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OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 E. F. BENSON 
 
MY FATHER, JET. 50 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 1867-1896 
 
 V V BY 
 
 E. y F. BENSON 
 
 AUTHOR OF "DODO," "DAVID BLAIZE," 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS 
 
 NEW XSJT YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
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 6 
 
 
 HP 
 
 \<v 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921, 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 U{,% 
 
 
 'JW 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Wellington and the Beginning ... 13 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Lincoln and Early Emotions .... 32 
 
 CHAPTER ni 
 Lincoln and Demoniacal Possession . . 52 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The New Home at Truro 62 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Private School and Holidays .... 80 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 The Dunce's Progress 108 
 
 CHAPTER VH 
 The Widening Horizons 137 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 Lambeth and Addington 163 
 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAQB 
 
 The Fall of the First Leaf .... 189 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 Cambridge 209 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 The Circle Is Broken ...... 237 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 An Arch^iological Excursion .... 255 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 Athens and Dodo . 276 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 Athens and Egypt 303 
 
 Index 325 
 
PORTRAITS 
 
 My Father, aet . 50 Frontispiece 
 
 PAGB 
 
 My Mother, aet. 20 19 
 
 Elizabeth Cooper: "Beth", aet. 78 . . . 69 
 
 E. F. Benson, aet. 19 119 
 
 "His Grace" 169 
 
 "Her Grace" 219 
 
 E. F. Benson, aet. 22 269 
 
 E. F. Benson, aet. 26 287 
 
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 
 
 MY father was headmaster of Wellington College, 
 where and when I was born, but of him there, in 
 spite of his extraordinarily forcible personality, I have 
 no clear memory, though the first precise and definite 
 recollection that I retain at all, heaving out of nothing- 
 ness, was connected with him, for it certainly was he, 
 who, standing by the table in the window of the dining- 
 room with an open newspaper in his hand, told me never 
 to forget this day on which the Franco-German war 
 came to an end. Otherwise as regards him, somebody 
 swept by in an academic cap and gown, a figure not at 
 all awe-inspiring as he became to me very soon after, but 
 simply a rather distinguished natural phenomenon to be 
 regarded in the same light as rain or wall-paper or sun- 
 shine. Cudgel my memory as I may, I can evoke no 
 other figure of him at Wellington, except as something 
 shining and swift; an external object whirling along on 
 an orbit as inconjecturable as those of the stars, and 
 wholly uninteresting. He had a study on the left of the 
 front door into the Master's Lodge, where there was a 
 big desk with a shiny circular cover. I know that I was 
 taken in there to say good night to him, but the most 
 
 13 
 
14 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 remarkable thing there was the big desk with large 
 handles, and perhaps a boy standing by it, mountainous 
 in height and looking extremely polite and gentle. There 
 was the same ceremony every evening: my father kissed 
 me, put his hand on my head and said, "God bless you 
 and make you a good boy always." The most significant 
 detail of that ritual was that my father's face was rough, 
 not smooth like the face of my mother and of Beth, and 
 that there lingered round him or the room a smell of 
 books and a smell of soap. 
 
 A little later on than that there came a period when 
 for half an hour before bedtime my two sisters and I 
 (for the present the youngest) used to visit him in that 
 same study while he drew entrancing pictures for us, 
 each in turn. One of these I found only the other day : 
 it represents a hill crowned with a castle and a church, 
 in front of which is a small knight waving his sword in 
 the direction of a terrifying dragon, horned and tailed, 
 who is flying across the sky. Below in minute capitals 
 runs a rhyming legend. Or I went to the College chapel, 
 though not often, and by way of a treat, and there 
 was the same figure in a surplice, in a stall on the right 
 hand of the door of entrance. I believe I was there on 
 the last Sunday of his Headmastership and that they 
 sang a hymn which he wrote. 
 
 Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with 
 memories of my first five years, but externally I have im- 
 pressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable 
 only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumul- 
 tuously alive. All these (and I think the experience is 
 universal) were external happenings, trivial in them- 
 selves, but far more lasting than emotional affairs in later 
 life. Never shall I forget, though I have forgotten so 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 15 
 
 much of far vaster import since then, the discovery of an 
 adder on the croquet lawn outside the nursery windows. 
 The gardener attacked it with the shears that he had been 
 using for clipping the edges of the grass: he made fine 
 chopping gestures, and presently disappeared into the 
 belt of wood with the adder slung on the blades. There 
 is the vignette: something terribly vivid but girt about 
 with mist. I have no other knowledge of the gardener 
 but that he killed an adder with his shears and went into 
 the belt of wood with the corpse dangling thereon. 
 
 There was an evening when, having had my bath in the 
 nursery I escaped from the hands of my nurse, slippery 
 with soapy water, and looked out of the nursery window. 
 Then a miracle burst upon my astounded eyes, for, 
 though it was bedtime my mother was in the act of put- 
 ting her foot on her own croquet ball, and with a smart 
 stroke sending the adversary into the limbo of a flower- 
 bed. That was allowed by the rule of 1870 or there- 
 abouts, and it gave me the impression of consummate skill 
 and energy. My mother, you must understand, stood 
 quite still with her own ball in chancery below her foot. 
 The concussion of her violent mallet sent the adversary 
 into a flower-bed, and the calceolarias nodded. . . . 
 Then Beth, my nurse, caught me, and rubbed me dry, 
 and I went to bed with the delicious sense of my mother's 
 magnificence, and the marvel of people still playing cro- 
 quet in daylight when I had to go to bed. I think that 
 this occasion was the first on which I recognised my 
 mother as having a personality of her own. The next 
 confused me again, for on some birthday of one of us, 
 or at Christmas, Beth told me that Abracadabra was 
 coming, and that I mustn't be frightened. I was then 
 taken to see my mother, who was lying down in her bed- 
 
16 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 room, and said that she was very sleepy, and I returned 
 to the nursery. Shortly afterwards there was a general 
 hubbub in the house, and on being taken downstairs from 
 the nursery into the hall, I saw a huge bedizened fairy 
 standing in front of the fireplace. She blew a piercing 
 trumpet at intervals, and made dance-steps to the right 
 and left, i She had a wonderful hat covered with lilies, 
 and a dress covered with jewels, and in front of her 
 was a- thing that might have been mistaken for the 
 clothes-basket out of which Beth took clean shirts and 
 socks, but it could not possibly have been that, because it 
 gleamed with pure gold. A sheet lay on the top of it, 
 and Abracadabra blew her trumpet, and Beth, holding me 
 close, said, "Eh, dear, don't be frightened; it's all right!" 
 Obviously it was all right; for to put an end to all 
 tearful tendencies, Abracadabra, with a magnificent ges- 
 ture, withdrew the sheet, and hastily presented me with a 
 clockwork train, just what I had always wanted. She 
 turned a key in the engine, and the engine then capsized 
 with loud buzzings, but when Abracadabra put it on its 
 wheels again, it proceeded to draw three tin carriages after 
 it. And it was mine, the very thing I had wanted, and 
 Abracadabra smiled as she gave it me, and I thought that 
 her face was rather like Mamma's. But the likeness 
 must have been purely accidental, because Mamma was 
 in her bedroom feeling sleepy. And when Abracadabra 
 went through the door into the kitchen passage blowing 
 loudly on her trumpet, and when, after a few excursions 
 of the clockwork train, I was allowed to go up to her 
 room again, and found her still sleepy, it might be indeed 
 considered proved that she was not Abracadabra. Be- 
 sides, when I told her about Abracadabra's visit, she 
 was very much vexed that she had missed her, and asked 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 17 
 
 whether Abracadabra had not left any present for her, 
 which she had not. That is the first clear and definite 
 memory I have of Abracadabra, and also, in a way, it 
 is the last, for when next that amiable fairy visited us, I 
 knew, alas, that she was no fairy at all, but my mother, 
 dressed in the amazing garb of fairyland. But though 
 that particular brand of fairyland was finished for me, 
 those subsequent occasions were girt with grandeur, for I, 
 concealing my own superior knowledge, must pretend 
 that this was genuine Abracadabra, thus indulging and 
 buttressing the belief of my youngest brother Hugh, who 
 still, innocent thing, had no grown-up doubts on the sub- 
 ject. ... I found those selfsame garments only lately 
 in a trunk stowed away in an attic at the last home my 
 mother lived in; a skirt covered with sprays of artificial 
 flowers, a bodice and stomacher set with gems of pure 
 glass, a hat of white satin embowered in flowers, a pair 
 of wings, gauze and gold, and a pair of high-heeled shoes 
 covered with gilt paper. They were moth-eaten and 
 mouldy, and it was scarcely possible for the most senti- 
 mental pilgrim to preserve them. Besides I had the mem- 
 ory of the day when the authentic fairy appeared in them, 
 and that memory was sweeter than the condition, forty- 
 five years later, of the robes themselves. My mother had 
 kept them, I make no doubt, when her own days of Abra- 
 cadabra were over by reason of our emergence from child- 
 hood, in the hope that one day a daughter or daughter-in- 
 law would assume them again for the joy and mystifica- 
 tion of grandchildren, but that day never came. So the 
 robes of fairyland stowed away in their trunk were for- 
 gotten, until that day at Tremans when I found them, as 
 I turned out the treasures and the rubbish of the vanished 
 years before the house passed into other hands. It was 
 
18 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS ' 
 
 a dark autumn day, and the rain beat softly on the roof, 
 but verily, when I opened the trunk and found them 
 there, the sunlight of the dawn of life shot level and de- 
 licious rays from the far horizon, and cast a rainbow over 
 the weeping sky. 
 
 People in those very early days, with the exception of 
 Beth, were more part of the general landscape of life than 
 human beings, similar in kind to myself, with an individ- 
 uality of their own. They were not loved or feared : they 
 were but a part of the general environment, like the walls 
 of the nursery, or trees or dinner or beds. But, as by 
 some superior swiftness of evolution, Beth ceased to be 
 landscape, and became a human being, wholly to be 
 adored and generally to be obeyed, sooner than any of 
 the family. She was well over fifty when first I remem- 
 ber her, and had by now almost completed the nursing 
 of a second generation, for she had been nursery-maid 
 with Mrs. Sidgwick, my mother's mother, when her fam- 
 ily came into the world, and had gone to my mother when 
 at the mature age of nineteen the first of her six children 
 was born. Thereafter Beth remained with my mother 
 until the end of her long and utterly beautiful life of 
 love and service. Very soon after she came to my grand- 
 mother, at the age of fifteen, she gave notice because she 
 wanted to go back from Rugby to her native Yorkshire, 
 and did not settle into more southerly ways. But my 
 grandmother encouraged her to think that she soon would 
 do so, and so Beth, instead of leaving, stopped on till the 
 age of ninety-three, in an unbroken devotion to us of 
 seventy-eight years. That devotion was returned: we 
 were all her children, and the darlingest of all to Beth's 
 big heart was Hugh. 
 
 Beth t£en, to my sense, emerged first of all into the 
 
MT MOTHER, vET. 20 
 
 [Page 19 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 21 
 
 ranks of human beings, servant and friend and to a very 
 considerable extent mistress. But she gave us no weak 
 and sentimental devotion, and though she never inspired 
 the smallest degree of fear, her rare displeasure caused an 
 awful feeling of loneliness and desolation. If we had 
 done wrong, she demanded sorrow before her forgiveness 
 was granted, and if to her wise mind the sorrow was not 
 sufficiently sincere, she was quite capable of saying, when 
 we said we were sorry in too superficial a manner, "I 
 don't want your sorrer," and the day grew black, until 
 she accepted it and beamed forgiveness. That granted, 
 there was never any nagging, and next minute she would 
 be running races with us again until panting and bright- 
 eyed she would stop and say, "Eh, dear, I can't run any 
 more : I've got a bone in my leg." 
 
 She mingles in almost every memory that I have of 
 those days, a loved and protecting presence. She it was 
 who lifted me up to look out of the nursery window when 
 a sham fight was going on, perhaps at Aldershot. There 
 were reports of guns to be heard and, so I fancy, flashes 
 and wreaths of smoke, and like George III I got it firmly 
 embedded in my mind that this was the battle of Water- 
 loo that I had witnessed. The connection I think lay 
 through the fact of this place being Wellington. She it 
 was who led me through a delicious sandy piece of waste 
 ground near the house called the Wilderness, and allowed 
 me to pick and eat a blackberry from a bramble that grew 
 by a rubbish heap on which was a broken plate. Never 
 have I seen such a blackberry. I can still hardly believe 
 it was not of the size of an apricot, for I know it entirely 
 filled my mouth and the juice spurted therefrom as out of 
 a wine-vat. She too consoled me for the loss of two front 
 teeth which came out into a piece of butter-scotch that 
 
22 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 she had given me. She removed the teeth and I pro- 
 ceeded with the toffee. She too allowed me to take out 
 of the Noah's ark with which we played on Sundays a 
 brown dog remotely resembling a setter, two of whose 
 legs had been broken. Her brilliant surgery had repaired 
 this loss by inserting in the stumps a couple of pins so that 
 it stood up as well as ever. This I was permitted to carry 
 about with me, partly in my pocket, but mostly in a warm 
 damp hand, which caused the setter to exude a pleasant 
 smell of paint and varnish. A moment of tragedy, the 
 first that I had known, was the sequel, and I do not 
 believe that ever in my life I have been more utterly 
 miserable. What happened was this. 
 
 It was Christmas Eve, and the five of us, Martin, 
 Arthur, Nellie, Maggie, and myself — Hugh, so I guess, 
 being then little more than a month old — were returning 
 from our walk, and the setter should have been in my 
 hand or in my pocket. We were going through a wood 
 of fir trees, the ground was brown and slippery with pine- 
 needles, and the sun low and red shone through the 
 tall trunks making, with the fact that it was Christmas 
 Eve, an enchanted moment. I had just found out that 
 my breath steamed, as it came out of my mouth, and 
 Beth and I were playing steamers. Then suddenly I 
 became aware that the setter was neither in my hand nor 
 my pocket, and the abomination of desolation descended 
 on me. For a little while we looked for it, and then Beth 
 decreed that we must go on. But Martin — this is the first 
 thing that I can recollect about him — being eleven years 
 old and able to walk alone after dark, got leave to stop 
 behind and look for it, while the rest of the bereaved pro- 
 cession went homewards. At that point my memory 
 fails, and I have no idea whether he found it or not. But 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 23 
 
 here were the two first crystallized emotions of my life; 
 the black misery of the loss of the setter, and the sense 
 of Martin's amazing kindness and bravery in stopping 
 behind by himself in the terrible wood. There was a 
 moon in the sky when we came out into the open and 
 frosty stars, but no heart within me to care for playing 
 steamers any more that day. 
 
 Next morning, after nursery-breakfast, I went down 
 to the dining-room, and was given a cup of milk to drink 
 by my father. This was an unusual proceeding, and as 
 I progressed towards the bottom of the cup he told me 
 to drink slowly. Something inside the cup clinked as I 
 finished it, and there was a shilling which was mine. 
 
 On Sunday morning, towards the end of the Welling- 
 ton days, I went down to breakfast in the dining-room. 
 There were short prayers first, about which I remember 
 nothing except the sight of servants' backs, kneeling at 
 chairs. But on one such morning, in the summer I sup- 
 pose, because all the windows were wide open, a very 
 delightful thing happened. There was a tame squirrel 
 that used to scamper about the house, and run up and 
 down stairs, and on this occasion he suddenly descended 
 from a curtain rod, crossed the floor and scampered up 
 the cook's back. Probably she pushed him off, for he 
 chattered with rage and went and sat on the sideboard 
 and began nibbling ham. 
 
 After prayers were over, while breakfast was being 
 brought up, it was my task to go round the walls of the 
 dining-room, where hung engravings of eminent person- 
 ages, and name them. There was the Prince Consort in 
 striped trousers with a bowler hat in his hand, the Duke 
 of Wellington in knee-breeches, the head and shoulders 
 of Dr. Walford, a full length of Dean Stanley, and Dr. 
 
24 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Martin Routh in a wig reading a book. Round the edge 
 of this which I think must have been a mezzotint were 
 various small sketches of the said Dr. Martin Routh in 
 other attitudes. Then came the smell of sausages and 
 the advent of two or three sixth form boys who in turn 
 breakfasted with my father. These were very glorious 
 persons and I marvelled at their condescension in com- 
 ing. Once the head of the school came, and following 
 my father's example I addressed him by his surname 
 (whatever it was) without the prefix of "Mister," for 
 which omission I was corrected. But out of his mag- 
 nificence he did not seem to mind. 
 
 Slowly, as the mists of infancy dispersed through which 
 like sundered mountain-tops were seen these scattered in- 
 cidents, a more panoramic vision of life as a coherent 
 whole made its appearance. There had been vignettes, 
 now of the Wilderness, now of my father's study, now 
 of the nursery, with nothing except the continuous as- 
 sociation with Beth to bind them together. But now 
 these scattered localities became parts of one connected 
 picture, and I could form some sort of complete idea of 
 the place. Most important was the house, the Master's 
 Lodge, a red brick building standing in its own grounds. 
 You entered through a gabled porch into a broad pas- 
 sage, on one side of which lay my father's study. Glass 
 doors separated this from the huge immensity of the hall, 
 with my mother's sitting-room, the drawing-room and the 
 dining-room opening out of it. The stairs started in the 
 centre of it and after one flight separated into two, each 
 of which led up into a gallery that skirted three sides of 
 the hall. Bedrooms opened out of this, also the day 
 nursery and night nursery, and pitch-pine banisters (a 
 wood much admired at that time) ran round it, and it 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 25 
 
 was through these banisters that one morning my sister 
 Maggie, in a fit of wonderful audacity inserted her foot, 
 and exclaimed, "That's my foot, Alleluia." In the 
 nursery, the room with which I was chiefly concerned, was 
 a rocking-horse with wide red nostrils and movable pum- 
 mels. These pummels penetrated right through his dap- 
 pled skin, and by removing them it was possible to drop 
 small objects like pebbles into his inside, where they rat- 
 tled agreeably as he rocked. Once some one of us, tempt- 
 ing Fate, held a penny at this remarkable aperture, and 
 the penny dropped inside, so that Beth had to turn the 
 rocking-horse upside down and shake him until it was 
 restored to currency again. There was a low deal table, 
 quantities of lead soldiers, and a swing hung from the 
 ceiling, so that altogether it presented most agreeable 
 features. There was also a large cupboard where play- 
 things must be put away when they were done with, and 
 I remember with excitement a Homeric struggle that took 
 place there between Martin and Arthur for the posses- 
 sion of a stick which was painted blue and red. But the 
 most remarkable feature of the nursery was its walls, 
 which, by the time we left Wellington, were entirely 
 covered with pictures. These pictures we children used 
 to cut out on wet days from old illustrated papers under 
 my father's supervision, and he, clad in a dressing-gown 
 to defend his clothes from splashes of paste, fixed them 
 up on the walls, till the entire surface was covered. He 
 had a step-ladder on which he attacked the higher alti- 
 tudes, and a roller with which he pressed down the affixed 
 pictures to the wall. There were battles there and his- 
 torical scenes, notable buildings, and numerous cartoons 
 from Punch. But one ought never to have been put there, 
 for I dreaded seeing it, and, like a child, kept my dread to 
 
26 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 myself. It was the outcome, I imagine, of some enquiry 
 into sweated trades, and represented a dressmaker talking 
 to a client and saying, "I wouldn't disappoint your lady- 
 ship for anything," or words to that effect. At the back 
 was a glimpse into her workroom, and there falling back- 
 wards with closed eyes was a girl, fainting I suppose in 
 the artist's intention, but I knew better and was aware 
 that she was dead. Nightmares pictured her as falling 
 across my bed in the sleeping-nursery next door, and Beth, 
 in her frilled nightcap came close and said, "Now, dear, 
 go to sleep again. I'm taking care of you." Doors in 
 the hall led I suppose to kitchens and servants' bedrooms, 
 but of these I remember nothing except the fact of a 
 flagged passage and the smell of a store-cupboard to 
 which I once went with my mother. That part of the 
 house did not matter. 
 
 Outside, the lawn was spread round two sides of the 
 house; if you crossed it, you found a wicket-gate in a 
 fence that bordered the belt of trees where the gardener 
 cast the dead adder, and through this you passed to the 
 kitchen garden. On the right of the lawn below the 
 trees stood a summer-house where the croquet mallets 
 were kept, and through these trees was a path that led 
 out into the school playing fields. A gravel sweep faced 
 the front door; there were laburnums and rhododendrons 
 by the gate, to the right lay the Wilderness and straight 
 in front the College buildings with the spired chapel at 
 the far end. Somewhere in these buildings was the school 
 library, only notable because it contained a glass case in 
 which was a white ant. Below the playing fields lay two 
 immeasurable lakes, in the lower of which was the school 
 bathing-place : the upper, though also immeasurable, was 
 smaller, and a waterfall of gigantic height severed the 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 27 
 
 two. By degrees the same world extended even further 
 than that, for by walking laboriously you could reach 
 either of two hills called Edgebarrow and Ambarrow, and 
 then it was time to come home again. 
 
 Simultaneously with this growing reality of the world, 
 its inhabitants (still with the exception of my father) as- 
 sumed an individuality of their own. Far the most in- 
 dividual of them was my mother, who seemed to live 
 entirely for pleasure except when she taught us our les- 
 sons. She played croquet with consummate skill, she 
 drove herself in a pony carriage, she put on a low shin- 
 ing dress every evening with turquoise brooches and brace- 
 lets, and had as much eau-de-Cologne as she wished on 
 her handkerchief. When she was dressing for dinner we 
 used to go into her room, examine that Golconda of a 
 jewel-case, and bring her clean handkerchiefs of our 
 own still folded up, for her to "make moons" on them, 
 as the phrase was, with eau-de-Cologne. She took the 
 stopper out of the bottle, and reversed it on to these 
 folded handkerchiefs, making three or four applications. 
 Then we unfolded these odorous handkerchiefs, held them 
 up to the light, and lo, they were penetrated with full 
 wet moons of eau-de-Cologne. She was, too, enormously 
 wealthy, for every Saturday we went to see her in her sit- 
 ting-room, and she opened the front of her inlaid Italian 
 cabinet, and drew from one of the pigeon-holes within, 
 a little wicker-basket, and out of it paid our weekly al- 
 lowances. For elders there was as much as sixpence, but 
 sixpences came out of a japanned cash-box, for juniors 
 there was twopence or a penny according to age, and all 
 these pennies, infinite apparently in number came out of 
 the wicker-basket. She had a rosewood work-box, lined 
 with red silk, which contained what was known as her 
 
28 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "treasures." These were two white china elephants with 
 gilded feet, a small silk parasol, the ferrule of which was 
 a pencil, an amber necklace, a cornelian heart, and boxes 
 that made loud pops when you opened them. If any of 
 us had a cold, or some ailment that kept us indoors, we 
 were allowed to play with her treasures, to while away 
 the solitude. But for some reason I did not think much 
 of the treasures, and after being consoled with them dur- 
 ing an afternoon indoors gave vent to the appalling criti- 
 cism, "What Mamma calls tessors, I call 'Ubbish." But 
 that, as far as I know, was the only disloyalty of which 
 I was ever guilty with regard to her. I just did not 
 care about that particular sort of treasures. 
 
 What a life was hers ! She ordered lunch and dinner 
 precisely as she chose; she had a silver card-case with 
 cards in it, stating who she was and where she was, and 
 we all belonged to her, and so in some dim way did my 
 father, and even the biggest boys of the great sixth form 
 itself touched their caps to her as she passed. And slowly, 
 slowly I became aware that she was worthy of all these 
 pleasures and this homage. 
 
 There were certainly lessons in those days, I suppose 
 for about an hour a day. There was a book called Read- 
 ing without Tears, which said that a-b -was "ab," and 
 d-o-g was "dog." There must have been certain crises 
 over this learning for I was kept in instead of going out 
 one day, and, with the fatal habit of inversion which has 
 clung to me all my life, said, so my mother told me, "I 
 call it tears without reading!" I record this anecdote in 
 pure self-condemnation : I don't suppose I knew that this 
 obiter dictum made sense; it was only the beginning of 
 a habit to play about with words, and see to what fash- 
 ion of affairs they could be suited. Every morning also, 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 29 
 
 when we came downstairs we went into my mother's sit- 
 ting-room, and learned a new verse of a Psalm, repeating 
 the verses previously learned. The Twenty-Third Psalm 
 was one of these, and the Ninety-First I think must have 
 been another, since I cannot remember the time when I 
 did not know it by heart. I do not think that these re- 
 ligious repetitions meant anything to me; they were part 
 of the inevitable day, which was full of glee. 
 
 That my mother had any other life of her own, full 
 as I know it to have been of worries and anxieties and 
 of marvellous happinesses, never, as was natural, occurred 
 to any of us. She was, as far as concerns my memory of 
 her at Wellington, a glorious sunlit figure, living a life 
 that appeared to be the apotheosis of hedonism, the 
 mistress of a shouting houseful of children, all wilful, 
 all set on having their own way, and she calmly ruled 
 us all, without even letting us know that we were being 
 ruled. All the time she was a very young woman mar- 
 ried to a man twelve years her senior who was as violent- 
 ly individual as anyone could be. But for us she floated 
 there like the moons of eau-de-Cologne which embellished 
 our handkerchiefs, carrying something of the fairyhood 
 of Abracadabra, and all the wizardry of her own inimit- 
 able wisdom. After Beth it was she who first emerged 
 out of the landscape which once embraced trees and peo- 
 ple alike, and to us soared upwards like a rising constella- 
 tion. She could not take Beth's place, for Beth filled 
 that, but she enlarged a child's heart, and dwelt there. 
 She never ceased from her own enlargements: in my 
 mother's house there were many mansions. There were 
 mansions for everybody, and none of the tenants usurped 
 the place of another. As we grew up, all of us, without 
 exception, felt that we were especially hers, and were in 
 
80 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 a unique relation to her. We were all quite right about 
 that, and so were a myriad friends of hers. There was 
 "the best room" for each of them. How she did it, how 
 she conveyed that adorable truth I know now, because 
 I know that love is of infinite dimensions, and has the 
 same perfect room for all. But the childish instinct was 
 right: she cared supremely, and gave her whole heart to 
 each of us. 
 
 My sisters, presently to be kindled for me with a great 
 illumination, were for the period of the Wellington days 
 quite dim, so too were Martin and Arthur now at a 
 private school at East Sheen, where, some years later, I 
 followed them, and the rest of the world at that time 
 consisted of vague visitors, among whom were my 
 mother's three brothers, William, Henry, and Arthur 
 Sidgwick (remarkable only for their beards and their 
 use of tobacco), and her mother, who is a much clearer 
 figure. She encouraged small visitors when she was 
 dressing for dinner, was generous in making moons, and 
 had a ritual with regard to the dressing of her hair which 
 filled me with wonder. It was parted in the middle and 
 she drew down two strands of it over the top of her 
 ears, and holding each of these in place applied to it a 
 stick of brown cosmetic whifch I now know to have been 
 bandoline. The effect of this was that the hair stuck 
 together in the manner of a thin board, absolutely smooth 
 and in one piece. Sometimes a crack or fissure appeared 
 it it, and more bandoline was employed. It formed in 
 fact a little stiff roof, and on the top she put a lace cap. 
 She had long chains round her neck, and carried a silver 
 vinaigrette containing a small piece of sponge soaked in 
 aromatic vinegar. It was chiefly used in chapel when she 
 was standing up during the Psalms. On the other side 
 
WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 31 
 
 of the family there were three aunts who corresponded 
 with the three uncles, sisters of my father, two of whom 
 were very handsome and of a high colour; the third, 
 Aunt Ada, seemed to me to be like a horse. They all 
 floated in a sort of remote ether, like clouds coming up 
 and passing again. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 
 
 IN 1873 my father was appointed Chancellor of Lin- 
 coln, and the move there was made in the summer of 
 that year, during July and August. We four younger 
 children, Nellie, Maggie, myself and Hugh went with 
 Beth to stay with my grandmother at Rugby while it 
 was in progress. That visit was memorable for several 
 reasons: in the first place I celebrated a birthday there, 
 and great-Aunt Henrietta had no idea that I was long 
 past fairies, for on the morning of that day she met me 
 in the hall, and said she would go out to see if there 
 were any fairies about, for she fancied she had heard them 
 singing. Accordingly she went out of the front door, 
 closing it after her, and leaving me in the hall. Sure 
 enough from the other side of the door there instantly 
 came a crooning kind of noise, which I knew was Aunt 
 Henrietta singing, and there was a rattle in the letter-box 
 in the door of something dropped into it. Aunt Hen- 
 rietta then returned in considerable excitement, and 
 asked me if I hadn't heard the fairies singing, and of 
 course I said I had. One had come right on to the doorstep, 
 she continued, while she stood there, and had dropped 
 something for me into the letter-box. And there w,as 
 a velvet purse with a brass clasp, and inside five shillings. 
 This was an opulence hitherto undreamed of. Aunt Hen- 
 rietta was remarkable in other ways besides generosity: 
 
 32 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 33 
 
 she wore a curious cap with pink blobs on it, and when 
 asked how they were made instantly replied that they 
 were made by coral insects underneath the sea. It was 
 also said of her that she went to church one Sunday with 
 a friend, and found they had only one prayer book, and 
 that with small print, between them. They were both 
 short-sighted and they each pulled so lustily on the prayer 
 book in order to see better, that it came in half about 
 the middle of the Psalms. 
 
 One day there came a moment which still ranks in my 
 mind as an experience of transcendent happiness. It had 
 been a delicious day already, for not only had my mother 
 arrived, but the ceiling of the dining-room was being 
 white-washed, and we had our meals in my grandmother's 
 sitting-room, which gave something of the thrill of a pic- 
 nic. That evening we were playing in the garden when 
 Beth came out to tell us it was time to go to bed. She 
 took me along the path, and there close to an open 
 window my mother and grandmother were having dinner. 
 We stopped a moment, and I asked if I might, not have 
 ten minutes more in the garden. That was granted, and, 
 as if that was not enough, my grandmother gave me three 
 grapes from a bunch on the table. As I ate them a breeze 
 brought across me the warm scent of a lilac bush, and 
 the combination of these things made me touch a new apex 
 of happiness. Something, the joy of the level sunlight, of 
 the three grapes, of the lilac scent, of having ten minutes 
 more to play in, rushed simultaneously over me, and at 
 that moment some new consciousness of the world and 
 its exquisiteness was unsealed in me. And I doubt if I 
 have ever been so happy since, or if anything, owing 
 to that moment, will ever smell so sweet to me as lilac. 
 
 Whatever that unsealing was, the wax was broken for 
 
34 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ever, and from then a more vivid perception was mine. 
 According to Wordsworth I ought, just about then, to 
 have ceased trailing my clouds of glory, instead of which 
 they trailed in far more radiant profusion. The arrival 
 at Lincoln still wonderfully etched in my memory was 
 an adventure of the finest kind, and the exploration of 
 the new land teemed with unique discoveries. The fact 
 that the house dated from the fourteenth century natural- 
 ly mattered not at all : its joy lay in its present suitability 
 to the diversions of children. There was a winding stone 
 staircase, opening from a nail-studded door in the hall 
 with pentagrams carved on the steps to keep off evil 
 spirits: there was a day nursery made of two bedrooms 
 thrown into one; there was a suite of amazing attics, 
 steeped in twilight, with rafters close above the head, and 
 loose boards underfoot. Here in dark corners lay water-cis- 
 terns which gurgled unexpectedly in the dusk with mirth- 
 less goblin chuckles; cobwebs hung in corners and mice 
 scuttled. Here too was a bare tremendous apartment 
 also under the roof, spread with pears and apples. Up 
 one side of it went a buttress, which certainly contained 
 the chimney from the kitchen, for it was warm to the 
 touch and altogether mysterious. 
 
 Instantly, so it seems to me now, we began playing the 
 most blood-curdling games in that floor of attics; people 
 hid there and groaned and jumped out on you with 
 maniacal screams. A short steep flight of steps led down 
 from it to the nursery floor, and how often, giddy with 
 pleasing terror, have I tumbled down those steps, be- 
 cause somebody (who ought to have been a sister, but 
 might easily have become a goblin) was yelling behind 
 me. One's mind, the sensible part of it much in abey- 
 ance, knew quite well that it was Nellie or Maggie, but 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 35 
 
 supposing one's sensible mind was wrong for once? It 
 was wiser to run, just in case. . . . From which vivid 
 memory I perceive that though I knew about Abracadabra 
 I was not so firmly rationalistic about the rooms with 
 gurgling cisterns in them. In the dark, strange metamor- 
 phoses might have occurred, and when one day I found in 
 the darkest corner of one of these attics, a figure apparent- 
 ly human, and certainly resembling Nellie, lying flat 
 down and not moving (though it was for the hider to 
 catch the seeker) the light of my sensible mind was 
 snuffed out like a candlewick, and I shrieked out, "Oh, 
 Nellie, don't!" Observe the confusion of an infant 
 mind ! I knew the corpse to be Nellie, for I addressed 
 it as Nellie, and told it not to; on the other hand, by an 
 involuntary exercise of the imagination I conceived that 
 this still twilight object might be something quite dif- 
 ferent. 
 
 My sisters were now of an age to sleep together in a 
 large apartment somewhere at the top of the stone stairs, 
 while I still slept in the night nursery, in a bed near 
 the window. Beth occupied another bed, and in a corner 
 was Hugh's crib with high sides, where he — being now 
 about two years old — was stowed away before the day 
 was over for me. Next door to the nursery was a room 
 smaller than any room I have ever seen, and this was of- 
 ficially known as "My Room." It had a tiny window, 
 was quite uninhabitable, for it was always shrouded 
 in a deadly gloom and piled up with boxes, but the fact 
 that it was my room, though I lived in the day nursery 
 by day, and slept in the night nursery by night, gave me 
 a sense of pomp and dignity, and I resented the fact 
 that presently my father had the wing of the house which 
 lay above the stone staircase connected with the night 
 
36 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 nursery by a wooden passage across the roof. This turned 
 my room into part of the passage, and though he called 
 this ten yards of passage "the Rialto," I felt that I had 
 been robbed of some ancestral domain. After all it was 
 My Room. . . . 
 
 The rest of the house was not particularly interesting; 
 it consisted of sitting-rooms and dining-room, and school- 
 room and lobbies, the sort of thing that you naturally sup- 
 posed would be there. But one day my father presented 
 my sisters and me with a room at the top of the stone 
 stairs, with which we were allowed to deal precisely as 
 we wished. We instantly called it "The Museum," and 
 put in it any unusual objects that we obtained. One day 
 Maggie found a piece of sheep's wool stuck in a hedge, so 
 that of course was brought home, washed white and care- 
 fully combed and put in a cardboard box with a glass 
 lid. Then (to anticipate as regards the Museum) we 
 spent a summer holiday at Torquay, and collected 
 various attractive pebbles, and madrepores, and shells. 
 These were dedicated to the Museum, and a large earth- 
 enware bread-bowl was lined with them, and filled up 
 with water to the top, so that they gleamed deliciously 
 through the liquid. Then there came a memorable day 
 when my mother killed a hornet on her window; she gave 
 us the squalid corpse, and after consultation we put it in 
 the water of the bowl, lined with spa and madrepore, in 
 order to preserve it. It floated about there and was sup- 
 posed to be in process of preservation. An addled swan's 
 egg joined the collection, which, very prudently, we de- 
 cided not to blow. But it began to smell so terribly even 
 through the shell that with great reluctance we scrapped 
 it. My father gave us a case of butterfles, collected by 
 his father, in which, without doubt were two "large cop- 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 37 
 
 pers." "As rare things will" that case vanished, and I 
 wonder what fortunate dealer eventually got the "large 
 coppers." . . . Then on a bookshelf was the great stamp- 
 collection, and I wish I knew what had happened to that. 
 There was all South Australia complete, and complete 
 too was Tasmania, and complete the Cape of Good Hope, 
 the stamps of which for the sake of variety were triangu- 
 lar. Heligoland was there and the Ionian Islands and 
 New Caledonia (black and only one of it). But the 
 stamp-collection was considered rather dull: the hornet 
 disintegrating in the bread-bowl, and the piece of sheep's 
 wool were far more interesting. They had the timbre of 
 personal acquisition, and rang with first-hand emotion. 
 Personal and precious too were the bits of oxydised glass 
 smouldering into rainbows which we dug up in the garden 
 and displayed here; there too we found bowls and broken 
 stems of tobacco-pipes which I think were Cromwellian. 
 But Cromwell was no good to us, so we said that they 
 were Roman tobacco-pipes. Then there was a collection 
 of fossils, which, with the aid of geological hammers that 
 my father gave us, we rapped out of stones in lime quar- 
 ries, or from the heaps that lay by the roadside for mend- 
 ings. Amateur stone-breakers indeed we were, and often 
 bruised fingers were of the party, but they added precious^ 
 ness to the trophies that we brought back to the Museum, 
 On the door of the Museum was a paper label, on which 
 was emblazoned in large letters tinted with water-colour, 
 "Museum. Private." The privacy was part of the joy 
 of it. Occasionally we asked my mother to have tea with 
 us there, and she came in her hat formally. This very 
 proper behaviour was duly appreciated. 
 
 Indeed that was a good house for children with its 
 attics and its winding-stairs, and its multitude of pas- 
 
38 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 sages. Judging the virtue of a house by the standards of 
 hide-and-seek, than which there is no more authentic 
 rule, I never saw so laudable a habitation. Endless were 
 the dark places for the concealment of hiders, endless also 
 the various routes by which the seekers might get back 
 uncaught to the sanctuary where Beth sat with her sew-» 
 ing over the fire and said, "Eh now, you'll be falling 
 down and hurting yourselves." There was the route up 
 the kitchen stairs, the route through my father's dressing- 
 room and study, only practicable (as on the days when 
 the Khyber Pass is open to caravans) when he was away: 
 there were the stairs up from the hall into the lobby; 
 there were the winding-stairs communicating through the 
 Rialto with the nursery passage, at the other end of which 
 were the nursery stairs. How rare again was the cul-de- 
 sac, that infernal invention of degraded architects and the 
 ruin of all good hide-and-seek, which makes capture in- 
 evitable, when once you are in the trap. For magnifi- 
 cence of design, judging by these standards, I unhesi- 
 tatingly allot the palm to the Chancery house in the Close 
 at Lincoln. 
 
 Gardens, in like manner, must be judged by their 
 serviceableness in the pursuit of games, and here again 
 we were fortunate. Adjacent to the house itself was 
 a big lawn, levelled and sown afresh, which was the 
 arena of cricket and rounders. Behind that was an 
 asphalted yard with a stable, a coach-house and a wood- 
 shed, erected no doubt in order that we might play fives 
 against them : a covered passage led to the kitchen garden. 
 There was sufficient space here for a lawn-tennis court, 
 the lines of which were laid down with tape secured by 
 hairpins. Occasionally the foot caught in the tape; "zp, 
 zp, zp," went most of the hairpins and the shape of the 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 39 
 
 court changed for the moment from an oblong to a trape- 
 zium with no right-angles. By one side of this was a 
 steep grassy bank with elder bushes growing on the top. 
 Here you laid yourself stiffly out on the ground, and like 
 that rolled bodily down the bank, sitting up again at the 
 bottom to find the world reeling and spinning round you. 
 When you felt a little less sick, you refreshed yourself 
 with elderberries, and rolled down again. Beyond this 
 was a pear tree large enough to climb, and high enough 
 not to fall out of, and an asparagus bed. The edible 
 properties of that vegetable were of no interest, but when 
 it went to seed and grew up in tall fern-like stems with 
 orange berries it was valuable as a hiding-place. Nar- 
 row grass paths led this way and that between the garden 
 beds, and they had been well constructed, for they were 
 of such a width that it was possible, though difficult, to 
 bowl a hoop down them without invading the cabbages. 
 A fool would have made them either wider or narrower, 
 and then they would have been useless. In a corner of 
 the garden were our own particular plots, and against 
 the red brick wall grew a fig tree, which I thought had 
 some connection with the biblical tree that withered away, 
 because it never yielded its fruit. All round the garden 
 ran a high wall, now brick, now ancient limestone, and 
 at the bottom was a mediaeval tower partly in ruins, where 
 we habitually played the most dangerous game that has 
 ever been invented since the world began. Why no one 
 was killed I cannot understand to this day. The game was 
 called "Sieges," and the manner of it was as follows: 
 A flight of some twenty high stone steps led up to a 
 chamber in the tower, which was roofless and ivy-clad. 
 They lay against the wall with a turn half-way up, and 
 up to that point had no protection whatever on one side, 
 
40 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 so that nothing could have been simpler than to have 
 fallen off them to the ground. From the chamber a 
 further short flight led up on to an open turret defended 
 at the top by a low iron railing of doubtful solidity. One 
 child was constituted King of the Castle, the others were 
 the besiegers. The besiegers stormed the castle and the 
 besieger and besieged tried to hurl each other downstairs. 
 The besieged had the advantage of superior height, for 
 he stood usually at the top of the stairs by the chamber; 
 the besiegers the advantage of weight and numbers. You 
 were allowed to resort to any form of violence in order to 
 win your object, except kicking; blows and pushings and 
 wrestlings and trippings-up formed legitimate warfare. 
 Even the rule about kicking must have been rather slack, 
 for I remember once seeking my mother with a bleeding 
 nose, and saying that Nellie had kicked me in the face 
 at "Sieges." Her defence, a singularly weak one as it 
 still appears to me, was that she hadn't kicked me in the 
 face at all: she had only put her foot against my face 
 and then pushed. Whereon the judge went into such fits 
 of laughter that the trial was adjourned. 
 
 At first my mother taught us entirely, and the sight of 
 the schoolroom when lessons were going on would cer- 
 tainly have conveyed a very false impression to a stranger, 
 for close to my mother's hand lay a silver-mounted riding- 
 whip of plaited horsehair. But it was not for purposes 
 of correction : its use was that if as we were writing our 
 exercises and copies she saw we were not sitting upright, 
 her hand would stealthily take up the whip and bring 
 it down with a sounding thwack on to the table, startling 
 us into erect attitudes again. To these instructions there 
 was soon added Latin, and I remember the charm of new 
 words just because they were new. It was also interesting 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 41 
 
 to grasp the fact that there really had been people once 
 who, when they wanted to say "table" preferred to say 
 "mensa," and found that their friends understood them 
 perfectly. I suppose that soon my mother became too 
 busy to continue the instruction of my sisters and me, for 
 a day-governess appeared, a quiet melancholy German 
 lady with brown eyes, and a manner that commanded re- 
 spect. She was not with us very long, and on her de- 
 parture we three went to a day-school kept by a widow. 
 She had a Roman nose, and though rather terrible was 
 kind. She lived in a house just outside the close which 
 smelt of mackintosh : the schoolroom was a larger wooden 
 apartment built out over the garden. 
 
 In between these curricula we had a temporary gover- 
 ness who seemed to us all the most admirable and en- 
 viable person who ever lived. This was Miss Bramston, 
 a great personal friend of my mother's, whose brother, 
 beloved subsequently by generation after generation of 
 Wykehamists, had been a master at Wellington under 
 my father. Never was there so delightful an instructress ; 
 by dint of her being so pleasant when we disobeyed her, 
 we soon got to obey her not out of discipline, of which 
 she had not the faintest notion, but out of affection, of 
 which she had a great deal. She wrote us a play in 
 rhymed verse, all out of her own head, which we acted 
 one Christmas, rather like Hamlet^ with rhymes thrown 
 in, and ending much more comfortably than that tragedy. 
 There was a king on a throne, only he wasn't the right 
 king and when alone he soliloquized, saying: 
 
 I'm a usurper, though I seem a swell; 
 The true King lies within a dungeon cell, 
 
 and I wish I could remember more of it. She painted 
 
42 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 not in water-colour only but in oils, and could make any 
 canvas of hers recognizable. For instance, you knew at 
 once that this was the Cathedral. But not only to us 
 was she not a usurper but a swell; she was a Public 
 Authoress, and wrote stories, printed and published, 
 which she gave us to read. The S.P.C.K. published them, 
 and the whole world could buy them, and she got paid for 
 writing them. One of her early works was Elly's Choice; 
 there was a poor good girl called Elly, and a rather nasty 
 rich cousin called Cordelia, a boy called Alick, and every- 
 body who mattered was about nine years old. A piece of 
 stained glass was broken in the "Octagon Room," and 
 Cordelia let Elly be punished for it though Cordelia had 
 broken it, and then Elly received apologies from Grand- 
 mamma Farmer, and Cordelia learned a lesson, and all 
 got wonderfully happy again. The extreme vividness 
 with which I remember it, surely shows that the book 
 fulfilled its purpose, that is, of interesting children. Later 
 Miss Bramston spread larger pinions, and I do not think 
 she did so well. To our intense joy she came back to us 
 at Truro a year or two later, and was as lovable as ever. 
 It was in those few years at Lincoln that my father 
 began to be individual, instead of being part of the land- 
 scape, and as I got to know him, I, like the rest of us, 
 also got to fear him. For many years we were none of 
 us at our ease with him, as we always were with my 
 mother, and it is tragic that it was so, for I know that he 
 regarded us all with the tenderest love. Often and often 
 his glorious vitality, keener and more splendid than any 
 I have ever come across, enchanted us, and the sunlight 
 of him was of a midsummer radiance. But he had no idea 
 how blighting his displeasure was to small children, and 
 for fear of incurring it we went delicately like Agag, at- 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 43 
 
 tending so strictly to our behaviour that all spontaneity 
 withered. Nothing would have pleased him more, had 
 we taken him into our confidence, but we feared his dis- 
 approval more than we were drawn to intimacy with him. 
 It -was always uncertain whether he would not pull us 
 up with stinging rebukes for offences that were certainly 
 venial, and in his watchfulness over our mental and moral 
 education, he came down upon faults of laziness and 
 carelessness as if to explode such tendencies out of our 
 nature. Earnest and eager all through, and gloriously and 
 tumultuously alive, he brought too heavy guns to bear 
 on positions so lightly fortified as children's hearts, and 
 from fear of the bombardment we did not dare to make 
 a sortie and go to him. Too much noise, an ordinary 
 childish carelessness might, so we believed, bring down 
 on us a schoolmaster's reproof instead of such remon- 
 strances as we got from my mother, which were com- 
 pletely successful, and with him we were careful to be 
 decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed 
 hands and neat hair and low voices, because thus we min- 
 imized the risks of his society. We were never frank 
 with him, we did not talk about the things that interested 
 us, but those which interested him and which we thought 
 he would wish us to be interested in. We sat on the edge 
 of our chairs, and were glad to be gone. If we had been 
 natural with him, I know that his appreciation of that 
 would somehow have made cement between us, but how 
 are you to be natural when, rightly or wrongly, you are 
 being careful*? Tearing spirits moderated themselves on 
 his approach, we became as mild as children on chocolate 
 boxes. If he was pleased with us, we breathed sighs of 
 relief: if he was displeased we waited for the clouds to 
 pass. With him I, at least, was a prig and a hypocrite, 
 
U OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 assuming a demure demeanour, and pretending to be in- 
 terested in the journal of Bishop Heber of Bombay, 
 which I still maintain is a dreary work, and not suited 
 to young gentlemen of between six and nine years old. 
 But the journal of Bishop Heber was given me as a 
 book to read on Sunday and helped to add to the weari- 
 someness of that rather appalling day. 
 
 Below our lovely Museum, and opening out of the 
 winding stone stairs, there was a room fitted up as a 
 chapel. There was stained glass in the windows, Arundel 
 prints on the walls, and a quite unique harmonium that 
 cost five pounds. The keyboard was only of three oc- 
 taves, extending from 
 
 zm 
 
 to 
 
 i 
 
 which, as it was used if not designed to be as an instru- 
 ment to accompany hymns, seems to me to be a truly 
 remarkable compass, since in order to accompany hymns 
 on it at all, you had to leave out the bass, or transfer the 
 whole tune to the higher octave. When fully extended 
 for purposes of melody, it stood about two and a half 
 feet high, but on its black japanned front were two steel 
 catches which, if pressed, caused it to subside into itself, 
 the foot-bellows becoming flat, and the harmonium itself 
 so small that a man could put it under his arm. Some- 
 times when playing it (as I was presently to do) a too 
 vigorous knee, in the movement of blowing, would touch 
 these catches, and it collapsed in the middle of the hymn 
 on to the feet of the organist, dealing them a severe blow, 
 and necessitating its readjustment before the hymn pro- 
 ceeded. It had two stops, one of which allowed the air 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 45 
 
 to get to its pipes, the other was a tremolo which caused 
 its voice to be transformed into a series of swift little 
 bleats with pauses in between like a soprano lamb much 
 out of breath. Perhaps it was designed to take the solo 
 part of a flute in one of those curious bastard orchestras 
 on which Mr. Oscar Browning, with the help of three 
 undergraduates, used to render quartettes in his rooms 
 at King's College, Cambridge, but here it was as an ac- 
 companying instrument at prayers in the chapel of the 
 Chancery, and took its part in the religious exercises of 
 the morning. 
 
 Sunday, in fact, began in the chapel for us children 
 after the early service for our elders in the Cathedral. 
 There was a hymn, my father read certain Sunday pray- 
 ers, and then came breakfast. The collection of hymns 
 which we used in chapel was Bishop Wordsworth's "Holy 
 Year." There are many admirable hymns in it, others 
 not so good. For instance, the one for the feast of St. 
 Philip and St. J^res began: 
 
 Let us emulate the names 
 Of St. Philip and St. James. 
 
 We children, therefore, could hardly help making up 
 another hymn for the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude 
 beginning (and then stopping) : 
 
 Let us try to be as good 
 As St. Simon and St. Jude. 
 
 Matins at the Cathedral was at half-past ten, so we 
 often bore a crude sausage there, as Juvenal would have 
 said. The service was fully choral, and the piece de re- 
 sistance, as far as I was concerned, was the Litany, 
 chanted by two lay-clerks at a desk in the middle of the 
 
46 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 gangway between the seats. Together I think (or per- 
 haps separately, while the other was in reserve) they 
 chanted the first sentences as follows: 
 
 I 
 
 i: 
 
 W 
 
 mt 
 
 Oh, God, the Fatter of Heaven, Hare mercy upon as miser - a - bit tinners. 
 
 The choir then repeated it in harmony, and the same 
 simple musical material furnished the whole of the sub- 
 sequent responses. 
 
 Sung thus very slowly the Litany took a full quarter 
 of an hour, but when that was over, I was at liberty to 
 find my hat and steal out. I used to put my hat, a round 
 soft felt hat with elastic under the chin, in an aperture 
 at the corner of our seat below the stalls, which had in 
 it an opening for ventilation. Sometimes my hat slipped 
 down this, and after an excited groping for it, it came up 
 covered with the dust of ages. The service had already 
 lasted an hour or more, and I made my jaded way back 
 to the Chancery, while my mother and sisters, and in the 
 holidays, my two elder brothers, remained for the rest of 
 the service. Martin and Arthur occupied stalls near my 
 father and were still dim figures to me, at home only for 
 a comparatively few weeks in the year, and having a sit- 
 ting-room of their own. I used to be rather glad when 
 they went to school, because my mother invented for me 
 the title of "The Eldest Son at Home," which could only 
 be used in their absence. 
 
 In the afternoon there was a family walk, and then 
 Cathedral service again. Then came a reading of Sun- 
 day books, or a reading of the Bible with my father, and 
 we went utterly fatigued to bed. It was not so much 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 47 
 
 the plethora of religious exercises that caused this lassi- 
 tude, but the entire absence of any recreation. Spare time 
 (and there was not much of it) was supposed to be taken 
 up with Bishop Heber's Journal, Agathos and The Rocky 
 Island. Once a certain brightness came into these Sun- 
 day readings, because we were allowed a book called 
 Sunday Echoes in Week-day Hours. There was a widowed 
 mother in it, and her boy called Cecil, and their con- 
 versation about collects was so excruciatingly pious that 
 it became merely humorous, and we invented fresh Cecil- 
 talk among ourselves. We once indulged in this before 
 my mother, who with a controlled countenance withdrew 
 the delightful volume. I remember waking up after fall- 
 ing asleep one Sunday night, and hearing Compline going 
 on in the chapel with another hymn, and thinking with 
 amazement that they were still at it. In the way of a 
 child, I think I was, from certain evidence that will ap- 
 pear, religious, but to put it quite frankly, I was sick of 
 the whole affair by Sunday evening. 
 
 I cannot chronologize the events in our life at Lincoln, 
 which only lasted for three and a half years, and I do 
 not quite know when the Cathedral services began to wear 
 a perfectly new complexion for me. The reason of this 
 was that I was violently attracted by a choir-boy, or 
 rather a chorister, one of four, who instead of wearing a 
 surplice like the common choir-boy, wore a long dark 
 blue coat down to the knees faced with white. A similar 
 experience, I fancy, is almost universal : the first romantic 
 affection a girl is conscious of is nearly always towards, 
 a girl, and in the same way, a small boy, when first his 
 physical nature begins to grope, still quite blindly and in- 
 nocently, in the misty country of emotion, is pretty cer- 
 tain to take as his idol for secret romantic worship, one 
 
48 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 of his own sex. It was so at any rate with me, and in- 
 stead of the Cathedral services being of incomparable 
 tedium, they became exciting and exalting. He, the 
 nameless he, came in procession at the end of the choir- 
 boys just before the lay-clerks, and besides having this 
 soul-stirring effect on me, he woke in me, by means of 
 his singing, my first love of music. He sat at the end of 
 the choir nearest our seat, and luckily on the other side, 
 so that I could see him without the intervention of dull 
 people's heads. I could hear his voice, sexless and un- 
 emotional, above the rest of the trebles, but with what 
 emotion did that voice inspire me! He used to sing 
 solos as well, and I am sure that the sneaking love that 
 I have still for Mendelssohn, was due to the fact that 
 (unaccompanied) he sang "The night is departing, de- 
 pa-a-art (A in alt) ing." I would have welcomed the in- 
 terminable Litany becoming literally interminable, so 
 long as he continued singing, "We beseech thee to hear us, 
 Good Lord," with his chin a little stuck out, and his eyes 
 roving about the pews. Sometimes I thought he saw me 
 and noticed me, and then my imagination took wings to 
 itself, and I saw myself meeting him somewhere alone, 
 him in his chorister's cope. What we should have to 
 say to each other, I had not the smallest idea, but we 
 should be together, and there lay completion. It was due 
 to his unconscious influence that I began to sing loudly 
 in the chapel at the Chancery, and never shall I forget my 
 father once saying to me, "Perhaps some day you will 
 sing an anthem in the Cathedral." That supplied a fresh 
 imaginative chapter to my secret book; I should be a 
 chorister too, and sit next the idol, and we would sing 
 together. I was not egoistic in this vision: I had no 
 thought of ravishing the world by the beauty of my 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 49 
 
 voice: it merely became a sunlit possibility (after all my 
 father had said as much) that I should sing in the Cathe- 
 dral. But I knew, though he did not, that I should be 
 singing with the chorister. Thanks to my idol, Sunday 
 became, as long as this passion lasted, a day in which joy 
 watered the arid sands of Bishop Heber's Journal, and 
 made it, literally, "break forth into singing." That emo- 
 tion, the fulfilment of which was brought into the realms 
 of possibility by my father's remark, touched such re- 
 ligion as I had with ecstasy, and I added to my prayers 
 the following petition, which I said night and morning. 
 
 "O God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, 
 and abide there in happiness evermore with Thee !" 
 
 Who "Thee" was I cannot determine: I believe it to 
 have been a mixture of God and the chorister, and, I 
 think, chiefly the chorister. 
 
 This quickening of emotion gave rise to a sort of wak- 
 ing vision in which I used then consciously to indulge, 
 promising myself as I undressed for bed a night of Holy 
 Convocation. Two minutes of Holy Convocation were 
 about the duration of it, and then I went to sleep. There 
 was a hymn in the "Holy Year" in which there were 
 lines 
 
 To Holy Convocations 
 The silver trumpets call, 
 
 and with that and the chorister as yeast, there used to 
 bubble out, when I had gone to bed, this curious waking 
 vision. I would not be asleep at all, but with open eyes 
 I distinctly saw against the blackness of the night nursery 
 a line of golden rails, very ornamental, before which I 
 knelt. There was the sound of silver trumpets in my 
 ears, there was the sound of the chorister, anthems in the 
 
50 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Cathedral, and the presence of God. But all these things 
 were secret and apart, never told of to this day, and 
 they did not in the least interfere with wrestlings in 
 the tower, and violent games of rounders and the pleas- 
 ing terrors of hide-and-seek. The shrine usually stood 
 shut, but when it opened it disclosed blinding splendours. 
 The Cathedral had, apart from the chorister and the 
 services, certain pains and pleasures of its own. Oc- 
 casionally assizes were held in Lincoln, and then on Sun- 
 day the judges would attend in robes of majesty with full 
 wigs falling on to their shoulders. They walked in pro- 
 cession up the choir, and, reaching their seats, turned 
 round awful pink clean-shaven faces of eternal calm, 
 awful mouths that pronounced death-sentences. Once to 
 my knowledge there was a murder-trial at Lincoln and a 
 man condemned to death and the judge on that occasion 
 became more terrible than death itself, and I slunk out 
 after the Litany with apprehension that I should be 
 called back, and hear some appalling sentence pronounced 
 on me. Again, one day, a canon of the Cathedral stepped 
 backwards through a skylight and was killed and Great 
 Tom, the big bell in the central tower, tolled for the 
 funeral. But the whole circumstances of that were so 
 interesting that, though terror was mingled with them, 
 they were more exciting than terrible. Wholly delightful 
 on the other hand was a scientific demonstration that took 
 place in the nave. A long cord was hung from one of 
 the arches, to the end of which depended a heavy lead 
 weight. On the pavement beneath it there was marked 
 out a circle in white chalk, and this pendulum was then 
 set swinging. As the hours passed, it swung in a different 
 direction from that in which it was started, and instead 
 of oscillating up and down the nave it moved along the 
 
LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 51 
 
 transepts, thus demonstrating the motion of the earth. 
 Why that delightful piece of science was shown in the 
 Cathedral I have no idea; certain it is, however, that my 
 mother took me to see the pendulum after breakfast one 
 morning and again before tea when it was swinging in 
 quite another direction. I never had any doubts about 
 the rotary movement of the earth after that, nor, as far 
 as I can remember, before. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 LINCOLN AND DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 
 
 THOSE three and a half years at Lincoln appear to 
 have lasted for decades, so eventful was the un- 
 folding of the world, and all the years which have passed 
 since then, with their travels to many foreign lands, and 
 climbings of perilous peaks, seem to have contained no 
 exploration so thrilling as the revelation of Riseholme, 
 where lived Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln, who wrote 
 the "Holy Year," and his wife, and his family and 
 Janet the housekeeper. (The latter, like Mrs. Words- 
 worth, had ringlets down the sides of her face, and dis- 
 pensed Marie biscuits and cowslip wine in unstinted pro- 
 fusion.) The family, too, were interesting, for one daugh- 
 ter when she laughed said, "Sss-sss," and another, "Kick- 
 kick-kick," and the Bishop himself had a face like a lion, 
 and a hollow ecclesiastical voice. My sisters considered 
 him very formidable, but I was not afraid of him, chiefly 
 because at an early stage of our acquaintance he gave me 
 an ink-bottle of pottery, with a gilded lion (like him- 
 self) on top of it, and a receptacle to hold sand for the 
 blotting of your letter, if you had managed to write it. 
 This argued an amiable disposition, and when I came in 
 contact with him, I was conscious of no embarrassment. 
 
 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
 A stately pleasure-dome decree, 
 
 but Xanadu was nothing to Riseholme for domes and 
 
 52 
 
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 53 
 
 stateliness. There were two lakes peopled with dace and 
 water-lilies and pike and swans, and an island where the 
 swans nested, and a sluice, around which the water was 
 of fabulous depth, where we fished for dace. There was 
 a boat-house, on the roof of which in the autumn a great 
 chestnut tree used to shed its fruit, bursting the husks, 
 and disclosing the shiny brown kernels ; and at Riseholme, 
 as far as I remember, we were allowed to do precisely 
 as we pleased. We used to go out alone in the boat, with 
 paste for bait, and splash the water at each other, and 
 come home with a couple of dace, dirty and wet and 
 hopelessly happy. Swans used to scold and hiss at us, 
 the boat did everything but capsize, and seons of bliss 
 were our portion. There were water-snails to be col- 
 lected, if the fish would not bite (they seldom did), and 
 wreaths of stinking water-weed, and broken fragments 
 of swan eggs lined inside with a tough kind of parch- 
 ment, which we called "swan-paper." Then dace (when 
 there were any) were cooked for tea, and provided a bony 
 mouthful for one; the swan-paper was taken home for 
 the Museum, together, on one glorious occasion, with the 
 addled swan's egg; and the wreaths of stinking water- 
 weed were laid out on sheets of cartridge-paper and 
 pressed. This pressing resulted in an awful fricassee of 
 weed and paper, and then something else occupied us. 
 On the banks of the lake, at intervals, appeared a sympa- 
 thetic Bishop with daughters, to whom we shouted the 
 results of our explorations, and one of the daughters said, 
 "Kick-kick-kick," and another, "Sss-sss-sss." For larger 
 people, such as Arthur, there was more grown-up fishing, 
 and once with a spoon-bait he caught a pike that weighed 
 three pounds. But not even the sympathetic and com- 
 
54 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 bined appetites of the juniors could finish that toothsome 
 dish. 
 
 Then there were expeditions into the vast forest that 
 lay below the sluice, where marsh-marigolds grew, and 
 the willow shoots flew back and slapped the faces of 
 those who followed the leader in these excursions. 
 Maggie and I formed a small club or society (I suppose 
 Nellie was too old then, being about eleven) to get lost 
 in this pathless place, but we never quite succeeded in 
 doing so. Just as we thought there was no hope of our 
 ever being discovered, in which case we proposed to live 
 on leaves and drink the water that came from the sluice 
 in a small stream, Beth's voice would sound quite near at 
 hand, or, by mistake, we came back into the meadow be- 
 yond the lake, or into the path that bordered it. So in- 
 stead, we collected chestnuts, if there was not a marine 
 or lacustrine expedition, and ground up the kernels into a 
 nutritive powder, or mixed it with lake-water to form a 
 paste. About this time Maggie and I formed a special 
 alliance, which continued till the end of her life, and the 
 light of it was never quite obscured by those dusky years 
 of darkened mind through which her way led, for she 
 was always willing to talk of the days at Lincoln, and 
 the collections and the amazing stories which we invented 
 to beguile our walks. They were compounded of strange 
 adventures, with the finding of gold and immense 
 diamonds, of desert islands and bandits, and the central 
 figures were she and I and the collie, Watch. All was 
 coloured with the vividness of dreams, and the serious- 
 ness of childhood. 
 
 Riseholme was about two and a half miles from Lin- 
 coln, and the most exciting experience I ever had in its 
 connection was that of being sent over there by my father 
 
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 55 
 
 with a note for the Bishop. I took Watch with me, and 
 "Kick-kick-kick" and "Sss-sss-sss" were so entertaining 
 and the Bishop so long in writing his answer that it was 
 nearly dark before, with sinkings of the heart, I started 
 on my return. "Sss-sss-sss" I think offered to accompany 
 me till I got out of the loneliness of the road and in touch 
 with the lights of Lincoln, but I was too cowardly to say 
 I was afraid of the darkness and the emptiness, and 
 started off alone. Wanting to get it over as quickly as 
 possible, I ran, and was frightened at the noise of my 
 running. Then, one after the other, my stockings came 
 down, and I thought that the strip of whiteness would 
 encourage highwaymen to attack me, and so had to stop 
 every third step to pull them up. Then I talked to Watch 
 in order to hearten myself, saying, in so many words, 
 "Watch, aren't we benighted?" (new word) and then 
 was frightened at the sound of my voice in the frosty 
 stillness. But there was pleasure in this sense of ad- 
 venture, and I was given an egg for tea. 
 
 There were expeditions to Nocton, where in a wood 
 of vast extent the whole ground was white with lilies of 
 the valley growing wild, and the still languid air beneath 
 the trees swooned with the scent of them, which, I am 
 told (though never since that day have I been able to 
 believe it), is extremely pleasant. For the last of these 
 expeditions to Nocton had a tragic sequel so far as I 
 was concerned. We had lunch there after picking lilies 
 all the morning, and I suppose I ate too much, and it 
 began to rain as we drove homewards so that the car- 
 riage, full of hot children and lilies of the valley, had to 
 be closed. The effect was that I was exceedingly un- 
 well and never since that day have been able to dissociate 
 the smell of lilies of the valley from being sick. To 
 
56 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 balance that bilious day was a glorious expedition to 
 Skegness, where I saw the sea for the first time, and fell 
 in love with it with a devotion that has never wavered. I 
 took with me a small black handbag in which to stow 
 the treasures of the shore, among which I rather mis- 
 takenly selected a dead decaying skate. An odour as 
 unpleasant to others as was that of lilies of the valley to 
 me filled the railway carriage on the return, which was 
 eventually traced to my bag, and the dead skate which 
 would have looked, anyhow, interesting in the Museum, 
 was thrown out of the window. That first impression 
 of the sea was confirmed by summer holidays spent at 
 Torquay, and it was there, I think, that I must have 
 learned to swim, and then have forgotten that I knew 
 how. For when some years later I went to Marlborough 
 and began to learn in the school bathing-place, I in- 
 stantly did swim, and the old instructor who sat with 
 small boys in a strap at the end of a fishing-rod, said 
 with disgust, "Why you swims already!" Torquay was 
 responsible for a whole host of further activities, for it 
 was there, I believe, that we began those scribblings 
 which subsequently developed into the Saturday Mag- 
 azine (an industry so important that it must presently 
 have a paragraph to itself) and it was certainly there 
 that there were hot twisty rolls for breakfast which were 
 only to be obtained by reciting some sort of rhyme, of 
 which one of my mother's seemed to me to touch the high- 
 water mark of inspired wit and poetry. This ran: 
 
 Bread is the staff of life, the proverbs say, 
 So give me of its twisted staff to-day. 
 
 Surely that was far better than a miserable effusion by 
 Bishop Temple, of Exeter, who merely said : 
 
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 57 
 
 An egg, 
 I beg, 
 
 and was sycophantically applauded by the grown-up 
 people present. You could have eggs without making 
 rhymes . . . but perhaps he didn't understand, and any- 
 how it was no use wasting time over him. There, among 
 the diversions of Torquay we all violently embraced the 
 career of artists, and drew miles of cottages and churches 
 and painted leagues of the English Channel. The shell 
 collection was started then, so also collections of wild 
 flowers, and there was bathing and Devonshire cream, 
 and a steep garden with gladioli and aloes in its beds. I 
 think my birthday must have been celebrated there, for 
 certainly I received a present of a terra-cotta teapot with 
 lines of blue enamel on it, after receiving which it was 
 difficult to imagine circumstances that could have the 
 power to hurt one ever again. 
 
 Never can I sufficiently admire or be sufficiently thank- 
 ful for the encouragement my father and mother both 
 gave to these multitudinous hobbies, for hobbies, as they 
 well knew, whether literary, artistic, or scientific, are 
 a priceless panacea for the preservation of youth, and the 
 stimulation of the world-wonder of beauty. At this time 
 we were all of us draughtsmen, ornithologists, concholo- 
 gists, geologists, poets, and literary folk: we all drew and 
 wrote and collected shells and birds' eggs, and smashed 
 stones in order to discover fossils. I claim no measure 
 of eminence or even promise in any of us, but that is not 
 the point. The point is that under parental encourage- 
 ment we did all these things with extreme zest and in- 
 terest. In sports and games my father gave us less sup- 
 port, for he looked on them only as a recreation which 
 
58 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 would enable the mind to get to work again, and as hav- 
 ing no intrinsic value beyond what a brisk walk could 
 have brought. But we had enough keenness among our- 
 selves for these, and a ball and something to hit it with 
 filled the rest of the vacant hours with ardour. For music, 
 among the arts, he had likewise no sympathy at all: he 
 liked the singing of Psalms and Handel and hymns en- 
 tirely because of the words, and when he joined in the 
 hymns in chapel, he produced a buzzing noise that bore 
 no relation to any known melody. By this time my own 
 love of music, sown in me by the adored chorister, had 
 taken firm hold, and with help from my mother to start 
 me, and an elementary book of instruction, music became 
 to me a thing apart. I wanted no companionship or 
 sympathizer in it, and though as far as execution on the 
 piano went I was leagues behind my sisters, I felt certain 
 in my own mind that I had opened a door for myself into 
 a kingdom to which they did not really penetrate though 
 they could execute (both counting very loud) Diabelli's 
 Celebrated Duet in D which I considered below contempt, 
 though it was very clever of them to move their fingers 
 so fast. At that time my mother, who had always an 
 Athenian disposition with regard to the joy of a new 
 thing, went in for a course of instruction somehow con- 
 nected with Dr. Farmer of Harrow. There was founded 
 at Lincoln a Farmer Society of some kind, and the ladies 
 met once a week or thereabouts and played easy Bach 
 to each other, and one of the most rapturous Lincoln 
 days was a certain wet afternoon, when the Society met 
 at the Chancery. My sisters and I were allowed to sit 
 in the window-seat, provided we remained quiet, and 
 we all had acid drops to suck, and books to read when 
 we got tired of listening. They were soon deep in Little 
 
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 59 
 
 Women and Good Wives, but for me, in spite of a tooth- 
 ache, I listened in an entranced bliss to a series of 
 Gavottes and Sarabands and Allemandes, while the rain 
 beat on the windows, and the melodious dusk gathered. 
 The time of the year must have been near Christmas, for 
 I feel as if I went straight from there to the nursery, on 
 the floor of which was laid out a large sheet piled with 
 holly and laurel and ivy, out of which we made wreaths 
 for the doors. The remaining leaves, when all was done, 
 were put in the fire and roared and crackled up the chim- 
 ney, filling the room with an aromatic smell of burning, 
 that ranks next in preciousness of recollection to the smell 
 of lilac. 
 
 It was in this last year at Lincoln that I had a fit of 
 demoniacal possession, for I committed three heinous 
 crimes one after the other. On a shelf in the drawing- 
 room with Dresden figures and vases there was an Easter 
 egg which had been sent to my father. It was decorated 
 with a cross and a crown and a halo and some flowers, 
 and was without doubt a goose's egg. This trophy was 
 singularly sacred, and my father had told us that we 
 were never to touch it. Because of that prohibition I wet- 
 ted my finger and rubbed off a piece of the crown and the 
 halo. I followed this up by stealing a quantity of sugar 
 from the tea-table in a yellow box which I think had 
 contained sweetmeats, and kept it on my knees under the 
 table-cloth. I suppose I then forgot about it and, get- 
 ting up, I caused it to fall to the ground, and spill its 
 contents all over the floor. 
 
 The third piece of devil work was far more daring and 
 inexplicable. I had a cold one day and was not al- 
 lowed to go out, but was left instead by the fire in the 
 sjtting-room belonging to my two elder brothers, There 
 
60 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 was a white sheepskin nig in front of it, and as soon as 
 my father with the four eldest children had left the 
 house, I ladled the whole of the burning coals out of the 
 grate and put them on the hearthrug. An appalling 
 stench arose as the wool caught fire; the place was filled 
 with smoke, and I left the room, quite impenitent and 
 merely interested to know what on earth would happen 
 next. The smoke must by now have penetrated to the 
 rest of the house, for I met my mother running down- 
 stairs, and she asked me if I knew what that smell was. 
 I told her that I didn't, and went up to the nursery. 
 Presently, having extinguished the fire, she followed me, 
 and again asked me if I was sure I didn't know anything 
 about it. Upon which I told her that it was I who had 
 emptied the fire on to the rug. A fine spanking followed, 
 which I did not in the least resent, and I was told to go 
 to bed till I was sorry. I never was sorry — for it was 
 demoniacal possession — but I suppose that some time I 
 must have got up again. 
 
 Friendships had sprung up between us and other chil- 
 dren at Mrs. Giles's day-school, and among these was 
 May Copeland, who was Nellie's particular friend, and 
 told us that she was descended from Oliver Cromwell. 
 This was very distinguished, and I fully meant to marry 
 her. There was also a girl whose name I forget, and she 
 was responsible for one of the greatest surprises of my 
 young life, for one day while she and I were looking 
 for a tennis ball in the bushes, she took my hands and 
 drew them upwards against her bosom. I found to my 
 astonishment that instead of being flat, she had two 
 swellings there, and I asked her if they were bruises. She 
 seemed rather offended and said that they certainly were 
 not. Then there was Willie Burton to whom I told, in 
 
DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 61 
 
 the spirit of bravado, what I had done to the sheep- 
 skin hearthrug, and he thought it very magnificent. He 
 used to get phosphorus matches from his father's table, 
 which was grand, for we only used Bryant and May's 
 safety matches, and our great game was to retire into 
 the blackness of the tool-house, wet the palms of our 
 hands, and rub on the phosphorus which glowed with a 
 mysterious light. He had an awful story which I en- 
 tirely believed of an aunt of his on whom a practical 
 joker played a dreadful trick, for he wrote up in phos- 
 phorus above his aunt's bed the text, "This night shall 
 thy soul be required of thee." On which his poor aunt 
 went raving mad, and I got a general distrust of phos- 
 phorus. . . . Willie Burton was dressed in sailor clothes, 
 and I in a short jacket and knickerbockers, and one day 
 with a sense of almost excessive adventure, we undressed 
 in the tool-house and each put on the other's clothes. 
 We then opened the door in order to let daylight behold 
 this transformation, and swiftly changed back again. 
 That was a wonderful thing to have done, and when we 
 met next day at the gymnasium we looked at each other's 
 clothes with glances of secret knowledge. 
 
 My final remembrance at Lincoln is perhaps the most 
 vivid of all, for the sense of it was not that of a momen- 
 tary impression, but of a growing reality. Every eve- 
 ning now we came down to my mother's room and for 
 half an hour before bedtime she read Dickens aloud to 
 us, sitting in front of the fire. She liked to have her 
 hair stroked, so I used to stand behind her chair, passing 
 my fingers over the smooth brown hair above her fore- 
 head, and listening to the story of the Kenwigses. Her 
 voice and the contact of my fingers on her hair wakened 
 in me the knowledge of how I loved her. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 
 
 ONE morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded 
 in the Chancery and blew Lincoln into fragments. 
 It came in the shape of two letters, one from the 
 Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, offering my father the 
 Bishopric of the newly created see of Truro in Cornwall, 
 the other from Queen Victoria, saying that she personally 
 hoped that he would accept it. These letters must have 
 arrived a few days before we knew of them, for that day 
 my father told us that he had thought it over and had 
 settled to go. I felt nothing whatever except wild de- 
 light and excitement, unmingled as far as I am aware, 
 with any regret for leaving Lincoln, and all the time 
 that we were out for our walk that morning Maggie and 
 I, instead of telling each other stories, whispered with 
 secret smiles, "The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord 
 Bishop of Truro !" We were vastly proud of my father, 
 and thought it most sensible of Lord Beaconsfield and the 
 Queen to have selected him.* 
 
 The fresh move came in the spring of 1877, and in 
 that loveliest of all seasons the train slid one evening 
 across the tall wooden viaducts with the lights of Truro 
 pricking the dusk, where the town lay below, and the 
 enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave its 
 
 * Lord Beaconsfield seems to have been as pleased as we were at my 
 father's accepting the bishopric, for he wrote exultantly to a friend, say- 
 ing, "Well, we have got a Bishop." 
 
 62 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 63 
 
 spell. The new home was the Vicarage of Kenwyn, a 
 small village high on the western hills and perhaps a 
 mile from the centre of the town. As a house it was 
 not comparable for amenities and mysteries with the 
 Chancery of Lincoln, but what was the garden at Lin- 
 coln, for all its towers and rolling banks, in comparison 
 to the garden here and the fields and water-haunted val- 
 leys which encompassed it? The garden at Lincoln, 
 confined within its brick walls and planted down in the 
 middle of a town, was like some caged animal that here 
 roamed wild and untamed. 
 
 Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I 
 awoke in the new house, and saw on the ceiling the light 
 of the early sun that shone in through the copse outside, 
 making a green and yellow dapple on the whitewash! 
 The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh's bed 
 with his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed 
 stealthily and went downstairs and out. From the lawn 
 I could see the viaduct over which we had come, and 
 below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple 
 piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded 
 like a frosty breath and beyond the town there stretched 
 broad and shining the estuary of the Fal. Instead of the 
 sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with tree-fuchsias, 
 and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never 
 was there such a bower of a habitation. On that April 
 morning no doubt the fuchsia and the roses were not in 
 flower, but looking back now, that moment seems to have 
 sucked into itself the decorations of all the months, mak- 
 ing in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot 
 now disentangle the true component parts. But surely 
 there was a gorse bush at the corner of the house, on 
 the edge of the copse through which the sun had shone, 
 
64 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy 
 feathery little football of a tit's nest, woven inextricably 
 among the spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infin- 
 itesimal bird peeped out of the circular door, when I drew 
 too near, and scolded me well for my intrusion. I passed 
 up the winding path that led through the shrubbery, and 
 found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went 
 cautiously past a row of beehives ; I came through a door 
 into a lane below the churchyard, where ferns (the sort 
 of things not known before to exist in other localities 
 than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties) grew 
 quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breath- 
 lessly scampering and surfeited with impressions past 
 woodshed and haystack and stable, and upstairs again 
 with heart and shoes alike drenched with the spring-dew. 
 All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were con- 
 siderably relaxed, and the lovely months passed like some 
 fugue built on the subjects of that early walk, coloured, 
 amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize for 
 botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, person- 
 ally pressed, and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper 
 with the English, and, if possible, the Latin name written 
 below), and we scoured the hedges and liquid water-sides 
 and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a definite 
 object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition 
 of those names (Latin if possible), but this, like some 
 homoeopathic dose conveyed in honey, was drowned in the 
 delight of rambling explorations. The appetite of the 
 collector was whetted ; there was a certain craving created 
 for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest 
 in the loveliness that we should not otherwise have 
 noticed, and the admiration which the interest engendered. 
 Definitely also I think I trace a love of words in them- 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO Q5 
 
 selves which this studied collecting gave us, for what child 
 could write "centaury" or "meadow-sweet," "bee-orchis," 
 "comfrey," "loosestrife," or in more exalted spheres, 
 "Osmunda regalis" on the virgin sheet of cartridge 
 paper without tasting something of the flavour of these 
 blossom-like syllables'? Or what child could fail to 
 whoop with gladness when one of us brought an unknown 
 bloom to a certain botanist friend of my father's, and 
 was apologetically told that its name was "Stinking Arch- 
 angel" % For in the lives of all of us, words and due dis- 
 crimination in their use came to play a considerable part, 
 and somewhere we hoarded these rich additions to our 
 vocabulary. My sister Nellie won the prize, and I re- 
 member that she afterwards confessed to me that she 
 had stolen some of my pressed specimens and added them 
 to her own. I never was more astonished, and class this 
 lapse of hers with instances already given of my own 
 demoniacal possession in the matter of the Easter egg 
 and the sheepskin hearthrug. We both agreed that she 
 could not possibly resign the prize, for that would lead 
 to investigation, and she gave me a shilling by way of 
 compensation. 
 
 Birds' eggs as a collection had hitherto been represented 
 in the Museum by one addled swan's egg, but now they 
 took rank among the objects of existence. Here my 
 father dictated the conditions under which they might 
 be acquired, namely, that no egg was to be taken from 
 any nest unless that nest contained four, and under no 
 circumstances was more than one to be taken. There 
 was of course no questioning his decision, but it seemed 
 a pity to leave the great tit in the gorse bush to bring 
 up a family of fifteen after our levy had been made, and 
 never to be able to get a wood-pigeon's egg at all, since 
 
66 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 those prudent birds refused to lay more than two. But 
 here Charles the groom shone forth gilded with the glory 
 of celestial charity, for he came to me one morning with 
 his entire collection of eggs and "would I accept of 
 them?" Was there ever such a groom? And among 
 these was a pair of wood-pigeon's eggs, so those parsi- 
 monious parents were thwarted. 
 
 For a while games were quite in abeyance, romantic 
 natural history held the field. For consider: my sister 
 Maggie and I had heard that otters were found in Corn- 
 wall, and on that simple fact we built up the following 
 fairy-like adventure. There was a round copse, rather 
 lonely, on the edge of our fields; from it the ground de- 
 clined in a steep down to the bottom of a valley, through 
 which ran a stream so small that by wetting only one foot 
 you could get across it at its widest part. But it ran 
 below bushes and under steep banks, and it seemed highly 
 probable that some of these Cornish otters lived there. 
 Well, otters went about on land as well as in the water, 
 and the lure of imagination pictured them taking a nice 
 walk up this down and coming to the lonely copse. This 
 grew very thick in brushwood, through which the otters 
 (now indigenous in the copse) would certainly walk. So 
 we hung nooses of string here and there a foot or so from 
 the ground so that the otter might, in his walks, insert 
 his head in the noose which would then be pulled tight, 
 and we should come and capture him. This gave rise to 
 further considerations; he might struggle, and get hurt 
 if not strangled in the noose, so we must clearly be 
 on the spot to loosen the noose, and substitute for it a 
 chain and collar of one of the dogs. But if the otter 
 saw us, he would probably gallop back over the down 
 to his stream, so we built a hut woven of withies between 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 67 
 
 two trees in which we could lie perdus, and watch for the 
 otter. Then we should lead him chained to the stables, 
 and gradually tame him till he could come out walking 
 with us in company with Watch and the nanny-goat which 
 already formed part of the family procession. (A second 
 goat, called Capricorn, was presently added, but he had 
 an odious habit of standing upright on his hind legs and 
 hurling himself like a battering-ram against the hinder- 
 parts of the unobservant, and when harnessed to a small 
 truck which was used for gardening purposes, galloped 
 with it at such speed that sparks flew from its wheels 
 as they spurned the gravel.) 
 
 A much larger bowl was now granted us for the aquari- 
 um, and the spa and madrepores carefully brought from 
 Lincoln (though the preserved hornet seemed to have 
 been forgotten) did not more than cover the bottom of 
 the new and sumptuous receptacle. Caddis-worms were 
 culled from the streams that flowed Fal-wards, and 
 whelk-like water-snails were comforted for their ex- 
 patriation by having the chance of eating bread crumbs 
 if so they wished. But the aquarium was still but a 
 crawling democracy, and needed some denizen of livelier 
 locomotive power to fill the post of king in this water- 
 world. And then one day, as I have told before, in a 
 book now mercifully forgotten, we caught the unique and 
 famous stickleback, by accident you may say (if you 
 believe in accidents), for certainly at the moment of his 
 capture we had not even seen him, though it is true that 
 we were dredging in the stream in which the otter still 
 failed to make his appearance. 
 
 My sister Maggie and I then were just emptying out 
 the dredging (butterfly) net thinking we had found no 
 great treasure on that cast, when something stirred in the 
 
68 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 residuary mud, after we had extracted no more than a 
 caddis worm or two, and it was he. With tremulous rap- 
 ture we popped him in a jar for transport to the aquarium, 
 and overcome with the greatness of the moment (like 
 Paolo and Francesco) we fished no more that day. For 
 perhaps a week he swam gorgeously about this new king- 
 dom, never getting over his delusion that if he swam 
 swiftly enough against the side of it, he would find him- 
 self at liberty again, and then the tragedy happened. 
 
 It was our custom every morning to empty out the 
 contents of the aquarium, down the drain in the stable 
 yard, and replace them with fresh water. During this 
 operation one of us held a piece of gauze over the lip 
 of the aquarium so that none of its inhabitants should 
 be poured away. And on one of these occasions, when 
 the water was nearly drained out, and the stickleback 
 swimming in short indignant circles in the residue, 
 Maggie's hand which was holding the gauze slipped sud- 
 denly and in a flood the remaining pint or two rushed out, 
 the stickleback in the midst of it. With one flick of 
 his tail, he disappeared down the drain in the stable yard, 
 leaving us looking at each other in incredulous dis- 
 may. . . . 
 
 It was certainly during this summer that another idol 
 came to fill that shrine of worship in my heart once oc- 
 cupied by the chorister, and once again music was the 
 hot coal that fired my incense, and the music in question 
 was the mellow thunder of the organ in Kenwyn Church. 
 I still believe that it was very skilfully and sympatheti- 
 cally played by the unconscious object of my adoration. 
 I must have fallen in love not really with what she was, 
 but with what she did, for my passion was all ablaze 
 before ever I had seen her face, or had the slightest idea 
 
ELIZABETH COOPER; "BETH." JET. 78 
 
 [Page 69 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 71 
 
 what she was like. All I knew of her was that she pro- 
 duced these enchanting noises, since from our pew I 
 could see nothing of her except her back, and a hand 
 which reached out to shut a stop or open another bleat- 
 [ing fount of melody. She played the pedals, those 
 great wooden keys, and swayed slightly from side to side 
 as her feet reached out for them. Once or twice, entering 
 or leaving the church I had a glimpse of her in less than 
 profile, and that served my adoration well enough. Her 
 name was Mrs. Carter, and I daresay she was thirty years 
 old or thereabouts, for she had a son of about my own 
 age who used sometimes to turn over leaves for her, sit- 
 ting by her on the organ bench, and though I don't think 
 I would quite have exchanged mothers with him, I would 
 have given most other things to take his place there. 
 
 This seemed likely to be a barren affair, for Sunday 
 after Sunday passed and I never saw more than the sway- 
 ing back of Mrs. Carter. But by way of killing one bird 
 and possibly two with one stone, I got leave somehow 
 (with the gardener's boy to blow the bellows for an occa- 
 sional quarter of an hour) to find my way about the 
 organ. That exploration was a good bird in itself, but 
 a better lurked in my mind, for I thought that Mrs. 
 Carter might so easily come up to Kenwyn Church dur- 
 ing the week to arrange her music or what not, and she 
 would find Me sitting in her place and making tentative 
 experiments with the stops, and straining after the nearer 
 pedals with my short legs. Surely some day I should 
 look up and see her standing by, and she would say, "Who 
 taught you to play so nicely'?" (I perceive that vanity 
 was mingled with passion) and I, in a happy tumult of 
 emotion, would reply, "Oh, Mrs. Carter!" 
 
 But this trap for Mrs. Carter never brought the hunter 
 
72 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 his quarry, and quite independent circumstances led me 
 closer. It was decreed that my sisters should have music 
 lessons and who but Mrs. Carter was engaged to be the 
 teacher? Twice a week she would come to the house, 
 so now no human agency, it would appear, could prevent 
 us from meeting. But for some time a human agency did 
 do so, that human agency being myself, for on observing 
 Mrs. Carter's approach up the drive, an agony of shyness 
 seized me, and I sat distracted in the day nursery until 
 she had gone upstairs, and the noise of the piano from 
 the schoolroom showed that she was engaged. Once, 
 summoning up all my courage, I went in while the lesson 
 was in progress, but she did not take her eyes off the copy 
 of Schubert's Impromptu in A flat, which Maggie was 
 fumbling at, and I went out and listened in the garden 
 for the cessation of the piano, on which, I determined, I 
 would walk quite calmly towards the front door and thus 
 meet Mrs. Carter there or thereabouts. But, alas for 
 this faint-hearted lover, as soon as the piano ceased I 
 walked in precisely the other direction, and it was not 
 likely that Mrs. Carter instead of going down the drive 
 would force her way through the laurel shrubbery in 
 order to find me. 
 
 I blush to record the next step of my wooing. An 
 invincible shyness (though I was not otherwise shy) for- 
 bade my walking down the drive as Mrs. Carter was com- 
 ing up, or taking any direct initiative, so I laid a lure 
 for her. Observing her approach to the house, I regret 
 to say that it was my custom to lean out of the schoolroom 
 window, singing loudly. This would certainly attract 
 her attention (indeed I think that once it did, and I 
 rushed, panic-stricken, away) and she would say to one 
 of my sisters, "Was that your brother who was singing? 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 73 
 
 What a charming voice !" And one of my sisters would 
 say, "Oh yes, he is very fond of music." Then surely, 
 surely Mrs. Carter would say, "I don't think we have 
 met," or perhaps even, "I should like to see him," and 
 then my sister would come and find me (for after these 
 bursts of melody out of the window I always fled like a 
 frightened dove to the nursery) and say that Mrs. Carter 
 would like to see me. I had looked on her face by now, 
 and I pictured to myself how her kind mouth would smile 
 as she shook hands, and she would say, "We must be 
 friends, mustn't we, for we are both so fond of music." 
 This bleating piece of Platonism came to an end some- 
 how, and I grew to be able to contemplate Mrs. Carter's 
 back swaying to her pedal-playing without emotion. But 
 I think that this warm soft Cornish climate must have 
 brought out a sort of measles of sentimentality in me, 
 for without pause I transferred my sloppy heart to the 
 curate at Kenwyn, the Rev. J. A. Reeve, who subse- 
 quently was appointed Rector of Lambeth by my father, 
 and was an intimate friend of all of us. He was a man 
 who was habitually surrounded by an atmosphere of 
 ecstasy, an adorer of children, and next door to a fanatic 
 in matters of religion, beloved and blissful, living in a 
 light that never was on sea or land. To the outward 
 view he presented a long lean figure, walking at a tre- 
 mendous pace, and perspiring profusely, with his umbrella 
 tucked under his arm, and his hands clasped in perpetual 
 admiration of this inimitable world, and the saints that 
 he constantly discovered in it under the most deceptive 
 of disguises. There were no "miserable sinners" in his 
 sight; the most impenitent were but rather wilful chil- 
 dren of the Father. He had a mane of yellow hair which 
 he tossed back as he laughed peals of uproarious appreci- 
 
74 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ation of any joke at all. But whereas with the chorister 
 and Mrs. Carter there certainly was some personal, physi- 
 cal attraction (though no doubt the main source of the 
 inspiration was music), with Mr. Reeve there was no 
 personal attraction of any kind, and the experience was 
 of the stained-glass window order, in which I was cast for 
 the stained-glass window, and Mr. Reeve for the wor- 
 shipper. At the bottom of it all perhaps there was some 
 grain of genuine religious sentiment, but this was so 
 largely diluted by mawkishness and vanity, that examina- 
 tion fails to find more than that minute presence described 
 in the analysis of medicinal waters as "some traces." He 
 used to breakfast with us after a short service in Kenwyn 
 Church at a quarter to eight every morning, to which we 
 children were encouraged though not obliged to go, and 
 he was a kind of unofficial chaplain to my father, writing 
 his letters for him half the morning with a puckered brow, 
 but ready to burst into peals of laughter on the smallest 
 opportunity for mirth. Every Sunday also, he came to 
 tea before service, and afterwards to supper, and every 
 Sunday evening after tea I went with him into a spare 
 bedroom where, with his arm round my neck, he read me 
 the sermon he was about to preach. I suppose my com- 
 ments were very edifying and satisfactory, for he cer- 
 tainly told my mother that "that boy was not far from 
 the kingdom of God." She must very wisely have begged 
 him not to tell me that, for I had no idea of it at the 
 time. Once, indeed, he sadly failed me, for meeting me 
 as I was being taken to the dentist by Beth, there to have 
 two teeth out under gas, he said that to have gas was 
 the same as getting drunk, and I went on my weary way 
 feeling not only terrified but wicked as well. It is true, 
 though scarcely credible, that the gas was administered by 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 75 
 
 Mrs. Tuck the dentist's wife, and that there was no an- 
 esthetist or doctor present. But I daresay Mrs. Tuck per- 
 formed her office very well, for I had a delightful dream 
 about being in a balloon in the middle of a rainbow. 
 
 That autumn lessons began again, and until I went 
 to a private school next Easter I suffered under the awful 
 rule of a German governess, not our kind Miss Braun of 
 Lincoln, but a dark-eyed and formidable woman who, I 
 was firmly convinced, must truly have been the terrible 
 Madame de la Rougierre in the tale of Uncle Silas which 
 I was reading then in small instalments, being too 
 frightened to read much at a time. She cannot have been 
 with us long, for before I went to school the beloved Miss 
 Bramston came back, not originally as governess but for 
 another and a tragic reason. 
 
 The Christmas holidays of 1877 were the last when 
 the whole of the family of six, with my father and mother 
 and Beth, who was absolutely of the family also, were 
 together. My eldest brother Martin was then seventeen, 
 and so great a gulf is fixed between that age and ten, 
 that never, till the day I saw him last, did I form any 
 clear idea of him. Here, then, I must abandon the stand- 
 point I have hitherto maintained, namely, that of speak- 
 ing of the events of these early years through my own 
 personal recollection of what impression they made on 
 me as the jolly days slipped by, and mingle recollection 
 with subsequent knowledge. 
 
 At the age of fourteen Martin had won the first open 
 scholarship at Winchester, and had now mentally de- 
 veloped into an extraordinary maturity and wisdom. He 
 took an amazing interest in the political affairs of the 
 day, in classics he was considered to be perhaps the most 
 remarkable scholar that Winchester ever had, and as wit- 
 
76 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ness to his innate love of learning there was a library 
 which he had himself acquired, and which must have 
 been unique for a boy of his age. Already at Lincoln 
 he had "spotted" an Albert Diirer woodcut pasted on to 
 the fly-leaf of some trumpery book at a penny bookstall, 
 and had breathlessly conveyed the treasure home, and 
 he and my father used to exchange original Latin versions 
 of hymns. But this precocity of scholarship did not in 
 the least check his boyishness, which verged on the fan- 
 tastic, for once he appeared in school with four little 
 Japanese dolls attached to the four strings of his shoe- 
 laces, and gravely proceeded with his construing. There 
 are notebooks full of his exquisite ridiculous drawings 
 with appropriate text in his minute handwriting: there are 
 poems as ridiculous, and behind it all was this serious 
 limpid spirit. . . . 
 
 He went back that January to Winchester, and Arthur 
 to Eton, and one day, early in February he had a sud- 
 den attack of giddiness, and then followed an attack of 
 meningitis. My father and mother were sent for; he 
 was then unconscious. Arthur went there from Eton, 
 but my mother decided that we younger children should 
 not go and instead Miss Bramston came down to us in 
 Cornwall. The rest I will tell by means of two letters 
 which my mother wrote to Beth. I found them, after 
 my mother's death, forty years after, in a little packet of 
 papers which had belonged to Beth, and consisted of let- 
 ters from all of us which she had always kept. 
 
 "Winchester, 
 
 Friday (Feb. 8, 1878). 
 Dearest Beth, 
 
 I must write you a few lines to-day. Our dear one is no 
 
 better at all. Nothing can be done for him but to watch him and 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 77 
 
 to give nourishment and to pray and trust in (rod. Everything 
 possible is done for him ; he has two nurses, day and night. We 
 go in and out of his room from time to time. He lies quite peace- 
 fully, mostly sleeping, and evidently quite unconscious of any 
 pain. There is no sign of pain about his face. He knows us now 
 and then, we think, but he does not speak. He takes a little nour- 
 ishment from time to time, but with difficulty. Sir William Jen- 
 ner has been sent for, though there does not seem anything he can 
 do. 
 
 Dearest Beth, it is such a comfort to think that you are with 
 those dear ones at home. I don't know what they would do with- 
 out you, or how we could bear to think of leaving them unless 
 they had you. We are both quite sure that it is better they should 
 not come. They could not be with him, and it is no use their 
 hearing details. We ought to and must keep before their young 
 minds just the Love of God, whether He shews it in giving our 
 darling back to our prayers, or in taking to Himself so beautiful 
 and holy a life. 
 
 But we must not, and do not give up hope. Though as far as 
 man knows or sees there is nothing to be done, and the doctors 
 dare not give us hope of recovery, yet just where man is most 
 powerless, God does work, often, and we continue to pray to Him 
 in hope for our darling's restoration. While there is life, we will 
 not despair. 
 
 Dearest Beth, God keep you all : the thought of you is such a 
 comfort to us. Pray yourself continually, — encourage them all 
 to pray. One of the Psalms to-day begins, T waited patiently for 
 the Lord, and He inclined unto me, and heard my calling.' 
 
 All our heart's love is with you all always. 
 
 Your most loving 
 
 Mary Benson." 
 
 This is the second letter: 
 
 "Dearest Friend and Mother Beth, 
 
 Be comforted for Martin. He is in perfect peace, in won- 
 derful joy, far happier than we could ever have made him. And 
 what did we desire in our hearts but to make him happy? And 
 
78 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 now he will help us out of his perfect happiness. He died with- 
 out a struggle — his pure and gentle spirit passed straight to God 
 his Father, and now he is ours and with us more than ever. Ours 
 now, in a way that nothing can take away. 
 
 Dearest Beth, we are all going to be more loving than ever, 
 living in love we shall live in God, and we shall live close to our 
 dear one. 
 
 One is so sure now, that sin is the only separation, and that 
 sting is taken out of death by Jesus Christ. My heart aches for 
 the dear ones at home, but I know you are a mother to them, and 
 will support and comfort their hearts, and keep before them that 
 God is love, and that He is loving us in this thing also. And I 
 want them to think of Martin, our darling, in perfect peace for 
 ever, free from fear, free from pain, from anxiety for evermore, 
 and to think how he will rejoice to see us walking more and more 
 in Love for his dear sake. 
 
 We cannot grudge him his happiness. 
 
 Dearest Beth, our boy is with God: he knows everything now, 
 and will help us. The peace of God Almighty be with you. 
 Your own child, your fellow-mother, 
 
 M. B." 
 
 There is nothing that could tell so simply and com- 
 pletely, not only what my mother was, but what Beth 
 was, as this letter which my mother wrote on the morn- 
 ing after the death of her eldest son. It gives the soul 
 of them both, of my mother that she could write it, and 
 of Beth the "fellow-mother," to whom it was written. 
 
 When I was old enough to understand my mother told 
 me about the day on which that second letter was written. 
 She had, so she said to me, a couple of hours of the most 
 wonderful happiness she had ever experienced on that 
 day, when she realized that though God had taken, yet 
 she could give. Her inmost being knew that, and when 
 she came back to us a few days later, there was no shadow 
 on her, for all that she said to Beth was the simple un- 
 
THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 79 
 
 touched copy of the writing on her heart. But even now 
 I can remember my father's face, as he stepped from the 
 carriage into the lamplight, for it was the face of a most 
 loving man stricken with the death of the boy he loved 
 best, who had been nearest his heart, and was knit into 
 his very soul. Often has my mother told me that though 
 he accepted Martin's death as God's will, he could not, 
 out of the very strength of his human love, adapt himself 
 to it. His faith was unshaken, but the deep waters had 
 gone over him, and years afterwards, when he saw the 
 martins skimming about the eaves of the house at Adding- 
 ton, he wrote about them and his own Martin a little 
 poem infinitely touching; and never, so I believe, did 
 some part of him cease to wonder why his Martin had 
 been taken from him. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 
 
 AFTER Easter, 1878, I was sent to a private school 
 presided over by Mr. Ottiwell Waterfield, at 
 Temple Grove, East Sheen, and remained there three 
 years. The house and grounds vanished entirely some- 
 where about 1908, under the trail of the suburban builder, 
 and now hideous rows of small residences occupy their 
 spaciousness. For the purposes of a school numbering 
 some hundred and thirty boys, the original George I and 
 Queen Anne house had been largely supplemented with 
 dormitories and schoolrooms, and a modern wing as 
 large as the house ran at right angles by the edge of 
 the cricket field. But the part where Mr. Waterfield and 
 his family lived had not been touched: there was a fine 
 library, drawing-room, and his study (how awful was 
 that place ! ) en suite, a paved hall, with a full-sized bil- 
 liard table and a piano where a frail widow lady called 
 Mrs. Russell gave music-lessons, and the French master, 
 whose name really was M. Voltaire, conducted a danc- 
 ing-class as well as teaching French and being, I think, 
 slightly immoral. A passage out of the hall gave on to 
 the private garden of Mr. Waterfield, where there were 
 fine cedar trees, and a broad oak-staircase led up from it 
 to the bedrooms of the family. 
 
 Already, darkly in the glass of fiction and under the 
 title of David Blaize, I have hinted at some of the habits 
 
 80 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 81 
 
 of the young gentlemen who led a life, alternately up- 
 roarious and terror-stricken, in the other part of the house, 
 but now more personal details can be indulged in. By 
 far the most salient feature in the school, even as the 
 sun is the most salient feature in the day, making it 
 precisely what it is, was Mr. Waterfield himself. He 
 seems now to me to have been nine feet high, and he 
 certainly walked with a curious rocking motion, which 
 was convenient, because if you were where you should 
 not be, you could detect his coming long before he could 
 detect anybody. He had a square grey beard which smelt 
 of cigars, a fact known from his practice, when he had 
 frightened the life out of you by terrible harangues, of 
 saying, "Well, that's all over, my boy," and kissing you. 
 I believe him to have been about the best private school- 
 master who ever lived, for he ruled by love and fear com- 
 bined in a manner that while it inspired small boys with 
 hellish terror, yet rewarded them with the sweet fruits 
 of hero-worship. He exacted blind obedience, under 
 peril of really infamous torture with a thick ruler with 
 which he savagely caned offending hands, but he man- 
 aged at the same time to make us appreciate his approba- 
 tion. The ruler was kept in a convenient drawer of the 
 knee-hole table in his study, and was a perfectly brutal 
 instrument, but the approach of the ruler, like a depres- 
 sion over the Atlantic, was always heralded by storm- 
 cones. The first of these was the taking of the keys 
 from his trousers-pocket, and then you had time to pull 
 yourself together to retract an equivocation, to confess 
 a fault, or try to remember something you had been re- 
 peatedly told. The second storm-cone was the insertion 
 of the key into the drawer where the ruler was kept. You 
 had to be of very strong nerve when that second storm- 
 
82 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 cone was hoisted, and divert your mind from the possible 
 future to the supine which you could not recollect, for 
 when the key was once inserted there might any moment 
 be a sudden startling explosion of wrath, and out flew 
 the ruler. Then came a short agonizing scene, and the 
 blubbering victim after six smart blows had the handle 
 of the door turned for him by somebody else, because 
 his hands were useless through pain. The ruler was 
 quite rare, and probably well deserved; anyhow it was 
 the counter-balance to the hero-worship born of Mr. 
 Waterfield's approval. For more heinous offences there 
 was birching, but that had certain compensations, for 
 afterwards you took down your breeches and showed the 
 injured parts to admiring companions. But there was 
 nothing to show, as Mrs. Pullet said about the boluses, 
 when you were caned. Besides you could play cricket 
 quite easily, shortly after a whipping, but no human hand 
 could hold a bat shortly after the application of the ruler. 
 
 The top form (called the first form, not the sixth form} 
 had certain specified lessons every week taken by Water- 
 field, and he did not teach regularly in other forms. But 
 he was liable to make meteoric appearances soon after 
 the beginning of a lesson in the big schoolroom where the 
 next three forms were at work, and take any lesson him- 
 self. A hush fell as he strode in, and we all cowered like 
 partridges below a kite, while he glared round, selecting 
 the covey on to which he pounced. This was a subtle 
 plan, for you could never be sure that it would not be he 
 who would hear any particular lesson, and the chance of 
 that made it most unwise to neglect any preparation alto- 
 gether. 
 
 The school got its fair share of public-school scholar- 
 ships, so I suppose the teaching of the other masters was 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 83 
 
 sound, but I cannot believe that a stranger set of in- 
 structors were ever got together. Rawlings, who taught 
 the first form, used habitually to read the Sporting Times 
 in school with his feet up on the desk until the time 
 came for him to hear us construe. Daubeny, the master 
 of the second form, had no thought but for the encourage- 
 ment of a small moustache; Davy of the third form 
 used mostly to be asleep; Geoghehan of the fourth form 
 (called "Geege") had lost his right arm, and used always 
 to have some favourite in his class, who sat on his knee 
 in school time and was an important personage, for he 
 could, if you were friends with him, always persuade 
 Geege not to report misconduct to Waterfield. One such 
 boy, now a steady hereditary legislator, I well remember : 
 he pulled Geege's beard, and altered the marks in his 
 register, and ruled him with a rod of iron. Geege was 
 otherwise an effective disciplinarian, and had an unpleas- 
 ant habit, if he thought you were not attending, of spear- 
 ing the back of your hand with the nib of his pen, dipped 
 in purple ink. Then there was a handwriting specialist 
 called Prior who gave out stationery on Saturdays. His 
 appearance was always hailed by a sort of Gregorian 
 chant to which the words were, "All boys wanting ink, 
 go to Mr. Prior." Then came Mr. Voltaire, the gay 
 young Frenchman, and these with one or two more of 
 whom I cherish no recollection all lived together at a 
 house in East Sheen called Clarence House, and were, 
 I think, a shade more frightened of Waterfield than we. 
 The ways of boys are past finding out, and what could 
 have induced us to believe that the food supplied was 
 disgusting to the verge of being poisonous I have no idea. 
 But tradition, at the time of which I am speaking, or- 
 dained that this was so, and how often when I was long- 
 
84, OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ing to eat a plateful of pudding have I shovelled it into 
 an envelope to bury in the playground, since the currants 
 in it were held to be squashed flies and the suet to be 
 made with scourings from dirty plates. Then somebody 
 once saw potatoes, no doubt intended for school consump- 
 tion, lying on the floor in a shed in the garden, which 
 was considered a terrible way in which to keep potatoes. 
 I remembering telling my father this, and with the utmost 
 gravity he answered that every potato ought to be 
 wrapped up singly in silver paper. He also asked if it was 
 true that Mr. Waterfield had been seen, with his trousers 
 turned up diluting the beer for dinner out of a garden 
 watering-can. Most poisonous of all were supposed to 
 be the sausages which we had for breakfast now and 
 then : it was a point of honour not to eat a single mouthful 
 of this garbage. Then suddenly for no reason the fashion 
 changed, and the food was supposed to be, and indeed 
 it probably was, excellent. We gobbled up our sausages, 
 asked for more and got it, and ate the potatoes that had 
 once lain on the dirty ground, and had even degraded 
 themselves by growing in it. . . . 
 
 I plunged headlong into this riot of school life and for 
 the first year enjoyed it enormously. I had been placed 
 too low in the school and without the slightest effort I 
 found myself term after term at the top of the class, and 
 loaded with prizes, for no merit of my own but for the 
 fact that I had the kind of superficial memory that re- 
 tained what it had scarcely attended to at all. In con- 
 sequence for a whole year I had no fear of Waterfield as 
 regards lessons, and devoted myself to games, stag-beetles, 
 and friendship, and I find it hard to decide whether the 
 rapture of making twenty at cricket against overhand 
 bowling (not lobs from sisters) was greater or less than 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 85 
 
 finding a stag-beetle on the palings, or in the early dawn 
 of summer mornings going on tiptoe into the next dormi- 
 tory, and, after waking up my special friend, sitting on 
 his bed, propped up with pillows and talking in whispers 
 till there came the sound of the dressing-bell, which por- 
 tended the entrance of the matron. Then it was neces- 
 sary to steal round the corner of his cubicle, and slide 
 back into my own bed, there apparently to fall into a 
 refreshing slumber, for to be caught out of bed before 
 it was time to dress meant to be reported to Waterfield, 
 who took a serious, and to me then an unintelligible view 
 of such an offence. But an hour's whispered conversation 
 with a friend was worth that risk, indeed probably the 
 risk added a certain savour to it, and perhaps our present 
 Minister at the Vatican has recollections similar to mine. 
 Or else it would be I who was awakened by the soft-step- 
 ping night-shirted figure, and moved aside in bed to give 
 room for him to sit there, and there would be plans to 
 be made, and then combining friendship with stag-beetles 
 into one incomparable compound we would take the stag- 
 beetles (for there were two of them, male and female 
 called "The Monarch of the Glen" and "Queen") out 
 of my washing basin, where they passed the night in 
 optimistic attempts to climb its slippery sides, and refresh 
 them with a breakfast of elm leaves and perhaps the half 
 of a strawberry. They had to be put back into two match- 
 boxes which were their travelling carriages before Jane 
 the matron came round, for she had said that if ever she 
 found stag-beetles in basins again she would throw them 
 out of the window. 
 
 An "Exeat" now and then diversified the course of the 
 term, and these I spent with my Aunt Eleanor who had 
 married Mr. Thomas Hare, famous for his book on the 
 
86 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Representation of Minorities. He was a great friend of 
 John Stuart Mill, whom Aunt Eleanor, for some reason 
 of her own, always called "Mr. Mills." They lived in a 
 house near Surbiton which had a tower in it, on the top 
 floor of which was Uncle Hare's laboratory, chemistry 
 being a hobby of his, and he made oxygen in glass retorts, 
 and put snippets of potassium to scurry, flaring and self- 
 lit, on the surface of a basin of water. . . . On the 5th 
 of November every year I was asked to a children's party, 
 given by Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck, at the White 
 Lodge, Richmond Park, and there was an immense tea 
 followed by fireworks in the garden. There we were 
 given squibs and told to be sure to throw them away as 
 soon as they burned low, before the explosion came at 
 the end, and on one of these occasions the Duke of Teck 
 wanting a light for his cigar told me to give him my squib, 
 for he had no matches. I told him that it was already 
 burning low, but he said "Wass*?" rather alarmingly, and 
 so I handed it to him. He had just applied the burning 
 end of it to his cigar when the explosion came, and his 
 face and hair were covered with sparks, and he danced 
 about, and said sonorous things in German, and I gathered 
 that he was vexed. . . . 
 
 The minds of children as they grow have those diseases 
 incident to childhood much as their bodies have. I had 
 had my measles of sentimentality, and having got over 
 that I developed during this year a kind of whooping- 
 cough of lying. I used to invent and repeat extraordinary 
 experiences, which had their root in fact, but were em- 
 bellished by my imagination to scenes of unparalleled 
 magnificence. For instance, the family spent that sum- 
 mer holidays at Etretat, crossing from Southampton to 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 87 
 
 Havre, and I came back with Arthur who was going to 
 Eton, a day late for the assembling of Temple Grove. 
 The crossing was an extremely rough one; all night the 
 water broke over the decks heavy and solid, and certainly 
 some unfortunate passenger came into the cabin drenched 
 through. All next day as I travelled to Temple Grove 
 my imagination worked on these promising materials, and 
 I told my admiring schoolfellows that we had barely es- 
 caped shipwreck. The waves, which certainly did deluge 
 the decks, I represented as having poured in torrents down 
 the funnels, extinguishing the furnaces, so that we had 
 to stop till the fires were relit, while out of the passenger 
 who came down drenched into the cabin I constructed a 
 Frenchman who was supposed to have said to me in 
 broken English, "Ze water is not coming over in bucket- 
 fuls it is coming over in shipfuls." So vividly did I 
 imagine this, that before long I really half believed it. 
 Again the next winter holidays were marked by a heavy 
 snowfall in Cornwall succeeded by a partial thaw and a 
 hard frost. In consequence the horses had to be roughed, 
 and it is certainly a fact that the carriage which was 
 bringing my father home one evening slewed so violently 
 that, according to his quite authentic description, he 
 looked out of the window, and saw instead of the hedge- 
 rows the steep glazed road in front of him. I seized 
 hungrily on that incident, and on returning to school 
 said that we had enjoyed delightful sledging in the holi- 
 days, over roads and lakes, adding the further embellish- 
 ment that I personally drove the horses. . . , There were 
 more of these fictions which I cannot now remember, all 
 of which had some exiguous foundation of fact, and great 
 was my horror when an implacable enemy handed me one 
 
88 OUR FAMILY "AFFAIRS 
 
 morning a scrap of paper, in the manner of an ultimatum 
 headed : 
 
 "Benson's Lies" 
 
 and there below, neatly summarized were all these stories 
 which I thought had been listened to with such respectful 
 envy. The implacable enemy added darkly that "they" 
 (whoever "they" might be) were considering what they 
 were going to do about it all. I suppose consternation 
 was graven on me, for he stonily added, "Yes, you may 
 well turn pale," and I pictured (my imagination again 
 rioting off) this damning text being handed to Waterfield, 
 who would send it to my father. What was the public 
 upshot, I cannot remember, but by aid of that terrifying 
 medicine I made a marvellously brisk recovery from that 
 particular disease. 
 
 Some time during that first year at school, there oc- 
 curred a scene which I still look back on as among the 
 most awful I have ever witnessed. Two boys, one high 
 in the school, a merry handsome creature, the other quite 
 a small boy, suddenly disappeared. They were in their 
 places at breakfast, but during breakfast were sent for 
 by Waterfield and at school that morning their places 
 were empty. They did not appear at dinner, they did 
 not appear at tea, and that night in the next dormitory 
 their beds were vacant. Jane said they were not ill, and 
 forbade any further questions, and curious whisperings 
 went about, of which I could not grasp the import. Next 
 morning there came a sudden order that all the school 
 should be assembled, and we crowded into the big school- 
 room. Presently Waterfield entered with his cap and 
 gown on, followed by the two missing boys. He took 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 89 
 
 his place at his desk, and motioned them to stand out 
 in the middle of the room. There was a long silence. 
 
 Then Waterfield began to speak in a low voice that 
 grew gradually louder. He told us all to look at them, 
 which we did. He then told us that they had brought 
 utter ruin and disgrace on themselves, that no public 
 school would receive them, and that they had broken 
 their parents' hearts. They were not going to stop an 
 hour longer amongst us, for their presence was filthy and 
 contaminating. They were publicly expelled and would 
 now go back to the homes on which they had brought 
 disgrace. 
 
 He then told us all to go out, and was left with those 
 two, and I wondered, limp with terror, whether he was 
 going to kill them, and what on earth it was that they 
 had done. And if I was limp then, you may judge what 
 was my condition, when presently the school sergeant who 
 brought summonses from Waterfield told me that he 
 wished to see me. . . . Indeed that imaginative habit 
 which had made up so many glorious adventures for my- 
 self on slender grounds was a poor friend at that moment, 
 for as I went to the study, it vividly suggested to me that 
 I too, for some unintelligible reason, would be despatched 
 to Cornwall, a ruined and disgraced boy. 
 
 I tapped at the door, tapped again without receiving 
 any answer and entered. Waterfield was sitting at his 
 table and he was crying. He indicated to me that I was 
 to sit down, which I did. Then he blew his nose with an 
 awful explosion of sound, and came with his rocking walk 
 across to the chimney-piece. 
 
 "I want to ask you a question," he said. "Do you 
 understand why those two boys were sent away?" 
 
 "No, sir," said I. 
 
90 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 His voice choked for a moment. 
 
 "I am very glad to hear it," he said. "I thank God for 
 that. You may go." 
 
 Here was a mysterious affair! I went out wondering 
 about a million things, why Waterfield was crying, why 
 he had sent for me, and above all why those two boys 
 were publicly disgraced. I began to grub in my memory 
 for any clue, and recalled trivial incidents. The elder 
 of the two had been rather kind to a junior like myself: 
 he had nodded good night to me one evening on the stairs, 
 and I think the next night had given me a lump of Turk- 
 ish delight. Finally, only a few days before, he had by 
 virtue of his first-form privileges taken me for a stroll 
 round the wooded grounds, where the first-form might 
 go at pleasure, and I felt highly honoured at his notice. 
 He had become rather odd: he began questions like, "I 
 
 say, do you ever ," and stopped. As I did not know 
 
 what he was talking about, and only grew puzzled, he 
 remarked rather contemptuously, "I didn't know you were 
 such a kid. Why, when I was your age . . ." 
 
 Then our privacy came to an abrupt conclusion, for 
 we suddenly met Waterfield, with a large cigar, strolling 
 along a path. He took us both into a greenhouse, and 
 gave us some grapes, and walked back with us, one on 
 each side of him. 
 
 There was nothing there at the time which had roused 
 any strong curiosity in me. I had wondered vaguely why 
 these sentences were left unfinished, and why he had only 
 then discovered that I was such a kid. But now, in an 
 intensity of wonder as to why Waterfield had been so 
 glad to know that the reason for this expulsion was in- 
 comprehensible to me, and as to what that reason was, I 
 began, with the groping instincts of a young thing, that 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 91 
 
 has either to guess its way, or to be told it, to fit meaning- 
 less little pieces of the puzzle together, trying first one 
 pair of fragments and then another, intensely curious 
 and instinctively certain that there was something here 
 which other boys understood, and which Waterfield cer- 
 tainly understood, but which I did not. I supposed that 
 the completed puzzle contained something in which right 
 and wrong were involved, since a transgression such as 
 the two expelled boys had been guilty of was an affair 
 that could not be atoned for by a caning or a birching. 
 
 For days after that, hints, fragments, surmises floated 
 as thickly about the school as motes of dust in a sunbeam. 
 We were forbidden to talk about the subject at all, which 
 gave an additional zest to discussion. Some knew a great 
 deal, some knew a little, some knew nothing. Those who 
 knew nothing learned a little, those who knew a little 
 learned more, and we seethed with things that were un- 
 savoury, because the secrecy and the prohibition made the 
 unsavouriness of them. . . . But in heaven's name, why 
 could we not all have been given clean lessons in natural 
 history? Is it better that young boys should guess and 
 experiment and be left to find things out for themselves, 
 with the gusto that arises from the notion of forbidden 
 mysteries, than that they should be taught cleanness by 
 their elders, instead of being left to experimentalize in 
 dirtiness? Until there is extracted from boyhood its 
 proper legitimate inquisitiveness which is the reason of its 
 growth, nothing can prevent boys from seeking to learn 
 about those things which its elders cover up in a silence 
 so indiscreet as to be criminal. It is a libellous silence, 
 for it surrounds, in an atmosphere of suspicion, knowledge 
 which is perfectly wholesome and necessary. 
 
 Between terms came holidays full of things just as 
 
92 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 wonderful as the swamping of the furnaces of the Havre 
 boat and "Benson's lies" generally, and these must be 
 lumped together, to form a general summary as to how we 
 amused ourselves for the next three years or so, when holi- 
 days brought us together. About now a joint literary 
 effort of all us children, called (for no known reason) 
 the Saturday Magazine, made its punctual appearance. 
 Already we were such savage wielders of the pen that 
 one issue every holidays no longer contented us, but two 
 or three times between term and term my father and 
 mother were regaled of an evening with a flood of prose 
 and poetry. Arthur would say one morning, "Let's have 
 a Saturday Magazine next Tuesday," and straightway 
 we called for a supply of that useful paper known as 
 "sermon paper," which contains exactly twenty-three 
 lines to a small quarto page, faintly ruled in blue. Dia- 
 logues, satirical sketches, tales of adventure, essays, and 
 poems, were poured out in rank profusion, the rule being 
 that each member of the family should contribute "at 
 least" four pages of prose, or one page of verse. There 
 was, after we had all got blooded with the lust of produc- 
 tion, little cause for this minimum regulation, and per- 
 haps it would have been better, in view of subsequent 
 fruitfulness, to have substituted for the minimum restric- 
 tion of " at least" a maximum restriction of "at most." 
 Yet this habit of swift composition gave us all a certain 
 ease in expressing ourselves if only because we expressed 
 ourselves so freely. The contents of the Saturday Maga- 
 zine were, since all choice of subject was left to the author, 
 of the most varied description. Arthur would produce 
 (at least) an essay in the style of The Spectator (Addi- 
 son's) describing how he threw a cake of yellow soap 
 at a serenading cat, Nellie would refresh us with an 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 93 
 
 imaginary interview with our Scotch coachman on the 
 subject of sore backs, Maggie, whose chief avocation now 
 was to rear an enormous number of guinea-pigs and find 
 names for them, gave a dialogue between Atahualpa and 
 Ixlitchochitl (only she knew how to spell them) ; poor 
 Fred treated them to a poem on the Devil, which he felt 
 sure solved the very difficult question about the origin 
 of evil, and Hugh, who by reason of his youth was let 
 off with two pages of prose, produced adventures so 
 bloody, that out of sheer reaction his audience rocked with 
 unquenchable laughter. There was a Saturnalian liberty 
 allowed, and my mother's experiences with a runaway 
 pony, or her fondness for cheese, were treated with sharp- 
 edged mockery, and even my father made a ludicrous ap- 
 pearance in some dialogue, where he was supposed to be 
 worsted by the superior wit of his children. . . . 
 
 In lighter mood (save the mark) we played a poetry 
 game called "American nouns," in which you had to 
 answer, metrically and with rhyme, a question written 
 down at the top of a half -sheet of paper, and bring in 
 a particular word like "unconstitutional" or some stumper 
 of that kind. This particular word was given to my Uncle 
 Henry Sidgwick together with the question, "What do 
 you know of astronomy 1 ?" to which in the winking of an 
 eye he produced the following gem : 
 
 Phoebus, the glorious king of the sky, 
 
 In his unconstitutional way, 
 Dispenses at will his bounties on high 
 
 And royally orders the day. 
 No starry assembly controls his bright flow, 
 No critical comet presumes to say "No." 
 
 Or again,, my mother having to answer the question, 
 
94 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "Does the moon draw the sea?" and to bring in the word 
 "artist," made a glorious last stanza: 
 
 Ask me no more, but let me be ; 
 
 My temper's of the tartest: 
 For if the moon doth draw the sea, 
 
 Why, then she is an artist. 
 
 Somehow she got the reputation of being an indifferent 
 poet, but that was considered remarkably good "for her," 
 and worthy of being immortalized on the printing press 
 which belonged to this epoch. This was a small wooden 
 box, at the bottom of which you set the type backwards 
 if you were capable of a sustained effort, and if not, any- 
 how. The "forme" was then smudged over with a black 
 roller anointed with printer's ink, and letters of the set 
 type used to stick to it (like teeth in toffee) and must be 
 replaced if possible. Then a piece of paper was gingerly 
 laid on the top, a lid was fitted on, and a lever was turned 
 which pressed the lid (and of course the paper) against 
 the inked type. The lever got out of order and I think 
 broke, so instead several smart hammer-blows were given 
 to the lid in order to produce the same result. The 
 printed paper was then taken out, and the marks of 
 punctuation inserted by hand, because there weren't any 
 commas and colons and so forth in our fount, or because 
 it was easier to put them in afterwards. "E's" had often 
 to be left out too, and inserted afterwards, because "e" 
 being a common letter was not sufficiently represented 
 if you wanted to print a long piece like Uncle Henry's. 
 . , . Chemistry, also, among the Arts and Sciences 
 claimed our attention, especially Maggie's (when she was 
 not too busy about guinea-pigs) and mine. The highest 
 feat that we attained to, and that wanted a lot of stirring, 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 95 
 
 was to dissolve a threepenny-piece in nitric acid. Then 
 there was photography; I think a godfather gave me a 
 camera, and we made our own wet plates which was very 
 difficult, and began with pouring collodion (was it collo- 
 dion?) smoothly over a piece of glass. Then nitrate of 
 silver — we might have used the dissolved threepenny-bit, 
 I suppose — must be applied. The plates usually recorded 
 nothing whatever, but once an image remarkably like the 
 yew tree outside the nursery window did certainly ap- 
 pear there. Arthur began collecting butterflies and moths, 
 which eventually became a very important asset to a 
 museum which now overflowed into all our bedrooms. 
 There was an extraordinary abundance of clouded yellows 
 {Colzas Edusa, and why do I remember that?) one year 
 and he used to return, profusely perspiring, with captives 
 in chip boxes, to which Maggie and I were anaesthetists, 
 for Nellie took no part in this collection, as she objected 
 to killing butterflies. 
 
 Small strips of blotting-paper — this was our procedure 
 — were taken, and moons of chloroform, quite similar to 
 the eau-de-Cologne moons, were made on them from an 
 unstoppered bottle of chloroform. These were inserted 
 in the chip boxes while Arthur, the executioner, got the 
 oxalic acid and a nib. With this lethal weapon he speared 
 their unconscious thoraxes, and out came the setting- 
 boards. Nocturnal expeditions for purposes of "sugar- 
 ing" tree-trunks were even more exciting. We mixed beer 
 and sugar, heating them together, and at dusk pasted 
 trees in the garden with the compound which Watch 
 found so delicious that if the jug containing it was left 
 on the ground for a moment, he began lapping it up. 
 On such sugaring nights I was allowed to sit up later 
 than usual, and about ten o'clock the excited procession 
 
96 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 again started with more chip boxes, and a dark lantern, 
 which was turned on to the sugared patches. There 
 were the bright-eyed creatures of the night, drunkenly 
 feasting, and Arthur enriched his pill-boxes with Silver 
 Y and an occasional Golden Y, and rejected the Yellow 
 Underwing, and grew taut over the Crimson Underwing, 
 while I carried a butterfly net, and swooped with it at 
 wandering moths which were attracted by the unveiled 
 lantern carried by Maggie, and Watch wagged his tail 
 and licked up gratefully the droppings from the sugared 
 tree and any moths that might be on them. And then 
 Beth would come out and say that "my Mamma" said 
 that I must go to bed at once, and I usually didn't. O 
 happy nights! 
 
 I think every day in those holidays must have lasted 
 a week, and every month a year, for when I consider it, 
 we surely spent the whole afternoons in playing 
 "Pirates" in the garden. Theoretically now, as well as 
 practically then, I believe that "Pirates," a game evolved 
 by the family generally, and speedily brought to its per- 
 fect and stereotyped form, was the best sporting inven- 
 tion, requiring no material implements, of modern time. 
 What powers of the mind, what refinements of cunning, 
 compared to which deer-stalking is mere child's play, were 
 brought into action ! For here we were up against each 
 other's wits, and awful were the results of any psycho- 
 logical mistake. I must describe that game for the bene- 
 fit of families of energetic children who like thinking and 
 running and scoring off each other. 
 
 At the top of the garden there was a summer-house, 
 and that of course was "home." There was a lateral 
 laurel hedge to the left of it which screened a path that 
 led by the copse outside the nursery windows, and com- 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 97 
 
 municated by means of a garden door with the abysses of 
 the stable copse, and the stable yard. The henyard, an 
 outlying piece of kitchen garden, and the other copse, 
 excellent hiding-places in themselves, were outside the 
 range of pirates, and the touch-line, so to speak, beyond 
 which neither pirates nor trophy-seekers might go passed 
 on the hither side of these. Straight in front of "home" 
 was an open space, safe in itself but hedged in with peril, 
 for there were climbable trees, from which a pirate might 
 almost drop on your head, and thickets. To the right 
 was a most dangerous door, because the latch was stiff 
 and if you were pursued from outside by the pirate you 
 were almost bound to be caught before you could kick 
 it open. In the middle distance, straight ahead were 
 beehives; beyond, kitchen garden and orchard. Never 
 was there anything so trappy. 
 
 So much for the theatre: the dramatis persona were 
 five (occasionally six when my mother played, once seven 
 when my father played), and of this number there were 
 chosen in rotation two pirates, but my father and mother, 
 of course, were never pirates, because they would not have 
 had a chance, as you will see. The pirates, being chosen, 
 went away together, and were given five minutes law to 
 hide wherever they chose within the assigned limits. Dur- 
 ing these five minutes a captain was chosen from among 
 the blockade runners, who directed his side as to what 
 trophy each of them was to bring from his cruise. One 
 had, for instance, to bring back a croquet hoop from the 
 lawn, another an apple from the third tree in the orchard, 
 another an ivy-leaf from the stable-yard. With their 
 trophies in their hands they had to return in safety to the 
 summer-house without being caught by a pirate. 
 
 So far all is simple, but now there comes in the great 
 
98 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 point of the game. No pirate could catch you, until you 
 had your trophy, whatever it was, about you. Thus if 
 your trophy was the curry-brush, you might (and did) 
 if you were seen by a pirate and knew it, hastily pluck 
 up a croquet hoop and begin running. Then the pirate, 
 supposing that this was your trophy, ran like mad after 
 you, and when he caught you, you merely assured him 
 that the croquet hoop wasn't your trophy. That was a 
 score, it also winded the pirate a little, and perhaps Nellie, 
 going cautiously towards the croquet-lawn where her real 
 mission was, would have observed this, and plucking up 
 a croquet hoop (which was her true trophy) begin to run. 
 On which the slightly winded pirate would leave you and 
 run after Nellie, who generally screamed, thus giving 
 away the fact that she had her trophy. Meantime you 
 would proceed with caution towards the stable-yard, seize 
 up a curry-brush and instantly hear a crash from the 
 copse and find the second pirate in pursuit. Even as deep 
 called unto deep the pirates would then shout to each 
 other, and though you thought you could get away from 
 one, the other, having captured Nellie, would appear in 
 front of you. ... 
 
 There were infinite psychological problems. Suppos- 
 ing your trophy had been an apple, you would, if you 
 were very cunning, put it in your pocket, and continue a 
 pleasant stroll, without hurry, more or less in the direction 
 of "home." Then if a fast pirate like Arthur sighted you, 
 you would not run away at all, but ask him sarcastically 
 if he had caught anybody yet. There was a good chance 
 that he would think you had not yet got your trophy 
 and would continue to follow you, till he saw another 
 blockade runner looking guilty. On the other hand, he 
 might conceivably suspect you had it already and clap an 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 99 
 
 awful hand on your shoulder, and say, "Caught." But 
 probably he preferred to watch you, for that made more 
 sport, and then you would suddenly sprint for home, while 
 he was off his guard. There was a bay tree round which a 
 skilful dodger could score off a heavier and faster craft, 
 but under no circumstances might you jump over flower- 
 beds, because that led to running through them instead, 
 which was ruinous to petunias. 
 
 In the same summer-house which was "home," we also 
 held a mystical "Chapter," of which Arthur was war- 
 den, Nellie, Maggie and myself, sub-warden, secretary 
 and treasurer, and Hugh was Henchman. The word 
 "Chapter" was no doubt of Cathedral origin, and denoted 
 a ceremonious meeting. We all subscribed to the funds 
 of the Chapter (my mother, who was an honorary mem- 
 ber, subscribed most) and the money was spent in official 
 salaries, and in providing decorations, chains and crosses 
 and ribands for the officials. The largest salary, which I 
 think was half a crown, was drawn by Arthur as warden ; 
 he also wore the most magnificent jewel, while Hugh, 
 the menial, drew but the salary of one penny, and had 
 a very poor gaud to console himself with. As Hench- 
 man, his duty was chiefly to run errands for the rest 
 of the Chapter, to summon my mother when she was 
 allowed to appear, to kill wasps, and to fetch the war- 
 den's straw hat. He was the only member of the Chapter 
 who dared to dispute the will of the warden, and was 
 known to exclaim, "Why shouldn't Fred?" (the treas- 
 urer) when he was tired of running about. Even more 
 subversive of canonical discipline was his assertion one 
 day that he would not be a member of any more societies, 
 in which he was only deputy sub-sub-bootboy. But I 
 secretly (though treasurer) rather sympathized with him, 
 
100 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 for I considered then, and consider still, that the Chap- 
 ter was rather a soft job for Arthur. It is true that he 
 invented it, that he covered our symbols of office with 
 sealing-wax lacquer — what has happened to sealing-wax 
 lacquer all these years'? — and that he wrote out in ex- 
 quisite black-letter hand the patents whereby we held 
 office, signed by himself, but a salary of half a crown was 
 excessive. At the meetings we had to present these pat- 
 ents to him before we took our seats, and then had a short 
 formal conversation in which we were "Brother Sub- 
 warden, Brother Secretary" and so forth, and read the 
 minutes of the last meeting, and when the presence of 
 the Honorary Member was requested, Brother Henchman 
 had to go to find her. Donations were made, and salaries 
 were paid, but I am confident that nothing else happened. 
 The Chapter was then adjourned; the orders were put 
 back in a box, and we played pirates. . . . 
 
 And yet though we played Pirates all day, and col- 
 lected clouded yellows all -day, and printed the most ex- 
 quisite poems as well as writing them, and held Chapters, 
 and did a certain amount of holiday-task, and rode with 
 my father, and drove with my mother, there was always 
 time for other excitements. There was bathing in the 
 Fal, there were picnics at Perran, especially when a south- 
 west gale had been blowing, and from seven miles inland 
 there was audible the thump of Atlantic waves on that 
 bleak beach. Then in Truro itself there were great 
 things to be done, for the volcanic energy of my father 
 had soon kindled the county into pouring out money for 
 the erection of a new Cathedral, the first that had been 
 built in England since the time of the Reformation. St. 
 Mary's Church was the site of it, and to-day an aisle of 
 St. Mary's (the rest of a wonderfully hideous church 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 101 
 
 being demolished) forms the baptistery of the Cathedral. 
 The ground was cleared and foundations were dug, and 
 slowly the great stately building began to rise flower-like 
 from the barren soil. I do not suppose that any of us 
 cared independently two straws about a Cathedral, but 
 to go down there with my father, and hear him talk to 
 Mr. Bubb, the Clerk of the Works, infected us with his 
 noble zeal, and the rising walls got pleasingly confused 
 with the rebuilding of the temple by Nehemiah, and the 
 vision of the New Jerusalem. Hugh, I am certain, was 
 allowed to lay a stone himself, and Mr. Bubb presented 
 him with the trowel and mallet with which he had laid 
 it. Or did we all lay stones'? I seem to hear my father 
 say in an awestruck voice, "There, you have helped to 
 build Truro Cathedral !" but I am not sure whether that 
 was said to me or not, and my uncertainty is the measure, 
 I am afraid, of the impression that the building of the 
 Cathedral really made on me. . . . 
 
 I wonder if it could have been otherwise, and with 
 regret I do not see how it could. As his own childish 
 records show, my father at my age then was a zealous 
 ecclesiastic, for did he not when ripely eleven obtain the 
 use in his mother's house of an empty room, which he 
 converted into an oratory 1 ? There was an altar there, 
 and it was hung with rubbings he had made from brasses 
 in churches. This piece of childish piety was certainly 
 natural to him, and as certainly there was no kind of 
 priggishness in it, for he set a booby-trap over the door, 
 so that his sisters should not be able to enter "his" oratory 
 in his absence without being detected. He did not want 
 his sisters praying there: and the booby-trap over the 
 chapel door was certainly an admirable device to keep 
 them out. But in none of us, nor indeed in my mother, 
 
102 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 was there implanted an ecclesiastical mind, not even in 
 Hugh. He took orders it is true, in the English Church, 
 and subsequently the Catholic Church claimed him, and 
 to it and its service he gave his whole love and energy. 
 But the ecclesiastical mind in him was a later develop- 
 ment, for it must be remembered that before taking orders 
 at all he had tried and failed to get into the Indian Civil 
 Service. (He and I, at that time, used to dress up in 
 nightshirts, with trousers over our shoulders to represent 
 stoles, and celebrate the "rite of the Silver Cow" in our 
 sitting-room at Addington. I feel sure that there was 
 not any solid profanity in it: we but parodied, and that 
 with great amusement, the genuflexions, the bobbings 
 and bowings, the waving of a censer, considered merely 
 as ridiculous pieces of ritual, but such a rite could not 
 be held indicative of a reverent attitude towards ritual 
 as such.) But my father's mind, even as a child, was 
 strongly ecclesiastical; only his children did not share 
 it, nor did my mother. Of all men and women that I 
 have ever known, she was the most deeply religious in 
 her realization of the pervading presence of God, but 
 the garb, the habiliments of her religion were not the same 
 as my father's. To him the Church and its ceremonies 
 were a natural self-expression, and in that he gorgeously 
 clothed his love of God. To none of us was such ex- 
 pression natural, and thus his enthusiasms though they in- 
 fected us to some extent were things caught from him, 
 not cathedraically developed. That he missed this in all 
 of us, I think could not be helped, but I do not think, at 
 that time at any rate, that he missed it much, for he was 
 Elijah in the whirlwind of his enthusiasms, and caught 
 us all up, as in the fringes of a dust-cloud, to subside 
 again when he had passed. 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 103 
 
 What estranged was my continued fear of him, which 
 now yields easily to analysis and dispersal, but was in 
 those days regarded by me merely as an instinct, as natural 
 and as incontrovertible as hunger or thirst. I under- 
 stood neither him nor any part of him. I did not grasp 
 the fact that the root in him as regards his children was 
 his love for them, and that it was his love and nothing else 
 that, at bottom, was accountable for his quickness in 
 putting his finger on a fault and his sternness in rebuke. 
 It was out of his love that he regarded himself so strictly 
 as responsible for our mental and moral education, and 
 what I thought his readiness to blame was only the watch- 
 fulness of it. For instance, if, as I so well specifically 
 remember, I appeared with an umbrella huddled up any- 
 how in its confining elastic, he saw in that a tendency 
 towards slovenliness, and he made, in the fervency of his 
 wish that I should not grow up to be of slovenly habit, 
 no allowance for the natural frailty of tender years. 
 Trivial carelessness and unpunctuality in the same way 
 were pounced upon with a severity that altogether over- 
 brimmed the cup of the occasion; he saw in them (and 
 his love hastened to correct) instances of a dangerous 
 tendency. In consequence he brought great and formid- 
 able guns to bear on small faults, which could just as 
 efficiently have been visited with a light instead of a 
 heavy hand. Sometimes, too, he was utterly wrong in 
 his interpretation of our motives, and this gave us a 
 sense of injustice; etchingly recorded on my memory, for 
 instance, is a Sunday afternoon walk when Maggie and 
 I pranced and ran ahead, from the mere exuberance, as 
 far as I can judge, produced by a heavy meal and a fine 
 day. But my father put the gloomiest interpretation on 
 our antics, telling us that we were behaving thus in order 
 
104 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 to excite the admiration of passers-by at our agility. 
 "You are saying to yourselves, 'I am Hercules, I am 
 Diana,' " he witheringly observed; whereas, nothing was 
 farther from our thoughts. But it was unthinkable to 
 argue the point, to assure him that no similitude of that 
 kind had ever suggested itself. The only course was to 
 walk soberly and sedately instead of running. And since 
 the lives of young children, especially if they are at all 
 vividly inclined, are a chessboard of small faults, this 
 fear of the rebuke, in the absence of comprehension of 
 its root-cause, became a constant anxiety to us, making 
 us mere smooth-faced, blue-eyed dolls in his presence, 
 with set fixed movements and expressions; and when re- 
 leased from it, we scampered off as if from an examination 
 under a magnifying-glass. 
 
 I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was 
 continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from 
 the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced 
 the most fascinating measure; continually he played to 
 us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchant- 
 ing airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at 
 his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his 
 stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any 
 moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable re- 
 buke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea 
 we had committed. But it was never any joy in fault- 
 finding that prompted it: the real cause was the watch- 
 fulness and responsibility of his love. How often our 
 fear was ill-founded, passes enumeration, but one way 
 or another, it had become a habit with all of us, except 
 perhaps Nellie, for she, out of a remarkable faculty of not 
 knowing at all what fear meant (except when playing 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 105 
 
 Pirates) arrived at a much completer comprehension of 
 my father than any of us. 
 
 Still less did the rest of us understand those fits of 
 black depression which from time to time assailed and 
 overwhelmed my father, not grasping the fact that when 
 they were on him, he really ceased to be himself, and was 
 under a sort of obsession. They were, I imagine, as 
 purely physical as a cold in the head or an ache of in- 
 digestion, but during the two or three days that they lasted 
 he was utterly unapproachable. He would sit through 
 a meal, or take us out for a walk in a silence which if 
 broken at all, was broken only by blame or irony. If 
 we spoke to him, there would be no reply; if, under the 
 intolerable heaviness we were silent, he would ask if 
 there was nothing that interested us which he was worthy 
 of hearing. . . . And all the time, as we knew later, he 
 was struggling with this demoniacal load, longing to be 
 rid of it, yearning to burst out of it, but possessed by it 
 to the point of helplessness. While the fit was on him, 
 and he was in this abnormal state, the most innocent of 
 words and actions would evoke a formidable censure, 
 and I suspect that three-quarters of our fear for him 
 were derived from our belief that these attacks were a 
 part of him, always there, and always liable to come into 
 play. That was an entire mistake, though it was a natural 
 one. As it was, these black fits were not incapsulated by 
 us, but suffered to mingle with and make part of our 
 estimate of him. That we should so have feared him, that 
 we should so have made ourselves unnatural and formal 
 with him, when all the time his love was streaming out 
 towards us, makes a pathos so pitiful that I cannot bear 
 to think of it. But there it was, and long it lasted, and 
 all the time I never got a true perspective of him. We 
 
106 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 saw ourselves as a nervous row of pupils before a school- 
 master, and all the time it was his very strictness which 
 was a manifestation of his love, and his love hungered 
 for ours. Our troubles and our joys, the worst of us 
 and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my 
 mother, and she gave the same welcome to the one and 
 to the other, and for ever treasured both. 
 
 The relationship of each one of us to her was unique 
 as regards any other of us, for each of us found exactly 
 and precisely what we desired, though how often we did 
 not know what we desired till she gave it us ! All her life 
 she was wiser and younger than anybody else, limpid and 
 bubbling, and from the first days when any of us began 
 to understand what she was, she never had any blank 
 surprises in store, for it was always quite obvious that 
 she would understand and appreciate, and would never 
 condone but always forgive. Never from first to last 
 did I repent having opened my heart to her; never did I 
 not repent having shut it. I do not think she ever asked 
 any of us for a confidence, but the knowledge, conveyed 
 in the very atmosphere of her, that she was ready, toeing 
 the mark, so to speak, to run to us when the pistol fired, 
 gave her that particular precision of sympathy. Did she 
 scold us? Why, of course; but how her precious balms 
 healed our heads ! 
 
 Love is a stern business, and about hers there was never 
 the faintest trace of sentimentality. She loved with a 
 swift eagerness, and she had no warm slops to comfort 
 us. But there was always the compliment of consulta- 
 tion. "Now you've behaved very badly indeed," she 
 would say, "Don't you think the first thing to do is to 
 say you're sorry?' . . . And then with that inimitable 
 breaking of her smile, "Oh, my dear, I am glad you told 
 
PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 107 
 
 me." . . . And did ever any other mother at the age 
 of forty run so violently in playing that strenuous game 
 called, "Three knights a-riding," that she broke a sinew 
 in her leg? Mine did. And did ever a mother so en- 
 courage an extremely naughty boy of thirteen after a 
 really dreadful interview with his father, as by giving 
 him a prayer book and saying, "I shall write in it 'Where- 
 withal shall a young man cleanse his ways'?' " Being 
 called a young man at the age of thirteen was enough in 
 itself to make him realize what an exceedingly tiresome 
 child he had been. Tact! Beth used to call it "tac," 
 and when I got my shoes wet through three times a day, 
 or fell backwards into one of those Cornish streams she 
 said, "Eh, Master Fred, but you've got no tac' !" No 
 more I had. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DUNCE S PROGRESS 
 
 AFTER that first brilliant year at school, when I 
 got so many prizes without taking any trouble, 
 there ensued two extremely lean years, during which I 
 took just as much trouble as before, and got nothing at 
 all. For just as, physically, growing children spurt and 
 are quiescent again, storing force for the next expansion, 
 so mentally they have in the intervals of development 
 periods of utter stagnation. I had swept, a prodigious 
 infant, through all the other forms, leaving Geege and 
 Davy and Daubeny mere dim fixed stars across the path 
 of the comet, and then the unfortunate comet gave one 
 faint "pop" and went completely out. Other boys 
 straggled and struggled up to the first form, which I had 
 so easily stormed, and I continued sinking through them, 
 like a drowned rag, to my appointed place at the bottom. 
 Agitated letters were exchanged between Waterfield and 
 my father, of which I found the other day several of 
 Waterfield's ; he clung to a certain forlorn optimism about 
 me, but seemed puzzled to know why without positively 
 neglecting my work I invariably did it worse than any- 
 body in the form. He still believed me not to be stupid. 
 In that quiescent period I could not assimilate any more ; 
 all that I was fed with merely gave me indigestion, and 
 the mental stuffing was liberally supplied to the poor 
 goose, for at the end of that year I was to try for an 
 
 108J 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 109 
 
 Eton scholarship, with regard to which my prospects grew 
 ever less encouraging. A drawer in Waterfield's study- 
 adjoining the room where the first class was tutored was 
 entirely devoted to the dreadful copies of Greek and 
 Latin prose and Latin elegiacs which I produced. Week 
 after week these grew and collected there, each of them 
 thickly scored by Waterfield's red ink. Of one of them 
 I can recall the image now; scarcely a word remained 
 that was not underscored in red. But I gather that Water- 
 field must have concluded that some blight other than 
 carelessness and inattention was responsible for my fail- 
 ures, for he never threatened me with rulers or birchings 
 for them. Mentally, during those three atrocious terms, 
 the only thing in which I can remember taking the slight- 
 est interest was hearing him read out the piece of Eng- 
 lish verse which it was our task to turn into Latin elegiacs. 
 His reading was altogether beautiful; often his voice 
 broke, as when he read us "Home they brought her war- 
 rior dead," and, though he quite failed to instil in me 
 the desire to put such verses into beautiful Latin, he in- 
 tensely kindled my love of beautiful English. Similarly, 
 when the Sunday divinity lesson was over and such storms 
 as had raged round St. Paul's missionary journey were 
 stilled, he would tell us all to make ourselves comfort- 
 able, and for the rest of the hour entranced us with The 
 Pilgrim's Progress. His delightful voice melodiously 
 rose and fell; he asked us no inconvenient questions to 
 probe the measure of our attention; his object, in which he 
 strikingly succeeded, was to let us hear magnificent Eng- 
 lish magnificently read, and to leave us to gather our own 
 honey. 
 
 A great event of the summer term was Waterfield's 
 birthday. The whole school subscribed to give him a 
 
110 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 birthday present, which must have been of some value, 
 for the sum of five shillings or ten shillings (I forget 
 which) was charged up to every boy's bill. But we cer- 
 tainly got that back again, for the birthday, kept as a 
 whole holiday, was celebrated by everybody being taken 
 to the Crystal Palace for the day and furnished with half 
 a crown to spend as he pleased, so decidedly Waterfield 
 was not "up" on the transaction. A few of the more 
 favoured were invited to spend the day on the Thames 
 with him and his family; they embarked on a steam 
 launch at Richmond and had luncheon in some riverside 
 wood. Now, above all things in the world I longed to 
 see the Crystal Palace, of which I had formed the image 
 as of some ineffable glittering constellation, a piece of 
 real fairyland fallen from the sky and now at rest on 
 Sydenham Hill, and it was with a black despair that I 
 received the distinction of being bidden to the family 
 picnic instead. But a dea ex machina came to the rescue 
 in the person of Mrs. Waterfield, who quite ironically 
 said to me, "I suppose you would much sooner go to the 
 Crystal Palace?" Throwing "tac" and politeness to the 
 winds, I unhesitatingly told her that I certainly would, 
 and I was given my half-crown and joined the proletariat. 
 ... Or was Mrs. Waterfield's enquiry not ironical at all, 
 but a piece of supreme "tac'"? Had some hint reached 
 her that I really wanted to go to the Crystal Palace? 
 I cannot decide. In any case, that kind-hearted woman 
 would have been rewarded for making the suggestion, 
 could she have realized with what rapture I beheld that 
 amazing edifice glittering in the sun, and went through 
 its Palm Court and its Egyptian Court and its Assyrian 
 Court, and beheld all that the Prince Consort had done 
 to educate the love of beauty in these barbarous islanders. 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 111 
 
 All day I wandered enchanted, and laid out most of the 
 half-crown in a glass paper-weight with a picture of the 
 Crystal Palace below, and the remainder in a small nickel 
 ornament in the shape of an ewer, undoubtedly made in 
 Germany. Indeed, I was wise to fasten on the oppor- 
 tunity given me by Mrs. Waterfield, for thus I secured 
 the wonderful experience of being absolutely bowled 
 over by the beauty of the Crystal Palace, which has not 
 happened to everybody. All the same, I suffered a few 
 years later a crushing and double disillusionment, for I 
 was taken there again to hear Israel in Egypt at the 
 Handel Festival. On that occasion my main impression 
 was that I thought the Crystal Palace a very suitable place 
 for that monstrous performance. The scale on which the 
 one was built and on which the other was performed 
 served not to conceal but to accentuate the essential 
 meanness of each. . . . 
 
 I weave this into a digression not unconnected with 
 the first of these lean years. Though mentally, as re- 
 gards the metres of foreign verse and the inexorable gram- 
 mar of Greek and Latin, I was as idle "as a painted ship 
 upon a painted ocean," I gorged myself not only on the 
 readings of Waterfield, but on music. That frail widow, 
 Mrs. Russell, is probably unknown to fame as a teacher 
 of the piano, but I owe her an undying debt of gratitude. 
 I begged to be released from the study of such works 
 as those of Mr. Diabelli, whom I had long ago judged 
 and found wanting, and from "arrangements" of the 
 Barber of Seville, and even from the sugared melodies 
 of "Songs without Words" (over which, especially No. 
 8, an occasional tear used to drop frbm Mrs. Russell's 
 eyes), and to be allowed to entrap my awkward ringers 
 in Bach, whom I had heard rendered by the "Farmer 
 
112 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Society" at Lincoln. My request was granted, and I was 
 permitted to make a rapturous hash of slow Sarabands 
 and more rapid Gavottes and Minuets out of the Suites 
 Anglais es. Never was there so enthralled a bungler; for 
 I could hear (this I positively affirm), through the crash 
 of my awkwardness, what was meant. Bach then and 
 there and ever afterwards was my gold standard in the 
 innumerable coinage of music. There was good silver, 
 there was good copper, there was promissory paper. All 
 these, in a loose metaphor, might temporarily be depreci- 
 ated in the exchange of my mind, or might have a rise, 
 but Bach remained gold. Out of my "taste," whatever 
 that was, I was quite prepared to put Beethoven (in slow 
 movements) in his place, and to give Mozart, as judged 
 by his "Variations on a Theme in A," a very dis- 
 tinguished position, and to concede a neatness to "The 
 Harmonious Blacksmith." Brahms I had never heard 
 of. But all these, then as now, were, at the most, dis- 
 tinguished gentlemen, equerries or grooms or chamber- 
 lains in attendance round about the court, and having 
 speech with the King. 
 
 By the time I heard Israel in Egypt at the Handel 
 Festival, I had also heard the St. Matthew Passion at 
 St. Paul's, and I quite definitely compared them. Prob- 
 ably it is a mistake ever to compare one achievement with 
 another even if they are built on an appeal to the same 
 sense : it is no more use comparing Handel with Bach than 
 it is comparing a sunset with the view of the Bernese 
 Oberland. But, taken by itself, that performance of 
 Israel in Egypt seemed to me a monstrous attempt to 
 cover up a commdn invention by inflating it with noise. 
 The fact that there were four thousand (or perhaps four 
 million) singers all bawling, "He gave them hailstones 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 113 
 
 for rain," did not essentially make the hailstorm one 
 whit the stormier, though the immensity of the row 
 pleasantly stunned the senses. It would be as unreason- 
 able to take a carte-de-visite photograph of a man with a 
 stupid mouth and a chin-beard, and hope to make it im- 
 pressive by enlarging it to the size of the Great Pyramid. 
 Indeed, the bigger the enlargement, the sorrier would be 
 the result. But by that time I had the sense to see how 
 delicate and delightful an artist is Handel when he con- 
 fines himself to the limits of his true territory. For sweet- 
 ness and neatness of melody, in the violin sonata in A, 
 the piano sonatas, and songs from countless operas, I 
 knew he had no rival — in the silver standard. But no 
 one, with the one exception of Bach, has ever defeated 
 the awful limitations of the "form" of oratorio, and, as 
 a rule, the larger the orchestra, the more stupendous the 
 body of voice, the more shaky becomes the credit of the 
 composer. Indeed, the very fact that so gigantic a rep- 
 resentation as a Crystal Palace Handel Festival was ever 
 desired or enjoyed postulates not only a complete want 
 of musical perception on the part of the public, but a cor- 
 responding want of musical achievement on the part of 
 Handel. No one would deny that the "Hailstone 
 Chorus" sounds better when a huge band and an immense 
 chorus all produce the utmost noise of which they are 
 capable. We all like hearing a quantity of voices and a 
 Nebuchadnezzar-band thundering out commonplace 
 melodies, because a loud and tuneful noise has a stimulat- 
 ing effect on the nerves, and because we like our ears 
 (occasionally) to be battered into a hypnotized submis- 
 sion. But we submit not to the magic of the music, but 
 to the overpowering din of its production. And when 
 "the feast is over and the lamps expire," when we have 
 
114 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 had "the louder music and the stronger wine" of noise, 
 our hearts steal back to the spell of Cynara. . . . 
 
 Soon after that first enthralling day at the Crystal 
 Palace came the scholarship examination at Eton, which, 
 as far as I was concerned, produced no prize whatever. I 
 spent a delightful three days there, basking in the efful- 
 gence of Arthur, then just eighteen and demi-godlike, 
 and came back to Temple Grove after a pleasant outing. 
 And at the end of that term Waterfield retired, and I went 
 back in September to be tutored again for more scholar- 
 ships. 
 
 The new headmaster, Mr. Edgar, previously conducted 
 a boarding-house, and was hitherto distinguished for a 
 very long clerical coat, two most amiable daughters, a 
 gold-rimmed eyeglass which he used to clean by inserting 
 it in his mouth and then wiping it on his handkerchief, 
 and the most remarkable hat ever seen. The nucleus of 
 it, that is to say the part he wore on his head, was of hard 
 black felt, like the ordinary bowler, but it was geometric- 
 ally, quite round, so that he could put any part of it any- 
 where. That I know because I have so often tried it on 
 myself. Outside that circular nucleus came an extremely 
 broad black felt rim, far wider than that of the shadiest 
 straw hat, and turning upwards on all sides in what I can 
 only describe as a "saucy" curve. As worn by Edgar, it 
 produced an impression of indescribable levity, just as 
 if he was, say, Mr. George Robey posing as a parson. His 
 amiability was unbounded, and his driving-power that 
 of a wad of cotton-wool. Indeed, he was so pleasant that 
 for his sake it became the fashion to fall in love with either 
 of his two daughters, whose mission was to influence us 
 for good. They gave us strawberries, and tried to get 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 115 
 
 between us and the soft spring-showers of their father's 
 disapproval, like unnecessary umbrellas. 
 
 Under Edgar's beneficent sway, I managed to get into 
 the most complicated row that ever schoolboy found him- 
 self immersed in, for I committed three capital (or rather 
 fundamental) offences in one joyous swoop. In the first 
 place, I concealed five shillings of sterling silver about 
 my person, though all cash derived from "tips" had to be 
 given up to the matron, and by her doled out as she 
 thought suitable. This clandestine millionaire thereupon 
 bribed a fellow-conspirator to break bounds and go into 
 Richmond, there to spend four of those shillings in Turk- 
 ish delight, and keep the fifth for his trouble. He got 
 back safely, and three friends had a wonderful feast in 
 the dormitory that night, all sitting on my bed, and cloy- 
 ing ourselves and the bedclothes with that delicious sweet- 
 meat. Unfortunately there was amongst those midnight 
 revellers one stomach so effete and spiritless that it re- 
 volted at the administration of these cloying lumps, and, 
 prostrated with sickness, the owner of it confessed to an 
 unusual indulgence, while the state of my sheets com- 
 pleted the evidence. The chain went back link by link 
 from his sickness to my bed, and from my bed to the 
 finding of the empty Turkish delight box, and from the 
 Turkish delight to the place it came from, and from the 
 place it came from to the money wherewith it was 
 purchased, so that I was left in as the unrivalled culprit 
 in the reconstructed story. But though I should have 
 swooned with anxiety and probably confessed all, had 
 Waterfield been the Sherlock Holmes, I never gave a 
 moment's thought to Edgar's unravelling. He said I 
 had been very naughty, and sucked his eyeglass, and 
 hoped I wouldn't be naughty again. It was all very 
 
116 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 polite and pleasant, and I knew I had nothing to fear 
 from him. But even at the time I had a secret misgiv- 
 ing as to the Judgment Book that should soon be opened 
 at this page. The best thing, probably, that I could 
 have done would have been to write home instantly and 
 tell my father all about it, for that would certainly have 
 seemed to him the proper course, and also he would have 
 blown off part of his displeasure in a letter. But I con- 
 tinued to procrastinate, and before many weeks the term 
 mildly ebbed away. Then with a sudden crescendo my 
 misgivings increased, and it was a very unholiday-minded 
 urchin who went back that December for Christmas at 
 Truro. 
 
 About now my fear of my father was at its perihelion, 
 and morning by morning I used to come downstairs, a 
 quarter of an hour before breakfast time, to look at the 
 post which had arrived, and see if among the letters for 
 him there was one with the Mortlake postmark and the 
 "Temple Grove" inscription on its flap. Some morning 
 soon, I knew, my report on the term's work and my con- 
 duct generally would come, and in it, no doubt, would 
 be an allusion to this escapade. Edgar had treated it 
 so lightly that it was still just possible that he would 
 not allude to it in his report, but that possibility was not 
 seriously entertained. Morning by morning I turned over 
 the letters, while my father was at early service, and 
 then one day, while Christmas was nearly on us, I saw 
 with a sinking of the heart that the fatal letter had ar- 
 rived. What added to the terror of it was that my father 
 was in a fit of black depression. 
 
 He did not open his letters at breakfast, and afterwards 
 I went out into the garden in pursuit of an entrancing 
 game just invented, that concerned a large circular thicket 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 117 
 
 of escalonia which grew near the front door. There was 
 an "It," who at a signal started in pursuit round the 
 bush to catch Hugh and me, and "It" on this occasion was 
 Nellie. She came running round the curve of the bush 
 and set us flying off in the opposite direction, still keeping, 
 by the rule of the game, close to the bush. Then, when 
 she had got us really moving, she would double back with 
 the design that we should still, running in that direction, 
 rush into her very arms and be caught. Full speed astern 
 was the only thing that could save us. . . . In the middle 
 of this out came the butler, who said that my father 
 wanted to see me at once. "Come out again quickly," 
 called Nellie. 
 
 My father was sitting in his study with an open letter 
 in his hand. I think he gave it me to read ; in any case, 
 Mr. Edgar had been sufficiently explicit, and in all my 
 life I have never been so benumbed with fear. . . . Had 
 I committed the most heinous of moral crimes my father 
 could not have made a blacker summing-up. He said 
 that he would not see me among the rest of his children. 
 I was to have my meals alone and disgraced upstairs, and 
 to take no part in their games or in their society, and 
 away I went battered and yet inwardly rebelling against 
 this appalling sentence. Then I think my mother or 
 Nellie must have pleaded, for I was allowed to go out 
 for a walk with Nellie alone that afternoon, but was 
 segregated from the others. I was still bewildered with 
 the fierceness of my father's displeasure, and took it for 
 granted that I must have done something unintelligibly 
 wicked, for I asked Nellie if she had ever done anything 
 so dreadful as the crime of which I had been guilty. She 
 said she had not, so I drew the inference that her theft 
 of dried plants from my collection (which, after all, was 
 
118 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 a violation of one of the commandments) was venial. 
 But it was precious on that black afternoon to receive 
 sympathy at all, which certainly she gave me, and I did 
 not risk the loss of it by enquiring about the comparative 
 wickedness of the "Affair Turkish delight" and theft. 
 
 Then on Christmas Eve, which I think must have been 
 next day, came one of those unutterable brightnesses 
 which my father always had in store. Again he sent for 
 me, and I went stiff and resigned,. not knowing whether 
 there was not to be some renewal of his anger. ... In- 
 stead, he put me in an armchair close by the fire and 
 wrapped a rug round my knees, and asked if I was quite 
 comfortable, and shared with me the tea that had been 
 brought in for him, since he was too busy to come into 
 the nursery as usual and have it with the rest of us. And 
 then he somehow gave me a glimpse, sitting tucked up by 
 the fire, of the love that was at the base of his severity. 
 How, precisely, he conveyed that I cannot tell, but there 
 was no more doubt about it than there was about the 
 heaviness of his displeasure. 
 
 The remaining two terms at Temple Grove passed 
 along pleasantly. In school work I continued my slow 
 placid gravitation to the bottom of my form, as other 
 boys were promoted into it and took their places below 
 me. I sank gently through them and came calmly to rest 
 at a position where no fresh sinking was possible. There 
 I went in for a little more sleep, "a little slumber, a 
 little folding of the hands in sleep," and resisted with the 
 passive force of mere inertia any attempt to raise me. 
 But probably vital forces were beginning to stir again, 
 for I got free of the successive childish ailments which had 
 been afflicting me — colds, sore throats, earaches and tooth- 
 aches — all of which no doubt added their contribution to 
 
E. F. BENSON, JET. 19 
 
 Wage 119 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 121 
 
 my general apathy, and also I woke to a violent interest 
 in friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. The last of 
 these I take to have been due to the fructification of the 
 seed sown by Waterfield's readings, and, with Carring- 
 ton's translation of the "^Eneid" to help, it is a fact that 
 I produced in an American cloth-covered notebook a 
 complete and rhymed and rhythmical rendering of the 
 third "iEneid" which we were working at in school, with- 
 out caring one jot for the merits of the original Latin. 
 What I wanted to do was to compose a quantity of Eng- 
 lish myself, and compose it I did, glorying in the speed 
 of its production, quite careless about the faithfulness of 
 the rendering or the accuracy of the grammar, and the 
 only merit it can possibly have had was that it was a 
 labour of love. Other poems dashed off in the intervals 
 of this epic were connected with friendship, for I con- 
 ceived a violent adoration for a boy of the same standing 
 as myself, romantic to the highest degree in that I gave 
 him a whole-hearted devotion, but quite devoid of mawk- 
 ishness or sentimentality. To him I addressed rhymed 
 odes, and then we quarrelled and made it up again, with 
 more odes, for he addressed me also in flowing stanzas. 
 Then there was a parody of Hood's "Song of the Shirt," 
 held to be a devastatingly comic piece ; and not less comic 
 I suspect was a blank verse lament by a mother over the 
 death of her only son. 
 
 Not very far behind poetry and friendship as objects of 
 existence came steam-engines, my fellow-engineer sitting 
 next me, bottom but one of the form. We got illustrated 
 catalogues from the makers of models, and copied and 
 recopied diagrams of slide-valves, waste pipes, and ec- 
 centrics with a zeal and accuracy which, if devoted to 
 lessons, must speedily have pulled us out of the humble 
 
122 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 positions we so contentedly occupied. A certain geo- 
 graphical jealousy was mixed up in this, since, though 
 we both condemned the engines on the South-Western, on 
 which line was Mortlake, as very poor and flimsy mecha- 
 nisms, he, whose home was reached by the Great Northern, 
 considered the engines on that line far superior to any- 
 thing that the Great Western, which took me to and from 
 Truro, had to show. He drew pictures of the Great 
 Northern express engines, and I retorted with sketches of 
 the "Flying Dutchman" (1145 a.m. from Paddington), 
 which went to Swindon without a stop and ran on a broad 
 gauge, while the Great Northern was only a narrow 
 gauge. Against that he set the fact that Peterborough 
 was a mile further from London than was Swindon. . . . 
 He was the happy possessor of a model locomotive with 
 slide-valve cylinders and a waste-pipe going up the chim- 
 ney, and though I could not run to that, by dint of saving 
 up and of my mother's anticipation of my birthday, I 
 became possessor of another model with a copper boiler 
 and a brass chassis called the "Dart." The "Dart" had 
 only oscillating cylinders, which, as all the world knows, 
 do not discharge their waste steam up the funnel, but 
 from small holes at their base, and have this further in- 
 firmity, that they only have one steam-driven stroke in 
 each revolution of their fly-wheel, whereas a slide-valve 
 cylinder has two. The slide-valve engine, therefore, was 
 of a different class altogether from the "Dart," but I 
 found that I could get up a very powerful head of steam 
 in the "Dart" by stuffing small pellets of blotting-paper 
 up the safety-valve, so that she held her breath while her 
 rival was letting off steam. Then, when for fear of a 
 burst boiler I said the "Dart" was ready, and turned on 
 the tap that conveyed the steam to the cylinder, she would 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 123 
 
 start off like mad, and for a few yards easily outrun her 
 more powerful rival. But long before she got to the 
 end of the open-air cloisters where these races took place 
 she would be overhauled; and, indeed, the "Dart" usually 
 failed to run a complete course, and had to be bottled up 
 again to develop fresh energy. But inferior as the "Dart" 
 was in staying power, it must be accounted unto her for 
 righteousness that she never burst when her safety-valve 
 was stopped up. There was also a stationary engine 
 (oscillating cylinder) belonging to one of us, but we un- 
 fortunately burned its bottom out by neglecting to put 
 any water in the boiler. 
 
 Friendship, engines, and poetry, then, were the safety- 
 valves — not choked with blotting-paper like that of the 
 much-enduring "Dart" — through which my growing 
 vitality discharged itself, and I used to lie awake at night, 
 making rhymes and phrases and thinking of the friend of 
 my heart, and trying to devise some plan by which the 
 "Dart" should generate a more abundant supply of steam. 
 To these objects of existence, when the summer term be- 
 gan, was added cricket, but never did my school work 
 arouse one ounce of latent energy, even though scholarship 
 time was coming near again. If I can recollect my atti- 
 tude rightly, I was entirely without ambition as regards 
 winning a scholarship, in the sense that I chose to devote 
 myself to Latin and Greek with a view to subsequently 
 obtaining one. It is true that I wanted, rather, to go to 
 Eton, and knew that I should not be sent there unless I 
 got a scholarship, but for that end I did not divert my 
 energies from friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. I 
 think I am correct in this recollection, for in all the years 
 that have passed since then I cannot remember ever being 
 nearly so much interested in the future as in the present. 
 
124 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 The actual interest blazing within me (and there were 
 often several respectable conflagrations going on) has 
 always seemed to me of far vaster importance than a re- 
 moter goal. I do not mean that I was fitful in my in- 
 tentions, because I certainly pursued the same object for 
 years together; only it was not for the ultimate achieve- 
 ment that I pursued it, but because I was continuously in- 
 terested in the same thing. That the opposite line of 
 action is the most effective and brings the biggest results 
 I do not deny, but, on the other hand, think of the wild 
 and fugitive acquisitions that fall to the lot of the short- 
 range strategist. . . . But I am not defending my con- 
 duct, in any case, but merely describing it. 
 
 My own lack of effective ambition must have been ter- 
 ribly disappointing to the elders who had formed and, in 
 a material sense, directed this scholarship campaign. Mr. 
 Edgar and my father agreed on a tremendous programme, 
 which I was to carry out, and the "general idea" was this. 
 There was a scholarship examination at Marlborough in 
 June or perhaps early in July, in which there were of- 
 fered for competition some half-dozen scholarships, with 
 a great plum at the top called the "House Scholarship." 
 The House Scholarship was worth, I think, £80 a year, 
 the next six £50, and my father in a letter he wrote me 
 shortly before the event said that he did not think the 
 great plum was out of my reach. His main desire, I 
 know, was that I should achieve a distinction, but I am 
 also sure that he felt I ought to do something to help 
 towards the expenses of my education, since he believed 
 that I was capable of so doing. He was not a rich man ; 
 hitherto his sons Martin and Arthur had won scholar- 
 ships which made their education at Winchester and Eton 
 a matter of small expense, and he did not mean to send 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 125 
 
 me to Eton, as the event proved, unless I got a scholar- 
 ship, but to a much cheaper but in no way less excellent 
 school. I was, therefore, in the examination at Marl- 
 borough to get a scholarship of some sort — the House 
 Scholarship for choice — and then, a few weeks later, to 
 go up for Eton. If I got a scholarship there, I was to be 
 sent there instead of Marlborough, but, failing that, to 
 accept the laurels which Marlborough would no doubt 
 have offered me. 
 
 So first I went off to Marlborough and competed there. 
 I didn't carry off the House Scholarship, nor did I carry 
 off any other scholarship, nor was my name mentioned 
 as having approached to distinction, and so Eton was 
 given its chance without any back-thought at having 
 wiped Marlborough's eye. Once again, therefore, I com- 
 peted sadly at Eton, and Eton had precisely the same 
 opinion of me as it had had a year before. The plan of 
 campaign had completely failed, and it was settled that 
 I should unconditionally surrender to Marlborough. I 
 did not in the least want to go there, because I wanted to 
 go to Eton, as far as I wanted anything at all apart from 
 friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. Certainly I did 
 not want to remain at Temple Grove any longer, for my 
 greatest friend had won a scholarship at Winchester, and 
 the steam-engine friend was off to Harrow, and another 
 person who mattered had been successful at Eton. But 
 the idea of Marlborough was not without charm, for a 
 year before another friend had gone there, and I looked 
 forward with a certain excitement to seeing him again. 
 We had met during the days of the scholarship examina- 
 tion, and he had aroused in me some shy sort of adora- 
 tion. He had grown tall and handsome, and asked con- 
 descendingly about Temple Grove and the odious habit 
 
126 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 of keeping stag-beetles, yet with a certain personal in- 
 terest that he veiled behind a splendid manly brusqueness. 
 I wondered whether he would appreciate a short ode, but 
 decided that he would not. But he called me a "decent 
 little kid," which I liked as coming from so magnificent a 
 being. 
 
 Temple Grove ended very soon after that in a general 
 dammerung of failure. Faute de mieux I was to be sent 
 to Marlborough, and throwing a Latin dictionary care- 
 lessly into my locker, I squashed my gigantic stag-beetle 
 quite flat, and he was as Og the King of Bashan. On the 
 last day of the term I played cricket against a team of 
 Old Templegrovians and lost the match by failing to 
 hold the easiest catch ever spooned up amid a wildly 
 excited circle of contemporaries, having previously got 
 out first ball (or second). But Mr. Edgar was kind, and 
 said that it didn't matter, though his frenzied sucking of 
 his eyeglass and his dropping it into my lemonade in- 
 dicated tact rather than sincerity. 
 
 So the poor ugly duckling who had failed to accomplish 
 anything went home to its family of swans, who, daz- 
 zlingly white, cut circles in the air above it on the pinions 
 of their various accomplishments. There was Arthur, 
 now nineteen, who had got an Eton scholarship at King's 
 College, Cambridge, and was going there in October, 
 whose scholastic success was only equalled by his volleys 
 with an Eton football and his wholly untakeable service 
 at lawn-tennis. He could do everything with ease, was 
 listened to by my father with attention when he talked, 
 and yet remained unconscious of his sovereignty, and was 
 altogether kind and faintly pitiful to my all-round short- 
 comings. There was Nellie, who annexed every distinc- 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 127 
 
 tion that could be annexed at the Truro High School, ex- 
 cept when Maggie butted up against her, who could play 
 Schumann's first novelette and had been pronounced to 
 have a "veiled" contralto voice in which she sang melo- 
 dies by Marzials and Molloy, and who, on the occasion 
 of Redruth High School or some inferior congregation of 
 females challenging Truro High School for a match at 
 cricket, bowled out the entire side of those misguided 
 young ladies with lobs that cut the daisies from their 
 stalks and were admired even by the vanquished for their 
 paralyzing swiftness. Then there was Maggie, who took 
 the rest of the prizes at the High School and painted 
 ravishly not only in water-colours, but in oils, with Mc- 
 Guilp (was it 1 ?) as a medium, and tubes that squirted 
 rainbows on to her palette. She was not athletic, but 
 she had the great physical distinction of having been 
 knocked down by a cow whose calf had been taken from 
 her, and lying prone on the ground held on to the animal's 
 horns and with perfect calmness continued to scream 
 loudly and serenely until rescued by Parker the butler. 
 After these dazzling swans there came the ugly duckling, 
 who had failed in games and in scholarship, who had 
 not achieved the smallest intellectual distinction, but who 
 in some queer manner of his own was quite as independ- 
 ent as any of the swans. 
 
 And, finally, there was Hugh, on whom at this time 
 my father's hopes were centred, for I think he regarded 
 him as the one who was going to take Martin's place. 
 If he listened with respect to Arthur, he hung on Hugh, 
 who, for independence, for knowing what he wanted, and 
 for a perfectly fearless disregard of other people's opin- 
 ions, was, for a boy of nine, wholly unique. If his reason 
 was convinced, he would adopt a plan different from the 
 
128 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 one he had chosen, but it was necessary to convince him 
 first, and no amount of bawling or insistence would make 
 him alter his mind if he did not agree. He adored Beth, 
 but if he chose to walk through puddles, neither affection 
 for her, nor respect for her authority, would make him 
 cease to do so, unless she convinced him of the greater 
 suitability of the dry places. He was so dreadfully funny 
 that nobody could possibly be angry with him for long, 
 and when he had reduced a sister, who was teaching him 
 his lessons, to distraction by his disobediences and inat- 
 tention, he would anticipate the final threat the moment 
 before it came, and, with shut eyes and a face inexpressi- 
 bly solemn, would chant, "Mamma shall be told !" Arthur 
 alone out of us all could deal with him. Once, when in 
 some theatrical rehearsal, Hugh, with soft paper round a 
 comb, had to supply orchestral accompaniment to the 
 piano, and wouldn't stop, Arthur observed in an awful 
 voice, "If the orchestra isn't quiet, it shall be sent out of 
 the room with several hard slaps." . . . Hugh had a 
 habit, when things were breezy, of writing insulting re- 
 marks in round hand on a piece of paper, and then doub- 
 ling it up and throwing it at the object of his scorn, and 
 while you were reading it he ran away. A further de- 
 velopment of this was that, when pursuit was hot behind 
 him, he would pull a small ball of paper out of his 
 pocket and surreptitiously drop it, as if fearing to be 
 caught with it. Naturally, the pursuer stopped to smooth 
 out the paper and see what fresh insult was recorded there, 
 and would find a perfectly blank half-sheet. But by that 
 time Hugh would be at the top end of the garden path 
 and have had time to conceal himself anywhere. Clad 
 in pasteboard armour, covered with silver paper, with 
 a shield and a helmet and greaves, he would hide in the. 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 129 
 
 shrubbery and hurl paper lances at you. Then a hot pur- 
 suit followed, until one of the greaves dropped off, and, 
 still flying, he would pant out "Pax, until I've put on 
 my greave again !" He and I lived in a perpetual high- 
 tension atmosphere of violent quarrels, swift reconcilia- 
 tions, and indissoluble alliances with secret signs and 
 mysteries to which even Maggie was not admitted. We 
 had a cypher language of our own which consisted in 
 substituting for each vowel the one that came next in 
 the alphabet; it was easy to write, but difficult to speak 
 and even more difficult to understand when spoken. 
 What we communicated to each other in it I have no con- 
 ception, nor can I now remember the aims and objects of 
 the mystic club called "Mr. Paido." One of the rites 
 consisted in walking in the garden with bare feet, which, 
 after all, was an adventure in itself. 
 
 The great excitement of this summer holiday, after 
 which I was to go to Marlborough, was an expedition to 
 Switzerland. All that any of us knew about Switzerland 
 was a remarkable picture that hung in the nursery in 
 which rows of dazzling summits crowned cerulean lakes. 
 Above that panoramic view, in which the Jungfrau and 
 Mont Blanc somehow appeared together, were little vi- 
 gnettes, one of a Swiss chalet, one of the Staubbach, one 
 of the castle at Chillon. We journeyed via Southamp- 
 ton and Havre, five children, Beth, my father and mother, 
 and sat upright in a second-class carriage all the way from 
 Paris to Berne, by what route I have no idea. Our ob- 
 jective was a village called Gimmelwald, a few miles 
 from Murren, and we spent a day and a night at Berne, 
 and from Berne, on the terrace in front of the church, 
 I had my first glimpse of snow mountains. Perhaps 
 because I had been sitting bolt upright all night, perhaps 
 
130 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 because I had thought that the brilliant blues and daz- 
 zling whites of the pictures in the nursery would be col- 
 lectively unveiled on an enormous scale, I was more dis- 
 appointed than words can fairly convey. Low on the 
 horizon were a few greyish jagged hills beset with stream- 
 ers of mist, and that was all. Nellie drew a long breath 
 and said, "Oh, isn't it wonderful!" and I labelled her 
 the most consummate hypocrite. 
 
 Next morning we started again, and came out on the 
 lake of Thun, the shores of which we traversed in some 
 sort of train like an omnibus, with an open top, and in 
 due proportion to the bitterness of the disappointment at 
 Berne came that day's rapture. We passed below the 
 Niesen, which wore a snow-cap, and my mother told us 
 that the Niesen was nothing particular. Summits gleamed 
 from the other side of the lake, and they were nothing 
 particular; but oh! for the lake itself, while we awaited 
 other incredible developments. It was bluer than the 
 picture in the nursery, and it was trimmed with a trans- 
 lucent bottle-green that showed the shallow water, and 
 sharp as the edge of a riband laid against it came that 
 deep clear blue. From Interlaken we proceeded in car- 
 riages, between meadows tall with gentians, and over 
 them there skimmed Apollo butterflies with orange spots 
 on each under-wing, and Camberwell Beauties no less 
 (foreign variety, with a yellow instead of a white border 
 to their wings). And then we turned a corner (I was on 
 the front seat), and Nellie opposite said, "Oh!" and I 
 thought she had been a hypocrite again and didn't look 
 round, because I was observing a pale clouded yellow. 
 And then she said, "Oh, look!" and I was kind enough 
 to forgive her her hypocrisies and look, and there, straight 
 jn front, was the Jungfrau, and the holy maiden was 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 131 
 
 unveiled white and tall above her skirt of dark pine 
 woods, and my heart went out to the snow mountains, 
 and has never yet come back. Much did I suffer at their 
 lovely hands during the next ten years, for that same 
 Jungfrau treated me to an excruciating climb of many 
 hours through soft snow; and the Matterhom kept his 
 worshipper interminably standing with one foot planted 
 on exiguous icy steps as each was hewn out by the leading 
 guide and the fragments went clinking down the preci- 
 pice; and the Rothorn (Zienal) gave me a very awkward 
 moment on the edge of a bergschrund; and the Piz Palu 
 came within an ace of causing Hugh to die of syncope 
 owing to the icy wind with which she enwrapped her 
 arete, and the Matterhom for the second time threw a 
 large quantity of boulders at me because I inconspicuously 
 crossed her eastern face on my way towards the Theodul 
 Pass; and the Dent Blanche directed so damnable a bliz- 
 zard at me that I could not make her further acquaint- 
 ance. But, as David said, "though all these things were 
 done against me," yet has my heart never returned to me 
 from the keeping of the great mountains, nor yet from 
 the keeping of the sea which I first saw at Skegness, and 
 if I could choose the manner of my death it would be 
 that I should, above some eminent ice-wall, fall asleep 
 in the immaculate purity of starlit frost, or sink in the 
 sea-caves round about the island of Capri, and, as I 
 sank, see from far below the glitter of the southern sun 
 above me in the clear dusk of deep waters. ... If God 
 pleases, I will be frozen or drowned when the time comes 
 for me to have done with this body of mine. I do not 
 covet for its last moment a comfortable bed, and pyjamas, 
 and a medicine bottle on the washstand. . . . Not that 
 it matters; only I should like the other mode of passage. 
 
132 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 We passed the Staubbach somewhere near Lauter- 
 brunnen and came in the hour of sunset to the little inn 
 at Gimmelwald. And then there was no more spirit left 
 in me, for Eiger and Monck and Jungfrau and Ebneflu 
 and Silberhorn were aflame with the salute of the evening. 
 Maggie sat down to sketch, and was prodigal of rose- 
 madder; but whereas she put rose-madder on to a draw- 
 ing-block, it was the sun that dyed the snows. And we 
 had bilberries and cream at dinner, and cows went home, 
 swinging bronze bells as they cropped a wayside morsel ; 
 and there was a noise of falling torrents and a scent of 
 pasturage, and the exitement of being "abroad" and the 
 knowledge that the Jungfrau would be there in the morn- 
 ing. 
 
 I wish I could estimate even in the roughest manner 
 the amount of luggage which accompanied that month 
 in Switzerland. My father had a heavy box of books 
 and manuscript, for he was working, then as always, when 
 he saw leisure ahead of him, on his Life of St. Cyprian, 
 which he began at Wellington and completed only shortly 
 before his death. Cyprian alone took up a large box, and, 
 apart from that in the way of books, there must have 
 been a great library. There were certainly half a dozen 
 copies of Shakespeare, because of an evening after din- 
 ner we read Shakespeare aloud, each taking a character; 
 and there was a quantity of Dickens, which my mother 
 read to us before dinner. Then each of us had some kind 
 of a holiday task, except Arthur. Nellie had something 
 about logic, and Maggie had her political economy, and 
 I had a large Latin dictionary and a large Greek diction- 
 ary to elucidate Virgil and the "Medea" of Euripides, 
 and Hugh had, at any rate, a Latin grammar and a 
 volume called "Nuces," which means "nuts," and hard 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 133 
 
 they were for him to crack. Everybody, individually, 
 had a Bible and prayer-book and hymn-book, and I am 
 sure there must have been some Sunday books as well. 
 Then the materials for "collections" came along also: 
 there were presses for each of us in which to receive and 
 to dry the flowers we picked, and there were killing bottles 
 for butterflies (not chloroform and oxalic acid any more) 
 containing cyanide of potassium, which killed after you 
 had screwed the lid on, and when you took it off next 
 morning, they were all dead bodies, like Sennacherib's 
 hosts; and setting boards for the laying out of the slain, 
 and large cork-lined boxes for their exhibition, and 
 packets of pins for their impalement, and many butterfly 
 nets for their original capture. Then there were packs 
 of cards for diversion, and my mother had a great medi- 
 cine-chest in case of illness. There were cool clothes for 
 all of us in the blaze of the Alpine day, and warm clothes 
 for the chill of the Alpine evenings; and each of us had 
 a paint-box and a "Winsor and Newton" block, and 
 Beth never moved without rolls of flannel and mustard 
 plasters and cylinders of cotton-wool. Each one of us 
 had an alpen-stock and huge hob-nailed boots, and 
 when you consider that there were eight persons, each 
 marvellously equipped for mental, physical, and artistic 
 enterprises, you must only wonder that some mode of 
 conveyance, if not all, was not fit to bear the strain of 
 this transportation. But arrive at Gimmelwald we did, 
 and while Maggie was prodigal with rose-madder this 
 train of equipment somehow got inside the inn. Beth 
 swooped on her flannel and her mustard plasters, my 
 father established his Cyprian library in our sitting-room, 
 my mother clutched her medicine-chest, and there was 
 left an enormous pile of books, apparatus for botany, 
 
134 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 climbing, and entomology, which remained in a passage 
 and was gradually broken up between its owners. I think 
 that the last pressing-case for dried flowers, the last kill- 
 ing-bottle for the extinction of butterflies, can hardly have 
 been clawed from that common heap before it was time 
 to pack it all up again. 
 
 Of that month certain indelibly vivid impressions re- 
 main. One was the ascent of the Schilthorn, popularly 
 supposed to be 10,000 (ten thousand) feet in height, and 
 to possess the witching attraction of owning "everlasting" 
 snow. It was not, unless it has abbreviated itself very 
 much since, anything near ten thousand feet high, and, 
 as for the everlasting snow, we climbed through torrid 
 uplands and finished by a mild rocky ascent without ever 
 setting foot on any snow perishable or everlasting. True, 
 there were patches of it on the northern face, and per- 
 haps those may be there still. But it was an enchanting 
 expedition, for we carried our alpen-stocks and the guide 
 had a rope round his shoulders, and we started at five 
 in the morning. My father had a guide-book with a 
 Schilthorn panorama, and we sat on the top and rejoiced 
 in the fact that we were ten thousand feet up in the 
 air and that small quantities of everlasting snow were 
 below us, and we followed his guiding finger as he pointed 
 out the jewels in the crown of mountains that surrounded 
 us. . . . We passed through Murren on the way down, 
 and there saw English people playing lawn-tennis on one 
 of the hotel courts, and never shall I forget my father's 
 upraised eyebrows and mouth of scorn as he said, "Fancy, 
 playing lawn-tennis in sight of the Jungf rau !" 
 
 But if there was some subtle profanity in playing lawn- 
 tennis in sight of the Jungfrau, I thought it much more 
 blasphemous to study "Medea" and the "iEneid" in the 
 
THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 135 
 
 same sacred presence. I had a considerable spell of these, 
 because it had been discovered that, although I was going 
 to Marlborough without a scholarship, there was yet 
 another of those odious competitions which I could enter 
 for after I had got there. I had fondly thought that 
 after this trinity of failures I had thoroughly be-dunced 
 myself and need make no more efforts, but it appeared 
 that I was wholly mistaken, for next December there 
 would be a chance of going in for Foundation Scholar- 
 ships at my new school, and in that there would be less 
 competition, for they were open only to sons of clergy- 
 men. So, after a few days' holiday, out came the Greek 
 dictionary and the Latin dictionary and the "Medea" 
 and the "iEneid," and I had a couple of hours every 
 morning under my father's tuition. I think he was very 
 strict with me, for he still believed in the existence of 
 my brains, and was determined that I should use them. 
 But it is impossible to get good results from a small boy 
 unless somehow interest is kindled, and there was often 
 despair on the part of the teacher and resentful gloom 
 on the part of the taught. Things came to a climax on 
 one particular wet morning, when we were all seated in 
 the sitting-room, Nellie with her logic, and Maggie with 
 her political economy, and Hugh going swimmingly with 
 his "nuces" under my mother's instructions. One by one 
 they all finished their tasks, and there was I left with a 
 chorus in the "Medea" which I could not translate at 
 all, getting more muddled and hopeless every minute, 
 and making fresh mistakes as we went over it again, and 
 my father getting exasperated with my stupidity. Stupid 
 I was, but my chief ailment that morning was that I was 
 frightened and addled and dazed with his displeasure. 
 Right up till lunch time was I kept at my task that day, 
 
186 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 and in the afternoon there was a walk in the rain, and I 
 got into some further disgrace for hitting Hugh with my 
 umbrella in mere retaliation. I was "done to a turn" by 
 this time, and I think my mother must have pointed that 
 out, for next morning, anyhow, instead of that just and 
 terrible thunder-cloud, when I brought up the weary 
 chorus again for retranslation, my father was enchant- 
 ingly encouraging, and slipped in little corrections when 
 I made mistakes, as if I had corrected myself. There was 
 no allusion to yesterday's trouble, and under his approval 
 my wits rallied themselves, and at the end he shut up the 
 book with a delicious smile and told me that it was the 
 best lesson I had ever brought him. . . . 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE WIDENING HORIZONS 
 
 MY father took me in person to Marlborough. I did 
 not much relish that, since I thought, with private 
 school ideas still hanging about me, that it would be a 
 handicap to be known as the son of a man who wore black 
 cloth gaiters, an apron, and a hat with strings at the side. 
 That was all very well in Cornwall, where he was bishop, 
 but here I should have preferred a parent who looked like 
 other parents. He seemed to have no consciousness of 
 being unusually dressed himself, and one incident in the 
 few hours he stayed much impressed itself on me, for he 
 came with me into some class-room or other where a lot 
 of boys were sitting, talking and whistling, with their 
 caps on. My father took off his hat when he entered 
 (which again I thought showed a slight want of knowl- 
 edge), and then, to my surprise, every boy in the place 
 did the same. The whistling ceased, nobody laughed, 
 and I went out again rather proud of him. He seemed to 
 have done the right thing. . . . 
 
 Outside the College buildings there were two or 
 three small boarding-houses and three large ones contain- 
 ing forty to fifty boys each, into one of which I should 
 have gone if I had got the famous "House Scholarship." 
 As it was, I was put into B House, a square brick build- 
 ing of three stories, each of which constituted an in- 
 college house. The edifice itself was like a penitentiary : 
 
 137 
 
138 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 a big open space from the skylight to the basement occu- 
 pied the centre of it, with two class-rooms and a boot- 
 room in the basement. Round this open space ran three 
 floors of stone passages, connected by stone stairs; these 
 passages were lit by arches opening on to the central space, 
 and defended from it by tall iron bars; and out of these 
 three tiers of passages opened four dormitories on each 
 floor, a class-room, one bathroom with three baths, a 
 sitting and bedroom belonging to the house-master of each 
 house, with corresponding accommodation for a second 
 house-master at the opposite corner, and a study next to 
 the bathroom for the head of the house. Ten to fifteen 
 boys slept in each of these dormitories, which were lit by 
 day from three or four small windows, and for purposes 
 of going to bed and getting up in the dark from one small 
 gas-jet. Down the centre of each dormitory stood a 
 board punctuated with basins, one for each boy, and fur- 
 nished with a corresponding number of crockery mugs to 
 hold water for tooth- washing. A narrow shelf ran round 
 the room above the beds, where brushes and combs were 
 kept. There was a chest of drawers underneath the gas- 
 jet belonging to the prefect of the dormitory, and he had 
 a chair by his bedside where he could put his clothes. As 
 half the beds were directly below the windows, the oc- 
 cupants naturally objected to having their immediate 
 windows open during inclemencies, so on cold or rainy 
 nights they were all shut. There were no partitions be- 
 tween the beds; all operations were conducted in whole- 
 some publicity, and there was no objection to anybody 
 saying his prayers. Each dormitory was known by a 
 letter of the alphabet; the houses were called B 1, B 2, 
 B 3, and every boy had his school number. Thus my dry 
 description was Benson, E. F., 234, B 1, L. 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 189 
 
 The day was a strenuous one. A clanging bell per- 
 ambulating the passages murdered sleep at half-past six, 
 and there was chapel at seven. If you chose to get up 
 at half-past six, you had time for a cup of water-cocoa on 
 the ground floor and for a bath. Usually you got up on 
 the first sound of chapel-bell at 6 150, and, cocoa-less and 
 with bootlaces flying, sped down the stairs and across the 
 court to get within the gates outside chapel before a single 
 fateful stroke of the bell announced that you were late. 
 By the gate were stationed two masters who on the stroke 
 put their arms across the entrance and prevented further 
 ingress. If there were many boys outside at that critical 
 moment they used to charge the masters and get in some- 
 how, bearing down all opposition, and it was delightful 
 on such occasions to be safely and legitimately inside and 
 see a sort of football scrimmage going on. Usually, how- 
 ever, there would only be a few stragglers, who attempted 
 no violence. Punishments for being late varied : on the 
 first occasion there was no penalty, but if you persevered 
 in tardiness, the penalties became unpleasantly heavy. 
 But if you were late, you could at least do up your boot- 
 laces and get a cup of cocoa. 
 
 There was a lesson from about a quarter-past seven on 
 the conclusion of chapel till a quarter-past eight. A 
 wholly insufficient breakfast was then provided, consist- 
 ing of tea ready mixed out of a tin can, a circular inch 
 of butter, and bread ; on certain mornings there was por- 
 ridge. If you wanted anything beyond this fare, you had 
 to buy it yourself at school-shop. But you took your pri- 
 vate milk-jug in to breakfast and were given, I suppose, 
 about a quarter of a pint of milk, which you kept for a 
 purpose. During the morning there were two hours' 
 school and one hour's preparation and an hour and a half 
 
140 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 leisure. There was meat and pudding for dinner at half- 
 past one, and thereafter the total provender provided was 
 another inch of butter, with tea and bread, at six, and 
 supper consisting of hard biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a 
 glass of beer after evening chapel, about 8.45. I had 
 an allowance, originally, of sixpence a week, which was 
 soon increased to a shilling; and, quite rightly, the whole 
 of that used to be spent in getting things to eat. These 
 were consumed at that daily love-feast called "brewing," 
 which was a joyful affair and merits its own paragraph. 
 
 "Brewing" was a social function; you brewed in your 
 class-room with your friend, for everybody had a friend 
 of some kind, and nobody brewed alone. This function 
 took place at varying hours in the afternoon, as dictated 
 by the hours of school, and rendered unnecessary the 
 scanty affair called "tea" provided by the college com- 
 missariat. In fact, as a rule, nobody went into college tea 
 at all, so bloated was he with liquid when poor, and 
 with liquid mixed with cake when rich. Brewing had 
 never anything to do with beer, for in winter you brewed 
 tea or coffee, and in summer lemonade in large earthen- 
 ware bowls, with straws or india-rubber pipes to drink it 
 from. The tea itself you certainly brought from home 
 (and when that was used up Beth would send me some 
 more), sometimes you had sugar, and sometimes you 
 hadn't, and the milk was provided, as aforesaid, by the 
 college commissariat, and thus the whole of your money 
 could be devoted to cake. And there we sat each fellow 
 by his friend, when football was over, with kettles in- 
 terminably filled at the college pump, and put to boil on 
 public gas-stoves, jealously watched in turn by you or 
 your friend, and the fresh kettle-full of water was poured 
 on the tea-leaves, and the last crumb of cake was de- 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 141 
 
 voured, and the last drop of milk was coaxed out of the 
 jug, and you enjoyed the full fellowship of not quite 
 enough to eat, scrupulously divided, and the romance of 
 being fourteen or fifteen thickened and fructified. You 
 quarrelled and made it up, and indeed there was very 
 little quarrelling, and you looked round the class-room, 
 and intrigued and wondered and loved, and spliced a 
 broken squash-racket, and uncurled the interminable folds 
 of felt of a burst fives-ball, down to the heart of cork 
 that lay in the centre of it, and made fresh plans. Then 
 if you were very prudent you washed out the teapot and 
 the cups and saucers, and especially the milk-jug, because 
 if you didn't, it stank appallingly next morning, and in 
 the morning you could not get any hot water. Cold water 
 was of no use with a milk-jug: it had to be rinsed with hot 
 water, unless you wanted to find dreadful curds when, 
 next day, the fresh milk was poured into it. Bloated 
 with tea you went to chapel again, and didn't want any 
 beer or cheese, and wished it was brewing-time again. 
 Then there was an hour's preparation in the house class- 
 room, and if you had not had a bath in the morning 
 very likely you had one at night, and the other boys 
 drifted into your dormitory where already you lay warm 
 and sleepy in bed, and perhaps the head of the house gave 
 you a piece of hot buttered toast, as he came in, for pre- 
 fects had the privilege of taking bread and butter away 
 from hall, and you ate it sumptuously and wiped your 
 greasy hands on the bedclothes. If there was a boy with 
 the gift of narrative in the dormitory, he often told a 
 story as soon as lights were put out (or rather the one 
 gas-jet) until he or his hearers got sleepy, and the story 
 faded into silence. A slippered footstep would be heard 
 
142 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 along the passage, and the house-master, candle in hand, 
 made his round of the dormitories. . . . 
 
 In each dormitory there was a big boy, not in sixth 
 form, who was captain of the dormitory, and a prefect 
 in sixth form. On the character of these and the two or 
 three other big fellows depended the character of their 
 dormitory. Bullying, as far as I know, was non-existent; 
 but in all other respects, they had far more power for 
 good or ill in their hands than the whole staff of masters 
 put together, for the house-master went his rounds soon 
 after lights were put out, and it was pretty certain that 
 he would not intrude again. Even if he should take it 
 into his head to come out of his rooms a second time, his 
 approach could be signalled by the boy who occupied the 
 bed opposite the door, which was always left open; he 
 would be told to Cf keep cave," and stories or bolster- 
 fights or any other irregularity could safely be committed, 
 for the young Brangaene from the watch-tower of a bed 
 would whisper, "cave," and the white-robed had plenty 
 of time to steal back to their nests from wherever they 
 might be and be plunged in profound sleep before the 
 master traversed the passage. Practically, then, there 
 was no superior supervision; the elder boys and prefects 
 of dormitories moulded the material committed to their 
 charge as they chose, and certainly there was no secret 
 detective-work or encouragement of talebearers on the 
 part of the masters. The decency, the morality, the dis- 
 cipline that result from such a system, where these virtues 
 are the result of public opinion, are of far more robust 
 quality than if they are merely the forced product of the 
 fear of detection. With the hideous ingenuity that is 
 peculiarly characteristic of boys, it would have been 
 perfectly easy to have evaded detection, if the knowledge 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 143 
 
 that there was secret detective-work going on on the part 
 of masters had challenged our wits and roused us to in- 
 vention for the sake alone of "scoring off" masters. As 
 it was, a well-behaved dormitory behaved well because 
 it was "bad form" to behave otherwise, while a dormitory 
 naturally ill-behaved, would have invented some system 
 of sentries which would certainly have defeated all sur- 
 prise night-attacks on the part of masters, and not, as 
 Plato says, have "advanced one whit in virtue." Boys 
 are far more ingenious than grown-up men, and the chal- 
 lenge on the part of the authorities implied by creeping 
 about at strange hours of the night in slippers would cer- 
 tainly have been delightedly accepted. But there was 
 no such challenge and well-conducted dormitories, by far 
 the majority, grew, so to speak, on their own root, and 
 were not grafted on to any stem that fed them with the 
 sap of authority. 
 
 Meantime, the fatal foundation-scholarship examina- 
 tion, to be held in December, was approaching, and I 
 awaited its advent with an unruffled consciousness of 
 another failure imminent. -To prepare for it, I had 
 certain private tuition out of school hours, and by a much 
 more oppressive piece of legislation, I was not allowed to 
 have anything to do with music except in so far as it was 
 musical to contribute a muscular treble to the choir in 
 chapel. That deprivation I still deplore, for I had at that 
 time an odd and quite untrained faculty for visualizing, 
 by some interior process, tunes that I heard, and being 
 able to "see" them, so to speak, without any direct exer- 
 cise of will. Thus, a term or two later, when an ac- 
 companist failed, I took his place at some sing-song, and 
 transposed at sight Handel's "Where'er you walk," 
 which I did not previously know, from the key of B 
 
144 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 flat into G, without any sense of effort, thanks to this little 
 "kink" of internal visualization. Whatever that kink 
 was, it was not the result of training, but, I suppose, some 
 small natural aptitude towards the science of sound which 
 now I dearly wish that I had been allowed to water and 
 cultivate without break. It must have been a feeble and 
 under-vitalized growth, for when I was at liberty again 
 to waste as much time as I chose at the piano, it was 
 certainly less vigorous than it had been, and never after- 
 wards recovered, when I could stray and strum as I 
 pleased in melodious pastures. The soil in which it 
 grew was there, for all my life music has been to me as 
 a celestial light, shining in dark places for the mitigation 
 of their blackness, and flooding the serene and sunlit 
 with its especial gold, but from that soil there withered a 
 little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated 
 eggs was despoiled, and the bird came not back. But I 
 expect that the wisdom of the edict was fully justified in 
 the judgment of the prohibitionists, when on one snowy 
 morning in December the list of the winners of founda- 
 tion-scholarships was promulgated, and there was my 
 name incredibly among them at a decent altitude. • 
 
 By one of Nature's most admirable devices our memo- 
 ries always retain a keener sense of such experiences as 
 have been enjoyable, than those of the drabber sort, and 
 to-day I find nothing that I can pick out of the bran-pie 
 that was not bright and alluring. There were friend- 
 ships and hero-worships, the initiation, in a blue and 
 black striped jersey, into the muddy mysteries of Rugby 
 football, and the dizzy heights (soaring far above the 
 sordid business of the foundation-scholarship) of playing 
 in the lower team of the house. There was a school con- 
 cert at the end of that first term, and it gave me a com- 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 145 
 
 placent thrill to remember that I was a foundation- 
 scholar when the "Carmen" was sung. But it gave me a 
 sense of stupefied astonishment to hear the organist, Mr. 
 Bambridge, play as an encore to his piano-solo, his own 
 original variations on the theme of "Auld Lang Syne." 
 Never (except in the case of Miss Wirtz) was there such 
 a finger, and speaking purely from the impression then 
 made, I should be obliged to confess that for matter of 
 pure brilliance of execution and mastery of technique, 
 Mr. Bambridge must have been a far more accomplished 
 performer than any pianist whom I have heard since. 
 Why did he not take London by storm with those amaz- 
 ing pyrotechnics of his own invention, and throne himself 
 higher than ever Paderewski or Carreno or Busoni soared % 
 I cannot even now bring myself to believe that any of 
 those lesser lights ever shone like Mr. Bambridge, when 
 with flying fingers and any quantity of the loud pedal he 
 swooped up and down in pearly runs and tremendous 
 octaves, while all the time that powerful thumb of his, 
 relentless and regular as the stroke of a piston, beat out 
 simultaneously (there was the wonder of it) the original 
 air. I wanted the piano to comprise an extra octave or 
 two that so he might have a larger arena for his melodious 
 magic. I wanted to have more ears, so that they should all 
 be glutted with the beautiful banging and netted in the 
 gossamer of Mr. Bambridge's chromatic scales. Even 
 Bach — but it is always idle to make comparisons between 
 the supreme: who judges between the various peaks that 
 face the dawn, or cares to plumb the sea, so long as the 
 sun glitters on its surface, and in the shadow of the rock 
 there glows the translucent blue of Tyre? . . . 
 
 Straight from that concert I made my honourable re- 
 turn to Truro, and found that my spurs were won, and 
 
146 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 with a light heart played Pirates again, and under the 
 short reign of Byron's supremacy ( for we had been learn- 
 ing "Childe Harold" by heart in the English repetition 
 lesson) deluged the chaste pages of the Saturday Mag- 
 azine with amorous innocence. Soon, too, the butterfly 
 collection began to assume the virile toga, for though 
 music was forbidden as a study, natural history, as en- 
 couraged at Marlborough by the society known as the 
 "Bug and Beetle," was a legitimate pursuit, and my father 
 strongly approved of my entering for the "Staunton 
 Prize," awarded to the best collection of butterflies and 
 moths, to be made that spring and summer, and to be 
 adjudged in the autumn. In the warm early-maturing 
 spring of Cornwall, the downs and lanes were lively with 
 lepidoptera at Easter, and those second holidays, passing 
 in a whirl of butterfly nets and a corking and uncorking 
 of killing-bottles, were a sort of canonization of the col- 
 lections. Brimstones and garden whites, and holly blues 
 and small tortoiseshells took on a more serious aspect, 
 and the pins that eventually fixed them in cork-lined 
 boxes were indeed as nails driven in by masters of as- 
 semblies. The collection must be a strictly personal one : 
 I had to catch the victims myself, and kill and set them, 
 but Maggie, even more wildly enthusiastic than me, 
 might, without a violation of conscientious scruples, in- 
 dicate a yellow- tip enjoying the sunshine, or among nib- 
 bled leaves discover a geometer caterpillar turning itself 
 into a measuring-rod. 
 
 Cricket, therefore, on the return for the summer half 
 took a subordinate place, and obtaining "leave off" from 
 it as a compulsory game, I spent the long summer after- 
 noons in the enchantment of Savernake Forest. Here it 
 was that the Staunton Collection began to lay more preg- 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 147 
 
 nant eggs in a receptive soil, for I trace to those sunny 
 hours the betrothal of my soul to the goddess of trees 
 and solitary places, to whose allegiance I have ever been 
 faithful. Net in hand, and bulging with nests of chip- 
 boxes I used to climb the steep down fringed with the 
 secular beeches that form the outer wall of that superb 
 woodland, pausing perhaps for a "blue" or a "small 
 copper" on the way, but eager for entry into the temple 
 of trees. Here underneath those living towers, the earth 
 would be bare, but from the coverts where the sunlight 
 fell only in flakes and shower-drops of gold, you passed 
 into open glades of bracken and bramble, through which 
 ran smooth grass-walks of short downland turf. In these 
 sunny lakes of forest-enfolded open, a few hawthorns 
 stood like snowy and sweet-smelling islands, and along 
 the edges of the grass-rides hovered the speckled fritilla- 
 ries. Then came a group of hazel trees to be beaten, with 
 net spread beneath to catch the dropping caterpillars, and 
 grey-trunked oaks, whose bark was to be diligently 
 searched for slumbering dagger-moths, difficult to find 
 owing to their protective colouring. Red-spotted burnets 
 clung to thistle-heads, green hair-streaks (especially in 
 Rabley Copse) must be put up from their resting-places 
 before they were visible, and there too marble whites 
 rustled their chequered wings in my net. Deeper and 
 deeper into the forest would I go, and though I had every 
 conscious faculty alert for pursuits and captures, yet all 
 the time — and this is precisely why I have lingered with 
 such prolixity over the Staunton Prize — the honey-bees 
 of my subconscious self were swarming in with their im- 
 perishable gleanings. Cell after cell they constructed 
 within me, and filled them with the essences that they 
 culled from beech and fern and all the presences that 
 
148 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 subtly haunted the great forest aisles. There first did I 
 hear the music of Pan's flute with the inward ear, and 
 with the inward eye did I see the dancing satyrs, and 
 the dryads of the woods; and if, as most surely I believe, 
 my disembodied spirit shall some day visit the places 
 where I learned to love the beauty of this peerless world, 
 how swiftly will it traverse the thyme-tufted downs of 
 Wiltshire to breathe again the noble and august serenity 
 of the forest, and see the fritillaries poise on the bracken 
 at the edge of the grass-rides. 
 
 The Staunton Prize (with how much more derived 
 from those excursions!) fluttered pleasantly into my 
 butterfly net, and with the flaming of the autumn leaves, 
 and the hibernation of my quarry, another interest, that 
 of athleticism, asserted its supremacy over its eager sub- 
 ject. Much has been written by many wise men as to 
 this robust autocracy in schools, deploring its paramount 
 sway, and suggesting nobler ideals than muscular swift- 
 ness and accuracy of eye for youth's pursuing, but what, 
 when all is said and done, can be proposed as a substi- 
 tute while the nature of the average boy remains what 
 it is ? Love of learning, intellectual ambitions at that age 
 are natural but to the few, and while we all respect the 
 youth who at the age of fifteen is really more attracted by 
 history or philosophy than by fives and football, who can 
 believe that there would be any great gain to the nation 
 at large if every schoolboy was like him 1 ? It is frankly 
 unthinkable that the average boy should choose as his 
 heroes those members of the sixth form who have a tre* 
 mendous aptitude for Iambics, or applaud, with the 
 fanatic enthusiasm with which he hails a fine run down 
 the football field, the intellectual athlete who this morn- 
 ing showed up so stunning a piece of Ciceronian prose. 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 149 
 
 Full opportunity in school hours and in voluntary study is 
 given to the few who, from physical disability or mental 
 precocity, actually prefer intellectual pursuits to athletics, 
 but the English fifteen-year-old is naturally a Philistine, 
 and Philistia had much better be glad of him. For as 
 a rule he is not a prig, and while he cannot quite under- 
 stand how anyone should prefer reading to playing games, 
 he does not despise the student, but generally refers to 
 him with a certain vague respect as being "jolly clever." 
 But if it was possible to implant firmly in the soil of 
 schools the intellectual banner, and to succeed in making 
 the whole body of boys rally enthusiastically round it, it 
 is difficult to repress a shudder at the thought of what 
 that school would be like. Germany, perhaps, alone 
 among the modern nations has succeeded in imbuing its 
 youth with a passion for learning and discipline, and it 
 would appear, now that we have been able to appreciate 
 German mentality, that this triumphant achievement 
 has been won at an appalling cost ; at the cost, that is, of 
 precisely those virtues which games, generally speaking, 
 are productive of. And in the long run, and on the large 
 scale that type seems to come to a bad maturity. 
 
 It is right then that for small boys games no less 
 than work should be compulsory, for if work produces 
 the man of letters, the man of science, the artist, the edu- 
 cated individual who can take his place in a progressive 
 nation, not less do games produce a certain general hardi- 
 hood, a sense of fair play, lacking which we should fare 
 badly as a nation. To most boys with growing limbs 
 and swelling sinews, physical activity is a natural in- 
 stinct, and there is no need to drive them into the foot- 
 ball field or the fives court: they go there because they 
 like it, and there is no need to make games compulsory 
 
150 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 for them. But it is for those who, whether from a lazy 
 habit of body or from a precociously active habit of mind, 
 do not naturally gravitate to those pleasant arenas, that 
 this compulsion is necessary, and to make them, for the 
 sake of their health, go for a walk instead, does not 
 produce at all the desired effect. They can go for any 
 number of pleasant walks when they are fifty : at fifteen 
 (given they have not got some corporal disability) it is 
 far better for them to run and to kick and to hit and to 
 sweat. Not their bodies alone partake in these benefits : 
 their minds learn control of all kinds; they must keep 
 their tempers, they must remain cool in hot corners (such 
 as they will assuredly experience in their offices in later 
 life), they must maintain a certain suavity in the midst 
 of violence; and it is just this discipline here roughly 
 summed up that gives games their value. Presently, 
 when the studious are a year or two older, they will have 
 attained to scholastic altitudes where athletic compulsion 
 is no longer put upon them, and then they can please 
 themselves. By that time, too, the normal young Philis- 
 tine will have awoke to the importance of other things 
 than games, and, unless he is a sheer impenetrable 
 dunce, have come to regard the studious with far more 
 sincere respect. But for both, this year or two of com- 
 pulsion is wholly beneficial. As for the supposed inflex- 
 ibility of this athletic autocracy, it is founded on a com- 
 plete misapprehension: it should with far more accuracy 
 be described as a democracy, for its heroes and legisla- 
 tors are undoubtedly elected by the people, and until the 
 nature of boys is subjected to some radical operation, so 
 long will they continue (though with infinite indulgence 
 for the "jolly clever") to make heroes after their own 
 hearts. 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 151 
 
 That which above all gilded and glorified these de- 
 lights, that which was the stem from which their green 
 leaves drew nourishment, was friendship. All these were 
 the foliage that was fed from that stem, though the sun 
 and the clear windy air and the rain fortified and re- 
 freshed them and swelled the buds that expanded into 
 flowers. For what man is there, surrounded though he 
 be with the love of wife and children, who does not re- 
 tain a memory of the romantic affection of boys for each 
 other 1 ? Having felt it, he could scarcely have forgotten 
 it, and if he never felt it he missed one of the most 
 golden of the prizes of youth, . unrecapturable in mature 
 life. In many ways boys are a sex quite apart from male 
 or female: though they take on much of what they are 
 and of what they learn, strengthened and expanded, into 
 manhood, they leave behind, given that they grow into 
 normal and healthy beings, a certain emotional affection 
 towards the coevals of their own sex which is natural to 
 public-school boyhood, even as it is, though perhaps less 
 robustly, to girlhood. For twelve or thirteen weeks three 
 times a year they live exclusively among boys, and that 
 at a time when their vigour is at its strongest, and it 
 would demand of them a fish-like inhumanity, if they 
 were asked to let their friendships alone have no share 
 of the tremendous high colours in which their lives are 
 dipped. Naturally there is danger about it (for what 
 emotion worth having is not encompassed by perils'?) 
 and this strong beat of affection may easily explode into 
 fragments of mere sensuality, be dissipated in mere 
 "smut" and from being a banner in the clean wind be 
 trampled into mud. But promiscuous immorality was, as 
 far as I am aware, quite foreign to the school, though 
 we flamed into a hundred hot bonfires of these friend- 
 
152 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ships, which were discussed with a freedom that would 
 seem appalling, if you forgot that you were dealing with 
 boys and not with men. Blaze after blaze illumined our 
 excited lives, for without being one whit less genuine 
 while they lasted, there was no very permanent quality 
 about these friendships. Your friend or you might get 
 swept into another orbit; diversity of tastes, promotion 
 in school, conflicting interests might sever you, and in 
 all friendliness you passed on, with eyes eager to give or 
 to receive some new shy signal which heralded the ap- 
 proach of another of these genial passions. For me 
 the sentimentality that coloured the choir-boy affair, or 
 that not less misbegotten case of Mrs. Carter had quite 
 faded from my emotional palette, which now was spread 
 with hues far more robust and healthy. My signals were 
 all made for the strong and the masculine, and I quite 
 put out my lights and showed a stony blackness to flut- 
 terings from one of mincing walk or elegant gestures or 
 a conjectured softness of disposition. I loved the children 
 of the sun, and the friends of rain and wind, who were 
 swift in the three-quarter line, and played squash with 
 me in the snow ; but still, by some strange law of attrac- 
 tion, too regular for coincidence, they were most of them 
 musical, and once more, though now without sentimental- 
 it)', chapel services, as in the case of the choir-boy and 
 Lincoln Cathedral, were entwined with my volatile but 
 violent affections. One such friend sang tenor and I 
 intrigued my corn-crake way back into the choir in order 
 to sit next him: another led the trebles. He must have 
 been quite two years younger than myself, which is a 
 gulf wider than two decades in mature life. But we 
 bridged it with a structure that carried us safely to each 
 other; there was music in that bridge, and there was the 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 153 
 
 wonder in young eyes of the fact that you had found (and 
 so had he) a passionate pilgrim, voyaging through fives- 
 courts and glades of Savernake, because of whom those 
 external phenomena shone with a new brightness, so 
 that now the sweep of the forest, and the fives-courts, and 
 the mire in the football fields, and the inadequate bound- 
 ing of balls in an open squash court, owing to the snow 
 that lay soddenly melting, grew into scenes and settings 
 for the jewels of human companionships and boyish af- 
 fections. 
 
 Intellectual kinship, community of tastes had very 
 little part in those friendships : they were founded on a 
 subtle instinct, and they were born of a blind mutual 
 choice. Often your tentative scouting was quite still- 
 born: you would hope for a friendship, and perhaps he 
 would have no signals for you, but wait wide-eyed and 
 expectant, for somebody quite different. Or again you 
 could have a "culte" (to adopt an odious phraseology for 
 which, in English, there happens to be no equivalent) 
 for someone, who in the sundered worlds of modern and 
 classic schools, might be miles away, and then with a 
 sudden and wondrous reward, the idol would give some 
 such signal of glance (that would be a direct method) or 
 more indirectly, he would say something to his compan- 
 ion as he happened to pass you in the court, which you 
 knew was really meant for you, and on your next meet- 
 ing you would perhaps get a glance, which was at least 
 an enquiry as to whether you were disposed towards 
 friendship. And then as you waited in the clear dusk 
 of some summer evening for the sounding of the boring 
 chapel-bell, you would sit down on one of the seats round 
 the lime-trees in the court outside, and he would stroll by, 
 still linked by an arm to some other friend, and you 
 
154 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 rather dolefully wondered whether, after all, there was 
 to be anything doing. The two would be lost in the 
 crowd beginning to collect round the chapel gate, and then 
 perhaps the figure for which you were watching would 
 detach itself, alone now, from the others, and with an 
 elaborate unconsciousness of your presence he would 
 stroll to the seat where you waited, and with the impla- 
 cable shyness that always ushered in these affairs still 
 take no notice of you. As he sat down it may be that a 
 book dropped from under his arm, and you picked it up 
 for him, and he said, "Oh thanks! Hullo, is that you'?" 
 knowing perfectly well that it was, and you would say, 
 "Hullo!" ... So after each had said, "Hullo," one 
 said, "There's about three minutes yet before stroke, isn't 
 there 1 ?" and the other replied, "About that," and then 
 taking the plunge said : 
 
 "I say, I've got a squash court to-morrow at twelve. 
 Will you have a game?' and the answer, if things were 
 going well would be, "O ripping; thanks awfully!" 
 
 Then a precious minute would go by in silence and it 
 was time to get up and go into chapel, with a new joy of 
 life swimming into your ken. Never did Cortez stare at 
 the Pacific with a wilder surmise than that with which he 
 and you looked at each other as together you passed out of 
 the dusk into the brightly lit ante-chapel, thinking of that 
 game of squash to-morrow, which perhaps was to lay the 
 foundation-stone of the temple of a new friendship. There 
 would be time enough after that for a dip at the bathing- 
 place, and a breathless race not to be late for hall. . . . 
 
 The ardent affair, if the squash and the bath had 
 been satisfactory, blazed after that like a prairie fire, and 
 the two became inseparable for a term, or if not that for 
 a few weeks. But to suppose that this ardency was 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 155 
 
 sensual is to miss the point of it and lose the value of it 
 altogether. That the base of the attraction was largely 
 physical is no doubt true, for it was founded primarily 
 on appearance, but there is a vast difference between the 
 breezy open-air quality of these friendships and the dingy 
 sensualism which sometimes is wrongly attributed to 
 them. A grown-up man cannot conceivably recapture 
 their quality, so as to experience it emotionally, but to 
 confuse it with moral perversion, as the adult understand 
 that, is merely to misunderstand it. 
 
 For a year I sat solid and unmovable in the form in 
 which I had been placed when I came to Marlborough, 
 and was then hoisted into the lower fifth, and began a 
 rather swifter climbing of the scholastic ladder, because I 
 came for the first time under a master who woke in me 
 an intellectual interest in Greek and Latin. This was 
 A. H. Beesly, who was by far the most gifted teacher I 
 ever came under either at school or at the University. 
 Not for me alone but for his whole form he made waters 
 break out in the wilderness, and irrigated the sad story 
 of Hecuba with the springs of human emotion. He had 
 translated it himself into English blank verse, with a pro- 
 logue that told how some Athenian slave, carried off to 
 Rome to serve in the household, read to fellow-captives 
 this song of Zion in his captivity. What the intrinsic 
 merits of the translation were, I can form no idea, but of 
 the effect of it on his^form, as read by the author, I cherish 
 the liveliest memory. For three or four Hecuba lessons 
 we would get no reading, and then Beesly would turn 
 round to the fire when we had stumbled through another 
 thirty lines, and say, "Well now, you boys don't know 
 what a fine thing it is. Let's see what we can make of 
 
156 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 your last few lessons. I'll read you a translation : follow 
 it in your Greek. We'll begin at line 130." Then he 
 would read this sumptuous jewelled paraphrase, which 
 rendered in English blank verse the sense of the passages 
 we had droned and plodded through, and gave them the 
 dramatic significance which we all had missed when we 
 took the original in compulsory doses of Greek. For a 
 long time we never knew who was the author of this 
 English version, and then one day Beesly brought into 
 form a whole bale of copies, printed in sheets, unfolded 
 and uncut, and gave one to each of us. There was the 
 name on the title page, as translated by A. H. B., with 
 the heading, "The Trojan Queen's Revenge." Never in 
 bookshop or in second-hand bookstall have I seen a copy 
 of that work, and I rejoice in that for perhaps I might be 
 disillusioned as to its merits, if I had seen it subsequently. 
 Certainly "The Trojan Queen's Revenge" was printed, 
 but I suspect (and bury the suspicion) that it fell still- 
 born from the press, and that the author bought up the 
 unbound copies. As it is, it has for me the significance of 
 some equerry who introduced me to the presence of royal 
 Greece, making the Greeks from that day forth the 
 supreme interpreters of humanity. Under the influence 
 of "The Trojan Queen's Revenge" I passed through the 
 portals into the very throne-room of that House of Art, 
 so that to this day I must secretly always employ a cer- 
 tain Greek standard to whatever the world holds of 
 beauty. Greek gems, Greek statues, became for me the 
 gold standard, compared to which all else, though noble, 
 must be of baser stuff. There were to be many idle terms 
 yet before I cared one atom about the Greek language 
 intrinsically : as far as the literature went I only cared for 
 the spirit of it revealed in "The Trojan Queen's Re- 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 157 
 
 venge." And before I quitted that form we had pieces 
 of (Edipus Coloneus brought to our notice, and once again 
 Beesly read out some translation — I suppose of his own 
 — of the great chorus. 
 
 "But if you want the spirit of it," he said, "listen to 
 this. It's by a man called Swinburne, of whom you have 
 probably never heard. Shut your books." 
 
 I can see him now: it was a chilly day in spring and 
 he put his feet up on the side of the stove that warmed 
 the classroom. He had closed his book too, and his blue 
 merry eyes grew grave as he began : 
 
 "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
 The mother of months in meadow and plain 
 Fills the hollows and windy place 
 With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain, 
 And the bright brown nightingale, amorous, 
 Is half assuaged for Itylum, 
 For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
 The tongueless vigil and all the pain." 
 
 Beesly held the thirty boys under the spell of that 
 magic: we were all quite ordinary youngsters of fifteen 
 and sixteen, and lo, we were a harp in his hand and he 
 thrummed us into melody. There was stir and trampling 
 of feet outside, for the hour of school was over, and I 
 remember well that he waited at the end of one stanza, 
 and said, "Shall I finish it or would you like to go*? Any 
 boy who likes may go." 
 
 Nobody got up (it was not from fear of his disap- 
 proval), and he went on: 
 
 "For winter's rains and ruins are over, 
 And all the season of snows and sins, 
 The day that severs lover from lover, 
 
158 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 The light that loses, the night that wins. 
 And Time remembered is grief forgotten, 
 And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 
 And in green underwood and cover 
 Blossom by blossom the spring begins." 
 
 He came to the end of the chorus and got up. 
 
 "You can all be ten minutes late next school," he said, 
 "because I have kept you." 
 
 Just as I must always think of "The Trojan Queen's 
 Revenge" as being among the masterpieces of blank 
 verse in the English language, so I cannot believe that 
 Beesly was not the finest racket-player who has ever served 
 that fascinating little hard ball into the side-nick of the 
 back-hand court. There was a new racket court just 
 built in the corner of the cricket-field, and here at twelve 
 o'clock on three mornings of the week, Beesly and another 
 master played the two boys who would represent the 
 school in the Public Schools racket competition at Easter. 
 The court, anonymously presented to the school, was an- 
 nounced, when Beesly retired a few years later, to be his 
 gift, and he provided practically all the balls used in these 
 games. Hour after hour I used to watch these matches 
 and began to play myself with the juniors. Beesly often 
 looked on from the gallery, in order to detect new talent, 
 and on one imperishable day, as we came out of the court 
 he said to me, "You've got some notion of the game: 
 mind you stick to it." If I had wanted any encourage- 
 ment that would have determined me, and I began to 
 think rackets and dream rackets and visualize nick-services 
 and half-volley returns just above the line. Beesly kept 
 a quiet eye on me, and after I had left his form, he would 
 often ask me to walk up towards his house with him, if 
 I was going that way, and would ask me to breakfast on 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 159 
 
 Sunday mornings, and what feasts of the gods were these ! 
 Perhaps there would be one of the school representatives 
 there, and Beesly, when the sausages and the kidneys 
 were done, would show us the racket cups he had won, or 
 he would read us something or tend the flowers in his 
 greenhouse. All this sounds trivial, but he never pro- 
 duced a trivial effect, and gradually he established over 
 me a complete hold, morally and mentally, which was 
 as far as I can judge entirely healthy and stimulating. If 
 he had seen me often with someone whom he considered 
 an undesirable companion he would fidget and grunt a 
 little and pull his long whiskers, and then with a glance 
 merry and shy and wholly disarming he said, "Now there 
 are plenty of people it's good to see a little of, but not too 
 much of." He would mention no name, but he never 
 failed to convey the sense of his allusion. On the other 
 hand if he thought I was devoting myself too much to 
 games (and in especial rackets) he would say, "Nothing 
 makes you enjoy a game of rackets so much as having 
 done a couple of hours hard work first." Or if, having 
 watched me playing, he thought I wasn't taking the game 
 seriously enough, he would stroll away with me from the 
 court, and a propos of nothing at all, he would casually 
 remark, "Better do nothing than do a thing slackly. 
 You'll find your games fall off, unless you play as hard 
 as you can." . . . And then up at his house on one 
 ecstatic morning when I was getting on for seventeen he 
 suddenly said, "You'll be playing for the school next 
 year if you take pains." Next moment he had a volume 
 of Browning in his hand and said, "Browning now : ever 
 read any Browning? I thought not. Listen to me for 
 a couple of minutes," and he read "The Lost Leader." 
 Once, I remember, I had been to his house in the evening, 
 
160 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 and he walked back with me across the cricket-field after 
 night had fallen. The sky was clear and a myriad frosty 
 stars burned there. For some little way Beesly walked 
 in silence, then, in his low distinct voice he began: 
 
 "See how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold." 
 
 I insist on the apparent triviality and fragmentariness 
 of all this, for it was just in these ways, not in heavy 
 discourses or lectures on morality and studiousness and 
 activity, that Beesly gained his ascendency over me. He 
 was never a great talker, but these obiter dicta stamped 
 themselves on my mind like some stroke of a steel die 
 on malleable metal. He was never in the smallest degree 
 demonstrative: he might have been speaking to a blank 
 wall, except just for that glance, merry and intimate, 
 which he occasionally showed me, but for all that I 
 divined a strong affection, which I for my part returned 
 in a glow of hero-worship. The very fact that he never 
 asked for a confidence prompted me to tell him all that 
 perplexed or interested me, in the sure knowledge that he 
 would always throw light in some brief curt sentence. 
 "Stupid thing to do," was one of his wise comments when 
 I had told him of some row I had got into with my house 
 master. "Go and apologize, and then don't think any- 
 thing more about it." There was the root and kernel 
 of the matter : down came that steel die, sharply impress- 
 ing itself, whereas discursive and laboured advice would 
 have merely been boring and unconvincing. Off I went, 
 trusting implicitly in his wisdom, and finding it wholly 
 justified. 
 
 And then, alas and alas, I wholly and utterly disap- 
 
THE WIDENING HORIZONS 161 
 
 pointed Beesly. I had, as he prophesied, attained to the 
 dignity of playing for the school at rackets, and had yet 
 another year before I left, and he made up his mind that 
 I and my partner were going to win the challenge cup 
 for Marlborough, where it had never yet been brought 
 home. Certainly two terms before that final event we 
 were an extremely promising pair, but after that we 
 scarcely improved at all, and fell from one stagnation of 
 staleness into another. Beesly took the wrong line about 
 this, and in the Christmas holidays that year I went to 
 stay with him at Torquay, in order to get more practice, 
 whereas what I needed was less practice. Even then we 
 made a close match in the semi-final or thereabouts with 
 the pair who eventually won, and Beesly, who up till 
 the last day, when he urged me to take a heroic dose of 
 Hunyadi water, continued to cling to the idea that at 
 last Marlborough would win, had all his hopes dashed 
 to atoms. Well do I remember his waiting for me out- 
 side the court, when we came out ; he could hardly speak, 
 but he patted me on the shoulder and blurted out, "Well, 
 I know you did your best: I know that," and walked 
 quickly away. He wrote me that night the most charming 
 letter, trying to console me who really cared far less 
 than he did ; for it was, I am perfectly convinced, the main 
 ambition of his life that Marlborough should win this 
 cup, and for a whole year he had believed that now at' 
 last we were going to, and that I was the chief of the 
 instruments through whom that ambition was to be 
 realized. 
 
 He combined his two passions for rackets and poetry, 
 in some such way as Pindar, who wrote the most mag- 
 nificent odes the world has ever read in honour of boys 
 who won victories at Olympia, and it was this Pindaric 
 
162 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 affection which he felt for those on whom his hopes 
 centred at Queen's. The affection I certainly returned, 
 but woe for the manner in which I failed to fulfil the rest 
 of the contract. 
 
 I suspect he was an unhappy man, and he was certainly 
 a very lonely one, and his loneliness no doubt was ac- 
 centuated to him by his shy reticence. He kept himself 
 largely apart from other masters ; to the best of my knowl- 
 edge I never saw him speak to a woman, and all the time 
 he was stewing in the affection which he was incapable of 
 expressing. But he had, out and away, by far the most 
 forcible and attractive personality of any tutor I came 
 across either at school or the University he was one of 
 those reserved demi-gods whom a boy obeys, reverences, 
 and loves for no ostensible reason. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 
 
 WHILE I was still in my second year at Marl- 
 borough a thoroughly exciting and delightful 
 thing happened at home, for my father was appointed 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, and up trooped his pleased 
 and approving family to take possession of Lambeth Pal- 
 ace and Addington Park with, so far as I was concerned, 
 a feeling that he had done great credit to us. Delight- 
 ful as Truro had been, we all welcomed the idea of these 
 expanded grandeurs, and felt colossally capable of tak- 
 ing advantage of them to the utmost. How great a man 
 my father had become was most pointedly brought home 
 to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marl- 
 borough soon after his appointment for my confirmation, 
 I could, then and there, measure the altitude of his pin- 
 nacle by the fact that there appeared on the school notice- 
 board next day an inscription to the effect that His Grace 
 had asked that a whole holiday should be given to the 
 school in honour of his visit. He had just asked for it, 
 so it appeared, and in honour of his visit, it was granted. 
 "Can't you be confirmed again?" was the gratifying com- 
 ment of friends. "I say, do be confirmed again." 
 
 To me, personally, all the splendour and dignity of his 
 office signified nothing : what concerned a boy in the orgy 
 of his holidays, was the new sumptuousness of his sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 163 
 
164 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Stupendous though my father had become, we knew 
 but little of his work and of its national significance, and 
 it was my mother who to us, far more than he, was ex- 
 alted into the zenith. Often since has she told me how 
 shy and inadequate she felt on entering London, as she 
 now did for the first time, in such a position, but never 
 can I conceive of her otherwise than as filling it with the 
 supremest enjoyment, which, after all, is the first of a 
 hostess's qualities. Her wisdom, her conversational bril- 
 liance, above all her intense love of people, just as such, 
 nobly filled and fitted the new sphere. The management 
 of the great house, with the added concern of the second 
 house at Addington, appeared in her a natural and effort- 
 less instinct : she took the reins and cracked her whip, and 
 the whole equipage bowled swift and smooth along the 
 road. The stables were under her control as well; she 
 arranged all the comings and goings of my father: out 
 rolled his landau with its tall black high-stepping horses 
 and gilded harness to take him to the House of Lords, 
 and scarce had the great gates below Morton's tower 
 clanged open for him, than Maggie and I set out on our 
 horses for a ride round the Row, very stiff in top-hats, 
 and riding habit and strapped trousers, and then round 
 came my mother's victoria, and woe be to the carriage- 
 cleaner if the japanned panels failed to reflect with the 
 unwavering quality of glass. She would be going to pay 
 a couple of calls and visit a dentist, and while she was 
 there, the victoria would take Hugh and Nellie to the 
 Zoo, and drop them with strict injunctions that in an hour 
 precisely they were to pick her up at a fatal door in Old 
 Burlington Street, and so proceed homewards to tea. 
 Meanwhile the carriage that deposited my father at the 
 House could take Arthur to some other rendezvous, and 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 165 
 
 once at any rate, the hansom containing the Archbishop 
 was prevented from entering the Lambeth Gate, because 
 the Archbishop's carriage (containing Hugh and me) 
 must be admitted first. Never were children so indulged 
 in the matter of equine locomotion, for the riding horses 
 clattered in and out, and Hugh returning from a straw- 
 hatted visit to the Zoo must in three minutes hurl him- 
 self into the top-hatted and black-coated garb which in 
 those days was current in the Row, in order to ride with 
 my father on his return from the House. One of the five 
 of us, at any rate, was kept on tap for a rather stately 
 ride with him whenever during the busy day he found 
 an hour to spare, and it was a pompous pleasure to see the 
 traffic stopped at Hyde Park Corner, so that we might ride 
 past saluting policemen through the arch. Physically I 
 suppose we enjoyed our fraternal scampers more, but it 
 could not help being great fun for a boy of fifteen to 
 steer a rather fretful horse that went sideways across the 
 street and behaved itself unseemly, while tall buses waited 
 for his esteemed progress. After all, if you happened to 
 be riding with your father, for whose passage in 
 those days all traffic was stayed, you might as well 
 enjoy it. . . . 
 
 All such arrangements, all such "fittings in" were a 
 pure delight to my mother. She revelled in her dexterity, 
 and revelled no less in the multitude of her engagements. 
 She loved, after a busy day, to dine at some political 
 house, and hear the talk of the hour, and follow that up 
 with some party at the Foreign Office, for though she 
 cared very little if at all about political questions them- 
 selves, she delighted in the froth and bustle and move- 
 ment. She was great friends with Mr. Gladstone, though 
 she cared not one atom about the Home Rule question, 
 
166 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 and he in turn had the greatest appreciation of her wit, 
 her humour which would strike a spark out of the most 
 humdrum of happenings : and I believe it is authentically 
 told that when once at Hawarden there was discussion as 
 to the identity of the cleverest woman in England, and 
 someone suggested my mother as the fittest candidate for 
 the post, he said in that impressive voice, reinforced with 
 the pointed forefinger, "No, you're wrong: she's the 
 cleverest woman in Europe." Quite unfatigued, she 
 would be up and dressed in her very oldest clothes before 
 seven next morning, and walk for a full hour before 
 breakfast, since the rest of the day held for her no leisure 
 for exercise. Never was there anyone so acutely observant 
 as she, and at breakfast there would be some grotesque or 
 comic side-show of the streets for narration. Parks and 
 open places were of no use to her at all in those rambles; 
 Lambeth Walk, or the .humours of Covent Garden Mar- 
 ket were her diversion, and refreshed by these humours 
 she tackled her new and delightful day. Never by any 
 chance did she go out to lunch, but never by any chance 
 did we lunch en famille; guests were invariably there. 
 Even more to her mind were her dinner-parties, in the 
 selection and arrangement of which she took an infinity of 
 rapturous trouble, and the bigger they were the more I 
 think she enjoyed them. There was, of course, a great 
 deal of clerical entertainment, but half a dozen times in 
 the season she gave more secular dinner-parties of about 
 thirty guests, when literature and science, and art and 
 politics, and the great world magnificently assembled. 
 And when the last guest had gone, a piece of invariable 
 ritual was that she with any of us children who were at 
 home, executed a wild war-dance all over the drawing- 
 room in a sort of general jubilation. I remember Lord 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 167 
 
 Halsbury coming back unexpectedly to tell my mother 
 some story which he had forgotten to mention, and find- 
 ing us all at it. 
 
 But however full was the day, my mother seemed pos- 
 sessed of complete and unlimited leisure for talk with 
 any of us who wanted her. I can remember no occasion 
 on which she was too busy for a talk. Her letters could 
 wait; anything could wait, and she would slew round 
 from her writing-table, saying, "Hurrah! Oh, this is 
 nice !" She would listen alert and eager to some infinitesi- 
 mal problem, some critical observation, and say, "Now 
 tell me exactly why you think that. I don't agree at all. 
 Let's have it out." It seemed that nothing in the world 
 interested her nearly as much as the point in question, 
 and verily I believe that it was so. She projected her 
 whole self on to it: she desired nothing so much, just 
 then, as to put herself completely in your place, and 
 realize, before she formed an opinion of her own, pre- 
 cisely what your opinion was. Then invariably the magic 
 of her sympathy seized on any point with which she 
 agreed, "Quite so: I see that, yes I feel that," she would 
 say. "But how about this 1 ? Let me see if I can put it 
 to you." 
 
 It was no wonder that the closeness of her special, 
 particular relation to each of us was ever growing. The 
 primary desire of her heart was to give love : when it was 
 given her (and who ever had it in larger abundance 1 ?) 
 she welcomed and revelled in it, but her business above 
 all was to give. And her love was no soft indulgent 
 thing : there was even an austerity in its intenseness, and 
 it burned with that lambent quality, which was so char- 
 acteristic of her. Never was anyone so like a flame as she : 
 her light illuminated you, her ardour warmed and stimu- 
 
168 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 lated. Withal, there was never anyone who less resembled 
 a saint, for she was much too human to be anything of 
 the kind; she had no atom of asceticism in her, and with- 
 out being at all artistic she adored beauty. 
 
 Spiritual beauty came first, for she loved God more 
 than she loved any of His works, but how close to her 
 heart was intellectual beauty, things subtly and finely 
 observed, things humorously and delicately touched! 
 How, too, she hated spiritual ugliness, as expressed by 
 priggishness with regard to the Kingdom of Heaven, and 
 mental ugliness as expressed by conceit or narrowness, and 
 hardly less did she dislike physical ugliness. Her tones 
 would rise from a calmness which she found quite im- 
 possible to maintain, into a crescendo of violent emphasis 
 and capital letters as she said something to the following 
 effect : 
 
 "Yes, I know: I'm sure he's a very good man, and 
 that's so trying, because he is such a prig, and always 
 does his duty, and, my dear, that awful mouth, and the 
 Beautiful sentiments that come out of it. Besides he's 
 so Very, Very Plain !" 
 
 No one was ever more beset with human frailties. She 
 was afraid of getting stout, and in her diary recorded 
 solemn vows that she would not eat more than two dishes 
 at dinner, nor take sugar. Then came an entry, "Soup, 
 fish, pheasant and souffle. What a Pig I am!" . . . 
 Or again if she found herself in some difficulty, where a 
 precise statement of what had really occurred would make 
 things worse, she would say, "I shall have to be very 
 diplomatic about it," and a perfectly well justified chorus 
 went up from her irreverent family, "That means that 
 Ma's going to tell a lie about it." With all her intense 
 spirituality, she had no use for conventional worship, 
 
1 
 
 
 \ 
 
 
 ; i 
 
 
 : 
 
 "his grace" (a domestic caricature) 
 
 [Page 169 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 171 
 
 and I can hear her say, on an occasion when my father 
 was out, "We won't have prayers to-night for a treat." 
 Similarly she could never take any emotional interest 
 (and I think gave up trying) in Synods and Pan- Anglican 
 Conferences, and Bishops' meetings, though she knew 
 that her tepidity about these things that concerned my 
 father so intimately was a distress to him. But while he 
 drove on his fervent way along the roads of organization, 
 tradition, ritual and ecclesiastical practice, her religion 
 was on quite other lines : prayer and meditation were the 
 solitary methods of it, and in the world which she de- 
 lighted in, love and sympathy. And whatever she sought 
 for and gathered there, with all her own temptations and 
 fallings and new resolves, she brought with humble con- 
 fident hands and laid them at the feet of Christ. 
 
 Though the beauty of living and sentient beings — 
 whether in the region of the soul, the mind or the body — 
 made so irresistible an appeal to her, she never really 
 cared for the beauty of plants or trees or skies or scenery. 
 Just there a firm frontier-line was drawn round the terri- 
 tory of her real sympathies, and it accorded very fitly with 
 her lack of touch with mere organizations. Just as she 
 cared not two straws for the Pan-Anglican Conference, 
 yet delighted in the human members of it, so, when stand- 
 ing in front of the west fagade of, say Rheims Cathedral, 
 or looking across from the Riffel Alp to the Matterhorn, 
 her real attention would not be devoted to these silent 
 sublimities, but much rather to a cat blinking in the sun, 
 or a sparrow building in the eaves. Things must move 
 or think or form opinions or commit voluntary actions 
 to enchant her, and in the Swiss holidays which often 
 followed the end of the London season, I doubt if she ever 
 looked with eagerness or wonder at the Matterhorn, ex- 
 
172 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 cept on the day when she knew that one of her sons was 
 somewhere near the summit in the early morning. On 
 such another day her eye was glued with enthusiasm on 
 the Rothhorn because two of us were making the ascent, 
 but towards the Rothhorn in itself, or towards the wav- 
 ing of poplars, or the flame of a sunset, she never felt the 
 emotional heart-leap. Thus, when August in Switzerland 
 or elsewhere was over, the ensuing five months or so at 
 Addington, with its delights for us of shooting and riding 
 and all the genial thrill of country life, made no appeal 
 to her. As far as they affected us, she threw herself into 
 them, but at any moment, she would have chosen to be 
 in the swim and the thick of things again, and have taken 
 those early morning walks down the Lambeth Road with 
 the interest of fishshops and costermongers to enlighten 
 her, rather than walk under the flaming autumn beech 
 trees, or see the frail white children of the spring begin- 
 ning to prick through the thawing earth of January. 
 There had to be a beating heart in that which enchained 
 her; she could not bother about primroses. That may 
 have been a limitation, but such limitation as that merely 
 stored her force of sympathy and discernment towards 
 the rest. She did not attempt to let it dribble out in 
 exiguous channels, but conserved the whole vigour of it 
 for the supply of the mansions where her treasure and 
 her heart lay. In the country also, she was a far more 
 defenceless victim against the one strong foe of her 
 triumphal banners, and that foe was fear. 
 
 In real trouble, especially when the trouble was con- 
 cerned with those she loved best, she walked boldly; no 
 one faced the large sorrows and bereavements that fell 
 to her destiny with a more courageous front. The mag- 
 nitude called forth the faith which unwaveringly sup- 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 173 
 
 ported her, but when all seemed peaceful and prosperous, 
 she was often a prey to acute imaginative apprehensions. 
 She could not bear, for instance, to see us all start out 
 riding together, and when the announcement came that 
 the half-dozen of riding horses were at the front door, she 
 went back to her room on the other side of the house. 
 Certainly she had some slight basis for her feelings, for 
 among those steeds there was a bad bucker and a rearer. 
 None of the riders minded that in the slightest, and away 
 went the cavalcade at a violent gallop up the long slope 
 of turf in front of the house with "Braemar" in the shape 
 of a comma, and "Quentin" playing the piano in the air 
 with his forelegs, and "Ajax" kicking up behind, and 
 "Peggy" going sideways, just because my father had 
 mounted first and smacked "Columba" over the rump 
 while the rest of us were betwixt and between the gravel 
 and the saddle. There were hurdles stuck up on the 
 slope, and Braemer, shrilly squealing, bucked over the 
 first and Ajax ran out, and Peggy trod solemnly on the 
 top of one, and Quentin still hopping on his hind legs 
 refused and was whacked, and my father went pounding 
 on ahead as we rocketed after him. He was not a good 
 horseman, but he had no knowledge of fear, and, though 
 he avoided the hurdles, he went tobogganing down the 
 steep sides of Croham Hurst with Columba slipping and 
 sliding on the pebbles and putting her foot into rabbit 
 holes, while her rider with slack rein enjoyed it all enor- 
 mously. In the meantime my mother had dreadful visions 
 of two or three of us being brought back on hurdles, and 
 carried into the house. But exactly at that point her 
 essential courage knocked her nervousness on the head, 
 for she would not at any price have had any one of us 
 not go out riding. Only, she didn't want to see the st: ~ .. 
 
174 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 It was this vague fear that was her enemy all her life, 
 and it could pounce on any quarry. She did not really 
 believe that the corpses of her children were soon to be 
 brought back to her, any more than she really believed 
 that when my father had a bad cold, it was speedily to de- 
 velop into double pneumonia, but she was prey in imagi- 
 nation to these disastrous possibilities. Hardly ever did 
 she suffer under them as regards herself; once only do I 
 remember her conjuring up a personal spectre. On that 
 occasion she got the idea that she was going to die before 
 the end of the month, a prognostication which she un- 
 fortunately made public. Thereupon, as the days went 
 by, some one of her children hurried from the tea-table 
 every evening, and stood spectre-like in the corner of the 
 room, and in a sepulchral voice said, "Nine days now" : 
 or "Eight days now," until the fatal and last evening 
 of her prophetic intuition arrived. The "To-night" was 
 received with roars of laughter, and she was in brilliant 
 health and spirits next morning, when she ought to have 
 been a corpse. She laughed at her fears herself (which 
 is just the reason why I treat them humorously now) but, 
 for all her laughter, they were year after year a miserable 
 bugbear to her, mostly and mainly during the leisurely 
 months at Addington. Oftenest they were quite vague, 
 but couched to pounce on any excuse for definiteness : if 
 my father had a cold she would evoke the image of pneu- 
 monia, if he was tired she would conjure up visions of a 
 breakdown. She kept these groundless imaginings to her- 
 self, and no one could ever have guessed how often she 
 was a victim to them, or how heavily they rode her. They 
 did not, except quite occasionally, get between her and 
 ♦•he sunlight, for she forced them into the shadow, caught 
 t jm and shut them in cupboards, steadily and continu- 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 175 
 
 ally disowned them. And when any real trouble came 
 they haunted her no more ; she rose serene and faithful to 
 any great occasion, welcoming it almost, as she had done 
 with Martin's death, as a direct dealing from God, receiv- 
 ing it sacramentally. 
 
 I wonder if children ever ran so breathless a race in 
 pursuit of manifold interests and enjoyments as did we 
 in those years when our ages ranged from the early twen- 
 ties to the early teens, and the Christmas holidays in par- 
 ticular, brought us together. One year, about 1884, a 
 snowfall was succeeded by a week's frost, and that by 
 another week of icy fog, and the foggy week I look back 
 on as having given us the fullest scope of hazardous ac- 
 tivity in hopeless circumstances, for shooting and riding 
 were impossible. We made a toboggan-run which soon 
 became unmitigated ice, down a steep hill in the park 
 among Scotch firs that loomed dim and menacing through 
 the mist. Half-way down the hill, just where the pace 
 was swiftest, and the toboggan skidding most insanely, 
 grew one of these firs close to the track, and on the other 
 side was a bramble-bush. From the top you could not 
 see this gut at all, and with eyes peering agonizedly 
 through the thick air you waited for the appearance of 
 this opening somewhere ahead. Sometimes you saw so 
 late that the bramble-bush or the Scotch fir must inevit- 
 ably receive you, and there was just time to slide off 
 behind, be rolled on the hard glazed snow, and hear the 
 plunge of the toboggan in the bramble-bush, or its crash 
 against the Scotch fir. If you got through safely, a second 
 and more open slope succeeded and you pursued your 
 way across the path between the church and the house, 
 and bumped into the kitchen-garden fence. Bruised and 
 
176 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 unwearied we took the injured toboggans to the estate 
 carpenter, whose time at Christmas must have been chiefly 
 occupied with repairing these fractures, and played golf 
 over the nine holes which we had made along the slope 
 in front of the house, on the snow and in a fog. The 
 greens, which were about as large as tablecloths, had 
 been swept, and the boy who had the honour whacked his 
 ball in the conjectured direction, and ran like mad after 
 it. When he had found it, he shouted and his opponent 
 drove in the direction of his voice. If he sliced or pulled, 
 he too ran like mad in the conjectured direction; if he 
 drove straight his ball was probably marked by the first 
 driver. The thrillingest excitement was when, driving 
 first, you topped your ball or spouted it in the air, for 
 then you crouched as you heard the crack of the second 
 ball, which whizzed by you unseen. Football in the top 
 passage with bedroom doors for goals ushered in lunch 
 and after lunch we skated on dreadful skates called 
 "Acmes" or "Caledonians," which clipped themselves on 
 to the heels and soles of the boot, and came off and 
 slithered across the ice at the moment when you proposed 
 to execute a turn. Hugh despised my figure-skating (and 
 I'm sure I don't wonder) and christened himself a speed 
 skater. The pond was of no great extent and fringed on 
 one side by tall rhododendron thickets, into which he 
 crashed when unable to negotiate a corner. 
 
 The evening closing in early was the dawn of the in- 
 tellectual labours of the day. The Saturday Magazine 
 made frequent appearances, burgeoning like Aaron's rod 
 into miraculous blossom of prose and poetry: between- 
 whiles Arthur composed voluntaries to be played on the 
 organ in the chapel at prayers, Nellie studied the violin, 
 Hugh produced a marionette theatre, and wrote a highly 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 177 
 
 original play for it, called The Sandy Desert; or, Where 
 is the Archbishop? and Maggie made oil pictures of her 
 family of Persian cats. Once at least during Christmas 
 holidays we all jointly wrote a play : it was The Spiritual- 
 ist one year, in which there was a slashing exposure of 
 mediums; another year we dramatized The Rose and the 
 Ring in operatic form with original lyrics set to popular 
 tunes. With the exception of Nellie, our voices were 
 singularly inefficient and completely untrained, which 
 was part of the fun of it. To these plays the neigh- 
 bourhood was invited, and all the servants and lodge- 
 keepers formed a solid mass at the back. At one of them, 
 Arthur for some reason, must be disguised as a young 
 woman, six feet two high, with a yard or so of trousers 
 showing below the skirt. This impersonation made a 
 kitchen-maid laugh so hysterically, that the play had to 
 pause while she was taken out by two housemaids, and her 
 yells died away as she retreated down the back-stairs. 
 
 Life in those holidays was an orgy, celebrated in an 
 atmosphere of absolutely ceaseless argument and discus- 
 sion. Every question rose to boiling-point: for while 
 we regarded each other with strong and quite unsenti- 
 mental affection we were violently critical of each other. 
 We drew biting caricatures of my father going to sleep 
 after tea, of my mother keenly observant above and not 
 through her spectacles, of Hugh falling off Ajax, of any 
 ludicrous and humorous posture. But above all it was 
 writing that most enthralled us, and innumerable were 
 the quires of sermon-paper that yielded up their fair white 
 lives to our scribblings. These were now beginning to 
 enter a more professional arena than the Saturday Maga- 
 zine; Nellie, then at Lady Margaret's Hall in Oxford, 
 had, before she was twenty, published an article on 
 
178 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Crabbe in Temple Bar; Arthur, a year or two older, had 
 written his first book, Arthur Hamilton, in the form of 
 an imaginary memoir, and Maggie and I were in the 
 throes of a joint story, in which I can perceive the infancy 
 of a novel called Dodo. This was abandoned before com- 
 pletion, but in a moraine of forgotten dustinesses, I came 
 across some few pages of it the other day and really felt 
 that there was some notion in it, some conscious attempt 
 anyhow, to convey character by means of conversation 
 rather than by analysis, an achievement in the direction 
 of which, in spite of dispiriting results, I am still grubbing 
 away. There certainly, in that heap of ancient manu- 
 script fortuitously preserved, was the conscious striving 
 after psychical dialogue, in which the interlocutors re- 
 vealed themselves. Trivial as might be the personalities 
 revealed, the idea of the excited authors was to avoid 
 narrated analysis, and to convict and justify their char- 
 acters out of their own mouths. There was a crisis of 
 creativeness in the writing of it, for we firmly and de- 
 signedly intended that a certain middle-aged lady, at 
 whose feet everybody else fell flat in adoration of her 
 tact and her sympathy and her comprehension, should 
 "be" my mother. But, such is the waywardness of ideal- 
 istic portraiture, we found, about Chapter VI, that though 
 she was already supposedly installed on the throne of 
 tact and comprehension, before which everybody else 
 bowed the knee, she had not justified the part which we 
 had cast for her, for she really had said little more than 
 "I feel so deeply for you," or "Pass the mustard." We 
 were determined that she should reveal her incomparable 
 humanity by the sympathetic dialogues in which we en- 
 gaged her, but she was so tactful that she never said any- 
 thing at all that bore on the problems which were sub- 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 179 
 
 mitted to her. In the book to which I have alluded, she 
 certainly appears as "Mrs. Vivian," who, as may faintly 
 be remembered, is supposed to be possessed of super- 
 human tact and insight, taking painful situations with 
 calming and yet exhilarating effect. For the satisfaction 
 of the curious, it may be stated that Mrs. Vivian was the 
 one live model in the book and was completely unrecog- 
 nisable. When first we enthusiastically scribbled at its 
 earlier incarnation, my sister and I were at the ages of 
 nineteen and seventeen, and for the very reason, namely, 
 that we thought of my mother in our adoring limning 
 of her, the presentment is not only unlike her, but unlike 
 anybody at all. 
 
 We went to Addington for a few weeks at Easter, and 
 the sojourn then was, according to my mother, of the 
 nature of a picnic. As a matter of fact there was not 
 really anything very picnicky about it ; the drawing-room, 
 it is true, was not used, but we managed with the ante- 
 room, the Chinese room, the schoolroom, my father's 
 study and her own room, by way of sitting-rooms, and 
 perhaps part of the household remained at Lambeth. 
 But to her vivid sense, to her delight of using all things 
 to the utmost, this constituted a very informal way of 
 life, for when she was running a house, everything must 
 be, in its own scale, spick-and-span and complete. You 
 might, for instance, dine on bread and cheese and a glass 
 of beer, but the cheese must be the best cheese, the bread 
 of the crispest, and the beer must be brimmed with froth. 
 Short of completeness and perfection, whatever your 
 scale was, you were roughing it, you were picnicking. She 
 did not at all dislike picnicking, but It Was picnicking, 
 and why not say so? For herself, with her passion for 
 people (like Dr. Johnson she thought that one green field 
 
180 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 was like another green field, and would prefer a walk 
 down Fleet Street) she would sooner have stopped in Lon- 
 don, but my father needed this break in the six months of 
 his busy London life. But to his volcanic energy and 
 vitality, such a holiday was of the nature of a compulsion 
 and a medicine rather than an enjoyment. In the long 
 run he was refreshed by it, but the getting out of the 
 shafts was always trying to him, and usually resulted in 
 a fit of depression, such as I have described before. When 
 he was very hard worked, he never suffered from this; 
 it was when he was obliged to rest that these irritable 
 glooms descended on him, and I particularly connect 
 them, during these years, with the Easter holiday. All 
 the time, as he once told me when talking of them, he 
 would be struggling and agonizing to get his head out of 
 those deep waters, but was unable to until the nervous 
 reaction had spent itself, and the pendulum swung back 
 again. By now we children had begun to understand that, 
 and though this mood of his was a damper on mirth and 
 generally an awful bore, we no longer feared him when 
 he was like that but "carried on," very sorry for him, 
 and sincerely hoping he would be better next day. The 
 person who felt it most was undoubtedly my mother : he 
 was miserable and she knew it, and knew the pathos of 
 his futile strivings to get rid of it, and her picnic was a 
 melancholy and anxious one till that cloud lifted. Often, 
 however, she and my father went to Florence for Easter, 
 where they stayed with Lady Crawford at the Villa Pal- 
 mieri, and of all the holiday sojournings it was that which 
 he enjoyed most keenly. He was absolutely indefatig- 
 able where churches or sacred art were concerned, because 
 of the cause which had inspired painter and architect. 
 To him the achievement for which the architect builded, 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 181 
 
 the sculptor chiselled, the musicians composed, and the 
 artist painted, must be the palpable and direct service 
 of God, and just as he would gaze in genuine rapture at 
 a second-rate Madonna, whereas a portrait or even a 
 Primavera would leave him cold, so, without any knowl- 
 edge or appreciation of music he would listen to Handel's 
 Messiah, while a Wagner opera, or a symphony by 
 Beethoven, had he ever listened or heard such, would have 
 been meaningless to him. Of ecclesiastical architecture, 
 again, its periods or its characteristics, he had a profound 
 knowledge, but whether a house was Elizabethan or 
 Georgian was a matter of much smaller interest to him. 
 He did not truly care, to put it broadly, who built a 
 column and when and how, or painted a picture and when 
 and how, so long as those monuments of art were only 
 directed towards human and aesthetic enjoyment. The 
 natural works of God, the woods at Addington, the moun- 
 tain ranges of Switzerland, he admiringly loved as being 
 in themselves direct divine expressions, but if the work 
 of man insinuated itself, he liked it in proportion as 
 it was religious in its aims. 
 
 One exception he made, and that was in favour of 
 Greek and Roman antiquities and the language of the 
 classics, and I am sure he enjoyed making a translation 
 of some English poem into Virgilian hexameters or 
 Sophoclean iambics fully as much as he enjoyed the origi- 
 nal version. Latin and Greek, especially Greek, were to 
 him only a little below the Pentecostal tongues: of all 
 human achievements they were the noblest flowers. To 
 him a classical education was the only education : he rated 
 a boy's abilities largely by his power to translate and to 
 imitate classical lore, and to wander himself in these 
 fields was his chiefest intellectual recreation. He loved 
 
182 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 to unpack, so to speak, some Greek word compounded 
 with prepositions, and insist on the value of each, over- 
 loading the dissected members of it with meanings that 
 never conceivably entered into the mind of its author, and 
 his own style in weighed and deliberate composition was 
 founded on the model of these interpretations; the 
 sentences were overloaded with meanings beyond what 
 the language could bear; he packed his phrases till they 
 creaked. But highest of all in the beloved language, with 
 a great gulf fixed below it and above the masterpieces of 
 classical literature, came the New Testament, which he 
 studied and interpreted to us as under a microscope. That 
 eager reverence was like a lover's adoration : his interpre- 
 tations might be fanciful, and such as he would never 
 have made in any other commentings, but here his search 
 for hidden meanings in simple phrases had just that 
 quality of tender and exquisite scrutiny. The subject of 
 this study was his life, and the smallest of its details must 
 be searched out, and squeezed to yield a drop more of 
 sacred essence. . . . On any other topic he would have 
 criticized the Hellenistic Greek, as falling far below 
 classical standards, but, as it was, he accepted it as verb- 
 ally inspired, and no enquiry was too minute. Rather 
 curiously, collations of differing texts did not engage 
 him, nor did he touch on Higher Criticism. The text of 
 his own Greek Testament was all that concerned him, 
 there was the whole matter, and on to it he turned the 
 full light of his intellect and his enthusiasm, without 
 criticism but minutely and lovingly poring over it, as it 
 actually and traditionally was. 
 
 From Monday morning until Saturday night these 
 weeks at Addington, especially at Christmas, were to us 
 a whirl of delightful activities from the moment that 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 183 
 
 chapel service and Bible lesson were over in the morning, 
 till evening service at ten o'clock at night. But Sunday 
 was a day set so much apart from the rest that it hardly 
 seemed to belong to Addington at all. There was early 
 communion in the chapel, unless it was celebrated after 
 the eleven o'clock service in church; morning service in 
 church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family 
 walk during which my father read George Herbert to us; 
 the walk was succeeded by a Bible reading with him, and 
 then came tea. After tea was evening service in church, 
 and after Sunday supper, he read the Pilgrim's Progress 
 aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up inter- 
 vals we might read certain Sunday books, the more ma- 
 ture successors of Bishop Heber and The Rocky Island 
 and Agathos. No shoal of relaxation emerged from the 
 roaring devotional flood ; if at meals the conversation be- 
 came too secular, it was brought back into appropriate 
 channels; there was even a set of special graces before 
 and after meals to be used on Sunday, consisting of short 
 versicles and responses quite bewildering to any guest 
 staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were 
 played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf 
 entailed no labour on the part of servants. However 
 fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no toboggan that day 
 made its perilous descent, and though the pond might be 
 spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on 
 the Day of Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly 
 to this prohibition on reasonable relaxation, became a 
 day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like "ducks and 
 drakes," from one religious exercise to another, relent- 
 lessly propelled. 
 
 To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely de- 
 votional mind, this strenuous Sunday was a time of re- 
 
184 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 freshment. It is perfectly true that he often went to 
 sleep in church, and if on very hot Sundays, the walk 
 was abandoned, and we read aloud in turns from some 
 saintly chronicle, under the big cedar on the lawn, not 
 only he, but every member of the family, except the 
 reader (we read in turn), went to sleep too. But he dozed 
 off to the chronicle of St. Francis and came back to it 
 again; nothing jarred. Thus ordered, Sunday was a per- 
 fect day for one of his temperament; no work was done 
 on it, no week-day breeze ruffled its devotional stillness, 
 but his appreciation of it postulated that all of us should 
 share to the full in its spiritual benefits. He did not be- 
 lieve that for himself Sunday could be spent more profit- 
 ably, and so we were all swept, regardless of its private 
 effect on us, into the tide. What he did not allow for 
 was that on other temperaments, that which so aptly ful- 
 filled the desires of his own produced a totally different 
 impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing bore- 
 dom and unutterable fatigue. Certain humorous gleams 
 occasionally relieved the darkness, as when the devil 
 entered into me on one occasion when Lives of the Saints 
 came to me by rotation, for reading aloud. There was 
 the serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar, posi- 
 tively gilding the tennis court, there was the croquet lawn 
 starving for the crack of balls, and there too, underneath 
 the cedar was my somnolent family, Hugh with swoony 
 eyes, laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie primly and 
 decorously listening, their eyelids closed, like Miss 
 Matty's, because they listened better so, and my father, 
 for whom and by whom this treat was arranged, with head 
 thrown back and mouth nakedly open. . . . And then 
 came Satan, or at least Puck. ... I read four lines of 
 the page to which we had penetrated, then read a few 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 185 
 
 sentences out of the page that had already been read. 
 Deftly and silently, but keeping a prudent finger in the 
 proper place, I turned over a hundred pages, and droned 
 a paragraph about a perfectly different saint. Swiftly 
 turning back I read some few lines out of the introduction 
 to the whole volume, and then, sending prudence to the 
 winds, found the end of the chapter on which we were 
 engaged. I gave them a little more about St. Catherine 
 of Siena, a little more from the introduction, then in case 
 anyone happened to be awake read the concluding sen- 
 tences of the chapter about St. Francis and stopped. 
 
 The cessation of voice caused Nellie to awake, and with 
 an astounding hypocrisy, subsequently brought home to 
 her, she exclaimed: 
 
 "Oh, how interesting!" 
 
 Her voice aroused my father. There we all were sit- 
 ting under the cedar, reading about St. Francis. Hugh 
 had awoke, Maggie had awoke: it was a peaceful de- 
 votional Sunday afternoon. 
 
 "Wonderful !" he said. "Is that the end, Fred?" 
 
 "Yes, that's all," said Fred. 
 
 Fred was also a passive actor in another Sunday 
 humour. My father had noticed in me a certain restless- 
 ness at readings, some twitching of the limbs at a Bible 
 lesson, or whatnot, and in order to confirm me in the 
 right practice of the day, had looked out a book in his 
 library about Sunday, which he recommended me to read, 
 without having sufficiently ascertained the contents of it 
 himself. Judge of my rapture when I found a perfectly 
 convincing chapter, showing how the sad, joyless, unre- 
 laxed English Sunday was purely an invention of Puri- 
 tan times. My father had given me the book to convince 
 me of the antique sanctity of the Addington use: the 
 
186 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 book told me that from the patristic times onwards, no 
 such idea of Sunday as we religiously practised had ever 
 entered into the heads of Christians, or had ever dawned 
 on the world until the sourness of Puritans robbed the 
 day of its traditional joy. It had been a day of festa, of 
 relaxation from the tedious round of business, and all the 
 faithful dressed themselves in their best clothes for fun, 
 and village sports were held, and hospitality enlivened 
 the drab week. Sure enough they went to church in the 
 morning, and after that abandoned themselves to jollity. 
 With suppressed giggles I flew to my mother's room to 
 tell her the result of this investigation, and she steered a 
 course so wonderful that not even then could I chart it. 
 Her sympathetic amusement I knew was all mine, but 
 somehow she abandoned no whit of her loyalty to my 
 father's purpose in giving me the book. I had imagined 
 myself (with rather timorous glee, for which I wanted her 
 support) pronouncing sentence on his Sunday upon the 
 very evidence which he had given me to judge it by, but 
 some consummate stroke of tact on my mother's part made 
 all that to be quite out of the question. How she did it I 
 have no idea, but surely the very test of tact lies in the 
 fact that yoi. don't know how it is done. Tact explained 
 ceases to be tact, and degenerates into reason on the one 
 hand or futility on the other. Certainly I never con- 
 fronted my father with this evidence, and Sunday went 
 on precisely as usual. Sometimes Hugh and I played 
 football in the top passage, but you mightn't kick hard 
 for fear of detected reverberations through the skylight 
 of the central hall. 
 
 There is a play by some Italian dramatist, which I 
 once saw Duse act: perhaps it is by D'Annunzio, but I 
 
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 187 
 
 cannot identify it. In the second act anyhow, the cur- 
 tain went up on Duse, alone on the stage. She wrote a 
 letter, she put some flowers in a vase without speech, 
 and still without speech, she opened a window at the 
 back, and leaned out of it. She paused long with her 
 back to the audience, and then turning round again said, 
 half below her breath, "Aprile." After that the action 
 of the play proceeded but not till, in that long pause and 
 that one word, she had given us the magic of spring. 
 . . . Not otherwise, but just so, were those Addington 
 holidays, when I was sixteen and seventeen, my April, 
 and thus the magic of spring in those seasons of Christ- 
 mas and Easter and September came to me. Bulbs and 
 seeds buried in my ground began to spike the earth, and 
 the soft buds and leaves to burst their woolly sheaths. 
 It was the time for the rooting up, in that spring-garden- 
 ing, of certain weeds; it was the time also of planting 
 the seedlings which should flower later, and of grafting 
 fresh slips on to a stem that was forming fibre in the place 
 of soft sappy shoots. Above all it was the time of re- 
 ceiving more mature and indelible impressions, and there 
 is scarcely anything which in later life I have loved or 
 hated, or striven for or avoided that is not derivable from 
 some sprig of delight or distaste planted during those 
 seasons of first growth. Childhood and earlier boyhood 
 were more of a greenhouse, where early growths were 
 nurtured in a warmed windlessness ; now they were 
 pricked out and put in the beds, where they had to learn 
 the robustness which would make them resist the inclem- 
 encies of a less sheltered life. Some died, scorched by the 
 sun or battered by the rain ; the rest, I suppose, had enough 
 vitality to make sun and rain alike serve their growth. 
 Above all it was the time of learning to enjoy, no longer 
 
188 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 in the absolutely unreflective manner of a child, but in a 
 manner to some extent reasoned and purposed. Some 
 kind of philosophy, some conscious digestive process be- 
 gan to stir below mere receptivity. I looked not only at 
 what the experiences with which I fed the lusty appetites 
 of life were at the moment, but at the metabolism they 
 would undergo when I had eaten them. But of all mental 
 habits then forming, the one for which I most bless those 
 lovely years, was the habit of enjoyment, of looking for 
 (and finding) in every environment some pleasure and 
 interest. That habit, no doubt, with all our games, our 
 collections, our scribblings had long been churned at: 
 about now it solidified. And by far the most active and 
 assiduous of external agencies that caused this— the dairy- 
 maid, so to speak, who was never weary of this magnifi- 
 cent churning — was my mother. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 
 
 THE dreadful "season of snows and sins" was already 
 beginning to approach again: in other words more 
 scholarship examinations at Oxford and Cambridge began 
 to pile their fat clouds on the horizon. These were the 
 snows : the sins were my own in not taking any intelligent 
 interest in the subjects which would make them "big with 
 blessing." Certainly I had been sent to school to learn 
 Latin and Greek among other things, but the other things 
 were so vastly more interesting. I was usually about 
 tenth in any form where I happened to be, and I remem- 
 ber a very serious letter from my father (after a series 
 of consecutive tenths) saying that he had always observed 
 that boys who were about tenth, could always do much 
 better if they chose : boys lower in a form were those who 
 often tried very hard, but were deficient in ability. I do 
 not think I was so diabolically minded as to consider this 
 a reason for doing worse, but certainly I declined from 
 that modest eminence where boys who could do better 
 pleasantly sunned themselves, and sank half a dozen 
 places lower. By one of those wonderful coincidences 
 which from time to time nourish starving optimists, it 
 so happened that in the summer of 1884 an unusually 
 large number of the sixth left school, and thus seventeen 
 promotions were made out of the fifth form, the very last 
 of which consisted of myself. With all the dignity and 
 
 189 
 
190 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 decoration of sixth form upon me, I had somehow justi- 
 fied my existence again, and the stigma of being seven- 
 teenth was swallowed up in the glory of being in the 
 sixth. I had a study of my own, instead of being one 
 of a herd in a classroom. I could make small boys fill 
 my brewing kettle for me and run errands, and I could, 
 without incurring criticism, wear my cap at the back of 
 my head. 
 
 Something, I fancy, in an address which the headmaster 
 gave to the new sixth form at the beginning of the Sep- 
 tember term, was said about duties and responsibilities: 
 if it was, it must have rebounded out of one ear without 
 penetration. For the average schoolboy is, I believe, 
 waterproof to such suggestions, if they come from with- 
 out : he will get his idea of his duties and responsibilities 
 purely from his own instinct, or rather from the collective 
 instinct of his contemporaries, and his notion of proper 
 behaviour in himself and others is practically entirely 
 built on what he and they consider to be "good form." 
 These commandments are the most elusive and variable of 
 decalogues, but usually wholesome, and completely auto- 
 cratic. Immorality, for instance, at that time was bad 
 form, though language which would have blistered the 
 paint off a sewer, was perfectly permissible, if you wished 
 to indulge in it : bullying was hopelessly beyond the pale, 
 gambling and drinking, which figure so menacingly in 
 those lurid histories designed to make mothers tremble for 
 their innocent lambs, were absolutely unthought of. We 
 (the sixth form generally) were a set of genial and 
 energetic pagans, caring most of all for each other, next 
 for games, but doing quite a decent amount of work; in- 
 deed, it was rather the fashion, and became more so, to 
 be industrious in certain well-defined patches. 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 191 
 
 Nobody took the very slightest interest in such subjects 
 as French or mathematics, and considering the way in 
 which they were taught, it would have been truly remark- 
 able if we had. An aged man, mumbling to himself, 
 wrote out equations and made pictures of Euclidian prop- 
 osition on a blackboard, apparently for his own amuse- 
 ment, without any reference to his audience. When he 
 had had enough of it, he told us to close all books, and 
 write out the proposition he had demonstrated. Some- 
 times you could, sometimes you couldn't, and if you 
 couldn't very, frequently, you had to do it twice and show 
 it up next school. If the aged man remembered to ask 
 for it, you had forgotten to do it, but usually he forgot 
 too. But what it was all about was a blank mystery, until 
 it became necessary to find out, because elementary Euclid 
 and algebra formed a part of the Oxford and Cambridge 
 certificate examination. When that approached, we put 
 our heads together and found out for ourselves. 
 
 French was equally hopeless : once a week we prepared 
 a couple of pages of some French history for the head- 
 master. Whatever French he knew he certainly did not 
 impart: of the spoken language I had picked up enough 
 abroad to be aware that he would have been practically 
 unintelligible to a Frenchman. I believe that both these 
 subjects were admirably taught on the modern side; on 
 the classical side the study of them was a mere farce. 
 But at Latin and Greek we worked quite reasonably and 
 intelligently: it was "good form" to take an interest in 
 them, and it was not thought the least odd if somebody 
 was found reading the Apology of Socrates (in a transla- 
 tion) out of school hours, though it had nothing to do 
 with class-work, or that I treasured a piece of white mar- 
 
192 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ble which my sister Nellie on a foreign tour had picked 
 up on the Acropolis. 
 
 The real interest of life centred in "the Alley," a pas- 
 sage running above a couple of classrooms in the school 
 buildings, out of which on each side opened minute studies 
 inhabited by sixth-form in-college boys. Some of these 
 were double studies shared by two occupants, but most 
 were single; inviolable castles if the owner chose to shut 
 the door. Inside there was room for a table, a hanging 
 bookcase, and perhaps three chairs if you sat close; but 
 who would dream of measuring Paradise by cubic con- 
 tents? Never surely was there a more harmonious de- 
 mocracy, and it was seldom that doors were shut; the in- 
 habitants, unless tied to their books, drifted up and down 
 and round and round like excited bubbles in some loqua- 
 cious backwater. Within the limits of "good form" every 
 freedom of action and opinion was allowed, and those 
 limits were really very reasonable ones. It must not be 
 supposed that "good form" was ever discussed at all: it 
 was merely the unwritten, unspoken code, which held 
 things together, and undoubtedly the gravest offense 
 against it was a hint of condescension or superiority. If 
 you were so fortunate as to get into the school fifteen 
 or achieve any distinction, "the Alley" pooled the credit, 
 and woe be to any who showed "side" to the Alleyites. 
 If you liked (hardly anybody did) to be extremely neat 
 in dress, to get yourself up to kill, to wear buttonholes, 
 you were perfectly at liberty to do so; but if you showed 
 the least "swank" over your rosebud, the witnesses of 
 your enormity would probably stroll thoughtfully away 
 and return embellished with dandelions and groundsel. 
 That was sarcasm, popularly called "sarc," and was a 
 weapon ruthlessly employed towards the superior per- 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 193 
 
 son. No one could stand a conspiracy of "sarc" for long: 
 it was better to mend your ways and reduce your swollen 
 head. Only one member of the Alley was ever known 
 to resist a continual course of "sarc," and he, poor fellow, 
 was goaded by the shafts of love, for he adored to dis- 
 traction one of the masters' daughters who appeared un- 
 aware of his existence. This was unusual conduct, but 
 he was at liberty to squander emotion on her if he wished ; 
 what roused the Alley to arms, so that they loaded them- 
 selves with "sarc," as with hand grenades, was that he 
 affected to despise all who were not enslaved by some 
 pretty-faced maiden. Then, as was right, he found hair- 
 pins mysteriously appearing on his carpet, and heard his 
 Christian name called in faint girlish falsetto from a 
 neighbouring study, and discovered notes with passionate 
 declarations of love and a wealth of suggestive allusions 
 that I would no longer "pollewt" my pen with describ- 
 ing nestling in his coat-pocket. But such was the innate 
 depravity of his amorous heart that he really didn't seem 
 to mind the most withering "sarc." . . . Games were 
 not compulsory in the sixth, and in consequence, though 
 athletes were in the majority, athleticism was no longer 
 automatic, and now a boy would suffer no loss of esteem, 
 or offend any sense of decency, if he chose not to play any 
 game whatever. A wide tolerance for your fellows was 
 the first lesson of the Alley; liberty, equality, and fra- 
 ternity were its admirable guides to life. 
 
 Next year, when, by another intervention of Provi- 
 dence, I suddenly found myself head of my house, with 
 a magnificent apartment next the bathroom for my habi- 
 tation, the snowstorm of scholarship examinations burst 
 over me. For a suitable inducement in the shape of a 
 scholarship or exhibition, I was prepared to go to New, 
 
194 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Magdalen, or Worcester at Oxford, or to King's College, 
 Cambridge; but not a single one of these ancient (or shall 
 we say antiquated?) seats of learning would, after exam- 
 ining me, put their hands in their pockets in order to 
 secure me. I was very busy at the time, for I was editing 
 The Marlburian and conducting the school "Penny Read- 
 ings," and playing football for them and rackets, and not 
 being able to find time for everything I let my school- 
 work slide altogether and, when the depressing results 
 came out, bore failure with admirable fortitude. In other 
 words, I did not care at all; if anything, I was rather 
 pleased, because I began dimly to conceive the possibility 
 of being allowed to stop at school for an extra year, 
 whereas I should normally have left in the summer. But 
 Marlborough was now to me the most amiable of dwell- 
 ings; there were friends there whom I could not bear the 
 thought of parting with ; there were schemes that I could 
 not bear to leave unfulfilled, and I directed all the in- 
 genuity of which I was capable to secure my remaining 
 here for an unheard-of year longer. From being re- 
 signed to failure I passed, as my plans matured, into being 
 enraptured with it. A false step, a misplaced interview, 
 might spell ruin, and after much thought I went to the 
 headmaster with a homily all about myself. It was clear 
 that I had not attained a decent standard of scholarship 
 yet ; surely my coming years at the University would be 
 more profitable if I was better prepared to take advantage 
 of them*? My father was bent on my having a career of 
 some distinction there, and would not he be far more 
 likely to find his ambitions for me realized if I made 
 there the better start that another year at school would 
 give me? Another year now of undiluted classics. . . . 
 This scheme enlisted his sympathy, and he said he 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 195 
 
 would talk to my house-master about it, who might not, 
 however, want to keep me in such august seniority. But 
 as to that I had no doubt whatever, for this gentleman 
 had only just come to the house, and his seat in the saddle 
 was at present remarkably uncertain. He used to ask 
 members of the sixth, and in especial the head of the 
 house, to go the rounds for him when it was the hour for 
 him to parade the dormitories at night ; he would do any- 
 thing to shirk disciplinary contact if a senior member of 
 the house could accomplish this for him. No senior mem- 
 ber of the house felt the slightest nervousness at what so 
 terrified the house-master: we visited the dormitories, sat 
 on a bed here and there, talking to friends, helped a strag- 
 gler who had not finished a construing lesson for the 
 morning, and eventually went back to the house-master's 
 room to say good night and report that all was well. 
 Then he gave you a slice of cake, and tried to conceal his 
 pipe, and hoped that nobody in the house smoked (which, 
 as a matter of fact, they didn't), and everything was 
 very pleasant and comfortable. The house was behaving 
 quite well, because prefects and senior boys had it well 
 in hand ; but if I left, my successor as head of the house 
 was bound to be a very mild, spectacled youth, and, with- 
 out conceit, I felt sure that my house-master would prefer 
 to keep me, who during this last year had managed it 
 quite nicely for him. His attitude came off according 
 to plan, and we had quite an affecting interview. 
 
 Then came the clincher to this careful spade-work, and 
 I got both him and the headmaster to write to my father 
 urging him to allow me to stop another year, not only 
 for my own good (interview A), but for the well-being 
 of the house (interview B). The double appeal was suc- 
 cessful : it was settled that I should stay for another year, 
 
196 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 and then go up to King's College, Cambridge. As I 
 would be over nineteen when the next scholarship exam- 
 ination came round, I was ineligible on account of ad- 
 vanced age, and thus, while the snowstorms were next 
 vexing my contemporaries, I should sit serene and calm 
 on the sunny slopes of antiquity. I had no notion of 
 using this extra year of life (for so it appeared then) for 
 idle or unedifying purposes. I meant to work hard at sub- 
 jects that would eventually "tell." I meant also, with 
 a suspicion of priggishness, to make the house streak a 
 meteor-like path across the starry sky of school. We were 
 going to be a model of enlightenment (this was the am- 
 bition) ; we were to win the racket house-cup, and the 
 fives cup, and the gymnasium cup, and the football cup, 
 and the singing cup (for, like the Meistersingers, every 
 house competed in singing), and two vocal quartettes, 
 triumphantly performed, gave a fifth challenge cup. 
 There it was — forty boys were to be drilled into win- 
 ning every event of this immense pentathlon. A sixth 
 cup, possibly within the range, was the cricket cup; but 
 in the matter of cricket the house generally was no more 
 than a company of optimistic amateurs. The other five 
 cups seemed within the limits of probable achievement, 
 and who knew but that a breezy eleven, rather ignorant 
 of cricket, except for the presence of the best left-hand 
 bowler in the school, might not effect some incredible 
 miracle*? Never has anybody's head been so stuffed 
 full of plans as was mine when I went back a year later 
 than was reasonable for this series of inconceivable ex- 
 citements. 
 
 The head of the school this year was Eustace Miles. 
 We had already been great friends for many terms, and 
 now this friendship ripened into a unique alliance; from 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 197 
 
 morning till night we were together, and seethed in proj- 
 ects, failures and accomplishments. There was no sport 
 or industry in which we were not associated. No mat- 
 ter came up within the jurisdiction of either of us in 
 which each did not consult the other. He was going up 
 for a classical scholarship at King's, Cambridge, for we 
 had quite settled not to have done with each other when 
 school was over. I had to get to learn some classics some- 
 how, and so together we concocted the most delightful 
 plan, namely, that we should neither of us do any French, 
 mathematics, or history, but should be excused coming 
 into school altogether while such lessons were in progress, 
 devoting ourselves in the privacy of our studies to classics. 
 The headmaster most sensibly saw and sanctioned our 
 point, and consequently we had a whole holiday one day 
 a week, and on two other days only one hour in school. 
 For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, tfi \ c brows- 
 ing at will in Attic and Roman pastures, gave me pre- 
 cisely all I had lacked before; the two dead languages 
 stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the sinews 
 and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, 
 and the winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon 
 them. Four years ago Beesly had awakened in me the 
 sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but not till now had 
 the flame spread to the language. That for me had 
 always smouldered and smoked under the damp of gram- 
 mar and accents; now, when I could learn as I chose, it 
 flared up. Prosody and inflexions, moods and cases, all 
 that was tedious to acquire, need no longer be learned by 
 rule ; the knowledge of rules began to dawn on me mere- 
 ly by incessantly coming across examples of them, and 
 I began to learn under the tuition of admiration. The 
 same thrilled interest invaded Latin also, and it was no 
 
198 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 longer what could be made of the languages in English 
 that attracted me, but what they were in themselves. 
 Such study did not lead to accurate scholarship, but it 
 gave me what was of much greater value to one who did 
 not mean to spend his life in editing school-books, namely, 
 an inkling of the infinite flexibility of language and joy 
 in the cadences of words, while from the scholastic stand- 
 point it added the stimulus which enabled me not to re- 
 main at Cambridge such a hopeless dunce at classics as I 
 had hitherto always been. All the teaching I had ever 
 received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as 
 I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never 
 been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier 
 grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with 
 gerunds and optatives. . . . With that illumination a 
 great lig^* shone on English also: in the galloping race 
 of composition at home I, at any rate, had much preferred 
 to run than to read, but now I plunged headlong into 
 the sea of English literature, reading fast, reading care- 
 lessly, but reading rapturously. I bought the six-volume 
 edition of Browning out of the money I won over school- 
 fives, which should have been devoted to the purchase of 
 a silver cup; a successful competition in rackets landed 
 the works of Dickens, and in the hours when I should 
 naturally have done mathematics and French and history, 
 these shared with Juvenal and Aristophanes the honey of 
 the flying minutes. Then came the need to imitate which 
 always besets the budding author, and if you searched in 
 the proper pages of The Marlburian you would surely 
 disinter some specimens that aimed at Addison and 
 stanzas which could never have found their printer, had 
 there not been in my study a well-thumbed copy of 
 Tennyson's early lyrics. 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 199 
 
 There was another by-road for the literary pilgrim: 
 four of us were joint editors, producers, and proprietors of 
 that school paper. Who the two others were I have no 
 idea; it is certain that Eustace and I wrote the greater 
 part of it, and that, with some fine journalistic flair, he, 
 and he alone, caused it to pour money into the pockets of 
 its four editors. Domestically he knew something about 
 printing and pulls and proofs, which had escaped the ex- 
 perience of his friend and the family printing press, 
 and that year The Marlburian, as I hope it is now, was 
 a paying concern. Eustace interviewed an astonished 
 tradesman, paid the printing bills, audited the accounts, 
 and flowed back to his collaborators a Pactolus of large 
 silver pieces. We wrote indignant letters signed "A 
 Parent," and answered them with withering rejoinders 
 signed "Another Parent" ; we invented abuses, and firmly 
 denied them; we cut down the habitual drowsy accounts 
 of house matches to the smallest paragraphs and spread 
 a table of Socratic dialogue, proving that football was 
 the same as cricket and that masters were the slaves of 
 boys; or imagined that a hundred years hence a frag- 
 ment of "The Princess" was dug up and edited and 
 amended by Dry-as-Dust; or recommended the school 
 generally, when a two-mile run was ordered by the foot- 
 ball captain of their houses, to buy a hoop and bowl it 
 along the road, in order to enliven the stupid act of 
 purposeless running. In this latter point we set the 
 example ourselves and bowled nice wooden hoops down 
 the Bath road, thereby for some reason infuriating the 
 staff of masters. Once, I remember, Eustace and I, 
 going out for a run with our hoops, passed the open door 
 of a class-room at an hour when the lower school was 
 at work, on which a demented master sent out two junior 
 
200 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 boys with orders to capture the hoops and bring them 
 in to him. Now, there was nothing immoral about hoops, 
 nor was there any school rule that forbade their employ- 
 ment, and so we went very briskly along down the Bath 
 road for a mile or two, with two small boys in pursuit, 
 and when they could run no longer we sat down on a gate. 
 They panted up, and said they had been told to take 
 away the hoops and bring them back to Mr. Sharpe, and 
 so, very politely, we said, "Come and take them." 
 Naturally they could make no serious attempt to take 
 away the hoops of the head of the school and the captain 
 of the Rugby fifteen, and so, after a little conversation, 
 we all came back together. It was all very silly, but why 
 did Mr. Sharpe send two small boys to take away the 
 hoops of two big boys who happened to choose to bowl 
 hoops ? We soon got tired of the habit, but it was great 
 fun to write indignant letters to The Marlburian about 
 hoops signed "Magister," and scathing replies signed 
 "Discipulus." It made excellent selling stuff for the 
 paper, and boys who had never dreamed of buying a 
 Marlburian before put their threepence down with a 
 spendthrift recklessness, because they knew that there was 
 a correspondence about hoops, with plenty of "sarc" in 
 it. There were real letters as well from dignified Old 
 Marlburians, beginning "Has it come to this 1 ?" . . . 
 
 To all these entrancing topics the editors gave their 
 serious consideration. They herded together for con- 
 sultation, and rejected each other's contributions with 
 suave impartiality, and when they had settled what they 
 wished to print, Eustace measured it, and usually said 
 that there was too much. If it was all very precious a 
 double number (price sixpence) was decreed; if not, a 
 Socratic dialogue or some trifle of that kind was cut out. 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 201 
 
 Three out of the four would be very complimentary to 
 the baffled author, and assure him that they found his 
 contribution most amusing, and if that did not soothe the 
 rejection of it, they would grow more candid, and say 
 it was beastly rot. When that was disposed of there 
 might perhaps be a few inches of column to spare, and 
 we inserted an advertisement that a sixth form boy was 
 willing to exchange his hoop (nearly new) for a set of 
 false teeth. Luckily someone remembered that a mathe- 
 matical master had false teeth, and would be liable to 
 think that this was "sarc" directed at' him, and some 
 answers to non-existent correspondents were put in in- 
 stead. By that time the cake would be finished and 
 the teapot dry, and Eustace took the MSS. to the print- 
 ers, and I went to conduct a rehearsal of Haydn's 
 Symphony for the approaching Penny Reading, and ask 
 Harry Irving what he was going to recite at it. 
 
 These Penny Readings which took place once a term 
 were an entirely delightful institution. Qui docebant 
 jam docentur, as the Carmen told us, for the whole of this 
 musical and dramatic entertainment was got up, rehearsed 
 (to whatever stage of efficiency), conducted and per- 
 formed by boys without any help from masters. There 
 were piano solos, part-songs, vocal solos or duets, and 
 perhaps some reading or representation, say, of the trial 
 scene in Pickwick. But this year the Penny Readings in- 
 cluded grim and finished recitations by Harry Irving, who 
 "drew" in a manner so unprecedented, that instead of 
 holding them in the "Bradleian," a hall of but moderate 
 dimensions, Upper School itself, capable of holding the 
 entire body of boys and masters, had to be requisitioned. 
 It fell to my lot to conduct the musical part of the en- 
 tertainment, and this year we audaciously rehearsed and 
 
202 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 performed Haydn's Toy Symphony, in which, for a spe- 
 cial treat, we allowed Mr. Bambridge to play the cuckoo. 
 There he sat, rapturously cheered as he mounted to the 
 platform with his little wooden tube, lean and grave with 
 a steady eye fixed on the conductor's baton. It had been 
 arranged that the cuckoo, otherwise so obedient and punc- 
 tual in its flutings, should at one point run amuck alto- 
 gether, and go on saying "cuckoo" in spite of the efforts 
 of the conductor to silence it. On it went till the roars 
 of the audience entirely drowned its voice, and when 
 silence was restored, it gave one more "cuckoo," pian- 
 issimo prestissimo, just to show that it was quite unre- 
 pentant. . . . But more than anything did Harry 
 Irving's recitations bring down the house. In appear- 
 ance he was his father, young and amazingly good-look- 
 ing, and he had all the assurance and grip of a mature 
 actor: he stalked and he paused, he yelled and he 
 whispered, and he withered us with horror in some appall- 
 ing little soliloquy by a dying hangman, round whose 
 death-bed the ghosts of his victims most unpleasantly 
 hovered. Then in the manner of a parson he gave us a 
 short sermon on the moral lesson "to be drawn from, 
 dear brethren, that exquisite gem of English poetry, 
 'Mary had a little larm.' " 
 
 The athletic ambitions of the first of these three terms 
 was of course to win the football cup in house-ties, and 
 also all the school matches. Neither quite came off, for 
 the house was beaten in the final, while the school only 
 made a moderate show in its foreign matches. But there 
 was little time for moaning. Close on the heels of that 
 disappointment came the Lent term with its fives, rackets 
 and singing cups, and there was then no cause for any- 
 thing but jubilation. At Easter came the dreadful fiasco 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 203 
 
 of the Public School rackets in London, and following 
 on that, the house was again knocked out in the final at 
 cricket. Never shall I forget the heaviness of heart with 
 which I came down that day from the cricket-field, due, 
 not to the fact only of defeat — for even if we had won, 
 that sense of finality would have been there — but because 
 for me all the zeal and the struggle, with its failures and 
 successes, of these entrancing school games, was over. 
 Not again could games, so I dimly and correctly realized, 
 have quite that absorbing and pellucid quality which dis- 
 tinguished house matches: there was already forming 
 in my mind, now that the last of these competitions 
 was over, a certain dingy philosophy clouding the bright- 
 ness, which recognized that games were amusements, to 
 be taken as such. They might give exhilaration and en- 
 joyment, but not again would they produce that unique 
 absorption. I could not imagine again caring quite as 
 much as I had cared during these last six years. Some 
 hour had struck, and not alone for games, but for the 
 multitudinous aims that had been bounded by the chapel 
 wall on one side, the master's garden on another, the field 
 where was the racket court and the football grounds in 
 winter and the cricket pitches in summer, on the third and 
 fourth sides. There was the angulus terra, which, apart 
 from brief holidays, had constituted the whole of life for 
 the vision of a boy. Apart from Addington, there was 
 nothing in the whole round world that mattered like 
 those few acres, and the glory which exuded out of their 
 very soil. 
 
 Dimly I conjectured that in a few months Marl- 
 borough would be withdrawn into some bright starry 
 orbit of its own, as far as I was concerned, revolving 
 there with a sundered light in which I should no longer 
 
204 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 share, and that soon I should peer for it through the 
 fog of the years that drifted across it. Some other orbit 
 was to be mine, which, when I began to move in it, 
 would no doubt have a heaven of its own to scour 
 through, but as yet it had no significance for me ; it was 
 dim and uncharted. Still incurably boyish, in spite of 
 the nineteen years which were verging on the twentieth, 
 I felt that I was being cast out of the only place that 
 mattered. I suppose I knew in some dull logical way, 
 that it was otherwise: that inexorable Time which sent 
 me forth out of this mature infancy had something left 
 in store, but to the eyes of nineteen, everyone who is 
 thirty, at any rate, must clearly be a sere and yellow 
 leaf, waiting for an autumnal blast to make an end of him 
 in the fall of withered foliage. Life might be possible 
 up to twenty-five or so, but then beyond doubt senility 
 must be moribund and slobbering. "Thirty at least" was 
 the verdict then: "Thirty at most" was so soon substi- 
 tuted for it. For the first time in my life I had the 
 definite sense of a book read through and loved from 
 cover to cover, being closed, the sense of an "end," a 
 finished period. Hitherto, change of home or the leav- 
 ing of a private school had been not an "end" but a be- 
 ginning: though one experience was finished the open- 
 ing of a new one, of fresh places, fresh conditions had 
 made the old just slip from the fingers of a careless hand, 
 without sense of loss. But now my fingers clung desper- 
 ately to what was slipping away: they did not clutch 
 at that which was coming, but tightened, as the smooth 
 days hurtled by, on that which they still just held. 
 
 The last game that mattered "frightfully" had been 
 already played, the last number of The Marlburian came 
 out, and while one half of me would have chosen that 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 205 
 
 the full moon of July should know no wane, the other 
 would willingly have seen her turn to ashes, and fall like 
 a cinder from the sky, to match the days from which 
 the glow and the radiance were dying in the frost of the 
 coming departure. Inanimate objects, beloved and 
 familiar, like the row of lime trees in the court with the 
 circular seats round them, my house study with the copies 
 of Turner water-colours by my sister, the Alley and its 
 noisy merry staircase, began to wear a strange aspect, for, 
 so soon, they would have passed completely into other 
 occupation. Drop by drop, like the sweet drippings from 
 the limes, the honey was oozing from them, leaving 
 empty cells and alien habitations. 
 
 In especial there was a certain covered columned pas- 
 sage, a paved and roofed pergola close to the sixth form 
 class-room where so often I had waited for the advent of 
 a friend. In stormy south-westerly weather the rain 
 beat into it, but it was a good meeting-place, for the 
 Alley, the Upper School, the sixth form room and the 
 Bradleian made it a junction for passengers, and there 
 was a board up with school-notices, promotions into the 
 eleven and the fifteen and whatnot, to while away the 
 waiting. A congregation of steps would come there as 
 some form was released, but he was not there : then would 
 come a few scattered steps, but not his. And then he 
 would come round a corner, in a blustering hurry, and 
 say, "Oh, sorry," and together we went up to the house- 
 study madly alive, and sanely content. Those minutes 
 of anticipation made the columned pergola more vivid 
 than even the house-study or the Alley or the lime trees, 
 and in so short a while it would all be dead, as a piece of 
 scenery remaining on a stage, where others should play 
 their friendly and wholesome parts. If I had had that 
 
206 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 which in the cant phrase is called "the corporate sense," 
 I suppose the great thing would have been that genera- 
 tions of others should do as I had done, and I should 
 have said my grace, and got up thankfully from the 
 delicate and vigorous feast. Instead I was Oliver and 
 asked for more, and every year since I have wanted more 
 of some quality that is inseparable from the wonder and 
 sunset of boyhood. But now the sun was notched by 
 the hills over which I must soon climb, where lay the 
 untravelled country: its last rays were level over the 
 plain, and before this last week of July was over, only 
 high up on the peaks of memory away to the east would 
 the rose linger. That, too, so I dismally supposed, would 
 fade presently, but there I was wrong. It has never faded 
 nor lost one atom of its radiance. 
 
 There were rejoicings and jubilations to be gone 
 through: the advent of Nellie for prize-giving, in which 
 at last it was my lot to make several excursions to the 
 table where morocco-bound books were stacked. There 
 was a house-supper on the last day of all in celebration 
 of the winning of those challenge cups, which was grati- 
 fying also, but below that was the sound of the passing- 
 bell. All that day it sounded, except just at the moment 
 when I should have expected it to be most unbearably 
 funereal. For the friend for whom I had so often waited 
 in the colonnade came up with me to the cricket pavilion, 
 from which I had to take away blazers and bat and 
 cricketing paraphernalia, and having got them stuffed in- 
 side my bag, we sat on the steep bank overlooking the 
 field to wait for the first stroke of the chapel-bell. Other 
 groups were straying about the grass, and some came and 
 talked for a bit, and we wished they would go away, be- 
 cause nobody else was wanted just then. It was not 
 
THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 207 
 
 that there was anything particular to say, for boys don't 
 say much to one another, and we lay on the grass, and 
 chewed the sweet ends of it, and when not silent, talked 
 of perfectly trivial things. And at last the friend rolled 
 over on to his face and said : 
 
 "Oh, damn!" 
 
 "Why?" I asked, knowing quite well. 
 
 "Because it will be awful rot without you." 
 
 "You'll soon find somebody else," said I. 
 
 "Funny," said he. 
 
 "Laugh then," said I. 
 
 He sat up, nursing his knees in his arms, and looking 
 down over the field. Just below was the stretch of grass 
 where house football-ties were played in the winter, to 
 the left was Beesly's house, and at the bottom of the 
 field the racket court. Beyond and below across the 
 road the chapel and the red school-buildings. Then his 
 eyes came back from their excursion. 
 
 "It's been ripping anyhow," he said. "Did two fel- 
 lows ever have such a good time 1 ?" 
 
 Quite suddenly at that, when the passing-bell should 
 have been loudest, it ceased altogether. The whole of 
 my dismal maunderings about days that were dead and 
 years that were past, I knew to be utterly mistaken. 
 Nothing that was worth having was dead or past at all : 
 it was all here now, and all mine, a possession eternally 
 alive. 
 
 "But did they 4 ?" he repeated, as I did not answer. 
 
 "Never. Nor will. And there's chapel-bell. Get 
 up." 
 
 He stood up and picked the grass seeds from his 
 clothes. 
 
208 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "Psalms this morning," he said telegraphically. 
 
 "I know. 'Brethren and companions' sake.' Didn't 
 think you had noticed." 
 
 "Rather. Good old Psalm." 
 
 I took up the cricket-bag, and he pulled at it to carry 
 it. A handle came off. 
 
 "Ass," said I. 
 
 "Well, it was three-quarters off already," said he. 
 "Come on; we shall be late. You can leave it at the 
 porter's lodge." 
 
 "Oh, may I, really? Thanks awfully," said I. 
 
 "Sarc," said he. 
 
 There was Beesly on the platform next day when I got 
 to the station, and I remembered he had asked me what 
 train I was going by. He just nodded to me, and con- 
 tinued looking at volumes on the bookstall. But just as 
 the whistle sounded, he came to the carriage door. 
 
 "Just came to see you off," he said. "Don't forget us 
 all." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 THE whole family went that summer holiday to the 
 Lakes, where my father had taken the Rectory of 
 Easedale, and in that not very commodious house five 
 children, two parents and Beth all managed to shelter 
 themselves from the everlasting rain that deluged those 
 revolting regions. Had not steep muddy hills separated 
 one lake from another, I verily believe that the Lakes 
 must have become one sheet of mournful water with a 
 few Pikes and Ghylls sticking up like Mount Ararat on 
 another occasion that can scarcely have been more rainy. 
 There was fishing to be had, but no fish: you might as 
 well have fished in the rapids of Niagara as cast a fly on 
 the streams, while the lakes themselves are noted for their 
 depths of barren water. Out we used to go in mackin- 
 toshes, and back we came in mackintoshes, and I cannot 
 suppose that thirty years later the Rectory at Easedale 
 can have lost its smell of wet india-rubber and drying 
 homespuns. As a special contribution to the general dis- 
 comfort Nellie discovered and developed a grand sort of 
 ailment called "pleurodynia," which I suppose is the 
 result of never being dry, and I capped that,by cultivating 
 the most orange-coloured jaundice ever seen, and con- 
 tinued being violently sick when you would have thought 
 there was nothing to be sick with. 
 
 But these atrocious tempests gave my father unlimited 
 
 209 
 
210 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 scope for what his irreverent family called "The Cottar's 
 Saturday Night." Best of all situations in the holidays 
 he loved to have his entire family sitting close round him 
 busy, silent and slightly unreal to their own sense, while 
 he "did" his Cyprian. There he sat with his books and 
 papers in front of him, at the end of a table in a smallish 
 room, with all of us sitting there, each with his book, 
 speaking very rarely and very quietly, so as not to dis- 
 turb him, and everybody, alas, except him, slightly con- 
 strained. In these holidays, Hugh, owing to inveterate 
 idleness at Eton (where, beating me, he had got a scholar- 
 ship), had a tutor to whom he paid only the very slightest 
 attention, and on these evenings he would have some piece 
 of Horace to prepare for next day, and would work at 
 it for a little, and then drop his dictionary with a loud 
 slap on the floor. Soon he would begin to fidget, and 
 then catch sight of Arthur reading, and something in his 
 expression would amuse him. He drew nearer him a 
 piece of sermon paper which Nellie's pen was busy de- 
 vouring on behalf of the next Saturday Magazine, and 
 began making a caricature. At the same moment perhaps 
 I would observe below lowered eyelids that Arthur was 
 drawing me, and so I began to draw my mother, and 
 Nellie catching the infection, began to draw Maggie. (If 
 you gave her pulled-back hair and a tall forehead, the 
 family would easily recognize it.) And then perhaps my 
 father, pausing in his work, would see Hugh with his 
 tongue protruding from the comer of his mouth (for that 
 is the posture in which you can draw best) and say: 
 
 "Dear boy, have you finished your preparation for 
 to-morrow? What are you doing?" 
 
 Hugh would allow he hadn't quite finished his prep- 
 aration, not having begun it, and my father would look 
 
CAMBRIDGE 211 
 
 at his drawing, and his mouth, the most beautiful that 
 ever man had, would uncurl, until perhaps he threw back 
 his head and laughed with that intense merriment that 
 was so infectious. Possibly he might not be amused, and 
 a little grave rebuke followed; he returned to his Cyprian 
 and we all sat quiet again. But the criticism of the 
 family was that this was "Papa's game, and he made the 
 rules." For he, unable to get on with his Cyprian, or 
 arriving at the end of a bit of work, would interrupt at 
 will the mumness which was imposed on his behalf. But 
 if Maggie or I finished what we were doing, we might not 
 make general conversation. . . . And then the door 
 would open, and Beth looked in, and said, "Eh, it's 
 dressing-time," and her lovely old face would grow alight 
 with love when she looked on my mother, her child of 
 the elder family, and five more of her children of the sec- 
 ond generation. From my father there would always be 
 a delicious word of welcome for her, and he would say: 
 "Beth, you're interrupting us all. Go away. Your 
 watch is wrong." 
 
 "Nay, sir, it isn't," said Beth — she always said "sir" 
 to him, whatever his title was — "It's gone half-past 
 seven." And she beamed and nodded, perfectly at ease 
 in this solemn assembly. With her (who counted of 
 course as one of it) there were eight in that little stuffy 
 room, where we fidgeted and sat and read. And what 
 would not I give, who with one other alone- survive from 
 those evenings, to have an hour of them again, in that 
 inconvenient proximity, surrounded by the huge love of 
 a family so devoted and critical of each other, with the 
 two amongst them whom nobody criticized, my mother 
 with her spectacles on her forehead, and Beth looking in 
 at the door? 
 
212 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 Then jaundice descended on me like the blur of a 
 London fog, and through the depression of it, there 
 seemed no ray that could penetrate. But my mother 
 managed to effect that entry, as of course she always 
 would, and she came back one dripping afternoon from 
 Grasmere, with a packet in her hand. 
 
 "As it's all so hopeless," she said, "I bought some lead 
 soldiers. Oh, do let us have a battle." 
 
 She poured a torrent of these metal warriors on to a 
 table by my bed. There were cannons with springs that 
 shot out peas, and battalions of infantry, and troops of 
 cavalry. It was she, you must understand, who wanted 
 to play soldiers, and to a jaundiced cynic of twenty that 
 necessarily was quite irresistible. Who could have re- 
 sisted a mother who asked you at her age to play soldiers'? 
 We shot down regiments at a time, for when you enfilade 
 a line of lead soldiers with a pea, if you hit the end 
 man, he topples against the next one, and the next against 
 the next, till there are none left standing. The peas flew 
 about the room, rattled against washing-basins and tapped 
 at the window-panes, and I felt much better. Then 
 we bombarded Beth who came to know if I wouldn't like 
 some dinner, and as I wouldn't, it was time to go to 
 sleep. 
 
 "A nice little bit of beef," began Beth. 
 
 "If you say beef again, I shall be sick," said the invalid. 
 
 "Nay, you won't," said Beth hopefully. 
 
 Then to my mother : 
 
 "Eh, dear, do go and dress," she said, "or you'll keep 
 everybody waiting." 
 
 My mother shot a final pea. 
 
 "I won't be the conventional mother," she said, "and 
 smooth your pillow for you. Nor will I peep in on tiptoe 
 
CAMBRIDGE 213 
 
 after dinner to see if you're asleep. But, my darling, I 
 know you'll be better to-morrow! Won't you?" 
 
 King's College, Cambridge, whither my father ac- 
 companied me in October, had, scarcely twenty years 
 previously, become an open College; for centuries before 
 that, it had been, as was originally the intention of the 
 pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation 
 consisting of Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. 
 If a boy, say, at the age of twelve, won a scholarship at 
 Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation there, it fol- 
 lowed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he 
 obtained in due rotation, without any further examina- 
 tion, a King's scholarship, when he went up to the Uni- 
 versity. After that, often while he was still an under- 
 graduate, he became a fellow of King's, and for the rest 
 of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with 
 commons, lodging, and an income of £200 a year pro- 
 vided he did not marry, till he became a senior fellow, 
 when his emolument was doubled. At the time of its 
 foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent en- 
 dowment for the encouragement of learning and the edu- 
 cation of priests, but long before this Etonian sanctuary, 
 consisting of fellows and scholars, was violated by the 
 rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system 
 had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachro- 
 nisms, that take rank with such institutions as pocket- 
 boroughs, where the local magnate could nominate his 
 own friends to represent the views of the nation in Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 The founder's idea had been that from year to year 
 the band of scholars going up from Eton should keep 
 the torch of learning alight, and grow old in celibate fine- 
 
214 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some 
 very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and 
 given stately leisure for the prosecution of their studies 
 and the advancement of sound learning, but such a system 
 was liable to many abuses, and as a matter of fact, acutely 
 suffered from them. A Fellow of King's, thus supported 
 for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compul- 
 sion to study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, 
 boarded, and supplied with a pocket-money of £200 or 
 £400 a year, without doing anything at all to earn it. 
 Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of 
 this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the 
 case in a monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot 
 tasks and duties to the fellows. Some, of course, did 
 tutorial work among the scholars, but for the rest, who 
 might or might not, according to their own inclination, 
 work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and 
 a man with no ambition in his work, meeting his fellows 
 only once a day at the high table in Hall, if he chose 
 to go there, and otherwise living alone might easily turn 
 into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died 
 not so long before I went up, was never seen outside his 
 rooms till dusk began to fall : then he would totter, stick 
 in hand, out on to the great grass lawn in the court, and 
 poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to himself, "Ah, 
 damn you, you haven't got me yet !" After this edifying 
 excursion, he would go back to his rooms and be seen no 
 more till dusk next day. All his life since the age of 
 twelve or so, the bounty of Henry VI had supported him, 
 and until the worms finally did "get" him, nothing could 
 deprive him of his emoluments. How far short of the in- 
 tention of the Royal Founder the college fell may be 
 conjectured from the list of the fellows, which from first 
 
CAMBRIDGE 215 
 
 to last contains no name of the slightest eminence or dis- 
 tinction as a scholar, except that of the late Walter Head- 
 lam, who was not an Etonian. 
 
 The reconstruction of King's took place some years be- 
 fore I went up, and no more of these life-fellows were 
 appointed. Henceforth fellowships expired at the end 
 (I think) of six years, though they could be prolonged if 
 the holder was doing tutorial work in the college, or was 
 engaged in such research as made it proper that his term 
 should be extended. But such men as were already life- 
 fellows were not shorn of their fellowships, and whether 
 or no they were resident, whether or not they were en- 
 gaged in any work which might, ever so faintly, be held 
 to be congruous to the intention of the founder, they 
 were still entitled for life to their income, their commons, 
 and dinner, and if they chose to reside in the college to a 
 set of fellows' rooms. At that time the college buildings 
 would not nearly hold all the undergraduates, and fresh- 
 men, unless they were scholars, must have lodgings out- 
 side college; but in spite of this certain life-fellows still 
 clung to their privileges, and continued to retain sets 
 of rooms in Fellows' Buildings, which they never oc- 
 cupied. One of these, engaged in wholly unscholastic 
 work in London, used to come up for a week or two at 
 the end of the Christmas term, but for the rest of the year 
 his rooms stood vacant, while two others, who to the best 
 of my knowledge never appeared in Cambridge at all, 
 had another set of rooms, which were used merely as 
 guest-rooms by other fellows. A fourth specimen of sur- 
 vivals such as the founder never contemplated was 
 ancient and dusky in appearance, and never left King's at 
 all, though he took no part in the academic life of the 
 place, appearing only in chapel and in Hall, and occupy- 
 
216 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ing himself otherwise with making faint wailings on a 
 violin. . . . But a friend of mine and I chanced on the 
 discovery that if you whistled as he crossed the court to 
 chapel, he stopped dead, and after a little pause, pro- 
 ceeded cautiously again. A repetition of the whistle 
 would make him retrace his steps, and it was possible 
 by continuing to whistle, to drive him back to his rooms. 
 This was extremely interesting, but the cause baffled con- 
 jecture. Later on, however, after years of eremite seclu- 
 sion, he suddenly burst into activity, like a volcano long 
 believed to be extinct, gave tea-parties in his rooms with 
 a leg of cold mutton on the sideboard and a table laid 
 as for dinner, and was induced to play the violin at col- 
 lege concerts. Then (Ossa piled on Pelion for wonder) 
 he married a girl in the Salvation Army, and disappeared 
 from these haunts of celibacy. Again I cannot imagine 
 that the founder contemplated that the head of the col- 
 lege should resemble our Provost, for Dr. Okes, though 
 resident, was approaching or had already reached his 
 ninetieth year, and inhabited in complete seclusion the 
 Provost's Lodge. I am sure I never set eyes on him at 
 all; he took no part whatever in college business, as in- 
 deed his advanced years prevented him from doing, but 
 there he had lingered on from year to year without a single 
 thought of resignation entering his venerable head. 
 Though totally past work, he was Provost of King's and 
 Provost of King's he remained, a drone apparently im- 
 perishable. 
 
 Others, however, of these life-fellows justified them- 
 selves by a busy existence; there was the Vice-Provost, 
 Augustus Austen Leigh, who performed all the presiden- 
 tial duties of the Provost; there was Mr. J. E. Nixon, 
 Dean of the college, lecturer on Latin prose to under- 
 
CAMBRIDGE 217 
 
 graduates, and Professoi of Rhetoric at Gresham Col- 
 lege, London, who surely made up for these drones who 
 abused the bounty of the founder, by his prodigious ac- 
 tivities. In appearance he was the oddest of mortals, a 
 little over five feet tall, wearing always, even when he 
 went down to play lawn-tennis in the Fellows' Garden, 
 a black tail-coat, and boots of immense length, of which 
 the toes pointed sharply upwards. He had only one 
 hand, and that the left; his right hand was artificial, 
 covered with a tight black kid glove. He had also only 
 one eye and that the right, but the other was marvellously 
 sharp. He made a tennis-ball to nestle in the crook of 
 his arm, and then by a dexterous jerk of his body flung 
 it into the air and severely served it. 
 
 His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on 
 some delirious and unintelligible business. "Show me a 
 man with a green nose," he once passionately exclaimed, 
 "and I'll believe in ghosts." He had a voice as curious as 
 his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of 
 a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every 
 week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his 
 rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea- 
 cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and rounds 
 and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, 
 as he got shriller and more excited, would slip from his 
 hand and fly with prodigious velocity across the room. 
 He always took the part of first tenor, and whoever gave 
 the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in order to 
 hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If 
 it was obviously out of range he would say (running all 
 his words into each other like impressions on blotting 
 paper} : "Surely thatsratherhighisthatonly A?" .... Then 
 the unaccountable mistake was discovered and we started 
 
218 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 again. Where he found all these rounds and catches I 
 cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have 
 heard in Nixon's room has never reached my ears again, 
 nor have I ever seen anyone, except those who attended 
 these meetings, who was acquainted with the following 
 catch. It started Lento, and, under the strokes of the 
 paper-knife quickened up to andante and allegro, and 
 ended prestissimo possibile. The words ran thus, start- 
 ing with a first tenor lead : 
 
 i i=> 
 
 Mr. Speaker, though 'tis late, 
 
 I must lengthen the debate, 
 
 The debate. 
 
 Pray support the chair! 
 
 Pray support the chair! 
 
 Mr. Speaker, though 'tis late, 
 
 I must lengthen the debate. 
 
 Question! question! Order! order! 
 
 Hear him ! Hear him ! Hear him ! Hear ! 
 
 (Da capo: da capo: da capo.) 
 
 Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over 
 "Order! Order!" grew louder and louder, until the 
 whole kennel was a yelp, and when everyone was quite 
 exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable, 
 Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown 
 out of his hand) with a loud bang on the table and wiped 
 his face and laughed for pleasure. Then he poured out 
 Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars, while he 
 tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and 
 tried to find "I loved thee beautiful and kind." 
 
 Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, 
 his mind chiefly ran on argument and on what he called 
 "starting a hare." He would advance some amazing 
 

 J 
 
 
 "her grace" (a domestic caricature) 
 
 
 [Page 219 
 
nn 
 
CAMBRIDGE 221 
 
 proposition, such as "Why shouldn't we all — no, that 
 wouldn't do, but why not play lawn-tennis and sing glees 
 in the morning, and work in the evening*?" He argued 
 about the most casual topic : if you said, "It's a fine day," 
 he cleared his throat raspingly, and dropped something 
 he was carrying, and said, "It all depends on what you 
 mean by fine. If you mean sun and blue sky, granted; 
 but why shouldn't you call it fine if there are buckets of 
 rain? It all depends what you mean by 'fine.' A fish 
 now " 
 
 "I meant an ordinary fine day," began his bewildered 
 guest. 
 
 "Very well: but I say 'fish.' I'm a fish and you're a 
 fish. To a fish probably the wetter it is, the finer it is, 
 and there you are." 
 
 There you were : long before anybody else Nixon had 
 invented the art of preposterous conversation, which Mr. 
 Hichens wrongly attributes to Oscar Wilde. To Nixon 
 it was not only an art, a product of instinct, but a. science, 
 a product of definite reasoning. He would not change 
 the subject, when his argument had been burnt to ashes 
 (c "ten by himself), but would confidently blow on the 
 c .ders, expecting some unconjecturable Phoenix to arise 
 fiom them. 
 
 By far the most notable of the life-fellows was Oscar 
 Browning, without mention of whom no adequate idea 
 of Cambridge life in the late eighties and early nineties 
 can possibly be arrived at. Though King's was in large 
 measure a college quite apart from the rest of the Uni- 
 versity, giving itself (so said the rest of the University) 
 unwarrantable airs, Oscar Browning (whom it is simpler 
 to designate as O.B. for he was never known otherwise) 
 pervaded not King's only, but the whole of Cambridge, 
 
222 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 with his pungent personality. His was a perennial and 
 rotund youthfulness, a love of loyal adventure not really 
 challenged by the most devout of his competitors, for 
 who except O.B. at the age of forty-five or so, ever bought 
 a hockey-stick, and imperilled a majestic frame in order 
 to have the pleasure of being hit on the shins by the Duke 
 of Clarence, then an undergraduate at Trinity, and heir- 
 presumptive to the English throne? I was still a junior 
 at Marlborough when these Homeric events happened, 
 but years afterwards, O.B. was still talking about the 
 "awfully jolly" games of hockey he had with Prince 
 Eddy. . . . Even the fact of his playing hockey at all, 
 which he certainly did, affords a key to the intensity of 
 his activities. 
 
 He rode a tricycle, and once, accompanying him on a 
 bicycle with funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of 
 Turkish baths and Grand Dukes, and Taormina and Eng- 
 lish history, I observed that he stuck fast in a muddy 
 place, and prepared to dismount, in order to shove him 
 out of it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of 
 the kind, for some casual youth was on the path beside 
 his enmired tricycle to whom he said : 
 
 "Charlie, old boy, give me a shove. Ha! Ha! 
 
 "Charlie old boy," with his face a-shine with smiles, 
 gave the required push, and O.B. rejoined me, as I 
 swooped and swerved along the road in order to go very 
 slowly. 
 
 "Charlie is my gyp's son," he said. "Such a jolly boy. 
 Thanks awfully, Charlie. Well, there I was, when the 
 Grand Duke's yacht came into Taormina. And, by the 
 way, do you know the Maloja 4 ? The Crown-Princess of 
 Germany came there one year when I was in the hotel, so 
 I dressed myself like a Roman proconsul, in a white toga 
 
CAMBRIDGE 223 
 
 of bath towels, ha, ha, and — and — really these ruts are 
 most annoying — and a laurel wreath, and went out to 
 meet her Royal Highness. I had a retinue of four young 
 men who were staying at the hotel as lictors, with axes 
 and sticks, and I read a short address to her to welcome 
 her, and we had lunch together, and played lawn-tennis 
 and it was all awfully jolly and friendly and unconven- 
 tional. Why aren't we all natural, instead of being 
 afraid of poor Mrs. Grundy, whose husband surely died 
 so long ago? She has never married again, which shows 
 she must be a most unpopular female. Most females, I 
 notice, are so unpopular: they never know when they're 
 wanted, and their hearts are always bigger than their 
 heads. Not of course your dear mother — those charming 
 Lambeth garden parties — and dear Lady Salisbury. I 
 saw the Queen when I was at Balmoral last year — my 
 bootlace has come undone, so careless of Charlie not to 
 notice it — and how hopelessly benighted is Cambridge al- 
 together ! Lord Acton came to stay with me the other day 
 — I think my tricycle wants oiling — and dined with me 
 at the High Table. Nixon was sitting on his other side, 
 propounding conundrums about bed-makers, and hoping 
 that he would sing glees with him. Ha ! Ha ! Every boy 
 ought to realize his youth, instead of wasting his energies 
 over elegiacs. When the Grand Duke came into Taor- 
 
 mina " 
 
 It is really impossible to render the variety of O.B.'s 
 general conversation, of which the foregoing is but a dim 
 reproduction. His performances, too (the expression of 
 himself in deeds), were just as various, and yet everyone 
 in Cambridge was aware that behind this garish behaviour 
 there was a real, a forcible and a big personality. His 
 performances chiefly expressed themselves in tricyclings 
 
224 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 and bathings, in lectures on English history, which no- 
 body attended, and in At-Homes on Sunday evening, 
 which everybody attended. He had a set of four rooms 
 (the first being a bathroom) which were all thrown open 
 to anybody, and if you had said you wanted a bath in 
 the middle of the party, O.B. would certainly have said, 
 "Ha, ha! awfully jolly," have given you a sponge and a 
 towel and have come in to help. Next to that came his 
 bedroom, lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, 
 with a bronze reproduction of the Greek "Winged Sleep" 
 over his bed; then, not a whit more public than these 
 apartments came two big sitting-rooms, in one of which 
 was a grand piano, and four small harmoniums of various 
 tones, one flute-like, one more brazen in quality, and two 
 faintly resembling wheezy and unripe violins. On these 
 — each with its performer and a miniature score — O.B. 
 and Bobby, and Dicky and Tommy would execute some 
 deliberate quartette, or with the piano to keep them all 
 moderately together would plunge with gay, foolhardy 
 courage into the Schumann quintette. Never was there 
 a more incredible sight (you could hardly believe you 
 saw it) than that of O.B. pedalling away at this Obeo- 
 phone (for thus this curious harmonium was aptly 
 named) with his great body swaying to and fro and 
 strange crooning sounds coming out of his classical mouth 
 to reinforce the flutings of his melody, while Bobby and 
 Dicky and Tommy, nimble-fingered members of the Cam- 
 bridge Musical Society, sat with brows corrugated by 
 their anxiety to keep in time with O.B. They never 
 learned that they were attempting an impossibility, but 
 followed him faint yet pursuing as he galloped along a 
 few bars ahead, or suddenly slowed down so that they 
 shot in front of him. At the conclusion he would pat 
 
CAMBRIDGE 225 
 
 them all on the back, and say, "Awfully jolly Brahms is, 
 or was it Beethoven?" and proceed to sing, "Funiculi, 
 funicula" himself. . . . Groups formed and reformed; 
 here would be a couple of members of the secret and 
 thoughtful society known as "The Apostles" with white 
 careworn faces, nibbling biscuits and probably discussing 
 the ethical limits of Determinism; there the President of 
 the Union playing noughts and crosses with a Cricket 
 Blue; there an assembly of daring young men who tore 
 their gowns, and took the board out of their caps, in order 
 to present a more libertine and Bohemian appearance, 
 when they conversed with the young lady in the tobaccon- 
 ist's. Dons from King's or other colleges fluttered in and 
 out like moths, and the room grew ever thicker with the 
 smoke of innumerable cigarettes. But O.B., however 
 mixed and incongruous was the gathering, never lost his 
 own hospitable identity in the crowd; waving bottles of 
 curious hock he would spur on the pianist to fresh deeds 
 of violence, making some contribution to the discussion 
 on Determinism, and promise to speak at the next debate 
 at the Union, as he wandered from room to room, bald 
 and stout and short yet imperial with his huge Neronian 
 head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. 
 Age could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he 
 was a great joyous ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for 
 geniality, remarkable generosity and kindliness, a good- 
 humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had 
 cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as 
 much stability of purpose as a starling. His extraordi- 
 nary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his 
 abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made 
 him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, 
 many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely re- 
 
226 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 mained the most outstanding and prominent personality 
 in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to 
 leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more 
 principled belief to give ballast to his f riskiness, he would 
 have been as essentially great as he was superficially gro- 
 tesque. 
 
 A small college as King's then was, splits up into far 
 more sharply defined cliques than a large one, and it 
 was not long before I found myself firmly attached to a 
 small group consisting in the main of Etonians belonging 
 either to King's or Trinity. The younger fellows of the 
 college mixed very democratically with undergraduates 
 of all years, and the head of this vivid group was cer- 
 tainly Monty James, subsequently Provost of King's and 
 now Provost of Eton. Walter Headlam, perhaps the 
 finest Greek scholar that Cambridge has ever produced, 
 and Lionel Ford, now headmaster of Harrow, both of 
 them having lately taken their degrees, were of the com- 
 pany, so too were Arthur Goodhart, then working for a 
 degree in music, and a little later among junior members 
 R. Carr Bosanquet, now Professor at Liverpool. We 
 were all members of the Pitt Club, that delightful and 
 unique institution where, to the end of your life, once 
 being a life-member, your letters are stamped without any 
 payment, and most of us were, or soon became, members 
 of a literary society called "The Chitchat," in which on 
 Saturday night each in rotation entertained the society at 
 his rooms with an original paper on any subject as in- 
 tellectual fare, and with coffee and claret-cup, anchovy 
 toast, and snuff, handed solemnly round in a silver box, 
 for physical stimulus. Sometimes if the snuff went 
 round too early, awful reverberations of sneezing from 
 the unaccustomed punctuated the intellectual fare, and 
 
CAMBRIDGE 227 
 
 I remember (still with pain) reading a paper on Mar- 
 lowe's Faustus, during which embarrassing explosions 
 unnerved me. I had reason to quote (at a very impressive 
 stage of this essay) certain lines from that tragedy, which 
 with stage directions came out as follows : 
 
 Faustus. Where are you damned? {Sneezings.) 
 
 Mephistopheles. In Hell. {Sneezings and loud laughter.) 
 
 For where I am is Hell {Sneezing and more 
 
 laughter), 
 And where Hell is ( Uproar) there must I ever 
 be. 
 
 On another occasion a prominent philologist whose 
 turn it was to regale us, found that he had not had leisure 
 to write his paper on "Manners" and proposed to address 
 us on the subject instead. He strode about the room 
 gesticulating and vehement, stumbling over the hearth- 
 rug, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away instead 
 of his match, while he harangued us on this interesting 
 ethical topic, with interspersed phrases of French and 
 German, and odd English words like "cocksuredom." As 
 this ludicrously proceeded, a rather tense silence settled 
 down on "The Chitchat"; its decorous members bit their 
 lips, and prudently refrained from looking each other in 
 the face, and there were little stifled noises like hiccups or 
 birds in bushes going about the room, and the sofa where 
 three sat trembled, as when a kettle is on the boil. Then 
 he diverged, via, I think, the exquisite urbanity of the 
 ancient Greeks, to Greek sculpture, and proceeded as a 
 practical illustration to throw himself into the attitude of 
 Discobolus. At that precise moment, Dr. Cunningham 
 of Trinity, who was drinking claret-cup and trembling a 
 great deal, completely lost control of himself. Claret- 
 
228 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 cup spurted from his nose and mouth; I should not have 
 thought a man could have so violently choked and 
 laughed simultaneously, without fatal damage to himself. 
 That explosion, of course, instantaneously spread round 
 the entire company, except the amazed lecturer, and Dr. 
 Cunningham, finding he could not stop laughing at all, 
 seized his cap and gown and left the room with a rapid 
 and unsteady step. Even when he had gone wild yells 
 and slappings of the leg came resonantly in through the 
 open windows as he crossed the court. . . . 
 
 But the Love-feast of the Clan was on Sunday evening, 
 when in rotation, they dined in each other's rooms. This 
 institution (known as the "T.A.F." or "Twice a Fort- 
 night") had been inaugurated by Jim Stephen, that bril- 
 liant and erratic genius, then in London, editing The 
 Mirror and astounding the Savile Club, who a year or two 
 later returned to Cambridge again, and, until his final and 
 melancholy eclipse, diffused over everyone who came 
 across him the beam of his intellect and personality. Of 
 him I shall speak later: at present the clan of friends met, 
 so to speak, under the informal hegemony of Monty 
 James. Intellectually (or perhaps aesthetically) I, like 
 many others, made an unconditional surrender to his 
 tastes, and, with a strong prepossession already in that 
 direction, I became convinced for the time — and the time 
 was long — that Dickens was the St. Peter who held the 
 keys of the heavenly kingdom of literature. When din- 
 ner at the T.A.F. was over, Monty James might be in- 
 duced to read about the birthday-party of the Kenwigses, 
 with a cigarette sticking to his upper lip, where it bobbed 
 up and down to his articulation, until a shout of laughter 
 on the reader's part over Mr. Lillyvick's glass of grog, 
 cast it forth on to the hearth-rug. He almost made me 
 
CAMBRIDGE 229 
 
 dethrone Bach from his legitimate seat, and by a revolu- 
 tionary movement place Handel there instead, so magnifi- 
 cent were the effects produced, when with him playing 
 the bass, and me the treble from a pianoforte arrange- 
 ment for two hands, we thundered forth the "Occasional 
 Overture." He was a superb mimic, and at the T.A.F. 
 and elsewhere a most remarkable saga came to birth, in 
 which the more ridiculous of the Dons became more ridicu- 
 lous yet. And when on these Sunday evenings the Dick- 
 ens reading, and the "Occasional Overture," and some 
 singing and Saga were done, a section of the T.A.F. would 
 go to O.B.'s "at home," and mingle with inferior mortals. 
 
 Another society common to many members of the 
 T.A.F. was the Decemviri Debating Society. To this, 
 some time during my undergraduate days, I was elected, 
 though I do not think I ever expressed any wish to be- 
 long to it, for when it came to making a speech, terror, 
 then as now, invariably deprived me of coherent utter- 
 ance, and a rich silence was all that I felt capable of con- 
 tributing to these discussions. Knowing this I never at- 
 tended any meeting at all, and as a rule of the society was 
 that if any member absented himself for a term (or was 
 it two*?) from the debates, he should be deprived of the 
 privileges of membership, I received one day a notice of 
 the next debate, at which there was private business to 
 be transacted in the matter of my own expulsion. Un- 
 justifiable indignation, for this time only, put terror to 
 flight, and I was allowed to open another debate in the 
 place of that already arranged for, and to make a speech 
 to show reason why I should not be expelled. My 
 motion was triumphantly carried, and I never went to a 
 meeting of the Decemviri again. 
 
 I suppose it must have been that belated year of volun- 
 
230 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 tary reading at Marlborough, which enabled me to win 
 an exhibition at King's at the end of my first term; 
 after that for a year and a half I was utterly devoid of 
 all interest in classical subjects. There was not the small- 
 est spur to industry or appreciation provided by tutors or 
 lecturers : if you attended lectures and were duly marked 
 off as present, you had conformed to the rite, but nothing 
 you heard could conceivably stimulate your zeal. The 
 classical tutor under whose academic frigidity we fol- 
 lowed Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War 
 stood on a dais at the end of the lecture room, and in- 
 decently denuded his subject of any appeal to interest. 
 He put his head on one side and said, "Then came Sphac- 
 teria: I don't know what Sphodrias was about," and so 
 
 nobody knew what either Sphodrias or Mr. X was 
 
 about. He looked over exercises in Greek prose as well : 
 on one occasion I was fortunate enough to drag in a 
 quantity of tags from Plato and Thucydides, and re- 
 ceived, for the only time, his warm approval. A piece of 
 Greek prose, according to academic standards, appeared 
 to be good, in proportion as it "brought in" quotations 
 and phrases plucked from Thucydides or Plato; Baboo 
 English was its equivalent in more modern tongues. Tags 
 and unusual words and crabbed constructions from the 
 most obscure passages were supposed to constitute good 
 Greek prose, just as in the mind of a Bombay or Calcutta 
 student, the memoir of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee 
 represented an example of dignified English. To quote 
 from that immortal and neglected work, "Having said 
 these words, he hermetically sealed his lips never to open 
 them again. He became sot to voce for a few hours, and 
 he went to God about 6 p.m." As this sublime death- 
 bed scene appears to the ordinary Englishman, so would 
 
CAMBRIDGE 231 
 
 the prose which Mr. X approved have appeared to 
 
 the ordinary Greek of the time of Pericles. . . . But he 
 had been Senior Classic, and carried on the wonderful 
 tradition, and in other respects was classical tutor and 
 an eager but inefficient whist-player. Nixon, an equally 
 traditional Latin scholar, trained us to produce a similar 
 Latinity, and we got Monty James to imitate them both. 
 Any dawning of love for classical language receded, as 
 far as I was concerned, into murk midnight again, and 
 having temporarily justified my existence by winning an 
 exhibition, I deliberately proceeded for the next year 
 and a half to follow more attractive studies. A year's 
 hard work on the approved Baboo lines, I calculated, 
 would be sufficient to secure success in the Classical 
 Tripos, which was the next event of any importance. 
 
 Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually 
 start a new University magazine, which for wit and 
 pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, 
 ancl I was no exception in the matter of this popular 
 gambit. Another freshman lodging in the same house as 
 myself was joint-editor, and so was Mr. Roger Fry, two 
 or three years our senior, and some B.A. whose name I 
 cannot recollect. Mr. Roger Fry certainly drew the il- 
 lustration on the cover of the Cambridge Fortnightly, 
 which represented a tremendous sun of culture rising be- 
 hind King's College Chapel. O.B. contributed a poem to 
 it, so also did my brother Arthur, and Mr. Barry Pain 
 sent us one of the best parodies in the language, called 
 "The Poets at Tea," in which Wordsworth, Tennyson, 
 Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and others are ludicrously 
 characteristic of themselves. He also tried to galvanize 
 the Cambridge Fortnightly into life by one or more ad- 
 mirable short stories, and Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson ap- 
 
232 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 plied the battery with him. But the unfortunate infant 
 was clearly stillborn, and considering the extreme feeble- 
 ness of most of its organs, I do not wonder that it was, 
 after the lapse of a term or so, quite despaired of. It had 
 really never lived : it had merely appeared. My share in 
 the funeral expenses was about five pounds, and I was 
 already too busy writing Sketches from Marlborough, 
 which was duly and magnificently published within a 
 year, to regret the loss. Fearing to be told that I had 
 better attend to my Greek and Latin, I did not inform 
 my father of this literary adventure; then, when a local 
 printer and publisher at Marlborough, to my great glee, 
 undertook its production, I thought he would consider it 
 very odd that I had not told him of it before and so I 
 did not tell him at all. The book had a certain local 
 notoriety, and naturally enough, the fact of it reached 
 him, and he wrote me the most loving letter of remon- 
 strance at my having kept it from him. There was no 
 word of blame for this amateur expenditure of time and 
 energies, but I divined and infinitely regretted that I had 
 hurt him. And somehow I could not explain, for I still 
 felt that if he had known I was working at it, he cer- 
 tainly would have suggested that I might have been better 
 occupied. Already, though half-unconsciously, I knew to 
 what entrancing occupation I had really determined to 
 devote my life, and though I might have made a better 
 choice, I could not, my choice being really made, have 
 been better occupied than in practising for it. The book 
 in itself, for the mere lightness which was all that it 
 professed, was not really very bad: the ominous part 
 about it (of which the omens have been amply fulfilled) 
 being the extreme facility with which it was produced. 
 
CAMBRIDGE 233 
 
 Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom 
 of cunning artificers, and consecrated by the love of rever- 
 ent hearts, none can surpass and few can equal the glory 
 of that holy and beautiful house which the founder of 
 King's decreed for the worship of God, with its jewelled 
 windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. 
 Half-way up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak 
 screen stretching from side to side, on which stands the 
 organ, a "huge house of sounds" with walls of gilded 
 pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels with 
 trumpets to their mouths have alighted. The nave on 
 Sunday afternoons in the short days of winter would be 
 nearly dark, but for the soft glow of the innumerable wax 
 candles with which the choir was lit, flowing over the 
 organ screen. At half-past three, the hour of those Sun- 
 day afternoon services, there would still be a little light 
 outside, though that would have faded altogether be- 
 fore service was over, and just opposite where I sat was 
 the window that I love best in all the world. The Saviour 
 has risen on Easter morning, and before him in dress of 
 sapphire and crimson Mary Magdalene is kneeling. She 
 had been weeping and had heard behind her the question, 
 "Woman, why weepest thou 1 ?" Her bereaved heart had 
 answered, and he whom she supposed to be the gardener 
 had said, "Mary." It was then, in that window, that she 
 knew him, and turning, she bowed herself to the ground, 
 with one hand stretched out to him, and said, "Rabboni !" 
 In the garden of the Resurrection He stood, with the 
 flowers of the spring about His feet, instead of the spike- 
 nard, very precious, with which she had anointed them for 
 his burial. . . . During the Psalms for the twenty- 
 seventh evening of the month, when she who sowed in 
 tears reaped in joy, the window would grow dark against 
 
234 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 the faded light outside, and the wise and tranquil candle- 
 light spread like a luminous fog to the cells of the vault- 
 ing above. At the end of the service, the red curtain 
 across the arch in the screen was drawn back, and you 
 peered into the dusk of the nave, and the dark of the 
 night. . . . 
 
 Or else on week-days a consultation of the musical bill 
 of fare on the chapel door would bring you, a little before 
 anthem time, into the nave, for Wesley's "Wilderness" 
 was soon to be sung. The choir, when service was going 
 on, was behind the screen and the crimson curtain, but 
 the candle-light there, aided by a few sconces here, made 
 visible the roof, and the black silhouettes of the trumpet- 
 ing angels on the organ. Then the solo bass began: 
 there was the fugue of the waters breaking out, and the 
 treble solo and chorus of the flight of Sorrow and sighing. 
 Perhaps you waited for the conclusion of inaudible 
 prayers, on the chance that Dr. Mann would play a Bach- 
 fugue at the end, after the crimson curtain had been 
 drawn back and the white choir had gone into its vestries. 
 There was this reward, let us say, that afternoon, for the 
 gamba on the swell started the melodious discussion, and 
 its soliloquy provoked an answer in the same words but 
 with another voice. The duet "thickened and broad- 
 ened," fresh voices joined; they found a second theme, 
 and gradually step by step, the whole organ, but for one 
 keyboard, silent as yet, took up the jubilant wrangling. 
 What the gamba had stated, the diapason now pro- 
 claimed: what the diapason had shouted was thundered 
 from the pedals. And then the last keyboard was in use, 
 for what but the Tubas could so have imposed themselves 
 and penetrated that immense and melodious rioting of 
 sound? Perhaps the golden angels at the four corners 
 
CAMBRIDGE 235 
 
 of the organ, "opened their mouths and drew in their 
 breath," and spoke through their celestial trumpets. 
 
 It is impossible to disentangle and reduce to chronology 
 the infinity of interests that interweaved themselves with 
 these three undergraduate years, and the reader must 
 sympathetically partake of a macedoine of memories, that 
 were the ingredients in the enthralling dish. Outside 
 Cambridge, which daily became more absorbing, I had 
 the emotional experience of seeing Miss Mary Anderson 
 double the part of Hermione and Perdita in The 
 Winter s Tale, and fell violently in love with her. Never 
 surely was there so beautiful a Shakespearian heroine, 
 never did another actress make such music of the tale of 
 the flowers she had gathered. No sculptor's skill or 
 whiteness of Pentelic marble ever approached the glory 
 of that queenly figure, and with what amazement of joy 
 I saw it stir and cease to be a statue when, with a waving 
 of lovely arms, that sent up a cloud of powder, there was 
 no statue any more but the queen, living and moving 
 again. I bought a photograph of her, carried it about 
 with me by day, and by night put it on a table by my 
 bed, fearing all the time that my father would discover 
 it, for he would not have cared much about this ex- 
 perience of mine. Not for nearly thirty years later did I 
 meet my Hermione in the flesh and lay my belated hom- 
 age before her. 
 
 Marlborough also was a lodestar, appearing already, 
 as must needs be, of lesser magnitude, now that new con- 
 stellations directed my voyagings, but, being granted an 
 exeat of two nights in order to witness the opening of 
 Truro Cathedral, I spent both in the train in order to get 
 half a day at my school. Already the old order had 
 
236 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 changed; the values were different, and even as I had 
 once suspected, a few months had sufficed to do that. 
 Yet the other aspect was true also; I had absorbed and 
 assimilated something from the Wiltshire upland which 
 was imperishably part of my personality : my very iden- 
 tity would have been something other than it was, had 
 I not lived and grown up there. But many ties which 
 had seemed close had drooped and loosened, and now I 
 saw which were the closest of all, and they, just one or 
 two of them, were as taut as ever; that of Beesly, still 
 merry-eyed behind the pince-nez to which he had taken, 
 and that of the friend who on the last day of term had 
 sat with me in the field waiting for chapel-bell. He 
 absented himself from an hour of morning-school, and 
 met me, dishevelled with a night journey, at the station. 
 As we passed through the town we bought rolls and 
 sausages, and while I had a bath, he came in and out, 
 making breakfast ready in the study that had been mine, 
 and for that hour it was as if the rind of the last months 
 had been peeled off, and the old friendship glowed like 
 the heart of the fruit. Otherwise, the little impression 
 I had made on that shining shore was already washed by 
 the advancing tide, and its edges were blunt, while, a 
 little higher up the beach, the sand-castles of others were 
 growing tall and turreted under vigorous spades. . . . 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 
 
 EVEN away from Cair bridge, which in those under- 
 graduate years was necessarily the hot hub of the 
 universe, life remained as highly coloured as at the time 
 when Lambeth and Addington first flung open their ador- 
 able pasturages. It was thrilling to know that Robert 
 Browning was coming to dinner one night, to be grasped 
 by the hearty hand that had written the poems of which a 
 fives competition had procured me a copy. There was 
 but a small party on the night that I remember, and after 
 dinner my father moved up to take the place next him, 
 and beckoned to me to close up on the other side. Some- 
 how a mention came of a volume of Austin Dobson's, and 
 Robert Browning preserved a cheerful silence till some 
 direct question was put to him. Then, drinking off his 
 port, he made a notable phrase. 
 
 "Well, some people like carved cherry-stones," he said. 
 
 I fancy he always avoided talking of his own works, 
 and that my father knew this, for certainly no allusion 
 was made to them. But, as we rose, he volunteered a 
 question to my father, saying, "What of my work do 
 you like best?" On which my father replied: 
 
 "Your lyrics." 
 
 Robert Browning gave some great gesticulation; he 
 seems to me now to have rubbed his hands, or jumped or 
 stamped a foot. 
 
 237 
 
238 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "Lyrics'?" he said. "I have deskfuls of them." 
 
 In consequence, I still faintly hope that some day there 
 may be discovered a great ream of lyrics by Robert 
 Browning, for, as far as I know, "deskfuls" have not yet 
 appeared. 
 
 On another occasion Tennyson was there. Of his con- 
 versation I have no sort of recollection, the reason for 
 which lapse may be probably accounted for by the fact 
 that he didn't say anything. But I had picked his note 
 of acceptance out of my mother's waste-paper basket and 
 the envelope signed in the bottom left-hand corner, both 
 torn across, so he could not leave me comfortless. 
 
 How very odd these dinner-parties, great or small, 
 would have appeared at the present day! There was 
 but one circulation of wine after the ladies had rustled 
 forth, and even when they had gone, there was nothing 
 in the shape of tobacco, which, combined with the indo- 
 lent progression of the decanter, surely accounted for 
 the austerity of Tennyson. A long sitting of abstemious 
 gentlemen was succeeded by a short sitting in the draw- 
 ing-room, and then the bell sounded at ten, and the whole 
 company trooped into the chapel for a slightly ab- 
 breviated evensong. Sometimes, this service was before 
 dinner; otherwise, at its conclusion, round about half- 
 past ten, the guests departed, for after this long de- 
 votional interlude, it was frankly impossible to resume a 
 festive sociability. Already the cigarette-habit had made 
 its footing in most houses, to the extent, anyhow, of a 
 guest, if so decadently inclined, having opportunity of in- 
 dulging his lust, but neither at Lambeth nor at Adding- 
 ton was there any parleying with the enemy. My father 
 intensely disliked the smell of tobacco, and once only 
 when the present King, as Duke of York, dined at Lam- 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 239 
 
 beth, was an after-dinner cigarette allowed. On that oc- 
 casion I, greatly daring, told my father that he liked a 
 cigarette after dinner (so it was popularly supposed), and 
 for the first time, the gallery of portraits was veiled be- 
 hind the unusual incense. There were many great stern 
 houses in the eighties, which kept the flag of no surrender 
 flying in the dining-room, but I doubt if any except my 
 father's held out till after the middle of the nineties. He 
 knew of but ignored the existence of a smoking-room at 
 Lambeth and Addington, but neither in drawing-room or 
 dining-room, nor until the hour of bedroom candles (elec- 
 tric lighting being still an exceptional illumination) was 
 there the chance of a cigarette. 
 
 A story, ben trovato, it may be, was told in this re- 
 gard, as to how, when a Pan-Anglican conference was in 
 progress at Lambeth and the whole house was buzzing 
 with bishops, my father had occasion late one night to 
 visit the bedroom of one of the prelates, with some paper 
 of agenda for next day: He got no answer to his tap 
 on the door, and entered, to find the occupant on his knees 
 before the fire-place. My father, supposing that he was 
 at his private devotions silently withdrew himself, and 
 tiptoed down the corridor again. The devotional tenant, 
 unaware of any entrance, but knowing the rule of the 
 house, continued to inhale his cigar, and puff the aromatic 
 evidence of his crime up the chimney. . . . Though my 
 father knew that his chaplains smoked, he would never 
 acknowledge it, and if a letter, difficultly drafted and 
 brought to him for his approval, bore unmistakable evi- 
 dences of this aid to inspiration, he would sniff at the 
 original letter and its answer, and say, "He must have 
 written it in a smoking-carriage." And though, again, 
 he knew quite well that all his three sons smoked like 
 
240 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 chimneys, I have heard him confidently assert that none 
 of us ever did. He would have liked to believe that. 
 In fact he would have liked it so much, that his fervour 
 allowed him to believe it. 
 
 But I am sure it never entered his head that my mother 
 smoked. She did: and once after a journey of a day and 
 a night and half a day to the Riff el Alp, my father, abso- 
 lutely unfatigued, insisted on the whole family getting 
 on to a glacier of some sort without delay. My mother 
 racked with headache, but thinking the air would do her 
 good, came with us, but having gained the glacier, refused 
 to proceed, and sat down on a rock on the moraine to 
 wait for her family's return. She indicated that I should 
 stay with her, and as soon as the family's back was 
 turned she whispered, "Oh, give me a cigarette, Fred." 
 By some strange mischance I hadn't got one, and was only 
 possessed of a small and reeking clay pipe and some to- 
 bacco. But I filled and lit it for her, and there she sat 
 smoking her clay pipe like a gipsy-woman, which made 
 me laugh so much that the rest of the family turned round 
 en bloc to see what was happening. Nothing appeared 
 to be happening, because she was wise enough to hand the 
 pipe back to me, and on they went. Then she had a 
 little more, and her headache was routed. . . . 
 
 That RifTel Alp holiday was one of the most sump- 
 tuous. Mountain-climbing with guides and porters is an 
 expensive pursuit, but my father "treated me" straight off 
 to any two first-class peaks I wanted to ascend. My in- 
 stant first choice was the Matterhorn, and after a few 
 days' gymnastics on less austere summits I set forth, 
 chaperoned by the most zealous of Alpinists, Mr. Toswill, 
 to make this adorable ascent. We slept in the Schwarz- 
 See Hotel, and starting at a moonless midnight to the 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 241 
 
 light of a lantern, stumbled on in that inconvenient il- 
 lumination till the first hint of dawn made the east dove- 
 coloured and the lantern could be quenched. The excite- 
 ment of the climb quickened the perceptions, and that 
 opening flower of day was the very glory of the Lord, 
 first shining on the earth. We still climbed in the clear 
 dusk, but high, incredibly high above us the top of the 
 great cliff grew rose-coloured, as the sun, still below our 
 horizon, smote it with day. The sky was clear and the 
 stars grew dim, as the great halls of heaven were slowly 
 flooded with light. Step by step the day descended 
 from peak to shoulder of our mountain till it met us 
 on the rocky stair. Dent Blanche, Rothorn, Gabelhorn, 
 Weisshorn were dazzled with the dawn: looking down 
 into the Zermatt valley was still like gazing into dark 
 clear water. 
 
 But that clarity of morning was not for long. On all 
 sides clouds were forming— it is a mistake as a rule to 
 speak of clouds "coming up" : they just happen — and be- 
 fore we reached the famous shoulder, it was certain that 
 if we were to make our peak, we must race against the 
 thickening weather. Already the range along the Theo- 
 dul was blanketed, and mist-wreaths were beginning to 
 form on the east side of our mountain below us. If they 
 stopped there and did not form higher up they would do 
 us no harm, but nobody would choose to be above the 
 shoulder of the Matterhorn in cloud. So at high speed — 
 duly recorded in the Visitors' Book at the hut — we made 
 our peak, opened the bottle of Bouvier (most of which 
 in that low pressure of the air rose like a geyser and in- 
 toxicated the snows) and began the descent. The air was 
 notably still : not a breath of wind stirred, but somewhere 
 
242 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 below us there were boomings of thunder not very re- 
 mote. 
 
 Before we got back to the shoulder a wisp of cloud 
 flicked round the edge of the precipice which plunges a 
 sheer four thousand feet on to the Zmutt glacier, and in a 
 moment we were enveloped by it. The sun was ex- 
 punged, the cold suddenly grew intense, and snow denser 
 than I thought possible that snow could be, began to fall. 
 In five minutes we wore the thickest white mantles, so too, 
 which was less convenient, did the rocks, which at this 
 point are not only difficult by reason of their steepness, 
 but dangerous because of the downward slope of the 
 strata. The thunder moved up to meet us, in fact we 
 were just beginning to pass into the storm-clouds them- 
 selves. The air was highly charged with electricity, for 
 presently the points of our ice-axes fizzled and sang like 
 kettles on the boil. Then below, a light, violet and vivid, 
 leaped suddenly out of the murk of snow, and the 
 thunder reverberated sharp as the crack of a dog-whip. 
 Once our rope got fouled, and we all had to untie our- 
 selves and stand perched on our steps, while the guide 
 wrought to release it. Forty highly exciting minutes en- 
 abled us to crawl down through the storm, and reach clear 
 air again, and though I am glad to have dived through a 
 thunderstorm on the Matterhorn, I will willingly dis- 
 pense with any further experience of the sort. Those 
 forty minutes rattling with ambient thunder were much 
 too tense to allow of conscious alarm, and I never wished 
 I was "safe home" again. But I would never choose to do 
 it a second time. 
 
 My second selection was the Dent Blanche, but after 
 starting for it a blizzard made the ascent impossible. So 
 for fear of losing my second big peak altogether — things 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 243 
 
 like the Breithorn, ascents of the Riffelhorn from the 
 glacier, and a subsequent crossing of the eastern face of 
 the Matterhorn were picked up by the way — I chose the 
 Zienal Rothhorn, and with Nellie made an entrancing 
 ascent. There was a huge cowl of snow on the summit, 
 and sheltered by this from the wind we sat for nearly 
 an hour 'in the blaze of the translucent day. Coming 
 down an ill-fitting boot tore the base of one of her nails, 
 and she was in bed next day with considerable pain. But 
 with what scorn she answered my query as to whether, 
 on her part, the expedition had been worth such a pay- 
 ment. Simultaneously there began a week's bad weather, 
 and we produced a stupendous Swiss Saturday Magazine. 
 
 My third year at Cambridge, it may be remembered, I 
 had resolved to devote to a strenuous course of the 
 classical tongues, and the autumn of 1889 saw me P ro " 
 vided with a shelf of interleaved Latin and Greek authors 
 (in order to make quantities of profound notes on the 
 opposite page) ; with a firm determination to remember 
 every crabbed phrase in case of finding some approximate 
 English equivalent in passages set for translation from 
 English into Baboo Latin or Greek, and triumphantly 
 dragging it in; with pots of red ink to underline them, 
 and with an optimistic determination of getting a first 
 in my Classical Tripos. Eustace Miles who could work 
 longer and more steadily than anyone I ever came across 
 before or since, became the anchor to keep me moored 
 on the rock of industry, despite the engaging tides and 
 currents that made me long to drift away, and I would 
 take my books to his room and vow that I would remain 
 glued to them as long as he. If I worked alone my in- 
 firmity of purpose was something ghastly to contemplate, 
 
244 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 but the living proximity of a friend who set so shining 
 an example shamed me into industry. He was bound for 
 the same port as I, namely, a first in the Classical Tripos, 
 and was a master in the art of inventing ludicrous phrases 
 which contained the key to dates, and memorized the 
 events of the Peloponnesian War for me in a few unfor- 
 gettable sentences. We had intervals when we set the 
 table on its side to serve as a back wall for some diminu- 
 tive game of squash, and then refreshed and dusty we 
 followed the odious symptoms that attended the plague 
 in Athens. I quite lost sight again of the beauty of the 
 classical languages, for just now the learning of them 
 was the mere grinding of the mills that should produce a 
 particular grist. It was no leisurely artistic apprecia- 
 tion, like that which had fitfully inspired me under Beesly 
 and during my last year at school ; I but wanted to com- 
 mit a sort of highway robbery on Sophocles and Virgil, 
 and take from them the purse that should pay my way 
 for a first-class ticket. After two terms of this, for the 
 only time in my life, I was considered to be in danger 
 of growing stale from sheer industry, and for a fortnight 
 of the Easter vacation, in accordance with my father's 
 suggestion, Monty James took two other undergraduates 
 and myself for a bookless tour through Normandy and 
 Brittany. It was nominally a walking-tour, but we went 
 by train, visiting Rouen, Caen, Bayeux, and Lisieux, and 
 finishing up with Amiens and Beauvais. We played 
 quantities of picquet, and the Nixon saga was enriched by 
 a Pindaric Ode in praise of Pnyxon winner in the tricycle 
 race against two Divinity professors. . . . 
 
 The last paper in the Tripos, after translations into 
 English from Latin and Greek verse and prose, and 
 translation into Latin and Greek from English, was in 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 245 
 
 classical history, of which I knew nothing whatever, and 
 so I sat up three-quarters of the night and read through 
 the whole of two short history primers. In the few hours 
 that intervened between that degrading process and the 
 history paper, it was impossible to forget crucial dates 
 or events of any magnitude, and by dragging in all col- 
 lateral information, and dishing it up with a certain 
 culinary skill acquired by years of Saturday Magazine, I 
 produced a voluminous vamp of information. And then 
 after some days of waiting came the lists, and the year 
 of Babooism had won its appropriate reward, for, sure 
 enough, I had taken a first. As for the history, I had pro- 
 duced a paper that caused me to be congratulated by 
 the examiner (Dr. Verrall) on my "grasp" — acquired the 
 night before — and was advised by him to take up history 
 for a second Tripos. That, knowing better than he what 
 the tenacity of my grasp really was, I thought better to 
 decline. 
 
 Having taken a first (such a first !) my father was more 
 than pleased that, pending the choice of a profession, 
 which I had already secretly registered, I should stop up 
 another year and attempt to perform a similar feat in 
 some other branch of knowledge. Should that also be 
 accomplished, I should be of a status that could see a 
 Fellowship at King's within possible horizons, and he 
 wanted no finer threshold of life for any of his sons than 
 a Fellowship of his college. Here then his scholastic 
 sympathies were completely engaged, but infinitely more 
 potent than they was his desire that we should all of us 
 enter the priesthood of the Church to which, with a 
 unique passion, all his life was dedicated. Arthur at this 
 time, had already been an Eton master for over five years, 
 and had not taken orders, and it was not likely now that 
 
246 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 he would. I was the next, and when my father more 
 than gladly let me stop up at Cambridge with a view 
 to a second Tripos, for another year, he coupled with 
 his permission the desire that I should attend some Divin- 
 ity lectures. Never shall I admire tact or delicacy more 
 than his upon this subject. For years while at school 
 he had put before me, never insistently but always po- 
 tently, his hope that I should be a clergyman, so that 
 now I was quite familiar with it. But at the very moment 
 when a strongly expressed desire on his part might have 
 determined me, he forbore to express such desire at all : 
 if I was to be a clergyman I must have the personal, the 
 individual sense of vocation, and not take orders because 
 Jie wished it. Already I knew that he wished it, but he 
 would not stir a finger, now that I had come to an age 
 when definite choice opened before me, to influence my 
 decision. He wished me to attend Divinity lectures in 
 order to learn something before I either chose or rejected, 
 but beyond that he never said a word in argument or 
 persuasion, nor even asked me if I had attended these 
 lectures. At the very moment, in fact, when his wish, 
 had he expressed it, that I should take a theological 
 Tripos with a view to ordination, would have had effect- 
 ive weight, seeing that he was allowing me to spend a 
 fourth year at Cambridge, he, with a supreme and perfect 
 delicacy, forbore to put a pennyweight of his own desires 
 into the scale, and welcomed the choice I made of taking 
 up archaeology for a second Tripos. He merely wished 
 me to attend a few divinity lectures, and left it at that. 
 Hugh, meantime, triumphantly carrying the banner of 
 early failure which I had so long held against all comers, 
 had unsuccessfully competed, after a year of cramming, 
 in the Indian Civil Service examination, which had been 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 247 
 
 his first choice of a profession. Having failed in that, 
 he was to come up to Trinity in October, unblushing and 
 unhonoured. I passed the banner to him with all good 
 wishes. 
 
 There were some weeks of long vacation after the 
 archaeological decision was made which I now know to 
 have been loaded with fate so far as my own subse- 
 quent life was concerned, though at the time those scrib- 
 blings I then indulged in seemed to be quite as void of 
 significance as any particular number of the Saturday 
 Magazine had been. For one morning, at Cambridge, 
 where I had returned for a few weeks before we went 
 out to Switzerland in August, I desisted from the perusal 
 of Miss Harrison's Mythology and Monuments of 
 Ancient Athens, and wrote on the top of a piece of blue 
 foolscap a word that has stuck to me all my life. For a 
 long time there had been wandering about in my head 
 the idea of some fascinating sort of modern girl, who 
 tackled life with uncommon relish and success, and was 
 adored by the world in general, and had all the embellish- 
 ments that a human being can desire except a heart. 
 Years ago some adumbration of her had occurred in the 
 story that Maggie and I wrote together; that I suppose 
 was the yeast that was now beginning to stir and bubble 
 in my head. She must ride, she must dance, she must 
 have all the nameless attraction that attaches to those 
 who are as prismatic and as hard as crystal, and above all 
 she must talk. It was no use just informing the reader 
 that here was a marvellously fascinating personality, as 
 Maggie and I had done before, or that to see her was to 
 worship her, or that after a due meed of worship she 
 would reveal herself as no more than husk and colouring 
 matter. Explanations and assurances of that sort were 
 
248 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 now altogether to be dispensed with. Scarcely even was 
 the current of her thought, scarcely even were the main 
 lines of her personality to be drawn: she was to reveal 
 herself by what she said, and thus, whatever she did, 
 would need no comment. There is the plain presentment 
 of the idea that occupied my youthful mind when I wrote 
 Dodo at the top of a piece of blue foolscap, and put the 
 numeral "one" on the top right-hand corner; and where 
 this crude story of mine still puts in a plea for originality, 
 is in the region of its conscious plan. Bad or good (it 
 was undoubtedly bad) it introduced a certain novelty 
 into novel-writing which had "quite a little vogue" for a 
 time. The main character, that is to say, was made, in 
 her infinitesimal manner, to draw herself. In staged and 
 acted drama even, that principle — bad or good — is never 
 consistently maintained, because other people habitually 
 discuss the hero and heroine, and the audience's concep- 
 tion of them is based on comment as well as on self- 
 spoken revelation. Also in drama there is bound to be 
 some sort of plot, in which action reveals the actor. But 
 in this story which I scribbled at for a few weeks, there 
 was no sort of plot: there was merely a clash of minor 
 personalities breaking themselves to bits against the cen- 
 tral gabbling figure. Hideously crude, blatantly inef- 
 ficient as the execution was, there was just that one new 
 and feasible idea in the manner of it. What I aimed 
 at was a type that revealed itself in an individual by 
 oceans of nonsensical speech. 
 
 I wrote with the breathless speed of creation (however 
 minute such creation was), almost entirely, but not quite, 
 for my own private amusement. It was not quite for 
 that internal satisfaction alone, because as I scampered 
 and scamped, I began to contemplate a book arising out 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 249 
 
 of these scribblings, a marketable book, that is to say, 
 between covers and for sale. Eventually, for the infor- 
 mation of any who happen to remember the total result, 
 I got as far as the lamentable death of Dodo's first hus- 
 band, and that, as far as I knew then, was the end of 
 the story. Dodo would be thus left a far from discon- 
 solate widow dangling in the air like a blind-string in 
 front of an open window. On the last page of the book, 
 she would remain precisely as she had been on the first; 
 she had not developed, she had not gone upwards or 
 downwards in any moral course ; she was a moment, a de- 
 tail, a flashlight photograph flared on to a plate without 
 the smallest presentment of anything, except what she 
 happened to be at that moment. All this I did not then 
 realize. . . . There it was anyhow, and having finished 
 it, I bundled the whole affair into a drawer, and with 
 that off my mind, concentrated again over the Mythology 
 and Monuments of Ancient Athens. 
 
 Then followed a few weeks at the Rieder Furca Hotel, 
 above the Aletsch Glacier, opposite the Bel Alp. At that 
 time it was a wooden structure of so light and airy a 
 build that without raising your voice you could talk 
 through the wall to the person next door. Maggie that 
 year was obliged to go to Aix for a course of treatment 
 and my mother went with her, but, even as it was, we 
 nearly filled the little hotel. The weather was bad, 
 an ascent of the Jungfrau which I made in very thick soft 
 snow, after sleeping for two nights at the Concordia hut 
 being the only big (and that an abominable) climb, and 
 there was a great deal of "Cotter's Saturday Night." My 
 father had a larger supply of books than usual, for he was 
 busy with his judgment in the Lincoln trial, to be de- 
 livered in the autumn. For a couple of years the case 
 
250 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 had been a perpetual anxiety to him. It was doubtful 
 at first whether he, as Archbishop, possessed the jurisdic- 
 tion to try it, and while personally (to put the matter 
 in a nutshell) he was very unwilling to do so, he did 
 not want the jurisdiction of the See, if it possessed it, to 
 lapse. The case was one of illegal ritual : and the Church 
 Association party, at whose instigation it was started, had 
 obtained their evidence in a manner peculiarly sordid, for 
 they had sent emissaries to spy on Bishop King's manner 
 of celebrating the Holy Communion. As their object 
 was to obtain evidence on that point, it is difficult to 
 see how else they could have obtained it, but the notion 
 of evidence thus obtained was revolting to my father. 
 On the other hand there was Bishop King, a man of the 
 highest character, of saintly life, an old and beloved 
 friend of my father's, who was thus accused of illegality 
 in matters which to the ordinary lay and even clerical 
 mind were of infinitesimal importance. But the indict- 
 ment was that he had offended against Ecclesiastical Law, 
 which my father as head of the Church was bound to up- 
 hold, so that when, after innumerable arguments and dis- 
 cussion, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 
 found that he had the jurisdiction, he decided to assume 
 it. That being so, he could dismiss the case as being a 
 frivolous indictment, but this course undoubtedly would 
 have caused a split in the English Church, and accord- 
 ingly he decided to try it. It was heard in February, 
 1890, and he reserved judgment. It was this pronounce- 
 ment that occupied him so closely all that summer, and 
 he finished it in September. 
 
 At the beginning of October, Hugh went up to Cam- 
 bridge, for the assembling of freshmen, and I had still 
 some ten days which I spent at Addington. Arthur was 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 251 
 
 already back at Eton, my father and mother and Maggie 
 soon went off on some visit, and thus it happened that 
 Nellie and I for a few days were alone there. We had 
 breakfast very late, with a sense of complete uncontrol, 
 we rode and we played lawn-tennis and talked in the 
 desultory argumentative manner that we both thoroughly 
 enjoyed. In particular we played at "old games," and 
 Beth used to join us. That year the big cedar in the gar- 
 den was covered with little immature cones, full of a yel- 
 low powder like sulphur, and we collected this in glass- 
 topped pill-boxes, part of the ancient apparatus of the 
 moth-collections, shaking the sulphur-laden cones into 
 them, and filling each full to the brim. There was no 
 design as to what we were to do with these: there was 
 just some reversion in our minds to childish "treasures," 
 like the spa and the dead hornet in the aquarium. It was 
 enough to fill these little pill-boxes with the cedar-pollen, 
 and screw the lids on, and know that half a dozen boxes 
 were charged to the brim. We were quite aimless, we 
 saw nobody but Beth, and were wonderfully content. I 
 did a little reading in Overbeck's Schriftquellen, and 
 Nellie translated the German part of it to me, to save 
 time. There was nothing more to remember of those days 
 except that delicious sense of leisure and love and 
 liberty: we did nothing except what we wanted to do, 
 and what we seemed to want was to be ridiculous chil- 
 dren again. Eventually, after some four or five days, 
 came the afternoon when I had to go back to Cambridge ; 
 my father and mother were coming back to Addington 
 that day or the next. Nellie and I parted, greatly regret- 
 ting that these silly days were done, and made plans for 
 Christmas. 
 
 A week or so afterwards, I got a letter from my mother, 
 
252 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 saying that Nellie had a diphtheritic sore throat. Anxious 
 news came after that for a few days, but on a certain 
 Sunday I had tidings that she was going on well. Early 
 on Monday morning I got a telegram telling me to come 
 home at once, for she was very much worse. I went round 
 to Trinity to see Hugh, and found he had received a 
 similar telegram. There was a train to London half an 
 hour later, and as I was packing a bag the post came 
 in with reassuring news. But that had been written the 
 day before : the telegram was of later date. 
 
 She had died that morning, facing death with the fear- 
 less welcome that she had always given to any new ex- 
 perience. During her illness she had not been able to 
 speak at all, but had written little sentences on scraps of 
 paper; after the nature of it was declared she had been 
 completely isolated, but her nurse disinfected these notes 
 and sent them to the others. The first was a joyful little 
 line to my mother, saying that as she had to be in bed, 
 she was going to have a good spell of writing at a story 
 she was engaged on. At the end, the last note but one 
 had been for her nurse; in this she had thanked her and 
 asked, "Is there anything I can do*?" Her nurse 
 answered her when she read it, "Let patience do her per- 
 fect work." ... So that was off Nellie's mind. And 
 then last of all she wrote to my mother who was by her 
 bed and she traced out, "I wonder what it will be like. 
 Give them all my love." Then my mother began saying 
 to her, "Jesu, Lover of my soul," and while she was 
 saying it, Nellie died. 
 
 That afternoon, we, the rest of us, went out on that 
 still sunny October day and strolled through the woods 
 together, splitting up into twos and threes and rejoining 
 again. My mother seemed to have her hand in Nellie's 
 
THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 253 
 
 all the time, telling us, who had come too late, tran- 
 quilly and serenely, how the days had gone, and how 
 patient she had been and how cheerful. We recalled all 
 sorts of things about her, with smiles and with laughter, 
 and there was no sense of loss, for my mother brought her 
 amongst us, and never let go of her. Then, back in the 
 house again, there were other arrangements to be made : 
 it was settled that Arthur, Hugh and I should go back to 
 Eton and Cambridge as soon as we could, but after the 
 funeral we must spend a week of quarantine somewhere. 
 How Nellie had got diphtheria was obscure, and it was 
 better that we should not sleep in the house, or run a 
 possible risk of infection. I wanted to see her, but my 
 mother said that what I wanted to see was not Nellie at 
 all, and that I must think of her as I had known her. 
 And as I knew her, so she has always remained for me, 
 collecting the cedar-sulphur, or laughing with open 
 mouth, or grave and eager with sympathy. The glass- 
 lidded pill-boxes were on a ledge of a bookcase, where 
 we had left them a week or two before. My mother had 
 seen them, and thought that there was probably some 
 mystic significance about them, so I told her how Nellie 
 and I had gathered them, and she said, "What treasures: 
 bless her!" Golden October weather it was, with frosts 
 at night and windless days, and the chestnut leaves came 
 peeling off the trees and falling in a heap of tawny yellow 
 below them, each leaf twirling in the air as it fell. 
 
 She was buried in Addington churchyard and next her 
 now lies Maggie, and on her other side my mother. 
 
 My father, all the time of Nellie's illness, had been 
 hard at work on the final revision of his Lincoln judg- 
 ment: now the delivery of that was postponed for a little, 
 
254 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 but not for long. Everyone had to get back normally and 
 naturally to the work and the play and the joy and sor- 
 row of life again, but at the Christmas holidays it was 
 seen how huge a gap had come in the circle which since 
 Martin's death, twelve years before, had grown up to- 
 gether, critical and devoted and wildly alive. No one, 
 when all were so intent on the businesses in hand, had es- 
 timated when a play, for instance, must be written and 
 rehearsed and managed, how largely it was Nellie's en- 
 thusiastic energy that carried things through. So there 
 was no play that Christmas, and the year after four of 
 us, my father and mother and Maggie and I, were in 
 Algiers, another year they were in Florence, and another 
 Maggie and I were in Egypt, and so that particular blaze 
 of young activity of which Christmas holidays had been 
 the type and flower came to an end. Besides we were all 
 getting older, and there was no Nellie; with her death 
 some unrecapturable magic was lost. 
 
 Of the many intimate friendships of my mother's life 
 none was closer than that which had ripened during these 
 years at Lambeth with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the 
 late Archbishop. She had constantly been with us in 
 town and at Addington, and now, after Nellie's death, 
 she made her permanent home with us. Then, when the 
 Lambeth days were over she continued, until my mother's 
 death, twenty-two years later, to devote her life to her. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 
 
 AT Cambridge the study of archaeology had forcibly 
 taken possession of me by right of love, and at last 
 I was working at that which it was my business to be 
 occupied in, with devotion to my subject. Roman art, 
 so I speedily discovered, was an utterly hideous and de- 
 based affair in itself, and the only things of beauty that 
 emerged from Rome were copies of Greek originals, and 
 even then these copies were probably made by Greek 
 workmen. In Roman buildings also all that was worth 
 looking at was stolen from the Greeks, and often marred 
 in the stealing, and the thick mortar between their roughly 
 hewn stones, the facing of them with a dishonest veneer 
 of marble, their abominable tessellated pavements, the 
 odious wall decorations of Pompeii revolted this ardent 
 Hellenist. Now, too, for the first time since I came up to 
 Cambridge, I came under an inspired and inspiring 
 teacher; indeed, there were two such, for it was impossible 
 not to burn when Dr. Waldstein in the Museum of Casts 
 flung himself into Hellenic attitudes, and communicated 
 his volcanic enthusiasm. But more inspiring yet was 
 Professor Middleton : he gave me no formal lectures, but 
 encouraged me to bn^.g my books to his room, and spend 
 the morning there. He used to walk about in a thick 
 dressing-gown and a skull-cap, looking like some Oriental 
 magician, and now he would pull an intaglio ring off his 
 
 255 
 
256 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 finger and make me perceive the serene and matchless 
 sobriety of an early gem as compared with the more 
 florid design, still matchless in workmanship, of a later 
 century, or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waist- 
 coat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative let- 
 ters and tell him where they came from. He had dozens 
 of notebooks filled with sketches of Greek mouldings and 
 cornices : there were sections of the columns of the Parthe- 
 non that showed how the drums had been ground round 
 each on the other, till, without any mess of mortar, they 
 adhered so closely that the joint was scarcely visible. 
 There were cedar-wood blocks in the centres of them with 
 bronze pins round which they revolved; the honesty and 
 precision of the workmanship could never be discovered 
 till the column was in ruins. But there was the very 
 spirit and ardency of Greece ; and as for the great frieze 
 of horsemen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon it 
 was so placed that only a mere glimpse of it could be had 
 by those who walked in the colonnade. k Yet in honour of 
 the goddess and in obedience to the imperious craving 
 for perfection, it, though scarcely to be seen, must be of 
 a fineness and finish unequalled in all the forums of 
 Rome. Then Middleton would take a fragment of Greek 
 pottery from a drawer, or a white lekythus from Eretria, 
 and show me the mark of the potter's wheel, and how the 
 white ground was laid on after the baking, and how the 
 artist with brush delicate and unerring had drawn the 
 raised arm of the ephebus who laid his garland on the 
 tomb. There were photographs also from the Street of 
 Tombs; in one there was standing a young girl with 
 braided hair. She it was who was dead, and the mother 
 stood in front of her lifting the small face upwards with 
 a hand under her chin, bending to kiss her for the last 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 257 
 
 time, and such of the inscription as remained ran 
 XAIPEHENO . . . The rest of the letters was gone, 
 but that was sufficient, and told how her mother gave 
 the final greeting of Godspeed and of farewell to 
 Penthesilea, for in that beautiful tongue "Hail"! and 
 "Good-bye" are the same word and affectionately wish 
 prosperity, whether for one who returns to the home, or 
 goes from the home on the longest journey of all. And 
 Professor Middleton made me realize the serenity of those 
 good wishes for Penthesilea : there was a wistfulness on 
 the part of those who remained, and a wonder and a great 
 hope, and God knows how that struck home to me. . . . 
 Or a young man sat languid on a rock, and his hunting 
 spear was propped behind him, and beside him just one 
 companion, weary with watching, had fallen asleep. 
 There was no mother there to send him on his way; his 
 friend and his hunting-spear were his comrades on earth, 
 and these he must leave behind him, when to-day he fared 
 out on his new adventure, further afield than ever his 
 huntings had taken him. . . . And thus to me, the 
 supreme race of all who have inhabited this earth became 
 real. They heard the voice of creation as none other has 
 heard it, and saw as none other has seen. They realized 
 in dawn and in nightfall the attainment towards which 
 all others have fruitlessly striven, showing in marble the 
 humanity of the divine, and the divinity of man; they 
 had birthdays for their gods, and for their dead, who 
 died not, they had the imperishable love that knows not 
 fear. 
 
 Professor Middleton never alluded in any way to this 
 archaeological tripos which I was to challenge after one 
 year's work. All the morning, three times a week or 
 more, I used to sit there with my books that I never read, 
 
258 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 because he, in his dressing-gown, produced, one after the 
 other, little bits of things which would make me love the 
 Greeks for no other reason than for the artistic joy of 
 their works and days. He knew of course that there was 
 a tripos impending, and this in his view was the best way 
 of preparing for it; while for drier stuff he gave me his 
 notebooks on Vitruvius, which would, with his little ex- 
 quisite sections and elevations, explain all that I need 
 know about the bones and alphabet of architecture. His 
 whole procedure, as I saw then, and his whole object 
 was to make me want to know, down to their sandals and 
 their salad-bowls and brooches, all that was to be learned 
 of the brains of a god-like race. Once, so I remember, a 
 bitter blizzard white with snow beat against the windows, 
 and from some roof near a slate flew off and crashed in 
 the small court at King's where the mulberry tree grew. 
 "That was Oreithyia," he said, sucking on his pipe. 
 "Boreas loved her, and blew her away. Rude Boreas, you 
 know. You should read up the myths. Most of Greek 
 sculpture illustrates myths." 
 
 Since the days when I was fifteen, since Beesly and the 
 Trojan Queen's Revenge, there had been no such inspirer. 
 But Beesly dealt only with language, while under Mid- 
 dleton the dry bones which had come together, not only 
 stood up "an exceeding great army," but went about their 
 work, and returned to their homes of an evening, and 
 lived and loved. Beesly had brought me to the portals 
 of the house of the people who made Art, and knocked 
 on the door for me. But Middleton pushed it open, and 
 the gold standard of the Greeks that, theoretically, seven 
 years ago I knew to be the only coinage, was now weighed 
 and was found sufficient, and all else whatever baser stuff 
 might load the opposing balance was found wanting. 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 259 
 
 It was at some time during that year that J. K. Stephen, 
 the founder of the T.A.F., returned to King's, and in- 
 stantly for me all the lesser lights of general influence 
 were eclipsed. In presence and personality alike he was 
 one of those who without effort or aim impose themselves 
 on their circle. Had he never said a word, the very fact 
 of his being in the room must have produced more effect 
 that any conversation that might go on round him. He 
 was splendidly handsome, big of head, impressive and 
 regular of feature, and enormously massive in build ; slow 
 moving and shambling when he walked, but somehow 
 monumental. He had an immense fund of humour, grim 
 and rather savage at times, at others of such froth and 
 frolic as appeared in the two volumes of verse which 
 he published during the next year, Lapsus Calami, and 
 Quo Musa tendis. But this bubbling lightness was 
 markedly uncharacteristic of his normal self. That it 
 was there, those two volumes proved, but that particular 
 spring, that light-hearted Puck-like quality, he certainly 
 reserved for his verse, which to those who knew him was 
 in no way the flower of his mind. In the dedication to 
 Lapsus Calami, he expresses the desire that the reader 
 should recognize his debt to "C.S.C." (Calverley of Fly 
 Leaves), he hopes that some one will think that "of C.S.C. 
 this gentle art he learned," and undoubtedly the reader 
 did think so, for it was certainly C.S.C. whose method 
 inspired some of these poems. But it is just these poems 
 in which he was obviously indebted to Calverley, that 
 are least worthy and characteristic of him. Jim Stephen 
 made, at his worst, amusing neat little rhymes not nearly 
 so good as Calverley's, but, at his best, he made poems, 
 such as "The Old School List," of which Calverley was 
 quite incapable. Both also were brilliant parodists, but 
 
260 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 here J.K.S. had a far subtler art than the man with whom 
 he hoped his readers would compare him. Calverley's 
 famous parody of Robert Browning, "The Cock and the 
 Bull," does not touch in point of rapier-work J.K.S.'s 
 poem "Sincere Flattery to R.B." The one does no more 
 than seize on ridiculous phrases in Browning, and go a 
 shade further in absurdity: the other ("Birthdays") 
 parodies the very essence of the more obscure lyrics : you 
 cannot read it, however often you have done so, without 
 the hope that you may this time or the next find out what 
 it means. He was the inventor, too, of a peculiarly 
 pleasing artifice with regard to parody, for he put into 
 Wordsworth's mouth, for instance, in pure Words- 
 worthian phrase, the exact opposite of Wordsworth's 
 teaching, and produced a lament over the want of loco- 
 motive power in the Lake district. The effect is inimit- 
 able : the poet longs to see in those happy days when Hel- 
 vellyn's base is tunnelled, and its peak grimy 
 
 The dusky grove of iron rails 
 Which leads to Euston Square, 
 
 and in lines that almost must have been written by 
 Wordsworth exclaims: 
 
 I want to hear the porters cry, 
 "Change here for Ennerdale !" 
 
 And I must be forgiven, since so few know the poem, for 
 quoting the postscript to his parody of Browning, suffi- 
 cient surely to make the poet, for whom Jim Stephen had 
 an immense reverence, turn in his grave in order to laugh 
 more easily. As follows : 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 261 
 
 P.S. 
 
 There's a Me Society down at Cambridge 
 Where my works, cum notis variorum 
 Are talked about : well, I require the same bridge 
 As Euclid took toll at as Asinorum. 
 
 And as they have got through several ditties 
 I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall 
 I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is, 
 A bridge to stop asses at, once for all. 
 
 If the art of parody can go further, I do not know who 
 has conducted it there. The kindly ghost of Robert 
 Browning might perhaps shrug his shoulders at "The 
 Cock and the Bull," and say, "Very amusing" : but read- 
 ing Jim Stephen's R.B. he must surely have winced and 
 frowned first, and thereafter broken into a roar of his 
 most genial laughter. 
 
 Often (when not indebted to C.S.C.) Jim Stephen's 
 most apt and biting parodies would be written or spouted 
 extempore: I remember for instance someone reading a 
 rather lamentable verse from F. W. Myers in which he 
 delicately alludes to the godly procreation of children 
 in the following lines : 
 
 Lo! when a man magnanimous and tender, 
 Lo! when a woman desperate and true, 
 Make the irrevocable sweet surrender, 
 Show to each other what the Lord can do. 
 
 upon which Jim Stephen without a moment's pause ex- 
 claimed : 
 
 Lo! when a man cbscene and superstitious, 
 Lo! when a woman brainless and absurd, 
 Strive to idealize the meretricious, 
 Love one another like a beast or bird. 
 
262 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 This could not be included in Lapsus Calami, nor un- 
 fortunately would he include one of his most ingenious 
 extravagances, and I cannot find that it has ever been 
 published. The subject matter was that a burglar "des- 
 perate and true" awoke in the night and found an angel 
 standing in his room, who asked him whether, being what 
 he was, he would sooner go to heaven or hell, the choice 
 being entirely his. His admirably logical conclusion was 
 as follows: 
 
 The burning at first no doubt would be worst, 
 But custom that anguish would soften ; 
 But those who are bored by praising the Lord, 
 Would be more so by praising him often. 
 
 He chooses accordingly. 
 
 All that year Jim remained in residence at Cambridge ; 
 during one vacation he stayed with us at Addington, dur- 
 ing another I went over to his Irish home, where, one 
 evening after an argument about Kipling, he took up his 
 bedroom candle saying, "Well, I wish he would stop 
 kipling. Good night." In ten minutes he came back, 
 "I've written a poem about it," he said, and proceeded to 
 read the two immortal stanzas which end, 
 
 When the Rudyards cease from kipling, 
 And the Haggards ride no more. 
 
 Close friends though we were, I was always conscious of 
 a side of him that was formidable, of the possibility of a 
 sudden blaze of anger flaring up though quickly ex- 
 tinguished again: there was, too, always present the 
 knowledge of that "dark tremendous sea of cloud" in the 
 skirts of which he had been before, and into the heart f of 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 263 
 
 which it was inscrutably decreed that he must go. There 
 came a dark December morning; that time the breakdown 
 was final, and he lived not many weeks. 
 
 Once again I made a triumphant tripos in the matter of 
 archseology, was given an open scholarship at King's, and 
 immediately afterwards applied for one of those grants 
 that seemed to hang like ripe plums on the delightful 
 tree of knowledge. Hitherto those branches had waved 
 high above my head, but now they graciously swept down- 
 wards and I plucked at the first plum I saw, and applied 
 for a small grant to excavate in the town-walls at 
 Chester. There was reason to suppose that quantities of 
 the Roman tombstones of the legionaries that had been 
 stationed there, had been utilized in the building of the 
 town-wall, and though there were only Roman remains 
 to be discovered (would that they had been Greek!) the 
 search for them would be a very pleasant pursuit for the 
 autumn, and might yield material for a fellowship-dis- 
 sertation. To my intense surprise some grant — from the 
 Wiirtz Fund, I think — was given me, for the purpose of 
 discovering, if possible, new facts about the distribution 
 of Roman legions in Britain. 
 
 The family went out to Pontresina that August, and I 
 with them for a week or two before the work at Chester 
 began. There I had a most horrible experience with 
 Hugh on the Piz Palu, one of the peaks of the Bernina. 
 Our plan was to make a "col" of it, that is to ascend it 
 on one side, pass over the top, and descend on another. 
 We tramped and perspired up southern slopes in deep 
 snow on the ascent, struck an arete which led to the top, 
 made the summit, and began to descend by another route. 
 The way lay over a long ridge swept by the most biting 
 
264 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 north wind, from which on the ascent the mountain had 
 screened us, and never have I encountered so wicked a 
 blast. The loose snow whirled up from the rocks was 
 driven against us as if it was torrents of icy rain, pierc- 
 ing and penetrating. Once as we halted, I noticed that 
 Hugh shut his eyes, and seemed sleepy, but he said that 
 he was all right and on we went. He was on the rope 
 just in front of me behind the leading guide, and sud- 
 denly, without stumbling, he fell down in a heap. He 
 was just conscious when we picked him up and said, "I'm 
 only rather sleepy; let me go to sleep . . ." and then 
 collapsed again. 
 
 He was alive and little more. Raw brandy, of which 
 we had about half a pint, stimulated him for a moment, 
 and soon, after another and another dose, our brandy was 
 gone. There was no question of the inadvisability of giv- 
 ing him spirits, in order to warm him, which is one of the 
 most fatal errors when a climber is suffering from mere 
 cold : there was just the hope of keeping him alive by any 
 stimulant. It was not possible to go back over the sum- 
 mit, and so to get into more sheltered conditions again; 
 the best chance, and that a poor one, was to convey him 
 down somehow along the rest of this bitter ridge, till 
 we could find shelter from the wind. Very soon he be- 
 came completely unconscious, he could move no more at 
 all, and the guide and the porter whom we had with us 
 simply carried him along the rest of the ridge. The rope 
 was altogether a hindrance, so we took it off, and pro- 
 ceeded in two separate parties. The guides carried Hugh 
 between them, and I followed. 
 
 I had no idea after we had made this arrangement if 
 Hugh was alive or not ; often I had to wait till they got 
 round some awkward corner, and then make my way after 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 265 
 
 them. Places that would have been easily traversed by 
 a roped party, took on a totally different aspect, when two 
 men unroped were carrying another, and when the fourth 
 of the party had to traverse them alone. What chiefly 
 occupied my benumbed mind was the sort of telegram 
 that would be sent to my father when we got down to the 
 foot of the glacier below, where there was communication 
 with Pontresina. Should I be sending a telegram that 
 Hugh was dead, or should I have slipped, and thus be 
 incapable of sending a telegram at all, or would nobody 
 come back? . . . For some hour or so this procession 
 went on its way: after I had waited for the trio to get 
 round some rock or obstruction on the ridge, I followed, 
 and caught sight of them again a dozen yards further 
 down. Whether they were carrying a corpse or not I 
 had no idea. 
 
 Gradually we came to the end of this ridge. I had 
 waited for them to scramble over a difficult passage, and 
 then they disappeared round a corner. One of the guides 
 had loosened a rock, and when I tried to step on it, it 
 gave way altogether and rattled down the almost precipi- 
 tous slope to the side. I had recovered on to my original 
 standing-ground, but with that rock gone, and being 
 alone and unroped, it took me some couple of minutes, 
 I suppose, to find a reliable foothold. When that was 
 done, a couple of steps more brought me, as it had brought 
 them, completely out of the wind, and on to a broiling 
 southern slope. Fifty feet below me there came another 
 corner, which they had already passed, and I could see 
 nothing further. I went round that corner, and found the 
 two guides roaring with laughter and Hugh quite drunk. 
 He was making some sort of ineffectual attempt to sit 
 on the point of his ice-axe. He was not dead at all : he 
 
266 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 was only drunk. The moment, apparently, that they had 
 got out of that icy blast, his heart-action must have re- 
 asserted itself, and there was a half-pint of raw brandy 
 poured into an empty stomach to render accounts. With 
 thick and stumbling speech, he staggered along, assur- 
 ing us that he had only been rather sleepy. . . . And so 
 he had, and I emptied the line snow that had been driven 
 in about my knees through my knickerbockers, and had 
 no need to send any telegrams. 
 
 Except for that adventure, which I would gladly have 
 done without, Pontresina was an uneventful place, rather 
 picnicky and wearisome. There was a friend of my sister 
 Maggie there under the sentence of the white death: 
 there was an elderly bishop who attached himself some- 
 what to our party : there was Miss Margot Tennant whom 
 then I met for the first time; and after a rather dull fort- 
 night, I turned back to England to embrace the career, at 
 Chester, of a serious archaeologist. 
 
 Now there was no particular reason why the Corpo- 
 ration of Chester should allow a young gentleman from 
 Cambridge University to pull the city walls about, in the 
 hope of extracting therefrom Roman tombstones, even 
 though he was quite willing that these monuments, if 
 discovered, should be presented to the local museum. So 
 with a view to securing a warmer welcome, I had got 
 my father to write to the Duke of Westminster at Eaton, 
 and this was a gloriously successful move. I went over 
 to see him, explained the plan, and got his support. He 
 in turn wrote to the Mayor urging the claims of archae- 
 ology on an enlightened town, and gave me £50 to aug- 
 ment the grant from the Wiirtz fund. The technical part 
 of the work, the underpinning of the wall, the subsequent 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 267 
 
 building of it up again in case we extracted Roman tomb- 
 stones from it was entrusted to the city surveyor: local 
 subscriptions came in, and tombstones of considerable im- 
 portance came out, for we found that a legion, "Legio 
 Decima Valeria Vdctrix" (The victorious Valerian), 
 whose presence in England was hitherto unknown, had 
 been stationed at Chester. Professor Mommsen, the his- 
 torian, must be informed about that, and the copies of 
 these tombstones must be sent him, and these produced a 
 letter of congratulation and acknowledgment from the 
 great man. I skipped with joy over that, for was not 
 this an apotheosis for the family dunce, that Professor 
 Mommsen should applaud his work*? And again I 
 skipped when one of the famous post-cards came from 
 Hawarden, asking me to come over and tell Mr. Glad- 
 stone about these finds. The sense of diplomacy spiced 
 that adventure, for profoundly ignorant though I was 
 about politics, I had just the prudence to be aware that 
 Eaton and Hawarden must not be put, so to speak, into 
 one pocket, since Mr. Gladstone with his policies of 
 Home Rule for Ireland and the Disestablishment of the 
 Welsh Church had digged a gulf of liquid fire between 
 himself and the Duke. There must be nothing said that 
 could tend to stoke that, and strict was the guard that 
 I set on my lips. 
 
 All are agreed on the sense of the terrific latent energy 
 with which that quiet country-house was stored : there was 
 high tension in its tranquillity. You felt that if you 
 touched anything a great electric spark might flare with 
 a cracking explosion towards your extended finger. . . . 
 I got there during the morning and was at once taken to 
 see Mr. Gladstone. He was in his study, sitting at his 
 
268 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "political" table: that other table was the table where 
 he worked at Homer, so he presently explained to me, sug- 
 gesting though not actually stating the image which flew 
 into my mind, of his boiling over, so to speak, at the 
 political table, that furnace of fierce contention and 
 white-hot enthusiasm, and of his putting himself to cool 
 off from controversy by the Ionian Sea. He instantly 
 plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain 
 as if nothing else really mattered or ever had mattered to 
 him, and pored over the copies of a few inscriptions I had 
 brought him. But he wanted more lively evidence than 
 a mere copy. 
 
 "I should like to see the squeezes of these," he said. 
 "Do you know the only proper way to make squeezes'? 
 You take your sheet of blotting-paper, and after you have 
 washed the stone, you lay it on, pressing the paper into 
 the letters of the inscription. Then sprinkle it with 
 water, but by no means wet your paper before you have 
 laid it on the stone, because it is apt to tear if you do 
 that. Then take a clothes brush — not too stiff a one — 
 and tap the surface over and over again with the bristles. 
 By degrees you will get the paper to mould itself into all 
 the letters of the inscription, and where there are letters 
 apparently quite perished, it will often show you some 
 faint stroke from which you can conjecture what the 
 missing letter has been, though it is invisible to the eye. 
 And let your blotting paper get dry before you remove 
 it. Otherwise again you may tear it. Yes, we are coming 
 to lunch: we know," he said to Mrs. Gladstone, who 
 came in for the second time to say it was ready. 
 
 I do not of course pretend to reproduce the precise 
 wording of this little dissertation on blotting-paper- 
 squeezes, but there or thereabouts was the substance of it, 
 
E. F. BENSON, ^T. 22 
 
 [Page 269 
 

AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 271 
 
 full of detail, full of fire and gesticulation, as if he him- 
 self had invented the science of squeezes, and had done 
 nothing all his life but make them. 
 
 After lunch he said he would drive me to St. Deiniol's, 
 the library, chiefly theological and philosophical, that he 
 was arranging, largely with his own hands, from his vast 
 accumulation of books, for the benefit of the district, and 
 in especial, for that of clerical students whose Church 
 he had vainly attempted to disestablish. Soon after 
 lunch it was announced that the carriage was round, and 
 he went to the door. I had supposed that there would 
 be some brougham or whatnot in charge of a coachman; 
 instead there was a pony carriage for two, with a groom 
 holding tight on to the pony's head. Mr. Gladstone, 
 already very dim-sighted, peered at the pony, and said 
 to me, "Wait a minute : that pony's a beast," and hurried 
 back into the house reappearing again with a formidable 
 whip. Then I became aware that he and I were going 
 alone, and that Mr. Gladstone, armed with this whip 
 in case the pony was "beastly," was intending to drive, 
 for he took up the reins, and, as soon as I was in, said 
 to the groom, "Let go, Charles," and whacked the pony 
 over the rump to teach him that there was his master 
 sitting inside. Under this charioteer, blind and aged and 
 completely intrepid, we cantered away to St. Deiniol's, 
 Mr. Gladstone pointing at objects of interest with his 
 whip, and reminding the pony that he would catch it, 
 if he misbehaved. From there, I think he drove me to 
 the station and returned alone. I duly sent him squeezes 
 prepared in the manner he had prescribed, and received 
 a series of post-cards suggesting the probable readings of 
 erased letters, and when next I went to Hawarden that 
 autumn, there were passages he had turned up in the 
 
272 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum" which bore on this 
 tombstone and on that, discharged at me as if from a 
 volcano. . . . 
 
 Six weeks' exploration was enough to exhaust my 
 funds, and I carried my squeezes and my sketches back 
 to Cambridge, there to put the results into shape. . . . 
 And there I found, and re-read with a suddenly re-kindled 
 interest those pages of blue foolscap on the first of which 
 was the heading "Dodo." I had written them chiefly for 
 my own amusement, but now, rightly or wrongly, I had 
 the conviction that they might amuse others as well. But 
 I really had no idea, till I took them out again, what they 
 were like; now it occurred to me that the people in them 
 were something like real people, and that the whole in 
 point of agitating fact was something like a real book, 
 that might be printed and bound. . . . But I instantly 
 wanted another and if possible a story-teller's opinion 
 about it, and sent it off to my mother, asking her to read 
 it first, and if it seemed to her to provide any species of 
 entertainment, to think whether she could not manage to 
 induce Mrs. Harrison (Lucas Malet) or Henry James, to 
 cast a professional eye over it. She managed this with 
 such success, that a few days afterwards she wrote to 
 me to say that Henry James had consented to read it, and 
 give his frank opinion. The packet she had already, on 
 his consent, despatched to him. 
 
 Now this MSS. which thus had reached the kindest 
 man in the world, was written in a furious hurry and 
 covered with erasures, that exploded into illegible inter- 
 polations, and was indited in such a hand as we employ 
 on a note that has to be dashed off when it is time already 
 to go to the station. This was genially hinted at when 
 late in November the recipient announced to me his judg- 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 273 
 
 ment in the matter; for he prefaced his criticism with 
 an apology for having kept it so long, and allowed that, 
 in consentng to read and criticize, he had "rather over- 
 estimated the attention I should be able to give to a 
 production in manuscript of such substantial length. We 
 live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I had taken 
 for granted your story would come to me in that 
 form. ..." 
 
 I should like to call the attention of Mr. Max Beer- 
 bohm, our national caricaturist and parodist, to this 
 unique situation. Henry James at that time had lately 
 evolved the style and the method which makes a deeper 
 gulf between his earlier books and his later than exists be- 
 tween different periods of the work of any other artist. 
 Nearest perhaps in this extent and depth of gulf comes 
 the case of the painter Turner, but the most sober and 
 quiet example of his early period is not so far sundered 
 from the most riotous of Venetian sunrises, as is, let us 
 say, "Roderick Hudson" from "The Ivory Tower." Just 
 about now Henry James had realized, as he told my 
 mother, that all his previous work was "subaqueous": 
 now, it seemed to him that he had got his head above 
 water, whereas to those who adored his earlier work he 
 appeared to have taken a header into some bottomless 
 depth, where no plummet could penetrate. At this pre- 
 cise moment when he had vowed himself to psychological 
 analysis so meticulous and intricate that such action as 
 he henceforth permitted himself in his novels had to be 
 sifted and searched for and inferred from the motives 
 that prompted it, he found himself committed to read 
 a long and crabbed MS., roughly and voluptuously 
 squirted on to the paper. With what sense of outrage as 
 he deciphered it sentence by sentence must he have found 
 
274 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 himself confronted by the high-spirited but hare-brained 
 harangues of my unfortunate heroine and her wordy 
 friends! Page after page he must have turned, only to 
 discover more elementary adventures, more nugatory and 
 nonsensical dialogues. At the stage at which my story 
 then was, I must tell the reader that the heroine was far 
 more extravagant than she subsequently became: She 
 was much pruned and tamed before she made her printed 
 appearance. The greater part of her censored escapades 
 have faded from my mind, but I still remember some 
 occasion soon after her baby's death when she was dis- 
 covered, I think by Jack,' doing a step-dance with her 
 footman. It must all have seemed to Henry James the 
 very flower and felicity of hopeless, irredeemable fiction 
 and still he persevered. ... Or did he persevere 1 ? He 
 wrote me anyhow the most careful and kindly of letters, 
 following it by yet another, delicately and delightfully 
 forbearing to quench the smoking flax. 
 
 "I am such a fanatic myself," he writes in the earlier 
 of these, "on the subject of form, style, the evidence of 
 intention and meditation, of chiselling and hammering 
 out in literary things that I am afraid I am rather a cold- 
 blooded judge, rather likely to be offensive to a young 
 story-teller on the question of quality. I'm not sure that 
 yours strikes me as quite so ferociously literary as my 
 ideal. . . . Only remember that a story is, essentially a 
 form, and that if it fails of that, it fails of its mission. 
 . . . For the rest, make yourself a style. It is by style we 
 are saved." 
 
 In case the reader has given a glance to Dodo, can he 
 imagine a more wisely expressed opinion, that opinion, in 
 fact, being no opinion at all ? Never by any possibility 
 could that MS. have seemed to him worth the paper it 
 
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 275 
 
 was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With 
 what a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its 
 wrapper again! 
 
 I suppose I was incorrigible on this question of scrib- 
 bling, for I was not in the least discouraged. But for the 
 time the further adventures of the book were cut short 
 by its author's Odysseys, for directly after Christmas my 
 father and mother, Maggie, Lucy Tait and I started for 
 Algiers, through which we were to journey together as 
 far as Tunis. After that I was going on to Athens to 
 spend the spring there studying at the British School of 
 Archaeology, and it was with a light heart that I clapped 
 Dodo, after this austere outing, back into a drawer again 
 to wait till I could attend to her. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ATHENS AND DODO 
 
 A CURIOUS incident marked that Algerian tour. 
 Before going, my father told Queen Victoria of his 
 intention, and she had at first been against his travelling 
 so far afield, putting it to him that if his presence in 
 England was urgently and instantly required, there might 
 be some difficulty about his getting back in time. 
 Whether she had in her mind the possibility of her own 
 sudden death she did not explain. But presently she 
 seemed to think that her reluctance that he should be 
 so remote from England was unfounded : she changed her 
 mind and wished him an interesting and delightful jour- 
 ney. So from Algiers we went slowly eastwards visit- 
 ing Constantine, Tebessa, Timeghad and Fort National 
 on the way, our most remote point from Engla; 1 -via 
 Tunis on the one side or (retracing our steps) Algiers 
 on the other — being Biskra. We got there late one after- 
 noon, and waiting for my father was a telegram from the 
 Lord Chamberlain, announcing the death of Prince Ed- 
 ward, Duke of Clarence, from influenza, and giving the 
 date for the funeral. My father and I with guides and 
 Bradshaws vainly attempted to find a route by which he 
 could get back to England in time, but such route did 
 not exist. Had this news come that morning he could 
 have got back, so also could he, if the funeral had been 
 arranged for the day after that for which it was fixed: 
 
 276 
 
ATHENS AKD DODO 277 
 
 but just here, at Biskra, and nowhere else throughout the 
 journey was my father unable to return in time. It 
 would perhaps be going too far to say that the Queen 
 had anything in her mind definite enough to call a pre- 
 monition; but the event happening just then was at least 
 a most curious coincidence. ... A few hours afterwards 
 a second telegram arrived, from the Prince of Wales who, 
 with great thoughtfulness, begged him not to interrupt 
 his tour. 
 
 My father was thus able to realize one of the dearest 
 dreams of his life, namely, to see with his mortal eyes 
 the Carthage which he knew so intimately in connection 
 with his lifelong study of Cyprian. His book on Cyprian 
 which had occupied his leisure for some thirty years was 
 now approaching completion, and long had he yearned 
 to behold the ruined site where Cyprian had worked as 
 bishop, to wander with his own feet over the shores and 
 hills, which, all these years, had been so familiar to 
 him; and that visit to Carthage had for him the sacred- 
 ness of some pilgrimage for which his heart hungered. 
 His own enthusiasm was so keen that I feel sure that he 
 had no idea that his Mecca could be less to us than to 
 him, and I have the vision of him kneeling on the site 
 of some early Christian church, with his face all aglow 
 with the long-deferred consummation. Just as his ap- 
 preciation of a picture was mainly due to the nature of 
 its subject, just as his pleasure in music was derived from 
 the words which were sung to it, so now, as his diary 
 records, he saw enchanting loveliness in that bare and 
 featureless hill where Carthage once stood, for Cyprian's 
 sake, and wondered at the want of perception which 
 caused other travellers to find nothing admirable in that 
 'bleak place. For once the classical associations of Car- 
 
278 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 thage, the Punic Wars, the subsequent Roman occupation 
 had no lure for him. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, was 
 the full moon among the lesser lights of the firmament. 
 
 At Tunis I left the rest of them, going on my own 
 special pilgrimage, and via Malta and Brindisi I came 
 to the city already known to me by map and picture, and 
 hallowed by some kind of predestined love. And just 
 as my father was enchanted with that ugly little hill of 
 Carthage because Cyprian had dwelt there, how was I 
 not transported when above mean streets and miry ways 
 I saw the sparkle of that marble crown of temples on the 
 Acropolis? For indeed, from the time that Beesly had 
 read us his Trojan Queen's Revenge, some idea, some 
 day-dream of Athens had been distilled, drop by drop, 
 into my blood. Whatever was lovely, whatever must be 
 estimated and esteemed I always laid alongside some 
 Greek standard. Not alone were things directly Greek, 
 like the chorus of the (Edipus in Colonos, the chorus in 
 Swinburne's Atalanta, the teachings of Middleton, the 
 holy dead in the Street of Tombs tested by the Hellenic 
 touchstone, but whatever moved my heart, the vision of 
 Mary Anderson in the Winter s Tale, the joy of athletics, 
 the austere crests of mountains, the forest of Savernake, 
 the Passion-music of Bach, had been instinctively sub- 
 jected to the same criterion. 
 
 The material standard and symbol of that, by this 
 subtle subconscious distillation, had always been the 
 Acropolis, and on this crystalline January afternoon, it 
 was mine to hurry along a tawdry Parisian boulevard, set 
 with pepper trees, to see on one side the columns of the 
 temple of Zeus, and on the other the circular Shrine of 
 the Winds. On the right, as I knew well, I should soon 
 pass the theatre of Dionysus and not turn aside for that 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 279 
 
 even, and then would come the stoa of Asclepius and a 
 great Roman colonnade, and for none of these had I a 
 glance or a thought to spare, for over the sheer southern 
 wall of the Acropolis there rose the south-west angle of 
 the Parthenon. And then, with a reverence that was as 
 sincere as love itself and not less ardent, I mounted the 
 steps of the Propylsea, with the rebuilt shrine on the 
 right of that fairy-presence, the Wingless Victory, who 
 shed her pinions because for all time she was to abide in 
 Athens ; and on the left was the great bastion wall stained 
 to an inimitable russet by the winds from Salamis, and 
 between the great Doric columns I passed, and there in 
 front was a bare scraped hill-top, and glowing in the sun- 
 set was the west front of the Parthenon, that serene abid- 
 ing presence, set for a symbol of what Athens stood for, 
 and, no less, of the eternal yearning of man for the glori- 
 ous city of God. Behind rose the violet crown of hills, 
 Hymettus and Pentelicus and Parnes. 
 
 "Holy, holy, holy!" was the first message of it, and 
 then like the dawn flowing down the cliffs of the Matter- 
 horn, it illuminated all that on earth had the power to 
 be kindled at its flame. Like the Sphinx it articulated 
 its unanswerable riddle, and by its light it revealed the 
 solution, and by its light it hid it again. The architect 
 who had planned it, the sculptor who had decorated it, 
 the hands that had builded it and formed the drums of its 
 columns into monoliths of translucent stone had thrown 
 themselves into the furnace of the creation that tran- 
 scended all the wit and the cunning of its creators. They 
 raised but a fog or a smoke of human endeavour, and 
 from outside, no less than from the heart of their love, 
 there dawned for them and for us the light invisible. 
 Whatever love of beauty was in their souls was tran- 
 
280 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 scended and translated into stone; the glory of jubilant 
 youth and of ridden stallions, of maidens who wove the 
 mantle of the goddess, of priests and of the hierarchy of 
 gods was but part of some world-offering to the austere 
 and loving and perfect presence which they had instinc- 
 tively worshipped, and, as in some noble trance, had set 
 in symbol there. With what wonder must they have be- 
 held the completed work of their hands, and, in their 
 work, the indwelling of the power that was its consecra- 
 tion. 
 
 A tremendous impression, such as that first sight of the 
 Parthenon undoubtedly made on me, would be a very 
 doubtful gain, if it caused the rest of life to seem unin- 
 teresting by comparison, for any kind of initiation must 
 quicken rather than blunt the workaday trivial activities, 
 and certainly in this case I lost no perception of the actual 
 in the flash of the absolute. Athens at that time (to 
 fuse together the impressions of this and subsequent 
 years) was the most comic of European capitals; it was 
 on the scale of some small German principality, and while 
 aping the manner of Paris in a backwater, claimed descent 
 from Pericles. It was opera-bouffe, seriously carried out, 
 imagining itself in fact to be the last word in modern en- 
 lightenment no less than in classical romance. It was 
 with just that classical seriousness that the Olympic 
 games were, a little later, reinaugurated here, and with 
 all the gaiety of opera-bouffe that defeated competitors 
 passionately argued with judges and umpires. At the 
 top of the town came "Constitution Square," which com- 
 prised an orange-garden and a parade-ground, where on 
 festive occasions the regiments of Guards deployed and 
 manoeuvred, quite, or nearly, occupying the centre of it: 
 and there have these eyes seen the flower of the Greek 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 281 
 
 army routed and dispersed by an irritated cab-horse, 
 which, clearly possessed by the devil, galloped and 
 wheeled and galloped again till the Guards had very 
 prudently taken cover among the orange trees, for it was 
 impossible to make any effective military display, when 
 harassed by that enraged quadruped. Sometimes I think 
 that this distressing scene was an adumbration of how, 
 a few years later, that same army bolted through Thessaly 
 on the approach of the Turks. "The host of hares" was 
 the Turkish phrase for them, and Edhem Pasha, then 
 commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army, described to 
 me, when I was at Volo after the Turkish occupation of 
 Thessaly, the battle of Pharsala. "We came over the 
 hill," he said, without enmity and without contempt, 
 "and we said f Sh-sh-sh' and we clapped our hands, and 
 that was the battle of Pharsala." . . . How complete 
 has been the regeneration of this versatile people may be 
 gathered from their later campaigns against the same 
 adversaries. 
 
 On three sides of Constitution Square, were hotels and 
 cafes and the residence of the Crown Prince Constantine 
 subsequently cast by destiny for the ludicrous role of 
 "King Tino." On the fourth side the Royal Palace, of a 
 similarly pretentious and ugly style as that which looks 
 over St. James's Park, presented a mean and complicated 
 face to the steam-tramway that puffed through the top 
 of the square on its way to Phaleron. A royal baby, that 
 year or the next, had seen the light, and we foreign but 
 loyal Athenians, what time a bugler stationed in the 
 colonnade of the palace made all kinds of music, craned 
 our necks and focussed our eyes to see the King come 
 forth. But in nine cases out of ten, it was not King George 
 who emerged but a perambulator pushed by an English 
 
282 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 nursery-maid. But that was the dynastic custom : when- 
 ever a royal personage came forth from the palace, the 
 bugler made all kinds of music, so that the inhabitants 
 of Athens might, like good Nebuchadnezzarites, fall 
 down and worship the pink little image. . . . Some- 
 times, however, their loyalty obtained a more adult re- 
 ward, for on Sunday afternoon King George would gen- 
 erally go down to Phaleron in the steam-tram, and ob- 
 serve the beauties of nature. On such occasions he was 
 marvellously democratic, and would come trotting across 
 the belt of gravel between the palace and the tram-lines 
 in order not to keep his citizens waiting. There is no 
 doubt that if he had attempted to do so, the tram would 
 have gone without him, leaving him to follow by the 
 next, or study the beauties of nature in his own garden. 
 He was democratic also towards foreigners. A tourist 
 staying in one of the respectable hotels round Constitu- 
 tion Square, for instance, was quite at liberty to intimate 
 to the Minister of his country that an audience with the 
 King would be agreeable, and in due course some footman 
 from the palace, in gorgeous well-worn livery, would 
 bear a missive with a tremendous crown on the envelope 
 which informed him that King George would give him 
 an audience next day. Or, if you did not express your 
 loyal desire, it would perhaps be intimated that it would 
 be quite in order if you did so, and thereupon, on the 
 appointed morning you would put on your evening dress- 
 clothes (rather green in the sunlight), and a white tie, 
 and a straw hat, and present yourself at the palace door. 
 On seeing this apparition the bugler stationed there has 
 been known to give one throaty blast, thinking that any- 
 one so ridiculously attired must be a royal personage, 
 then, catching the affrighted eye of the visitor, he recog- 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 283 
 
 nized his mistake, and with an engaging smile, saluted 
 instead. You took off your straw hat (or if it was winter 
 your top-coat and bowler) and were ushered with a series 
 of obeisances into a small bare room, furnished with a 
 carafe of water. Then a door was thrown open, and, as 
 in a dream, you advanced into a small apartment with a 
 purple paper and gold stars upon it, and found the King. 
 He always stood during these amazing interviews, and 
 kept rising on tiptoe with his feet close together, till the 
 instinct of unconscious mimicry made it impossible not to 
 do the same, and he and you seesawed up and down, and 
 talked for ten minutes about his friends in England. 
 He had a long neck, and shoulders like a hock-bottle, and 
 when he dipped them it was a sign that he had sufficiently 
 enjoyed your society. He was very bald, and so also was 
 the Crown Prince, who married the German Emperor's 
 sister. Both father and son (though this will hardly be 
 credited) wrote testimonials in praise of some fluid which, 
 when rubbed on the head, produces or preserves a fine 
 crop of hair. And if the hair-grease did them no good, as 
 it apparently didn't, I hope there was some sort of palm- 
 grease that made their testimonial worth their while. 
 
 Queen Olga was Russian, daughter of the Grand Duke 
 Constantine, a wonderfully beautiful woman, whom I 
 had seen first when I came up from Marlborough for 
 the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. She had an en- 
 gaging habit when she came round the room at balls or 
 after dinner in order to talk to the guests, of putting her 
 hands on the shoulders of the women she was conversing 
 with, and shoving them back into their seats, so that they 
 should sit down without ceremony. Sometimes she 
 would want to talk to two or three people together, and 
 down they would go like ninepins, while she stood. Be- 
 
284 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 hind her came the King still playing seesaw, and behind 
 him the Crown Prince, who did the same to the men he 
 wanted to talk to, and a little while afterwards there was 
 Prince George and Princess Marie, both putting people 
 into their places. It was all very democratic, but also 
 slightly embarrassing, because after large Prince George 
 had pushed you back into a low chair, you had to crane 
 your head up, as if you were talking to somebody on the 
 top of the dome of St. Paul's, the dome inverted being 
 represented by his tremendous and circular waistcoat. 
 After him came Prince Nicholas, but he had always 
 something terribly important and slightly broad, in the 
 shape perhaps of a ''Limerick," to communicate. So as 
 these could not be shouted, conversation was held on 
 more reasonable levels. 
 
 King George's family, as all the world knows, had 
 made magnificent marriages. He was the brother of 
 Queen Alexandra, and of the Dowager Empress of Russia, 
 and his eldest son had brought as wife to Athens the 
 German Emperor's sister, to whom, I suspect, these bugle- 
 regulations were due. The "in-laws" consequently were 
 often being bugled for, and the tram to Phaleron on a 
 Sunday afternoon would now be a fine target for Bol- 
 sheviks. The Crown Princess was constantly engaged 
 during these years on her wifely duties, and the arrival 
 of the Empress Frederick in Athens usually implied that 
 there would soon be fireworks in Constitution Square. 
 But when I write of her, there is no opera-bouffe atmos- 
 phere that I can attempt or desire to reproduce, for tragic 
 were her past years, bitter her present years, and grim 
 agonies of mortal disease were already making ambush 
 for her. During the three or four ensuing years, when, 
 instead of being at the British School or at a hotel, I spent 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 285 
 
 some months at the British Legation, where Sir Edwin 
 Egerton was Minister, I found myself on strangely per- 
 sonal terms with her. She had been a friend of an uncle 
 of mine, who became a nationalized German after years 
 of living in Wiesbaden, and starting from that, she 
 talked with a curious unrestraint. Bitter little stinged 
 remarks came out, "You are happy in being English"; 
 or "When I come to London I am only a visitor." On 
 one occasion I was left alone with her on a terrace above 
 the outlying rooms at the Legation, and to my profound 
 discomfort, she began pacing up and down with smothered 
 ejaculations. Then quite suddenly she said to me, "But 
 Willie is mad !" I suppose I idiotically looked as if this 
 was some joke, and she shook her outstretched hand at 
 me, "I mean that he is mad," she repeated. "Willie is 
 mad." . . . Then quite suddenly, with the arrested 
 movement of a bird, wounded to death in mid-air, she 
 ceased from her tragic flight, and came to earth. "If 
 you are going to bathe again at Phaleron," she said, with 
 a laugh, alluding to an incident of the day before, "I 
 must be sure there are no clothes on the beach, before I 
 sit down to sketch. You came out of the water, and there 
 was I . . ." 
 
 Or the bugle sounded, and there was the unhappiest of 
 the Czars looking very small beside his cousin Prince 
 George. Or again, one afternoon, when, by perpetual 
 permission, I was allowed to seek the shade and coolness 
 of the palace gardens, I heard the trampling of foot-steps, 
 and shrill expostulations, from behind a hedge of ole- 
 ander. Round the corner came the originators of this 
 disturbance. . . . King George seemed to have taken a 
 dislike to his sister's hat, and had plucked it from her 
 head and was kicking it along the garden path, while she 
 
286 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 followed remonstrating. "But it's an ugly hat," said 
 he, delighted to find some kind of umpire, "and there- 
 fore I took it and I kicked it, and she cannot wear it 
 any more. . . ." (Was there ever anything so like the 
 immortal Rose and the Ring?) "My hat!" said the 
 injured owner tersely, as she recovered her hopelessly 
 damaged property. . . . "So rude of you, George." 
 
 My first spring in Greece was mostly spent out of 
 Athens, for with another student I was put in charge of 
 the British excavations at Megalopolis. All the plums 
 had already been picked out of it, for the theatre had been 
 completely cleared, and the excavation of the year before 
 had laid bare the entire plan of the great Council hall, 
 the Thersilion, built in the time of Epaminondas, so that 
 this year excavation was equivalent to sitting on a wall 
 while a lot of workmen removed tons of earth in which 
 nothing could possibly be discovered. It was not thrill- 
 ing, but at least one could incessantly talk to them in 
 what purported to be modern Greek, until it became so. 
 There had been considerable excitement about Mega- 
 lopolis the year before, for the British excavators had 
 thought they had triumphantly refuted the German 
 theory, announced by Dr. Dorp f eld, that fourth century 
 Greek theatres had no stage. They had unearthed steps 
 and columns, which, they considered, proved the existence 
 of a stage, and, rather prematurely, had announced their 
 anti-German discovery in the Hellenic Journal with 
 something resembling a crow of satisfaction. On which" 
 this dreadful Dr. Dorpfeld came down from Athens with 
 a note-book and a tape measure, and in a couple of hours 
 in the pouring rain had proved quite conclusively, so 
 that no further argument was possible, that the British, 
 with a year to think about it, had quite misinterpreted 
 
E. F. BENSON, JET. 26 
 
 [Page 287 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 289 
 
 their own evidence, and demonstrated how what they had 
 taken for a stage was merely a back wall. Their re- 
 searches in fact had merely confirmed his theory. Then 
 he rolled up his measure and went back to Athens. . . . 
 So another and I cleaned up these rather depressing re- 
 mains, and when that was done we hired mules and went 
 a-wandering through the country and saw the spring 
 "blossom by blossom" (even as Beesly had read) alight 
 on the hills. Blossom by blossom, too, Greece itself, no 
 longer pictured in photographs or bored for in books, 
 opened its myriad lovelinesses, even as the scarlet ane- 
 mone made flame in the thickets, and the nightingales 
 "turned the heart of the night to fire" in the oleanders by 
 the Eurotas. We visited Homeric Mycense, and Epi- 
 daurus, the Harrogate of the fourth century B.C., and in 
 archaeological intervals I speared mullet by the light of 
 a flaming torch on moonless nights with the fishermen of 
 Nauplia, and ate them for early breakfast, broiled on 
 the sea-shore, before the sun was up. I crossed the Gulf 
 of Corinth and went to Delphi, where the French school 
 were beginning the excavations that were destined to yield 
 more richly than any soil in Greece except the precinct 
 at Olympia. There, too, I went, and if to me the Par- 
 thenon had been a revelation of the glory of God, there I 
 took my shoes from off my feet, and worshipped the glory 
 of man, because the Hermes of Praxiteles "caring for the 
 infant Dionysus," embodied, once and for all, the pos- 
 sible, the ultimate beauty of man, even as the Louvre held 
 the ultimate glory of woman. ... A few weeks more 
 in Athens were busy with the record of the meagre re- 
 sults from Megalopolis, and I left for England, know- 
 ing in my very bones that Athens was in some subtle way 
 my spiritual mother, so that on many subsequent jour- 
 
290 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 neys, as I went from England there, and from there back 
 to England again, I travelled but from home to home, 
 OLKodev OLKade. 
 
 Dodo had been put back in her drawer, after her ex- 
 pedition to Henry James: now for the second time I 
 took her out and tasted her, as if to see whether she 
 seemed to have mellowed like a good wine, or become 
 sour like an inferior one, in which case I would very 
 gladly have poured her on the earth like water, and 
 started again. But I could not, reading her once more, 
 altogether cast her off: she had certain gleams of vitality 
 about her, and with my mother's connivance and help 
 again I submitted her to a professional verdict. This 
 time it was my mother's friend, Mrs. Harrison, known to 
 our admiring family as "Lucas Malet," author of the 
 adorable Colonel Enderby's Wife, who was selected to 
 pronounce on my story, and again, I am afraid, it was 
 without the slightest realization of this highway robbery 
 on the time of an author that I despatched the book. 
 Anyhow those two assaults on Henry James and Lucas 
 Malet have produced in me a fellow-feeling for criminals 
 such as I was a quarter of a century ago, so that now, 
 when, . as occasionally happens, some light-hearted 
 marauder announces that he or she (it is usually she) is 
 sending me her manuscript, which she hopes I won't mind 
 reading, and telling her as soon as possible exactly what 
 I think of it, and to what publisher she had better send 
 it (perhaps I would write him a line too) and whether 
 the heroine isn't a little overdone (but her mother thinks 
 her excellent), and would I be careful to register it when 
 I return it, and if before next Thursday to this address, 
 and if after next Friday to another, etc. etc., I try to 
 behave as Lucas Malet behaved in similar circumstances. 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 291 
 
 I do not for a moment say that I succeed, but I can still 
 remember how pleasant it should seem, from the point of 
 view of the aspirant scribbler, that somebody should be 
 permitted to read what has been written with such rapture 
 and how important it all is. . . . 
 
 But I can never hope to emulate Lucas Malet's tact 
 and wisdom in her genial, cordial, and honest reply (when 
 she had had the privilege of wading through these sheets), 
 for they still remain to me, who know her answer almost 
 by heart, to be the first and the last word in the true 
 theory of the writing of fiction. Her deft incisions dis- 
 sected, from lungs and heart and outwards to the delicate 
 fibre of the skin that protects and expresses the life within, 
 the structure of stories, short or long, that are actually 
 alive. First must come the "idea," the life that is to 
 vitalize the complete animal, so that its very hair and 
 nails are fed with blood. . . . And then, since I cannot 
 possibly find words as apt and as sober as hers I will quote 
 from the letters themselves. 
 
 "First the idea, then the grouping, which is equivalent to our 
 drama — then a search for models from whom to draw. Most 
 young English writers — the artistic sense being a matter of ex- 
 perience, not of instinct, with most of us — begin just the other 
 way about. Begin with their characters . . . rummage about for 
 a story in which to place them, and too often leave the idea out 
 of the business altogether. . . . One evil consequence of this 
 method — among many others — is that there is a distracting lack 
 of completeness and ensemble in so much English work. The 
 idea should be like the thread on which beads are strung. It 
 shouldn't show, except at the two ends; but in point of fact it 
 keeps the beads all together and in their proper relation." 
 
 Then, to one already hugely interested in this admir- 
 able creed of the art of fiction, Lucas Malet proceeded 
 
292 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 to a dissection, just and kind and ruthless, of the story 
 as it stood. She hurt in order to heal, she cut in order that 
 healthy tissue (if there was any) might have the chance 
 to grow. She showed me by what process (if I applied it 
 seriously and successfully) I might convert my Dodo- 
 doll into something that did not only squeak when pressed 
 in the stomach, and gave no other sign of vitality than 
 closing its eyes when it was laid flat. In consequence, 
 greatly exhilarated by this douche of cold water, I col- 
 lected such fragments of an "idea" as existed, revised 
 what I had written, and wrote (in pursuance of the 
 "idea") the second volume, as it subsequently appeared, 
 in those days when novels were originally issued in three 
 or two volumes at the price of a guinea and a half or a 
 guinea. I finished it that autumn, sent it to the publisher 
 recommended by Lucas Malet, who instantly accepted it. 
 It came out in the following spring, that of 1893. I was 
 out in Greece again at the time, and though it was my 
 first public appearance (since Sketches from Marlborough 
 may be considered as a local phenomenon) I feel sure 
 that from the time when, with trembling pride, I cor- 
 rected the long inconvenient galley sheets that kept slip- 
 ping on to the floor, I gave no further thought to it at 
 all. Bad or good, I had done my best; what happened 
 concerned me no more, for I was quite absorbed in the 
 study of the precinct of Asclepios on the slopes of the 
 Acropolis, in the life at Athens, and in a volume of short 
 stories that I began to write with a pen still wet, so to 
 speak, with the final corrections on the proof sheets of 
 Dodo. She was done with, so far as I was concerned, and 
 it was high time, now that I was twenty-five, to get on 
 with something else, before the frosts of senility paralysed 
 all further effort. 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 293 
 
 For such a person as I happened to be, that, as I then 
 believed and still believe, was the wisest resolution I 
 could make. The habit of immediate activity, physically 
 or mentally violent, had, from the days when butterflies, 
 plants, athletics, friendship, Saturday Magazines were all 
 put under contribution to feed the raging energies of life, 
 become an instinct. If there was a kick left in my wholly 
 boyish nature, it had become a habit to kick, and not to 
 save the energy for any future emergency: if there was 
 a minute to spare, somehow to use or enjoy it. To what 
 use that minute and that kick were devoted, so I now 
 see, did not particularly matter: the point was to kick 
 for just that minute. No doubt there are other and ad- 
 mirable uses to which energy may be put; some make 
 reservoirs, into which they pour and store their vital force, 
 and while it increases, screw down their sluice, and let 
 the gathered waters rest and reflect. Such as these prob- 
 ably achieve the most abiding results, for when they 
 choose to raise their sluice, they can, by the judicious 
 use of winch and shutter, continue to irrigate the field 
 which they have determined to make fruitful, for a period 
 that they can certainly estimate. They burn a steady 
 unwavering candle which will always illuminate a fixed 
 area, and from the areas which do not concern them they 
 hide their ray and thus economize their wax and their 
 wick. But how surely are there others who from their 
 very nature are unable to construct their reservoirs or 
 burn this one decorous candle. Whatever head of water 
 there is, it must be instantly dispersed, whatever candle 
 there is, it must be lit at both ends, and if that is not 
 enough, it must be broken in half, and its new ends of 
 wicks kindled and used for the exploration of some trump- 
 ery adventure: "trumpery," that is to say, in the vocabu- 
 
294 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 lary of the wise and prudent, but how colossal in the 
 sight of the wild-eyed adventurer. And just here, just 
 where a moral lesson should be drawn showing the early 
 decay and the untimely ^end of these spendthrifts of 
 energy, the whole tendency of Nature lies in precisely the 
 opposite direction to that in which natural and moral 
 economy ought to tend, for it is the careful who grow 
 early old, and the careful investor of energy who declares 
 bankruptcy, and retires in middle life to the club win- 
 dows, where he shows a bald head to St. James's Street, 
 and a sour visage to the waiters. Somehow so it most 
 inexorably seems, those who spend, have ; those who save, 
 lack. Not that the spender could, by the laws and in- 
 stincts of his nature, have done otherwise than court 
 bankruptcy : not that the investor could have done other- 
 wise than court affluence. But the one careful candle, 
 as a matter of experience, gets blown out, and the irrele- 
 vant candle-ends continue to flare. . . . 
 
 So, after this second visit to Greece, I came home to 
 find to my incredulous and incurious surprise, that in the 
 interval I had become, just for the focus of a few months, 
 famous or infamous. One of those rare phenomena, less 
 calculable than the path of a comet, which periodically is 
 to destroy the world, had occurred, and there was a 
 "boom" in Dodo, and no one was more astonished than 
 the author, when his mother met him arriving by the 
 boat train at Victoria, and hinted at what was happening. 
 All sorts of adventitious circumstances aided it: it was 
 thought extremely piquant that a son of the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury should have written a book so frankly 
 unepiscopal, and quite a lot of ingenious little paragraph- 
 ists invented stories of how I had read it aloud to my 
 father and described his disconcertedness : the title-role 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 295 
 
 and other characters were assigned to various persons 
 who happened then to be figuring in the world, but apart 
 from all these adventitious aids, this energetic and trivial 
 experiment had — in those ancient days — a certain novelty 
 of treatment. There were no explanations ; whatever lit- 
 tle life its characters were possessed of, they revealed by 
 their own unstinted speech. That, as I have already ex- 
 plained, had been the plan of it in my mind, and trie 
 .execution, whatever the merits of the plan might be, was 
 in accordance with it. It went through edition after 
 edition, in that two-volume form, price a guinea (against 
 which shortly afterwards the libraries revolted) and all 
 the raging and clamour, of course, only made it sell the 
 more. It had received very scant notice in the Press 
 itself; what (as always happens) made it flourish so 
 furiously was that people talked about it. 
 
 But its success apart from the delightful comedy of 
 such a first act to its author, led on to a truly violent situ- 
 ation when the curtain rose again, for the critics, justly 
 enraged that this rare phenomenon called a "boom" 
 should not have been detected and heralded by their 
 auguries and by them damned or deified, laid aside a 
 special pen for me, ready for the occasion when I should 
 be so imprudent as to publish another novel; and they 
 all procured a large bottle of that hot ink which Dante 
 dipped for, 
 
 When his left hand i' the hair of the wicked, 
 Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma 
 Bit unto the live man's flesh for parchment, 
 Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 
 
 and since they were proposing to "let the wretch go 
 festering" through London, they read up Macaulay's re- 
 
296 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 view of Mr. Robert Montgomery's poems to see how it 
 was done. If they had not noticed Dodo, they would at 
 least notice her successor. Indeed the fairy godmother 
 who presents a young author at his public christening 
 with a boom, brings him a doubtful gift, for when next I 
 challenged attention all these little Macaulays and 
 Dantes uncorked their hot ink, and waited pen in hand 
 till Mr. Methuen sent them their "advance copies." Then, 
 saying "one, two, three — go," they all produced on the 
 birth-morning of the unfortunate book columns and 
 columns of the most blistering abuse that I remember 
 ever beholding in God-fearing journals. This blasted 
 infant was a small work called The Rubicon, now so 
 completely forgotten that I must ask the reader to take 
 my word for it that it was quite a poor book. It was not 
 even very, very bad: it was just poor. Critics have hun- 
 dreds of poor books submitted to their commiserated 
 notice, and they are quite accustomed to that, and tell 
 the public in short paragraphs that the work in ques- 
 tion is "decidedly powerful," or "intensely interesting" 
 or "utterly futile," and there is an end of it as far as they 
 are concerned. Had this blasted infant been a first book 
 it would naturally have received no more than a few rude 
 little notices, and perhaps a few polite little notices. But 
 as it was the successor to the abhorred comet it was 
 concertedly singled out for the wrath of the Olympians. 
 The candidatus exercitus of the entire Press went forth 
 with howitzers and Maxims (in both senses), with can- 
 nons of all calibres, with rifles and spears and arrows and 
 sharp tongues to annihilate this poor little May-fly. That 
 I am not exaggerating the stupendous character of this 
 fusillade can be shown from a few extracts. In those 
 days I used to take in Press-cuttings, and among a heap 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 297 
 
 of more precious relics in a forgotten box I came across 
 the other day a packet of these, which contained such 
 flowers as I could not leave to blush unseen, and I picked 
 and here present a little nosegay of them. 
 
 (1) The Pall Mall Gazette. (The Rubicon, E. F. 
 Benson.) 
 
 "Mr. Benson's New Play. 
 
 Dramatis Persons. 
 
 Eshumee Dodo. Madonna de Clapham. 
 Lord Anaemia. Jelly Fish. 
 
 Donjuans (sic). Vulgarities. Indecencies. 
 Time, The Middle Classes. Place, Le Pays Inconnu. 
 
 Mise en scene, Fluff." 
 
 Then follows a short analysis, not so fragrantly precious, 
 and then comes comment. 
 
 "All the gutter-elements of Dodo are rehashed and warmed up 
 again with no touch of novelty or improvement or chastisement. 
 . . . The Lives of the Bad are interesting assuredly . . . but 
 then they must be living and bad, and these pithless people are 
 only galvanic [galvanized*?] and vulgar. We do not wish to be 
 hard on Mr. Benson. Let him give three years to investigating 
 the distinctions between good writing and bad writing, between 
 wit and vulgarity . . . and then we should not be surprised if he 
 produced something worth finding serious fault with." 
 
 (2) The (late) Standard. (A column and a half.) 
 
 "Taking the book as a whole, it is an absolute failure. As a 
 rule, the writing is forced and uneasy, the reflections confused or 
 lumbering. The character-drawing is crude and uncertain. It is 
 emphatically one of those books that are sensual, earthly and 
 unwholesome," 
 
298 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 (3) Vanity Fair. (One column.) 
 
 "Of style he has little : of wit he has no idea ... of plot there 
 is less in The Rubicon than is generally to be found in a penny 
 novelette : of knowledge of Society (if he have any) Mr. Benson 
 shows less here than is usually possessed by the nursery-gov- 
 erness ; and in grammar he seems to be as little expert as he is in 
 natural science : of which his knowledge seems to equal his smat- 
 tering of the Classics . . . ill-named, full of faults, betraying 
 much ignorance of manners and unknowledge [sic] of human na- 
 ture : a book, indeed, compact of folly and slovenliness : guiltless 
 of any real touch of constructive art ; without form and void : a 
 book of which I fear that I have made too much." 
 
 (4) Daily Chronicle. (One column.) 
 
 "A Puzzle for Posterity. 
 
 What will the critical students of, say, two generations ahead, 
 make of the fact that in the spring of 1894 the newspapers of 
 London treated the appearance of a new novel by Mr. E. F. Ben- 
 son as an event of striking importance in the world of books? 
 The thought that death will rid us of the responsibility for that 
 awkward explanation lends an almost welcome aspect to the 
 grave. . . . 
 
 That The Rubicon is the worst-written, falsest and emptiest of 
 the decade, it would be, perhaps, too much to say. In these days 
 of elastic publishing standards and moneyed amateurs, many 
 queer things are done, and Mr. Benson's work is a shade better 
 than the poorest of the stuff which would-be novelists pay for the 
 privilege of seeing in print. ... A certain interest attaches, no 
 doubt, to the demonstration which it affords that a young gentle- 
 man of university training can meet the female amateurs on their 
 own ground, and be every whit as maudlin and absurd as they 
 know how to be. But the sisterhood have an advantage over him 
 in the fact that they can spell. . . . There are a score of glaring 
 grammatical errors, to say nothing of the clumsiness and incompe- 
 tency which mark three sentences out of five throughout the book. 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 299 
 
 Bad workmanship might be put aside as the fault of inexperience, 
 if the young man had an actual story to tell . . . but there is 
 nothing of that sort here. . . . The heroine is from time to time 
 led over to as near [sic] the danger line of decency as the libraries 
 will permit. She is made to utter several suggestive speeches, and 
 once or twice quite skirts the frontier of the salacious. . . ." 
 
 (5) The World. (Length unknown : I cannot find the 
 second half of it.) 
 
 "But, alas ! Eva Hayes in The Rubicon is quite as vulgar, quite 
 as blatant in the bad taste she is pleased to exhibit on every oc- 
 casion, as her predecessor Dodo, and is dull beyond description 
 into the bargain. From beginning to end of the two volumes 
 there is not one spark or gleam of humour, or sign of true obser- 
 vation and knowledge of humanity." 
 
 (6) The (late) St. James's Budget. (Six columns.) 
 
 "Another Unbirched Heroine. 
 
 It might have been supposed that the son of an Archbishop was 
 hardly the sort of person to shine in this kind of literature, but 
 Mr. Benson has taught us better than that. Yet our thanks are 
 due to him for one thing : his book consists of only two volumes ; 
 it might have been in three. . . . 
 
 How they Mate in the 'Hupper Suckles.' . . . 
 Languour, Cigarettes and Blasphemies. . . . 
 
 We conclude this enthusiastic appreciation of Mr. Benson with 
 the bold avowal that we regard The Rubicon as almost truly per- 
 fect of its kind, and probably unsurpassable. Any one of Shake- 
 speare's most remarkable gifts may be found, perhaps, in equal 
 measure in the writings of some minor author ; but none ever had 
 such a union of so many as he. So it is with Mr. Benson. A 
 school-girl's idea of 'plot,' a nursery-governess's knowledge of the 
 world ; a gentleman's 'gentleman's' views of high life ; an under- 
 graduate's sense of style and store of learning; a society para- 
 graphist's fine feeling and good taste ; a man-milliner's notion of 
 creating character : of each of these you may find plenty of evi- 
 
300 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 dence in the novels of the day; but nowhere else — unless it be 
 in Dodo — will they all be found welded into one harmonious 
 unity as they are here ! . . ." 
 
 Here is but the most random plucking of these blos- 
 soms, but what a nosegay ! The flower from Vanity Fair 
 grew of course from the same root as that from the St. 
 James's Budget, and this is interesting as showing the 
 excellent co-ordination between these different attacks. 
 As a Press-campaign on an infinitesimal scale, I give the 
 foregoing as a classical example. No book, however bad, 
 could possibly have called forth, in itself, so combined 
 an onslaught : every gun in Grub Street was primed and 
 ready and sighted not on The Rubicon at all, but on the 
 author of Dodo. But herein is shown the inexpediency 
 of using up all your ammunition at once, on so insignifi- 
 cant a target. It was clear that if the respectable jour- 
 nals of London made so vigorous an offensive, that offen- 
 sive had to be final, and the war to be won. Still more 
 clear was it that, if this was not a preconcerted, malicious 
 and murderous campaign not on a particular book, but 
 on an individual, the entire columns of the London Press 
 must henceforth be completely devoted to crushing in- 
 ferior novels. The Rubicon was but one of this innumer- 
 able company: if the Press had determined to crush in- 
 ferior novels, it was clear that for a considerable time 
 there would be no room in its columns for politics, or 
 sport or foreign news or anything else whatever. Not 
 even for advertisements, unless we regard such attacks 
 as being unpaid advertisements. . . . 
 
 So there was no more firing for the present, and it was 
 all rather reminiscent of the tale of how Oscar Wilde 
 went out shooting, and fell down flat on the discharge of 
 his own gun. 
 
ATHENS AND DODO 301 
 
 The Press, after that, had nothing more to shoot at 
 me, for all their heaviest shells had been launched; so 
 the blighted author walked off, as Mr. Mantalini said, 
 as comfortable as demnition, and proceeded vigorously 
 to write The Babe, B.A. and other tranquil works, just 
 as if he had not been blown into a thousand fragments. 
 
 The Press-notices, in fact, from which these six ex- 
 tracts are taken, were a huge lark, and one day I found 
 my father (who so far from summoning family councils 
 on the subject never spoke to me about my public scrib- 
 blings at all) wide-eyed and absorbed in one of these con- 
 temporary revilings. Suddenly he threw his head back 
 with a great shout of laughter, and slapped me on the 
 back. "You've got broad enough shoulders to stand that 
 sort of thing," he said. "Come along, are the horses 
 ready 1 ?" and out we went riding. But less humorous 
 were certain private kicks which I got (and no doubt 
 deserved) from less ludicrous antagonists. Of these the 
 chief, and the most respected both then and now, must be 
 nameless. He had been so hot in appreciation and so cor- 
 dial over Dodo, politely observing in it a "high moral 
 beauty" that I find him (in this same forgotten box) writ- 
 ing to me, before the appearance of The Rubicon, in these 
 words a propos of the growing public taste for realism: 
 
 "The public in the next generation will be what you and one 
 or two others like you choose to make it. Good work in any style 
 gives that style vogue. . . . It's ever when you are most serious 
 you are at your best. Work, work and live." 
 
 Well, I worked and lived like the devil for strenuous- 
 ness. Then The Rubicon made its appearance, and the 
 same friend took a blistering pen instead : 
 
302 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 "If anything could possibly give a more serious blow to your 
 chances of future and legitimate success than the publication of 
 The Rubicon, it would be to bring out within three or four years 
 another novel. ... It does not seem to me that you have formed 
 the slightest conception of the true situation. It is this. Your 
 first book, from accidental and even parasitic causes — things that 
 were not in the book at all — enjoyed an entirely abnormal and 
 baseless success. You have now to begin again, and for several 
 years the public will certainly not listen to you as a novelist." 
 
 For the life of me, I cannot now, reading these ex- 
 plosive records over again, determine whether I could 
 have gained anything by paying the smallest" attention to 
 them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for they 
 clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this 
 wretched old Rubicon, but against the person who had 
 dared to capture success with Dodo. Rightly or wrongly, 
 it seemed to me that vituperation so violent could not be 
 regarded as other than comic. If I was a nursery-gover- 
 ness and a man-milliner, and a gentleman's gentleman it 
 was all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I 
 was already terribly interested in the Babe, B.A. and not 
 at all interested in the St. James's Budget, except as a 
 humorous publication, which the Babe, B.A. tried to be, 
 too. And then there were delightful plans ahead; this 
 autumn Maggie was to come out to Athens with me, and 
 we were to go on to Egypt together, and have a Tre- 
 mendous Time. . . , 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 ATHENS AND EGYPT 
 
 SO there was Athens again, with its bugles and its 
 Royal Babies, and its eternal Acropolis, which cus- 
 tom never staled. Maggie jumped into the Hellenic 
 attitude at once, adoring the adorable, filling with the 
 laughter of her serious appreciation the comedy of the 
 life there, enjoying it all enormously, and finding ecstatic 
 human interest in Oriental situations. One day the M.P. 
 for Megalopolis appeared in Athens, and so, of course, I 
 asked him to tea in the Grand Hotel, and Maggie put in 
 some extra lessons in modern Greek with the English 
 vice-consul, in order that a tongue-tied female should not 
 mar the entertainment. The M.P.'s remarks were mostly 
 unintelligible to her, and these I translated back for her 
 benefit, and if she could find a phrase that fitted she 
 slowly enunciated it, and if not she said to him, syllable 
 by syllable, "I should like to see your wife and children, 
 but we are going to Egypt." All the "circles" in Athens 
 embraced at once her cordial and eager humanity. She 
 sketched all morning, and when I came to the rendezvous, 
 there would be a dozen young Greek urchins round her 
 canvas, to whom, as she washed in a lucent sky, she made 
 careful and grammatical remarks. . . . She captivated 
 the heart of the archaeologists, and Dr. Dorpfeld who had 
 proved himself so fatal to the theories of the British 
 School at Megalopolis, addressed his most abstruse argu- 
 
 303 
 
304 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ments to her as he announced that "die Enneakrounos, ich 
 habe gewiss gefunden" when he gave his out-of-door lec- 
 tures. The English Minister, Sir Edwin Egerton, used 
 to wrap her shawl round her, as she left the Legation 
 after dinner, saying, "Now you look like a Tanagra 
 figure," and the Queen asked her in strict confidence, 
 whether the English aristocracy really behaved as her 
 brother said they behaved in that odd book called Dodo. 
 The answer to that was given in a performance we got 
 up, ostensibly for the amusement of the English gover- 
 nesses in Athens at Christmas, of the Duchess of Bays- 
 water. Of course we got it up primarily because we 
 wanted to act, and then it grew to awful proportions. 
 The English Mediterranean Fleet happened to come into 
 the Pirseus about then, and Admiral Markham asked if 
 a contingent of two hundred blue-jackets or so might 
 stand at the back of the English governesses. On which, 
 the style of the entertainment had to be recast altogether, 
 and we bargained that, if they came the performance 
 should consist of two parts. The first part should be 
 supplied by sailors, who would dance hornpipes, and 
 sing songs, and the second part should consist of The 
 Duchess of Bay swat er. That was agreed, and we engaged 
 a large public hall. 
 
 Then Regie Lister who was a Secretary of Legation, 
 let slip to the Crown Princess that we were getting up 
 an entertainment for (and with) sailors and English 
 governesses, and she, under promise of discretion as re- 
 gards her relatives, was allowed to be one of the English 
 governesses. With truly Teutonic perfidiousness, she 
 informed all the Kings and Queens then in Athens what 
 was going on, and just as the curtain was about to go 
 up for The Duchess of Bay swat er a message came from 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 305 
 
 the palace that the entire host of royalties was then 
 starting to attend it. And so there was a row of Kings 
 and Queens and ten rows of English governesses, and a 
 swarm of English sailors. But we refused to cut out a 
 topical allusion to the Palace bugles. 
 
 And at precisely this point, the epoch of those absurd 
 theatricals, the sparkle and comedy of Athenian existence 
 was overshadowed or enlightened for me by the birth of 
 a great friendship. Regie Lister had the greatest genius 
 for friendship of any man I ever met ; no one, not even 
 Alfred Lyttelton, had a finer gift or a more irresistible 
 charm for men and women alike. The two, extraordi- 
 narily dissimilar in most respects, were identical in this, 
 that they compelled others to love them, because they 
 loved so magnificently themselves. Alfred Lyttelton, 
 for all his exuberant virility, had the feminine quality 
 of giving himself instead of taking, which is what I mean 
 by magnificent love, and Regie's genius in friendship 
 sprang from precisely the same abandonment. There 
 they diverged north and south, for Regie had practically 
 none of the manliness that was so characteristic of the 
 other. But he had superbly the qualities of his defects ; 
 in matters of intellect, the direct masculine attack was 
 represented by intuition and diplomacy and extreme 
 quickness, and in matters of affection by a certain robust 
 tenderness, quite devoid of sentimentality. All mankind, 
 whether male or female, is compounded of both sexes : 
 the man without any womanly instincts would be a mere 
 monster; the woman without any grit of manliness in 
 her, a mere jelly-fish, and in Regie's nature the woman 
 had a large share. One quality supposed to be a defect 
 of women rather than men he was quite without : he had 
 no notion whatever of "spite," and was incapable of tak- 
 
306 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 ing revenge on anyone who had annoyed or crossed him. 
 Most shining of all among his delightful gifts was his 
 instinct of seeing the best in everyone. Wherever he 
 went in his diplomatic posts, Athens, Constantinople, 
 Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, or Tangiers, he found, with- 
 out the least "setting to work" about it, that there never 
 was so heavenly a place, nor so delightful an entourage. 
 At heart he was really Parisian; that city, with its keen 
 kaleidoscopic gaiety, its intellectual and artistic atmos- 
 phere, dry and denned as its own air, suited him best, 
 but this instinct to find everyone with whom he came in 
 contact delightful, brought out, as was natural, all that 
 there was delightful in them, and thus his instinct was 
 justified. He was incapable of being bored for more 
 than a couple of minutes together, and would have found 
 something that could be commuted into cheerfulness in 
 the trials of Job. Whether he liked a person or not, he 
 always gave his best, not with the idea of making himself 
 popular, but because that was the natural expression of 
 his temperament. His amiability made the ripe plums 
 easily drop for him, but when he had determined to get 
 something which did not come off its stalk for the wishing, 
 he had indomitable perseverance, and that rather rare 
 gift of being able to sit down and think until a method 
 clarified itself. 
 
 With him, then, I struck up a friendship which dis- 
 pensed with all the preliminaries of acquaintanceship: 
 there was no gradual drawing together about it, it leaped 
 into being, and there it remained, poised and effortless. 
 Often during the ensuing years after he had left Athens 
 and was at his post in some European capital, we did 
 not meet for months together, but when the meeting 
 came, relations were taken up again, owing to some flame- 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 307 
 
 like quality in him which warmed you as soon as you got 
 near him, without break or sense of there having been a 
 break. Morning by morning he came down to the mu- 
 seum where I was studying sculpture with his paints and 
 sketching-block, and made the most admirable pictures 
 of some Greek head; we took excursions round Athens 
 up Hymettus or Pentelicus, we usually dined together 
 at some house of an evening, where he made cosmopoli- 
 tan diplomatists act charades or play some childish and 
 uproarious game. Best of all was it to leave Athens, 
 and wander three or four days at a time in the Pelopon- 
 nese. We cast pennies into the Styx, we lost our way 
 and our mules and their drivers on the slopes of Cyllene, 
 and were rescued by a priest who tucked up his skirts, 
 and hurled huge stones at the savage shepherd-dogs; we 
 slept in indescribable inns, where were all manner of 
 beasts, we bathed in the Eurotas, and lay that night 
 among goats in a shed on the Langarda Pass, and the 
 sorriest surroundings were powerless to abate Regie's en- 
 joyment. And on one unique and memorable day we 
 hunted for the temple at Bassae in a thick fog, and almost 
 despaired of finding it, when out of the heart of the 
 enshrouding mist there came the roar of a great wind that 
 tore the fog into tatters, and lo, not a hundred yards 
 away was the grave grey temple. The flying vapours 
 vanished, chased like frightened sheep along steaming 
 hillsides and through the valleys below, and all the 
 Peloponnese swam into sight, from the Gulf of Corinth 
 to the western sea, and from the west to the bays of 
 the south, and from the south to the waters of Naup- 
 lia. . . . Did two more ecstatic pilgrims ever behold the 
 shrine of Apollo? 
 
308 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 For the next three winters slices of Egypt were sand- 
 wiched between visits to Greece. I started with Greece, 
 went on with Maggie, or on other occasions joined her 
 at Luxor, and came back to Greece, living, after Regie's 
 departure for Constantinople, at the Legation with Sir 
 Edwin Egerton, the most hospitable of mankind. But 
 the magic of Egypt, potent and compelling as it was, was 
 a waving of a black wand compared to the joyful spell of 
 Greece. "All who run may read; only run" was the 
 Greek injunction: "All who read must run away" seemed 
 the equivalent in the Nilotic incantation. To get under 
 the spell of Greece implied a rejuvenation into a world 
 that was like dawn on dewdrops and gave so sunny an 
 answer to the "obstinate questionings" that there was no 
 need even to ask what the riddle had been. 
 
 "All is beauty, 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty, 
 What further can be sought for or declared?" 
 
 That glittered from the fading shores of Attica, and then 
 after a few miles of sea, there arose the low and sinister 
 coast, and as you began to guess at the mystery of the 
 desert-bounded land you quaked at the conclusion. There 
 was something old and evil there and as tired as Eccle- 
 siastes : it preached Vanitas Vanitatum instead of singing 
 the sunny love-spell of Greece, and while its mouth 
 mumbled the syllables, its relentless hands reared the 
 pyramids which must stand for ever to the astonishment 
 of the world as a monument of unimaginative construc- 
 tion and lost labour. There too it set the Sphinx whose 
 totally blank and meaningless face, innocent of any riddle 
 except that of its own soullessness, defies the rising glory 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 309 
 
 of the sun and the moon of lovers to instil any spark of 
 animation into its stony countenance. What monsters 
 to an Attic pilgrim were these gods conceived not in the 
 kindly image of humanity but as out of some incestuous 
 menagerie! Here was no deep-bosomed Hera, queen of 
 gods and men, for the royalty of motherhood; no 
 helmeted Athene for the royalty of wisdom; no Aphrodite 
 for the excellence of love sent her herald Eros to an- 
 nounce her epiphany from the wine-dark sea. The 
 Egyptian artificers hewed no images of joy and mirth, 
 they set no Faun nor Satyr dancing in the twilight, no 
 Hermes held the winds in the flower-like pinions of 
 his heels, or nursed the god after whom the Bacchantes 
 revelled, with the smile that so quivered on his mouth 
 that next moment surely the vitality with which he 
 tingled, would break through that momentary marble 
 arrest. Far other were these incongruous composite di- 
 vinities, all as dead as a hangman's noose, all incapable 
 of summoning up one quiver of a kindly mirth. As by 
 some disordered dream of a religious maniac the hawk- 
 faced god had a cobra for symbol of his divinity; a cow 
 or a cat or a lion had mated with a man and the offspring 
 sat there, bleak and appalling, to be worshipped. And 
 in matter of material, for the glow of the white Pentelic 
 that holds the sunshine in solution within, even as a 
 noble vintage is redolent of Provencal summers, these 
 monstrous forms were presented in dead black basalt, a 
 frozen opacity of ink. 
 
 Into these tight-fisted inexorable hands were given 
 the jail-keys of death. Egypt was ever the land of graves, 
 Memento Mori, the sad gospel of its religion. A little 
 honey, a little pulse, blue-glazed images of slaves who 
 might still toil for their master in that dim underworld, 
 
310 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 images of food in the chambers of the dead, were all 
 that the pious could provide for the desolate whimpering 
 soul, feeble as a moth, that went forth on its lonely- 
 journey through dubious twilight. The crowns and the 
 sceptres, the gold and precious stones that were buried 
 with the kings were but a mockery to them of all that 
 they had quitted; the mightiest monument that Pharaoh 
 had raised was no more than a flickering beacon behind 
 him as he trod the dark passage, which cast in front the 
 shadow of the man that he had been. The gigantic and 
 hopeless art, bound hand and foot by the fetters of 
 hieratic tradition could do no more than multiply mono- 
 liths, incredulous of its own greatness and untinged with 
 the living colour of humanity. Yet out of this mere 
 piling up of dead on dead there arose a musty necromantic 
 magic, awful and old and corrupt, that sat like a vulture 
 on the sandbanks and was wafted, eternally fecund, 
 down the waters of the Nile. All the way up to Luxor, 
 where we settled down for a time, through the splendour 
 of noon and the last ray of sunset that turns the stream 
 into a sheet of patinated bronze, there was present that 
 underlying sense of woe; and to this day my nightmares 
 are set on the Nile in the sweet scent of bean fields 
 beneath the waving of mimosa and of palms, where, by 
 the terrible river there crouches some abominable granite 
 god. 
 
 I have given a wrong notion of this curious psychic 
 horror if I have represented it as interfering with enjoy- 
 ment and interest. It lay couched and in concealment, 
 seldom stirring, and belonged I suppose to that sub- 
 conscious world which, somewhere within us, is absorbed 
 in its own constructive energies, and only rarely lets news 
 of itself rise, like a bubble through dark water, into our 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 311 
 
 controlled and effective consciousness. But cell by cell 
 was stored with its bitter honey, and my bees must have 
 been busy, for when a few years later I began to write 
 a book called The Image in the Sand I found the combs 
 full and ready for my despoiling. How such invention 
 as is implied in writing a book, exercises itself in others, 
 I do not know, but I have a very clear idea of my own 
 case. The material, the stuff out of which the threads 
 are woven, or, if you will, the stock-pot out of which the 
 pottage comes, has long been simmering and stewing be- 
 fore the planning, the conscious invention begins. These 
 two stages, so I take it, are widely severed from each 
 other; the storing and the stewing have long preceded this 
 rummage and inspection of what the author wants for his 
 purpose. But there is, practically always, a second pot 
 on the fire, subconsciously stewing, the contents of which 
 concern him not at all, while he is exercising such culinary 
 art as may be his over the contents of the first. Thus, 
 while subconsciously I was gathering and shredding into 
 this second pot, some of these secret and bitter herbs of 
 Egypt to be used years afterwards, my conscious cooking 
 powers were altogether absorbed with the stuff I had long 
 before collected in Greece. In other words, I was busy 
 with writing The Vintage while my subconscious mind 
 was just as busy on its own office of making ready for 
 The Image in the Sand. Every morning, and all morn- 
 ing, as we went up the Nile in the post-boat, I used to 
 carry book and pen and ink to some sequestered corner 
 where the sun beat full on me, and, while the sandbanks 
 and the vultures and the wicked old spell of Egypt were 
 working on my subconscious mind, I exuded on to paper 
 what I had captured of the sunnier spell of Greece. I 
 fancy that this must be a mental process common to 
 
312 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 most people, and that nobody writes of the interests and 
 experiences which at the moment absorb him. They have 
 to be kept and stored and stewed before they are fit for 
 use; the harvest in fact has long been completed before 
 the grain is ground, or before the baker, later still, is at 
 his oven. 
 
 Every winter then, for those three years, and indeed for 
 one year more, tragic and final — I went across to Egypt 
 from Greece, firm in the protection of the sunny gods 
 when I started, and hastening to swing the incense again 
 when I returned. And I must surely have been inocu- 
 lated with the poison of the darker deities, so that for 
 two years I was immune from their attacks, or perhaps 
 Maggie's excavations in the temple of Mut in Karnak 
 were so thrilling and surprising that "the plague was 
 stayed," or perhaps I made some truce and reconciliation 
 with the hawk-faced gods and the cats and the baboons, 
 or perhaps (as seemed most probable of all) I had im- 
 agined a vain thing when for the first time I thought that 
 the iron of these malignant conceptions had entered into 
 my soul, for the early months of the new year in 1895 
 and 1896 were weeks of incessant exhilaration, the glory 
 of which was this concession, given to Maggie by the 
 Ministry of Antiquities, that she might conduct the exca- 
 vation of a temple. 
 
 Did ever an invalid plan and carry out so sumptuous 
 an activity"? She was wintering in Egypt for her health, 
 being threatened with a crippling form of rheumatism; 
 she was suffering also from an internal malady, depress- 
 ing and deadly : a chill was a serious thing for her, fatigue 
 must be avoided, and yet with the most glorious contempt 
 of bodily ailments which I have ever seen, she continued 
 to employ some amazing mental vitality that brushed dis- 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 313 
 
 abilities aside, and, while it conformed to medical orders, 
 crammed the minutes with such sowings and reapings as 
 the most robust might envy. When I got to Egypt in 
 the first of these three years she had already obtained 
 permission to excavate the temple of Mut in the horse- 
 shoe lake at Karnak, with the proviso that the museum at 
 Gizeh was to claim anything it desired out of the finds ; 
 she had got together sufficient funds to conduct a six 
 weeks' exploration with a moderate staff of workers, and 
 there she was with her fly-whisk and her white donkey, 
 using a dozen words of Arabic to the workers with aston- 
 ishing effect. She had begun by trenching the site diago- 
 nally in order to cut across any walls that were covered by 
 the soil, and another diagonal soon gave the general 
 plan of the unknown temple. All the local English 
 archaeologists were, so to speak, at her feet, partly from 
 the entire novelty of an English girl conducting an exca- 
 vation of her own, but more because of her grateful and 
 enthusiastic personality, and M. Naville, who was en- 
 gaged at Deir-el-Bahari across the river, came and sat 
 like a benignant eagle on a corner stone, while Mr. New- 
 berry deciphered some freshly exposed inscription. I was 
 given a general supervision, with the object of discover- 
 ing the most economical method of clearing, of arranging 
 the "throws" of earth (so that those going to the chuck- 
 ing heap should not use the same path as those returning 
 with empty baskets, a plan which entailed collisions and 
 much pleasant conversation between the workmen who 
 were going to and fro) and with making a plan to scale 
 of the temple. A friend of Maggie's kept an eye wide 
 open for possible thefts of small objects, but the genius, 
 the organizer, the chairman of it all was Maggie. After 
 a morning there, she had to get back to Pagnon's Hotel, 
 
314 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 lunch quietly and rest afterwards, but presently she 
 would be out again, cantering on her white donkey with- 
 out fatigue owing to her admirable seat, with a tea-basket 
 on the crupper, and Mohammed the devoted donkey-boy 
 trotting behind with encouraging cries so that the donkey 
 should not lapse into that jog-trot which was so bad for 
 tea-things. At sunset, the work was over, and we made 
 our leisurely way back to the hotel. Maggie rested a 
 tired body before dinner, but exercised an indefatigible 
 mind, working at what was familiarly known as "her 
 philosophy," which eventually took shape in her book, 
 The Venture of Rational Faith, or scribbling at one of 
 the charming animal stories, which she published later 
 under the title of Subject to Vanity. Then after dinner, 
 the old habits reasserted themselves and we played games 
 with pencil and paper, producing poetical answers to 
 preposterous questions or rooking each other at picquet. 
 Each Saturday, she jingled out with money-bags to the 
 temple of Mut, and paid her workmen, while her native 
 overseer checked the tale of piastres, and waved the whisk 
 to keep the flies off his mistress. 
 
 Sometimes there were days off, when one of the three 
 was left in charge, and the two others went far through 
 the fertile land, or ferrying across the Nile, spent the day 
 with M. Naville at Deir-el-Bahari to see what fresh 
 sculptured wall had been reclaimed from the blown sand 
 of the desert, showing the pictured ivory and gold which 
 the expedition of Queen Hatasoo had brought back from 
 the mysterious land of Punt ; or we crawled dustily into 
 some newly discovered malodorous tomb in the valley 
 where the kings of Egypt were buried, or visited Professor 
 Petrie at the Ramesseum and exchanged the news of fresh 
 finds. Sometimes I took a holiday from the remote and 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 315 
 
 swarming past, and with a horse in place of the demurer 
 donkey, went far out into the desert on the other side 
 of the Nile. Pebbles and soft sand, hard sand and rocks 
 succeeded each other in slope and level, and the horse 
 whinnied as he sniffed the utter emptiness of the un- 
 breathed air. One kite hung, a remote speck in the brazen 
 sky, and the silence and the solitude wove the unutterable 
 spell of the desert. There, out of sight of all that makes 
 the planet habitable, your horse alone made the link with 
 the ephemeral living world; all else was as it had been 
 through uncounted centuries, and as it would remain 
 for centuries to come, until the spinning earth grew still. 
 In the desert the past and the future are one, and the 
 present, dwindled to a microscopical point, is but a 
 shadow of time in the timeless circle of eternity. Old 
 wicked Egypt was no more than that ; the dynasties were 
 whisked away like an unquiet fly, that persists for a 
 little, but not for long. 
 
 Luxor would be full of southerly-going dahabeahs and 
 English tourists during this month of January, and I 
 can see Maggie waving her long fine-fingered hands in 
 impotent despair, as I brought her an invitation from 
 some friend that she and I would dine on one of these 
 dahabeahs to-night or next night or the night after. 
 "How am I to get on with my work," exclaimed this out- 
 raged invalid, "with all these interruptions? Won't it 
 do, if we ask them to tea at the temple?" That certainly 
 usually "did" quite well, for while Maggie was making 
 tea, the cry of "Antica!" would arise from the diggers, 
 and she popped the lid on the teapot, and we turned to 
 see what had been unearthed. Once it was the statue of 
 the Rameses of the Exodus, which would tremendously 
 excite the visitor, but left us cold, for he was already 
 
316 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 plentifully represented. Or it might be a scribe of the 
 eighteenth dynasty whom to-day you may see in the 
 museum at Gizeh, and better even than that was a superb 
 Saite head, such as I may behold at this moment if I 
 raise my eyes from the page, or best of all it was the 
 image of Sen-mut himself, to see which, again, you must 
 go to Gizeh. That was the crown and culmination of 
 the digging and worthy of an archaeological digression. 
 
 Sen-mut, we knew, was the architect of our temple, and 
 of the temple of Deir-el-Bahari across the river, and the 
 mysterious thing in connection with him was that wher- 
 ever his name and his deeds appeared in hieroglyphic 
 inscriptions they had always been defaced, and an in- 
 scription about King Thothmes III, nephew and successor 
 of Queen Hatasoo, to whose reign the activities of Sen- 
 mut belonged had been superimposed. Sometimes the 
 deletion was not quite thorough and you could read Sen- 
 mut' s name below some dull chronicle of King Thothmes. 
 What the reason for these erasures had been was hitherto 
 only conjecture: now, on the close of this bright January 
 afternoon the riddle was solved, and we found ourselves 
 the accidental recoverers of a scandal nearly four thou- 
 sand years old. For Sen-mut was but a common man, 
 "not mentioned in writing" (i.e. with no ancestral rec- 
 ords), and he speaking from the inscription on the back 
 of this statue of himself which he had dedicated told us 
 that, "I filled the heart of the Queen (Hatasoo) in very 
 truth gaining the heart of my mistress daily . . . and the 
 mistress of the two lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) was 
 pleased with that which came forth from my mouth, the 
 Priest of Truth, Sen-mut. I knew her comings in the 
 Royal house, and was beloved of the ruler" 
 
 Here then was the reason for all these erasures: there 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 317 
 
 had been a scandal about the intimacy between this "com- 
 mon man" and the Queen; so, when she died, and her 
 nephew succeeded, he caused all mention of Sen-mut to 
 be erased, and covered up the blank spaces with majestic 
 records of his own achievements. It was his design to 
 destroy all evidence of this disreputable or at least un- 
 dignified affair, and hammer and chisel, at his order, were 
 busy to delete all hint of Aunt Hatasoo's indiscretions. 
 Pious King Thothmes was all but successful in this piece 
 of family pride: only just one record escaped his erasing 
 hand. But now, four thousand years later, Maggie dug 
 up that solitary omission. 
 
 I know that there must have been clouds on these 
 halcyon days of winter, but they passed and prevailing 
 sunlight was dominant again. Once Maggie got a chill 
 as she lingered by the horse-shoe lake, and developed a 
 congestion of the lungs, but when she was allowed to 
 leave her bed again and go out, she was carried in a sort 
 of litter, by her own express decree, to the beloved exca- 
 vation again, and made a delighted progress round the 
 fresh clearing, ordering that some mason must be at once 
 employed in piecing together the huge lion-headed statues 
 which had been discovered in the fore-court of the temple, 
 and in setting them in place again. She was more dubious 
 about certain abominable baboons that crouched in a 
 small chamber within the temple, whose awful ugliness 
 seemed better left alone. . . . Then over us both passed 
 the cloud of slightly disquieting letters from my mother. 
 My father was overtired, and Would go on working: he 
 had attacks of breathlessness if he rode, a sense of op- 
 pression on his chest that was not mitigated by his remedy 
 of thumping it. But no one, least of all the sufferer, took 
 these things at all seriously, Maggie got better, my 
 
318 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 father received no alarming report from his doctor, and 
 my mother, as these clouds seemed to melt, added them 
 to her general list of the workings of "unreasonable fear," 
 that ghostly enemy of hers, whom she was for ever com- 
 bating and holding at arm's length, but never quite 
 slaying. 
 
 Arthur, during these Grseco-Egyptian years, had slid 
 into the groove of a career; he was a house-master at 
 Eton, prosperous and popular, though from time to time 
 his own cloud beset him, and out of it he would an- 
 nounce that the burden of his work was quite intolerable, 
 and that he could not possibly stand it for another term. 
 But this was a fruitful Jeremiad, for it relieved his mind, 
 and he buckled to with renewed energy and that amazing 
 gift of getting through a task more quickly than anybody 
 else could have done it, without the slightest loss of thor- 
 oughness, and he added to the work that was incident to 
 his profession an immense literary activity of his own, 
 producing several volumes of verse, and experimentaliz- 
 ing in those meditative essays in which before long he 
 found his own particular metier. Hugh, in the same way, 
 after studying at Llandaff under Dean Vaughan, had 
 taken orders in the English Church and was attached to 
 the Eton Mission at Hackney Wick, so that of the three 
 sons I was the only one who had not settled down to any 
 career. By this time archseology, as a scholastic profes- 
 sion, was already closed to me, for Cambridge could not 
 go on giving me grants indefinitely, and in order to crown 
 my days of classical learning with a final failure, King's 
 had not decorated with a fellowship either the work I 
 sent in on the Roman occupation of Chester, or on certain 
 aspects of the cult of Asclepios. So, in deference to my 
 father's wishes, I took the first step towards getting a 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 319 
 
 post in the Education Office, collected and sent in testi- 
 monials, and craved employment there as an inspector 
 or examiner, I forget which. This regularized matters: 
 that was a respectable employment, and by sending in 
 those testimonials I was doing my best to be respectably 
 employed, and pending appointment I could go on writ- 
 ing, thus treading the path that by now I fully meant to 
 pursue. At no time was it definitely agreed that I should 
 become anything so irregular as a writer of novels, and 
 I suppose that if I had been appointed to a post in the 
 Education Office, I should have taken it up. But those 
 in whose hands the appointment rested thought that the 
 author of Dodo would be a very indifferent educator, in 
 spite of these brilliant panegyrics from his tutors, and 
 for aught I know those testimonials are dustily filed there 
 still. 
 
 But neither Arthur nor Hugh thought of their present 
 vocations in their present form as their lives' work; 
 Arthur, at any rate, had not the slightest intention, as 
 events proved, of plucking the rewards which his pro- 
 fession as schoolmaster was soon to offer him, and when 
 headmasterships came within his reach he did not put his 
 hand out to them. Hugh's case was only a little differ- 
 ent; the direct service of God was now his choice and 
 his passion, but as evolution of that progressed in him, it 
 took him out of the English Church altogether. No one 
 ever questioned that his joining the Roman communion 
 and taking orders there was anything but a matter of ir- 
 resistible conviction with him, but what would have hap- 
 pened had that conviction taken hold on him before my 
 father's death it is impossible to say. I cannot imagine 
 any human relation, any pietas restraining Hugh when he 
 had the firm belief that it was by divine guidance that 
 
320 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 he so acted : on the other hand I cannot imagine what the 
 effect on my father would have been; whether he could 
 have beaten down his own will in the matter, as my 
 mother did, and have accepted this without reserve at 
 all, or whether it would have been to him, as the death 
 of Martin had been, an event unadjustable, unbridgable, 
 unintelligible, a blow without reason, to be submitted to 
 in a silence which, had it been broken, must have been re- 
 solved into bewildered protest. 
 
 Apart from their present professions both Arthur and 
 Hugh were moving towards the pursuit, that of author- 
 ship, which was soon to take at least equal rank with their 
 other work. Within ten years it was as an essayist, a 
 writer of delicate meditative prose that Arthur was most 
 widely known, and to this he devoted the flower of his 
 energy, while Hugh served his Church not as a parish 
 priest, but as preacher and as writer of propagandist 
 novels, novels with the purpose of showing the dealings 
 of God through His Church. As works of art his sermons 
 far transcended his books, an opinion which no one I think 
 who ever listened to that tumultuous eloquence could 
 doubt. They carried his untrammelled message; while 
 he preached, he could say with supreme instinctive art all 
 that in novel-writing he had more indirectly to convey: 
 his sermons had an overwhelming sincerity which made 
 the delivery of them flawless and flame-like. When 
 he wrote he was never quite so inspired : the message was 
 the same, but it had to be wrapt about with the allegory 
 of ordinary life, he had to convey it in terms of country 
 houses or historical episode, and the sermon which was 
 the underlying intention was often a handicap to the art 
 of story-telling. But it was towards his books that his 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 321 
 
 inclination tended; his joy of achievement lay in the 
 written, not in the spoken word. 
 
 Then came the closing summer of this period, after 
 which the whole stage and manner of life was altered 
 altogether. That year I had stayed late in the south, 
 going on from Athens to Capri, and laying the foundation 
 then of that Italian castle of dreams, which was after- 
 wards to take a more solid form. Maggie had supple- 
 mented Egypt with a cure at Aix-les-Bains, but in August 
 we were all together again at Addington, and once more, 
 as before Nellie's death, and never since then, there were 
 hundreds of small cones on the cedar that scattered the 
 sulphur-like powder. Arthur came there before he went 
 to Scotland, Hugh had a holiday release from the Eton 
 mission, Maggie was established there deep in the colla- 
 tion of the results from the digging at Luxor. Soon my 
 father and mother were to start on a tour through Ire- 
 land, and when September saw their departure, Maggie 
 and I stayed on for a little and then drifted off on differ- 
 ent visits. We were all free to stop at home if we liked, 
 and ask friends there; Addington was just an ark for any 
 wandering family doves, picnicky as my mother said, but 
 there it was. . . Maggie and I saw my father and mother 
 off, and as from my first remembered days and ever after- 
 wards when he wished "good night" or "good bye," he 
 kissed me, and said, "God bless you, and make you a good 
 boy always." Then, after he got into the carriage, he 
 waved his hands with some affectionate and despairing 
 gesture, saying, "I can't bear leaving you nice people 
 here," and the carriage turned, and went up the slope in 
 front of the house. A very few days afterwards, Maggie 
 and I went off on our ways, leaving Beth at the front 
 door, saying, "Eh, pray-a-do come back soon." 
 
322 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 
 
 I had trysted with a friend to spend a few days at Ad- 
 dington early in October, and arrived there to find a 
 letter from him that he was prevented, and I was in two 
 minds as to whether to stop here alone, or go off on 
 some other visit for the Sunday. That scarcely seemed 
 worth while, for I had learned that my father and mother 
 were leaving Ireland that day, and would spend the Sun- 
 day with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The Irish tour 
 therefore was over, and they would be back on Monday. 
 Beth and I talked about it, and she said, "Nay, don't you 
 go away to-day, you be here for when your Papa and 
 Mamma get back. Have a quiet Sunday, you and me." 
 
 It was arranged so: and after lunch on Sunday I went 
 out for a long walk through the myriad paths of the Park, 
 where the beeches were russeting and the squirrels gather- 
 ing the nuts, and came home in time to have tea with 
 Beth. There was a telegram for me on the-hall-table, and 
 glancing at the sender's name first I saw it was from Mrs. 
 Gladstone. 
 
 "Your father passed over quite peacefully this morn- 
 ing," it said. "Can you come with Maggie?" 
 
 I did not comprehend at first what it meant. My 
 father was a very bad sailor, and it was quite possible 
 that Mrs. Gladstone had merely telegraphed the little 
 news that he was comfortably back in England. For one 
 or two or three long seconds which seemed like hours, 
 I tried to think that this was what she meant. But then 
 my father had crossed not "this morning" but on Friday : 
 and why should I "come with Maggie" ? I suppose that 
 the comprehension of the real meaning of this message 
 was only a matter of a moment, and I think the envelope 
 of the telegram was scarcely crumpled up in my hand be- 
 fore I knew. Just then, Beth, having seen my entry from 
 
ATHENS AND EGYPT 323 
 
 the window of her room, came down to tell me that she 
 had got tea ready. And she saw that something had hap- 
 pened, for her hands made a nuivering motion, and then 
 were clasped. 
 
 "Is there any trouble*?" she asked. 
 
 I could get up to London that night, but not to Chester. 
 I slept in the Euston Hotel and went on by an early train 
 next morning. 
 
 My father and mother had arrived at Hawarden on 
 Saturday: he was very well and in tremendously good 
 spirits, and sat up late that night talking with Mr. Glad- 
 stone. They had all gone to early communion on Sun- 
 day morning, returned for breakfast, and walked again 
 to church for the eleven o'clock service. Mrs. Gladstone 
 and they were in a pew together, and during the Confes- 
 sion, my father sank back from his upright kneeling, and 
 did no more than sigh. ... He bowed himself before 
 his Lord, as he met Him face to face. . . . 
 
INDEX 
 
 Addington, Easter holidays at, 
 179 
 last family gathering at, 321 
 liberty and leisure at, 251 
 non-ecclesiastical ritual at, 
 
 102 
 Sunday routine at, 183 
 Aix-les-Bains, Maggie Benson 
 
 at, 321 
 Algeria, a tour in, 276 
 Algiers, visits to, 254, 276 
 "American nouns" and how 
 
 played, 93 
 Anderson, Mary, a tribute to, 
 
 235 
 author's meeting with, 235 
 
 Archaeological researches in 
 Greece and Egypt, et seq., 
 286 
 studies at Cambridge, 255 
 Athens, a representation of the 
 Duchess of Bayswater at, 
 301 
 author in, 279, 303 
 royalty at a theatrical per- 
 formance in, 304. 
 Athleticism, benefits of, 149 
 
 Babe, B.A., The, 301, 302 
 Bambridge, Mr., as pianist, 145 
 his part in a performance of 
 
 Haydn's Toy Symphony, 
 201 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, offers 
 Bishopric of Truro to au- 
 thor's father, 62 
 Beesly, A. H., classics master 
 at Marlborough, 155 
 obiter dicta of, 160 
 Benson, Arthur Christopher, 
 (brother), 22 
 a mystical "Chapter" and its 
 
 warden, 99 
 a nursery reminiscence of, 25 
 and his brother Hugh, 128 
 as actor: a hilarious kitchen- 
 maid, 177 
 as author, 178, 320 
 as butterfly collector, 95 
 at Eton, 87, 123, 251 
 contributes a poem to Cam- 
 bridge Fortnightly, 231 
 gains an Eton scholarship at 
 
 King's, 126 
 holiday activities of, 92 
 house-master at Eton, 318 
 piscatorial exploits of, 54 
 schooldays at East Sheen, 30 
 Benson, E. F., a fellowship ex- 
 amination at Eton, 114 
 a first in the Classical 
 Tripos, 245 
 
 325 
 
326 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Benson, E. F. — 
 
 a fit of demoniacal posses- 
 sion, 59 
 
 a (neglected) untrained fac- 
 ulty for visualizing, 143 
 
 a ride with Gladstone, 271 
 
 a squirrel at prayers, 23 
 
 a trip to Switzerland, 129 
 
 an attack of jaundice, 209 
 
 an instance of his fatal habit 
 of inversion, 28 
 
 and his brother Hugh, 
 128 
 
 and the food question at 
 school, 83 
 
 applies for post in Education 
 Office, 319 
 
 archaeological studies at 
 Cambridge : an inspiring 
 tutor, 255 
 
 at Marlborough, 137, 196 
 
 attends children's parties at 
 White Lodge, Richmond 
 Park, 86 
 
 "Benson's lies," 86 et seq. 
 
 "Beth" on his want of tact, 
 107 
 
 birth of, 13 
 
 birthday celebrations at 
 Rugby, 32 
 
 Bishop Wordsworth's gift to, 
 
 52 
 
 boredom of Sundays at Ad- 
 dington, 183 
 
 botanical studies in Corn- 
 wall, 64 
 
 butterfly and moth collect- 
 ing, 146 
 
 Benson, E. F. — 
 
 Chester, archaeological ex- 
 ploration at, 266 
 
 childhood days: impressions 
 of, 13 et seq. 
 
 climbs the Matterhorn, 241 
 
 compulsory study in Swit- 
 zerland, 135 
 
 conducts Haydn's Toy Sym- 
 phony, 201 
 
 confirmation at Marlborough, 
 163 
 
 Cornwall, a new home in, 
 62 et seq. 
 
 curricula at Lincoln, 40 
 
 cycles with "O. B.," 222 
 
 death of his brother Martin, 
 78 
 
 death of his sister Nellie, 
 252 
 
 disquieting letters from his 
 mother, 252, 317 
 
 Dodo, publication of, 292 
 
 edits The Marlburian, 194 
 
 Empress Frederick and, 
 284 
 
 enjoyments during a foggy 
 Christmas, 175 
 
 excavations at Megalopolis, 
 288 
 
 fails in a scholarship exam- 
 ination, 1 25 
 
 father appointed Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, 163 
 
 first view of the Parthenon, 
 279 
 
 first visit to Crystal Palace, 
 ill 
 
INDEX 
 
 327 
 
 Benson, E. F. — 
 
 friendship with Regie Lister, 
 305 et seq. , 
 
 games and school matches at 
 Marlborough, 203 
 
 Greece, the spell of, 308 
 
 hide-and-seek at Lincoln, 35 
 
 his father, 13, 42, 62, 102 
 {see also Benson, Edward 
 White) 
 
 his mother, 18 et seq., 27, 
 29, 40, 58, 61, 102, 106 
 {see also Benson, Mrs.) 
 
 holidays in the Lake Dis- 
 trict, 209 
 
 hoop-bowling at Marl- 
 borough, 200 
 
 in Algiers, 254, 276, 277 
 
 in Athens, 279 et seq^ 303 
 et seq. 
 
 in Egypt, 254 
 
 influence of A. H. Beesly on, 
 155 et seq. 
 
 journeys to Truro for open- 
 ing of Cathedral, 235 
 
 lacks effective ambition, 123 
 
 Lambeth and Addington, 163 
 et seq. 
 
 lean years at school, 108 et 
 seq. 
 
 learns to swim, 56 
 
 liberty and leisure at Ad- 
 dington, 251 
 
 Lincoln, reminiscences of, 52 
 et seq. 
 
 love of music, 58, 68, 112, 
 152 
 
 lure of the mountains, 130 
 
 Benson, E. F. — 
 
 meets Mary Anderson, 
 
 235 
 
 Mrs. Gladstone's telegram 
 
 , announcing death of his 
 father, 322 
 
 natural history studies of, 
 65, 66, 96 
 
 parental encouragement of 
 hobbies, 57 
 
 poetical efforts of, 93, 121 
 
 Pontresina, a trip to, and his 
 brother Hugh, 263 
 
 private schooldays, and holi- 
 days, 80 et seq. 
 
 Reeve, the Rev. J. A., a pen 
 picture of, 73 
 
 revisits Marlborough, 235 
 
 Rubicon, The, published, and 
 adverse critiques, 296 et 
 seq. 
 
 scholarships at King's, 230, 
 263 
 
 schooldays at East Sheen, 
 80, 108, 114 
 
 schoolfellows expelled, 89 
 
 "Sieges — the most dangerous 
 game since the world be- 
 gan," 39 
 
 Sketches from Marlborough, 
 publication of, 232 
 
 Sundays at Lincoln and at 
 Addington, 46, 183 
 
 Swiss mountain-climbing, 41 
 et seq. 
 
 the charm of the sea, 56 
 
 the passing-bell at Marl- 
 borough, 209 
 
328 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Benson, E. F. — 
 
 the tragedy of a stickleback, 
 67 
 
 tours Normandy and Brit- 
 tany, 244 
 
 Turkish delight, midnight 
 revels, and the sequel, 115 
 et seq. 
 
 Wellington and the begin- 
 ning, 13 et seq. 
 
 widening horizons of, 147 et 
 seq. 
 
 wins a foundation scholar- 
 ship, 145 
 Benson, Edward White (fa- 
 ther), a wet holiday in the 
 Lake District, 209 
 
 accompanies author to Marl- 
 borough, 137 
 
 Algerian tours of, 254, 276, 
 277 
 
 and his son Hugh, 127 
 
 and Robert Browning, 237 
 
 and the erection of Truro 
 Cathedral, 101 
 
 and the Lincoln judgment, 
 250, 253 
 
 appointed Bishop of Truro, 
 62 
 
 as picture-hanger, 25 
 
 becomes Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury, 163 
 
 Chancellor of Lincoln, 32 
 
 death of his eldest son, 78 
 
 dinner parties at Lambeth 
 Palace, 237 
 
 Easter visits to Florence, 
 181 
 
 Benson, Edward White (fa- 
 ther) — 
 
 frequent fits of depression, 
 103, 105, 180 
 
 headmaster of Wellington 
 College, 13 
 
 his death at Hawarden 
 Church, 322 
 
 his dislike of tobacco, 238 
 
 his sternness, and the cause, 
 
 403 
 holiday "leisure" of, 132, 
 
 133, 210, 278 
 last farewell to his children, 
 
 321 
 love of the classics, 181 
 Press reviews of The Rubi- 
 con, and, 300 
 Queen Victoria and, 277 
 relentless Sundays of, 183 
 tour through Ireland, 321 
 visits Carthage, 278 
 Benson, Maggie (sister), 22, 
 
 25, 54, 127, 178, 275 
 conducts excavations of a 
 
 Karnak temple, 312, 315 
 develops congestion of the 
 
 lungs in Egypt, 317 
 guinea-pig rearing by, 93 
 her Venture of Rational 
 
 Faith, 314 
 ill-health of, 312 
 in Athens, 303 
 prizes at Truro High School, 
 
 127 
 publishes Subject to Vanity, 
 
 3H 
 researches in Chemistry, 94 
 
INDEX 
 
 329 
 
 Benson, Maggie (sister) 
 
 trips to Algiers and to 
 Egypt, 254, 276 
 Benson Martin (brother), 22, 
 23. 25, 30 
 
 at Winchester, 124 
 
 death of, 78 
 
 precocity of, 75 
 Benson, Mrs. (mother), a 
 stanza by, 94 
 
 and her children, 40, 106, 
 167 
 
 at Addington, 179 
 
 death of, 254 
 
 death of her daughter Nellie, 
 252 
 
 fear as her enemy, 173, 318 
 
 friendship with Mr. Glad- 
 stone, 165 
 
 her subscriptions as "honor- 
 ary member," 99, 100 
 
 how she whiled away a wet 
 afternoon, 212 
 
 informs author of the Dodo 
 "boom," 294 
 
 letters to "Beth" on illness 
 and death of her son Mar- 
 tin, 76, 77 
 
 religious instincts of, 78, 102, 
 168, 175 
 
 smokes a pipe on the Alps, 
 240 
 Benson, Nellie (sister), 22, 65, 
 98, 99, 251 
 
 an article in Temple Bar by, 
 177 
 
 an attack of pleurodynia, 209 
 
 and her father, 105 
 
 Benson, Nellie (sister) 
 
 ascends the Zienal Rothhorn, 
 
 2 43 
 
 at Truro High School, 126 
 
 Bishop Wordsworth and, 52 
 
 death of, 252 
 
 distributes prizes at Marl- 
 borough, 206 
 Benson, Robert Hugh (broth- 
 er), a mountain climb — 1 
 and the sequel, 264 
 
 a play by, 177 
 
 as henchman to a mystical 
 "Chapter," 99 
 
 as preacher, 320 
 
 at Cambridge, 250 
 
 attached to Eton Mission, 
 Hackney Wick, 318 
 
 "Beth" and, 211 
 
 childish piety of, 101 
 
 early journalistic efforts of, 
 
 93 
 
 family caricatures by, 210 
 
 his father and, 127 
 
 joins the Roman church, 102, 
 
 319 
 
 lays a stone for erection of 
 
 Truro Cathedral, 101 
 propagandist novels by, 320 
 skating in a fog, 176 
 studies at Llandaff, 318 
 takes orders, 102 
 wins a scholarship at Eton, 
 210 
 Berne, a day and night at, 129 
 "Beth" {see Cooper, Eliza- 
 beth) 
 Bird's-nesting in Cornwall, 65 
 
330 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Biskra, a Royal bereavement: 
 
 news received at, 277 
 Bosanquet, R. Carr, 226 
 Bramston, Miss, as authoress, 
 
 41, 42 
 in Cornwall, 76 
 Braun, Miss, 75 
 "Brewing" at Marlborough : 
 
 function describ d, 140 
 Browning, Oscar, 45, 221 et 
 
 seq. 
 contributes a poem to Cam," 
 
 bridge Fortnightly, 231 
 his At-Homes at Cambridge, 
 
 224 
 Browning, Robert, author's 
 
 meeting with, 237 
 Bubb, Mr., Clerk of Works of 
 
 Truro Cathedral, 101 
 Burton, Willie, 60, 61 
 Butterflies and moths, holiday 
 
 collection of, 95, 146 
 
 Calverley, Charles Stuart, 259 
 
 Cambridge Fortnightly, the, 
 232 
 
 Cambridge University: author 
 at, 213 et seq. 
 King's College, 213 
 
 Canterbury, Archbishop of (see 
 Benson, Edward White) 
 
 Capri, a visit to, 321 
 
 Carter, Mrs., organist of Ken- 
 wyn Church: a boyish 
 romance, 68 
 
 Carthage, a visit to, 278 
 
 Cathedral, the first post- 
 Reformation, 100 
 
 "Chapter," a mystical, 99 
 
 Chemistry, holiday researches 
 in, 94 
 
 Chester, archaeological research- 
 es at, 267 
 
 "Chitchat" literary society, 226 
 
 Clarence, Duke of, and "O. B.," 
 death of, 222, 276 
 
 Constantine, Crown Prince of 
 Greece (afterwards King 
 "Tino"), 283 
 
 Cooper, Elizabeth ("Beth"), 
 15, 18, 22, 33, 36, 38, 42, 
 74, 96, 107, 128, 321, 
 322 
 and Hugh Benson, 18, 127 
 and the Archbishop, 221 
 games at Addington, 251 
 her love for Mrs. Benson, 
 
 211 
 Mrs. Benson's letter an- 
 nouncing illness and death 
 of Martin, 77. 78 
 
 Copeland, May, 60 
 
 Cornwall, the charms of, 62 
 
 Crawford, Lady, entertains 
 Archbishop and Mrs. Ben- 
 son 180 
 
 Crystal Palace, the, first visit 
 to, 111 
 
 Cunningham, Dr., a story of, 
 228 
 
 Daily Chronicle, the, an un- 
 favourable review of The 
 Rubicon in, 299 
 
 Decemviri Debating Society, 
 the, 229 
 
INDEX 
 
 331 
 
 Deir-el-Bahari, archaeological 
 
 explorations at, 310, 314 
 Delphi, French excavations at, 
 
 289 
 Dickinson, G. Lowes, 231 
 Dodo, Lucas Malet's frank let- 
 ters on, 291 
 publication of, 292 
 read by Mrs. Benson and by 
 
 Henry James, 272 
 the infancy of, 178 
 Dorpfeld, Dr., and Miss Mag- 
 gie Benson, 303 
 and the fourth century Greek 
 theatres, 288 
 Duchess of Bayszvater, a repre- 
 sentation of, in Athens, 
 
 304 
 
 Easedale Rectory, a wet holi- 
 day in, 209 
 
 East Sheen, author's schooldays 
 at, 80 et seq. 
 
 Edgar, Mr., headmaster of 
 Temple Grove School, 114 
 a bad report from, 117 
 
 Edhem Pasha, 281 
 
 Egerton, Sir Edwin, 285 
 
 and Miss Maggie Benson, 
 
 '3°3 
 as host, 308 
 
 Egypt, visits to, 254, 308 
 
 Epidaurusj a visit to, 289 
 
 Eton, a second failure for 
 
 scholarship at, 125 
 Arthur Benson at, 87, 124, 
 
 250, 318 
 Etretat, holidays at, 86 
 
 Fal, the, bathing in, 100 
 
 Ford, Lionel, headmaster of 
 Harrow, 226 
 
 Frederick, Empress, and au- 
 thor, 284 
 
 Friendships of schoolboys, how 
 made and how retained, 
 
 151 
 Fry, Roger, and the Cambridge 
 Fortnightly, 231 
 
 Geoghehan, Mr., fourth form 
 master at East Sheen 
 school, 83 
 
 George V (then Duke of York) 
 dines at Lambeth Palace, 
 238 
 (then Prince of Wales) and 
 the death of the Duke of 
 Clarence, 277 
 
 George, King of Greece, 281 
 an audience with, 282 
 and his sister's hat, 288 
 
 George, Prince (of Greece), 
 284 
 
 Germany, Crown Princess of, 
 and Oscar Browning, 
 222 
 
 Giles, Mrs., her day-school and 
 the scholars, 41, 60 
 
 Gimmelwald, arrival at, 133 
 
 Gladstone, Mrs., a fateful tele- 
 gram from, 322 
 
 Gladstone, Right Hon. W. E., 
 a dissertation on blotting- 
 paper squeezes, 267 
 and the Chester archaeological 
 researches, 261 
 
332 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Gladstone, Right Hon. W. 
 E.— 
 
 friendship with Mrs. Benson, 
 166 
 Golf on the snow and in a fog, 
 
 176 
 Goodhart, Arthur, at King's 
 
 College, 226 
 Greece, the Court of, 283 
 author in, 286 et seq. 
 the spell of, 308 
 Greek theatres, German theory 
 
 regarding, 286 
 Guinea-pigs reared by Maggie 
 Benson, 93, 94 
 
 Halsbury, Lord, at Lambeth 
 
 Palace, 167 
 Handel Festival at Crystal 
 
 Palace, 110, 113 
 Hare, Thomas, 86 
 Harrison, Mrs. ("Lucas 
 
 Malet"), reads Dodo, 290 
 Hatasoo, Queen, and Sen-mut, 
 
 316 
 Hawarden, author interviews 
 
 Mr. Gladstone at, 267 
 Gladstone's tribute to Mrs. 
 
 Benson at, 166 
 Hawarden Church, tragic death 
 
 of the Archbishop in, 
 
 323 
 Headlam, Walter, at King's 
 
 College, 226 
 Henry VI, and King's College, 
 
 Cambridge, 213 
 Hobbie_s as a preservative of 
 
 youth, 58 
 
 Image in the Sand, The, 31 1 
 Irish tour of the Archbishop 
 
 and Mrs. Benson, 321 
 Irving, Harry, recitations at 
 Marlborough Penny Read- 
 ings, 202 
 
 James, Henry, earlier and later 
 works of, 272 
 reads Dodo, 272 
 James, Monty, Provost of 
 Eton, as mimic, 226, 229 
 readings from Dickens by, 
 229 
 Jungfrau, the, an ascent of, in 
 thick snow, 249 
 first glimpse of, 130 
 
 Karnak, excavations in the 
 
 temple of Mut, 312 
 Kenwyn Church and its or- 
 ganist, 72 
 Kenwyn Vicarage, 63 
 King Dr., Bishop of Lincoln, 
 
 trial of, 250 
 King's College, Cambridge, a 
 notable life-fellow of, 221 
 eccentric, Fellows of, 214 et 
 
 seq. 
 glee-singing at, 217 
 life at, 226 et seq. 
 the chapel, 233 
 
 Lake district, the, a wet holi- 
 day in, 209 
 
 Lambeth Palace, dinner parties 
 at, 237 
 Mrs. Benson as hostess at, 164 
 
 Leigh, Augustus Austen, Vice- 
 Provost of King's, 216 
 
INDEX 
 
 333 
 
 Lincoln and earlv emotions, 32 
 et seq. 
 
 and demoniacal possession, 
 52 et seq. 
 
 Sundays at, 45 
 
 the Cathedral, 45 et seq. 
 
 trial, the, Archbishop Ben- 
 son and, 249, 253 
 Lister, Regie, and a theatrical 
 performance in Athens, 
 
 304 
 author and, 306 
 
 his genius for friendship, 305 
 
 Llandaff, Hugh Benson at, 
 
 3i8 
 
 Luxor, a stay at, 310 
 Lyttelton, Alfred, the secret of 
 his popularity, 305 
 
 "Malet, Lucas" {see Harrison, 
 
 Mrs.) 
 Mann, Dr., 234 
 Marie, Princess (of Greece), 
 
 284 
 Markham, Admiral, and a the- 
 atrical performance in 
 Athens, 304 
 Marlborough College, an in- 
 dulgent house-master, 194 
 author at, 137 
 author promoted to sixth 
 
 form, 190 
 life at, 138 
 
 Penny Readings at, 201 
 the racket-court, 158 
 unsuccessful scholarship ex- 
 amination at, 125 
 Marlburian, the, 199 
 
 Mary, Princess, Duchess of 
 Teck, a children's party at 
 White Lodge, 86 
 
 Matterhorn, ascent of: a peril- 
 ous descent, 241 
 
 Megalopolis, archaeological ex- 
 cavations at, 288 
 
 Middleton, Professor, and his 
 love of archaeology, 255 et 
 seq. 
 
 Miles, Eustace, a hoop-bowling 
 run with author, 200 
 a unique alliance with au- 
 thor, 196 
 his aptitude for study, 243 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 86 
 
 Mommsen, Professor, and the 
 Chester archaeological re- 
 searches, 267 
 
 Mountain-climbing, 131, 241 et 
 seq. 
 
 Murren, lawn tennis at, 134 
 
 Mycenae, a visit to, 289 
 
 Myers, F. W., an original verse 
 by — and a parody, 261 
 
 Naville, M., his explorations 
 at Deir-el-Bahari, 313 
 
 Newberry, Mr., and the Kar- 
 nak excavations, 313 
 
 Nicholas, Prince (of Greece), 
 284 
 
 Nixon, J. E., Latin prose lec- 
 turer, 216, 231 et seq. 
 
 Nocton expeditions to, 55 
 
 "O. B." (see Browning, Oscar) 
 Okes, Dr., Provost of King's, 
 217 
 
334 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Olga, Queen, 283 
 and Dodo, 304 
 Olympia visited by author, 289 
 
 Pain, Barry, his parody in 
 Cambridge Fortnightly, 
 231 
 Pall Mall Gazette reviews au- 
 thor's Rubicon, 297 
 Pan-Anglican conference at 
 
 Lambeth : a story of, 239 
 Parker, butler at Truro, 127 
 Parody and parodists, 260 
 Penny Readings at Marl- 
 borough, 201 
 Perran, picnics at, 100 
 Petrie, Professor, visits to, 314 
 Pharsala, battle of: Edhem 
 
 Pasha's epigram of, 281 
 Photography, first efforts at, 95 
 "Pirates"— the game described, 
 
 96 
 Pitt Club, Cambridge Univer- 
 sity, 226 
 Piz Palu, a horrible experience 
 
 on the, 263 
 Poetry, author's early efforts in, 
 
 93» 121 
 
 "Poetry games," 93 
 
 Pontresina, an unpleasant ad- 
 venture at, 263 
 
 Press-cuttings, unfavourable, 
 297 
 
 Printing press, a primitive, 94 
 
 Prior, Mr., of East Sheen 
 school, 83 
 
 Racket Court, Marlborough 
 College, 161 
 
 Rawlings, Mr., first form teach- 
 er at East Sheen school, 
 
 83 
 Reeve, Rev. J. A., reminiscences 
 
 of, 73 
 
 Riffel-Alp, climbing : a perilous 
 
 descent, 241 
 Riseholme, enjoyable days at, 
 
 53 
 Rotten Row, exercise in, 164 
 Rubicon, The, publication of: 
 
 Press reviews, 296 
 Russell, Mrs., author's music- 
 teacher, and a tribute to, 
 80, ill 
 
 St. James's Budget and The 
 Rubicon, 299 
 
 St. Mary's Church, Truro, 100 
 
 St. Paul's Cathedral, Passion 
 music at, 112 
 
 Saturday Magazine, the, 56, 92, 
 176 
 a Swiss edition of, 243 
 
 Savernake Forest, butterfly col- 
 lecting in, 146 
 
 Schil thorn, the ascent of, 134 
 
 Sen-mut, Egyptian architect, 
 316 
 
 Sermon paper, a new use for, 
 
 92, 177 
 Sharpe, Mr., objects to hoop- 
 bowling, 200 
 Sidgwick, Arthur (uncle), 30 
 Sidgwick, Henry (uncle), an 
 astronomical poem by, 
 
 93 
 
 visits Wellington, 30 
 
INDEX 
 
 835 
 
 Sidgwick, Mrs., 18, 30 
 Sidgwick, William (uncle), 
 
 30 
 Skating under difficulties, 176 
 Skegness, a visit to, 56 
 Standard the, a review of au- 
 thor's Rubicon, 297 
 Staunton Prize, the, conditions 
 
 of, 146 
 Stephen, J. K., as parodist, 257 
 death of, 263- 
 inaugurates the "T. A. F.," 
 
 328 
 personality of, 259 
 Sundays at Addington, 183 
 
 at Lincoln, 44 
 Switzerland, holidays in, 129 
 
 "T. A. F.," the, at Cambridge, 
 229 
 
 Tait, Lucy, a tour in Algeria, 
 276 
 her devotion to Mrs. Benson, 
 254 
 
 Teck, Duchess of {see Mary, 
 Princess) 
 
 Teck, Duke of, a cigar and a 
 squib, 86 
 
 Temple, Bishop (afterwards 
 Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury), 56 
 
 Tennant, Miss Margot, 266 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, at 
 Lambeth Palace, 238 
 
 Thothmes, King, and the tem- 
 ple hieroglyphic inscrip- 
 tions, 316 
 
 Thun, lake of, 130 
 
 Tobogganing under difficulties, 
 
 175 
 Torquay, summer holidays at, 
 
 Toswill, Mr., a zealous Alpin- 
 ist, 240 
 
 "Trojan Queen's Revenge, 
 The," and its author, 156 
 
 Truro, author's father ap- 
 pointed Bishop of, 62 
 erection of the Cathedral at, 
 100 
 
 Truro Cathedral, opening of, 
 
 2 35 
 Tuck, Mrs., 75 
 
 Vanity Fair reviews The Rubi- 
 con, 297 
 
 Vaughan, Dean, of LlandarT, 
 3i8 
 
 Victoria, Queen, and the Arch- 
 bishop's Algerian tour, 277 
 and the see of Truro, 62 
 
 Vintage, The, how and where 
 written, 311 
 
 Voltaire, M., French master at 
 East Sheen, 80, 83 
 
 Waldstein, Dr., 255 
 
 Waterfield, Ottiwell, and his 
 private school at East 
 Sheen, 80 et seq. 
 as elocutionist, 80, 109 
 
 Waterfield, Mrs., 110, ill 
 
 Wellington College, and its 
 headmaster, 13 
 the dining-room, 23 
 
 Westminster, Duke of, an inter- 
 view with, 266 
 
336 
 
 INDEX 
 
 White Lodge, Richmond Park, 
 children's parties at, 86 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, a tale of, 300 
 
 Wordsworth, Bishop, of Lin- 
 coln, 52 
 
 Wordsworth, Mrs., and family, 
 52 
 
 Wordsworth, William, Jim 
 Stephen's parodies of, 260 
 
 World, The, on The Rubicon, 
 307 
 
 Zienal Rothhorn, the, au- 
 thor's ascent of, 243 
 
BRENTANO'S