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How many in every age have craved to read the future, to uncover the secrets of the coming years; and to that end have pinned a foolish faith upon the words of fortune-tellers, soothsayers and suchlike blind leaders of the blind. For my part, owing more to a sluggish quality in my blood, probably, than to any special wisdom or strength of mind, I have always felt thankful—since I became capable of reasoned thought—the future was a sealed book to me, or rather a book of which it is ordained I shall turn but one page at a time. To skip, to look on, to take a glance at the end, would be, in my case anyhow, to paralyse will and action by excess of hope or dread. No; depend on it, that is a merciful dispensation which condemns us to make haste slowly in deciphering the story of our lives, learning here a little and there a little, precept upon precept and line upon line. Unquestionably had second-sight been given me as to much which lay ahead, on the glorious June mid-day when I started with Hartover up to town, I should have been utterly unnerved by the prospect of the stern doings I was to witness; and so have proved but a pitiably broken reed on which for him to lean.
I rose early, though still tired; and, somewhat refreshed by a cold bath, dressed and made inquiries regarding Hartover. Finding he still slept, I left a message for him and went out.
I have observed that, in fatigue, the mind is peculiarly responsive to outside influences. It was so with me, as I walked along the familiar streets in the radiant morning sunlight. Never had the[386] inherent poetry of Cambridge, its dignity and repose, appealed to me more forcibly. My filial affection went out to this place which had sheltered my youth and inexperience, nourished my intellect, given me the means of livelihood, given me, also, many friends—went out to its traditions, to its continuity of high endeavour through centuries of scholarship, of religious and of scientific thought. What a roll of honour, what a galaxy of famous and venerable names, it could show!
But I had no time to linger, to-day of all days, over meditations such as these. Not past splendours but very present anxieties claimed me. I hastened my steps, and passed in under the fine Tudor gateway of my own college just as the men—‘a numerous throng arrayed in white’—poured out from chapel, into the sunshine and shadow, the green and grey of the big quadrangle.
My object was to obtain speech of the Master; and I was fortunate enough to catch him as he was entering the Lodge. I begged for ten minutes’ talk with him while he ate his breakfast—a request he granted readily, being curious, as I fancied, to learn my errand and, since I had not kept my chapel, whence I came.
I satisfied him on both points, telling him as much as I deemed expedient about Hartover’s unexpected descent upon me—to all of which he listened with genuine interest and concern.
‘And now, sir,’ I said, in conclusion, ‘the question arises as to whether I can be spared from my college duties until this painful business is placed upon, what at all events approaches, a reasonable and workable footing?’
‘Which signifies, being interpreted—am I prepared to sanction your doing that which you fully intend to do whether I sanction it or not? Eh, Brownlow?’
I acquiesced smiling, relieved to find him in so sympathetic a humour.
‘Very well, then; so be it,’ he said. ‘Having put your hand to this particular plough—at no small personal cost to yourself, quixotic fellow that you are—you are resolved not to look back; and I am the last man to invite you to do so. On the contrary, go on with your ploughing and drive a straight furrow. Only provide, to the best of your ability, against friction and disappointment here. Your absence will necessarily create some. Both I and others shall miss you. You must pay—or rather we, I suppose, must pay—the price of your popularity.’
And he looked at me very kindly, while I reddened at the implied praise.
‘See the amount of friction be as small as possible,’ he went on. ‘And now, as to this erratic young nobleman, Lord Hartover—whose affairs appear to furnish such a promising battlefield to the powers of good and evil—I shall make no attempt to see him, although it would interest me to do so. Knowing all that I do know about him and his family, I should find it almost impossible to ignore personal matters, and equally impossible, in the present crisis, to speak of them without a breach of good taste. I have hardly seen him since the death of his mother, the first Lady Longmoor, when he was a child.—Ah! there was a rare specimen of womanhood, Brownlow, if you like! I stayed at Hover frequently during her all too brief reign. This young man may esteem himself fortunate if he inherits even a tithe of her charm of person and of nature.’
After which pleasantly encouraging words I rose to depart. While, as the Master held out his hand to me⸺
‘Remember I am content to pull the strings unseen,’ he added. ‘Consult me by letter if you need my advice. Count on me in respect of pounds, shillings, and pence, too, if your own funds do not cover the expenditure in which you may find yourself involved. We must prepare for contingencies—Detective Inspector Lavender to wit. With his participation, by the way, I should strongly advise you not to acquaint Lord Hartover unless absolutely compelled. Convict the woman, but, if possible, do so privately. Avoid all appearance of running her down; since, for sentimental if no deeper reasons, it might lead to a breach between yourself and the young man which would be lamentable in the extreme.’
This last bit of advice was sound, but far from easy to follow. The more I thought it over—as we posted those fifty odd miles, by Audley End, Bishop Stortford, Broxbourne and Tottenham, from Cambridge up to town—the more clearly I saw how greatly the fact of my having already called in the help of a detective increased the difficulty of my seeing Mademoiselle Fédore and demanding the explanation Hartover desired. Could I do so without taking Inspector Lavender into my confidence regarding Hartover’s discovery? And could I take Lavender into my confidence without curtailing my own freedom of action and inviting a public exposure of Fédore which must be abhorrent to the dear boy? Here, indeed, was a problem hard of solution! Still it appeared an integral part of the whole, and to the whole I had pledged myself. I must be guided, therefore, by circumstance, dealing with each new phase of this very complicated affair as it[388] presented itself; keeping, meantime, as cool a head and quiet a mind as might be. To meet danger half-way may be less an act of prudence than a waste of energy. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and the good thereof likewise, if a man has faith to believe so.
We were to dine on the way, and to reach the great house in Grosvenor Square between nine and ten o’clock. There, as I learned from Hartover, he still—when he pleased—occupied a set of rooms upon the ground floor, with a private entrance from the side street, which I well remembered.
‘It isn’t that I have any particular love for being under the family roof,’ he told me. ‘But I saw the Rusher wanted to oust me and collar those rooms for himself, and I did not choose to have it. So I stuck to them. Her Magnificence couldn’t give me notice to quit without appealing to my father, and she really had not the face for that. There are limits to even her audacity! Now she and I are like buckets in a well. When she arrives, I depart and take up my abode elsewhere. Quarrelled with her? Good Lord, no. She is the most impossible person to quarrel with on the face of the earth. As slippery as an eel—I beg your pardon, a mermaid, shall we say? It does sound more polite. But hold her you can’t. She slithers through your fingers, in that fascinating, mocking, laughing way of hers—you know it?’
Did I not?⸺
‘And leaves you, feeling like every sort of fool, cursing, most consumedly, both her and yourself.’
He laughed not quite pleasantly.
‘But, the devil helping me, Brownlow, I’ll be even with her some day yet. When my father dies—always supposing I survive him, which quite conceivably I shall not—her Magnificence and I will square accounts. It’ll be a little scene worth witnessing. I hope, dear old man, you may be present!’
A wish I could not altogether find it in my heart to echo. But, as he fell silent, staring out over the sun-bathed country, through the cloud of dust raised by wheels and horse-hoofs—subtle lines of care and of bitterness deforming the youthfulness of his beautiful face—I was spared the necessity of answering, for which I was glad.
All day—though towards me he had shown himself uniformly courteous and gentle, loving even—the boy’s spirits had fluctuated, his moods being many and diverse. At one time he was full of anecdote and racy talk, at another steeped in gloom or irritably[389] explosive, swearing in most approved fine-gentleman fashion at any and every thing not exactly to his taste. In short, while he avoided any mention of the object of our journey and our conversation of last night, I could not but see these were persistently uppermost in his thought, keeping his nerves cruelly on edge. What wonder, when all his future hung in the balance! How far did he actually love Fédore—how far actually want her proved innocent? I could not tell. His attitude baffled me. Yet it seemed incredible the society of such a woman should continue to satisfy him—that differences of age, station, nationality, education, should not be prolific, at times at all events, of repulsion and something akin to disgust. Quite independent of that matter of the jewels and the ugly suspicions raised by it, must he not have begun by now to measure the enormity of his mistake in marrying her? I, at once, hoped and feared he had. While, as the miles of road fled away behind us beneath the horses’ trotting feet, the sadness of his position grew upon me, until I had much ado to keep my feelings to myself.
Once arrived, Hartover slipped his arm through mine, and we entered the stately house together, while he said, a little huskily:
‘Brownlow, it is good to have you—very good of you to come. Don’t imagine I do not appreciate what you are doing for me because to-day I have not said much about it. Oh! how I wish you could always be with me! Having given Cambridge the slip, you’ll stay now, won’t you, as long as you possibly can?’
Deeply touched by his affection, I was about to assure him I would indeed remain while I was of any real service and comfort to him, when William—grown stout, sleek, but, as I thought, a good deal more trustworthy-looking—came forward with a packet on a salver.
‘What’s that?’ Hartover inquired sharply. ‘Put it down. I cannot be bothered with it now.’
‘I am sorry, my lord,’ the man answered, with evident unwillingness, ‘but I am bound to bring it to your notice. His lordship sent by express this morning from Bath. The messenger is waiting for your acknowledgment.’
Hartover’s hand grew heavy on my arm.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will send my orders presently.’
And he led me into a fine room, opening off the corridor on the left, where supper had been laid for us.
‘As I supposed,’ he went on, after glancing at the contents of[390] the packet. ‘A summons from my father to attend his deathbed—in which last, by the way, I don’t for an instant believe. Brownlow, what am I to do?’
‘What but obey?’
‘To be told, when I get there, either that he has been miraculously restored to health, or that he has changed his mind; in either case that he no longer wishes to see me, and so—practically—have the door slammed in my face? No, I tell you these repeated visits to Bath become a farce, and an impertinent one at that. My father persistently sends for me and as persistently refuses to receive me when I come. Last time I swore, if he sent any more, he would send in vain. Why should I let him make me a laughing-stock, and treat me with less consideration than one of his own valets? Why cannot he be reasonably civil to me? It is intolerable, not to be borne. But his mind—such mind as he ever possessed, no great thing from the first as far as I can discover—has been poisoned against me for years by the gang of hypocrites and toadies which surrounds him. Only just now’—Hartover spread out his hands passionately, his face flushed, his eyes filling with tears—‘think, Brownlow, think how can I leave London? How can I endure the suspense of absence when—when’⸺
For a moment I feared he would give way to one of those fits of ungovernable anger before which I had trembled at Hover of old. But, to my great relief, he mastered himself, after a while growing gentle and composed.
‘You are right, dear old man, as usual,’ he said at last. ‘I will go. Then at least my conscience as a model son will be clear, whatever his lordship’s as a tender father may, or may not, be.’
And so it was settled he should start at cock-crow, leaving me to deal with the unlovely business of Mademoiselle Fédore—an arrangement I found far from unwelcome, since it secured me greater freedom of action than I could have hoped for otherwise.
Left to myself, next morning, I sought out Detective Inspector Lavender—a large, fair, pink-faced, grey-eyed man, with a soothing voice and fatherly smile, as unlike the human sleuth-hound of[391] melodrama and fiction as could well be. Before making my fateful call upon Fédore it would be very desirable, I felt, to learn whether he had any fresh news for me and shape my course accordingly.
He greeted me with—
‘Well, sir, you are the gentleman of all others I was wishing to see. My fellow officers are a bit jealous sometimes of what they are pleased to call Lavender’s luck—and my luck is uncommonly to the fore, I must say, this morning.’
I inquired why.
‘Because this little man-hunting job of yours and mine seems on the tip of success. A word from you may settle it.’
I inquired how.
‘Well, sir, could you undertake to identify this Mr. Marsigli if you saw him?’
I answered that I believed I undoubtedly could.
‘Then the affair becomes very simple. Lavender’s luck, sir, Lavender’s luck. So, if you have an hour or two to spare, I will ask you to go with me to a certain humble residence, from the windows of which two of my men are keeping watch on a certain door, in a certain garden-wall, not very many miles from here.’
‘In Chelsea?’ I said—the question surprised out of me by his words, before I had time to consider the wisdom of asking it.
‘Just so, sir—in Chelsea—you’ve hit the right nail on the head.’ And, for all his soothing voice and fatherly smile, the detective’s grey eyes grew uncommonly keen and bright.
‘Pray may I ask, have you any particular interest in a door in a garden-wall giving access to a queerly stowed-away little house in a Chelsea side street?’
Clearly there was nothing for it but to put him in full possession of the facts; at the same time urging him to bear in mind the relation in which the inhabitant of that same queerly stowed-away dwelling stood, or was supposed to stand, to Lord Hartover.
He considered, for some minutes in silence, rubbing his hand slowly over his chin. Then—
‘This promises to be a more delicate piece of work than I expected. Either we must act together, fair and square and above-board, you understand, sir, without reserve on either side; or you must leave it all to me; or I must retire from the business, making the best case I can for myself to the authorities, and leave it all to you. It is a ticklish enough job either way. Now which shall it be, sir? The decision rests with you, since you are, in a[392] sense, my employer; but I must ask you to make it at once, before I give you any further information. And please remember, sir, that while I am ready to do all in my power to meet your wishes and spare the young nobleman’s feelings, my first duty and first object is to bring the guilty party, or parties, to justice, whatsoever and whosoever they may be.’
It was my turn now to consider, since I could not but admit the soundness of his position. And I found myself, I own, in a dilemma. To leave all to Lavender appeared to me at once cowardly and somewhat lacking in good faith towards the dear boy; while to take the entire responsibility upon myself would be, I feared, both presumptuous and foolhardy.
‘No, we must work together, Inspector,’ I said, finally. ‘You may depend upon my loyalty; and I may, I am sure, depend upon your discretion, so long as the ends of justice are in no wise imperilled.’
‘Well said, sir,’ he replied. ‘I believe you will have no reason to regret your decision.’
And we proceeded to talk matters over thoroughly, he asking me again for a careful description of Marsigli.—Tall, of good figure and distinguished appearance, as I told him, a genuine North Italian type, crisp black hair, clear olive skin, and regular features; a serious and courtly manner, moreover.
Lavender consulted some notes.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘that tallies with the account of an individual my men have had under observation for the best part of a fortnight. Twice he has called at the house I spoke of. Our gentleman has added a neatly-grown moustache and beard to his other attractions, recently, as I fancy; but it will hardly prevent your recognising him—that is if Lavender’s luck holds, sir, and I can procure you a good look at him.’
Regarding my mission to Fédore—we agreed, since Hartover could not be back in town under a couple of days at soonest—it might very well stand over until to-morrow, and that meanwhile I should place my time entirely at my companion’s disposal.
‘If we have not laid hands on this fellow before midnight, you shall be free to follow your own wishes as to visiting the lady,’ he promised me; and therewith, calling a coach, bore me off south-westward to Chelsea.
The glorious summer weather of the past three or four days was about to terminate in the proverbial English thunder-storm. I seldom remember a more oppressive atmosphere. London still[393] offers a not altogether satisfactory example of applied sanitary science, but, at the date in question, once you left the fashionable districts and main thoroughfares, was frankly malodorous, not to say filthy. Half-way along King’s Road Lavender paid off the coach, and conducted me, on foot, by festering, foul-smelling by-ways, to the back of a row of mean two-storied houses. Gaining access to one of them—which from its dilapidated condition I judged to be empty—through a yard strewn with all manner of unsightly rubbish, a dead cat included, we passed by a narrow passage and stairway to a front room on the first floor. Here two detectives awaited our coming, and here, seated on a remarkably comfortless Windsor chair, by the defaced and broken window I passed what appeared a small eternity, looking out into the ill-paved street, where groups of squalid, half-naked children played and fought, and hawkers plied a noisy, unremunerative trade.
Opposite was a long stretch of much-defiled drab brick wall, pierced by a green-painted door, and furnished with a fringe of broken bottle glass along the top, above which showed the upper branches of a plane-tree and the roof and chimney-pots of an otherwise invisible dwelling. The whole presented a sordid and disheartening picture in the close heavy heat, beneath a sullen grey-blue sky across which masses of heavy cloud stalked upright in the face of a fitful and gusty wind.
And to think this was the place to which Hartover—heir to immense wealth and princely possessions, heir to royal Hover affronting the grandeur of those wind-swept Yorkshire fells—must needs descend to seek comfort, companionship, and some ordinary human kindness of care and woman’s love! The irony, the cynicism, of it struck through me with indignation and disgust.
I am under the impression Lavender did his best to lighten the tedium of my vigil by talking, humorously and well, of matters pertaining to his profession. That he discoursed to me of the differences between English and Continental methods of criminal procedure—the former of which he held notably superior in dignity and in fair-play—while his underlings smoked their pipes in modest silence. But I am afraid I accorded his well-meant efforts for my entertainment scanty attention; nor even, when the storm broke, did I pay much heed to the long-drawn cannonade, the boom and crash of warring elements.
For, throughout that lengthy waiting, the thought of Hartover and of his future had grown to be a veritable obsession, dwarfing[394] all else in my mind. Again his pathetic outcry over the ‘poor, poor, hateful little Chelsea house’—the roof and chimney-pots of which I could see there opposite, above the fringe of broken bottle glass topping the wall—rang in my ears. And, as it did so, Self, by God’s grace, at last, was mastered. Yes, it came to this—to all else would I give the go-by, readily, gladly—to my pleasant studious life at Cambridge and its prospect of solid emoluments, of personal distinction and scholarly renown, to my last lingering hope—for even yet a faint, sweet, foolish hope did linger—of some day making Nellie Braithwaite nearer, and ah! how vastly, exquisitely dearer than a mere friend—if thus I might be permitted to redeem Hartover, to save him from the consequences of his own wayward, though not ignoble, nature, and from the consequences of others’ wholly ignoble conspiracies and sins. I was ready to make my sacrifice without hesitation or return; only, in my weakness, I prayed for some assurance it was accepted, prayed for a sign.
Was the sign given? It seemed so. I sprang to my feet, calling Lavender hurriedly by name.
It was late afternoon now. The worst of the storm over, though big plashy drops still fell, while steam rose off the sun-baked paving-stones. Through this veil of moisture a man walked rapidly to the door in the wall and knocked. Waiting for his knock to be answered, he turned, took off his hat, shook it sharply to dislodge the wet, and, so doing, glanced up at the still lowering sky. I saw his face distinctly.
Lavender stood at my elbow.
‘Well, sir, well, sir?’ he said, an odd eagerness and vibration in his voice.
‘Yes,’ I declared. ‘Marsigli, Lord Longmoor’s former butler, without doubt.’
‘You would be prepared to swear to him in a court of law, if required?’
‘Absolutely prepared,’ I said.
Here the door was opened cautiously from the garden. Marsigli thrust past the servant, and disappeared within.
Now or never! Lavender and his underlings darted down the crazy stairs and across the road. I followed at my best pace, very vital excitement gripping me, in time to see him knock, await the opening of the door, and—then a rush. The three were inside so quickly that, before I could join them, the servant—a[395] middle-aged, hard-featured, somewhat shrewish-looking French-woman—was safe in the custody of the younger detective, Lavender and the other pushing on for the house.
‘If she attempts to scream, throttle her,’ Lavender said, in a sufficiently loud aside to have a wholesomely restraining effect upon the captive. ‘Now, sir,’ to me, ‘as little noise as possible in getting upstairs, please.’
And he glanced meaningly, though not unkindly, at my lame leg.
I crept after them as quietly as I could, and had reason; for on reaching the landing we heard voices, a man’s and a woman’s, high in altercation.
The door of the front drawing-room, I should explain, stood open, the front room communicating with the back by folding doors. These were closed, and within them the quarrel took place; but so loudly that, as we advanced, I could distinguish nearly every word.
‘It is impossible. I tell you he is still away.’
‘No one else can have taken them. No one else has a key to this sweet little nest—and so the game is up, my child, by now the fraud discovered. You are trapped—trapped!’
‘Beast,’ the woman cried, in a tone of concentrated fury and contempt. ‘Go. Do you hear? I tell you to go, or I send Marie for the police.’
‘Pish, you little fool, you know you dare not. What money have you?’
‘Money, indeed! I have none, and if I had I would rather fling it in the gutter than you should have it. Go—go—are you deaf?’
‘Hand over the rest of the jewels then; or I call in the police myself, and tell them—you know what.’
‘It is a lie—a lie. I am his wife.’
‘Idiot—you are my wife, not his.’
‘You cannot prove it,’ she said fiercely.
‘I can. I have the documents safe in Paris.’
‘Go and fetch them, then.’
‘So I will, and take you and the jewels along with me. For I am willing to forgive—yes, listen—it is your only chance now that you are found out.—I, your lawful husband, Bartolomeo Marsigli, am willing to forgive, to condone your infidelities, and receive you back.’
‘And I spit upon your forgiveness. Understand, once and for[396] all, I will never go back to you, never—I would die first. Having had the nobleman, what can I want with the nobleman’s valet? Keep off—you brute. Touch me at your peril. Take that—and that’⸺
The sound of a tussle. Then the man’s voice—
‘Heigh! my fine lady, would you bite then, would you scratch? There, be reasonable, can’t you, for I repeat the game is up. Your aristocratic boy-lover is lost to you for ever in any case. Come away with me to Paris while there still is time. I love you—and I will have you’⸺
Again the sound of a tussle, wordless, tense.
‘That will do, I think, sir,’ Lavender looked rather than spoke, and quietly opened the folding doors.
There are certain spots—in themselves often commonplace enough—which are branded, by mere association, indelibly upon the retina. So is that inner room on mine. I remember every stick of furniture it contained; remember even the colour and pattern of the wall-paper—a faded fawn dotted with tarnished gold and silver fleur-de-lis. The room—like every other back drawing-room in an unfashionable suburb of that day—was narrow, but high and of some length, a window, at the far end, opening down to the floor, a little balcony beyond, and the tops of a few fruit-trees in the garden below.
Across the window a couch had been drawn, upon which Fédore—wrapped in a loose dressing-gown of some pale silk stuff—had either been thrown or thrown herself in the heat of the recent struggle. On this side the couch, near the head of it, stood Marsigli, his back towards us.
Fédore’s nerve was admirable, her self-control consummate. Quick as thought she grasped the situation and used it to her own advantage. As she saw the doors open, disclosing our presence, she neither exclaimed nor shrank. On the contrary, drawing herself into a sitting position, she calmly extended one hand, with a proud sweeping gesture, and, as calmly, spoke.
‘Marie has done her duty then, faithful soul, without waiting to be told! There is the door, Marsigli, and there, behind you, are the police—and Mr. Brownlow, an old friend of mine too—how fortunate! Yes, arrest him, gentlemen; and hang him if you can—I do not understand your English laws—as high as St. Paul’s, for the most cowardly and insolent villain you ever took.’
Marsigli turned, saw us, and suddenly raised his right arm.
‘Die then, since you prefer it,’ he said. ‘Thief, liar—adulteress.’
While, with a terrible cry, Fédore leapt off the couch.
‘A knife!’ she screamed. ‘Save me. He has a knife.’
And, as she ran towards us, I saw something narrow and bright flash downwards between her shoulders, and—a red spout of blood. Her knees gave under her. She lurched, flung up her arms, kneeling for an instant bolt upright, a world of agony and despair in her splendid eyes, and then, before either of us could reach her, fell back.
Of the half-hour which followed I can give no coherent account. As I try to recall it, after the lapse of many years, details start into vivid relief, but without sequence or any clear relation of cause and effect.
I have an impression of helping Lavender to raise Fédore from the ground, and of his muttering—‘A foul blow, before God a foul blow,’ as we laid her, quivering but apparently unconscious, upon the couch. An impression of sultry, copper-coloured sunshine suddenly and harshly lighting up the disordered room, the grim assembly of men, and the woman’s pale recumbent figure, as with a glare of widespread conflagration. I have an impression of Marsigli, too, and that a very strange one, coolly holding out his hands—the right hand horribly splashed and stained—while Lavender clapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. The fury of primitive passion seemed assuaged in him by his hideous act of vengeance, and he had become impassive, courtly even in manner, as I remembered him when waiting on her Magnificence at table or ushering in her guests. He had given himself up, as I heard later, without any struggle or attempt at escape. But above all I have an impression, nauseating and to me indescribably dreadful, which—though I trust I am not unduly squeamish—I shall, I believe, carry with me to the day of my death, an impression of the sight, the sense, the smell of fresh shed blood. Upon that I will not dwell further, since, however deeply affecting to myself, it can serve no useful purpose.
Finally—summoned, I suppose, by the younger of Lavender’s underlings, who had reappeared after locking the servant, Marie, in some room below—a surgeon arrived. Then I slipped away downstairs[398] and out into the comparatively cool untainted atmosphere of the shabby little garden. If I was wanted, they must call me. Not voluntarily could I witness a professional examination of what, less than an hour ago, had been a strong and very beautiful if very sinful woman, and was now but a helpless corpse.
All my thought had softened towards Fédore. Her evildoings—evil even in respect of her accomplice—were manifest. For, let us be just, Marsigli’s crime was not without provocation. But she had played for great stakes and had lost. The pathos of irremediable failure was upon her. And I was awe-stricken by the swiftness of her punishment, the relentless and appalling haste with which she had been thrust out of life. Into what uncharted regions of being had her astute, ambitious, and voluptuous spirit now passed? Regardless of the prohibitions of my Church, I prayed—and how earnestly!—her sins might be forgiven; and that through the Eternal Mercy—so far broader, deeper, more abiding, as I confidently believe, than any man-made definition of it—she might even yet find a place for repentance and peace at the last.
Under the plane-tree I found a rickety garden seat, on which, being now very tired, I was glad enough to rest.
How long I remained there in solitude—hearing the distant roar of London and a confused movement and noise of voices from the street, in which I judged a crowd had now gathered—I know not. But, finally, I beheld the stalwart form of Lavender, his hands clasped behind him and his head bent as in deep thought, coming up the wet garden path between the straggling row of little fruit-trees. His aspect struck me as depressed.
‘Well, sir,’ he said, when he reached me, ‘I think we have done all we can for to-night. I have disposed of Mr. Marsigli, and I and my men have been pretty thoroughly through the house. Some of what I take to be the stolen jewels are there, and a certain amount of plate; but no letters or papers that I can discover.’
He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
‘This is strictly between ourselves, sir,’ he went on, ‘you understand of course?’
I assured him I did.
‘Then I think I may say that in my opinion you can make your mind easy as to the existence of a previous marriage. You remember the conversation we overheard? Her answer, you may have observed, was not a denial of the fact but of the existence of[399] proof—a very different story. However, if we fail to find proofs nearer home it will be simple to take a run over to Paris. We shall have no difficulty with the prisoner. It is in his interest to give all the information he can, and he is sharp enough to know that. A rum customer, though, as I have ever had to deal with—one minute a mad savage and the next close on a fine gentleman. Trying cattle these foreigners, always springing some trick on you! He’ll have to swing for her, I expect—still she must have led him a pretty lively dance. Something to be said on both sides, sir, as in my experience there usually is.’
Much of the above was welcome hearing; yet the detective’s aspect remained depressed. Again he wiped his face.
‘And now I dare say you’ll not be sorry to be moving, sir,’ he remarked.
Then as I rose, stiff and weary, and walked beside him along the garden path, the real source of his trouble was disclosed.
‘I feel I am bound to apologise, sir, for letting you in for so much unpleasantness. I blame myself; I was over-confident, and have got a well-deserved slap to my professional pride as the result.’
‘How so?’ I asked him.
‘Why, I delayed too long before opening those double doors in my eagerness to secure all the evidence I could—a mistake which might be excusable in a youngster, but not in one of my standing. The very secret of our business is to know the moment for action to a tick. I let them both get too worked up. And, worked up as they were, he being Italian, I ought to have foreseen the likelihood of that knife. No, sir, look at it what way I will, I am bound to blame myself. It is a discredit, in my opinion, and a grave one, for a man in my position to have a murder—and in broad daylight too—committed within three yards of his nose. The less said the better, I’m afraid, for some time to come, sir, about Lavender’s luck.’
I consoled the mortified and over-conscientious hunter of criminals and crime to the best of my ability; and then, thankfully bidding farewell to that blood-stained and tragic little house, pushed my way, with Lavender’s help, through the gaping and curious crowd in the street, and, bestowing myself in the coach one of his men had called for me, rumbled and jolted back to Grosvenor Square through the hot, thundery dusk.
(To be continued.)
Being bidden to set down a subject for your entertainment, advised that it should have some relation to Shakespeare, and unable to distract my thoughts from war and the state of Europe for long together, I combined war, diplomacy, and Shakespeare at a venture; I had never considered Shakespeare’s work, as bearing on either of those topics, with any particular attention, and had no settled expectation of what might be the outcome.
In the result I confess that I am surprised, and, as that result is largely negative and therefore incapable of demonstrative proof, I do not feel much confidence that I shall be believed. When Shakespeare was growing up and beginning to know the world, both war and diplomacy were full of fresh matter for curiosity. Diplomacy, as we now understand it, was an invention of the Renaissance, and especially the Italian Renaissance, flourishing in an exuberant youth and wearing the ornaments of humanist learning not always free from pedantry, and humanist accomplishment often straying into over-ingenious conceits. The letters of Elizabethan statesmen and scholars, even on ordinary business, often conceal their real point from a modern’s first reading by their refined excess of caution. Here, it would seem, the comic Muse might find profitable matter, if only it came within her range of observation.
War, again, was ancient enough in itself, and so indeed were the fundamental rules of military art; but the outward face of war and the whole scheme of manœuvres, tactics, and fortification, had passed or were still passing through critical change due to the general use of fire-arms. Henry VIII.’s castles embodied the latest designs of Italian engineers, and English archery was already decaying though shooting at butts was still a matter of legal duty. Many details of armament and the like were in a state of transition, and came to rest only about the end of the seventeenth century, a rest which was little troubled for a century more. I need hardly remind you that Marlborough would have found very few novelties in Wellington’s army, save for such trifles as the cock of a hat, and the recognition—still not wholly without grudging—of gunners as[401] being soldiers and not mere auxiliary artificers. Shakespeare found the art of war in such a swift new growth as was not to happen again till the times of which I can remember the beginning.
It would seem offhand, therefore, as if we ought to find, in the writing of so keen an observer as Shakespeare, considerable marks of these innovations, and some evidence of intelligent curiosity about their working: not so much, indeed, as would prove Shakespeare either an ambassador or a soldier, though I believe some ingenious persons have let their fancy go so far even as that. But in fact my search up and down the plays has led me to think that Shakespeare the playwright could do nothing with the modern diplomatic art, even if he had any knowledge of it, and that he never troubled himself much about the revolution in the art of war. Observe, I say Shakespeare the playwright. We have very little evidence of Shakespeare’s private pursuits and tastes outside the theatre, and for aught we know he may have been interested in matters for which the stage had no use, or which he did not choose to show there for other reasons. Observe also that beyond question the externals of both diplomacy and war figure in Shakespeare’s works, and those of war rather abundantly. You shall find passages of embassies and ambassadors, many fighting men, a fair number of fights on the stage, not counting brawls and private encounters, and plenty of talk about guns and gunpowder. Fire-arms might still have a smack of novelty at Stratford-on-Avon when William Shakespeare was a lad. And yet he thought them (if he thought at all) older than they were, for we read of cannon in ‘King John’ a century and more before they came into use, and about half a century before Roger Bacon made a cracker. As there is not a word about Magna Carta in ‘King John,’ nor in the older play on which Shakespeare worked, some persons may guess that ‘the troublesome raigne of John, King of England’ was a very dark age to Elizabethan playwrights. But for my part I would rather believe the omission to be a deliberate touch of dramatic fitness. John’s crimes and defaults could not be concealed; nevertheless he is exhibited as becoming at the last a champion of England against foreign encroachment, and it would have spoilt that effect to bring in his differences with the barons on constitutional points. It is true that the Great Charter had not yet become a popular rallying cry, but knowledge of its existence can hardly have been confined to antiquarian scholars. This, however, is not to the purpose here; and in truth the anachronism of the cannon is only a conspicuous example of a kind fairly common in Shakespeare. Thus King[402] Henry V. is made to speak of the Grand Turk as holding Constantinople a full generation too soon.
To return to our theme, the treatment of public affairs and negotiation in Shakespeare is wholly subordinate to stage effect, the Elizabethan stage effect which depended largely on rhetorical set speeches in the more serious passages, and it is therefore rudimentary from a political point of view. Shakespeare knew the conceits of the fashionable epistolary style well enough, and could make sport with them. But when princes and their ministers discourse on affairs of state, contentiously or otherwise, we have no play of dialectic or development of argument. Every speaker gives his own view with little regard to conviction or reply, the matter being taken just as it came to hand in the chronicle or other authority relied upon, and the manner worked up more or less according to the importance of the scene and personages and the opportunity given by the situation. Recrimination is not uncommon, but there is no real critical discussion. Still less is there any indication of what Shakespeare himself thought of the merits. At the beginning of ‘Henry V.’ we find the King’s clerical advisers deliberately encouraging a foreign war of ambition to divert an attack on swollen church revenues,[1] and the Archbishop of Canterbury giving transparently bad reasons (as at this day they seem to us) for the English claim to the crown of France. There is no suggestion of anyone seeing anything wrong in such conduct; not that this is any ground for inferring that Shakespeare approved it. He followed his chronicle, here as elsewhere, mistakes and all.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a live negotiation on the stage is the conference of Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer over the map of England, already partitioned in their imagination, in the third act of ‘Henry IV.,’ Part I. The scene is admirably contrived to bring out Hotspur’s reckless ambition and Glendower’s pride, and for that very reason there is no scope for Italian subtilties. Hotspur blurts out his objection to the proposed boundary without reserve or preparation of any kind:—
The course of the river, he says, must be changed to give a juster line.
After a short and heated bandying of words both Hotspur and Glendower suddenly think better of it. Glendower offers to yield:—
and Hotspur magnificently waives the whole quarrel:—
This is not a sample of diplomacy—nor would diplomatic art have been in place—but it is great play-writing which the mysterious dispensations of modern theatrical management compel us to enjoy only with the mind’s ear ‘in the closet,’ as our ancestors said. I have seen Phelps in Falstaff, but ‘Henry IV.’ does not keep the stage.
Outside the region of public affairs the intricate combinations of device and accident which formed the staple of the Italian novel were familiar enough to Shakespeare. They were plastic in his hands, assuming a farcical aspect in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ a purely comic one in the higher sense of comedy in Portia’s caskets and her secret expedition to Venice, and a serio-comic one in ‘Twelfth Night,’ though in spirit, as Mr. Masefield has finely observed, that is the most English of the great comedies; while in Iago the same instrument sounds the deepest of tragic notes. I do not count the catastrophe of Shylock in ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ where all reason, justice, and probability are violated with a superb audacity that never fails to carry the spectator on a magic flood of illusion in even a passable performance. Therefore I see no need to set down Shakespeare’s eschewing of diplomacy[404] to personal ignorance or indifference. It is true that he did not consort much with ambassadors or secretaries of state, neither were state papers accessible in print as they now are. But the very simplest explanation seems like to be the right one, that such material would not serve his turn. The game of diplomacy, being mostly played with pens and ink, and a leisurely game in those days, was not presentable to an audience. Exchange of dispatches and notes may make good reading for posterity, but is not good stuff for actors; and Shakespeare’s business was to produce acting stage-plays, which is an elementary truth forgotten by too many commentators.
Turn we then to the more bustling field of war. If anyone expects to find a general moral judgment about war in Shakespeare he will be disappointed. Shakespeare, like Justinian—a person to whom it would be hard to find any other resemblance in him—accepts war among the inevitable facts of life. Princes and nations fight, and arms are the natural profession of a gentleman. One of man’s seven ages, according to Jaques, is to be a soldier, ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard’; and we are told that Bassanio was a soldier, seemingly because otherwise something would be lacking to him, for nothing turns on it. The reasons for making war, be they better or worse, are as a rule not too plainly bad to be plausible to the common understanding; a fair mark, it may be, for satirical quips, but that is not the main business. What really matters is that war must needs come in the dramatist’s way if he presents histories ancient or modern, and offers not only stirring incidents but precious occasions for developing every kind of character. Without the field of Shrewsbury we should not know Falstaff as we do know him; it gives us the exact measure of his braggadocio and the full wealth of the measureless ironical humour which he turns freely on himself, being resolved, since he may be no better than he is, to make himself out rather worse. He is the very contrary of that actual braggart who, having no humour, bragged sincerely and was a valiant man notwithstanding, Benvenuto Cellini.—One might fall to wondering what Shakespeare would have made of Benvenuto, had he ever heard of him; but the perpetual trouble with Shakespeare, as with the Oxford English Dictionary, is that at every turn one is tempted to stray and browse in by-ways.—Accordingly it was very well for a solemn Byzantine emperor, and his learned assessors who added the precepts of the Church to the Roman lawyers’ humane Stoic tradition, to[405] deprecate war in set terms, along with slavery, as a lamentable departure from the ideal rule of natural reason, though in fact inveterate by the common custom of mankind: but a Renaissance playwright, who would be no dramatist without his share of unreasonable human nature, could hardly wish himself deprived of the material that war furnished him both for action and rhetoric. Such lines as
explain better than any commentary why the military pageant of history had a warm place in an Elizabethan actor-manager’s professional affections. Shakespeare would have liked to display it better. The Chorus in ‘Henry V.’ apologises for the ‘four or five most vile and ragged’—i.e. battered—‘foils’ which were the best the Globe Theatre’s armoury could produce for the campaign of Agincourt. Of that play there will be a word more to say anon.
Considering the need of rapid action on the Shakespearean stage, and its limited spectacular resources, it is obvious that actual warfare could be indicated only in a series of personal episodes, confining the visible symbols to a Homeric or at least a frankly medieval pattern. One might think, as far as the text went, that battles were decided by single combats; and probably those who begin to read Shakespeare young enough do think so. In ‘Henry V.’ we are told nothing of the military dispositions preceding the battle of Agincourt but the bare fact that a small and wearied English army was opposed by a larger and over-confident French one, and there is not one word about the English archery.[3] There is proof, however, though not too much, that Shakespeare had some notion of the offices of higher command in war, and could describe an episode of minor tactics not seen on the stage in a perfectly clear way. Yet it is noticeable that these proofs are not found in the historical plays. For the recognition of military science we have to go to the satirical romantic drama of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ and for the business-like anecdote to the very late legendary play of ‘Cymbeline,’ which, for whatever reason, seems to pay less regard to stage effect than any other work of Shakespeare’s.
In the first act of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ the Greek chieftains, who conform only in the roughest way to their traditional characters, and quote Aristotle as if on purpose to show that the action has no[406] relation even to accepted legend,[4] are discussing the state of affairs before Troy. Ulysses speaks of the discontented Ajax and his followers:—
We shall do no excess of violence to the difference of the times if we call this a staff officer’s view; and, all things considered, I think it goes near to be Shakespeare’s own, or at least that which he conceived to be the better opinion among those who had served in the wars of the Low Countries: as who should say ‘We can beat the Spaniard with any fair proportion of numbers, but you are not to think it is to be done without brains.’ Doubtless the opposite opinion, that of the rule-of-thumb soldier who thinks meanly of scientific warfare, made itself heard too, perhaps more loudly, at the Mermaid and elsewhere, and Shakespeare gives us a glimpse of it when Iago sneers at Michael Cassio as a great arithmetician who knows nothing of real fighting. But if Shakespeare had thought it sound he could have put it in a better mouth. The more familiar phrase of Mercutio’s dying speech: ‘a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic,’ is remote from this context as it belongs not to the art of war at large but to the contrast between the old English sword-play and the tricks of the new fangled Italian rapier: a topic which, I think, interested both Shakespeare and his audience more. In the same scene of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ we may find other military aphorisms: Nestor speaks of the uses of disappointment in war:—
and he almost anticipates the doctrine, now proverbial, that victory is for the side that makes fewest mistakes:—
There may just possibly be an allusion here to the ‘Islands Voyage’ and other poorly managed expeditions against the Spanish West Indies, then fairly recent.
Nestor has also a sharp word for Thersites the professional pessimist:—
We cannot all be as wise as Nestor; but we can at least refuse to lend our ears to Thersites.
In this connexion we may note some lines given to the Messenger at the opening of ‘King Henry VI.,’ which may have been touched by Shakespeare’s revising hand, though I would not vouch for it:—
The first ‘faction,’ curiously enough, is not far from Queen Elizabeth’s own policy. The second falls pat for our very latest variety of politician, the ‘air service candidate,’ and the third for those who want to discuss terms of peace in detail before the enemy is beaten, except that in our time they are highly conscientious persons who would be shocked by any suggestion of guile.
Later in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ the Greek and Trojan leaders exchange elaborate compliments which savour more of the Middle Ages than the Renaissance; they have no military significance.
Before leaving ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ produced when the state of war with Spain was coming to an end, it may be observed that, so far as I know, direct mention of Spain as a hostile power does not occur anywhere in the plays.
In the last act of ‘Cymbeline’ we hear how the banished Belarius and the young princes who pass for his sons have rallied the Britons, flying from Roman invaders, at the head of a narrow lane, checked the pursuit, and led a successful counter-attack. The nature of the ground is explained with some detail:—
The rest of the description, which is rather involved in style and may not have received the author’s last touches, adds nothing definite. The questioner, an unnamed ‘British lord,’ seems hardly to see the point:—
It is well attested by experience that a few determined men, or even one, may stop a panic if once they can get a rallying point; and I am much disposed to think that Shakespeare used in this passage an incident heard from someone who had actually seen it, or been very near it, ‘somewhere in Flanders.’
The most military of Shakespeare’s plays is ‘Henry V.’; there are other plays with much fighting in them, but neither within nor without the chronicle series is there one with so little of other interest in it. Henry V. is the only Shakespearean king who is a typical soldier, so much so that the type all but swallows up individual character. Mr. Masefield, who is always ingenious and often profound, thinks that Shakespeare did not admire the type; that he studied it with full knowledge and carefully framed the so-called heroic figure, a competent but no more than sufficiently competent leader, carrying on with fine animal spirits, unthinking, just and fair according to his lights, keen on playing the game as he knows it and scorning those who do otherwise with a scorn capable of being merciless, living by custom and not seeking ideas, never doubting that he is right—I am not using Mr. Masefield’s own words, but putting his judgment in a slightly less severe form;[409] and then, Mr. Masefield will have it, Shakespeare holds up a piece of our own image to us in the jolly, obtuse soldier-king, with a whisper in his sleeve for the more knowing:—These be your gods, O Englishmen! I will not say there is nothing in Mr. Masefield’s point, but I cannot go all the way with him, the rather that if I am wrong it is in Sir Walter Raleigh’s company. Shakespeare’s command of human nature included other, richer, more complex, and more interesting characters; he knew very well that a prince always posing like Richard II., who is an accomplished cabotin, or always thinking like Hamlet, who fails not because he is weak but because he knows too much, would not have done Henry V.’s business; it does not follow that he thought ill of that business, and for my part I conceive that he admired Henry V. as the right man for his place and meant the audience to admire him. King Henry V.’s ostentatious repudiation of Prince Hal’s ways and companions is violent and awkward, and to a modern judgment unpleasant, as Mr. Masefield says. But that was forced on Shakespeare by the tale which he had to accept as history. Another difficulty is to see why a war of conquest against France should have been glorified on the stage at a time when France and England were not only at peace but in all but formal alliance against Spain: to which I see no answer except that chronicle plays were in fashion, a good play was a good play, and people did not go to the Globe to learn current European politics. We have not to consider whether Shakespeare thought Henry V. was in truth such a man as he put on the stage; or whether he did or did not stop to think that the real Henry V. must have known French quite well, if not as well as English, from his infancy; or other little puzzles that any observant reader may put, and get no certain answer, in this and most of the plays: for these things are not to our present purpose.
Shakespeare’s Henry V. is most human when he talks with his own soldiers as a plain gentleman, and they reason of the king’s responsibility in a thoroughly medieval fashion. The point is not whether a king who goes to war may have to reproach himself with the horrors of war as commonly understood, the temporal evils of death, destruction, and rapine. What is urged—and by a private soldier—is the risk that men slain in battle may die in mortal sin: ‘if these men do not die well.’ The king’s answer is a fine sample of Shakespeare’s grave prose dialogue, and, to the best of my belief, very sound moral theology. ‘Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.’ It is[410] obvious that the principle is by no means confined to warlike enterprise. Did Shakespeare write this scene to justify the Archbishop of Canterbury’s praise, at the opening of the play, of Henry’s learning in divinity?
As for the usages of war, Henry V. accepts them as he finds them: that is, as Shakespeare—not to say Grotius—found them. When he summons Harfleur to surrender he is clear that the consequences of further resistance will be the governor’s fault and not his. Everybody is aware that a town taken by storm is pillaged; there is just a hint that no known discipline could prevent it; and indeed we moderns know what ado Wellington had in that matter little more than a century ago, and in a friendly country too. As a point of strict military rule, defence of an untenable position forfeited the defenders’ right to quarter down to the Peninsular War, and Wellington thought there was much to be said for it on the ground that the existence of the rule operated to prevent useless waste of life. This, however, is not explicit in Shakespeare.
Fluellen, the Welsh captain, is really a more distinct and human character than the king, though a minor one. He is a martinet, and probably would be a bore if he were allowed to expound the disciplines of the wars and the rules of Pompey’s camp at large; but he is a thoroughly good soldier, and a good friend. If it entered into Shakespeare’s plans to show off any knowledge of military science, here was a chance; the difference between the early fifteenth and the late sixteenth century would give no trouble, as in some details not worth particularising it certainly did not. We get nothing of this kind, however, from Fluellen beyond a few words about mines and countermines, which may be paralleled by the metaphorical use of the same matter in a still better known speech of Hamlet’s.[6]
Let us take leave of Henry V. with the remark that Shakespeare by his mouth anticipates Wellington’s policy and rebukes the Prussian devil’s gospel of frightfulness. ‘We give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French[411] upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.’ And this is the Shakespeare whom the Germans pretend to understand better than his own countrymen.
It is curious that the longest string of military terms in Shakespeare, if I mistake not, is delivered by a woman, when Lady Percy tells Hotspur (I. ‘King Henry IV.’ ii. 3) that he has talked in his sleep
Some of the plays, like ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Coriolanus,’ are martial, inasmuch as there are combats and ‘excursions,’ but not military, inasmuch as the fighting is but the inducement or vehicle of some greater tragic event. Plutarch furnishes brave Roman sayings, or the politic sense of Elizabethan elders is condensed in aphoristic lines; but all this is secondary; what really concerns the poet is a spiritual conflict of eternal import, a soul triumphing though at the cost of life or wrecked. War and peace, conquest and exile, are the transitory matter the spirit works in, and Shakespeare troubles himself no more about the details than is needful for preserving a congruous atmosphere.
In Shakespeare’s time there was no English army in any proper sense, but only occasional levies. His illustration of English military method, such as it then was, is to be found in Falstaff’s immortal exploits as a recruiting officer. It is common knowledge that there was a very ancient tradition of compulsory service in time of war within the realm, but the operation of the principle was rough and inefficient. We may believe if we like that Falstaff knew his business when he chose; it is certain that the way he does choose is not only to be a corruptible and corrupt officer, but to sell exemptions shamelessly. By his own confession he ‘misused the king’s press damnably’ and ‘got in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers three hundred and odd pounds.’ If we consider him with a cold military eye—which is the last thing Shakespeare intended—it is clear that he deserved to be shot. We gather from the great recruiting scene in the third act of the second part of ‘King Henry IV.’ that officers[412] chose their own subalterns and raised their own men with a pretty uncontrolled discretion. One would like to quote the whole scene, but paper is scarce, and it is better for the reader to enjoy it in the full text. Doubtless it is a caricature, but I would not wager any great odds on the exaggeration being gross. The impudence of taking ‘three pound to free Mouldy and Bullcalf’ and then magnifying the quality of the scarecrows who are left is as delightful as any of Shakespeare’s humours. ‘Care I for the limb, the thewes, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man! Give me the spirit, Master Shallow. Here’s Wart; you see what a ragged appearance it is.... O, give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones. Put me a caliver[7] into Wart’s hand, Bardolph.... Come, manage me your caliver. So: very well: go to: very good, exceeding good. O, give me always a little, lean, old, chapt, bald shot....’ We may yet hear news of Falstaff in the trenches, for there be many pretty wits at the front.
There remains a question of which I have said nothing because it is too plain for discussion. Did Shakespeare think England worth fighting for? As to that, the answer is written all over his work; not only in such splendid passages as John of Gaunt utters in ‘Richard II.,’ which have quite properly been repeated many times, in print and on platforms, in the course of this year, but in the whole tone and colour of all his pictures of country life, whether the nominal scene be at Athens, or in the forest of Arden, or in Illyria. Besides, there are some questions really too impertinent to be put to any honest English gentleman, even when he is dead and immortalised these three hundred years.
[1] There is apparently no real foundation for this; in fact there were serious commercial quarrels of some standing.
[2] One is much tempted to regard this epithet as inserted by some dull-pated player who did not see that in Hotspur’s eyes to be Hotspur’s friend would be desert enough without addition. The lines would then read, to the advantage of the metre:—
The metrical reason would be of little weight if it stood alone; still the irregularity of the verse as printed is particularly jarring, however one tries to arrange the lines.
[3] It is conspicuous in Drayton’s ‘The Battaile of Agincourt.’
[4] There were limits to Shakespeare’s carelessness, and I believe this enormous anachronism to be wilful.
[5] The insertion of ‘man’—actually made in the later folios—or ‘one’ is an obvious but not obviously necessary emendation.
[6] It may be irreverent to doubt whether Shakespeare knew or regarded the difference between a petard and a mine; yet it is certain that a petard was not fitted to hoist anything, but was a special contrivance for blowing in gates and the like. It was a novelty in the third quarter of the sixteenth century (Littré, s.v.). Drayton understood its use, but by a slip as bad as any of Shakespeare’s brought ‘the Engineer providing the Petar, to breake the strong Percullice’ into Henry V.’s war: ‘The Battaile of Agincourt,’ ed. Garnett, p. 22.
[7] A considerable anachronism, but these are trifles.
All day long Papa Laval had been wandering about the streets of the little town, listening restlessly to the distant thunder of the guns, questioning eagerly the first of the fugitive peasantry who came streaming through in their flight towards safety. Papa Laval with his one arm and his cripple leg and his tales of ’70-’71 was naturally an authority on matters of war, and his fellow-townsmen listened deferentially to all he had to say about affairs. Papa was scornful of the first tales the fugitives told of a German victory and an Allies’ retreat; but the first rumble of heavy transport wagons through the cobbled streets in the middle of the night brought him quickly from his bed and down the narrow stairs to find out what it meant. He could learn nothing much because the transport drivers were English, could only take some comfort from the calm with which they steered through the crowded street, laughed and called jokes which none understood down to the staring townsfolk. But Papa had seen too much of war not to understand the meaning of the swelling tide of transport, to mark as the light grew the jaded horses and the sleep-worn looks of the drivers. His dismay grew when the khaki regiments began to flood through after the toiling transport, while out behind them the growling thunder of the guns rolled louder and louder.
And by noon he was in utter despair. The street through the town was by then choked from end to end with a seething mass of men and cattle and vehicles, military transport and ammunition wagons, soldiers, old peasant men and boys, women with children clutching their skirts or wailing in their arms, country carts piled with bedding and furniture, squealing pigs and squawking leg-tethered poultry, with huddled clinging old crones and round-eyed infants. And when Papa was told that the road was blocked in the same way for miles back, that the Germans were coming fast, that the whole army was retiring as fast as it could, he groaned in despair. He watched the slow torrent struggling and scrambling along the choked street, the impatience of the officers and dull apathy of the men in the marching regiments as they progressed a few yards and halted for the head of the column to clear a way;[414] and he pictured to himself visions of a squadron of Uhlans swooping down on the crowded road back there and the havoc they would make in the packed masses under their lances.
About noon he found a new interest and fresh food for thought. A regiment arrived and, instead of pushing on through the town as the others had done, sought billets there and halted. Six men were billeted on Papa Laval, and between the smattering of broken French that one of them spoke and Papa’s equally broken English it was possible to hold some conversation and glean some understanding of the recent battle. But the men were too worn out, too dead beat, too utterly fatigued to talk much. They ate and drank and then flung themselves down to sleep, and all that Papa learned was that in truth a big battle had been fought, that the Germans had been held, but that for some reason the English were retreating. Fugitives from Maubeuge direction had told a similar tale of the retreat of the French, and Papa groaned again and wandered out into the street to curse impotently as he watched the struggling tide of fugitives that still poured with desperate slowness through the town. ‘Perhaps it would be better,’ he told his daughter at last and very reluctantly, ‘for you to go away while there is yet time. Not for yourself, but for the sake of the little ones. There will be fighting here, as I see it. This regiment remaining while all the others pass through means a rearguard action, an attempt to cover the retreat of the others. But that is a plan without hope. There is only a handful of men left to hold the town, and they are worn to the edge of exhaustion with marching and fighting. The Germans will attack in force, they will sweep through the town and take the bridge. That no doubt is the plan, and holding the town and the bridge they will sever the English army and the retreat will be a rout. Yes, my child, you had better go now.’
But the woman refused to go, to leave their little house, to drag her children out into the crowded roads on the way to nowhere; and after a little Papa gave up trying to persuade her.
It was a bare four hours after the weary men had found their billets when the alarm came that the enemy were coming. Papa shook his head as he watched the six men in his house rouse slowly and reluctantly, yawn and stretch and rub their eyes. ‘Four hours,’ he thought. ‘Of what use is a little four hours to men exhausted by battle and marching? If it had been eight hours’ sleep now, who knows—they say these English are good fighters,[415] and they might have held the town a few hours. But four hours....’
The men themselves took it differently. ‘That shut-eye done me good,’ said one. ‘If I’d a decent wash now I’d be as good as ever.’
‘Glad we’re goin’ to ’old ’em up here,’ said another. ‘This retreatin’ game don’t suit me none. I’d sooner stop an’ fight it out.’
‘Dunno wot the blank we retreated for at all,’ grumbled a third. ‘They couldn’t ’ave pushed us out o’ that last position in a month.’
‘They do say the Frenchies on the right broke,’ said a corporal, the man with the smattering of French, ‘an’ we had to fall back ’cause they’d left our flank open. Fancy it must ha’ been something o’ that sort too.’
They were hastily buckling on their kits when Papa came in to them. ‘Cheer up, Daddy,’ they told him. ‘We’re not letting ’em come any further. But there’s goin’ to be a scrap here an’ you’d better keep your tuppenny tucked well in or you may get hurt by a stray lump o’ lead.’
‘Noos restey ici—compronney?’ said the corporal, and Papa nodded his understanding. ‘Mais not posseebl’ for to make victoire,’ he demurred. ‘Anglais ver’ few; Allemands plenty, ver’ plenty.’
‘Don’t you believe it, Daddy,’ said the corporal heartily. ‘Beaucoo Anglaise to stop—haltey les Allemong. You’ll see,’ and he got his men together and hurried off.
Papa had to admire the smart and business-like fashion in which the town was set in a state of defence, the houses commanding the roads loopholed, the street entrances blocked with barricades of transport wagons, the men distributed to the various vantage-points. But he had little or no hope of the result, because he saw how few the men were, how they had to be split up into small companies to cover all the many points which might be attacked. It was true that the defenders held the advantage of cover in the houses, but that would avail little against artillery; and the enemy had the advantage of being able to choose their point of attack and mass on it against the weakness of the distributed defence. Papa gave the defence half an hour at most to hold out after the real attack developed. As it happened, he was perfectly right in his surmise that a mere section of the defence[416] would have to bear the full brunt of the attack, although he was quite wrong as to how long they could withstand it.
The attack came soon after the early darkness had fallen.
At first there was a quick rumour running round that a mistake had been made, that it was a French column that was approaching. It may have been this that deceived the defenders into allowing the enemy to come almost to hand-grips before the fighting began, and anyhow it is certain that the first sounds of conflict that Papa heard were not, as he had expected, a long-drawn rapid rifle fire, but one single and then a few scattered shots, shoutings, and the clash of steel on steel. For the moment it looked as if the first rush was to swamp the defence and break through it, since a seething mass of men fighting fiercely with butt and bayonet eddied slowly back and actually into the street of the town. Rifles began to blaze and bang from some of the upper windows, and then with a wild cheer a rush of khaki swept out from a side street and plunged into the fight. The fresh weight told, and although the defence was still outnumbered by two to one it was the stronger at close-quarter work, and the attack was driven slowly back and back until at last it broke and ran, leaving the street and the road about the outside of the town heaped with dead and wounded.
Papa Laval ran out into the street and began to give what help he could to carry in the wounded British, when he heard a whistling screech and the crash of a shell on one of the outer houses of the town. He ran crouching in to the shadow of one of the houses, and presently his straining eyes caught the quick leaping flash of the German piece and another shell hurtled over and burst in a hail of shrapnel about the entrance to the town. Papa ran back, and in a side street found a young officer and a dozen men breaking in the door of a deserted house. Papa guessed their intention, and since the officer fortunately was able to speak French, Papa could tell him a better house to choose, one taller and with a better and more commanding outlook on the point of attack. He led the way to the house and to the upper rooms, and pointed out the best windows, and watched them pile bedding at the windows and break out loopholes in the wall. All the time shell after shell was smashing and crashing down somewhere outside, and now the Germans began to fire star-shells that floated down in a blaze of dazzling light, blinding the defenders and exposing them as visible targets to the hail of bullets that came drumming and rattling in from their unseen foes.
Then came another fierce rush against the barricaded streets and the rifle fire rose to a full deep-noted roar, punctuated by the crashing reports of the shells and the boom of a gun that began to fire back from somewhere in the town. Down in the street the attack pushed home again to the barricades, and men pulled and dragged at the overturned carts and leaped and scrambled to cross them, and fired in each other’s faces; and, where the barricade was gapped for a moment, thrust and stabbed with the bayonet and smashed with the butt and tore and beat at one another, until slowly the attack gave again and the barricade was made good. In the rooms upstairs where Papa Laval was, the men pumped bullets from the loopholes and the windows down on to the struggling mass that pushed in to the barricade, until a machine-gun was turned on the house and hailed a storm of bullets back and forward, across and across its front. The storm caught several of the men at the windows, and they fell back killed or badly wounded for the most part. A group of the enemy turned from the barricade, ran across and began beating at the door and the barred and shuttered windows. Half a dozen of the garrison, on a command from the officer, jumped from their loopholes and poured clattering down the stairs, just as a rifle thrust into the lock and fired blew it away and the door swung open. As the Germans rushed in they were met by the men plunging headlong down the stair, and in the passage and about the stair-foot commenced a wild and desperate hand-to-hand scrimmage. Somewhere outside a building had caught fire, and in the dim light reflected into the house-passage from the leaping flames the fighters scuffled and raged, scarcely seeing each other, stabbing and striking and singling friend from foe by blind instinct. The passage was a pandemonium of shouts and cries and oaths, of trampling scuffling feet, of clashing steel and thudding blows, with every now and then the thunderous report of the officer’s revolver reverberating in the confined space. The advantage of numbers was largely with the Germans, but the narrowness of doorway and passage made it difficult for this weight of numbers to come at the defenders and beat them down; and the British were not only holding their own but were even driving the invaders slowly backward, when the sound of rapid blows, the riving and crashing of woodwork, the clash and tinkle of breaking glass told that one of the shuttered windows had been forced.
‘Get back! Get back and hold the stair,’ the officer was yelling; and his men, with one last fierce rush, drove the Germans further[418] along the passage, turned and made good their retreat to the stair-foot. Then when the position looked to be too desperate for hope, there came from outside a burst of rifle fire, a fresh clamour of fighting noises, a hoarse yell of English cheers. A mixed mob of the fighters swirled past the open doorway, and a rush of khaki swung past and licked in after it, followed closely by a line of British swarming across the width of the street and running forward with bayonets at the level. Inside the house the panting remnant of the defence slammed the door shut, piled a tangle of furniture—tables, chairs, chests of drawers—into the passage, busied themselves re-securing the broken window, wedging a big table and the heaviest articles of furniture they could find against it, and making all ready for a renewal of the attack.
But the attack was not again successful in reaching a point level with the house. Another attempt, made twenty minutes later, succeeded in coming almost level with the house, but it was too fiercely swept by the fire from the barricade, by a tempest of bullets from a couple of machine-guns placed in position in some of the houses commanding the approach, and had to fall back without any result beyond an increase in the piled bodies littered about the street, the wounded crawling and writhing away as best they could out of the line of fire.
The fighting continued throughout most of the night, but never reached again the savage ferocity of the first hour, never came within such measurable distance of success for the attack. And at dawn the enemy withdrew and left the defence time to collect its wounded and tally its dead, and make all ready for continuing the fight.
And when Papa Laval came back an hour after to his daughter’s house he found her busy making coffee for the corporal and one other man—the only ones left, as it turned out, from the six who had billeted there. The corporal’s head was tied up, his sleeve and shirt-sleeve were slit their full length and stained a dull brown from a wound, the red-wet bandage of which showed round his upper arm when the slit sleeve fell back from it.
But he was quite cheerful and turned triumphantly to Papa Laval when he came in. ‘Wot did I tell you, Daddy? Ici noos restey, eh?’
‘You ’ave spik true,’ said Papa warmly. ‘Ze Anglais—ah, zey are ze brav mans—mos’ brav—magnifique. I no tink it posseebl’—it was not posseebl’, but zey do heem, zis imposseebl’, and make ze victoire.’
‘It was a good scrap,’ assented the corporal modestly. The Frenchman assented warmly after he had had the meaning of ‘scrap’ explained to him.
‘Good, good, ver’ good,’ he said. ‘I, Papa Laval, who have seen much fighting in ’70 and ’71, say it was ver’ good. So much Allemands an’ so leetle—so not-much Anglais an’ so fatigue, so tire they. Ver’ much kill, ver’ much blessés, what you say wounds, but zey fight on an’ zey make victoire. I see ze Anglais to-morrow—no, yesterday—an’ I say ze grande armée anglaise is feenish, is defeat. Mais, now I onnerstand heem no defeat, heem yet make ze good fight.’
‘Oh, we’ll make a fight all right when the time comes,’ said the corporal.
By now the coffee was ready, and the two men drank it hurriedly and ate hastily of the meal the woman set before them. Papa Laval was concerned about this haste. He would have had them sit down and wait till a good breakfast was cooked and then eat it at leisure and in comfort. The corporal shuffled a little uneasily. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we got to be movin’ on. Orders, voo savvy—les instruckshions à marchey; noos continuey le moshion à la sud.’
Papa stared at him in bewilderment. ‘Mais—zat ees ze retreat,’ he stammered. ‘Pourquoi ze retreat après la victoire?’
‘Wot’s ’e say?’ asked the other soldier through a huge mouthful of bread and butter.
‘Says why should we bolt again after lickin’ the Germans,’ explained the corporal.
‘An’ that’s exackly wot I wants to know,’ said the private disgustedly. ‘We ’as the bloomin’ company near wiped out, an’ B Company the same, and stands off the attack all right; an’ when we’ve chased ’em off good an’ handsome we has to up stick an’ run away again. Bloomin’ rot, I calls it.’
‘Steady on,’ cautioned the corporal. ‘You don’t want these bloomin’ French people to get no wrong notion about our runnin’ away. Look ’ere, Papa, it’s like this: Up there,’ he waved his hand towards the north, ‘we have le grand fight, battle. We win, voo savvy, la victoire c’est à noos. I dunno why we retreat after it—je ne comprong pas pourquoi le retreat, but—I mean, mais les instructions they says retreat. (Dashed if I know the French for “they says.”) Voo savvy, noos make le retiremong because⸺(An’ I’ve forgot the word for “because” now! Oh, dash this French language!)’
‘I onnerstand, m’sieu,’ broke in Papa. ‘The ordaire it is retreat and, parbleu! ze good soldat he obey ze ordaire. Quand ze ordaire ees fight, ze good soldat he fight; eh, is it not?’
‘Egg-zackly,’ said the corporal. ‘Certimong, Papa.’
‘Bien,’ said Papa. ‘I know you spik true. I have seen ze Anglais fight. Zey are keel, peut-être, mais nevaire—how you say it?—run away. I have seen, and I know. I go now to spik it to ze peoples in la ville who is disconsole, peut-être, when ze retreat continue.’
‘That’s it, Papa,’ said the corporal. ‘An’ you tell ’em this army is never goin’ to run away. When the order is retreat, we retreat, even though we don’t like it. But one day the order will be to advance, an’ then we’ll show ’em. You tell ’em not to be afraid. The French is bound to win this war. We’ve come over to see it through with them, an’ we’re not goin’ ’ome till we’ve chased every dash German back to Germany. You savvy, when the time comes, en avong is the order, an’ avong we goes.’
It is very doubtful if Papa caught all the meaning of this harangue, but he got the sense of it and the last words at least.
‘En avant!’ he cried, leaping to his feet. ‘Vivent les Alliés! Vivent les Anglais!’
‘If you two ’as finished ’andin’ out bookays to each other,’ said the private, ‘p’raps you’ll ask Madam ’ere if she’s got a spare loaf we can put in our ’aversacks. There’s the fall-in sounding.’
The death of John Llewelyn Davies in May last took from us a man of great strength of character and power of mind. He was in his ninety-first year when he died, and had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. Through his long life he was known to the few rather than to the many; but to those who knew him he was a notable figure, connoting high and pure aims, firm will, deep religious faith, and elimination of self in the service of his fellow-men. The outer man in his case did not tell the full story of his nature. No one had a warmer or kinder heart, a greater fund of sympathy, or more real and abiding enthusiasm for the causes in which he believed, and for which he zealously contended. Fire was there and humour too, but there was no effusiveness in manner or in speech. Strong feeling was held in restraint by stronger self-control.
He was a man of varied interests and claims to distinction, without being in the ordinary sense a many-sided man. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as in later years were three of his sons; and he took his degree in company with a singularly able body of men, comprising, for instance, Bishop Westcott, the great Latin scholar Professor Mayor, and Lord Stanley, as he then was, afterwards Lord Derby, Foreign Minister under Disraeli, Colonial Minister under Gladstone. Four years later the soundness of his scholarship was abundantly proved by giving to the world the well-known translation of Plato’s ‘Republic,’ used and implicitly trusted as hardly any other translation of a classical author before or since. His colleague in the work was the Rev. David Vaughan, brother of the great headmaster of Harrow, who was afterwards Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff. Llewelyn Davies and David Vaughan had been bracketed in the Tripos, and as Llewelyn Davies was one of the Founders of the Working Men’s College in London, so Vaughan a little later founded a Working Men’s College at Leicester on the same lines.
As a theologian, he belonged to the sane, masculine Cambridge school, which included his friends Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, and others—a race of men who were not afraid to bring scholarly criticism to bear upon theological writings and doctrines, strengthening the faith by broadening its basis. On sacred subjects, as on[422] Plato, he wrote with acknowledged authority. The man whom he followed above all others, and whose views he embodied, was Frederick Denison Maurice. He read the last words over Maurice’s grave, and, until he himself was laid to rest, he preached and practised the life which Maurice led and taught.
Virile in mind, he was virile in body also. One of the original members of the Alpine Club, and a pioneer in some notable ascents, he lived to attend the jubilee dinner of the Club, and was well over eighty when he visited Switzerland for the last time. A hard-working clergyman of the Church of England, hard-working whether in town or country, for his benefices ranged from Whitechapel and Marylebone to Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland, he was all the time not a clergyman only, but a citizen, holding that the one implied the other; that the preacher of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man must practise what he preaches; that you cannot guide the people unless you know them, not as a member of an exclusive caste, but being among them as one that serveth. At one time he was a member of the London School Board: he was a staunch supporter of the co-operative movement: he laboured for the cause of women, was Principal of Queen’s College, Harley Street, and Chairman of the governing body of the Working Women’s College. So strong was his sense of public duty that a friend described him as the only man who had ever been known to take a positive pleasure in paying rates and taxes.
Like Maurice, he was wholly indifferent to worldly gain, and the last man to solicit preferment in any shape. His own words on the subject were, that he would rather that people asked why he was not made a bishop than why he was. The story goes that Mr. Gladstone once attended his church in Marylebone, in order to judge for himself of the vicar’s fitness for promotion. The Prime Minister was so depressed by the discourse which he heard and the small attendance, that all chance of promotion vanished. The great man did not know that, as a matter of fact, he had been listening to another preacher altogether, that, as it happened, Llewelyn Davies was away on a holiday and not in the church that day. It is true that the latter was somewhat cold in manner and measured in address, not by any means a preacher to electrify large congregations and appeal to popular audiences, one who convinced rather than attracted—a guide to thinking men, not a master of the rhetoric which moves the multitude. Still, in a worldly sense, he never received his due. Our Church of England seems to have considerable capacity for leaving its best and wisest[423] sons out in the cold. Maurice and Llewelyn Davies kept numbers in the faith who would otherwise have drifted from it, because their teaching and their lives proved to demonstration that breadth of view, intellectual power, and democratic sympathies are wholly compatible with intense religious belief, conspicuous before all men every day and all day.
He took his degree in what he himself styled the ‘fateful year’ 1848, a time of social and industrial upheaval. Then it was that what was known as the Christian Socialist Movement came into being, and six years later, in 1854, the Christian Socialists founded the Working Men’s College. Llewelyn Davies was one of them; and when he died, the last of the founders passed away after nearly sixty-two years of the life of the College. They were a great band of men, these Christian Socialists. Charles Kingsley was prominent among them. So was John Ruskin, so were Tom Hughes, John Malcolm Ludlow, the father of Friendly Societies, Professor Westlake, the International lawyer, and many other men of note. They were poles asunder from one another in character, in pursuits, in a hundred ways; but they all had the betterment of their fellow-men in mind, and one man held them all together, the greatest but most humble-minded of them all, Maurice, a leader in spite of himself. I came into the College years after Maurice had died, but I found that some rare and potent influence had been and still was at work, that some personality had left an impress, which was different in kind and greater in degree than anything in ordinary life. Men of all religions and of no religion seemed to have become infected with a kind of noble contagion, and in turn to be infecting others. One old student explained to me that the secret of Maurice’s influence was his transparent truthfulness, that he taught ‘No lie ever had done or ever could do any conceivable good in the world.’ Another found the explanation in his burning sense of brotherhood. The truth was that a man had come among them who, as no other man they ever saw or heard of, gave the message and lived the life of Christ.
Charles Kingsley did not take much active part in founding and fashioning the College, and after Maurice died the clerical element among the founders was represented by Llewelyn Davies. I have said that the founders were of the most divers views, in religion as in other respects. Notwithstanding, the College was cradled in religion; the influence of Maurice was paramount; and to Ludlow or Tom Hughes, laymen both, religious faith was as the breath of life. Of all the founders, other than Maurice[424] himself, Hughes was probably Llewelyn Davies’ closest friend. The two men were of the most different types. Hughes was sanguine, trustful, impulsive, carrying on into old age all the warmth and buoyancy and charm of youth. Davies was calm, thoughtful, reserved, weighing men and things in the balance with the utmost care. But their very diversities seemed to bring them together, and they loved one another. In the Jubilee volume of the College, which Davies edited, he wrote of his friend Hughes as ‘the man of childlike heart, of knightly loyalty, of the most humane geniality, and of the simplest Christian faith.’
Hughes was Principal of the College, in succession to Maurice, when I joined it: many were the stories which he told himself, and many gathered round him. He used to tell with glee his experience as a teacher, when the College first opened its doors. Professor Westlake’s account of what happened is as follows: ‘His teaching of English law, not by his fault, but by that of the subject, never, I think, attracted the numbers which the value of the study ought to command.’ Hughes’ own account was far more racy: he took a law class, which was a complete failure, upon which he converted it into a boxing class, which was an unbounded success. One evening Hughes impressed upon us that the great object of the College was to teach what were known in old days as ‘the Humanities.’ Lord Justice Bowen, who was present and spoke after him, pertinently asked whether he included boxing among the Humanities.
A great friend of Hughes and his circle, and a warm friend of the College, was James Russell Lowell, who, it will be remembered, was at one time American ambassador in this country—not the only American ambassador to whom the College owes a debt, for Mr. Choate at a later date gave us a notable address on Benjamin Franklin. I remember an annual gathering at which both Hughes and Lowell spoke. Hughes in his speech recalled the beginnings of the College and of the co-operative movement, the two having been closely associated with each other, and told the story of a certain brushmaker who had been a student of the College. The brushmaker had fallen on evil times, and his business had collapsed. Hughes and other co-operators and Christian Socialists clubbed together to set him up again, and in gratitude the brushmaker made them all brushes which, according to Hughes, had exceedingly hard bristles. Now Hughes had a most shiny bald head, and, with his eye on that head, Lowell, who spoke afterwards, in stately and measured terms, expressed a hope that all the students of the College did their work[425] as thoroughly and effectively as the brushmaker had done his. On this same occasion Hughes referred to the fact that some time before Nathaniel Hawthorne had come to tea at the College. Again Lowell saw and took his opportunity. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘Mr. Hughes has made a slip; it cannot have been tea that my friend Hawthorne came to, for Hawthorne was a man of robuster fibre.’
I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him, I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I received infinitely more than I ever gave. Apart from friendships made for life, apart from having become, I hope, infected with the contagion of which I have spoken, simply and solely from the point of view of getting on in the world, it was a distinct gain to a young man to be thrown into association with great men or the intimate friends of great men, and to be constantly in an atmosphere of wide interests, high aims, and tolerant views. My start in the teaching line was even more unlucky than Tom Hughes’. Apparently he got some kind of class together, who then deserted him until he took to boxing. My recollection is that I put out an elaborate prospectus of what I was going to teach, and that no class turned up at all. Subsequently, however, I did manage to scrape together a small class, and supplemented teaching, not by boxing, but by becoming an active member of the Maurice Cricket Club, the President of which was Alfred Lyttelton, who, like Hughes, took a law class, but with much greater success.
If, as some people fondly imagine and like to insist, there is a difference between the Oxford and Cambridge type of man and cast of mind, Hughes and Llewelyn Davies may be taken as excellent representatives of their respective Universities. Oxford gave to the Working Men’s College the more emotional Hughes, with his all-round views and interests. Davies contributed the thoroughness and accuracy of Cambridge thought and methods. On the other hand, Charles Kingsley, another Cambridge man, would certainly be classed with Tom Hughes rather than with Llewelyn Davies. The author of ‘Westward Ho!’ might well have written ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays,’ or vice versa; but it is impossible to picture[426] Llewelyn Davies as the author of ‘Tom Brown,’ or Hughes as the translator of Plato’s ‘Republic.’ In a later generation at the College, the counterpart of Hughes, with less genius but greater practical ability, was again a Cambridge man, the dearly loved Alfred Lyttelton, to whom I have already referred. The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. Year after year Oxford and Cambridge have welcomed parties of Working Men’s College students; and year after year, without any intermission, a constant stream of new teachers has flowed in from the two Universities—sometimes in greater volume from the one, sometimes from the other. It would be impossible to decide to which University we owe the greater debt. Maurice himself can be claimed by both, though Cambridge has the prior and, I think, the stronger claim to him. Of four past Principals, Maurice is in the balance, Lord Avebury belonged to neither University, and the other two, Tom Hughes, and Professor Dicey most admirable and effective of Principals, must be credited to Oxford. On the whole, perhaps, I must, as an Oxford man, reluctantly but gratefully acknowledge that Trinity College, Cambridge, stands out in our annals as having been from first to last our greatest benefactor. The two latest survivors of the founders, Westlake and Llewelyn Davies, had both been Fellows of Trinity.
I have spoken of Davies’ strong sense of civic duty. To compare him again with Hughes, there was as great devotion to duty in the latter, but with a somewhat different colouring. In Hughes’ case the sense of duty was not so sharply defined, or clearly thought out, nor so much a matter of reason. With him it was rather a feeling, an instinct, part of his nature, such a sense of duty as comes into being at a great public school, in the form of esprit de corps, loyalty to a community of comrades and friends. All these men had this sense of obligation in different shades and forms; all heard the call of duty, each in his own way—the clergyman, the scholar, the public official, the merchant, the lawyer, the artist—and all obeyed the call by giving of their own particular store of knowledge.
To the Greeks of old duty and goodness presented themselves in the guise of the beautiful, and this may be one reason why so many artists of fame gave their help to the College. In the list of art teachers of the past are the names of Ruskin, D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Burne Jones, Thomas Woolner, Stacy Marks, and others. One of the longest lived and best loved of the founders was Lowes Dickinson, who taught in the art class for many years, and, as all who knew him will testify, never lost sight of the connection between goodness and beauty. But it was not to be expected that the students, or would-be students, would be all of this type, until they had been duly inoculated. For instance, in the account of art teaching at the College in early days, which is given in the Jubilee volume, there is a story of a man coming to Ruskin’s class with a request to be taught how to draw a cart-wheel. He explained that he was a wheelwright, and that it would pay him in his business if he could draw a wheel as it looked lying on the ground. He wanted no art or anything of the kind, but simply to learn how to draw a wheel. This limited aspiration was not at all to Ruskin’s mind, and the wheelwright appears to have gone away sorrowing. The man came, quite naturally and laudably, in order to obtain some technical instruction, which would bring him in more money. No set of men were ever more anxious than the Founders of the College that their poorer brethren should rise and prosper, hence their staunch support of the Co-operative Movement. But they did not found it to give technical instruction; they founded it to teach the ‘humanities’ in the widest sense (including boxing), to give to poor men more human lives, to widen and multiply their interests, to open their understanding, to make them better citizens. They were democrats, but not democrats of the utilitarian type. They taught duty, the faith that was in them, more than rights or claims. They never taught the working man to try everything by the test question, What am I going to get by it in pounds, shillings, and pence? nor did they for one moment appeal to the manual workers as a class with interests distinct from those of the community. The spirit of class was to them anathema, the negation of brotherhood and of true citizenship, the enemy of the State. They taught that men should have their full living wage, if they earned it; that true citizen life implied conditions under which honest labour would always ensure to the labourer sufficiency of good food and a decent home; but they taught also that pounds, shillings, and pence are not the one thing needful; that[428] possessions mean something more and something better than lands or wealth; that knowledge and wisdom, the manifold interests which come from knowledge, the intelligent appreciation of the world around, of men and things, are what life has to give, and are available to poor as well as to rich; that, if a man has knowledge, with bread to eat and a human home, it is a matter of indifference whether he is rich or whether he is poor: he is an equal among equals. So they taught, and so the students learnt and lived their lives accordingly.
These men founded a college. Here is Maurice’s conception of a college, as given by Llewelyn Davies: ‘The name College had a significance on which Maurice loved to dwell.... A college was an association of teachers and learners; and that was what Maurice desired the Working Men’s College to be. It was not to be an institution to which the uneducated might resort, to pick up knowledge which might be of pecuniary benefit to them. The idea of fellowship was to run through all its work; every teacher was to assume that he might learn as well as teach; every student was to be made to feel that, in coming to the College, he was entering into a society in which he might hope to become more of a citizen and more of a man.’ This was no conception of a visionary, which ended in a dream. These were the lines laid down for practical guidance and application, and on these lines to this day the College lives and moves and has its being. My experience of the world at large has been that the rich man is apt to patronise the poor, and that working men in their turn are somewhat inclined to look askance upon would-be benefactors with good intent. But when I first went to the College a great many years ago, I found no signs of patronising, or being patronised. Nothing of the kind was in the minds of students or teachers: it was all natural. They were not troubling their heads as to social standing or worldly equipment; nor, on the other hand, was there the slightest affectation of studied equality or absence of the ordinary courtesies of life. There they were in their own College, friends among friends, all engaged in the same pursuit, the pursuit of knowledge, all ready to help and grateful for being helped. I found that a large proportion of the teachers were, as is still the case, student teachers; men who, having owed to the College all their store of knowledge, and much more also, had come back to repay the debt in kind, taking classes for years together, usually after a heavy day’s work in their trade[429] or profession; and I found, again, that there was an attachment to the place, an animus revertendi—at least as strong as in the case of the old Public Schools or Universities. To put it bluntly, the Working Men’s College was founded to turn out gentlemen in the truest and best sense of the term, and it is turning them out, according to the original sample, to the present time.
To take one among numberless examples which might be given of the College spirit, I call to mind an old student who was a very great favourite with us all and a constant attendant at the College, until age and infirmity limited the number of his visits. He was a wood-turner by trade; always a poor man, but the happiest, as he was the friendliest, of men, for he was master of a science which he needed no riches to follow up: he was a most expert botanist, and when not earning his bread, he was studying his subject or collecting new specimens on country walks. What did he care about class distinctions or political parties or social upheavals? Nothing at all. On the other hand, he illustrated the truth that a live and wholesome community, which is at unity with itself, is a most fruitful field for good stories and humorous sayings. He had the most delightful gift of dry humour. A man of portly carriage, he had been listening at one of our festive gatherings to a speaker who enlarged on the subject of all-round men—I forget in what connection, but presumably on the product which was to be expected from the College. Speaking later, my old friend described himself as not an all-round man but bulging out on one side. On another occasion the Lubbock Field Club—the natural history club of the College—gathered to do him honour, and the speakers indulged in exuberance of sentiment. In acknowledging his reception, the honoured guest botanically remarked, ‘The Field Club is all heart, like winter cabbages.’
Ever setting duty and citizenship before their own eyes, and the eyes of those whom they guided and taught, the Founders of the College were intensely good Englishmen and whole-hearted lovers of their country without any reservations. That the claims of class should ever compete with duty to the State would have been abhorrent to them. Nor were they scared by any bogey of militarism. The members of the College entered heart and soul into the Volunteer movement of 1859, and a corps was formed, one of the earliest of all the volunteer corps, which became the 19th Middlesex. As might be expected, Tom Hughes was the[430] commandant; prominent among the officers were John Martineau, pupil and intimate friend of Charles Kingsley, and the Anglo-Saxon scholar, Dr. Furnivall, most bellicose of men; while Maurice himself became chaplain of the regiment. In these days of conscientious objectors, many might with advantage read a letter which Maurice wrote to his soldier son, afterwards the distinguished military writer, Sir Frederick Maurice, and in which the nobility of the soldier’s calling is set forth by one who had been brought up in tenets of a widely different kind, but had renounced them on the principles which governed his whole life—duty to man and fear of God. The letter is published in the memoir of Sir Frederick Maurice by his son, now also General Maurice, who in the third generation is adding new distinction to a great and honoured name.
During his thirty-six years of parish work in London, Llewelyn Davies had little time to give to the teaching or management of the College; and for the nineteen years when he held the living of Kirkby Lonsdale, he was necessarily cut off from it, save for occasional visits, as was Tom Hughes in his County Court Judgeship at Chester. He had taken a Bible class in early days, in 1866; and after he came back from Westmorland to end his days in retirement in London, again, a very old but still vigorous man, he took the Bible class for a short time. His last words spoken at the College were at our annual supper in the Maurice Hall, in December 1910. He testified that ‘the College had always opened its arms to those who came to it with the idea of not merely getting personal advantage, but of becoming better citizens of their country, and better members of the great human family, and who desired to serve their country and kind to the best of their power’; and he claimed that ‘every one who had been associated with the College, either as teacher or as student, had felt in some degree that they were honoured by their connection with it.’ It probably never entered into his head that the College was honoured by association with him. His speech ended with what he said and felt might be a parting benediction, ‘God bless the Working Men’s College.’ He was never able to come among us again, but as each Founder’s Day came round we remembered him, and he remembered us. And we shall ever remember him and his work. He lies in Hampstead Churchyard, as his master, Maurice, at Highgate. The line of founders has now died out, but their memorial is a living memorial—better and nobler lives of men.
The tall, young, frock-coated librarian came into the ladies’ reading-room with a noiseless, gliding step and an air of apology. He moved a library ladder against the high shelves of calf-bound volumes, ran up the ladder with a gentle swiftness, selected a tall folio from the top shelf and came down again, leaving the room by the half-glass door as unobtrusively as he had entered it.
There were only two people in the reading-room. One was an elderly woman, who sat in front of a splendid fire, dozing, her head to one side. She rested her cheek in her hand. She was elderly and had a disordered, tousled look. Her hair, which had been a colourless fair, and was now an indeterminate grey, was falling loose about her ears. Yet there was a suggestion of lost beauty and grace, something evanescent, something of youth, of the wreck of loveliness, about the drooped head and the huddled figure.
Outside, the streets were miserable. The flagged courtyard beneath the windows showed a dull surface of glimmering wet reflection. No hope of its clearing. The skies were muddy, and beyond the courtyard in the narrow street there passed now and again an oilskinned figure under an umbrella, or a depressed cab-horse, behind an ancient driver and disgracefully rickety vehicle—himself, poor beast, only fit for the knacker’s yard. It was comfortable in the ladies’ reading-room, where very few people came except the two who now occupied it. There was something that appealed to Esther Denison, the younger of the two ladies, in the rooms which had been undisturbed since Lord Edward Fitzgerald had moved about them, his head full of rare dreams, more than a century ago.
That was the Beloved himself in the portrait above the magnificently carved mantelpiece, set amid the backs of the old volumes on their shelves, glimmering out of the soberly rich surroundings with a suggestion of eternal gaiety and tender charm.
Such colour and vivacity! The brown eyes of the portrait drew Esther Denison from her books and manuscripts, in spite of herself. She was working at ‘Middle Irish’ for a University studentship. Now and again she had to tinkle the little bell for a librarian to find something she wanted. There were several librarians, but it[432] was always the same one who answered her bell. She was hardly conscious of him while she thanked him so sweetly for finding what she wanted. She was hardly aware how painstaking he was, how anxious to help. There never was more than a murmured word between them. They observed the rule of silence of the reading-room, although there was never anyone there but Esther Denison, and that queer old Miss Brooke, who in her waking hours read nothing but eighteenth-century memoirs, with now and again a volume of poetry or a romance.
The ladies’ reading-room was a very good place for such work as Esther Denison’s. The quiet was unbroken, because of the thick walls and the retired situation of the great house between the courtyard and the gardens at the back. All the corridors were lined with books,—such books as no one ever asks to read—old calf and leather-bound volumes, which were never taken from their shelves. Those Transactions of Parliament had been there when the Beloved was young and in love, when he went to and fro between this house and the House of Commons in College Green. The deep walls of books seemed to deaden all rumour of life in the ladies’ reading-room, while downstairs the men’s reading-room was crowded, and the swing-doors went from morn till even.
Esther Denison used to forget that there was any presence in the room but her own while she worked. The work absorbed her: she delighted in it, difficult as it was. Hour after hour she would sit there, her delicate Muse-like head bent over the abstruse page. Her face was as soft in colour, as delicately and firmly moulded, as a pink sweet-pea. She wore her fair hair plaited, and twisted like a laurel-wreath around her small head. She never looked round, nor glanced up, when the librarian came in noiselessly. He went away carrying with him an impression of the pure profile, the softly opening lips, the head filleted with pale gold, which drew him to return against his will.
Little by little something of intimacy sprang up between Esther Denison and Miss Brooke. At first the girl had sent the elder woman a pitying glance and thought. She was half crazed or whole crazed, poor thing. She talked in her sleep, and she was often asleep. When she woke up, she talked to herself or to the picture above the fireplace. Some girls might have been afraid of this strange companion. Not so Esther Denison. She had become accustomed to the odd figure sitting in the chair in front of the fire. She would have missed it if it had not been there.
One very grey, very dull afternoon, the fire sank low in the[433] grate while Miss Brooke slept. Esther realised with a start that the room was cold. She had opened a window and the damp chill had entered. It was nearly time for the lights. She stood up and went to replenish the fire, putting on the coal gently, bit by bit, so as not to disturb the sleeper.
Kneeling between her and the fire, Miss Brooke’s face seemed to glimmer out of the dark. The rooms were always full of mysterious shadows. Glancing at her, as a little flame sprang up in the grate and died away, Esther Denison had a queer illusion. The withered face was for the moment the face of a girl, soft and round and purely tinted—not so unlike the face of which she had caught a careless glimpse in the glass as she arranged her hat before coming out that morning. Then the illusion vanished. Miss Brooke woke up with a weary sigh and shivered. She was elderly and cracked-looking again. Esther stirred up the fire and went to the window, which she closed before returning to her work.
Every afternoon, about five, a bright face would appear framed in the glass of the door, and there would come a sharp little tapping on the pane. Then Esther would nod, close her book, and lay it aside; gather her things together and go off home through the wet streets—they were nearly always wet that winter—with her brother, Bobby, who was a student at Trinity College. Bobby would wait, cooling his heels in the corridor, while his sister put on her outdoor things in an inner room of the ladies’ reading-room. That too had its roaring fire and deep, shabby, easy chairs. It also was walled with books. The ordinary reader, whenever she came—which was seldom—seemed unaware of the inner room which you entered by a door that simulated book-shelves, continuing the long line of books by dummy backs, painted on the door. People had occasionally been startled to see that door open.
Esther would go home with her brother to the house in the suburbs and the pretty faded mother, who lamented that she had a blue-stocking for a daughter.
‘You grow old-maidish already,’ she would say. ‘Your indifference has cooled off the men your pretty face attracted. You will be old before your time, working in that fusty room at something that will never be any good to you. Men hate a blue-stocking.’
Esther only laughed. She was very fond of the pretty complaining mother with whom she had so little in common. She merely remarked that the reading-room was the most comfortable place in Dublin during these winter days. By and by, when the[434] spring came, she would go out into the fields. It did not matter to her about men. She was only interested in them when they were grey and scholarly—except, of course, Bobby, who was her darling and always stood up for her. She had not met the young man who mattered to her.
As she said it she remembered the face of the portrait in the reading-room, and her pulses quickened a little. Men like that did not live nowadays.
Her lips curled a little scornfully. There were none like the Beloved in these prosperous days of a peaceful dullness. She remembered his eyes, brown as salmon-pools in their amber depths, his quick sideways smile, the light on his brown head. Why, there were moments in the high dim room full of shadows when the portrait had looked alive! It was a brilliant bit of painting—the green of the cravat, the scarlet of the waistcoat, the brown face with the touch of carmine in the cheeks. Odd, how they lit the room!
Every morning now she returned to the reading-room with an ever growing sense of pleasant anticipation. No matter how early she arrived Miss Brooke was already there, in her accustomed place. If another reader came by any chance, Miss Brooke would go off into the inner room and remain there till the intruder had gone. Her meals were brought to her in that inner room from some place outside. They were very light meals—tea, a boiled egg, a little fruit, some hot cakes.
The time came when, with an air of friendliness, she brought a cup of tea and placed it by Esther’s elbow.
‘You forget to go out for your lunch,’ she said. ‘That is not good for the young. You spend too much time over those queer characters. You will lose the brightness of your eyes; your back will bend. I like to look up and see you there when I am awake. But⸺I was once as pretty as you. Do not come here too much. This place is full of dreams. I have found it worth while to give up all things, but⸺’
She would be quite sensible and coherent for a while; then she would wander off into something unintelligible.
While they were talking one day the librarian came in. He greeted Miss Brooke in a murmur as he passed on to find the thing[435] he needed. He seemed to need many books from those otherwise undisturbed shelves.
‘That is a pleasant young man,’ Miss Brooke said as he went out, closing the door behind him. ‘He is in and out here a great deal since you began to read here, much more than formerly.’
She fixed her rather mad, bright eyes on Esther, who, to her annoyance, felt the colour come to her cheeks; she always coloured very easily.
‘Ah, that is right,’ Miss Brooke said. ‘Mr. Tyrrell is an excellent young man. You do not know him. I must make you known to each other. I was afraid that you were going to follow me. You are so exactly like a girl I once knew. I am disappointed in you, but it is best so. One should grasp at the happiness near at hand, even though grace and beauty—and more than that—are dead a hundred years.’
She stopped suddenly as though she listened, and went on again.
‘What was I talking about?’ she asked. ‘My poor head! It is full moon. I always talk nonsense when there is a full moon. Is that your brother come for you, my dear?’
It was not Bobby. It was the librarian. He brought a message from Bobby, who was unable to come for her. She was to take a cab home with her books and papers.
Having delivered his message the librarian waited while Esther put on her hat. She dressed very prettily, in the picturesque fashion of a day which had an artistic movement all to itself. Her cloak and flat cap of green velvet were like the sheathing of a flower. As she came from the inner room so attired, the librarian’s eyes fluttered as though he had seen a vision.
‘I will carry these for you,’ he said, lifting the parcel of books.
Miss Brooke did not appear to notice. She had a queer way of suddenly leaving realities behind. The librarian replenished the fire. She did not seem to notice the noise he made. Her eyes were fixed on the picture above the fireplace.
‘What time does she go home?’ Esther Denison asked, as they went out into the dim corridor where the lights were not yet on. ‘It seems so lonely, leaving her there.’
‘As a matter of fact’—the librarian had the slightest hesitation of speech, which gave him the air of a gentle deference—‘she does not go home. I do not believe she has any home to go to.’
‘Then she lives here?’
‘I believe she sleeps in front of the fire. It was a long time before we discovered that she remained here at night, after every one was gone. When we discovered—it is an irregularity of course—but—we wink at it. We could not discover that she had anywhere to go to or any friends. She does no harm. She is always about—as though she has just arrived—when the servants begin to arrange the rooms in the morning. She is not really mad, you know. She has only hallucinations. She has been coming here so long that she seems to belong to the house.’
‘It is a beautiful house to belong to,’ Esther said, as though she were talking to herself. ‘I am glad you let her stay.’
A little later a thought came to her. Supposing Miss Brooke were to be taken ill in the night? Some one, she supposed, slept on the premises. Only the front of the house—the main block, in which had been the reception-rooms—was used as library and reading-rooms. There was the underground story, in which no servant would sleep nowadays; but there was also abundant room at the back, or at the top of the house—not accessible from this part. She had already ascertained that there was no communication between these rooms and a great portion of the old house. The rooms suddenly ceased in a wall of books. The communication must have been blocked up.
She was working very hard at this time. The annoying thing was that, as the examination came near, she began to find it difficult to concentrate her thoughts. Perhaps she had been working too hard. It could not be that ‘Middle Irish’ was losing its fascination for her; but, little by little, she found that something was coming between her and the folios and manuscripts. The something was—it took the shape of—the portrait of the Beloved. Once or twice she fell asleep, just as Miss Brooke did, and slept, her face upon her folded arms, amid the scattered learning on the table.
‘The room was so hot,’ she said apologetically to the librarian, who had wakened her and seemed more perturbed about her drowsiness than need be.
‘You are overworking,’ he answered, with a sharpness in his voice. ‘You will have to give it up, or have a nervous breakdown.’
She forgot to wonder at the something like anger in his voice.
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’ she said, ‘so near the exam.! Afterwards, I shall take a good rest. I shall read nothing but novels for a month.’
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘There are cobwebs here that get into people’s brains. Look at Miss Brooke! You must go away into the country and not touch a book. The Spring will be here soon. Although it is wet to-night there is a west wind that brings the fields.’
‘I must get through my exam. first,’ she said. ‘Afterwards, I dare say it will be best for me.’
‘You will break down before,’ he replied gloomily, and she was frightened.
There came a few fine, beautiful days, when she went out and wandered in country lanes and by the sea. The librarian was taking a holiday at this time and sometimes she encountered him, and they walked together and returned to town together. The larks were singing by this time, and here and there in the fields there was a daisy. There were authentic tidings of spring blown down from the mountains and in from the fields and woods. She had listened at last to the librarian—their intimacy had grown in those country walks—and had consented to lay aside her work till the eve of the studentship exam., because she felt that she was going to fail if she stuck at it. But he could not know, she said to herself, the strain it was upon her to keep away from her work in the reading-room. She had been so happy there. There was something missing even in the fields and by the sea.
A week passed, and one evening she dined alone, her mother and Bobby having gone to a theatre. Her dinner was but a pretence. She remembered that the ladies’ reading-room was open till nine o’clock. It tempted her like a forbidden fruit. She could get in an hour’s work there while they were at the theatre. Her heart began to beat hard as the thought came to her of the walk through the wet streets, the lit windows of the great house beyond the courtyard, the hall through which she would pass so quickly, the stairs, the narrow corridor between the books. Then the ladies’ reading-room, so good after the cheerless street, its fire, the brown books with their flash of gilding, Miss Brooke sitting by the fire, the portrait—it would flash a look of welcome as she came in, wondering why she had stayed away so long.
She loved her work, and she had missed it. It was lucky Mr. Tyrrell was out of town or he might have called, as he had called once or twice lately, with a book or some other pretext for coming, and had hindered her. The rest had done her good. It was so good to be getting back to work, to be so keen.
Her pulses beat in her ears as she hurried on her way. She[438] arrived at her destination. As she passed through the hall, she had an absurd feeling that Archie Tyrrell—she knew his name was Archie by this time—might meet her and turn her back. He had taken a masterful way with her lately. If by any unforeseen chance he should have come back!
She glanced fearfully at the swing-door of the general reading-room. Then she remembered. He was not on duty in the evenings, even if he had been in town. Few readers came in the evenings. It was a concession to poor students engaged in the daytime that kept the library and reading-room open at night till nine o’clock. She hurried along the corridor, joy in her blood and giving wings to her feet. Through the half-glass door she saw that the room was dim beyond. There was only firelight in it. She was glad. That meant she should find only Miss Brooke. The last day she had been there a couple of girls had come in: had asked for Swinburne’s poems and Rossetti’s, and had hovered over them like butterflies, dipping into a page here, a page there, till they remembered an appointment and went away. She had felt a sense of resentment against them as intruders into a place which had become so strangely dear to her.
Miss Brooke was not there, though her chair stood in front of the fire as usual. She must only just have left it, for the leather back was warm. Oddly enough, now that she was come, Esther had no inclination to work. She sat down in Miss Brooke’s chair. She leant back, looking up at the portrait. It seemed to lean towards her, smiling at her. It was as though the sun had come out.
Had she fallen asleep? She awoke with the strange sense of its being night and every one in the world asleep. The fire had gone low, was almost out. There was a little glimmer in the darkness, which she knew somehow came from the street-lamps beyond the courtyard. Somewhere there was a faint murmuring as of voices at a distance—in the rooms, not out-of-doors.
She was suddenly frightened—of the old house and all its ghosts. She remembered the Beloved. With him no woman need be afraid.
She turned to where the portrait hung for comfort; but she could see nothing. She stood up, groping in the darkness.
Somewhere a clock struck two great strokes in the silence of the sleeping town.
Where was Miss Brooke? She felt her way towards the wall of[439] books, still but half awake. They still burnt oil-lamps in the library: electric light was not yet come into general use. She had no matches to strike a light. The darkness was very baffling. The furniture seemed to get in her way as though it were something animate that would keep her back.
At last she found the book-shelves. She groped along them for the door. It was slightly ajar. There were the whispering voices not far away.
She passed into the inner room. To her amazement, in the solid wall of books before her there was a door, which stood ajar. Beyond it was a light. The voices were in the room beyond the open door.
She went forward quickly, striking against a table as she went. Something fell with a loud noise. The whispering—it was not much more than that—went on undisturbed.
She was at the door. With her hand upon her frightened heart she stood, looking in amazement. The room into which she looked was a stately long room. It was lit by three hanging chandeliers in which were many candles. It had an air of old-fashioned elegance with its gilt couches and tabourets covered in a Pompadour silk. The walls and ceilings were painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses and wreaths of flowers. The curtains of the long windows were of the same silk as the chair-covers. She noticed the colour of the silk—a faded delicate blue.
At the moment, she was not aware that she noticed any of these things. Her conscious self was only aware of two people clasped in each other’s arms by the fireplace at the far end of the room. The Beloved—just as he was in the picture—and a childishly young girl, her face lifted to his. There was something of wild sweetness about the girl, in her bunched-up white frock and scarlet ribbons. Her dark hair fell in a maze of curls—like—was it ‘The Parson’s Daughter’ of Romney? Something as familiar as that.
They were entirely absorbed in each other. The girl’s white arms were flung about the neck of the Beloved. Esther Denison forgot that she was spying. She stood against the darkness of the room, watching them with distended eyes. Was there some sickness of envy in her heart? The Beloved made so perfect a lover, and these days were so drab.
‘Edouard! mon Edouard!’
It was the girl who spoke in a passionate whisper.
‘Hist!’ he said, turning about in a startled way. ‘Did you hear a sound?’
The girl dropped her arms from about his neck. She seemed to listen. She grew pale, clasping her hands together and looking at him. She was very young, although she had the soft roundness of young maternity about her childish figure.
‘Mon ami!’ she began, panting.
‘It is nothing,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘A mouse in the wainscotting. The place is alive with them. We have an hour yet before dawn.’
The lights were broken up, wavering. Some queer unreality was coming over the scene. There were voices, the murmuring of many waters in Esther’s ears. She felt like some one coming back from a great distance to the light, travelling slowly, painfully.
Then she was aware of something familiar, comforting. It was the face of the librarian—a good, strong, reassuring face, something to hold on to in the medley of her thoughts that made the world insubstantial. The room was full of grey light, beyond the one lamp which some one had thought of lighting.
‘Are you better, darling?’
It was her mother’s voice. Gradually she came to the knowledge of where she was. She was in the ladies’ reading-room. Before her was the wall of books in which there had been the door she had seen open.
‘You must have fallen asleep, darling, and been locked in,’ her mother went on, in the voice of one who speaks to some one unutterably dear, who has very nearly slipped away from love and life. ‘We were terrified not to find you at home. No one knew where you had gone to. Fortunately, Bobby thought at last of Mr. Tyrrell. He had just come back from the country by the last train. There was a business to find the person who had the keys. But⸺You are all right, darling, and we are here—Bobby and Mr. Tyrrell and I. There is a carriage waiting.’
Some days later she told Archie Tyrrell her story. Oddly enough, she had felt unable to tell it to anyone else. ‘No one is ever to hear it but you,’ she had stipulated.
‘I promise.’
She was still on her sofa. She had been rather alarmingly ill from the shock of her experience. He listened. His face was grave and gentle. He expressed no disbelief. He did not try to persuade her that her vision was hallucination. Instead, he said[441] something for which she loved him. She had been so afraid of disbelief—of hard, practical common sense.
‘The house is his monument,’ he said, ‘his shrine, his temple. You cannot get away from him. You must not read there again: it is too lonely. They are going to close those rooms. Soon we shall have the fine new building growing up.’
‘Ah,’ she said pitifully. ‘I am sorry. It is like turning them out. And poor Miss Brooke—what will she do?’
She had a sudden thought.
‘I believe she used to see him,’ she said. ‘She talked so oddly that I did not heed her—but now things come back to me.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘She thought she saw him. It began when she was quite a young girl, a student like you, and very pretty. She was always sitting there facing the portrait. It became real to her. He put her out of conceit with common men. She might have married: there was a lover—but then’⸺
‘He was not the Beloved,’ said Esther Denison, and slipped her hand into his. Then she began to weep.
He did not tell her then, not till some weeks had passed, that Miss Brooke was dead. The threat of eviction from her old quarters had killed her. She had been found in some kind of a fit in her familiar place in the ladies’ reading-room, on the very afternoon of the day that was to end with Esther’s falling asleep under the eyes of the Beloved.
She was quite herself again, and within a week of her wedding-day, when he thought it safe to take her to see the alterations which were being made in the ladies’ reading-room. The portrait was gone—to the gallery across the garden. A great number of the books had been removed. The place looked disordered and unhappy—not as she had known it. This would have laid no spell on her.
It was in the workmen’s dinner-hour. They had the place to themselves. He took her hand and held it in a firm, warm clasp. ‘There was a door,’ he said; ‘you were quite right. It was just where we found you in a huddled-up heap on the floor. But it was locked, and the bookcases covered it. You can walk through now.’
They went into the inner room. There was the open door as she had seen it. But what desolation beyond! The long room was bare of furniture; it had evidently been shut up for a long time, for it smelt mouldily. The light came in coldly through the long[442] windows, curtained only with cobwebs. There was dust everywhere, in drifts on the floor, deadening the sounds of their feet. It had dimmed the shepherds and shepherdesses of the painted walls and the flower-wreaths and Cupids of the ceiling.
‘They used to meet here,’ he said in a low voice. ‘When he was “on his keeping.” He had some secret way of entry known only to them and one or two faithful servants. When the scent was hot she hid him here, and not even the Duke or Duchess knew. He used to read in these rooms when the house was asleep. There was a man here before me who swore he saw him at night searching the shelves for some book he wanted. It is the influence, of course. Such as he leaves the influence behind him long after he is dead.’
She was very pale. As they turned and went out of the room quietly, she said, nodding her head towards the fine new building which was going up in the courtyard:
‘After all, I do not think I shall ever read there. I doubt that I am cut out for scholarship. I do not feel that I could go back to “Middle Irish.” The studentship will have to go.’
‘No?’ he said, with a lifting of his handsome eyebrows. ‘After all, a married woman will not have much time for scholarship—of so difficult a kind.’
‘I suppose not,’ she said, as they stepped out into the open air. ‘Perhaps—after all—I worked too hard. Women have that way—have they not? I am not surprised I ... broke down.’
Then she added something quite irrelevant:
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if poor Miss Brooke ever saw them together. When she spoke—it was only of him. Could she have seen them—as I did?’
Katharine Tynan.
In the evening of April 22, 1915, my regiment left camp, and entrained at about 11 P.M. We were very packed in the train, and this did not improve our tempers. We had not the slightest idea where we were going, and in the early hours of the morning of April 23 we found ourselves at Cassel, a small town in the department du Nord, where we detrained, and began a long, weary march. The country-side was very hilly, and we soon began to feel how near we were to the front, as we distinctly heard the booming of the guns, and all the cross-roads were guarded by French soldiers. At last, when very tired, we found ourselves marching into a plain, and shortly afterwards arrived at the little town of Winnezeele, a few miles from the Belgian frontier. It was about 9 A.M. when we arrived there, and we were told that we were going no further that day.
Troops were billeted in the neighbouring farms, and I was kept busy interpreting for everyone. I was at last able to see to the needs of my own platoon, and got my odd sixty men comfortably settled down in a nice farm. The lady of the place, whose husband was serving at Dunkirk, was rather surly at first, owing to her having shortly before received an enforced visit from some Canadians, who had proved rather rough. She and I ended in becoming very good friends, and still further cementing the Entente cordiale. We spent a delightful day of rest amid charming scenery, in the enjoyment of a really lovely day in early summer; it was hard to realise what we were doing there at all. We would forget, only to be brought back to earth by the rumbling of the guns, none too far away, and by the sight of a German aeroplane which was being fired at, the flash of the guns being quite visible. I have nothing but pleasant memories of Winnezeele and district. The farms were very picturesque, the village clean and prosperous, and prettily situated. Its atmosphere somehow reminded me of Bamburgh. The people were all cordial. One old man told me that early in the war, when the Germans attempted their great enveloping movement, an Uhlan patrol rode into the village. In tones of great excitement, he told me how some courageous[444] citizen, whose name he declared must be kept a profound secret, went and informed the French infantry patrol, and how the ‘fantassins’ came and rounded up the enemy. Since then no German had appeared in Winnezeele. This little incursion must have been one of the high-water marks of the Teuton invasion. We officers messed at the chief Inn, and had quite a good time, trying to turn our French to good account by conversing with a certain ‘Marie Louise,’ who ministered to our wants. It was a little picture of France at war: France at her best. There were no young civilians to be seen, no ‘starred’ men. All had gone to the war. The fields were being worked by women, girls, young children, and old folk, and all worked with a will. Even the farmer was not exempt. The husband of Madame Dubois, upon whom I and my platoon were billeted, had gone, and his wife cheerfully carried on in his place, and ran the farm. The country-side, however, seemed to be managing very well, and we found plenty of good fare in the little place. I had an attic all to myself on the farm, and spent a splendid night on a bed stuffed with straw, a Belgian boy refugee kindly turning out to make room for me. The men, as usual, slept in the hay barn.
Having spent what was to be our last comfortable day for a long time to come, we started off again the next day (April 23) at about twelve noon, and soon crossed the frontier into Belgium. We met several refugees making their way to France, and a very motley crowd they appeared to be. They indeed could feel the realities of war! We passed through several villages, filled with war-stained British troops, and the civil population appeared pleased to see us. We also noticed that, once in Belgium, the male civil population was much larger than in France. In Belgium the conscription laws by no means include all males capable of bearing arms, whereas in France there are no exemptions whatsoever. The Flemish type became more prevalent as we proceeded, all the girls wearing the fringe which seems to be characteristic of Belgium. They certainly knew how to smile. After much marching and many halts, through the Flemish plain which had begun round Winnezeele, we reached the now famous Poperinghe, a fine old Flemish town with a beautiful church. In peace times the place could be compared with some of our rather sleepy cathedral cities, but now it was full of Yankee hustle. It was packed with French and Belgian soldiers, who all gave us a hearty welcome. We were in excellent spirits as we marched through the town, and[445] poor Lieut. Bainbridge, the Brigade Signalling Officer, as he passed me on a motor bike, said, ‘Make as much noise as you can, as these people,’ referring to the civil population, ‘need cheering up.’ Certainly to them, with the Germans so close, the entry of more troops to keep back the swarms which had already wrought such havoc in most parts of their country must always have been a very welcome sight. On the march through the country-side, where there was not so much to interest us, we played the mouth-organ to cheer one another on, and I often took a turn myself, sometimes resting in favour of ‘Bob’ Young, who was soon to meet his end in the forthcoming battle.
After leaving the town the evidence of war was everywhere seen, ambulances and wagons becoming more and more numerous, and squads of Belgian soldiers, with staves only, continually passing us on their way to rest. As dusk was falling we found our way to a wood called Flamertinghe, the only building near us being a solitary inn. We at last got some food, and bivouacked for the night. At this place we were only five or six miles from the German line, and there were some reserve trenches close by which were to be manned by us if necessary. ‘Bramble’ Booth, who had been out previously with the London Rifle Brigade, said he recognised the locality, which had been the scene of desperate Anglo-German combats. During the night, when not asleep, we were entertained by a continuous rattle of musketry, which seemed to be extremely close at hand. It did not disturb me much, however, and I was soon fast asleep.
On awaking on April 24, we found that we had some neighbours, Zouaves and other French troops, and Belgians, who were soon all very friendly with our men.
We here heard some startling news, to the effect that the French lines outside Ypres had been pierced owing to the use of poison gases. The Zouaves said that hundreds of their comrades had been ‘gassed.’ The Canadians, however, had made a furious counter-attack, and had repaired some of the damage; their losses had been very heavy, and the situation was reckoned to be serious. We made the best of our time, and spent the morning writing letters and watching a large British howitzer at work, close to us. The gunners claimed to be making some good hits.
We made a hearty lunch, and I pleased the officers by getting wine for them at the inn. We expected to be there a week, when suddenly, about four o’clock in the afternoon, an order came for[446] the Brigade to concentrate at a place about two miles east of Ypres. We soon found ourselves on the main road. We marched up on the right-hand side, and on the extreme left of the road there was a continued stream of ambulances coming down from the front. Up the centre of the road ammunition carts were galloping at full speed towards Ypres. It was evident that a very big battle was raging in front, and the air was full of rumours brought by stragglers and slightly wounded men, painfully making their way towards safety. These men looked utterly exhausted and seemed exceedingly pleased to see us; one of them said ‘You are badly wanted,’ though at the time we never realised how desperate the situation was. On the other hand, another straggler cheerfully informed us that we had only to take one more trench and then the whole of Belgium would be in our hands. This man was the cause of raising many false hopes, soon to be violently dispelled.
At last, as it was night, we approached the ruins of Ypres, and the roar of the guns was tremendous. We marched past the famous Cloth Hall (even then badly knocked about), and began to move at the double, so as to escape being shelled. It was too late, however, and we were brought to a halt in the grand square of Ypres, opposite the cathedral. Shells were bursting all round us, and the Brigadier seemed uncertain whether he should proceed. It seems that spies were sheltered in the place, and signalled our arrival to the Germans, who gave us a very uncomfortable ten minutes. The first casualties occurred in No. 1 Platoon, a shell bursting at the head of the battalion, and wounding several men. For a moment there was almost a panic; but by great efforts we kept the men in their places, and after that they behaved splendidly. I had a close shave for a start, a shell bursting close to my platoon, and wounding Private Henderson, who was next to me, in the foot.
The cathedral was on fire, and made a glorious, but sad, spectacle. At this time it was still more or less intact, as were the majority of the deserted houses.
At last we moved on, and debouched from the town without further loss. We could clearly see the German lines, which were lit up by large coloured flares, as a safeguard against night attacks. The flares reminded one of fireworks and were quite pretty to watch. We had not gone far before we turned off into a field, and lay down and rested. Each platoon lay in a group by itself, so[447] as to minimise the danger from the enemy’s shells, which were falling thick and fast. It was also wet and damp, and however elevated we might be morally, we felt extremely miserable. An hour or so before dawn on the 25th we were collected together, and more ammunition was issued. This operation took some time in the dark, and ought to have been done before we entered Ypres, as a few shells might have wiped us out.
At last we were on the forward road again, and after a mile or two turned to our left down a narrow lane, and were there halted. Dawn was now breaking, and none of us had the least idea what we were going to do. It was cold, muddy, and sopping wet. I never felt more miserable in all my life. However, there was nothing we could do but try and make the best of it, till the sun should come out and dry us.
I afterwards discovered that we were rather to the right of Hill 60, and that the British position, a mile or two ahead, was being held by a handful of men. In parts of the line this handful had been overwhelmed, and we were ordered to go forward and try to save the situation. The Canadians had been fighting against enormous odds, and were almost exhausted; a great many of them had been gassed, and some, whom our men came across, said that they could do no more. In such circumstances we were ordered to advance, although we had no precise instructions; apparently we were to go on as far as we could, and drive the Germans back, or at least hold them.
We commenced our advance in ‘artillery formation,’ but soon extended into ‘open order.’ I won’t attempt to give many details of that long morning, as they are too complicated. We advanced and retired, and then advanced again, during which time several casualties occurred. The bursting of the shells all round one was rather trying, and a very strange experience to the uninitiated! A shell unfortunately burst in the middle of No. 1 Platoon (Morpeth), very seriously wounding Second Lieutenant Adams, and killing and wounding several of his men. Captain Flint, also of this company, was blown up by a shell, though not actually touched. He jarred his spine on landing again, having been carried to a great height. Some of the Germans were very close, and several of our men almost ran into them accidentally. This was made possible by the undulating nature of the ground.
Our advance was a complete success, and the advance posts of the enemy withdrew. They could probably have overwhelmed[448] our battalion, but fortunately were under the impression that they were opposed by a much larger force than they really were. The G.O.C. used our brigade as a bluff, and the fact that our men, in their enthusiasm, advanced at a great pace, lent colour to this. A Seaforth Highlander’s letter appeared in an Edinburgh paper, in which he said that they had received a terrible shelling, and had made up their minds that their last hour had come. Then suddenly they observed that the shells were passing over their heads, and looking back they saw to their joy the Northumberlands, advancing in perfect order, as if on parade.
These Germans, who withdrew before us, I have since discovered, were beginning to come through the gap which had been made in our front line. If they had only known the number of British reinforcements, and had pushed their attack home, they might perhaps, to use an expression, have been marching into Ypres ‘in fours’ in the evening. As it was, our advance in open country completely bluffed them: they hesitated and were lost. Their hesitation enabled our front line to close its gap, and several of the enemy, who had broken through, and then withdrew before our advance, were captured.
Finally on that day we took up a defensive line on the hillside. We had not a very large ‘field of fire,’ because after about 60 or 100 yards the ground sloped downwards, and so if the enemy should attack we should have to be extremely smart with our rifles. In front, however, somewhere on the slope, out of sight, the London Rifle Brigade were entrenched. We did not know for certain, but heard rumours that they were hard pressed and that a party of Germans had broken through and might be on us any minute. My platoon was in a ditch with a hedge in front of it, and underwent a terrible shelling in the afternoon, which slackened off towards the evening. Shells burst continually all along the long, thin line of our battalion, some bursting just short, some just beyond, and others crashing through and making cruel gaps among our men. I had many almost miraculous escapes. A bullet passed through my cap, and I was all but buried by a shell, which tore away half of a little shelter I had crawled into. One shell, which burst a yard or two off me, killed two of my men and injured another. The two men displayed great heroism in their dying agony. One of them, Bob Young, as he was carried away, minus his legs, called upon an officer, who was almost overcome by the sight, to ‘be a man’; and I was further told that he died kissing his wife’s photograph, with the word ‘Tipperary’ on his lips. Such were the men the[449] Germans failed to break, men with an unconquerable spirit which no human horror could overcome.
The most trying time was when it became dark, because, had the Germans attacked us, we should have been unable to shoot many. We waited with fixed bayonets and found it bitterly cold. I spent a good part of that long afternoon and evening in sorting out my men, finding them scattered about the line, and getting them together, so that when we should march off there would be less confusion, and No. 7 Platoon would be ready. There was a ruined farm just behind our line, and there we obtained some good water from a pump. There Donkin showed me his bleeding foot, which had received a dose of shrapnel.
At last, between ten and eleven P.M., under cover of the night, we were relieved by other troops, and retired to almost the same place from whence we started in the morning. We lay down in a field and slept, in spite of the cold, for we were worn out; we had been marching and fighting for about thirty-six hours on end, and the only food we had had was the iron ration we carried with us, and the water we got at the farmhouse. I lost my ration as a matter of fact, as it became unfastened from my belt in the course of the advance. The battalion in these operations lost about 150 killed and wounded, including the two young Wakes (Wilf and Tom) of Bamburgh, both killed by the same shell.
Three officers were wounded, whom I have already mentioned, viz. Captain Flint, Second Lieutenant Adams, and T. Donkin of Rothbury. Donkin’s injury was slight, and we rather envied him. I should mention that the officer in command of my company, Captain T. O. Wood, was absent, having been detained at Havre, while the second in command, Captain Hugh Liddell, was temporarily incapacitated by a shell which burst near him, so I, as senior subaltern, commanded No. 2 Company for most of the day. In my own platoon I had thirteen casualties, most of them only wounded, and all the lads gave me the greatest assistance and seemed quite fearless, so much that I feel the praise bestowed upon us, both by Sir John French and the Commander of the Canadian Division, was fully justified. During the day I had to throw away my greatcoat, as I found it so heavy, and now, as I lay on the field, which was very damp, I felt bitterly cold. I got in, however, between two of my men, and notwithstanding the possibility of more shells and the intense cold I was soon fast asleep.
We were roused up early in the morning (April 25), still feeling extremely cold. We made some tea, however, at a ruined farmhouse[450] close by, and this brought warmth and comfort. One of my men lent me his greatcoat, and insisted that I should wear it for a bit. Captain Wood turned up, and took over the command of the company. Before long the sun came out, and we had a gloriously fine day. The battalion moved into an adjoining field, and rested there for the morning; this rest was very welcome, and the sun dried our clothes. We spent the time cleaning our rifles, several also taking the opportunity to write home. The subalterns busied themselves making out lists of casualties for the Divisional Staff Orderly. Rations arrived, and by mid-day we sat down to a good meal.
We were much interested by a force of Indians close to us, the Lahore Division I heard afterwards, and they seemed full of the stoicism of the East. Though no shells fell amongst us, we saw one burst with sad effect among a column of Indians on the march. Our quiet morning was a great contrast to our desperate advance in the afternoon. I must here explain in a few words the situation. We were in the Ypres salient and were thus exposed to the enemy from the east, north, and south. On the previous day we had checked the enemy on the east, but a new danger now threatened the British positions from the north side of the salient, the French colonials having been driven out of the village of St. Julien. There was thus a danger of the troops in the salient being overwhelmed by an advance of the enemy from St. Julien, with the consequent fall of Ypres. As this town was the old capital of Flanders, the moral effect would have been great, besides opening the road for further progress towards Calais; it had therefore to be defended at all costs. The position of the English troops was insecure; they had suffered great losses; their artillery was almost powerless owing to lack of ammunition, and England’s new armies were hardly yet ready. In such circumstances the arrival of the Division was most opportune, and behind them more troops were being hurried up from all directions. Cavalry, even the Life Guards, were compelled to do infantry work in the trenches, and it was thought that by sending our Brigade against the strong position of St. Julien (an almost impossible task) the Germans would be bluffed, and would remain on the defensive.
This being the state of affairs, we were ordered shortly after lunch to attack St. Julien immediately, and to take it at all costs. We were off almost at once. We advanced at a great rate, in artillery formation, soon extending, however, into open order. If yesterday had been heavy, to-day was ten times worse. The[451] German fire was terrific, and we had to face a hail of shells and bullets. The neighbourhood was infested with snipers, cleverly concealed, who made a point of picking off senior officers or despatching the wounded. It is a wonder that the whole battalion was not exterminated. The men, however, went forward with such spirit, and kept such magnificent discipline, that casualties, heavy as they were, were thus minimised. Now, perhaps, some of us for the first time realised the value of good discipline and good training.
We found that the only way to advance was for a few men, under an officer or an N.C.O., to make a short rush forward, and then to lie down flat and regain their breath. The whole battalion was mixed up, and I found myself on its left flank, where it joined on to the 6th Northumberlands. It was a case of every man using his own intelligence with courage. We made a good deal of progress, and took up a strong line with a hedge in front of it, which afforded some shelter. The order came down, however, that the advance had to be continued. I consulted an officer of the 6th and we decided to lead the men on at once. We advanced about thirty yards where the men could take cover behind another hedge, while others a little more to the right could take cover behind a sandbag wall, made on some former occasion, and which acted as a continuation of the hedge. On the right of this wall was a ruined farm building. In front of this position was a large open field, and at the other end of it, a few hundred yards distant, lay the village of St. Julien and the Germans. To cross this field without adequate artillery support was impossible, and yet we had been ordered to advance. Our present position by the farm, however, was being shelled to such an extent, that as far as our safety went it did not much matter where we were.
While I was taking a short rest behind this last sandbag wall, I met a young officer of the 6th Northumberland Fusiliers wounded in the arm, who told me that he was in the office of Messrs. Dees and Thompson, my father’s solicitors. He and some other officers all insisted that I was their senior, and must take command of the troops in this part of the attack. We began our last advance, and made two or three short rushes. I had just finished the last of these, and was going to lie down, when I received a staggering blow on the back and fell forward. I suffered an agonising pain, and soon felt another blow on the back, also extremely violent. I began to find difficulty in breathing, and wondered if I would ever leave this spot. Any moment I expected would be my last. I felt faint, and called to a soldier near by, and asked him to give[452] me some water; he at once threw me his water-bottle, and that somewhat revived me. I felt, however, that I might bleed to death, and I called to the man to see if he could come and help me. He came at once, but was unfortunately wounded in the leg in so doing. My position was a perilous one, as the Germans swept the plain with their murderous fire, and to stand up was certain death. Projectiles of all kinds were falling round me, and I began to realise that my chance of getting out alive was dubious. The man who had already befriended me now said that there was a ditch close by, and if I could crawl on my stomach he would try to pull me along by the leg. Every movement was agonising, but at last we managed to reach the ditch and lie there exhausted. By this time our advance was quite held up, and we had reached further forward than the other part of the battalion. Soon others began to crawl into the ditch, including two very nice officers of the 6th Northumberland Fusiliers, who were most sympathetic. Besides them, I heard Corporal (later Sergeant) Renwick’s cheery voice, and he was straining every nerve on my behalf, regardless of danger to himself. He afterwards told me that a colour-sergeant, when I had finished my painful trek, pushed me into the ditch, to be himself blown to pieces immediately after by a shell. There were two dead men, apparently, lying by my side, though I was unaware of these facts.
The afternoon wore on, and I continued in great pain, though some brandy was passed up to me. After a long wait, it seemed likely that our men would have to retire a little, and as I could not move I was in danger of being captured. To have carried me away would have been an impossibility, as we should most certainly have been shot down by a heartless enemy. Sergeant Renwick was anxious to risk it, but the young officers insisted on taking the risk themselves. At last, when Sergeant Renwick had crawled away to get help, one of the young officers told me that it was imperative I should make every effort to get away; so I crawled for about fifteen yards over a specially dangerous zone, and was then helped up, and supported by an officer on one side, Lieutenant Bruce Ramsay of the 6th, and by a soldier on the other. I managed to struggle along, supported by them, to the ruined farmhouse, which was being defended by some soldiers of the D.C.L.I., I think. The officer in command told Ramsay that it was against the regulations to help me and that he must therefore join his own battalion, while he himself would look after me. Part of the ruined farm was being used as a field dressing station; but before I could reach[453] it I had a miraculous escape from two shells, which apparently fell on a manure heap close by which I was standing, and which prevented them doing any further mischief.
I was most kindly treated at this station, and the D.C.L.I. officer soon had me sent away on a stretcher towards the Ypres road, and it was with a feeling of relief that I left this infernal charnel-house, and found myself gradually entering a safe zone. We stopped at a farm building by the roadside, where I was laid on some straw in the open courtyard. Darkness was now coming on, and for some time I received but scanty attention. At last some medical men came and questioned me, and I told them my name and regiment; they seemed interested, and asked me if I was Lord Armstrong’s son. There were very few ambulances, and by mistake I was not put into one of them. When the officers discovered this they had me taken down by stretcher to a dressing station near Ypres where I was well attended to, and received an injection of morphia to deaden the pain. It was probably here, unless it was at the first field dressing station, that I received the anti-tetanus serum, and was given a Tommy’s greatcoat. I slept here apparently for several hours, and Major Wright, also wounded, remembers seeing me here. Eventually I was placed in an ambulance which brought me to Poperinghe, several miles from the front. We had gaily marched through this town only a few days before.
In the meantime my battalion was unaware that I had been rescued, and Sergeant Renwick, who, as I stated, had gone to get help, came back with a party only to find that I had disappeared. Company Quartermaster Turner also went out to look for me, and I understand that all betrayed great anxiety on my behalf and feared the worst. Major Mackay, who displayed the greatest gallantry in attending to the wounded throughout the battle, and who has since been awarded the C.M.G., was also very upset in being unable to find me.
On arriving at Poperinghe, I was taken with others and placed in the church, which had been turned into an emergency hospital. Before recounting my experiences in the church, however, and those that followed on afterwards, I must finish off the account of the battle of St. Julien.
After I was wounded, it was found impossible for the 7th to advance any further. The plain in front of them was simply swept by a shower of lead from the enemy’s machine guns, rifles, and artillery, and the wounded were in a most precarious position.[454] As darkness came on they gradually removed the wounded, and the battalion held on where they were. Various reports of the battle were circulated through the Press, and it appears that some members of the brigade advanced to the outskirts of the village, but were unable to capture it. The object of the British Staff, however, had been gained. Ypres was in deadly peril, and its defenders were short of artillery, ammunition, and men. Every moment saved was of value, as reinforcements and ammunition were being hurried up. In the meantime the Germans had to be kept busy and so prevented from advancing. Hence our brigade was hurled against their position, though there was no prospect of real success. As has been said before, it was a case of bluff, and it succeeded, for the Germans, thinking they were going to be attacked in great numbers, remained on the defensive, and invaluable time was gained. The cost of more than half of one of Britain’s best infantry brigades seemed heavy, but what did it matter if Ypres and the worn-out second army were saved?
The 7th Northumberland Fusiliers suffered very heavily. We lost a great number of our men, our casualties for this afternoon’s work being about 470 killed and wounded. This added to our former casualties brought our total number of dead and wounded for the two and a half days up to about 620. We were fortunate, however, in the large number of only wounded in proportion to the number killed. Our officer casualties were: Second Lieutenant Kent killed, and Captains Archer (Adjutant), Wright, Welsh, and Lambton, and Lieutenants and Second Lieutenants J. Merivale, Frank Merivale, Herriott, Fenwicke-Clennell, and myself wounded. On the previous day we had lost, wounded, Captain Flint and Second Lieutenants Adams and Donkin.
The other battalions in the brigade all suffered heavily, and our Brigadier himself (Brigadier-General Riddell) was killed. On all this, we can only comment that it was the ‘fortune of war,’ and what does it matter who dies, if only England lives?
It is satisfactory to note that Lieutenant Bruce Ramsay, who was so instrumental in saving my life, has since been awarded the Military Cross for general good work, and also largely, I hear, for the devotion he showed in rescuing me. Sergeant Renwick was mentioned in despatches and recommended for the D.C.M., which, however, he was unfortunate to miss. Among other honours since awarded to members of the 7th, the D.S.O. of Lieutenant-Colonel Jackson and the C.M.G. of Major Mackay have been deservedly popular, as well as the M.C.s of Captains Ball and Vernon Merivale.
I have one comment to make, however, on all these operations.[455] The shortage of artillery ammunition was most apparent, and we received hardly any support from our artillery. The enemy’s shells burst in hundreds all round and among us, and we could barely reply. The gunners were wringing their hands, and watching the infantry being mowed down—infantry whom they were supposed to protect. The great agitation sprang up soon after in the Press, and many prominent men, including the Bishop of Pretoria, wrote very strongly from the Front. Whatever the causes, the fact remains that a great disaster nearly occurred through lack of shells, and that it was only the almost superhuman courage of the British infantry which saved Ypres, and did almost alone what should have been their joint work with the gunners. It was a case of human flesh and courage against German steel and preparedness. It was not till the great efforts made in England to rectify this succeeded that the warfare on the Western Front began to be waged on terms of more equality.
On the arrival of the ambulance at Poperinghe I was, as I have already mentioned, placed inside the large church which adorns this town. It was packed with all sorts of wounded, including Indians. Belgian ladies kindly brought tea to the sufferers, and chaplains came and wrote out field postcards for the men. I was feeling fairly easy, and the tea much refreshed me. I heard a familiar voice near me, and it was Frankie Merivale, who had luckily received only a slight wound. I could not move round and so was unable to see him, but we conversed for a little. I directed some field postcards, the chaplain doing the writing of course.
I cannot tell how long I stayed there, but I may have slept a night there. At any rate I remember being suddenly taken out of the church in broad daylight, and then, to my horror, found German shells bursting everywhere. I was left alone in the open for some minutes, and a shell burst within a few yards of me and shook me uncomfortably. At last, however, I was put into an ambulance, and taken to Hazebrouck, a town a few miles on the French side of the frontier.
I spent a month in this town, in No. 10 Casualty Clearing Station. The weather was extremely hot, and the wards small and stuffy. At first I was very ill indeed, being in a critical condition, and receiving frequent injections. A visit from my father, however, greatly cheered me up, and everybody showered kindness on me. The Staff were terribly overworked, as the wounded and gassed cases were pouring in from the great battle, which was still raging, and the issue of which was so doubtful that we hardly knew if Hazebrouck would continue to be safe. I was much troubled by[456] an incessant cough, and suffered a great deal of pain. Nevertheless I made progress, and must pay a high tribute to the kindness and devotion shown on all sides, by doctors, nurses, orderlies, and military chaplains. The orderlies were as gentle as angels and would sit for hours at my bedside. There was one lad of about seventeen, Private McIntyre, of Glasgow, who used to spend practically whole nights procuring me milk etc. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien came and visited me, and greatly pleased and cheered me by saying how well we had all done. Colonel Rutherford, R.A.M.C., of our Division, and my cousin Major-General Stopford also came and saw me, and the latter was most kind in procuring me various things. The Senior Chaplain, Archdeacon Southwell, was most thoughtful, and a kinder man it would be hard to find. He would write letters for me, and when I got a bit better I much amused him by dictating a letter to Monsieur Albin in French. He richly deserves the C.M.G. which he has been awarded.
For a time I had a young Belgian R.A.M.C. officer as my companion, who had suffered from a concussion, apparently by a fall from his horse. He spoke hardly any English, and feeble as my voice was I had often to try to do the necessary interpreting on his behalf. He thought I was a French officer, and had to be assured that I was not! Parcels and letters from home were a source of delight to me.
After about a month I was able to be moved to No. 7 Stationary Hospital at Boulogne, where I remained till June 25. Again I became very ill, as blood-poisoning supervened and nearly ended my life. I had an operation to get the empyema out of my chest, and another one to draw the abscess which formed on my leg and which fortunately collected and threw off the septicæmia. I was one of the lucky 25 per cent. who recover from this terrible form of blood-poisoning. I was much cheered, however, by the presence of my father, who remained at the French port for about three weeks, and brought me much fruit, strawberries being my especial favourite.
Sister Dodds, who nursed me very devotedly, brought a splendid gramophone into my room, and my father used to manipulate this for me very efficiently. I was especially fond of ‘By the silvery, silvery sea,’ ‘Girls, girls everywhere,’ and ‘Let’s all go down the Strand.’ Music did me a great deal of good, and brought smiles back to my face, which for some weeks past had been more often twisted with pain. Private C. G. Brown, A.S.C., also visited me and brought me some lovely fresh eggs. As at Hazebrouck, so at Boulogne, I became impatient towards night-time for my injection,[457] which had the most soothing effect, and, banishing for the moment pain and restlessness, allowed my brain to think calmly in peace.
Again I had most expert medical treatment, and the nurses, both Scotch and English, were very kind. As the weeks went on, I gradually threw off the poison, and my wounds became healed.
I received a visit from my charming Parisian friends, Madame and Mademoiselle Lefranc, who were very kind. Mr. Holt, of the British Red Cross (now a captain in the Army), was also a good friend to me. He kept my spirits up by amusing stories, and by impressing upon me the necessity of making an effort, and trying to get to London, he did much to save my life.
At last the tide turned, and when I landed in England on June 25 I was much better, though considerably fatigued by the long journey. I was taken to Lady Ridley’s Hospital, 10 Carlton House Terrace, and there spent another two months, being well nursed and surrounded by luxuries. My relatives and friends were all kindness; and this did much to revive me and to fill me once more with the joy of life.
I made rapid progress, and was discharged from hospital early in September, when I moved into lodgings for a three weeks’ final treatment from Dr. Carl Westman. This Swedish doctor, a clever and charming young man, was instrumental in bringing back full use to my right shoulder, which otherwise would have remained permanently stiff. On September 28 I was at last enabled to leave London for Cragside, and once more reached home after several months’ sojourn in strange parts, having passed through many vicissitudes and experiences.
Afterword:—
I spent a pleasant convalescence, and joined the 7th (Reserve) Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers, stationed at Alnwick under Lieutenant-Colonel J. Gillespie, T.D., at the end of January 1916, having been passed for light duty. I continued to make progress, and was enabled, after a time, to attend a musketry course at Strensall, and a general one at Cannock Chase. Altogether I was awarded £250 compensation for my wounds, and I am glad to state that I am now in a position to repay the Government all the money spent on me by personal service, and leave home to-morrow, en route to rejoin the old first line of the 7th in Flanders. There I hope I may be enabled to partake in those final great victories which will bring about the ruin and destruction of that plague-spot which has arisen on God’s fair earth, the German Empire.
Press Bureau: Passed for Publication.
Before Villers had been a month at school he had betrayed his master passion. He discovered that his housemaster was expecting an heir. Delicacy was not Villers’ strong point, and he at once proceeded to organise a sixpenny sweepstake among the fags. He took no chances, as Knox who drew ‘triplets’ discovered. Villers, himself, drew a blank, but he bought ‘assorted twins’ from Mixon Minor for ninepence, and Villers was, perhaps, the only person who was really pleased when Mrs. Strange presented her husband with—assorted twins: to wit, a thriving boy and girl.
‘Sweep’ Villers, as he was speedily christened, was no good at games, but despite this handicap he soon made a position for himself in the house. Villers was a ‘card,’ to borrow Mr. Bennett’s pet word, and boys will forgive much to a genuine ‘card.’ Betting and sweepstakes were the two main interests of his life. It was, of course, too risky to bet on racing save in an informal fashion with his young friends, but Villers contrived to get a good deal of amusement without troubling London bookmakers. Villers regarded Providence as a kind of super-bookie and the future as the raw material for bets. Sweepstakes were his main diversion, but he was always ready for a wager. He lost no chances. When Allen, a house prefect, was just on the point of giving Villers a few flicks with a cane for ‘cutting’ fag duty, Villers, who had assumed the orthodox position, glanced over his shoulder and remarked, ‘Bet you a bob, Allen, I don’t get up between the shots.’ ‘I’ll take you,’ said Allen grimly, ‘but I shall give you an extra two for cheek.’ ‘However,’ as Villers afterwards confided to an admiring circle, ‘I scored all along the line. Allen was so keen to win his bet that he lost his length after the first shot. He didn’t keep his eye on the ball. He began to press, and, instead of four beefy drives, he could only manage six regular foozles. And I won my bob.’
To Villers a sweepstake was not only an end in itself but an instrument for investing tedious events with the glamour of adventitious excitement. Moony’s terminal sermon, for instance, could scarcely be regarded as anything but an inevitable ordeal, for the dear gentleman never preached for less than half an hour, and[459] within the memory of man he never said anything which bordered on the interesting. But once, at least, in his life he had an excited audience. Once at least he had a listener who was bitterly disappointed when he petered out under the half-hour. That listener was Villers, who had drawn ‘thirty-five minutes’ in the sweepstake on Moony’s evening run.
So, too, the Fortnightly Orders were a subject of interest only to a few eccentrics. But one day Villers decided that the Fortnightly Orders should be made an event of first-class importance. He suggested a sweepstake on the result, and the Lower Fifth welcomed the idea with enthusiasm. Twenty-four members of the form contrived to raise a shilling. The twenty-fifth member of the form declined to enter. ‘Tomkins,’ said Villers with sour contempt, ‘won’t go in. He’s pi. I expect his father is a Baptist.’ There was no truth in the deduction from Tomkins’ piety, but none the less it was thenceforward accepted as a fact that Tomkins came of Baptist stock, and nothing that Tomkins could say to the contrary could wipe out this stigma on the family name.
It was an interesting draw. Everybody was pleased when Glover and Taylor drew each other. It should be explained that there were two prizes: one for the boy who drew the top of the form, another for the boy who drew the bottom. Now Glover and Taylor were two veterans who had moved up the school with more dignity than speed. They averaged a remove per annum. They were very ancient and very lazy, and the last two places in the form were theirs by immemorial right.
Now, since there was a prize for the drawer of the bottom boy, Taylor and Glover each had a lively interest in insuring that the other should be bottom. Each of them argued that if he could just beat the other he would win twelve shillings, for neither of them could conceive that the wooden spoon should become the property of any other member of the form. Both of them, therefore, while making a great parade of laziness, began surreptitiously to neglect their work a shade less thoroughly than before.
There were two favourites for the other prize. Poor Tomkins had declined to enter for the sweepstake, but his name had been entered and had been drawn by Cork. Cork was in the same house as Tomkins, but whereas Tomkins was a mere insignificant scholar Cork was in the Cricket Eleven and a great man. Hitherto he had treated Tomkins with good-humoured contempt. Tomkins was useful to him. Tomkins was responsible for Cork’s classical[460] studies, his French, and his mathematics. Cork did not overwork Tomkins; he did not give him his essays. Somebody else did the essays.
In consideration for these services Cork had not interfered with Tomkins’ ambition to work hard. Cork was a man of large tolerance. If Tomkins liked to ‘sweat himself blue’ that was Tomkins’ look-out. So he contented himself with occasional badinage in which Tomkins was asked to explain the pleasure he derived from ‘oiling.’
But, of course, the sweepstake altered Cork’s attitude. He had drawn Tomkins and, if Tomkins could beat Rolland, Cork would win twelve shillings. Clearly Tomkins must spare no effort to beat Rolland. ‘Oil,’ instead of seeming an eccentric hobby, became a civic virtue. Cork began to take the liveliest interest in the progress of his young ward. Cork had been left near the bottom of the form, and Tomkins, who had come up with a head remove, sat just behind him. When Tomkins missed a question, Cork turned round and expressed by crude but intelligible signs his bitter disappointment.
Mr. Strange, who was Cork’s housemaster as well as form-master, was very puzzled by this new development. ‘Why this sudden interest in Tomkins?’ he said one day. ‘I’m not sure that Tomkins is altogether grateful for your attentions.’
Tomkins wasn’t. Cork’s zeal quite put him off. Tomkins began to lose his nerve, and Rolland beat him all along the line.
Cork was quite embittered by Tomkins’ failure. ‘Oh, yes, Tomkins,’ he said one day, ‘you can oil all right when it’s only to please yourself, but when it’s a question of twelve bob for me you simply foozle everything. You did a rotten rep. this morning. Your father’s a Baptist, isn’t he? Well, by gum! if you don’t come out top I’ll baptise you.’
Tomkins murmured nervously that his father was Church of England.
Cork sat next to Mr. Strange at lunch, and on the fatal Sunday he did his best to pump Mr. Strange. ‘Has Tomkins come out top?’ he pleaded wistfully. ‘I should so like to know, sir.’
‘My dear Cork,’ said Mr. Strange, ‘I can’t make you out. You don’t usually condescend to take the least interest in your work or anybody else’s. What’s in the wind?’
Cork was understood to say that the honour of the house was very dear to him, and that while he was doing his best for the[461] house at footer, he expected Tomkins as the star scholar to do his best for the house in school. Mr. Strange asked him if he was feeling the heat.
That afternoon a murmur of excitement ran round the form-room when Mr. Strange appeared. Besides the sweepstake, most of the Lower Fifth had contracted a number of side-bets on the result of the Fortnightly Order. Tomkins and Rolland both carried money, and for the first time in their school careers their respective achievements were a matter of general interest. Cork had despaired of Tomkins, and had vainly tried to ‘sell’ him for half a crown. But there were no offers.
Glover and Taylor, who had both been working a little harder and cribbing a great deal more thoroughly, were each convinced that they had beaten the other. Five to four against either of them was freely quoted. Glover was sure that Taylor would be bottom and that he would therefore win the prize allotted to the lucky drawer of the bottom man. Taylor was no less confident that Glover would occupy that ignoble position.
Mr. Strange glanced round the room before beginning to read out the Order, and remarked drily, ‘I am flattered, but a little surprised, at the sudden interest which some of you seem to be taking in the Form Order. This is such a contrast to your usual attitude of bland indifference that I really wonder whether you’ve been betting on it. The only objection to this theory is that I don’t suppose for a moment that any of you consider your school work of sufficient importance to risk a spare sixpence on it.’
Mr. Strange, it will be seen, was a cynic. Only cynics understand boys.
The Form Order was a surprise and a shock to a good many people.
Cork gave a resigned snort when Tomkins was read out second, but Cork’s disappointment was mild compared to the fury of Glover and Taylor, who, thanks to their sudden zeal, had risen ten places and were bracketed fifteenth. Never was promotion less welcome. ‘This is most gratifying,’ said Mr. Strange—‘most gratifying. Our stalwarts, our Arcades Ambo, have at last shown what they are capable of. I always suspected, my dear Glover, that it was energy rather than brains that you lacked; and you, Taylor, have, I feel sure, done yourself an injustice in the past by your pathetic insistence on your small intellectual endowment. This improvement must be maintained. I shall be very angry with you if you sink back to bottom again.’
Glover and Taylor began to devise some effective punishment for Villers. Villers and his rotten sweepstakes! Good Heavens, just think of it! They had been bamboozled out of a prize, and they had set themselves an impossible standard of hard work for the future.
The Form Order contained yet another sensation.
‘Sweep’ Villers had sunk from twelfth to twenty-fifth. Curiously enough, when his name was read out bottom of the form a smile of relief seemed to cross his face. Mr. Strange caught this smile. It did not improve matters. ‘Don’t sit there smiling,’ he said. ‘It’s no use trying to carry off this disgraceful exhibition with an affectation of jaunty indifference. You don’t deceive me, I assure you.’
None the less, he was deceived. For Villers’ smile was a smile of genuine and unaffected joy. You see, he had drawn himself in the sweepstake, and, as he had managed to come out bottom, he had won twelve shillings.
What man, unless he be entirely devoid of imagination, has not been profoundly impressed when, for the first time, he hears the distant roll of the guns? How many a soldier makes it the theme of his first letter home? It is the first intimation his relatives get that he is really at the front. And yet, from the sound alone, he will get very little idea as to how far off the line really is. The conformation of the ground, the wind and possibly other climatic conditions affect the transmission of sound in an extraordinary way. One can often hear the guns from very far back, whereas from closer up nothing can be heard at all. If there is a bombardment on, the noise is continuous but varies in intensity either with the wind or according to the number of heavy pieces that are firing at the same instant.
Later on, if he is observant, the soldier may get to know the individual voices of some of these guns and recognise the bursts of their shell.
On first coming into the line he is unable to distinguish the meaning of the various sounds, and the report of one of our own field-guns firing behind him is likely to cause him more alarm than a Boche rifleman sniping at his unwittingly exposed head. The 18-pounder field-gun makes a most ear-splitting crack for those who stand in front of the battery, and, moreover, the sound seems to come from only a few yards away. The sniper’s bullet will strike the parapet with a resounding crack, followed by the whirr of its passage through the air, and a new-comer might easily imagine that one of our own men had fired from the next traverse.
The German field-gun, in common with our own 18-pounder, and, in fact, all high-velocity guns, always sounds a good deal nearer than it really is, and as the shell travels very fast and reaches the front-line trenches very shortly after, or, sometimes, even before, the whizz of its approach, it gives the infantry the impression that the battery is in some impossible position just behind the German support line.
The ‘whizz-bang’ and the ‘pip-squeak’ are terms applied to[464] the same German field-gun by people who are shot at by him at different ranges.
In the first case there is a warning whirr of approach, but the shell reaches the man who is ‘pip-squeaked’ while it is still travelling faster than sound, and he gets the ‘pip’ of the explosion first and the whizz afterwards—if there is enough of him left to hear it!
The voice of the German 77-millimetre field-gun can usually be distinguished from the various other guns, trench mortars, bombs and shells that are continually heard along the line. It sounds like two planks being banged together in a courtyard where there is some echo from the walls.
The heavy howitzers make far less noise, and the report cannot always be detected, but the sound of the shell in the air is unmistakable. It is a curious, intermittent, hollow, rushing sound, with an ever-deepening note which dies away, if it is not coming near you, just before the rending ‘crump’ of the explosion.
This ‘crump’ is a sound-phenomenon which I am unable to explain. Whereas the lighter shell goes off with an ordinary ‘bang,’ the 15-centimetre and larger projectiles sound like a whole family of explosions going off not quite at the same instant.
The German light field-howitzer in its acoustic effects is much like a smaller edition of its larger brothers. Of the huge 42-centimetre shells I have had, I am glad to say, no experience so far.
Another sound that one gets to know with experience is the report of the trench mortar. This is not distinguishable if there is much noise going on, and is best likened to the ‘clap’ of a pigeon-trap. My ear has been somewhat trained by much shikar in Ceylon jungles, and this has held me in good stead on at least one occasion, when, after blowing a mine, the Germans fired four trench mortars at a group of miners and myself in a front-line sap. I distinctly heard the ‘clap’ of the report and was able to give the warning to disperse. There was not much cover, but we had good luck and no one was hit.
A pleasant ‘drawing-room’ voice is that of our beautiful little field-howitzer. It goes off with more of a puff than a bang, and the shell sails away with a soft whirring note which is lost in the distance long before the formidable crash of the burst is wafted back from the German lines.
An alarming sound that one used to hear earlier in the war, when ammunition was of a lower quality than it is now, was that[465] of a shell with a ‘stripped’ driving band. Such a shell will whirl through the air at any angle and will land, possibly base first, a mile or two short of its mark.
One of the most encouraging of sounds is the dull thud of a German ‘blind’ shell, especially if, as often happens, they are coming over in appreciable numbers. We are sometimes treated to furious ‘strafes’ with shells of the ‘toy-shop’ quality, of which only a small percentage detonate properly, while a somewhat larger proportion go off with an impotent pop, and the majority fail to explode at all.
‘Smoky Bill’ used to fire such shells. ‘Smoky Bill’ was a funny old thing dating back from the ’seventies. A vast column of smoke rising from behind a certain wood in the German lines was the first signal that he had fired, and this was followed by a fearsome whirr in the air, and then, five times out of six, by a dull thud and nothing more! We knew where ‘Smoky Bill’ was, but nobody ever fired at him—he was one of the side-shows of that sector and never did anyone any harm.
Now ‘Percy’ is another fellow altogether. ‘Percy’ is the long 13-centimetre high-velocity German gun. At most ranges ‘Percy’ comes quicker than sound, and there is no warning of his approach. He goes off with a mighty bang, and his shell, when you do hear it, comes along with a terrific shriek. The only encouraging thought about ‘Percy’ is that he is not very common down the line, whereas we have many guns that must give the enemy similar thrills.
In order to feel thoroughly optimistic about the war one must hear the voice of the French ‘75’ when he is really angry. I happened to be at an observation-post down in the French lines one evening when word had come down from the front line that enemy trench mortars were very active in a certain sector. Two batteries of ‘75’s’ immediately took on the offenders. One or two rounds for réglage were sent over from the première pièce of each battery, there was a slight correction for range (‘diminuez de cinquante!’), and then they literally pummelled the Hun trenches for about a minute and a half. A confused roar of ear-splitting cracks, a wild swirl of shells, and two continuous rows of black spurts shot up from the German trenches. There was one gap in the wall of bursting melinite, which gradually narrowed, and then the firing stopped. A few words down the telephone, and then, with a loud crash, two salvoes went into the remaining gap. The[466] captain in the observation-post merely remarked ‘Bon!’ and sat down to record his targets. These short vigorous strafes must be very disconcerting to friend Hun, and although, of course, every round did not actually hit the mark, the shooting was remarkably accurate and the majority did get some part of the trench. One can imagine the effect of the last two salvoes on the previously unstrafed portion where seekers after shelter would have gathered!
On another occasion, at the beginning of one of the minor battles of the war, I was at the same post, and these two batteries were firing at a most remarkable speed, the general principle being to return anything that was sent over by the enemy with interest—a thing that the Frenchman always seems able to do unless his guns happen to be hopelessly outnumbered by some local concentration of the Germans.
Many and interesting are the various sound-phenomena of the battlefield. Why is it, for instance, that once when a certain battery was firing over my head from behind a crest the rush of the shell was heard going away in an opposite direction, so that it seemed, at first, as if the breech had blown out; and that when I approached the battery the shells sounded as if they were going straight up in the air? Why is it that, from some positions, the shells from our own batteries are heard to give forth a crackling sound instead of the usual swirl when speeding over to the enemy? This last effect may occasionally be due to a badly centred shell, but, I think, not always. One is too busy in war-time to look into these interesting details, and in peace-time one has not the opportunity!
I remember an occasion when the guns made a very effective accompaniment to a song. I was lunching below ground in an observation-post dug-out, and a very pleasant-voiced lady was singing to us from a gramophone. I forget what the song was, but the regular bang and whirr of a battery firing overhead certainly improved the effect. We shouted up to the observer to know if the shells were ‘ours’ or ‘theirs,’ and elicited the interesting information that it was the Germans who were supplying the accompaniment!
The sound of the enemy shells is all too well known to most of us out here, but there appear to be not many who have actually seen one in the air. I have seen German shells coming towards me on two separate occasions, but have, so far, never met anyone who has had the same experience. This seems strange, for there[467] is no reason why it should not happen fairly frequently. It is quite an easy matter to see one of our own shells leaving a howitzer, and sometimes a gun, if one stands straight behind it, and it should only be a question of happening to look in the right direction to see one coming the other way.
It was in the spring of last year near ‘Windy Corner’ that I first saw a German shell on the wing. I had not been long at the front, and I instinctively looked up when I heard it coming. What I saw was a minute but very rapidly increasing speck in the sky, moving so fast that I was somehow unable to judge where it was going to fall. I accordingly made myself as small as possible, but it burst in a farm at the comparatively safe distance of some 150 yards. It was from a 15-centimetre howitzer, and was immediately followed by another, which I again saw by looking in the same direction. As this was followed by a flight of ‘whizz bangs,’ and as I had no pressing business there at the moment, I hurried from that well-known and unwholesome spot.
It was many months before I again had a similar experience, and this time it was rather more thrilling. I was walking over some open country towards the trenches in company with my sergeant-major, and the Germans had started shelling a battery behind us. They were firing with the ordinary 77-millimetre field-gun, and the first few rounds were short and unpleasantly close to us. The Hun battery must have been some way back, as we heard the report and the warning whistle of the shell some two or three seconds before it arrived. At the next report I looked up instinctively to gauge the direction in which the shell was going. The range had been increased, and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a tiny speck in the sky which grew larger and disappeared close over my head in a small fraction of a second. It did not appear to come straight, but described a ‘googly’ curve. How much of this was due to its actual path, and how much the mere effect produced on the eye by its extreme speed, I cannot say, but I know that shells do not travel straight but affect a kind of ‘slice.’
On such occasions those who duck or take cover are usually too late. The rush of its near approach reached my sergeant-major after I had seen it go over, and though he has a delightful contempt for Germany’s efforts to destroy him, which I am not always able to share, on this occasion it was I who stood up apparently unconcerned while he crouched on the ground waiting[468] for a shell which had already burst in the battery some 200 yards behind us!
When a shell passes very near to one its whistle increases to the roar of an express train, and when there is anything like a heavy bombardment on it is only those shells which pass dangerously close that one can hear above the general din.
More disconcerting than the actual burst of the shell is the ‘whirr’ of the splinters or, in the case of shrapnel, the loud ‘miaow’ of the flying bullets. I suppose our gallant airmen have more shrapnel fired at them than anyone else, and the loud ‘clump, clump, clump’ of the bursting ‘Archies,’ followed by the whine of three hundred bullets flying from each shell, is an almost continuous tune down the line even on the quietest of days.
Happily, man can accustom himself to most things, and to the seasoned soldier these sounds arouse little more interest than the rumble of London traffic to the Cockney—unless, of course, he is actually being fired at himself!
But to-day (July 1) the distant sound of the guns is once more stirring me as it did on my first morning in Flanders over a year ago. The rumble is more persistent and continuous than it has ever been. Yesterday my work took me down to the line, and I witnessed some pretty ‘strafing,’ but it is only back here at head-quarters that the true meaning of things is borne in upon me. Whichever side of the hill I stand, and according as the breeze varies, the thud and roar is continuous—it comes from three points of the compass. It is useless to speculate, but, whatever may happen in the future, this, at least, is a black day for Germany—the voices of the mighty guns of Britain and of France are raised in such a chorus as was never heard before.
It is over a year ago since an Irish private, known to his pals by the above rather obvious contortion of the proper name of Donohue, was brought into hospital. He came with a convoy of British who, nearly all, were suffering from gas poisoning as well as wounds. Those being the early days of ‘the gaz,’ as Do’-no-who called it, arrangements for its defeat were not yet altogether successful. After all, who could then have foreseen such a devilish invention of war? However, the poor, panting, choking, indeed in some cases retching, men who came to us had been given some kind of protection. Each one clung still to his particular mask, limp, blackened, flimsy affair that it was.
Poor old Do’-no-who’s condition was pretty desperate. You could hear him breathing fifty yards away. He was sustained from first to last by the most indomitable fighting spirit I ever came across. During a struggle of several days’ duration there was only one order which he utterly declined to obey. Nothing would, nobody could keep him from talking—even in his sleep. I am bound to say it chiefly took the form of endless ejaculation. As, for instance, when with intense difficulty he managed at first to gulp down a little champagne, it was like this—‘Isn’t that fine now?’ ‘Grand!’ or ‘That’s killin’ the divil’s own gaz’—a word at a time between every sip.
Soon realising that every known resource was being tried to relieve his sufferings, old Do’-no-who did his level best to respond to it and to cheer us on. ‘Och, I’m finely now,’ or ‘It’s only the gaz that’s hindering ye’s all,’ he would say, with a sorry attempt to smile. But sometimes there would be anxious moments, when he would lie back only partially conscious. Then it seemed as though he was engaged in some most exciting and exhausting struggle. Little exclamations of despair or joy in turn would escape him.
‘Sure this gaz’ll defate me!’ ‘Deed it will that!’
Then, after renewed panting, the perspiration would pour down his cheeks, and ‘I have it!’ ‘Isn’t it weighty now?’ and the puff! puff! puff! greater than ever made one wonder what huge burden he thought he was lifting.
‘I’m afraid he’s a little delirious,’ said the doctor, as he put his finger again on the patient’s pulse. Old Do’-no-who seemed to hear this. He would open his eyes and say in a tone of triumph:[470] ‘Sure! Won’t I be comminded for conspicuous gallantry!’ So, whilst some doubted, others could only see conviction in his clear steady blue eye as he again thankfully attempted to inhale more oxygen. His hands were continually seeking and fingering a little string of beads that lay beside him: ‘It was me rosary brought me t’rough,’ he said, as he relapsed into a painful sleep.
Once he overheard some remark that rather pleased him, and he cut in rather unexpectedly: ‘Yes, prayer is the foundation of all graces.’
In spite of the constant and hideous strain of the breathing, we were amazed at the way his constitution bore him along. Also he had certain intervals of marked improvement and we almost dared to hope. So did Do’-no-who. ‘Sure we’ll niver die!’ he said, and his eyes shone with such confidence and joy that we began to think he was right.
Even in his worst agony he had always managed to fling an occasional word of wit or chaff towards his companions. Now it was impossible to suppress him. Carried outside in his bed in the glorious sun, he and several of the patients quite revived under the influence of that soft May air.
It was a pathetic little row of beds; some of the men’s faces so deadly white, others still of that dark uncanny colour which tells its own story of asphyxiation. Yet few there were, indeed hardly one of those men within earshot of Do’-no-who, that did not shake with weak giggling if he so much as opened his lips or looked across at them. There indeed was the medicine of the merry heart.
Alas! for us all when one morning Do’-no-who began to show signs of relapse. He had had a bad night and was unmistakably low in his mind. Instead of the usual radiant smile and the variable welcome ‘I’m grand!’ or ‘Sure, I’ll be rightly sune,’ it was a kind of beaten look that greeted us. His glad expression had suddenly changed to one of unutterable sadness. He gravely shook his head without a word, and then sank back on the pillow.
Every effort was still being put forth to relieve him, but oxygen, ‘dry-cupping,’ and various other remedies seemed this time to have lost their power. Only, strange to say, the doctor found his pulse had lost little of its strength. He told him so.
‘Mebbe, yer honour, but I’m greatly fataagued,’ murmured Do’-no-who, as he wearily closed his eyes.
The truth was he had given himself up. Once a man does that it is little use to argue with him. Poor old Do’-no-who’s Gethsemane[471] took the form of dire disappointment. ‘Sure, I’ll miss mi rewa-r-rd,’ he faintly whispered.
Spite of all our attempts to keep bright, an atmosphere of depression was gradually creeping over the ward. The sudden change in Bed 14 was responsible for it all. Do’-no-who lay there perfectly helpless, his painful breathing sounding more like the regular sawing of a piece of wood than anything else.
In the afternoon there was little change, except that his pulse at last showed signs of weakening, the light had gone out of his eyes, and he was unable to swallow anything.
By this time some of the patients were beginning to get along well: so much easier was their breathing they were able to sleep in comparative comfort. Others, however, were wakeful. They only wished to lie quiet. Some indeed tried to look at picture papers, but you could tell by the quick anxious glances they gave towards Bed 14 from time to time that their thoughts were centred entirely on one person.
As the hours progressed we found that Do’-no-who’s strength was gradually waning. His pulse was faint and fluttering, he had fallen into a heavy drowsy state, and his breathing came in short light puffs. Yet all the time, strange to say, he would insist on keeping that great strong arm of his right up at the back of his head which lay so still on the pillow. He remained like that for hours, whilst the breathing gradually slowed, faltered and went on again, till it was almost inaudible and the fluttering pulse could scarcely be felt. Then—quite suddenly—as he slept the tired head fell over and the big hand relaxed. He had stepped over the border without a struggle. We placed his hand gently beside him, and took the rosary from the other one and hung it round his neck.
Before very long some orderlies came and fetched Do’-no-who. It was touching to see the patients—all who could—standing at attention as the stretcher came down the ward and was carried out through the door. Even those in bed managed to raise a weak hand to their forehead as the big frame of Donohue wrapped in a Union Jack passed along.
One, Murphy, a quiet little Irishman with ferrety eyes who[472] occupied the adjoining bed, had scarcely spoken all the time. We were not surprised, for he too had suffered badly from the gas, but judging by the way he kept his eyes rivetted on Do’-no-who we felt he took more than ordinary interest in his case. Now, as the sad little procession disappeared, Murphy turned right over on his pillow and quietly covered his face with his sheet. When a little later we told him we had put his supper near him, he left it untouched, and silently declined to emerge from his retreat.
That night when most of the others had gone to sleep, Murphy was seen to uncover his face, and as the night Sister passed down the ward he signalled to her.
Most pitifully red and tear-stained though he was, he had evidently something important to say. He began abruptly:
‘I’m spakin’ God’s truth to ye, Sister, I tell you I saw him miself.’
‘Saw whom, Murphy?’
‘Yon man,’ waving toward the empty bed. ‘Don’t ye mind what he told ye about conspicuous gallantry?’
‘Oh to be sure. You mean poor Donohue? But didn’t the doctor say he was delirious?’
‘God’s truth,’ again said Murphy. ‘Do’-no-who was no man for lying. I’ll tell ye all I saw, Sister.’
‘Don’t you think you had better try and sleep now? We can talk better in the morning.’
‘Deed no, it’s little sleep I’ll get till me mind’s relaised,’ and poor Murphy looked so distressed and worried the Sister saw it was best to let him have his way. This is what he told her.
‘Do ye mind the day we was brought in? It was that fore-neune we’d had the biggest gaz battle that iver ye saw. Sure, we’d shtarted attackin’ finely. We Irish boys was with the Highlanders. We’d quit our trenches and was for dashing right across to the Boches, when all in a minute we seemed to come intil a gaz cloud. It set us shtrugglin’ and imprecatin’ and shplutterin’. Do’-no-who was beside me. We would have suffocated entoirely, so we got to runnin’. Do’-no-who, strong boy that he was, was prancin’ along past me, chokin’ and trying to git his mask fix’d on him, when he stopped all of a sudden. He might have been par’rlised.
‘“Come along,” ses I, what with the gaz.
‘“Divil a bit,” ses he. “I’ve just moinded the machane-gun. We’ve left it for the Boches.”
‘“How could we help ’t?” ses I. “Think o’ yiself and quit troublin’ about machane-guns.”
‘“I am thinkin’ of miself,” ses Do’-no-who. “Sure I’m the boy that can fetch it out.” With that, he lept off and back into the gaz cloud, whilst I did nothin’—may the holy Virgin forgive me! I went on runnin’ and shtrugglin’ to get clear o’ the gaz which was killin’ me.’
Here Murphy broke down and sobbed aloud with the memory.
‘After a wee while,’ he went on presently, ‘whin I’d joined the boys and was for settin’ beside thim, where we was all coughin’ and chokin’ and shpittin’, I saw the stritcher bearers comin’ along. They had been pickin’ up several of us and on the last stritcher of all didn’t I see puir old Do’-no-who? Ooh! but he was pantin’ like a shteam roller and black in the face.
‘“Are ye dead?” ses I intil his ear as he passed me.
‘“I’m not,” he whishpor’d, “only spacheless.”
‘That was all, and I shtaggared on after them. ’Twas the divil’s own tramp to the dressin’ station. I could see them takin’ Do’-no-who in. After a while one of his stritcher bearers came out, so I got spakin’ till him.
‘“Yon’s a grand man,” ses he.
‘“He is. Where did ye find him?” ses I. “I lost him in the misht.”
‘“We caught sight of him comin’ thro’ the gaz,” ses he. “He was rollin’ and shtumblin’ like as he was in drink, but he was bringin’ somethin’ along on his shoulders. We couldn’t see what it was at first. It seemed weighty—he was doubled up under it like a camel. We’d got near him, about fifty yards off, when he giv another big shtumble and over he trip’t and fell over all in a big wee bonch. When we got till him he was shtretched out flat and a machane-gun was lying beside him. Ochone, it’s done for him I’m thinkin’, but sure, hadn’t he the divil’s own pluck to bring it that far?” ses he.’
Murphy lay very quiet after he had finished his tale, but he was now distinctly relieved. He submitted to having his bed made comfortable and his pillows shaken, and he let the Sister give him a little soup before settling off.
She passed him half an hour afterwards and was thankful to see that the ferrety eyes were closed. By the difficult but regular breathing that came from that tired little body she knew that sleep, in merciful pity, had wiped out the memory of the machine-gun tragedy—for a few hours at any rate.
Dosia Bagot.
On March 28, 1916, in a blizzard of snow and a tempest of wind, which might bear comparison with the storm during which Oliver Cromwell passed away, celebrated by Tennyson’s ‘Talking Oak’—
—the gentle and loving spirit of James Leigh Strachan-Davidson passed away. During his early manhood his health had been so weak that he had been regularly compelled to winter abroad, and few would have anticipated that he would have exceeded by three years the Psalmist’s allotted span of threescore and ten; but his dauntless courage, serene patience, and strong sense of duty carried him through a long career of usefulness.
I had known and loved him for more than half a century, and when I saw the news in The Times of the following morning my thoughts went back to the last occasion when we met at a rather remarkable gathering of old Balliol contemporaries which had taken place annually during all that period, nothing but the sternest necessity keeping any of us away. We had dined together once every year since 1867, generally on the second day of the University cricket match, and we met for the last time under the presidency of Sir Horatio Shephard, long a distinguished Indian Judge, on July 6, 1914. Although there was a full attendance, two or three had dropped out of our ranks since the last meeting, when twenty-three out of a possible twenty-four had been present, but gaps were to be expected when the youngest of the gathering, myself, was on the verge of seventy, and I voiced a pretty general feeling when I proposed that after our next dinner (actually the 46th) we should wind up voluntarily, finishing in 1915 with a special Jubilee Festival. My resolution was carried unanimously, but, alas for the vanity of human wishes! in one short month Armageddon was upon us, and in 1915, when the day came round for the University match and our dinner, the rival blues, both sides one khaki-clad phalanx, were fighting side by side ‘somewhere in France’ or on the shrapnel-swept[475] heights of Gallipoli; and we ourselves, with sons and grandsons at the front, had no heart for festivities. Our ‘Balliol dinner’ was fated to die a natural death, but it should not be allowed to come to an end ‘without the meed of a melodious tear.’ I typed a copy of the book in which all our meetings are recorded in the hands of the successive presidents, from the first dinner, under the presidency of Archer Clive, in 1867, at the Castle Hotel, Richmond, with all the names of those attending, excuses for absence, and comments upon the quality of the menu, the wine, and the waiting. We were forty-three in all from first to last, and the bright promise of that generation of Balliol undergraduates had in many cases ripened into fulfilment. Among politicians we numbered the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Earls of Morley and Jersey, Matt Ridley, afterwards the first Lord Ridley, and Sir William Anson, even more distinguished as an embodiment of the spirit of Oxford, Warden of All Souls, Vice-Chancellor, and historian of the Constitution, than as a member of Parliament, Privy Councillor, and Minister of Education. We had altogether three Heads of Colleges, Anson, our dear Master of Balliol, and Wright Henderson, Warden of Wadham; Wood was Head Master of Harrow, while Raper and Papillon held their place high among choicest representatives of Oxford scholarship. John Julius Hannah, Dean of Chichester, Canon Argles, and a round dozen of beloved Rectors and Vicars, doing excellent and unostentatious work in various country parishes, represented the Church. Then we had the head officials at the table of both Houses of Parliament; Sir Henry Graham, Clerk of the Parliaments, was and still is leading luminary in the House of Lords, and Sir Courtenay Peregrine Ilbert occupies a similar place as first Clerk in the House of Commons. Other lesser luminaries distinguished in the Civil Service were Sneyd Kynnersley, who has recorded his career as a School Inspector with rich humour in that amusing book ‘H.M.I.,’ and Charles Vertue and Hamilton Hoare, of the Education Office. Sir Francis Horner was a successful Commissioner of Woods, and the well loved ‘Mike,’ R. A. H. Mitchell, the mighty cricketer of the ’sixties, did useful work as one of the best and most popular of Eton House Masters. Truly a goodly company! And there were others of a promise as bright which never had time to ripen: Barratt, the Rugby Scholar who obtained the unprecedented number of five first classes, Classical and Mathematical ‘Mods’ and Greats, and Law and History, then the only other final school, and only stopped because, like Alexander, he could find[476] no more worlds to conquer, and Archer Clive, the brilliant son of a distinguished Herefordshire family, who gained the highest honours at the University and a fellowship at Lincoln, but never attained that success at the Bar which his great intellect led his contemporaries to expect. He was chosen with Henry Northcote (the late Lord Northcote) to accompany Sir Stafford Northcote and his colleagues to America as Secretary to the Mission which negotiated the Alabama Treaty, and gained great credit from his chief in that capacity. A singular incident, now almost forgotten, occurred in the year when he took his degree at Oxford. After the examination some practical joker sent a forged ‘Greats’ Class List to The Times. It failed in its object of deceiving anyone who really knew anything about the prospects of Honour Candidates, for it placed Archer Clive in the Third Class, which, as Euclid would have put it, was absurd. He ‘devilled’ at the Bar for Lord James of Hereford, whose pupil he had been and who entertained the highest appreciation of his abilities, but soon after his return from America he developed symptoms of pulmonary disease, which shortly afterwards proved fatal.
To return to Strachan-Davidson, the appreciative notice printed in The Times of March 29 says that when he and his friends were disappointed at his being passed over for the Mastership of Balliol on Jowett’s death in 1893 he bore it ‘like an angel.’ The expression is by no means too strong; whatever were his personal feelings, he sank them altogether in the interest of the College he loved, and devoted all his energies to help to make Dr. Caird’s Mastership a success. He was incapable of envy, jealousy, or huffiness, and on the two occasions when I met him and Caird together he showed his fine appreciation of his old friend’s character and seemed to delight to do him honour. The first was that of our Balliol dinner in July 1898, when, for the only time in our half-century of existence, we entertained a guest in the person of our Master, Caird, who was brought and introduced by Strachan-Davidson. A notable gathering it was, under the presidency of Sir Courtenay Ilbert, twenty-six being present out of a possible thirty-one, three of the five absentees being ill, one in India, and one in Norway. The second was that memorable gathering in the Hall of the old College when we celebrated Lord Newlands’ princely gift; and fathers and sons met under the presidency of Caird.
Jowett, great man as he was, did not show a like spirit when Scott was appointed to the place he coveted, and thought he had earned[477] Achilles sulked in his tent and chuckled over the difficulties of his predecessor as long as his reign continued. Certainly Scott, although ever a kindly and courteous gentleman, was rather a figurehead, and had no great influence in the College. There was a story of him—I will not vouch for its truth—that on a well-remembered occasion somewhere about 1865, when three undergraduates, two of them exhibitioners and distinguished and influential scholars, came to him to announce their conversion to Rome, he thought for a moment and then said ‘Have you considered, gentlemen, that the rash step you propose is not merely calculated to imperil your immortal souls, but also to do a great deal of harm to the College?’ Neither of these considerations availed to alter their determination, but the College, which now has many Roman Catholics among its fellows and members, still seems to manage to keep up its reputation, and maintains its high position. I give the story, but do not credit it. Scott, although inclined to be pompous, had a strong sense of humour, as I may evidence by his celebrated charade on ‘Toast-Rack,’ which I give from memory:
Many solvers have puzzled over the last line; and yet nothing could more accurately describe a slice of bread toasted on both sides and then eaten.
I think that the thing which struck me most by way of contrast between the Balliol of my own time and the same College when my dear son Alfred was there, and Strachan-Davidson, although not yet Master, was its ruling spirit, was the comradeship and real intimacy and affection which subsisted between the so-called Dons and the undergraduates. Their relations were more like those of elder and younger brothers of the same family than those of tutors and pupils. I remember one occasion when my son was confined to bed with a complication which proved slight, but might have been dangerous. I was written to, and hastened to the bedside, where I found Strachan-Davidson sitting and helping to wile away the irksomeness of the enforced confinement with his bright smile and cheerful flow of conversation and anecdote. I afterwards found[478] that this incident was typical of the relations which subsisted between tutors and undergraduates. My boy always spoke of them with no want of respect, but with all the intimacy and frankness bred by understanding companionship, and he and all his contemporaries, after leaving, voluntarily contributed to the fund so nobly headed by Lord Newlands to increase the inadequate endowment of the College. Perhaps I may be pardoned a reference rather personal to myself, but I cannot forget that my last communication from the Master was a most touching and sympathetic letter when that beloved son fell at the head of his company on the blood-stained field of Loos. ‘Another name,’ wrote Strachan-Davidson, ‘on the list of honour on the Chapel door; no College gathering will ever be the same without our beloved “Tortoise”’; and with his dear words of sympathy he enclosed the prayer used daily at the College services, a model form of thanksgiving and intercession in which I seem to trace his inspiring spirit of lofty courage and resignation:
‘O God, with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, we give Thee thanks for our brethren the members of this College who have willingly offered themselves, and have laid down their lives for us and for our country, and for the liberty of the world. Give us grace to follow their good example, that we may never lose heart, but may bear with patience and courage, as these have done, whatever Thy Providence calls upon us to endure. Comfort the bereaved, and grant to all of us that our afflictions may purify our hearts and minds to Thy glory. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
The Dons of my time were a distinguished body enough, brilliant scholars, kindly and sympathetic advisers, and inspiring and ardent teachers. No one could lightly underrate such men as ‘Jimmy’ Riddell, Edwin Palmer, Henry Smith, Green, Newman, and the great Jowett. With the last I was never brought personally much into contact, as, conscious of my deficiencies in the requirements for success as a classical scholar, I took the earliest opportunity of transferring my energies to the Law and History School, in which I saw more prospect of success. But I shall never cease to be grateful to him for a piece of advice which he gave me when looking over those weekly essays which were about the most useful part of our ordinary College education. He smiled rather grimly at some turgid and high-flown sentences of which I was inclined to be particularly proud, and suggested that my composition would be improved if I struck out any passage which I was inclined to think particularly[479] fine. I have ever since taken his advice to heart with great advantage, making it a rule, when revising, to apply the pruning knife unsparingly to ‘purple patches.’ Young authors, please copy! But whatever my gratitude may be to my teachers and masters—and I certainly owe my ‘First’ in the Final Schools to the inspiring History Lectures of Newman; his grasp of essentials and power of connoting the relations of cause and effect, in various movements, historical, political and philosophical, and imparting his views and their reasons to his disciples—there was never the frank companionship and confident and equal intercourse which I admired so much in the Balliol of Strachan-Davidson. Perhaps the difference should be ascribed to the times rather than to the persons. The relations between children and parents, and between husbands and wives, have likewise greatly altered during the half-century.
Another member of our dining club with whom I was very intimate at Balliol was Jersey, seventh Earl, born in the same year as myself, and my contemporary both there and at Eton. At school I did not see a great deal of him, as, although he was in the lower division of the fifth form at the same time as myself, he was not in the same house, and had a different tutor. Two things, however, I especially remember about his time at Eton; I heard what was practically his funeral sermon preached! and afterwards saw him win the open mile race. His illness was so severe that the master who was preaching in chapel told us that he wished we were all as ready to face our end as the young companion just about to leave us. It was a rash prophecy, but certainly no one would have expected that the weak-lunged lad was destined to accomplish his seventy years, to shine as an athlete, and to enjoy exceptionally good health almost to the end of his strenuous labours in every kind of public and domestic usefulness. Paymaster-General, Governor of New South Wales, Lord Lieutenant of his County, President of the Royal Agricultural Society, and last, not least, first unpaid Chairman of the Light Railway Commission—in each of these varied spheres of activity he won golden opinions from all who had to do with him. By an odd coincidence I succeeded him in the last capacity, and my brother Commissioners, Colonel Boughey, and Henry Steward, the first Secretary of the Commission, are never weary of singing the praises of the ideal Chairman who gave so much of his valuable time and energy to striving to make Mr. Ritchie’s Light Railway Act a success. For causes which it would be foreign to my present purpose to dwell upon here, the work of[480] the Commission has been light of recent years, but when Jersey first undertook the Chairmanship, he and his colleagues held hundreds of inquiries, travelled thousands of miles, and laid down principles and adopted methods which have stood all tests for twenty years. I have had many opportunities of ascertaining the views of those counsel and solicitors, engineers, local authorities and private individuals, who come before the Commission to promote or oppose Light Railway Orders, and one and all echo the praises of my colleagues. But when writing of Balliol my thoughts of Jersey rather go back to those last six months of my undergraduate life in 1867 when I was reading hard for my class, and used to walk or run round the ‘Parks,’ then ploughed fields, with him every morning before breakfast, and start my five hours’ morning work at nine invigorated and refreshed. I also had many long walks with him, and I particularly remember a Sunday walk I took with him to Henley, when we covered the distance of some twenty miles at an average rate of four-and-a-quarter miles an hour. He was always a good ‘stayer,’ and used to come with a tremendous spurt at the end of a long-distance race. He carried away all the honours for distances from four miles to one at his own University, but had to yield pride of place in the mile to Lawes, and in the four-mile race to the late Viscount Alverstone in the first Inter-University contest held at Cambridge. He also comes into my own début on the running path. My College instituted a half-mile handicap race, for which nearly everyone entered, myself included. I was given seventy yards start, and, being chaffed by a friend, took the odds he offered against me of £150 to £7, and when I began to train it was found that I could do the course in a much shorter time than most of those handicapped as favourably as myself. Jersey of course was scratch, but I was not much afraid of him, as I thought that with thirty-seven starters he would find a difficulty in getting through his horses. On the memorable day I was in good condition and rather a hot favourite, and might have hedged my wager on favourable terms, but I preferred ‘to put my fortune to the touch, to win or lose it all.’ I started at a great pace and kept the lead till nearly the end, when a dark horse, by name Garrett, an Australian, who had received sixty-five yards start, only five yards less than myself, caught me up and beat me. Jersey came with his usual rush at the end, and just got before me on the post, but I think I might have saved the second place had I known he was so near. Garrett afterwards turned out to be quite a good runner, taking the second prize in the open quarter-mile and long[481] hurdles. In the following year I won the event pretty easily, although I had not been quite so generously treated by the handicapper, but I had no big gamble upon the event. I still have the silver-mounted claret jug I won on that occasion, and value it as the only trophy of success on the running path. Jersey might have filled a plate chest with the prizes he carried away.
What shall I say of Lansdowne, Viceroy of India, Governor of Canada, Leader of the Conservative party in the House of Lords, and distinguished in many more public capacities? The world knows his fame as a statesman, but I can tell them something of his ability as a cook. He taught me to make excellent omelettes, an accomplishment which has stood me in good stead at many camps and picnics. We were in the same division at Eton, and I was second to him in Collections the half I left Eton, when we were both ‘up to’ Joynes, afterwards Lower Master. Boy and man, he always had the same refined and genial manners, without the least trace of ‘side’ or conceit. One interest we shared in common was a love of fishing, and when I was writing my volume on the Salmon for the ‘Fur, Feather, and Fin’ series he lent me the account of his doings on the Cascapedia River, in Canada, for the four years when he was Governor-General of the Province. My mouth waters as I glance over the figures for the four years: 1245 salmon, weighing 29,188 lb.; 210 fish over 30 lb. The largest fish 35 lb.
Sir William Anson, who died somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly just before our last Balliol dinner, making a sadly conspicuous gap in our narrowing circle, was one of my oldest and most valued friends. We saw a great deal of one another from our boyhood onwards. We went up to Eton at the same time, and were neighbours at home in Kent. There was a half-way house where we frequently met: Bedgbury, the hospitable seat of Alexander Beresford-Hope, the Member of Parliament and Privy Councillor, whose criticism of the ‘Caucasian Mystery’ invited Disraeli’s retort about his ‘Batavian grace.’ Anson was a great favourite with Lady Mildred, who had much of the ability and sarcastic humour of her brother Lord Salisbury, whom she greatly resembled also in personal appearance. After Eton, we were contemporaries at Balliol, where we matriculated on the same day, although I, being nearly two years younger, did not actually come up till a term later. I was a candidate for the All Souls Fellowship on the occasion when he and the present Lord Justice Phillimore were elected on the foundation over which he afterwards presided with such eminent success, and shortly afterward was a[482] fellow pupil with him of the great Thomas Chitty, the pleader, in whose chambers so many sucking lawyers destined to become great legal luminaries, from Lord Chancellor Cairns to A. L. Smith, Master of the Rolls, learnt the elements of pleading before the Common Law Procedure Act put a final end to declarations and demurrers. We were a merry as well as an industrious party, and I remember a game of cricket in which Anson took part, played with two volumes of Blackburn and Ellis for bat and wicket, and some crumpled sheets of draft paper for a ball. Even the long-suffering Chitty sent up his clerk to request us to make a little less noise.
I should not omit some notice of the part taken by Anson when at Eton in the foundation of the ‘Eton Observer,’ a magazine conducted by a committee of editors which numbered among its members Vincent Stuckey Coles, now the beloved head of Pusey House, and John Andrew Doyle, afterwards fellow of All Souls and historian. It had quite a long life for such a venture, and contained some very promising productions, notably the easy and flowing verse of Vincent Cracroft Amcotts, who was afterwards also our friend and contemporary at Balliol: the dramatist of the ‘Shooting Stars,’ an amateur dramatic club, which performed very successfully operettas founded upon Meilhac and Halévy’s librettos with Offenbach’s music. ‘Helen, or Taken from the Greek’ (‘La Belle Hélène’), and ‘Lalla Rookh,’ which adapted the story of Moore’s poem to the music of ‘Orphée aux Enfers,’ were the most notable of these compositions; in the latter, Anson, always an admirable amateur actor, took the part of Fadladeen, first the hostile critic, and afterwards the ardent admirer of the disguised prince and poet. I have photographs of him in character among the faded portraits of College contemporaries, which call up many memories when I glance at my old album. Amcotts died young, or he might have emulated the literary fame of his Balliol friend, Andrew Lang, or of his St. John’s contemporary, H. D. Traill, who when at Oxford was, like himself, a successful librettist and actor.
The ‘Eton Observer’ differed from such predecessors as Canning’s ‘Microcosm’ and Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s ‘Etonian’ by being started and conducted by boys comparatively low down in the School, two years before they reached the glories of Sixth Form. The irate ‘Swells’ assailed it both in prose and verse, comparing the ambitious editors to the frog in the fable who tried to make himself a bull! This roused the wrath of that kind and popular house master ‘Billy Johnson,’ himself to be celebrated as a poet[483] later under his better known name of William Cory, the author of ‘Ionica,’ and he fulminated against the critics in the following impromptu epigram, which somehow still sticks in my memory:
When we were both called to the Bar, Anson and I went the old Home Circuit and the Kent Sessions together for some years and during the Assize fortnight at Croydon, where in those days important London causes were tried and the provincial town was full of big merchants and City solicitors, we were more than once guests of the Daniells at Fairchilds, their beautiful country place outside the town. John Daniell, our host, was married to Katherine Bradshaw, a cousin of my mother, who still retained much of the beauty and charm which earlier had inspired some characteristic lines of Tennyson; I may be pardoned for quoting them, as I do not think they have ever yet found their way into print:
One day Katherine Bradshaw, driving with her mother and Alfred Tennyson, looked at her watch. ‘Don’t do that,’ said the Poet; ‘if it looks at you it will stop!’
She was as clever and delightful as she was beautiful, and those were happy days when we lounged in the summer evening in that beautiful garden, so near and seeming so far from the ‘fumum et opus strepitumque’ of the noisy Courts we had just left. Her children, who still live there, gathered round us while we read or recited poetry. I can remember Alfred Thesiger’s rendering of Tennyson’s ‘Gardener’s Daughter,’ all its vivid nature touches appealing the more to us because we were camped where ‘the cedar spread his dark-green layers of shade,’ ‘the voices of the well-contented doves’ forming a fit accompaniment to the musical lines. I think the presence of her brother Henry Bradshaw, the beloved Cambridge Librarian, who much resembled his sister,[484] added a charm which those of his friends who are still living will recall with gratitude and affection. The tragedy which burst like a thunder-cloud upon this peaceful holiday group fell with its full weight upon Willie Anson. I shall never forget that day in August 1873 when a messenger of ill tidings broke in upon us with the news of the terrible accident at Wigan which wrecked the carriage in which Sir John Anson and his two daughters were travelling north, killing him instantly. The calamity touched me the more closely as the father and sisters were on their way to Poltalloch, where I was myself shortly due for one of those happy ‘Autumns in Argyllshire’ which had already begun.
Our friendship remained unbroken, and we had many happy meetings, although Anson drifted away from the Bar into other spheres of greater usefulness. I was more than once his guest at All Souls, where the two sisters who happily escaped from the accident which robbed him of a father made ideal hostesses. He was hardly ever absent from our Balliol dinner in the Match week, and was President in 1884 and 1907. Another bond of union arose between us when he became a fellow director of the old Law Life Assurance Society, where we had many happy weekly Wednesday gatherings until that ancient and successful institution allowed its existence to be absorbed by and renewed in the Phœnix. Balliol was strongly represented on the Board, which numbered among its eight Barrister Directors my brother-in-law, W. R. Malcolm, the doyen of Coutts’ Bank, Sir Henry Graham, Anson, and myself.
As the youngest member of the Club I formed a link with a somewhat junior generation of Balliol men who added a Lord Chancellor, a Lord Justice of Appeal, and a Judge of the High Court to this notable list. I remember how we welcomed ‘Bob’ Reid, prince of scholars, cricketers, and athletes, when, much to the disgust of the President of Magdalen, he flung up his demyship at that College to compete for the open scholarship at Balliol, which he gained with the greatest ease. He came up from Cheltenham with a high reputation for running, among his Crichton-like gifts, but never competed in the University or College sports. Once at least he kept wicket for the University at Lord’s, and his career as a scholar gave promise of the eminence he afterwards attained in the profession over which he presided on the woolsack as Lord Loreburn. He only once competed for a fellowship, and when he did not obtain the success to which he believed he was entitled on the merits, his strong and firm, some would say obstinate, character forbade him to become candidate for another College,[485] though doubtless many Common Rooms would have welcomed such an addition to their numbers.
Bargrave Deane, the Judge of the Probate and Divorce Court, was then and is still one of my most valued friends. He was a fine cricketer, having played in the Winchester Eleven before he came up to the University, and although he never got his ‘blue’ he was a most useful member of the College team, and often played in University matches, though not at Lord’s. He also rowed in his College Eight, and was an officer of the Oxford Volunteers, as he was later in the Devil’s Own, of which I think he was for some time colonel. He was a magnificent rifle shot, and showed equal skill in the forest and at the competitions at Wimbledon—it was before the days of Bisley. His father, the Queen’s Advocate, Sir James Parker Deane, used to take a moor in Scotland, where I was privileged to share the sport; I remember seeing Bargrave bring down with a rifle a grand roebuck, running away from him at a long range, and how I envied and admired his skill. He was a fine fisherman, and not only cast a beautiful line, but made flies for salmon and sea-trout as well as he used them. Farwell, the late Lord Justice of Appeal, I did not know so well, but he was much looked up to and respected when at Balliol, and was very popular throughout his long and successful career at the Bar and on the Bench. Of Lansdowne, as Viceroy of India, Governor of Canada, statesman and politician, I need say nothing. Here I think rather of the boy who was with me at Eton. He was a great favourite with Jowett, who early recognised his outstanding ability and promise.
Since my time many Balliol undergraduates of intermediate generations have risen to high positions. To-day we boast of the Prime Minister, the Speaker, and Earl Curzon, Chancellor of the University, to name only three of the most important. But at this time of our national need I prefer to dwell upon that noble band who have willingly offered themselves in their country’s service. By October 1915 no less than fifty-four members of my old College had already given their lives in the War; two had gained the Victoria Cross, three the Distinguished Service Order, eight the Military Cross, one corporal (now a Captain) the Distinguished Conduct Medal, while twenty had been mentioned in despatches, and three had gained foreign Orders. To-day the empty halls and lecture rooms bear even more eloquent witness than they did when full to overflowing to the debt England owes to my beloved College.
On the day following Constance’s visit to the Boar’s Hill cottage she wrote to Radowitz:—
‘Dear Otto,—I am going to ask you not to raise the subject you spoke of yesterday to me again between us. I am afraid I should find my visits a pain instead of a joy, if you did so. And Mrs. Mulholland and I want to come so much—sometimes alone, and sometimes together. We want to be mother and sister as much as we can and you will let us! We know very well that we are poor painted things compared with real mothers and sisters. Still we should love to do our best—I should—if you’ll let me!’
To which Otto replied:—
‘Dear Constance,—(That’s impudence, but you told me!) I’ll hold my tongue—though I warn you I shall only think the more. But you shan’t have any cause to punish me by not coming. Good Heavens!—if you didn’t come!
‘The coast is always clear here between two and four. I get my walk in the morning.’
Two or three days a week, accordingly, Constance or Mrs. Mulholland or both took their way to the cottage. They did all that women with soft hearts can do for a sick man. Mrs. Mulholland managed the servants, and inquired into the food. Connie brought books and flowers, and all the Oxford gossip she could collect. Their visit was the brightness of the boy’s day, and, thanks to them, many efforts were made to soften his calamity. The best musical talent that Oxford could furnish was eager to serve him; and a well-known orchestra was only waiting for the completion of his symphony and the result of his examination to produce the symphony in the hall of Marmion.
Meanwhile Connie very rarely saw Falloden—except in connection either with Otto’s health, or with the ‘Orpheus,’ as to which Falloden was in constant communication with the inventor, one Auguste Chaumart, living in a garret on the heights of Montmartre;[487] while Constance herself was carrying on an eager correspondence with friends of her own or her parents, in Paris, with regard to the ‘records’ which were to make the repertory of the Orpheus. The automatic piano—or piano-player,—which some years later became the pianola, was in those days slowly developing. The difference between it and the Orpheus lay in the fact that the piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for anything more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided by the rolls; while, in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation, as given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered in the cylinders. For the Orpheus, the precursor, also, of types that have since been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical mechanism, and the audience was intended to listen to Chopin or Beethoven, to Schumann or Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players of the moment, without any intervening personality.
These things are very familiar to our generation. In the early eighties they were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden’s lavish expenditure was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors.
But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and flirted and talked, when at eighteen she had spent a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most brilliant success. Otto’s story as told by her vivacious letters had gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a College frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto’s father and mother and the musical promise of the fair-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland’s exodus under the revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young Polish marvel of the day—Paderewski—had been drawn in, and his renderings of Chopin’s finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie’s dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania—the most characteristic utterance of a martyred people.
‘They are songs, chère petite,’ wrote the old man—‘of revolt, of exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the world, just as there is no history in the world like Poland’s. Your poor friend knows them all—has known them all from his childhood. They will speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle—the White Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs, chère Miladi, that we Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs—our music—our poets—our memories:—as a nation that is all we have—except the faith in us that never dies. Hinc surrectura! Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much, poor boy!—but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland,—they will some day reward him!’
And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series of variations on the lovely theme of the ‘Heynal’—that traditional horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of Panna Marya—of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.
But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of emotion. Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when she did guess, held her tongue. But her relations with Falloden, which at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the coldest, gradually became less strained. To his own astonishment, he found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which amazed himself and her. The advice concerned, of course, merely the small matters of daily life bearing on Otto’s health and comfort, and when the business was done Falloden disappeared.
But strangely amenable and even humble as he might appear in these affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their experience of the cottage household during these weeks:—simply this—that whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily, and perhaps unconsciously,[489] becoming master of the situation, the indispensable and protecting power of Otto’s life.
How he did it remained obscure. But Mrs. Mulholland at least—out of a rich moral history—guessed that what they saw in the Boar’s Hill cottage was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox—that there is a yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power. It seemed to her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of half-subdued excitement, produced by this strange realisation that he and his life had become so important to Falloden that the differences of training and temperament between them, and all the little daily rubs, no longer counted; that he existed, so to speak, that Falloden might—through him—escape the burden of his own remorse. The hard, strong, able man, so much older than himself in character, if not in years, the man who had bullied and despised him, was now becoming his servant, in the sense in which Christ was the ‘servant’ of His brethren. Not with any conscious Christian intention—far from it; but still under a kind of mysterious compulsion. The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden’s portion. A bad or a good night—appetite or no appetite—a book that Otto liked—a visit that amused him—anything that for the moment contented the starved musical sense in Otto, that brought out his gift, and his joy in it—anything that, for the moment, enabled him to forget and evade his injuries—these became, for Falloden also, the leading events of his own day. He was reading hard for his Fellowship, and satisfying various obscure needs by taking as much violent exercise as possible; but there was going on in him, all the time, an intense spiritual ferment, connected with Constance Bledlow on the one side, and Otto Radowitz on the other.
Meanwhile—what was not so evident to this large-hearted observer—Otto was more than willing—he burned—to play his part. All that is mystical and passionate in the soul of a Polish Catholic had been stirred in him by his accident, his growing premonition of short life, the bitterness of his calamity, the suddenness of his change of heart towards Falloden.
‘My future is wrecked. I shall never live to be old. I shall never be a great musician. But I mean to live long enough to make Constance happy! She shall talk of me to her children. And I shall watch over her—perhaps—from another world.’
These thoughts, and others like them, floated by day and night through the boy’s mind; and he wove them into the symphony[490] he was writing. Tragedy, passion, melody,—these have been the Polish heritage in music; they breathe through the Polish peasant songs, as through the genius of a Chopin; they are bound up with the long agony of Polish history, with the melancholy and monotony of the Polish landscape. They spoke again through the beautiful thwarted gift of this boy of twenty, through his foreboding of early death, and through that instinctive exercise of his creative gift, which showed itself not in music alone, but in the shaping of two lives—Falloden’s and Connie’s.
And Constance too was living and learning, with the intensity that comes of love and pity and compunction. She was dropping all her spoilt-child airs; and the bower-bird adornments with which she had filled her little room in Medburn Hall had been gradually cleared away, to Nora’s great annoyance, till it was almost as bare as Nora’s own. Amid the misty Oxford streets and the low-ceiled Oxford rooms, she was played upon by the unseen influences of that ‘august place,’ where both the great and the forgotten dead are always at work, shaping the life of the present. In those days Oxford was still praising ‘famous men, and the fathers who begat’ her. Their shades still walked her streets. Pusey was not long dead. Newman, the mere ghost of himself, had just preached a tremulous last sermon within her bounds, returning as a kind of spiritual Odysseus for a few passing hours to the place where he had once reigned as the most adored son of Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a generation before.
In Balliol, there sat a chubby-faced, quiet-eyed man, with very white hair, round whom the storms of orthodoxy had once beaten, like the surges on a lighthouse; and at Christ Church and in St. Mary’s the beautiful presence and the wonderful gift of Liddon kept the old fires burning in pious hearts.
And now into this old, old place, with its thick soil of dead lives and deeds, there had come a new seed, as to which no one could tell how it would flower. Women students were increasing every term in Oxford. Groups of girl graduates in growing numbers went[491] shyly through the streets, knowing that they had still to justify their presence in this hitherto closed world—made by men for men. There were many hostile eyes upon them, watching for mistakes. But all the generous forces in Oxford were behind them. The ablest men in the University were teaching women how to administer—how to organise. Some lecture-rooms were opening to them; some still entirely declined to admit them. And here and there were persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending this new eagerness of women to explore regions hitherto forbidden them in the House of Life.
Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora’s lead she had begun to make friends among the women-students, and to find her way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea-time. They all seemed to her superhumanly clever, and superhumanly modest. She had been brought up indeed by two scholars; but examinations dazzled and appalled her. How they were ever passed she could not imagine. She looked at the girls who had passed them with awe, quite unconscious the while of the glamour she herself possessed for these untravelled students—as one familiar from her childhood with the sacred places of history—Rome, Athens, Florence, Venice, Sicily. She had seen, she had trodden; and quiet eyes—sometimes spectacled—would flame, while her easy talk ran on.
But all the time there were very critical notions in her, hidden deep down.
‘Do they never think about a man?’ some voice in her seemed to be asking. ‘As for me, I am always thinking about a man!’ And the colour would flush into her cheeks, as she meekly asked for another cup of tea.
Sometimes she would go with Nora to the Bodleian, and sit patiently beside her while Nora copied Middle-English poetry from an early manuscript, worth a king’s ransom. Nora got sevenpence a ‘folio,’ of seventy-two words, for her work. Connie thought the pay scandalous for so much learning; but Nora laughed at her, and took far more pleasure in the small cheque she received at the end of term from the University Press than Connie in her quarterly dividends.
But Connie knew very well by this time that Nora was not wholly absorbed in Middle English. Often, as they emerged from the Bodleian to go home to lunch, they would come across Sorell hurrying along the Broad, his master’s gown floating behind him.[492] And he would turn his fine ascetic face towards them, and wave his hand to them from the other side of the street. And Connie would flash a look at Nora,—soft, quick, malicious—of which Nora was well aware.
But Connie rarely said a word. She was handling the situation indeed with great discretion, though with an impetuous will. She herself had withdrawn from the Greek lessons, on the plea that she was attending some English history lectures; that she must really find out who fought the battle of Hastings; and was too lazy to do anything else. Sometimes she would linger in the schoolroom till Sorell arrived, and then he would look at her wistfully, when she prepared to depart, as though to say—‘Was this what I bargained for?’
But she always laughed and went. And presently, as she crossed the hall again and heard animated voices in the schoolroom, her brown eyes would show a merry satisfaction.
Meanwhile Nora was growing thinner and handsomer day by day. She was shedding awkwardness without any loss of that subacid sincerity that was her charm. Connie, as much as she dared, took her dressing in hand. She was never allowed to give a thing; but Annette’s fingers were quick and clever, and Nora’s Spartan garb was sometimes transformed by them under the orders of a coaxing or audacious Constance. The mere lifting of the load of care had let the young plant shoot, so that many persons passing Ewen Hooper’s second daughter in the street would turn round now to look at her in surprise. Was that really the stout, podgy schoolgirl, who had already, by virtue of her strong personality, made a certain impression in the university town? People had been vaguely sorry for her, or vaguely thought of her as plain but good. Alice, of course, was pretty; Nora had the virtues. And now here she was, bursting into good looks, more positive than her sister’s.
The girl’s heart indeed was young at last. For the neighbourhood of Connie was infectious. The fairy-godmothering of that young woman was going finely. It was the secret hope at the centre of her own life which was playing like captured sunshine upon all the persons about her. Her energy was prodigious. Everything to do with money-matters had been practically settled between her and Sorell and Uncle Ewen; and settled in Connie’s way, expressed, no doubt, in business form. And now she was insisting firmly on the New Year visit to Rome, in spite of many protests from Uncle Ewen and Nora. It was a promise, she declared. They should be[493] let off Athens, if they chose, but Rome—Rome—was their fate. She wrote endless letters, inquiring for rooms, and announcing their coming to her old friends. Uncle Ewen soon had the startled impression that all Rome was waiting for them, and that they could never live up to it.
Finally, Connie persuaded them to settle on rooms in a well-known small hotel, overlooking the garden-front of the Palazzo Barberini, where she had grown up. She wrote to the innkeeper, Signor B., ‘a very old friend of mine,’ who replied that the ‘amici’ of the ‘distintissima signorina’ should be most tenderly looked after. As for the Contessas and Marchesas who wrote, eagerly promising their ‘dearest Constance’ that they would be kind to her relations, they were many; and when Ewen Hooper said nervously that it was clear he must take out both a frock-coat and dress-clothes, Constance laughed and said, ‘Not at all! Signor B. will lend you anything you want,’—a remark which, in the ears of the travellers to be, threw new and unexpected light on the functions of an Italian innkeeper. Meanwhile she piled up guide-books, she gathered maps; and she taught both her uncle and Nora Italian. And so long as she was busied with such matters she seemed the gayest of creatures, and would go singing and laughing about the house.
In another old house in Oxford, too, her coming made delight. She spent many winter hours beside the Master of Beaumont’s fire, gathering fresh light on the ways of scholarship and scholars. The quarrels of the learned had never hitherto come her way. Her father had never quarrelled with anybody. But the Master—poor great man!—had quarrelled with so many people! He had missed promotions which should have been his; he had made discoveries of which others had got the credit; and he kept a quite amazing stock of hatreds in some pocket of his vast intelligence. Constance would listen at first to the expression of them in an awed silence. Was it possible the world contained such mean and treacherous monsters? And why did it matter so much to a man who knew everything?—who held all the classics and all the Renaissance in the hollow of his hand, to whom ‘Latin was no more difficile Than to a blackbird ’tis to whistle’? Then, gradually, she began to have the courage to laugh; to try a little soft teasing of her new friend and mentor, who was at once so wonderful and so absurd. And the Master bore it well, could indeed never have too much of her company; while his white-haired sister beamed at the sight of her. She became the child of a childless house, and when Lady Langmoor sent her peremptory invitations to this or that country mansion[494] where she would meet ‘some charming young men,’ Connie would reply—‘Best thanks, dear Aunt Langmoor—but I am very happy here—and comfortably in love with a gentleman on the sunny side of seventy. Please don’t interfere!’
Only with Herbert Pryce was she ever thorny in these days. She could not forgive him that it was not till his appointment at the Conservative Central Office, due to Lord Glaramara’s influence, was actually signed and sealed, that he proposed to Alice. Till the goods had been delivered, he never finally committed himself. Even Nora had underrated his prudence. But at last one evening he arrived at Medburn Hall after dinner with the look of one whose mind is magnificently made up. By common consent, the drawing-room was abandoned to him and Alice, and when they emerged, Alice held her head triumphantly, and her lover was all jocosity and self-satisfaction.
‘She really is a dear little thing,’ he said complacently to Connie, when the news had been told, and excitement subsided. ‘We shall do capitally.’
‘Enfin?’ said Connie, with the old laugh in her eyes. ‘You are quite sure?’
He looked at her uneasily.
‘It never does to hurry these things,’ he said, rather pompously. ‘I wanted to feel I could give her what she had a right to expect. We owe you a great deal, Lady Constance—or—perhaps now—I may call you Constance?’
Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for Alice’s sake she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on, and Mrs. Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear conscience, and possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so happy by the bustle of the trousseau that she fell in love with her prospective son-in-law as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile watched him with mildly shrewd eyes, deciding once more in his inner mind that mathematicians were an inferior race.
Not even to Nora—only to Mrs. Mulholland—did Constance ever lift the veil during these months. She was not long in succumbing to the queer charm of that lovable and shapeless person; and in the little drawing-room in St. Giles the girl of twenty would spend winter evenings, at the feet of her new friend, passing through various stages of confession; till one night Mrs. Mulholland lifted the small face, with her own large hand, and looked mockingly into the brown eyes:
‘Out with it, my dear!—You are in love with Douglas Falloden!’
Connie said nothing. Her little chin did not withdraw itself, nor did her eyes drop. But a film of tears rushed into them.
The truth was that in this dark wintry Oxford, and its neighbouring country, there lurked a magic for Connie which in the high midsummer pomps it had never possessed. Once or twice, in the distance of a winding street—on some football ground in the Parks—in the gallery of St. Mary’s on Sunday, Constance caught sight, herself unseen, of the tall figure and the curly head. Such glimpses made the fever of her young life. They meant far more to passion than her occasional meetings with Falloden at the Boar’s Hill cottage. And there were other points of contact. At the end of November, for instance, came the Merton Fellowship. Falloden won it, in a brilliant field; and Connie contrived to know all she wanted to know as to his papers and his rivals. After the announcement of his success, she trod on air. Finally she allowed herself to send him a little note of congratulation—very short and almost formal. He replied in the same tone.
Two days later, Falloden went over to Paris to see for himself the condition of the ‘Orpheus,’ and to arrange for its transport to England. He was away for nearly a week, and on his return called at once in Holywell, to report his visit. Nora was with Connie in the drawing-room when he was announced, and a peremptory look forbade her to slip away. She sat listening to the conversation.
Was this really Douglas Falloden—this grave, courteous man—without a trace of the ‘blood’ upon him? He seemed to her years older than he had been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical everyday world. This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his affairs—incredible! He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain domestic details of the cottage—the cook, the food, the draughts, the arrangements to be made for Otto’s open-air treatment which the doctors were now insisting on—with an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly keep her face straight in the distance—they were so like a pair of crooning housewives. Then he began on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow on the back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly mass of hair—handsomer, thought Nora, than ever. And there was Connie listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile distinct against the dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him. Nora’s perplexed eyes travelled from one to the other.
As to the story of the ‘Orpheus’ and its inventor, both girls hung upon it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre, and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!—with a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the Welt-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm to take it up. Then Falloden’s astonishing letter and offer of funds, based on Radowitz’s report—itself the echo of a couple of letters from Paris—had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.
Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should hear Chopin’s great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.
The moment came. Wife and children gathered breathless. Chaumart turned on the current, released the machinery.
‘Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette!’
They listened—with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its utmost. And nothing happened!—positively nothing—beyond a few wheezing or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor, in despair, chased everybody out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash it or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the morning sun rose he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary blunder,—a vital connection missed between the power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on each other’s necks—and what a déjeuner in the Palais Royal—children and all—paid for by the inventor’s last napoleon!
All this Falloden told, and told well.
Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his tale. She clapped her hands in delight.
‘And when—when will it come?’
‘I must go over again—but I think the first days of January[497] will see it here. I’ve only told you half—and the lesser half. It’s you that have done most—far most.’
And he took out a little note-book, running through the list of visits he had paid to her friends and correspondents in Paris, among whom the rolls were being collected, under Chaumart’s direction. The ‘Orpheus’ already had a large musical library of its own—renderings by some of the finest artists of some of the noblest music. Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann—all Otto’s favourite things, as far as Connie had been able to discover them, were in the catalogue.
Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She put down the note-book, and spoke in a low voice, as though her girlish joy in their common secret had suddenly dropped.
‘It must give him some pleasure—it must!’ she said, slowly, piteously, as though she asked a question.
Falloden did not reply immediately. He rose from his seat. Nora, under a quick impulse, gathered up a letter she had been writing, and slipped out of the room.
‘At least—’ he looked away from her, straight out of window—‘I suppose it will please him—that we tried to do something.’
‘How is he—really?’
He shrugged his shoulders. Connie was standing, looking down, one hand on her chair. The afternoon had darkened; he could see only her white brow, and the wealth of her hair which the small head carried so lightly. Her childishness, her nearness, made his heart beat. Suddenly she lifted her eyes.
‘I wish you knew’—it seemed to him her voice choked a little—‘how much—you matter to him. Mrs. Mulholland and I couldn’t keep him cheerful while you were away.’
He laughed.
‘Well, I have only just escaped a catastrophe to-day.’
She looked alarmed.
‘How?’
‘I offended Bateson, and he gave notice!’ Connie’s ‘Oh!’ was a sound of consternation. Bateson had become a most efficient and comfortable valet, and Otto depended greatly upon him.
‘It’s all right,’ said Falloden quickly. ‘I grovelled. I ate all the humble-pie I could think of. It was, of course, impossible to let him go. Otto can’t do without him. I seem somehow to have offended his dignity.’
‘They have so much!’ said Connie, laughing, but rather unsteadily.
‘One lives and learns.’ The tone of the words was serious—a little anxious. Then the speaker took up his hat. ‘But I’m not good at managing touchy people. Good night.’
Her hand passed into his. The little fingers were cold; he could not help enclosing them in a warm, clinging grasp. The firelit room, the dark street outside, and the footsteps of the passers-by—they all melted from consciousness. They only saw and heard each other.
In another minute the outer door had closed behind him. Connie was left still in the same attitude, one hand on the chair, her head drooping, her heart in a dream.
Falloden ran through the streets, choosing the by-ways rather than the thoroughfares. The air was frosty, the December sky clear and starlit, above the blue or purple haze, pierced with lights, that filled the lower air; through which the college fronts, the distant spires and domes showed vaguely—as beautiful ‘suggestions’—‘notes’—from which all detail had disappeared. He was soon on Folly Bridge, and hurrying up the hill he pushed straight on over the brow to the Berkshire side, leaving the cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk. It was the English winter at its loveliest—still, patient, expectant—rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of. But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been so near to him, and yet so far away; so sweet, yet so defensive. His whole nature cried out fiercely for her. ‘I want her!—I want her! And I believe she wants me. She’s not afraid of me now—she turns to me. What keeps us apart? Nothing that ought to weigh for a moment against our double happiness!’
He turned and walked stormily homewards. Then, as he saw the roof and white walls of the cottage through the trees, his mood wavered—and fell. There was a life there which he had injured—a life that now depended on him. He knew that, more intimately than Connie knew it, often as he had denied it to her. And he was more convinced than Otto himself—though never by word or manner had he ever admitted it for a moment—that the boy was doomed—not immediately, but after one of those pitiful struggles which have their lulls and pauses, but tend all the same inevitably to one end.
‘And as long as he lives I shall look after him,’ he thought,[499] feeling that strange compulsion on him again, and yielding to it with mingled eagerness and despair.
For how could he saddle Connie’s life with such a charge—or darken it with such a tragedy?
Impossible! But that was only one of many reasons why he should not take advantage of her, through their common pity for Otto. In his own eyes he was a ruined man, and having resolutely refused to live upon his mother, his pride was little more inclined to live upon a wife, common, and generally applauded, though the practice might be. About five thousand pounds had been saved for himself out of the wreck, of which he would certainly spend a thousand, before all was done, on the ‘Orpheus.’ The rest would just suffice to launch him as a barrister. His mother would provide for the younger children. Her best jewels, indeed, had been already sold and invested as a dowry for Nellie—who showed signs of engaging herself to a Scotch laird. But Falloden was joint guardian of Trix and Reggie, and must keep a watchful eye on them, now that his mother’s soft incompetence had been more plainly revealed than ever by her widowhood. He chafed under the duties imposed, and yet fulfilled them—anxiously and well—to the amazement of his relations.
In addition he had his way to make in the world.
But Constance had only to be a little more seen and known in English Society to make the most brilliant match that any scheming chaperon could desire. Falloden was aware through every pulse of her fast developing beauty. And although no great heiress, as heiresses now go, she would ultimately inherit a large amount of scattered money, in addition to what she already possessed. The Langmoors would certainly have her out of Oxford at the earliest possible moment—and small blame to them.
In all this he reasoned as a man of his class and antecedents was likely to reason—only with a bias against himself. To capture Connie, through Otto, before she had had any other chances of marriage, seemed to him a mean and dishonourable thing.
If he had only time—time to make his career!
But there would be no time given him. As soon as her Risborough relations got hold of her, Constance would marry directly.
He went back to the cottage in a sombre mood. Then, as Otto proved to be in the same condition, Falloden had to shake off his own depression as quickly as possible, and spend the evening in amusing and distracting the invalid.
But Fortune, which had no doubt enjoyed the nips she had inflicted on so tempting a victim, was as determined as before to take her own capricious way.
By this time it was the last week of term, and a sharp frost had set in over the Thames Valley. The floods were out north and south of the city, and a bright winter sun shone all day over the glistening ice-plains and the throng of skaters.
At the beginning of the frost came the news of Otto’s success in his musical examination; and at a Convocation held shortly after it he put on his gown as Bachelor of Music. The Convocation House was crowded to see him admitted to his degree; and the impression produced as he made his way through the throng towards the Vice-Chancellor, by the frail boyish figure, the startling red-gold hair, the black sling, and the haunting eyes, was long remembered in Oxford. Then Sorell claimed him, and hurried him up to London for doctors and consultations, since the effort of the examination had left him much exhausted.
Meanwhile the frost held, and all Oxford went skating. Constance performed indifferently, and both Nora and Uncle Ewen were bent upon improving her. But there were plenty of cavaliers to attend her, whenever she appeared, either on Port Meadow or the Magdalen flood water; and her sound youth delighted physically in the exercise, in the play of the brisk air about her face, and the alternations of the bright winter day—from the pale blue of its morning skies, hung behind the snow-sprinkled towers and spires of Oxford, down to the red of sunset, and the rise of those twilight mists which drew the fair city gently back into the bosom of the moonlit dark.
But all the time the passionate sense in her watched and waited. The ‘mere living’ was good—‘yet was there better than it!’
And on the second afternoon, out of the distance of Magdalen meadow, a man came flying towards her as it seemed on the wings of the wind. Falloden drew up beside her, hovering on his skates, a splendid vision in the dusk, ease and power in every look and movement.
‘Let me take you a run with the wind,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘You shan’t come to any harm.’
Her eyes and her happy flush betrayed her. She put her hand in his, and away they flew, up the course of the Cherwell, through the flooded meadows. It seemed the very motion of gods; the world fell away. Then, coming back, they saw Magdalen Tower, all silver and ebony under the rising moon; and the noble arch of the bridge. The world was all transmuted. Connie’s only hold on[501] the kind common earth seemed to lie in this strong hand to which she clung; and yet in that touch, that hold, lay the magic that was making life anew.
But soon the wind had risen gustily, and was beating in her face, catching at her breath.
‘This is too cold for you!’ said Falloden, abruptly; and wheeling round, he had soon guided her into a more sheltered place, and there, easily gliding up and down, soul and sense fused in one delight, they passed one of those hours for which there is no measure in our dull human time. They would not think of the past; they shrank from imagining the future. There were shadows and ghosts behind them, and ahead of them; but the sheer present mastered them.
Before they parted, Falloden told his companion that the ‘Orpheus’ would arrive from Paris the following day, with a trio of French workmen to set it up. The electric installation was already in place. Everything would be ready by the evening. The instrument was to be placed behind a screen in the built-out room, once a studio, which Falloden had turned into a library. Otto rarely or never went there. The room looked north, and he, whose well-being hung upon sunshine, disliked it. But there was no other place for the ‘Orpheus’ in the little cottage, and Falloden, who had been getting new and thick curtains for the windows, improving the fireplace, and adding some arm-chairs, was eagerly hopeful that he could turn it into a comfortable music-room for Otto in the winter evenings, while he—if necessary—read his law elsewhere.
‘Will you come for a rehearsal to-morrow?’ he asked her. ‘Otto comes back the day after.’
‘No, no! I won’t hear anything, not a note—till he comes! But is he strong enough?’ she added, wistfully. Strong enough, she meant, to bear agitation and surprise. But Falloden reported that Sorell knew everything that was intended, and approved. Otto had been very listless and depressed in town; a reaction, no doubt, from his spurt of work before the Mus.Bac. exam. Sorell thought the pleasure of the gift might rouse him, and gild the return to Oxford.
‘Have some tea, old man, and warm up,’ said Falloden, on his knees before a fire already magnificent, which he was endeavouring to improve.
‘What do you keep such a climate for?’ growled Radowitz, as he hung shivering over the grate.
Sorell, who had come with the boy from the station, eyed him anxiously. The bright red patches on the boy’s cheeks, and his dry, fevered look, his weakness and his depression, had revived the most sinister fears in the mind of the man who had originally lured him to Oxford, and felt himself horribly responsible for what had happened there. Yet the London doctors, on the whole, had been reassuring. The slight hæmorrhage of the summer had had no successor; there were no further signs of active mischief; and for his general condition it was thought that the nervous shock of his accident, and the obstinate blood-poisoning which had followed it, might sufficiently account. The doctors, however, had pressed hard for sunshine and open air—the Riviera, Sicily, or Algiers. But the boy had said vehemently that he couldn’t and wouldn’t go alone, and who could go with him? A question that for the moment stopped the way. Falloden’s first Bar examination was immediately ahead; Sorell was tied to St. Cyprian’s; and every other companion so far proposed had been rejected with irritation.
Unluckily, on this day of his return, the Oxford skies had put on again their characteristic winter gloom. The wonderful fortnight of frost and sun was over; tempests of wind and deluges of rain were drowning it fast in flood and thaw. The wind shrieked round the little cottage, and though it was little more than three o’clock, darkness was coming fast.
Falloden could not keep still. Having made up the fire, he brought in a lamp himself; he drew the curtains, then undrew them again, apparently that he might examine a stretch of the Oxford road just visible through the growing dark; or he wandered in and out of the room, his hands in his pockets, whistling. Otto watched him with a vague annoyance. He himself was horribly tired, and Falloden’s restlessness got on his nerves.
At last Falloden said abruptly, pausing in front of him:
‘You’ll have some visitors directly!’
Otto looked up. The gaiety in Falloden’s eyes informed him and at the same time wounded him.
‘Lady Constance?’ he said, affecting indifference.
‘And Mrs. Mulholland. I believe I see their carriage.’
And Falloden, peering into the stormy twilight, opened the garden door and passed out into the rain.
Otto remained motionless, bent over the fire. Sorell was talking with the ex-scout in the dining-room, impressing on him certain[503] medical directions. Radowitz suddenly felt himself singularly forlorn and deserted. Of course, Falloden and Constance would marry. He always knew it. He would have served to keep them together, and give them opportunities of meeting, when they might have easily drifted entirely apart. He laughed to himself as he thought of Connie’s impassioned cry—‘I shall never, never, marry him!’ Such are the vows of women. She would marry him; and then what would he, Otto, matter to her or to Falloden any longer? He would have been, no doubt, a useful peg and pretext; but he was not going to intrude on their future bliss. He thought he would go back to Paris. One might as well die there as anywhere.
There were murmurs of talk and laughter in the hall. He sat still, hugging his melancholy. But when the door opened he rose quickly, instinctively, and, at the sight of the girl coming in so timidly behind Mrs. Mulholland, her eyes searching the half-lit room, and the smile, in them and on her lips, held back till she knew whether her poor friend could bear with smiles, Otto’s black hour began to lift. He let himself, at least, be welcomed and petted; and when fresh tea had been brought in, and the room was full of talk, he lay back in his chair, listening, the deep lines in his forehead gradually relaxing. He was better, he declared, a great deal better; in fact there was very little at all the matter with him. His symphony was to be given at the Royal College of Music early in the year. Everybody had been awfully decent about it. And he had begun a nocturne that amused him. As for the doctors, he repeated petulantly that they were all fools—it was only a question of degree. He intended to manage his life as he pleased in spite of them.
Connie sat on a high stool near him while he talked. She seemed to be listening, but he once or twice thought, resentfully, that it was a perfunctory listening. He wondered what else she was thinking about.
The tea was cleared away. And presently the three others had disappeared. Otto and Constance were left alone.
‘I have been reading so much about Poland lately,’ said Constance suddenly. ‘Oh, Otto, some day you must show me Cracow!’
His face darkened.
‘I shall never see Cracow again. I shall never see it with you.’
‘Why not? Let’s dream!’
The smiling tenderness in her eyes angered him. She was[504] treating him like a child; she was so sure he never could—or never would—make love to her!
‘I shall never go to Cracow,’ he said, with energy, ‘not even with you. I was to have gone—a year from now. It was all arranged. We have relations there—and I have friends there—musicians. The chef d’orchestre—at the Opera House—he was one of my teachers in Paris. Before next year, I was to have written a concerto on some of our Polish songs—there are scores of them that Liszt and Chopin never discovered. Not love-songs, mind you!—songs of revolution—battle-songs.’
His eyes lit up and he began to hum an air—to Polish words—that even as given out in his small tenor voice, stirred like a trumpet.
‘Fine!’ said Constance.
‘Ah, but you can’t judge—you don’t know the words. The words are splendid. It’s “Ujejski’s Hymn”—the Galician Hymn of ’46.’ And he fell to intoning.
‘There!—that’s something like it.’
And he ran on with a breathless translation of the ‘Z dymen posarow,’ the famous dirge for the Galician rebels of ’46, in which a devastated land wails like Rachel for her children.
Suddenly a sound—a sound reedy and clear, like a beautiful voice in the distance.
‘Constance!’
The lad sprang to his feet. Constance laid hold on him.
‘Listen, dear Otto—listen a moment!’
She held him fast, and breathing deep, he listened. The very melody he had just been humming rang out, from the same distant point; now pealing through the little house in a rich plenitude of sound, now delicate and plaintive as the chant of nuns in a quiet church, and finally crashing to a defiant and glorious close.
‘What is it?’ he said, very pale, looking at her almost threateningly. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘It’s our gift—our surprise—dear Otto!’
‘Where is it? Let me go.’
‘No!—sit down and listen! Let me listen with you. I’ve not heard it before! Mr. Falloden and I have been preparing it[505] for months. Isn’t it wonderful! Oh, dear Otto!—if you only like it!’ He sat down trembling, and hand in hand they listened.
The ‘Fantasia’ ran on, dealing with song after song, now simply, now with rich embroidery and caprice.
‘Who is it playing?’ said Otto, in a whisper.
‘It was Paderewski!’ said Constance between laughing and crying. ‘Oh, Otto, everybody’s been at work for it!—everybody was so marvellously keen!’
‘In Paris?’
‘Yes—all your old friends—your teachers—and many others.’
She ran through the names. Otto choked. He knew them all, and some of them were among the most illustrious in French music.
But while Connie was speaking the stream of sound in the distance sank into gentleness, and in the silence a small voice arose, naïvely, pastorally sweet, like the Shepherd’s Song in ‘Tristan.’ Otto buried his face in his hands. It was the ‘Heynal,’ the watchman’s horn-song from the towers of Panna Marya. Once given, a magician caught it, played with it, pursued it, juggled with it, through a series of variations till, finally, a grave and beautiful modulation led back to the noble dirge of the beginning.
‘I know who wrote that!—who must have written it!’ said Otto, looking up. He named a French name. ‘I worked with him at the Conservatoire for a year.’
Constance nodded.
‘He did it for you,’ she said, her eyes full of tears. ‘He said you were the best pupil he ever had.’
The door opened, and Mrs. Mulholland’s grizzled head appeared, with Falloden and Sorell behind.
‘Otto!’ said Mrs. Mulholland, softly.
He understood that she called him, and he went with her in bewilderment, along the passage to the studio.
Falloden came into the sitting-room and shut the door.
‘Did he like it?’ he asked, in a low voice, in which there was neither pleasure nor triumph.
Connie, who was still sitting on the stool by the fire with her face turned away, looked up.
‘Oh yes, yes!’ she said in a kind of desperation, wringing her hands; ‘but why are some pleasures worse than pain—much worse?’
Falloden came up to her, and stood silently, his eyes on hers.
‘You see—’ she went on, dashing tears away—‘It is not his[506] work—his playing. It can’t do anything—can it?—for his poor starved self.’
Falloden said nothing. But she knew that he felt with her. Their scheme seemed to be lying in ruins; they were almost ashamed of it.
Then from the further room there came to their ears a prelude of Chopin, played surely by more than mortal fingers,—like the rustling of summer trees, under a summer wind. And suddenly they heard Otto’s laugh—a sound of delight.
Connie sprang up—her face transformed.
‘Did you hear that? We have—we have—given him pleasure!’
‘Yes—for an hour,’ said Falloden, hoarsely. Then he added—‘The doctors say he ought to go south.’
‘Of course he ought!’ Connie was pacing up and down, her hands behind her, her eyes on the ground. ‘Can’t Mr. Sorell take him?’
‘He could take him out, but he couldn’t stay. The college can’t spare him. He feels his first duty is to the college.’
‘And you?’ She raised her eyes timidly.
‘What good should I be alone!’ he said, with difficulty. ‘I’m a pretty sort of a nurse!’
There was a pause. Connie trembled and flushed. Then she moved forward, both her little hands outstretched.
‘Take me with you!’ she murmured under her breath. But her eyes said more—far more.
The next moment she was in Falloden’s arms, strained against his breast—everything else lost and forgotten, as their lips met, in the just selfishness of passion.
Then he released her, stepping back from her, his strong face quivering.
‘I was a mean wretch to let you do that!’ he said, with energy.
She eyed him.
‘Why?’
‘Because I have no right to let you give yourself to me—throw yourself away on me—just because we have been doing this thing together,—because you are sorry for Otto—and—’ his voice dropped—‘perhaps for me.’
‘Oh!’ It was a cry of protest. Coming nearer, she put her two hands lightly on his shoulders—
‘Do you think—’ he saw her breath fluttering—‘do you think I should let anyone—anyone—kiss me—like that! just because I was sorry for them—or for someone else?’
He stood motionless beneath her touch.
‘You are sorry for me—you angel!—and you’re sorry for Otto—and you want to make up to everybody—and make everybody happy—and⸺’
‘And one can’t!’ said Connie quietly, her eyes bright with tears—‘Don’t I know that? I repeat’—her colour was very bright—‘But perhaps you won’t believe that—that’—then she laughed—‘of my own free will, I never kissed anybody before?’
‘Constance!’ He threw his strong arms round her again. But she slipped out of them.
‘Am I believed?’ The tone was peremptory.
Falloden stooped, lifted her hand and kissed it humbly.
‘You know you ought to marry a Duke!’ he said, trying to laugh, but with a swelling throat.
‘Thank you—I never saw a Duke yet I wanted to marry.’
‘That’s it. You’ve seen so little. I am a pauper, and you might marry anybody. It’s taking an unfair advantage. Don’t you see—what⸺’
‘What my aunts will think?’ asked Constance coolly—‘Oh yes, I’ve considered all that.’
She walked away, and came back, a little pale and grave. She sat down on the arm of a chair and looked up at him.
‘I see. You are as proud as ever.’
That hurt him. His face changed.
‘You can’t really think that,’ he said, with difficulty.
‘Yes, yes, you are!’ she said, wildly, covering her eyes a moment with her hands. ‘It’s just the same as it was in the spring—only different—I told you then—’
‘That I was a bully and a cad!’
Her hands dropped sharply.
‘I didn’t!’ she protested. But she coloured brightly as she spoke, remembering certain remarks of Nora’s. ‘I thought—yes, I did think—you cared too much about being rich—and a great swell—and all that. But so did I!’ She sprang up. ‘What right had I to talk? When I think how I patronised and looked down upon everybody!’
‘You!’ His tone was pure scorn. ‘You couldn’t do such a thing if you tried for a week of Sundays.’
‘Oh couldn’t I! I did. Oxford seemed to me just a dear stupid old place—out of the world,—a kind of museum—where nobody mattered. Silly, wasn’t it? childish?’ She drew back her head fiercely, as though she defied him to excuse her. ‘I was[508] just amusing myself with it—and with Otto—and with you. And that night, at Magdalen, all the time I was dancing with Otto, I was aiming—abominably—at you! I wanted to provoke you—to pay you back—oh, not for Otto’s sake—not at all!—but just because—I had asked you something—and you had refused. That was what stung me so. And do you suppose I should have cared twopence, unless⸺’
Her voice died away. Her fingers began fidgeting with the arm of the chair, her eyes bent upon them.
He looked at her a moment irresolute, his face working. Then he said huskily—
‘In return—for that—I’ll tell you—I must tell you the real truth about myself. I don’t think you know me yet—and I don’t know myself. I’ve got a great brutal force in me somewhere—that wants to brush everything—that hinders me—or checks me—out of my path. I don’t know that I can control it—that I can make a woman happy. It’s an awful risk for you. Look at that poor fellow!’ He flung out his hand towards that distant room whence came every now and then a fresh wave of music. ‘I didn’t intend to do him any bodily harm⸺’
‘Of course not! It was an accident!’ cried Connie passionately.
‘Perhaps—strictly. But I did mean somehow to crush him—to make it precious hot for him—just because he’d got in my way. My will was like a steel spring in a machine—that had been let go. Suppose I felt like that again, towards⸺’
‘Towards me?’ Connie opened her eyes very wide, puckering her pretty brow.
‘Towards someone—or something—you care for. We are certain to disagree about heaps of things.’
‘Of course we are. Quite certain!’
‘I tell you again,’ said Falloden, speaking with a strong simplicity and sincerity that were all the time undoing the impression he honestly desired to make—‘It’s a big risk for you—a temperament like mine—and you ought to think it over seriously. And then’—he paused abruptly in front of her, his hands in his pockets—‘Why should you—you’re so young!—start life with any burden on you? Why should you? It’s preposterous! I must look after Otto all his life.’
‘So must I!’ said Connie quickly. ‘That’s the same for both of us.’
‘No!—that’s nonsense. And then—you may forget it—but[509] I can’t. I repeat—I’m a pauper. I’ve lost Flood. I’ve lost everything that I could once have given you. I’ve got about four thousand pounds left—just enough to start me at the bar—when I’ve paid for the “Orpheus.” And I can’t take a farthing from my mother or the other children. I should be just living upon you. How do I know that I shall get on at the bar?’
Connie smiled; but her lips trembled.
‘Do think it over,’ he implored; and he walked away from her again, as though to leave her free.
There was a silence. He turned—anxiously to look at her.
‘I seem’—said Connie, in a low voice that shook—‘to have kissed somebody—for nothing.’
That was the last stroke. He came back to her, and knelt beside her, murmuring inarticulate things. With a sigh of relief, Connie subsided upon his shoulder, conscious through all her emotion of the dear strangeness of the man’s coat against her cheek. But presently, she drew herself away, and looked him in the eyes, while her own swam.
‘I love you’—she said deliberately—‘because—well, first because I love you!—that’s the only good reason, isn’t it? and then, because you’re so sorry. And I’m sorry too. We’ve both got to make up—we’re going to make up all we can.’ Her sweet face darkened. ‘Oh Douglas, it’ll take the two of us—and even then we can’t do it. But we’ll help each other.’
And stooping she kissed him gently, lingeringly, on the brow. It was a kiss of consecration.
A few minutes more, and then, with the Eighth Prelude swaying and dancing round them, they went hand in hand down the long approach to the music-room.
The door was open, and they saw the persons inside. Otto and Sorell were walking up and down smoking cigarettes. The boy was radiant, transformed. All look of weakness had disappeared; he held himself erect; his shock of red-gold hair blazed in the firelight, and his eyes laughed, as he listened silently, playing with his cigarette. Sorell evidently was thinking only of him; but he too wore a look of quiet pleasure.
Only Mrs. Mulholland sat watchful, her face turned towards the open door. It wore an expression which was partly excitement, partly doubt. The strings of her large mushroom hat were untied; and her ample skirts, looped up to keep them from the mud, billowed round her. Her snow-white hair, above her very[510] black eyes, and her frowning, intent look, gave her the air of an old Sibyl watching at the cave’s mouth.
But when she saw the two—the young man and the girl—coming towards her, hand in hand, she first peered at them intently, and then, as she rose, all the gravity of her face broke up in laughter.
‘Hope for the best, you foolish old woman!’ she said to herself—‘“Male and female made He them!”—world without end—Amen!’
‘Well?’ She moved towards them, as they entered the room; holding out her hands with a merry, significant gesture.
Otto and Sorell turned. Connie—crimson—threw herself on Mrs. Mulholland’s neck and kissed her. Falloden stood behind her, thinking of a number of things to say, and unable to say any of them.
The last soft notes of the Prelude ceased.
It was for Connie to save the situation. With a gentle, gliding step, she went across to Otto, who had gone very white again.
‘Dear Otto, you told me I should marry Douglas, and I’m going to. That’s one to you. But I won’t marry him—and he agrees—unless you’ll promise to come to Algiers with us, three weeks from now. You’ll lend him to us, won’t you?’—she turned pleadingly to Sorell—‘we’ll take such care of him. Douglas—you may be surprised!—is going to read law at Biskra!’
Otto sank into a chair. The radiance had gone. He looked very frail and ghostly. But he took Connie’s outstretched hand.
‘I wish you joy,’ he said, stumbling painfully over the words. ‘I do wish you joy!—with all my heart.’
Falloden approached him. Otto looked up wistfully. Their eyes met, and for a moment the two men were conscious only of each other.
Mrs. Mulholland moved away, smiling, but with a sob in her throat.
‘It’s like all life,’ she thought—‘love and death, side by side.’
And she remembered that comparison by a son of Oxford, of each moment, as it passes, to a watershed—‘whence equally the seas of life and death are fed.’
But Connie was determined to carry things off with a laugh. She sat down beside Otto, looking business-like.
‘Douglas and I’—the name came out quite pat—‘have been discussing how long it really takes to get married.’
Mrs. Mulholland laughed.
‘Mrs. Hooper has been enjoying Alice’s trousseau so much, you needn’t expect she’ll let you get through yours in a hurry.’
‘It’s going to be my trousseau, not Aunt Ellen’s,’ said Connie with decision. ‘Let me see. It’s now the 18th of December. Didn’t we say the 12th of January?’ She looked lightly at Falloden.
‘Somewhere near it,’ said Falloden, his smile at last answering hers.
‘We shall want a fortnight, I suppose, to get used to each other,’ said Connie coolly. ‘Then’—she laid a hand on Mrs. Mulholland’s knee—‘you bring him to Marseilles to meet us?’
‘Certainly—at your orders.’
Connie looked at Otto.
‘Dear Otto?’ The soft tone pleaded. He started painfully.
‘You’re awfully good to me. But how can I come to be a burden on you?’
‘But I shall go too,’ said Mrs. Mulholland, firmly.
Connie exclaimed in triumph:
‘We four—to front the desert!—just about the time that he’—she nodded towards Sorell—‘is showing Nora and Uncle Ewen Rome. You mayn’t know it’—she addressed Sorell—‘but on Monday, January 24—I think I’ve got the date right—you and they go on a picnic to Hadrian’s Villa. The weather’s arranged for—and the carriage is ordered.’
She looked at him askance. But her colour had risen. So had his. He looked down on her while Mrs. Mulholland and Falloden were both talking fast to Otto.
‘You little witch!’ said Sorell in a low voice—‘what are you after now?’
Connie laughed in his face.
‘You’ll go—you’ll see!’
The little dinner which followed was turned into a betrothal feast. Champagne was brought in, and Otto, madly gay, boasted of his forebears and the incomparable greatness of Poland as usual. Nobody minded. After dinner the magic toy in the studio discoursed Brahms and Schumann, in the intervals of discussing plans and chattering over maps. But Connie insisted on an early departure. ‘My guardian will have to sleep upon it—and there’s really no time to lose.’ Everyone took care not to see too much of the parting between her and Falloden. Then she and Mrs. Mulholland were put into their carriage. But Sorell preferred to walk home, and Falloden went back to Otto.
Sorell descended the hill towards Oxford. The storm was dying[512] away, and the now waning moon, which had shone so brilliantly over the frozen floods a day or two before, was venturing out again among the scudding clouds. The lights in Christ Church Hall were out, but the beautiful city shone vaguely luminous under the night.
Sorell’s mind was full of mingled emotion—as torn and jagged as the clouds rushing overhead. The talk and laughter in the cottage came back to him. How hollow and vain it sounded in the spiritual ear! What could ever make up to that poor boy who could have no more, at the most, than a year or two to live? for the spilt wine of his life?—the rifled treasure of his genius? And was it not true to say that his loss had made the profit of the lovers—of whom one had been the author of it? When Falloden and Constance believed themselves to be absorbed in Otto, were they not really playing the great game of sex like any ordinary pair?
It was the question that Otto himself had asked—that any cynic must have asked. But Sorell’s tender humanity passed beyond it. The injury done, indeed, was beyond repair. But the mysterious impulse which had brought Falloden to the help of Otto was as real in its sphere as the anguish and the pain; aye, for the philosophic spirit, more real than they, and fraught with a healing and disciplining power that none could measure. Sorell admitted—half-reluctantly—the changes in life and character which had flowed from it. He was even ready to say that the man who had proved capable of feeling it, in spite of all past appearances, was ‘not far from the Kingdom of God.’
Oxford drew nearer and nearer. Tom Tower loomed before him. Its great bell rang out. And suddenly, as if he could repress it no longer, there ran through Sorell’s mind—his half melancholy mind, unaccustomed to the claims of personal happiness—the vision that Connie had so sharply evoked; of a girl’s brown eyes and honest look—the look of a child to be cherished, of a woman to be loved.
Was it that morning that he had helped Nora to translate a few lines of the Antigone?
‘Love, all-conquering love, that nestles in the fair cheeks of a maiden⸺’
It is perhaps not surprising that Sorell, on this occasion, after he had entered the High, should have taken the wrong turn to St. Cyprian’s, and woke up to find himself passing through Radcliffe Square, when he ought to have been in the Turl.
THE END