IV
Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Teixeira, discovered later—to the subject’s delight—in the waiting-room of an eminent gynaecologist, emphasizes the most strongly marked natural and acquired characteristics of his appearance: a big nose and a liking for the fantastic in dress. There is hardly space, in the drawing, even for the tiny hat of the music-hall comedian, so devastating is the sweep of that nose, outward from the lips, up and round, annihilating forehead and cranium until it merges in the nape of the neck. Of the dress no more need be said than that it looks like a valiant attempt to live up to the nose.
As this caricature has not been published in any collection of Max Beerbohm’s drawings, it was probably unknown to most of those who were brought into the Intelligence Section of the War Trade Intelligence Department, there to be introduced to its head, to receive the handshake and bow of a courtier and towonder how Tenniel could have drawn the old sheep inAlice Through the Looking-Glasswithout Teixeira as a model. Tall and broad-shouldered, with thick black hair and a white face, tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, and a cigarette in a holder, taciturn, impassive and unsmiling, Teixeira never failed to conceal that he was more shy than his visitor. With articulation as beautifully clear as his writing and in words not less exquisitely chosen than the language of his books, he would introduce the newcomer to those with whom he was to work. Messengers would be despatched to bring an additional chair and table. In the resultant confusion, the immense, silent figure would walk away with a heavy tread, to find that a pile of papers, two feet high, had risen like an Indian mango where there had been but six inches a moment before. A voice of authority, rolling its r’s like the rumble of distant artillery, would telephone for more messengers; in time the pile would dwindle until the spectacles and then the nose and then the cigarette-holder were visible. In time, too, the newcomer recoveredfrom his fright and set about learning the business of the department.
It was a pleasant surprise to hear “this Olympian creature”, as Stevenson called Prince Florizel, addressed by Sutro as “Tex”; and, although the first terror was disabling, even the newcomer realized that every one in the section seemed happy. The Olympian creature never lost his temper, he condescended to jokes and invented nicknames; the appalling gravity was found to be a mask for shyness and a disguise for bubbling absurdity.
In the summer of 1915 the machinery of the blockade was still making. The department, overworked and understaffed, was inadequately housed in a corner of Central Buildings, Westminster. In the autumn it moved to Broadway House, in Tothill Street; and one newcomer was invited to sit at Teixeira’s table as deputy-head of the section. Thenceforth, until the armistice, we worked together daily, save when one or other was on leave or ill and during the early summer of 1917 when I was sent to Washington. The office, changing almost weekly in personnel,underwent reconstruction when the blockade was modified in 1918: Teixeira became secretary to the department; I succeeded him as head of the intelligence section; and, when I left in 1919, he stayed behind to help in dismantling the old machine and in assembling a new one to supply economic information to the peace conference.
Our correspondence for the last three years of the war was restricted to the times when one of us was away. These absences grew more frequent as Teixeira exchanged one illness for another. His letters present him as a government servant rejoicing in his work, tingling with the new sense of new responsibility and, “from his circumstances having been always such, that he had scarcely any share in the real business of life”, suggesting irresistibly a comparison with Dr. Johnson at the sale of his friend Thrale’s brewery, “bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an exciseman”. So much of them, however, is taken up with departmental business that I have drawn sparingly upon them.