treaty obligations to France did not necessarily imply
our embroilment. And there the message stopped.

The effect of that was that the whole party melted away: nobody could
stand any more “party.” But two hours later came the rest of the speech.
An ultimatum had been sent to Germany which expired at midnight.

I had been fortunate enough to find a job of war-work which would occupy
me and perhaps be of some little use, and went to Tremans for a few days
before settling down to it. It seemed impossible to realize that a
European war, the greatest conceivable disaster that the mind had ever
idly pictured, was then actually in progress. Of course, one knew it to
be true, but with the same cold, unemotional knowledge as one knew it to
be true that the brightness of a star-lit night was derived from suns
fabulously remote: the mind had received information which it did not
doubt, but the immensity of it baffled its power of assimilation. It was
not that the fact produced any stunning effect, but that a thing so
prodigious was insoluble at first by the acids of mental digestion.

Up in London it was patent, it was hammered into you till you believed
it, but in these first days of August-tranquillity in the remote
country, it was impossible continuously or convincedly to realize that
the great cataclysm had arrived. There was certain evidence on the point
in the daily papers, but they only arrived once a day, and for all the
rest of the hours, the fragrance of dewy mornings, the chequered
sunlight and shade of noon, the serenity of the clear twilight, all
seemed to contradict that evidence, and made it impossible to establish
in the mind that guns were already reaping a harvest other than that
which now stood ripe on the golden Sussex weald. And even the news in
the papers, which was all that the country-dweller had to go by,
exhibited an optimism of which at first no one grasped the fatuity, for
there seemed to be a hundred reasons for supposing that, bitter and
bloody though the autumn might be, everything would be over by
Christmas. Lord Kitchener, in whom the nation’s confidence was rooted,
was believed to have said that we were in for a three years’ war, and,
so ran the impression, he was quite right to lay his plans for an
inconceivable contingency. But I imagine not one person in ten thought
that he believed anything so utterly unimaginable. He wanted (and used
bogey and turnip-ghost to get) an army of a million men not over thirty
years of age. It was, of course, a ludicrous number, but naturally he
desired to have plenty of margin. Then there were Liége, Namur, Antwerp,
all guaranteed to be impregnable fortresses, which no enemy could leave
untaken in his rear. There was the English fleet, which, blockading
German ports, would speedily starve the Central Empires into submission,
and, above all, there were the unnumbered hosts of Russia, which, if
Germany attempted to drive back the Allied line on the Western front,
would make an unchecked advance on Berlin. Russia, the relentless
steam-roller (such was the universal phrase), was already on the move,
and such armies as Germany could spare from the mere holding of the
French front, could be no more than a crushed pebble on her road. . . .
Then, later, when Liége and Namur the impregnable fell to the remote
coughings of the huge German guns, and the tide of the German armies
swept westwards as over level sands, the optimistic experts of the press
grew more gleeful yet. Every day now, they whispered, the German lines
of communication were lengthening: soon, as by a scissor-snip, they
would be severed, and the great full flower-head of German armies would
drop to the ground. Then came the magnificent rumour that Russian
armies, the waste surplus of those who were steadily marching on Berlin,
and for whom there was no room for deployment on the Eastern front, had
been passing, in incredible numbers, through England to reinforce the
West. Army corps of Russians were daily disembarking at Havre, at
Dieppe, at Boulogne, and if you didn’t believe it, you would soon
see. . . . But behind these optimisms, behind the serenities and
securities of the country-side, there was the sense of nightmare, not
yet quite real. Only, as one began to awake, one realized that it was
not of sleep that the nightmare was born, but of day and of reality.

In such sort of ignorance and miscomprehension did the country-dweller
wallow during those early days of the war, when, sundered from all
information except rumour and press-news hardly more reliable, Hugh and
I were together at Tremans for the last time. He had already volunteered
his services as chaplain, a prospect which he detested, but did not in
the least shrink from, the less so, because he was inclined to look on
the war as Armageddon, the mystic and final and futile stand of Satan
against the heavenly hosts, which should be fought out, according to the
Book of Revelation, on this planet. There were stories, too, of Angels
seen at Mons. “It’s extremely like Armageddon,” he said, “and why
shouldn’t the Kaiser be Anti-christ? Besides, there’s an eclipse of the
sun to-morrow. It all fits in. ‘The sun shall be turned to ashes.’”
. . . Next day, sure enough, we had the eclipse, and noon grew
sumptuously dark. And though Hugh strongly suspected that Armageddon was
in progress, and the “great and terrible day of the Lord” might be
imminent, nothing could vanquish his invincible instinct of “playing,”
and he was marvellously absorbed in the fall of thirty degrees in the
thermometer, in the device for observing the sun’s disk in a pail of
water, and in the phenomenon of the specks of light filtering through
leaves, being no longer globular but crescented, reflecting, like little
moons on the path, the shape of the uneclipsed portion of the sun. . . .
And just when that cold twilight of noon-day was at its dimmest, and the
birds had tuned up, as at nightfall, and were silent again, there came
the crunch of gravel underneath the bicycle of a telegraph-boy from the
village, who delivered to Hugh the envelope he carried. Hugh tore it
open, and the message announced the death of the Pope. . . . It was all
Armageddoner than ever.

There was always a ceremony at Tremans when any of the family went away.
The rest, who remained, collected at the front-door from which the
carriage was to start, and saw the departing person into it. He then
drove off with his back to them, but the family waited till the vehicle
reached the sharp angle on the drive a few yards away, which brought the
carriage broadside on, and then he and they simultaneously made violent
and encouraging gesticulations of farewell with their arms. Immediately
afterwards the road passed behind the corner of the house and the
voyager was carried out of sight. Just so did it happen when next
morning Hugh went off. He whisked round the corner while we all threw up
our arms and waved.

So, holding himself in readiness to go out any moment as chaplain, Hugh
went homing to his blissful Hare Street, from which he issued for
preachings and lecturings, returning again as soon as he possibly could.
During the next few weeks he began, especially after any physical
exertion, to suffer increasingly from spasms of pain, about which he
consulted a doctor. These pains were declared to be those of “false
angina,” in no way serious, but severe while they lasted: there was
nothing whatever wrong with his heart, either functionally or
organically. Incessant smoking of cigarettes was discouraged, but Hugh
did not pay any particular attention. . . . And there came to him the
call, not that for which he held himself in readiness, but one for which
he was just as ready. He neither expected it nor feared it, and when it
came he seemed to welcome it, with such confidence did he look on the
face of death. In October he was delivering a series of sermons and
addresses at Salford, when these attacks of pain grew much more violent,
though still in no way constituting any dangerous menace. Indeed, they
seemed rather to be some strong warning, some bright danger-signal of
nature, wholly friendly. It was with great difficulty that he got
through the course, and he was leaving again for Hare Street, was, in
fact, on the way to the station, when he felt himself physically unable
to face the journey and went back to the Rectory at Salford for a few
days of nursing and quiet. The pain was most intolerable when he lay
down, and that night, seeking relief, he walked about his room, very
lightly clad, and even went out into an open courtyard. Pneumonia
developed.

A day or two later a telephone message from my mother, who was at
Lambeth, reached me, saying that Hugh was seriously ill and that Arthur
had gone to Salford. The doctors did not wish anyone else to come, for
fear that Hugh should be made additionally anxious about himself by any
further family arrival, and, indeed, there seemed to be no need. Only a
few hours later came the final news. Without struggle or any mortal
anguish Hugh had passed on, unquenched, taking that light of his round
the corner, even as he had gone two months ago from the door at Tremans,
with gay hands of salutation and farewell waving at us.

I went down next day to Hare Street, in order to find Hugh’s will and
ascertain whether he had left any special directions about the place and
manner of his burial, which it might be necessary to telegraph to Arthur
at Salford. Everything had been made ready in his house for his return,
which had been expected three days before, and the place seemed
indescribably full of him; he had surely arrived, and was looking round.
Was there not a subdued tinkle from the piano in the library? was not
that a step on the stairs? Or perhaps he was out in the garden, seeing
what progress had been made with the rose-bed. As, in the early-fading
light of that grey October afternoon, I searched for his will through
locked drawers and likely places, I must have looked up a dozen times to
see whether he had not naturally and noiselessly entered. And then,
still not finding it, I turned to a pile of papers on his writing-table
in the parlour, round the walls of which ran the Quest and the
Attainment of the Grail, and there it was, on the top of them, as if
before he went away he had arranged that it should be easily accessible.
It was strange that he should have placed it there, but, as far as I
know, he had no presage of his death when he left Hare Street.

He had left elaborate and curious wishes respecting his grave. He
wanted, if it was possible, to be buried in a brick vault in his garden
at Hare Street, over which, at some future time, there would be built a
chapel. He directed that his coffin should be of light construction,
easily broken from within, and there was to be placed close to it a
duplicate key of the vault. If it was impossible to follow these
instructions, he directed that a vein in his body should be opened
before he was buried, so that it might be made certain that he was dead.
As he lay dying, he repeated this wish to my brother.

I do not think that this dread of Hugh’s with regard to being buried
while in a state of suspended animation, now for the first time made
known to us, can have been anything like a real “phobia,” an
unreasonable, fixed obsession. Even while he wrote these directions, I
feel sure he must have been “playing.” . . . With what gusto (it seemed
as clear as if we had discussed it together over the fire) must he have
elaborated his plan of the light coffin and the duplicate key. “There’ll
have been the mass in the chapel,” I could almost hear him saying with
his eager stammer, “and then you’ll b-b-bury me and lock the door of the
vault. And that evening you’ll be sitting here in the parlour, and
you’ll hear a t-t-tapping on the window, and when you go to see what it
is, there’ll be Me in my robes and b-b-biretta, with the end of my nose
quite white from being pressed against the glass. And then you’ll think
it’s my g-g-ghost, but it won’t be, and so you’ll let me in and we’ll
have supper. What awful fun. . . . ’Tisn’t playing with death, because I
shan’t have been dead at all, and I’ll write a book about it.”

So I felt then (and feel still) that, in spite of some touch of “phobia”
about being buried alive, he vastly enjoyed writing these directions: it
would be a thrilling adventure. He had no doubt vaguely intended to
build this vault, but he had not done so, and it was now clearly
impossible to contrive everything as he had planned: indeed, his request
to Arthur that his death should be made quite certain showed that he
recognized this. All that could be done was to obtain permission from
the Home Office that he should be buried in the garden with a view to
the subsequent erection of a chapel, such as now stands there, over his
grave. This permission was given, and, after his death had been made
sure, his body was brought from Salford to be buried close to the
rose-plot over which he had been so busy that autumn, and there he was
laid in his own garden. In the chapel which had been Hugh’s first care
when he came to Hare Street, the mass for the dead was celebrated by
Cardinal Bourne, and sung by members of the Westminster Cathedral choir,
and in a tree by the grave-side a robin was joyful.

The whole of this little domain which Hugh loved more than any spot on
earth, Hare Street House, with the garden and another house he had
already built on the property, was bequeathed by him, with a suitable
endowment for upkeep, to the head of the Roman Catholic Church in
England at the time of his death and in perpetuity to his successors.
Everything in the house, except for a few named objects and a little
choice of mementoes for friends and relations, was included in the
bequest, and so there will ever be this strange thing, that in the house
of the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England will be found
several pictures of Archbishop Benson of Canterbury and many volumes of
the early Christian Fathers from his library.

There was a curious sequel, for Hugh’s will was found to be invalid, not
having been properly witnessed. He was therefore adjudged to be
intestate, and the whole of his estate, including, of course, Hare
Street, passed to his next of kin, his mother, his brothers, and his
sister. So, in order to carry out his wishes, we were obliged to have a
friendly law-suit with Cardinal Bourne, by which the whole property
passed into our possession, and then we gave it back to him. I mention
this because there was an impression that we fought the will in order to
deprive Cardinal Bourne of the bequest, but we must disclaim all such
splendours of ultra-Protestantism, for the facts were precisely the
opposite. The suit was necessary in order to enable us to give
possession of Hare Street to those for whom Hugh had intended it, and it
is now, and will always remain, the property of the head of the Roman
Catholic Church in England.

In times of great sorrow and intimate bereavement my mother, all her
life long, had ever soared above the cloud and found the brightness, and
it was so with her at Hugh’s death. For many months she had been anxious
about him, feeling that nobody, especially if he was not physically
robust, could “go on” as Hugh was doing without a breakdown, and indeed,
in the sunshine of her faith, she feared death for herself and for those
she loved less than she feared the hazards of life. Illnesses,
anxieties, perplexities were entangled with the mere act of living: you
were in a net of knots and enmeshment from which there was but one
release, since, as long as you lived, you had to do your best with
constraining circumstances.

But she was utterly at peace with regard to death; death was not
puzzling, but simple and big, and though she loved life, and loved that
those she loved should afford her the sweetness of their presence, so
many of those she had known longest, and into whom she was most closely
knit in soul and spirit, had by now passed over the little ferry that
could not be very far ahead on her own marchings. It was thirty-six
years ago that her eldest son Martin had died, and even then, in the
plenitude of her health and activity, she had hailed God’s will, not
with submission, but with welcome, and now that welcome was serener yet,
and less difficult, by reason of the counterpoise of earthly ties and
considerations of attainment. For Martin had died in the promise of his
brilliant boyhood, with all his gifts and possibilities yet in the bud,
but now there was no such ground for struggle in her acceptance. Hugh
was young still, but for years now he had over-worked and over-strained
himself, and had he recovered, there must have been a long and tedious
convalescence, such as it was impossible to imagine as tolerable for
him, and even then no return to that whirl of activity and pressure
which really seemed the only atmosphere in which he could breathe. He
was now safe in the heart of the infinite Love, and she feared for him
no longer. With her whole soul she had longed and prayed for his
recovery, but somehow this was better yet. Just because her heart was so
big and her faith so burning, and because, too, it could not be very
long in the measure of years till she would see him again, she looked on
his death as she might look, a little dazzled, on an added brightness in
the sunset towards which she moved.

It was the living for whom she feared, and, of these, most of all for
Maggie. There had been a hope there; for only a day or two before Hugh’s
death, she had undergone an operation, serious but not dangerous, which,
if successful, might perhaps have revealed and relieved the source of
the trouble. But the hope was not realized, and for some days yet, as
she recuperated, it was not possible to tell her about Hugh. But when it
was permitted, I went down to Wimbledon; she had been moved to a sofa
from her bed, and, when she knew, we talked for an hour about him and
his love for her, and his funny ways when he was little, and his
disobedience to Beth, and the lessons which Maggie taught him. There was
his paste-board armour covered with silver paper, his habit of crying
“Pax” when, having insulted an elder, vengeance was imminent, his
conversion to another Church, his house at Hare Street, the tiny pond at
Tremans which he tried to stock with perch, his unspeakable boots. But
most of all she recalled memories from his boyhood, with little gleams
of smiles breaking through her sorrow. She was completely herself that
afternoon, without blame or displeasure or delusion. . . . And then the
rent clouds blew over her again, and the storm beat. But there had been
just that little remission.


                              CHAPTER XII

The optimists of the press, who had so gleefully prognosticated that
there would be peace by Christmas, owing to the Russian steam-roller in
the East, the cutting of the enemy’s lines of communication in the West,
and the sure starvation of the Central Empires from the strangle-grip of
the English fleet on sea-traffic, were chirping rather less vociferously
(like the birds on the noon-day eclipse in August), and wondering if
Lord Kitchener really meant what he said. The German lines of
communication were still intact, no news of starvation came through, and
the only steam-roller that appeared to be taking any part in the
proceedings was that of the German armies, which had crushed their way
over the north-east provinces of France. There was no abatement of
patriotism, no loss of courage or lowering of the heart held high, but
during the next spring it began to be realized that we were not in for a
short and terrific combat, but for a struggle long and bitter beyond all
previous conception: there grew the sense that the war was not to be won
by one swift, magnificent stroke, such as the early optimists had
encouraged us to hope, but by sheer endurance.

The only contribution of help that civilians—women and men over the
fighting age—could make was a strict attention to such work, however
infinitesimal, that had been allotted them. Most of them were beginning
to find the unaccustomed routine quite intolerably dull, and they
discovered that (wholly apart from the great issues, from the horrors
and sorrows and splendours) the war was, above all things, the most
frightful bore. As the year went on, its boring quality steadily
increased: the lights of the city were darkened in view of air-raids;
the train services, whenever you could get any, were so curtailed that
the guard’s van was often the only place where you could find
standing-room; food-supplies were rationed, meat, sugar, butter,
occasionally bread, were reduced to derisory measures; matches were
often unattainable; whisky, as by some inverted miracle, we turned into
water; prices rose, and so did the income-tax; books would not sell;
ladies with trays of flags blackmailed you in the street; all the
comforts and amenities of life, in fact, which had hitherto been
phenomena, as regular and as natural as the rising of the sun and the
setting of the moon, dropped off the stem of existence like withered
autumn leaves. Excitement, pleasurable in itself independently of its
cause, could not permanently remain at fever pitch: you could not go on
for ever reading edition after edition of the evening papers as they
came out, and excitement was boiled down into a glue of anxiety and
depression, which rendered the minor discomforts of life doubly irksome.
By degrees the wiser part of the civilian population, instead of
thinking about the war all the time, strove to do its war work, whatever
it was, as efficiently as possible, and, as far as possible, not to
think about the war. So London generally finding itself quite ignorant
of what was really going on, did its tasks, and settled down in a truly
English spirit, to make the best of discomforts, among which air-raids
began to be numbered, and bethought itself of the wisdom of Queen
Elizabeth, who in the days preceding the Spanish Armada, pronounced that
“there was need of mirth in England now.” The disasters of 1915 and the
two and a half years which followed were not lessened by pulling long
faces, nor by listening to the numerous ravens who croaked unfounded
tales of woe, and those with any grain of sense set themselves to enjoy
all that they possibly could. If the news, such as was vouchsafed, was
good, there was an added cause for cheerfulness; if the news was bad,
they danced and played bridge when their work was done, with a
determined detachment wholly admirable. The working hours of the day
were for me taken up in certain businesses, some dull, some interesting,
such as the study of the affairs first of Turkey and then of Poland,
with a view to the enlightenment of the public regarding these arenas,
and when the day’s work was done, and my brain bewildered with
marshalling facts in such a way that difficult and complicated
situations might appear simple to the reader, I made my daily escape in
the evening into scenes and years as remote as possible from the
environment of war. I shut and locked the door, and went back into
boyhood with David Blaize. Over him I must be pardoned for lingering a
moment, for, however trifling the result, I have never in all my
commerce with scribbling, found in the process so potent a Lethe for the
current pains and pleasures of conscious existence.

I had long wanted to write some kind of chronicle concerning a boy’s
adolescence, when for a time, shy and impressionable and vastly
sentimental, he belongs to neither of the two sexes, and does not melt
into his own sex for a year or two yet. Some boys, rather rare
exceptions, are thoroughly male throughout this period, but most are of
some strange third sex, lively but quite indeterminate. Just at that age
everything is fiery; the proper human boy, who is on the way to become a
man with stuff in him, whether for the building of empire or the
amelioration of slums or the more ascetic devotion to art, touches life
with a burning finger. His affections and friendships, like his cricket
or butterfly-collecting, are passions to him. With girls the same
general principle holds good, but with this difference, that a girl is
far more a little woman than a boy of corresponding age is a little man.
Her sex has more definitely declared itself than his, and though the
normal girl makes passionate friendships with those of her own sex, she
is always imagining herself a woman with marriage and wife-hood and
child-bearing dimly in front of her. Two girls, in fact, will confide to
each other, in virgin intimacy and innocence, the glories of a boy, but
two boys of fifteen or sixteen, in similar circumstances, will not so
often rave over the wonder of a girl. The riddle of sex bothers them
less, the expression of it more, but they have a compensation in the
greater outlets for energy that they enjoy. Boys (the energy of the
sexes being taken as equal) can blow off their steam over games, which
to girls are more a recreation than an aim. There is, though boys are
just as sentimental as girls, a larger sluice, the joy of running and
hitting.

In both boys and girls then about the time of adolescence, there occur
these signs and signals of love: an adoration, that is to say, and a
devotion wholly transcending the normal limits of friendships. In an
adult they would rightly be termed abnormal, but at an earlier age they
are so common that we must regard them as a stage in ordinary natural
development. But the whole subject from the male point of view was
somehow tainted with beastliness, or guttered away into mere tallowy
slosh; if rash people wrote a story about school-boys and touched on
their affections, they seemed at the most to set their climax at the
school-concert, where the small boy (treble) sang “Oh, for the wings of
a dove,” and felt that he was singing at the captain of the school
cricket eleven, who, eighteen years old, blue-eyed and golden-haired,
had made a century that day, and was sitting next the head-master’s
daughter, whom he married afterwards. Sometimes the younger boy
contracted consumption, and, as in _Tim_, was carefully kissed by the
elder shortly before he died. Otherwise, school stories, if more
discreet, were even more blatantly unreal: there were cheats and bullies
(Group I) and cricketers and noble young people (Group II), and the
cheats were detected and degraded to lower forms, and the bullies were
birched, and all the cricketers made immense scores, and all the noble
young people got scholarships at Balliol.

But why not try, so I had long thought to myself (and probably fail), to
write a school story not about cheats and bullies and sopranos, to deal
with affairs that conceivably might have happened: to imagine a boy
clean-minded and instinctively revolting from sentiment, who is yet
absorbed in such passionate friendship as is characteristic of the fiery
age? There was no need to get rid of the captain of the eleven, for he
invariably occurs in real life, nor of normal boys madly keen on cricket
and friendship, who, though loathing the expression of sentimentality,
were, nevertheless, profoundly sentimental. All this had churned in my
head for years past, and now, just now, what completer escape from the
tragedy and boredom could a scribbler find? It was to be boyhood again
before war was invented or sex manifested, when four copper coins would
infallibly produce a pound of sugar, when perfect bliss could be enjoyed
with half-a-dozen racket balls and a friend, and when anyone over the
age of twenty seemed already ripe for the winding-sheet.

And then, with half a page written, and the half page torn up, and a
page written and the page torn up, the door at which I was thus rapping
swung open, and let me in to a domain where I had no need to invent but
only remember and rediscover. For there, in the forest of years in which
my boyhood had wandered and lost itself, I seemed to find it again,
quite alive and happy and ready to talk, and the whole business of
recording appeared to be taking down the dictation of some external
agent. Of course there was no external agency, but some internal and
subconscious clamouring of memories which had so long been forgotten by
my conscious self that they wore the garb of discovery. Now the door of
that store-house was open and it was lit within and full of lively folk,
and chapter after chapter came bubbling on to the paper without effort
or selection or arrangement on my part. The lively folk had settled it
all among themselves: I had only to put down what they told me. So, on
most evenings for six months or more, I locked out the war and tiptoed
back to where David and his friends were waiting for me. . . . When it
was published, I found, with a thrill of amazed pleasure, that at last I
had written something which my mother hailed and rejoiced in.

                 *        *        *        *        *

During the spring of 1915 she began to be aware in herself that the hope
of Maggie’s recovery was growing dim. Mentally she was better: it often
seemed that the mists were very thin: she was separated by clouds that
stirred and shifted. There was less blame, there was a softened
hostility: Hugh’s death seemed to have shaken her enmities. But, though
up to the time of her operation last October her physical health had
been very good, that rock, on which we relied for the rebuilding of her
mind, now began to totter: disquieting symptoms appeared, and her heart
showed signs of weakness. Hitherto she had often come up with her nurse
from Wimbledon to my house, and the change of scene, the fact of free
re-entry into normal life had refreshed her. But now these excursions
became rare, and it was oftener that I went down to Wimbledon instead,
for the drive and the change of scene tired rather than invigorated her.
Still, now and then, on good days, she came, and so thin sometimes were
the mists round her that for an hour or two she seemed wholly normal,
rather sad, but with no burden of heavy melancholy or disordered
thinking. But physically she was weaker, not alarmingly, but
increasingly.

Then in August there came a crisis which, as one saw afterwards, gave
the key to the manner in which would come the end to her imprisoned
darkness. She had an attack of syncope, but with that tenacity to life
which nearly twenty years ago in Egypt had almost miraculously enabled
her to turn and come back out of the very gate of death, so now, with
mind suddenly serene and clear, she fought her way through it, and asked
to see her mother, to whom, in this bitter dream of estrangement, she
had so long imagined herself to be hostile. In a few hours she was
there, and Maggie was just an ailing child again, wanting her and
finding her. The cloud had lifted, and disclosed Maggie exactly as she
had been before ever the trouble came. . . . In childish days, when she
took her worries to the heart that never failed her, she, when the
comforting talk was finished, used often to kiss her and say, “Oh,
Mamma!” and Mamma said, “Oh, Maggie!” and then they laughed. And now
when her mother, sleeping in the house, left her to go to bed, Maggie
sent her nurse with a message to her, asking her to bring back her
mother’s reply. The message conveyed by the nurse was just, “Oh, Mamma!”
and when Nurse Holt came back from her errand Maggie asked, “And what
did she say?” Of course she had said, “Oh, Maggie!”

And then, as Maggie grew physically stronger after that attack, the
clouds grew thick again. The tragic, disordered hostility returned, and
a few weeks later she thought that she knew how mistaken she had been in
believing that there was love between them. But those few hours had been
tonic to her mother, for now she knew, not by faith only but by
experience, that Maggie was _there_ all the time. She had never really
doubted it, but Maggie had been absent from her so long: now, for a
moment, Maggie, her very self, had come to her. That gave her confidence
during the few months that were yet to pass before the last mists
dissolved, leaving the serenity of love undimmed.

It was in May of 1916 that the final light and deliverance came. All the
winter Maggie had been losing ground: her heart could no longer stand
the ascent of stairs, and her bed was moved into a big sitting-room on
the ground-floor. There were but a few steps down into the garden, and
in that spring of loveliest blossom she often sat out there. She had
taken up her sketching again, and made sad, pale little pictures, and
she had collected and revised for publication some tales about animals
which she had written before her illness. Intellectually her faculties
were as alert as ever, her memory and her critical powers were
unimpaired, but delusions were thick and dense. . . . One afternoon, for
instance, she had been telling me in hushed tones that there were
several people—“not quite people”—talking together in the corner of
her room, and boding no good to her, but she was willing, though with
misgiving, to say that she was not really quite sure about this
invasion, and we went on talking as usual of Beth and Hugh and the
distant days at Lincoln and Truro. That afternoon I did not stop very
long with her, for she was tired, but I promised to come back to-morrow.

And when next day I came, Maggie was there, she herself. . . . Her nurse
had gone into her room that morning, and she was still sleeping, but
presently she awoke, and smiling at her, she said, “Eureka!” She asked
for the doctor and his wife, and when they came, she told them what she
had found, and it was that all was healed, and that there was nothing in
the world except love. She thanked them for their care of her: she
wanted to know if her mother might come to see her.

That was how I found her in the afternoon:

“Oh, this is nice,” she said. “Come and sit close by me. Look, I am
wearing the little Egyptian lapis-lazuli bird you gave me. They have
promised never to take it off my neck: never.”

I do not think I have ever been happier than I was then. I knew that
Maggie could not be many days with us: she might, perhaps, be only a few
hours, but before she went she had come right out from the darkness and
the prison, and was free. She smiled at the memory of my visit
yesterday.

“I can’t think why I supposed there were people in the room,” she said.
“There was no one but you and I. Can you stop here a long time to-day?
Mamma is coming: she will soon be here now.”

We talked on, and presently my mother arrived, and on her face was a joy
past telling. Last year, for a little, the cloud had parted, but it had
formed again: now it had dispersed altogether, and Maggie had gone back
to years long past, when there was no such friend as she who sat beside
her now. All next morning my mother was with her, and they never spoke
of the last nine years of deluded estrangement, but only of their love,
and of Love itself from which that flame was kindled.

Then once more came my turn: there had been a bowl of lilies of the
valley by her bed, but just before I came in, she remembered that, by
reason of a childish biliousness, I still disliked the smell of them,
and in the doorway I met her nurse who had been asked to carry them
away. And after a little Maggie wanted both of us together, and then my
mother alone. She, when she left, was under promise to come again quite
early next morning, and Maggie said she would settle down for the night
very soon, so as to be ready for her.

Once in the night she woke, and her nurse heard her say over the first
verse of the hymn, “As pants the hart for cooling streams.” Then she
went to sleep again, quiet and happy, and without movement or struggle
her breathing ceased, and her eyes opened on the everlasting day.

I do not suppose that to the end of my mother’s life a single day passed
on which there was not in her mind the memory of those last hours with
Maggie and the sweet miracle of her restoration. She would, in any case,
have looked on her death as a release, but this complete and serene
return before the end, made just the whole difference, for it utterly
expunged the bitter and bewildering years. They were annihilated: it was
to her as if they had never been, or, at the most, they were of texture
unreal as a dream, that faded in the dawn and dayspring of death. All
through she had told herself that Maggie was there, and now in the final
triumph Maggie had come herself to ratify the truth of her
steadfastness. . . .

                 *        *        *        *        *

In the autumn I began to be busy, in a branch of the Foreign Office,
with collecting materials about the enemy’s position in Turkey, where
with an incredible thoroughness and industry the Germans were rapidly
assuming complete control over military, naval, political, industrial,
educational, and financial affairs. Turkey was already a helpless
vassal, having been deluded into this serfdom by Imperial promises of
the construction of an Ottoman Empire which was to stretch on the East
to the boundaries of China, to include vast Volga provinces, and embrace
the whole of Egypt. Beautiful German maps, which I studied with ravished
attention, were already in wide-spread circulation throughout Turkey,
showing into what world-wide dominion she would leap at the victorious
conclusion of the war. German officers were drilling Turkish troops,
German engineers were completing the Taurus tunnel on the Baghdad
railway, and a trans-European express was running from Berlin,
advertised and labelled as the “Baghdad Express,” though I do not think
that before the end of the war (and certainly not afterwards) it went
any farther than Constantinople. Germany instituted Boy Scouts in
Turkey, who would soon become German soldiers fighting Germany’s
battles, she brought under cultivation thousands of acres to supply food
for the Fatherland, she made docks and quays and reservoirs: she even
produced a Turkish national poet who wrote magnificent patriotic odes to
Attila: “My Attila, my Huns” is the fine opening of one of these, which
thus ingeniously couples together ancient invasions of Europe from the
East with the Western invasion of Europe from Prussia. In all such
propaganda, Germany chiefly employed Jewish agents, just as she did in
raising the Russian revolution, and this poet Tekin Alp was a Semite
from Salonica.

The Turks, in that strange mixture of barbaric ignorance and of
high-breeding which characterizes them, swallowed, incredible though it
sounds, all these preposterous baits. Their ignorance permitted them to
believe that they were capable of becoming a great Empire: their innate
gentlemanliness refused to credit that their high-born ally, the Emperor
William, would not keep the promises he had made to those ruffians
Talaat and Enver Pasha. As a matter of fact, of course, Germany was
getting, and by the end of 1916 had got, complete control of all
Turkey’s internal affairs. Turkey was a German province magnificently
organized and completely dependent on the Fatherland. There were,
however, significant symptoms of a want of confidence in these golden
dreams woven by Germany for her dear ally, for Talaat and Enver,
secretly hedging, had withdrawn from the Deutsche Bank in Constantinople
the whole of their own private fortunes and of the funds of the Young
Turkish Party, the Committee of Union and Progress, and had converted
them, at 50 per cent. loss on the exchange, into Swiss francs, lodging
the balance at Zurich.

By the summer I had, as far as I could judge, sucked dry all possible
sources of information on my subject, and it was necessary to leave
other work alone, and to assimilate and classify these facts, in the
hope of producing an intelligible volume exposing Germany’s little
plans. Some “villegiatura” in the country seemed desirable, and even as
I said “villegiatura” there leaped into my mind the image of my white
house in Capri, with the stone-pine whispering in front of the windows.
Oh, for the sun and the South! Oh, to take bundles and sheaves of notes,
and Tekin Alp’s poem, and a map of the future Turkish Empire, and a
little private memorandum from Zurich about certain funds, out to the
white villa on the enchanted island, and there clarify and scribble! I
wanted very much indeed to do that: I sat down and wanted it.

Now, if you set yourself to want anything with the right brand, the
effective quality of wanting, you usually get it. You must not dissipate
your energy in frenzied fussing or widowish importunity: you must want
in a certain quiet and deadly fashion, ready of course to take hold of
your chance when it approaches, but with no hasty grabbing movement; it
is as when you seek to catch a horse that is loose in a meadow. I give
no explanation of this; I understand it no more than I understand
cyclones and lunar revolutions and other examples of natural forces, but
I am aware that they are founded on fact. I feel sure that if you want
in the correct manner, you will get. . . . It happened just like that
now: a friend in the Foreign Office wished for something—here
discretion takes command—to be conveyed to Rome, and simultaneously a
friend in another department desired a little information which could
best be ascertained at Rome: I was perfectly ready to convey the one and
ascertain the other.

And so one evening, after some interesting conversation in Rome, and the
delivery of an object at the Embassy, and after the dispatch of a dozen
pages of closely-written facts and surmises to London, I saw again the
enchanted island outline itself against the molten flames of sunset on
sea and sky. Italy now had abandoned her neutrality, and, though
seething with very remarkable German intrigues, was committed to the
cause of the Allies. But, as ever, the few miles of sea which separated
Capri from the mainland, were Nepenthe and Lethe, and disembarking from
the waters of oblivion, I could scarce believe, save for my sheaves and
bundles of Turkish jottings, that there was any war at all. The papers,
it is true, brought news of it, when there was not some strike of post
or printers, but the sound of its roaring was no more than the echo of
the sea in a shell, and the machinations of Talaat and the manœuvres of
Enver seemed, as I began to tackle them again, like some fantastic
history of goblins and highwaymen. But for the chronicler such
detachment was all to the good, the business had gained perspective, and
could be contemplated and explained with equity. The chief difficulty
was to make it plain and easy. Anything easy to understand can so
readily be made complicated by elusive narration, for the air of mystery
and bewilderment is sooner woven than any other. But it is far more
baffling to take a tangle and straighten it out into a clear skein
without knots or impediments to smooth running, and the reward of
success is to read it, as I did, to a victimized friend, and hear him
say, “But it’s all pretty obvious, isn’t it?” So here again were the
mornings and the noons and the nights of enchantment, the windless
southern summer, the ripe figs and the lizards basking on the walls, and
though I have no disordered desire for figs, and no passion for lizards,
nor any imperative internal need of swimming in warm seas and dining
under a pergola, the sights and the sounds made up a spell, and it was
the old gay spell of Italy. Meat on the island was hard to get, and
harder yet to eat, the bread seemed to consist of shingle and minced
wood, so instead of your toast or your chop you ate some peaches.
Ruefully I regarded the progress of my writing, and the pages of notes
on my table ebbing away as I snowed the torn remains of each embodied
leaf into the waste-paper basket, for the end of my work was the end of
my days here, and I must get back to the fogs and the grime. But there
were red-letter days of respite when I could not make much headway, and
even better was it to be taken aback, and forced to re-write instead of
going forward: I have never been so conscientious a constructor.

The conscientious constructor had a very agitating moment on the
platform of the station at Rome on his return journey. I have an
inaptitude for packing clothes in travelling bags and trunks, which
amounts to a positive deficiency, and when I came to the bestowal of my
effects in the cases in which they had been packed for me, they were
choked and gorged and unlockable, while shoes and shirts and manuscript
still lay profusely waiting. The only remedy was to get another
receptacle, especially since I knew that I was to convey a bag of
dispatches from the Embassy at Rome to the Foreign Office. I remembered
that I had left a suitcase here, which I had taken to India a few years
before, and there, sure enough, I found it in the box-room, and I
bundled my overflow into it, and found that there was still plenty of
room for the bag of dispatches. . . . Two evenings after, there was I on
the platform at Rome with the dispatches and my completed manuscript on
Turkish affairs inconspicuously housed in the suitcase which had been to
India. As I stood waiting for the conductor of the sleeping-car to
verify the number of my cabin, I suddenly observed that this suitcase,
with its precious and private contents, was incomprehensibly attracting
a good deal of attention: there was quite a crowd forming round, with
pointed fingers. Then with a positive pang of horror I grasped the
reason, for I had sailed to India from Trieste in an Austrian-Lloyd
steamer, and there, intact and flaming on the end of my suitcase, was a
hotel label and a luggage label of that accursed town.

It was a wonderfully disagreeable moment: there was I, wanting only to
shun publicity and objecting very strongly to have any attention called
to that particular package by reason of its contents. I purported to be
carrying dispatches for the British Government, as my passport would
show, and all the time my luggage mutely and distinctly testified that I
had come from a port in the enemy’s country. Forged passport, spy,
Tedesco were words that vividly occurred to me, as no doubt they were
occurring to that interested group of persons round my suitcase. I
snatched it up from the gaze of curious eyes, and retreating into the
sanctuary of the sleeping-car, with clawing nail and jabbing pen-knife I
scratched to shreds those labels (so liable to be misunderstood), and
threw the fragments out of the window. But I had no idea until then how
durable was the quality of the gum on labels, or how pleasant, under
certain circumstances, it was to find your train in motion. . . .

That July, while Arthur was at Tremans, once more the demon of acute
depression attacked him, and drove him into a rest cure where he
wretchedly remained for many months. So when the Christmas gathering at
Tremans came round, we were again a dwindled party. Cold and seasonable
was the weather, with the ice bearing on the lake, the holly bright with
berries, and now for the last time the Christmas hearth crackled for us
with the glowing embers of the wood-fire, and our places at breakfast
were piled with mutual presents, and after dinner the crackers were
pulled. I can see my mother now, older than any in years, and the
youngest of all in heart, shutting her eyes for the explosions as she
tugged at the frilled end of her firework, and thereafter crowning
herself with the pink paper cap that came out of one and blowing
frantically on a small whistle from another. And, indeed, these feats
were not to her only symbols and memorials of Christmases long ago, when
she might be supposed to deck herself in these treasures in order to
amuse her small children, by making herself bright with decoration and
dizzy with blowing: she enjoyed it all immensely on her own account.
This was Christmas, and all right-minded people behaved like that at
this season. Already that morning she had been wakened by the servants
singing carols outside her windows, and probably she would be kept awake
that night by the sound of their revels as they played games in the hall
and danced to the strains of an immense musical-box, as heavy as a
loaded portmanteau, which played twelve different tunes. So there we all
sat in our caps and tassels, and made a row with the toys, and when
nobody could go on any longer, the whistles and the squeaking machines
had to be collected by my mother to hang up in Joey’s cage, so that he,
too, like a Christian parrot, might take part in the jubilation. That
was done, but Joey was not at all like a Christian parrot, for he cursed
and swore at being disturbed, not rightly grasping the significance of
these offerings. Then she and I played a peculiarly irritating form of
patience, in which it was really hard to remember that you were a person
of good breeding and self-control, and for a little while we sat round
the fire, and looked forward to Arthur’s being of the party again next
year. It was past bedtime now, and the musical-box was merry.

                 *        *        *        *        *

As soon as I had seen my exposition of Turkish affairs through the
press, I started gaily on those of Poland, and instantly descended into
a bottomless pit of confusion. To pick your way about even, not to
mention getting anywhere particular or escorting others there, was
precisely like attempting in the dark to find a path through a
wilderness of barbed wire. There were nineteen political parties in
Poland, all at loggerheads with each other, and each clamouring for a
different method of making a united Poland. If I got hold of what seemed
an indisputable fact one day, it followed as a corollary that I should
find a flat, indisputable contradiction of it the next, and it was not
till I had wandered for weeks in the darkness, eternally impaling myself
on barbed wire, that the faintest light began to dawn, and even that at
first only more convincingly revealed to what an inextricable position I
had come. The affairs of Turkey in comparison seemed like a broad and
level high-road running straight and orderly between well-defined
hedges: you only had to march on; here, for a road, were morasses and
moving quick-sands.

Then by degrees some kind of mournful clearness brightened: I could get
my chapters drafted, and I really thought I was coming to the end of
trouble when M. Dmowski, the head of the National Democrats, who was
then in London, most kindly read the whole manuscript and went through
it with me, chapter by chapter. But then, when I took certain parts to a
Polish expert at the Foreign Office for fuller elucidation, he, with a
squirt of statistics, washed away the very foundation of the structure.
He said that M. Dmowski’s figures were all wrong, and M. Dmowski
asserted that never had there been anything so incontrovertible as his
figures. A very puzzling place was Poland. . . .

But during that spring there was always an escape for a day or two, and
that to Tremans. There, somehow, the dusk and the madness of it all did
not penetrate, not because my mother did not realize the darkness, but
because a vaster light illumined her, that “clear shining after rain”
which comes sometimes towards the end of life, which is death, towards
death which is the beginning of life. She looked forward to no rounding
by sleep, but to a far more vivid consciousness, and she writes in her
diary of how coming back from an early celebration one Sunday morning,
she would not have been surprised if she had met a delightful company of
those who in their life had been in so close a communion with her. Out
of her six children four already were waiting for her a little way
ahead, and her husband was there, and more friends of her heart than now
survived. There was no abatement in her love for those still with her,
she still found the world fascinatingly interesting, she was well and
very serenely happy.

                 *        *        *        *        *

It was in June when, after a considerable absence, I could get down home
again. The Polish business, for good or bad, was finished, and the
result, type-written, needed a week of correction and revision. So I
wrote to my mother suggesting myself for a whole week, if she was sure
that was convenient, and her answer was, “Oh, Fred: a whole week!
Lovely! Come to your foolish but ever loving Ma.” And, if it wouldn’t be
tiresome, would I read aloud in the evening what I had written about
Poland? She wanted to hear it all: it was disgraceful not to know about
Poland, and the _Times Atlas_ must be fetched in order to arrive at
complete comprehension, and might she take the last chapter up to bed
with her, to be returned faithfully in the morning? And the last evening
came. “Oh, it has been a lovely week,” she said. “Can’t you come back
very soon?”

In the morning came the family ritual of departure, with wild wavings of
hands as the car turned sharply round at the angle of the house, and I
never imagined, I never guessed. . . . I went down for a week-end next
day into Essex, after leaving Poland at the printer’s, and in the slack
after-breakfast hour on Sunday morning there came a telegram, summoning
me back at once. Before I could start there came another.

She had died as she had always hoped she might. She had just got to bed
on Saturday night, when God’s hand was laid on her head. There was
nothing left of her here but the small sweet raiment in which her spirit
had dwelled. She had no more use for it, and had left it behind.

I thank God for her dear love, and her shining life, and her swift
death.

                                THE END

                  _Made and Printed in Great Britain._
          _Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._




                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

    Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where
    multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

    Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer
    errors occur.

    Book name and author have been added to the original book cover.
    The resulting cover is placed in the public domain.

    [The end of _Mother_, by E. F. Benson.]