The opening of the Long Vacation of 1907 was pleasantly signalized for us Benedictines by the gratifying successes in the Final Schools of our little Hall, which secured two first classes (in "Greats" and History), and a second class in Theology. TheOxford Magazinewas kind enough to point out that this was a remarkable achievement for a Hall numbering nine undergraduates, and compared favourably with the percentage of honours at any college in the university. I was given to understand that my young theologian would also have secured his "first" had he not objected to the matter and form of some of the questions set him, and declined to answer them!
This cheerful news sent me in good spirits up to Dumfries for my usual week's examinations at the Benedictine convent school there. I found almost eighty nuns in residence, including the exiled community of the mother house of Arras, whom (the Prioress was eighty-five, and there were several old ladies on crutches) the great French Republic had driven out of house and home as a "danger to the State!" I had several interesting talks with "Madame la Prieure," who had been professed in the reign of Louis Philippe, and who bore her crueluprootal with true French (and Christian) resignation and cheerfulness. I do not know if the tradition about St. Swithun holds good in Scotland; but these days succeeding his festival (July 15) were certainly almost continuously wet. One of the French nuns said that in her country (Picardy) St. Medard was credited with a similar influence, and quoted the lines—
Quan ploon per San Médar,Ploon quarante jhiours pus tard;
and I recalled the Italian distich about St. Bibiana (December 2)—
Se piove il giorno di Santa Bibiana,Pioverà per quaranta giorni ed una settimana.
I spent a few days at Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert Jerningham's Border castle, when my work at Dumfries was finished, and found my host, as usual, excellent company, and full of anecdotes, both French and English. Speaking of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund at Pontigny in which he had joined some years before, he said that an English newspaper described an open-air benediction given by the "Bishops of Estrade and Monte"; the reporters having doubtless been informed that the bishops wouldmounton theplatformto give the blessing! He showed us a cutting from another English newspaper, stating that MM. Navire, Chavire, and Bourrasque had been shipwrecked and drowned at sea! Sir Hubert had a complete set of theRevue des Deux Mondesin his library; and I hunted up for his delectation a passage in which M. Forgues, writing on English clerical life,à proposof George Eliot's first book,gave an original etymology for the wordtract. "Il [Rev. Amos Barton] a saTrack Society, qui va mettre en Fair toutes les bonnes femmes du pays, enrégimentées pour dépister (track) les pauvres hères susceptibles de conversion." The same writer rendered the epithet "Gallio-like" (applied by the minister to the parishioners of Shepperton) by "pareils à des Français!"
Yorkshire, after Northumberland, claimed me for two pleasant visits—the first to the Herries' at Everingham, with its beautiful chapel copied from the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and its famous deer-park, one of the oldest in England (so Lord Herries told me), and a very different thing, as one of Disraeli's country squires inLothairremarks, from a mere park with deer in it. The weather was bright and hot; and it was a pretty sight to see the droves of fallow-deer, bucks and does together, clustering for shade under the great trees near the house. From Everingham I went on to Bramham, where George Lane Fox was spending a happy summer in his old home. He took me everywhere, through the lovely gardens laid out by Lenôtre, and (in a brougham drawn by an ancient hunter and driven by a stud-groom not less ancient) all over the park, and up the noble beech avenue called Bingley's Walk. My friend had lost his splendid inheritance for conscience' sake; and it was pleasant to see him, in old age and enfeebled health, passing happy days, through his nephew's hospitality and kindness, at the well-loved home of his boyhood and youth.
I was glad to find myself settled for some golden weeks of August and September at our abbey amongthe Highland hills, where we were this autumn favoured with almost continuous sunshine. Our many guests came and went—some of them busy city men, enjoying to the full the pure air, lovely surroundings, and quiet life in our guest-house, all to the accompaniment of chiming bells and chanted psalms. Whether they found our "brown Gregorians" as devotional as the sentimentalist of Mr. Hichens's novel[1] I know not; but anyhow to me our monastic plain-chant was restful and pleasant after the odd stuff in the way of "church music" which had elsewhere assailed my ears. I confess that after our more normal Oxford hours (though I hope we were not sluggards at our Hall), I reconciled myself with difficulty to "the hour of our uprising" in the monastery. The four o'clock matin-bell had always been more or less of a penance to me (as I suppose it was to most of my brethren), though I tried to fortify myself with Dr. Johnson's argument—a purely academic one in the case of that lie-abed old sage—that "it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many more hours theconsciousness of being"; but an American guest of ours, to whom I cited this dictum, countered it by a forcibly-expressed opinion "on the other side" by one of the most eminent living specialists in insanity.[2]
One recalls delicious rambles with our brethren or our guests during those sunlit autumn days: sometimes among the verdant Glengarry woods, sometimes at our outlying "chapel-of-ease," some miles up the most beautiful of the glens which run from Central Inverness-shire to the sea. A veritable oasis this among the hills, with its green meadows, waving pines, and graceful bridge spanning the rushing river; and all framing the humble chapel, its eastern wall adorned with a fresco (from the brush of one of our artist monks[3]) which the little flock—sadly diminished of late years by emigration—greatly admired and venerated. A week-end was sometimes spent pleasantly and not unprofitably at some remote shooting-lodge, saying mass for Catholic tenants, and perhaps a handful of faithfulHighlanders. One such visit I remember this autumn at a lodge in Glencarron, a wild wind-swept place, with the surrounding hilltops already snow-coated, which Lord Wimborne (for some years Lovat's tenant at Beaufort) had recently acquired. Although in the heart of the forest, the lodge was but two hundred yards from the railway; there was no station, but the train would obligingly stop when signalled by the wave of a napkin from the front door! A crofter's cow strayed on the line one day of my stay, was, by bad luck, run over by one of the infrequent trains, and (as a newspaper report once said of a similar mischance) "cut literally intocalves."[4] The night before I left Glencarron, we were all wakened, and some of us not a little perturbed, by two very perceptible shocks of earthquake—a phenomenon not unusual in the district. We heard afterwards that at Glenelg, on the west coast, the shocks had been more severe, and some damage had been done; but, as a witty member of our party remarked, Glenelg might have been turned inside out, or upside down, without suffering any appreciable change.[5] On my way back to Fort Augustus I stayed a day at Beaufort to wishbon voyageto Lovat's brother-in-law and sister, who were just offto visit another married sister at our Embassy in Japan, and (incidentally) to travel round the world. I met on the steamer on my way home one of my Wauchope cousins, a spinster lady who had gone some time before to live in Rome, and had asked me for letters of introduction to "two or three Cardinals." Tired of Rome, she was now making for the somewhat differentmilieuof Rotherhithe, with some work of the kind popularly called "slumming" in view.
I visited, on my way south, a married brother at his charming home in Berwickshire, where there was much tennis, and pleasant expeditions by motor to interesting spots on both sides of the Border. One lovely autumn day we spent at Manderston, where our hostess had her brother, my lord chancellor of Oxford University, staying with her. The great man was very affable, and asked me to go and see him in Michaelmas Term, when he would be in residence at the "Judge's Lodgings" in St. Giles's. I joined a family gathering at Newhailes, a few days later, for the pretty wedding of my niece, Christian Dalrymple—"a very composed bride," remarked one of the reporters present, "as befitted a lady who had acted as hostess to the leading lights of the Conservative party ever since she left the schoolroom."[6] Her uncle, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, tied the knot (of course "impressively"), and I was glad to find myself at Newhailes in his always pleasantcompany. Driving with him to pay a call or two in the neighbourhood, I amused him with anà proposstory of the bishop who rode out on a long round of leaving-calls, attended by his groom, who was sent into the house, before starting, to get some cards. When they reached the last house, the order came, "Leave two cards here, James"; and the unexpected reply followed: "I can't, my lord; there's only the ace of spades left!"
After a few days at Niddrie Marischal, the fascinating old seat of the Wauchopes near Edinburgh (General "Andie" Wauchope's widow had lived there since her husband's gallant death at Magersfontein), I went to Cumbrae to visit Lady Bute at the Garrison, her home on that quaint island in the Firth of Clyde. The house, too, was quaint though comfortable, built in semi-ecclesiastical Gothic, with a sunk garden in front, and a charming moonlight view from my window of the broad Firth, with the twinkling lights of the tiny town in the foreground. Millport was a favourite "doon-the-water" resort for Glasgow folk on holiday; and I had quite a congregation at my Sunday mass in the little chapel in the grounds, as well as a considerable catechism-class afterwards. Winifred Lady Howard of Glossop, my lady's stepmother, was paying her a visit, and as an inveterate globe-trotter (if the word may be respectfully applied to an elderly peeress) kept us entertained by stories of men and things in many lands. I spent one afternoon at the college and "cathedral" of the Isles, the quaint group of buildings, redolent of Butterfield and looking like an Oxford college and chapel through the wrong end of a telescope, which the sixth Earl of Glasgow (mybrother-in-law's predecessor) had more or less ruined himself in erecting. Provost Ball, whom I found at tea with his sisters, received me kindly, and showed me the whole establishment, which looked rather derelict and neglected (I fancy there was very little money to keep it going); and the college had been closed for some years. Some of us crossed the Firth next day in an absurd little cockle of a motor-boat (unsuitable, I thought, for those sometimes stormy seas), and I was glad to find myself onterra firma, in a comfortable White steam-car—my first experience of that mode of propulsion—which whirled us smoothly and swiftly to Glasgow, in time for me to take the night train to London and Oxford.
In university circles I found a certain amount of uneasy trepidation owing to the official presence of Lord Curzon. A resident Chancellor was a phenomenon unprecedented for centuries, and one unprovided for in the traditional university ritual, in which the first place was naturally assigned to the Vice-chancellor. There was much talk as to when, and in what direction, the new broom would begin to sweep, and amusing stories (probablyben trovati) of dignified heads of houses being called over the coals at meetings of the Hebdomadal Council. Personally the Chancellor made himself very agreeable, entertaining everybody who was anybody at his fine old mansion, once the "town house" of the Dukes of Marlborough. It was all, perhaps, a little Vice-regal for us simple Oxonians, who were not accustomed to write our names in a big book when we made an afternoon call, or to be received by a secretary or other underling instead of by our host when we went out to luncheon or dinner. But itwas all rather novel and interesting; and in any case the little ripples caused on the surface of Oxford society by our Chancellor's sayings and doings soon subsided; for, as far as I remember, his term of residence did not exceed a month or so altogether. I was kept busy all this autumn term by the considerable work I had undertaken (the contribution of nearly eighty articles) for the AmericanCatholic Encyclopædia. One of the longest was on Cambridge; and I felt on its completion that I knew much more about the "sister university" than about my own! Most of my work was done in the Bodleian Library; and it was a pleasant and welcome change to find oneself installed in the new, well-lighted and comfortable reading-room arranged in one of the long picture-galleries, instead of (as heretofore) in an obscure and inconvenient corner of Duke Humphrey's mediæval chamber. The then Bodley's Librarian was a bit of an oddity, and perhaps not an ideal holder of one of the most difficult and exacting offices in the university; but he was always kindness itself to me, and, whatever his preoccupations, was always ready to put at my service his unrivalled knowledge of books and their writers. His memory was stored with all kinds of whimsical rhymes: sometimes he would stop me in the street, and—at imminent peril of being run over, for he was extraordinarily short-sighted—would peer in my face through his big spectacles, and say, "Did you ever hear of
——the learned Archdeacon of York,Whowouldeat his soup with a knife and a fork:A feat which he managed so neatly and cleverly,That they made him the Suffragan Bishop of Beverley!"
Or it would be, perhaps, "Listen to this new version of an old saw:
Teach not your parent's mother to extractThe embryo juices of an egg by suction:The aged lady can the feat enactQuite irrespective of your kind instruction."
And before I had time to smile at the quip I would be dragging my friend off the roadway on to the pavement to escape the oncoming tramcar, bicycle or hansom cab. Sometimes we walked together, usually in quest of some relic of antiquity in the neighbourhood, in which he would display the most lively interest, though I really believe it was all but invisible to his bodily eyes. One such walk was to inspect the old lepers' chapel of St. Bartholomew, in the fields near Cowley—a lovely derelict fragment of the ages of faith, which the local Anglican clergy had expressed their intention of "restoring to the ancient worship." "You," said my friend the librarian, with his ironic smile, "will doubtless regard this promise as what our friend Dean Burgon would have called 'polished banter,'" the allusion being to a phrase in a sermon preached by the future Dean of Chichester at St. Mary's at the time when the spread of the so-called "æsthetic movement" was causing some concern to sensible people. "These are days," he cried, "when we hear men speak, not in polished banter, but in sober earnest, of 'living up to their blue china!'" I heard him speak these words myself; and recalling that inimitable tone and accent, can imagine the impression made by a more memorable utterance from the same pulpit, when the new doctrines of Darwin were in the air, and the alleged affinity of man with monkey wasfluttering orthodox dovecotes. "O ye men of science! O ye men of science! leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I will willingly leave you yours in the Zoological Gardens!"
I had the pleasure in November of paying a short visit to the wise and good Bishop of Newport, for a church-opening at Cardiff. A profit as well as a pleasure, one may hope; for indeed no one could spend any time in Dr. Hedley's company without instruction as well as edification. We spoke of the late Lord Bute's remarkable philological gifts; and I asked the Bishop if he had found his ignorance of Welsh any practical hindrance to the work of his diocese. "No," was his reply. "Fortunately for me (for I am no Mezzofanti) I find English a good enough means of communication with my people, the majority of whom are neither Welsh nor English, but Irish." I told him, much to his amusement, of the advice once given to an Englishman appointed to a Welsh (Anglican) see, as to the proper pronunciation of the Welsh doublel. "May it please your lordship to place your episcopal tongue lightly against your right reverend teeth, and to hiss like a goose!" A young Oxford friend of mine whom I met at Cardiff carried me thence to Lichfield to stay a night at the Choristers' House of which his father was master. It chanced to be "Guy Fawkes Day," and I assisted at the fireworks and bonfires of the little singing-boys, who (I was rather interested to find) did not associate their celebration in the slightest degree with the old "No Popery" tradition. The merry evening concluded with some delightful part-singing.
I recall a week-end at Arundel when term was over: a large and cheerful party, and the usual"parlour games" after dinner, including dumb-crambo, in which I was almost the only spectator; for everybody else was acting, the Duke being a polar bear rolled up in a white hearthrug! My customary Christmas was spent at Beaufort, in a much-diminished family circle. Lord Lovat was on his way home from South Africa, one brother absent on a sporting tour in Abyssinia, another gold-mining in Rhodesia; his second sister with her husband in Japan, and two others stillen voyageround the world. Some schoolboy nephews, however, and their young sisters, were a cheerful element in our little party, and there was a great deal of golf, good, bad, and indifferent, on the not exactly first-class course recently laid out in the park.[7] I had to go south soon after New Year, to tie the knot and preach the wedding sermon at a marriage in Spanish Place Church.[8] A thoroughly Scottish function it was, with Gordon Highlander sergeants lining the long nave, the bridegroom's kilted brother-officers forming a triumphal arch with their claymores, and a big gathering of friends from the north afterwards at the Duchess of Roxburghe's pretty house in Grosvenor Street. I attended next evening at our Westminster dining-club, and heardFather Maturin read a clever, if not quite convincing paper, on "The Broad and Narrow Mind," some of his paradoxes provoking a lively subsequent discussion which I found very interesting. I had a stimulating neighbour in Baron Anatole von Hügel.
The opening of the Lent Term of 1908 at Oxford was dreary enough, with a succession of the dense white fogs which only the Thames valley generates in perfection. It is not cheering to come down morning after morning to find what looks like a huge bale of dirty cotton-wool piled up against one's window-panes; and the news at this time was as depressing as the weather. We heard early in February of the brutal murder of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal, before the eyes of wife and mother; and I was saddened in the same month by the death of an exemplary member of our community at Fort Augustus, though that had been long expected. I was myself on the sick-list, and recall little of interest during these weeks, except a most excellent lecture—of course on boy scouts—given by General Baden-Powell, which I only wished could have been heard, not by dons, ladies, and undergraduates, but by the cigarette-slobbering, street-corner-loafing lads who were, I think, more in evidence at Oxford than anywhere else. Early in March I was in London, for the wedding of my old pupil, Charles Vaughan of Courtfield, to the pretty niece of the Duke of Newcastle. I got to Westminster Cathedral an hour before the appointed time: the chapter-mass was being celebrated, and waves of sonorous plain-song floating about the great misty domes overhead. After the ceremony I joined the wedding guests at the Ritz for a short time, and, amid thefrou-frouandva-et-vientof all the smart people, managed to impart to a few intimate friends the news that I was going into hospital in a few days, with no very certain prospect of coming out alive!
The next fortnight or so was of course taken up with inevitable worries—giving up work for an indefinite period, resigning for a time (it turned out to be for good) the mastership of my Hall, and finding alocum tenensletter-writing to a host of inquiring friends, and all this when physically fit to do nothing. I spent the last days of freedom at Arundel, receiving from the good people there every possible kindness; and on March 18, under the patronage of the Archangel Gabriel (saint of the day), betook myself to my nursing home in Mandeville Street. Nurses (mine were most kind and devoted), surgeons and anæsthetists soon got to work; and for a time at least (in the almost classic words of Bret Harte) "the subsequent proceedings interested me no more."
A critical operation, followed by a slow and difficult convalescence, ranks, of course, among the deeper experiences of a man's life. "We were all anxious," said an Oxford friend some weeks later, a good old chemist whom I had known for years; "for we heard that you were passing through very deep waters." The expression was an apt one; and I suppose no one rises from such waters quite the same man as he was before. This is not the place to dwell on such thoughts; but one reflection which occurs to me is that in such a time as I am now recalling one realizes, as perhaps one had never done before, how many kind people there are in the world, and appreciates what true friendship is. Duringmy long stay in hospital my nearest relations chanced to be greatly scattered, some of them in very remote parts of the world. This made me all the more grateful for the extraordinary kindness and attention I received, not only from approved friends, but from many others whom I had hardly ventured to count as such. I remember a little later compiling a kind oflibro d'oro, with a list of the names of all who had been good to me in word or deed during those weary weeks. Some of them I have hardly ever seen since: many have passed beyond the sphere of one's gratitude here on earth; but I still sometimes con my list, and thank the dead as well as the living for what they did for me then.
I remember my first drive—round Regent's Park, on a perfect May day, in the steam-car of which I have already spoken; and very tiring I found it. After a lazy fortnight at St. John's Lodge, and daily trundles in a Bath chair among the gay flower-beds of the park, I was able to get down into the country; and after a sojourn with Lady Encombe and her two jolly little boys near Rickmansworth (a wonderfully rural spot, considering its nearness to London), I made my way to Arundel, where it was pleasant to meet the Herries's and other kind friends. The great excitement there was the hoped-for advent of a son and heir, who made a punctual and welcome appearance before the end of the month, and was received, of course, with public and private jubilations in which I was happy to be able to participate. After this I paid quite a long visit to my soldier brother at Kneller Court, the pretty place near Fareham which he was occupying while commanding the Artillery in that district. There were plenty ofpleasant neighbours, who treated me to pleasant motor-drives through a charming country little known to me; and the elm-shaded hall (I believe Sir Godfrey Kneller had really lived there once), with its gay old garden and excellent tennis-lawn, was a popular resort for young officers from Portsmouth and elsewhere, who dropped in almost daily to luncheon, tea, or dinner, and doubtless found the society of a kind hostess and her two pretty daughters a welcome diversion from their naval and military duties. One June day we spent in Portsmouth, lunching with Sir Arthur and Lady Fanshawe at Admiralty House, a big, cool roomy mansion like a French château, full of fine old portraits. We went out afterwards on the flag-captain's launch to see theVictory, a visit full of interest, though I was unequal to climbing the companions connecting the five decks. A man whom I sat next at tea in the Admiral's garden said he was connected with the Patent Office (I do not think he was actually Comptroller-General, but he was something high up in that rather mysterious department of the Civil Service), and told me some entertaining yarns about early patents and monopolies.[9] One was granted in 1618 to two men called Atkinson and Morgan, "to find out things in monasteries!" Another man, about the same time, secured the exclusive right of importing lobsters, which had hitherto cost a penny; but the patentee bought them out at sea from Dutch fishermen, andsold them at threepence. In Charles I.'s reign a "doctour in phisick" called Grant got a patent for a "fishe-call, or looking-glass for fishes in the sea, very useful for fishermen to call all manner of fishes to their netts, seins, or hooks." In the same reign it was made compulsory to bury the dead in woollen in order to encourage the wool manufacture; and ten years later Widow Amy Potter got a (rather gruesome) patent for the elegant woollen costume she devised for this purpose.[10]
I went from Kneller to spend a breezy week at Brighton with Captain Frank Grissell, to whom his brother, my old Oxford friend, had left practically all his possessions and collections, and who had just purchased a pretty villa in Preston Park in which to house them. No brothers were ever more dissimilar or more devoted than Hartwell, whose whole interests in life had been ecclesiastical and Roman, and his brother Frank, ex-cavalry officer, to whom horses and hunting, racing and coaching, were the salt of life. He had arranged his brother's miscellaneous treasures, in one or two spacious rooms, with great care and pains; and it was a curious experience to pass out of an atmosphere and environment of religious paintings, Roman bookbindings, panels from cardinals' coaches, Papal coins and medals, Italian ecclesiological literature, and what theFrench callobjets de piétéof every description, to the ex-lancer's own cheerful living-rooms: the walls hung with pictures of hunters, steeplechasers, coaching and sporting scenes; stuffed heads, tiger-skins, and other trophies of the chase everywhere about, and the windows looking out on a pretty garden, in the improvement and cultivation of which the owner was promising himself unfailing interest and occupation.
"Doctor Brighton" (was not this affectionate sobriquet the invention of Thackeray?) did much for the restoration of my health and strength; and I was able to get to Oxford before the end of summer term, to spend a fortnight with kind Monsignor Kennard at his charming old house in St. Aldate's, where I had a room so close to Tom Tower that the "Great Bell of Tom" sounded as if it were tolling at my bedside![11] In his pretty chapel (of which the open roof was said to be a relic of Oseney Abbey), I had the happiness, on Trinity Sunday, of celebrating Mass for the first time for more than three months—a greatly-appreciated privilege.
[1] "A brown Gregorian is so devotional.... Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent magenta."
[2] Dr. Selden Talcott, of the State Asylum, Middleton, New York; according to whom early rising is the most prolific cause of madness. "A peremptory command to get up, when one's sleep is as yet unfinished, is a command which grinds the soul, curdles the blood, swells the spleen, destroys all good intentions, and disturbs all day the mental activities, just as the tornado disturbs and levels with advancing ruin the forest of mighty pines.... The free and lazy savage gets up when he feels ready, and rarely or never becomes insane." Dr. Talcott quotes the percentage of lunacy among country people as compared with professional men. The latter, almost without exception, get up comparatively late, whereas our manual labourers all leave their beds long before they should. "The early morning hours, when everything is still, are peculiarly fitted for sleep; and it is agross violation of Nature's lawsto tear human brains out of the sound rest they enjoy at this time." A weighty utterance, no doubt: still, it is but fair to point out that among monks, who perhaps, as a class, get up earlier than any men living, the number of those whose good intentions are destroyed and mental activities disturbed, and who finally become lunatics, is really not alarmingly large.
[3] Dom Paulinus Gorwood, who had been a choirboy at Beverley Minster, and draughtsman in a great shipbuilding yard, and had studied religious art in the famous Beuron Benedictine school at Prague. He had industry as well as talent; and there were specimens of his handiwork in places as remote from one another as the Highland Catholic Church at Beauly, and the college chapel at St. Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate.
[4] This printer's feat somehow reminds me of the statement in an Edinburgh paper that a certain eminent tenor, who had had a bad fall alighting from the train, was nevertheless "able to appear that evening at the concert in several pieces." But the funniest printer's slip which I remember in connection with trains was an announcement in a Hampshire newspaper that "The Express Engine was seriously indisposed, and confined to bed." The distinguished invalid was really the Empress Eugénie!
[5] The word Glenelg is, of course, a palindrome, reading backwards and forwards alike.
[6] Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain, and Arthur Balfour were only a few among the political magnates who had enjoyed my brother-in-law's hospitality in the fine old Georgian mansion where Lord Hailes had entertained Dr. Johnson. Newhailes was, of course, a very convenient "jumping-off" place for meetings in the Scottish metropolis.
[7] About as good, perhaps, as a certain English nine-hole course over which the secretary invited (partly by way of advertising his club) a famous golfer to play. "Well, what do you think of our course?" asked the secretary with some trepidation when the game was over. "Oh well, it might be worse," was the great man's answer. "How do you mean exactly, might be worse?" "Well," said the eminent golfer, "there might be eighteen holes!"
[8] That of Alister Gordon, of the Gordon Highlanders, to a sister of Charles Edmonstoune-Cranstoun, an old pupil of mine. The bridegroom was a fine soldier, became Brigadier-General in the European War, and fell gallantly at Ypres in July, 1917.
[9] My well-informed friend told me, if I remember right, that statutes having been passed in more recent times, limiting the grant of patents to actual new inventions, scientific or otherwise, nothing so amusing as the instances he quoted were to be found in their modern records.
[10] Not more gruesome, perhaps, than an exhibition organized at Stafford House, in my young days about London, by Anne Duchess of Sutherland, ofwicker-work coffins. They were spread about the garden, where tea was likewise provided; and a dapper and smiling young man (I suppose the patentee) was in attendance to point out the advantages—sanitary, economic, and æsthetic—of his invention to the Duchess's interested guests.
[11] I could not claim the concession (I believe unique) granted to an old Captain De Moleyns, who lived—and died—close to Christ Church, and during whose last days the immemorial ringing of "Tom" was suspended. He was a man of very advanced age, and used to tell how as a little boy he was rowed across Plymouth Harbour to see Napoleon standing on the deck of theBellerophon!
I passed the closing days of the summer term of 1908 very pleasantly at Oxford, receiving many kindnesses from old friends, mingled with expressions of regret that my official connection with the university was approaching its close. I recall an interesting dinner-party at Black Hall, the Morrells' delightful old house in St. Giles's, where my neighbour was Miss Rhoda Broughton, at that time resident near Oxford. We talked, of course, of her novels; and the pleasant-faced, grey-haired lady was amused to hear that my sisters were not allowed to readCometh Up as a Flower, andRed as a Rose is She[1] (considered strong literary food in the early 'seventies), until they "came out." Mrs. Temple, the archbishop's widow, was also a fellow-guest: she had taken a house in Oxford, close to "dear Keble"; but said that the noise and uproar emanating at night from the college of "low living and high thinking" was so great that she thought she would have to move. A member of the lately-establishedFaculty, or Institute, of Forestry, who was of our party, told us some "things not generally known" about trees, which I noted down. The biggest tree known in the world was, he said, not in America (what a relief!), but the great chestnut at the foot of Mount Etna, called the Chestnut of a Hundred Horses, with a trunk over 200 ft. round, and a hole through it through which two carriages can drive abreast. The biggest orange-tree known was, said our oracle, in Terre Bonne, Louisiana: 50 ft. high, 15 ft. round at base, and yielding 10,000 oranges annually. Finally, the most valuable tree in existence was the plane-tree in Wood Street, in the City, occupying a space worth, if rented, £300 a year—a capital value of £9,000 or thereabouts. All these facts I thought curious.
Term over, I stayed for a little time with a sister in Kensington Gore, very handy for Kensington Gardens, where I sat an hour or two every morning enjoying the fresh air and verdure of that most charming of "London's lungs," and surrounded by frolicking children, including my small nephew. One of his little playfellows, a grandson of Lord Portman, suddenly disappeared from the gay scene; I inquired where he was, and was told that he had gone for a rest-cure. "Great heavens!" I said, "a child of three!—but why, and where?"—"Oh," was the reply, "Master Portman was taking too much notice of the busses and motor-cars and such-like, and wouldn't go to sleep; so he is taking a rest-cure in his nursery at the top of the house, looking over the chimney-pots!" The modern child! but then I do not of course profess to understand infants and their ways and needs.
The White City, with its Irish village, and a notable exhibition of French and English pictures, was a great attraction this summer. A kind cousin motored me thither once or twice; and I met a little later at her house some pleasant Italian cavalry officers, smart in their Eton blue uniforms, who were going to jump at the horse-show at Olympia. I went, at their urgent invitation, to see their performance, and was both interested and impressed. As an exhibition of the art of show-jumping it seemed to me unsurpassable. The horse answered the very slightest movement of the leg or body of its rider, who, as he rose to each leap, was so perfectly pivoted on the insides of his knees that his balance remained absolutely unaffected. The French competitors combined pace and dash with their excellent horsemanship; and the finest horses were certainly those ridden by the English. But the cool, quiet, scientific, deliberate riding of the Italians, trained in the finest school in the world, made all their rivals seem, somehow, a little rough and flurried and amateurish; and they gained, as they undoubtedly deserved, the chief honours of the show.
The heat in July was great; and I was so depressed, visiting the great National Rose Show in the Botanic Gardens, by the spectacle of 100,000 once lovely blossoms hopelessly wilted and shrivelled, that I fled from London to a brother's shady river-side home near Shepperton. It was reposeful under the big elms overhanging his garden, to watch the boat-laden Thames gliding past; and another pleasure which I enjoyed whilst there was a quite admirable organ-recital given at a neighbouring church—Littleton, I think it was. The kind rector showed us roundand gave us tea; and the sight of the many tattered regimental colours (Grenadier Guards and others) hanging on the church walls drew down upon him the following lines, which I sent him next day in acknowledgment of his courtesy:—
THE COLOURS
(Hung in churches: no longer [1908] taken into action.)
That rent is Talavera; that patch is Inkerman:A hundred times in a hundred climes the battle round them ran.But that is an ended chapter—they will not go to-day:Hang them above as a link of love, where the people come to pray.
*****
Perhaps when all is quiet, and the moon looks through the pane,Under that shred the splendid dead are marshalled once again,And hear the guns in the desert, and see the lines on the hill,And follow the steel of the lance, and feel that England isEngland still.
I found it very little cooler in Yorkshire than in London; but there were noble trees and welcome shade in the beautiful park of Langdon, near Northallerton, where I spent some July days, in an atmosphere a thought too equine for my taste; however, my kind hosts (the Fifes) were as fond of their flowers as of their horses, and were busy adding wildernesses and rockeries and other informal beauty-spots to the formal gardens of their new home, which they had recently bought from Lord Teignmouth. I was driven over one day to see the Hospital of St. John of God at Scorton, where a hundred inmates, all crippled or disabled, were tended with admirable care and devotion by a religious brotherhood. A local clergyman, I remember, dined with us that evening at Langdon—a man whose mission, or hobby, seemed to be to collect and retail such odd and out-of-the-way facts as one finds in thestatistical column ofTit-Bits. In the course of the evening he informed us (1) that a pound of thread spun by a silkworm will make a thread 600 miles long; (2) that there are in the skin of the average man 2,304,000 pores; and (3) that about 30,000 snails are eaten every day in the city of Paris. What one feels about such facts, dumped down on one promiscuously, is that they do not lead anywhere, or afford any kind of opening for rational conversation.
I had rather hoped to escape the burden of my Oxford Local Examination work this summer; but as it was apparently difficult to replace me, I went up to Dumfries for my usual week in July. Our Convent-school being the only centre in the district for these examinations, there were, as usual, several candidates from outside. Among them were two pairs of Protestant sisters (Wedderburn-Maxwells and Goldie-Scotts), whose mamma and governess respectively sat all day in the corridor outside the big schoolroom, keeping watch and ward, it was understood, against the danger of their children being "got at" between the papers by the nuns—or possibly the Benedictine examiner!—and influenced in the direction of Popery. Our children were much amused by the way in which these little girls were whisked away, during the intervals, from any possible contact with their "Roman" fellow-candidates; but the little girls themselves looked somewhat disconsolate, having perhaps had pleasant anticipations of games, between examination-hours, in the well-equipped playground of the school.
The kind abbot of Fort Augustus would not let me return to the monastery, as I had expected to do when my Dumfries work was over, butsuggested instead some further rest (for I was still far from robust) with my own people in the west of Scotland. I spent a few pleasant days first at Mountstuart, and was rather amused on the first of August (the end of the "close season" for small birds) to see my young host sally forth—a sailor, an architect, and an artist in his wake—on a shooting-expedition, with as much ceremony and preparation as if it had been the Twelfth![2] We motored out after them, and lunched on one of the highest points of the island; drinking in, as we ate our Irish stew, an entrancing prospect of the blue Firth, the long sinuous Ayrshire coast, and the lofty serrated peaks of Arran. From Bute I went on to Dunskey, a place full to me always—even under its new, altered, and improved conditions—of a hundred happy memories. There was anal frescoentertainment—tea, music, and dancing on the lawn—given by my niece to the tenants and their families one afternoon; and I (mindful of old days) was happy to watch her and her boy, the little heir, welcoming their guests. Some of their names, Thorburns, Withers and MacWilliams, recalled the past; and they greeted me with the friendly simple cordiality characteristic of Galloway folk. One of our house-party had just arrived (by yacht) from the Isle of Man, where he had been staying for some weeks. He had stories of the quaint customs of the Men of Man, and wrote down for me the oath administered in their courts.The closing simile is delightfully unconventional:—