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[1]

THE
CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

JULY 1916.

CHAPTER XXIII.

It was the beginning of the Lent term. I had stayed up during the vacation, my College being also my home. And during that vacation a weight of loneliness descended upon me. This was wrong, since had I not very much to be thankful for? My position was a secure, and, from the university standpoint, an even brilliant one. I liked my work. It interested me. Yet, in some aspects, this university life seemed to me narrow. It pained me to see old faces depart, and new ones enter who knew naught of me. Other men halted here, but for a while, on their life’s journey, moving forward to meet the larger issues, to seek ‘fresh woods and pastures new.’ And I remained—as one, held up by accident, remains at some half-way house, seeing the stream of traffic and of wayfarers sweep for ever forward along the great crowded highroad, and pass him by.

If I had not had that break in my university course, if I had not spent those two years at Hover in a society and amid interests and occupations—pleasures, let me put it roundly—foreign to my own social sphere, Cambridge, and all Cambridge stood for, would not probably have palled upon me. But I had beheld wider horizons; beheld them, moreover, through the windows of an enchanted castle. Thus memory cast its shadow over the present, making me—it was faithless, ungrateful, I had nearly said, sinful—dissatisfied and sad.

However, being in good health, I was not too sad to eat a good dinner; and so, one fine day at the beginning of term, when the bell rang for hall, I crossed the quadrangle and went in—or went [2] rather to the door, and there stopped short. For, face to face, I met none other than Mr. Halidane, in all the glory of a freshman’s brand-new gown.

‘Ah! Mr. Brownlow,’ he exclaimed, with his blandest and most beaming smile, ‘it is indeed a gracious dispensation to meet you, sir, an old and valued friend, on my first day within these hallowed and venerable walls. I feared you might not have come up yet. Allow me to congratulate you upon your distinctions, your degree, your fellowship. With what gladness have I heard of them, have I welcomed the news of your successful progress. I trust you are duly thankful to an over-ruling providence!’

‘I trust I am,’ quoth I.

I believed the man to be a hypocrite. He had done me all the harm he could. Yet, what with my loneliness, what with my memories of that enchanted castle, I could not but be moved at this unexpected meeting with him. I choked down my disgust, my resentment for the dirty tricks he had played me, and shaking him by the hand asked what had brought him here.

‘The generosity of my pious patron,’ he answered, casting up his eyes devoutly. ‘Ah! what do I not owe—under providence—to that true ornament of his exalted station! Through his condescending liberality I am enabled to fulfil the wish long nearest my heart; and by taking, as I humbly hope in due time, Holy Orders, to enter upon a more extended sphere of Christian and national usefulness.’

I abstained from asking how he had suddenly discovered the Church of England suited his religious convictions and abilities better than the sect of the ‘Saints indeed,’ and contented myself, not without a beating heart, by enquiring after Lord Longmoor and all at Hover.

I got answers; but none that I wanted. The Earl was perfection; the Countess perfection; even for Colonel Esdaile he had three or four superlatives. The Countess, he trusted, had been lately brought to the knowledge of the truth. The Colonel only needed to be brought to it—and he was showing many hopeful signs—to be more than mortal man.—It was evidently his cue to approve highly of Hover and all dwellers therein. And when, with almost a faltering voice, I asked news of my dear boy, he broke out into fresh superlatives; from amid the rank growth of which I could only discover that Lord Hartover was a very dashing and popular young man about town, and that it served [3] Mr. Halidane’s purpose to approve—or seem to approve—of his being such.

‘The pomps and vanities of this wicked world, you know, my dear Brownlow,’—the fellow began to drop the ‘Mr.’ now—‘the pomps and vanities—but we must make allowances for youth—and those to whom little is given, you know, of them will little be required.’

‘Little given!’ thought I with a shudder, as I contrasted Halidane’s words with my own old lessons.—God grant that this fellow may not have had the opportunity of undoing all the good which I had done! I made the boy believe once that very much had been given him.—But I said nothing. Why waste words where the conversation will never go deeper than words?

So we went in to hall together; and, what was more, came out together, for it was plainly Mr. Halidane’s plan to quarter himself upon me, physically and morally—physically, in that he came up into my rooms and sat down therein, his countenance falling when he perceived that I brought out no wine.

‘You are a Nazarite still?’ he said at last, after looking uneasily several times towards door and cupboard.

‘I am, indeed,’ I replied, amused at his inability to keep his own counsel.

‘Ah—well. All the more freedom, then, for the wine of the Spirit. I trust that we shall have gracious converse together often, my dear Brownlow, and edify one another with talk of that which belongs to our souls’ health as we wander through this wilderness of tears.’

I replied by asking, I fear a little slyly, after Lord Longmoor’s book on prophecy.

‘As was to be expected—a success,’ he replied—‘a magnificent success, though I say so. Not perhaps in the number of copies sold. But what is worldly fame, and how can we expect the carnal man to favour spiritual things? Not, again, from a pecuniary point of view. But what is filthy lucre? His lordship’s philanthropy has enabled him, so to speak, to make the book a present, a free gift to the elect. No, not in such material gains as Christians will leave to the unsanctified, to a Scott or a Byron, does success lie; but in the cause of the Gospel. And, if humble I have been instrumental to that success, either in assisting his lordship’s deeper intellect, as the mouse might the lion, or in having the book properly pushed in certain Gospel quarters where I have a little [4] unworthy influence—’ (Unworthy indeed, I doubt not, thought I!)—‘why, then—have I not my reward—I say, have I not my reward?’

I thought he certainly had. For being aware he wrote the whole book himself, and tacked his patron’s name to it, I began to suspect shrewdly he had been franked at College as hush-money, the book being a dead failure.

And so I told the good old Master next day, who slapped his thigh and chuckled, and then scolded me for an impudent truth-speaking fellow who would come to ruin by his honesty.

I assured him that I should tell no one but him, having discovered at Hover that the wisdom of the serpent was compatible with the innocence of the dove, and that I expected to need both in my dealing with Mr. Halidane.

‘Why, I understood that he was an intimate friend of yours. He told me that your being here was one of the main reasons for his choosing this College. He entreated humbly to be allowed rooms as near you as possible. So—as he came with the highest recommendations from Lord Longmoor—we have put him just over your head!’

I groaned audibly.

‘What’s the matter? He is not given to playing skittles, or practising the fiddle at midnight, is he?’

‘Heavens, no!’

But I groaned again, at the thought of having Halidane tied to me, riding me pick-a-back as the Old Man of the Sea did Sindbad, for three years to come. In explanation I told the Master a good deal of what I knew. About Nellie, however, I still said not one word.

The Master smiled mischievously.

‘I suspect the object of his sudden conversion from sectarianism is one of my lord’s fat livings. You may see him a bishop yet, Brownlow, for a poor opinion of his own merits will never stand in the way of his promotion.—Well, I will keep my eye on this promising convert to the Church of England as by Law Established, meanwhile—and you may do the same if you like.’

I did like—the more so because I found him, again and again, drawing round to the subject of Mr. Braithwaite and of Nellie. He slipped away smoothly enough when he saw I avoided the matter, complimenting me greasily upon my delicacy and discretion. I was torn two ways—by longing to hear something of both father and daughter, and repulsion that this man should soil [5] the name of her whom I loved by so much as daring to pronounce it. But of all living creatures lovers are the most self-contradictory, fearing the thing they desire, desiring that which they fear.

At last one day, when he had invaded my rooms after hall, he said something which forced me to talk about Hover with him. He had been praising, in his fulsome fashion, Mademoiselle Fédore among the rest. She too, it appeared, was under gracious influences, aware of her soul’s danger and all but converted—the very dogs and cats of the house were qualifying for salvation, I believe, in his suddenly charitable eyes. He finished up with—‘And how nobly the poor thing behaved, too, when that villain Marsigli absconded.’

‘Marsigli absconded?’ I exclaimed, in great surprise.

‘Of course—I thought you knew⸺’

‘I know nothing of what happens at Hover now,’ I said, foolishly allowing bitterness to get the better of caution.

‘No—you don’t tell me so!—Really, very strange,’ and he eyed me sharply. ‘But the facts are simple and lamentable enough. This villain, this viper, the trusted and pampered servant—for far too much kindness had been lavished upon him by my lord and lady, as upon all—yes, all—my unworthy self included.—How refreshing, how inspiring is condescension in the great!—This pampered menial, I say—ah I what a thing is human nature when unregenerate!—as was to be expected—for what after all, my dear Brownlow, can you hope from a Papist?—disappeared one fine morning, and with him jewels and plate—plate belonging to our sainted friend and patron, in whose service the viper had fattened so long, to the amount of four thousand pounds.’

I listened in deepening interest.

‘This is serious,’ I said. ‘Has any of the property been traced and recovered?’

‘Not one brass farthing’s worth.’

‘And is there no clue?’

‘None, alas! save what Mademoiselle Fédore gave. With wonderful subtlety and instinct—Ah! that it were further quickened by divine grace!—she pieced together little incidents, little trifling indications, which enabled the police to track the miscreant as far as Liverpool. But, after that, no trace. They concluded he must have sailed for America, where he is doubtless even now wantoning, amid the licentious democracy of the West, upon the plunder of the saints.’

He buried his face in his hands and appeared to weep.

[6]

I remained silent, greatly perturbed in mind. For there flashed across me those words of Warcop’s, spoken on the morning of my departure, when I sat with him in his sanctum, dedicated to the mysteries of the stud-farm and the chase: ‘By times they—Marsigli and Mamzell—are as thick as thieves. By times they fight like cat and dog or’—with a knowing look—‘like man and wife.’ There flashed across me, too, a strange speech of Fédore’s I had overheard, as I walked along one of the innumerable dimly lighted passages at Hover, one night, on my way from the library, where I had worked late, to my own study. To whom she spoke I did not know, for a door was hastily closed immediately I passed, though not hastily enough to prevent my hearing a man’s voice answer.—‘Ah! you great stupid,’ she had said. ‘Why not what these English call feather your own nest? I have no patience with you when, if you pleased, you could so easily be rich.’—The episode made an unpleasant impression upon me at the time, but had almost faded from my mind. Now in the light of my conversation with Halidane it sprung into vivid relief.

The loss of a few thousand pounds’ worth of jewels and plate was a small matter. But that Mademoiselle Fédore should remain in the household as Marsigli’s accomplice—and that she was his accomplice I suspected gravely—perhaps to regain her power over the boy, was intolerable. As to her assisting the police by pointing out the probable route of the delinquent, what easier than to do so with a view to putting them on a false scent?

‘This is indeed ugly news,’ I said at last. ‘I wonder if the Master knows.’

‘Why not? It was reported in the papers at the time.’

‘Ah! and I was absorbed in my work and missed it. How unfortunate!’

‘Do you think you know anything, then?’ he said greedily, with sharp interest.

But the question I did not answer, perceiving he was curiously anxious to be taken into my confidence.

CHAPTER XXIV.

I sat long, till the fire in the grate burnt low and the chill of the winter night drove me shivering to my bed, revolving this conversation in my mind. If it could be proved that Mademoiselle Fédore was in league with the Italian, still more, if it could be [7] proved she and he were married, Hartover could be permanently set free from her intrigues and her influence. I did not want to be vindictive; but with every fibre of my being I wanted to free the boy. For, as I realised in those lonely midnight hours, while the wind rumbled in the chimneys and roared through the bare branches of the elms in the Fellows’ Garden just without, the boy’s redemption, the boy’s growth into the fine and splendid character he might be, could be—as I believed—even yet, was dearer to me than any advantage of my own.

Had I not promised, moreover, to stand by him and help him to the end? Could I then, in honour, sit with folded hands, when the chance, however remote, of helping him presented itself? I had always feared Mademoiselle Fédore had not relinquished her designs on the boy, but merely bided her time. For a while my presence frustrated those designs; as, in even greater degree, did his passion for Nellie Braithwaite. But marriage with Nellie forbidden, and he surrounded, as he must be, by the flatteries lavished on, and snares set for, a rich and popular young nobleman in London, was it not too probable that in hours of idleness or reaction from dissipation she might gain an ascendency over him once more? Not only self-interest was involved. He being what he was, might she not only too easily fall genuinely in love with him? I would give her the benefit of the doubt, anyhow. Upon the exact nature of that love, whether of the higher, or the baser and animal sort, I did not choose to dwell. The difference in age, too, struck me now—more versed as I had grown in the ways of the world and of human nature—as no bar to inclination on his part. She was a clever woman and a beautiful one, of a voluptuous though somewhat hard type—to the Empress Theodora I had often compared her in my own mind. Further, as Warcop said to me long ago, did not ‘the she-kite know her business?’—Alas! and for certain, only too well!

So sitting there, through the lonely hours, the idea grew on me that the boy was actually in very grave peril; and that—neglect and silence notwithstanding—in his innermost heart he clung to me, and to the lessons of duty and noble living which I had taught him, still. This idea might, as I told myself, be a mere refinement of personal vanity and egoism. Yet I could not put it aside. If he called, even unconsciously, and I failed to answer, a sin of omission and a heavy one would assuredly lie at my door.

Finally I decided to seek counsel of my kind old friend the Master. The opportunity of doing so presented itself next day. [8] For the Master had bidden me to a dinner party at the Lodge, given in honour of his widowed sister and her daughters, who were staying with him. This flutter of petticoats in our bachelor, not to say monastic, atmosphere produced in some quarters, I had reason to fancy, a corresponding flutter of hearts. Ladies were conspicuous by their absence in the Cambridge of those days, save during the festivities of the May term; and I own to a certain feeling of mild elation as I found myself seated beside Miss Alice Dynevor, the elder of the two young ladies, at the Master’s hospitable board.

I cannot assert that she appeared to be remarkable either for good looks or cleverness; but she was fresh and young—about twenty, I judged her—modest in manner, and evidently desirous to please; full of innocent questions concerning Cambridge and Cambridge ways, concerning our famous buildings, their names and histories, which I found it pleasant enough to answer. In the drawing-room, when we rejoined the ladies after dinner, she went to the piano, at her uncle’s request, and sang some Scotch songs and some sentimental ballads then much in vogue, with no great art, I admit, but with pleasing simplicity and a tuneful voice.

The evening left me under impressions at once agreeable and not a little sad. For, from the time I returned to Cambridge, I had hardly spoken to a woman. Doing so now, memories of Mere Ban and of Nellie crowded upon me thick and fast; and, throwing me back into that fantastic inner life of unsatisfied and consuming love, threw me also into a necessity for renewed self-abnegation and self-torment. At all costs I must find means to set the dear boy free of Fédore’s influence—set him free—and for what?

I stayed after the other guests had left and asked for a little private talk with the Master; recounted the substance of my conversation with Halidane last night, and stated my own convictions and the ground of them. He had heard of Marsigli’s disappearance, but had not mentioned it to me simply because he supposed I had seen it in the newspapers. I was much vexed at the strange oversight. Had I but learned it at the time, how much might have been saved! How much truly—more a thousand times than I then imagined.—Yet how know I that? No—I will believe all the events of our lives are well ordered, so long as they do not arise from our wilful ill-doings; and will never regret, as the result of blind chance, that which is in truth the education given each one of us, for our soul’s good, by an all-merciful and all-wise Father in Heaven.

[9]

CHAPTER XXV.

I told the Master enough for him to agree it would be well I should go to town; and to town two days later I went. I had learned, by cautious questioning of Mr. Halidane, that the family was in London, as was Hartover.

So I made my way to the great house in Grosvenor Square, which was not altogether unknown to me. I had stayed there once, for a few days, with the dear boy, during the time of my tutorship; and to my delectation had made acquaintance with its many treasures in the matter of pictures, furniture, and objets d’art . Oh! the priceless possessions of these people, and the little care they had for them!

The men servants, who received me, were unknown to me, supercilious in manner and only just not insolent. I asked for my young lord. He was on guard at St. James’s. They supposed I should hear of him there. Where he lived, when not staying here, they did not know.—Odd, I thought; but the ways of great folks were odd sometimes!

I took a coach and drove to the Palace. My longing to see the boy again was very strong; yet I felt anxious. Would he be greatly changed? Would he be glad or would he think my coming a bore? Above all, how would he take my interference? A sense of the extreme delicacy of my mission increased on me, making me nervous and diffident.

An orderly ushered me into a room where half a dozen dandies were lounging. These stared at me sufficiently, and thought me, evidently, a dun. One beardless youth, indeed, after brushing past me, turning his back to me, and otherwise bristling up like a dog at a strange dog, expressed his opinion aloud.

‘MacArthur!’ to the orderly. ‘Are you not aware that this is a private room?’

‘I am sorry,’ I said instantly, for their impertinence restored my self-confidence, ‘if I am intruding. I simply asked for Lord Hartover, and was, as simply, shown in here.’

I thought the lad might have known me for a gentleman by my voice; but possibly his experience in life had not extended so far, for he answered:

‘Lord Hartover, I imagine, pays his bills at his own house.’

I did redden, I confess, being still young and sensitive; but, [10] after staring at him as full as he stared at me, I answered, bowing:

‘I am afraid I am not so useful a person as a tradesman. I am only a Cambridge scholar, formerly Lord Hartover’s tutor, who wishes to see him upon urgent private business.’

‘I—I really beg your pardon. Pray sit down, sir,’ quoth the sucking hero, evidently abashed, handing me a chair.

But at that moment a pair of broad shoulders, which had been bent over a card-table at the farther end of the room, turned about with:

‘Hey? Why, Brownlow, by all that’s— Odd trick, Ponsonby—wait one moment.—How are you, my dear fellow? And what on earth brings you here among us warriors?’

And the mighty Rusher rose, like Saul the son of Kish a head and shoulders above his fellows. At first I believe he was really pleased to see me. His handsome face was genial, a light of good-natured and kindly amusement in his eye.

‘Well, how are you?’ he repeated. ‘Do you remember Brocklesby Whins and the brown horse? Come up this winter and you shall ride him again; by Jove, you shall—and take the rascally little grey fox home with you. I’ve got him stuffed and ready, as I promised I would; and wondered why you’d not claimed your property before.’

I was beginning to speak, but he ran on:

‘Brother officers, let me introduce you to my friend Mr. Brownlow, as fine a light-weight across country as you need wish to know, and who saved my pack from destruction at the risk of his own life,—a long and prosperous one may it be!’

‘My hunting days are over, I fear,’ I said, as the men of war stared all the more at the lame young don, black-coated, black-breeched and black-stockinged—thinking, I doubt not, I was a ‘rum ’un to look at’ even if a ‘good ’un to go.’

‘But I beg of you to tell me where I can find Lord Hartover; or, if I cannot see him, to let me have a few words with you.’

‘Where is Faublas—anyone know?’ the Colonel asked of the company in general, and so doing I fancied his geniality waned a little and a trace of uneasiness came into his manner. As for me, my heart sank as I heard that name, of all others, used as my poor boy’s sobriquet.

‘Gone down to Chelsea, I believe,’ said the youth who had first spoken to me, hardly repressing a smile. ‘He announced he should dine to-night with the fair unknown.’

[11]

‘I question whether he will be at home even to you, then, Brownlow,’ the Colonel declared, forcing a laugh.

‘In that case I am afraid I must ask for a few minutes’ conversation alone with you.’

We went out into the Park; and there, pacing up and down under the leafless trees, I told all I thought fit. I watched his face as I did so. It was unusually serious.

‘I think, my dear fellow,’ he said at last, ‘you had very much better leave this matter alone.’

I asked why. He fenced with me, pointing out that I had nothing more than suspicion to go upon—no real evidence, circumstantial or otherwise. I urged on him the plain fact that the matter could not be let alone. A great felony had been committed; and it was an offence, not only against honour and right, but against law, to withhold such information as I could give.

‘You will repent it,’ he said.

Again I asked why.

‘I beg you to take my word for it, there are reasons,’ he said earnestly. ‘Be advised, my dear Brownlow. Let sleeping dogs lie.’

I was puzzled—how could I help being so? But, more and more, I began to fear the connection between Fédore and Hartover had been resumed.

‘And where is Mademoiselle Fédore now?’ I said presently.

‘’Pon honour, I am not responsible for the whereabouts of gay damsels.’

‘Then she is no longer with lady Longmoor?’

‘No, no—has left her these two months—may be in St. Petersburg by now, or in Timbuctoo, for aught I know.’

‘The police could find her there as well as here.’

His tone changed, becoming as sarcastic as his easy good-nature and not very extensive vocabulary permitted.

‘And so you would really hunt that poor girl to the gallows? Shut her up in gaol—eh? I thought you preached mercy, went in for motives of Christian charity, and so forth. We live and learn—well, well.’

He took another turn, nervously, while I grew increasingly puzzled. Was it possible Fédore might be connected with him, and not with Hartover? If so, what more natural and excusable than his reluctance to satisfy me? That thought softened me.

‘I will do nothing further,’ I said, ‘without consulting his lordship.’

[12]

‘His lordship?’ He shrugged his shoulders, laughing contemptuously.

‘Her ladyship, then.’

He paused a moment.

‘Yes,’ he said; ‘you’re right.’ A new light seemed to break on him. ‘Yes,’ he repeated; ‘we’ll go at once on the chance of finding her at home. It is only seven now. Let’s call a coach.’

So back we drove to Grosvenor Square, both in deep thought. Arrived at the house, he took me into a small room, off the hall, and kept me waiting there for the best part of an hour. I began to wonder, indeed, if he had forgotten me altogether, and whether I had not best ring and make some enquiry of the servants.

The room was dimly lit with wax candles, set in sconces high on the silk-panelled wall; yet not so dimly but that, when the Colonel at last returned, I could see he looked pale and agitated, while his hands and lips trembled as he spoke. And my mind carried back to the day of the meet at Vendale Green, when her ladyship—Queen of Beauty that she was—stepped down from her pony-chaise, and stood on the damp turf beside his great bay horse, talking to him; and how, straightening himself up with a jerk, his face grey and aged as that of a man smitten with sudden illness, he answered her: ‘Impossible, utterly impossible’; and how she, turning, with a light laugh, got into the pony-chaise again, waving her hand to him and wishing him good fortune.

‘Yes—you are to go,’ he said to me hurriedly. ‘See Hartover at once. His address is number ⸺ Church Lane, Chelsea. You’ll remember?’

‘I shall.’

‘Remember, too, I am no party to this proceeding of yours. I warned you against it. Whatever happens you will have brought on yourself.’

‘Very good. I am perfectly ready to accept the responsibility of my own actions.’

‘And I say—see here, Brownlow. You won’t tell Hartover I gave you his address.’

‘Of course not, if you desire it. I can decline to say where I learnt it.’

‘He’ll find out, though, through the other officers,’ he muttered, as we crossed the hall and he saw me into the still waiting coach. ‘It’s an accursed business, and we shall come ill out of it. I know we shall; but a woman must have her way.’

[13]

‘For Heaven’s sake,’ I cried, ‘remember you are not alone.’

He looked fiercely at me, as one who should say, ‘What have I betrayed?’ Then added with a sneer:

‘Brownlow, I wish to God we’d never seen you. You’re a devilish deal too honest a fellow to have got among us.’

With which cryptic words he went back into the great house, leaving me to drive down to Chelsea, and to my thoughts. What they were I hardly knew myself. Sufficient that I was most miserable and full of questioning dread.

We passed, as it seemed, through endless streets, until we reached the then lonely King’s Road; drove along it, turned to the left down Church Lane, and drew up at a door in a high wall apparently enclosing a garden. I got out of the coach and rang the bell. A moment after I heard a woman’s quick tripping footsteps within. The door was flung wide open, disclosing a covered way leading to a pretty hall, gay with coloured curtains and carpets, and a voice cried:

‘Ah! c’est toi enfin, mon bien aimé. A-t-il perdu le clef encore une fois, le petit étourdi?’

The speaker and I recoiled apart. For, immediately before me, under the passage lamp, was Fédore.

Superbly lovely, certainly, if art can create loveliness, with delicately tinted cheeks and whitened skin; her raven hair arranged, according to the prevailing mode, so as to add as much as possible to her height. Dressed, or rather undressed—for women then wore only little above the waist—in richest orange and crimson; her bare arms and bosom sparkling with jewels—none brighter, though, than these bold and brilliant eyes—there she stood, more like her namesake Empress Theodora than ever, and flashed lightnings into my face—disappointment, rage, scorn, but no trace of fear.

‘And what, pray, does Monsieur Brownlow wish at such an hour of the night?’

‘Nothing, Mademoiselle,’ I answered gravely and humbly. ‘I came to see Lord Hartover, and he is not, I perceive, at home.’

Was she going to shut the door on me? Nothing less. Whether from sheer shamelessness, or whether—as I have often fancied since—she read my errand in my face, she composed herself in an instant, becoming amiable and gracious.

‘Could not Monsieur come in and wait? Would he not stay and sup with us?’

[14]

I bowed courteously. She was so superb, so daringly mistress of herself, I could do no less; and said I should be shocked at interrupting such a tête-à-tête . I apologised for having brought her to the door on so cold a night; and, raising my hat, departed, having, at least, taken care to tell her nothing.

Why should I not depart? Had I not seen enough, and more than enough? The Rusher was right so far—for who was I to interfere? What had I to offer Hartover as against that gorgeous and voluptuous figure? If my suspicions could be proved, and I succeeded in parting him from her, would he not go to someone else? And who was I, after all, to judge her, to say hard words to her? If she were dazzled by him, what wonder? If he by her, what wonder either?—Ah! that they had let him marry Nellie, boy though he was, two years ago! But such is not the way of the world; and the way of the world, it seemed, he was doomed to go.—Oh! weary life, wherein all effort for good seemed but as filling the sieve of the Danaides. Oh! weary work for clean living and righteousness, which seemed as a rolling of Sisyphus’ stone for ever up the hill, to see it roll down again. What profit has a man of all his labour? That which has been shall again be, and there is no new thing under the sun.

I went back to Cambridge unhappy, all but cynical and despairing, and settled down to my routine of work again, and to the tender attentions of Mr. Halidane, to whom however I told no word about my fruitless expedition to London. And so sad was I, and in such a state of chronic irritation did Halidane keep me, that I verily believe I should have fallen ill, had not the fresh evil been compensated for by a fresh good—and that good taken the form of renewed intercourse with Mr. Braithwaite.

CHAPTER XXVI.

It fell out on this wise. In the hope of lightening the weight of depression under which I laboured, I took to riding again so many afternoons a week—an indulgence which I could now afford. True, a hack from a livery stable was but a sorry exchange for the horses upon which Warcop had been wont to mount me; but if love of horse-flesh takes you that way—and take me that way it did—the veriest crock is better to bestride than nought.

The day was fine, with sunshine and white fleets of blithely [15] sailing cloud. Hedges and trees thickened with bud, and the rooks were nesting. I had made a long round by Madingley and Trumpington, and was walking my horse back slowly over the cobbles of King’s Parade—admiring, as how many times before, the matchless Chapel, springing from the greensward, its slender towers, pinnacles and lace-work of open parapet rising against spaces of mild blue sky—when, amid groups upon the pavement wearing cap and gown, or less ceremonial boating and football gear, a tall heavily built figure, clothed in a coat with bulging skirt-pockets to it, breeches and gaiters of pepper-and-salt-mixture, attracted my eye. The man halted now and again to stare at the fine buildings; and at last, crossing where the side street runs from King’s Parade to the Market Place, turned into the big bookseller’s at the corner.

I thought I could hardly be mistaken as to his identity; and, calling a down-at-heels idler to hold my horse, I dismounted and followed him into the shop. If I had made a mistake, it would be easy to ask for some book or pamphlet and so cover my discomfiture.

But I had made no mistake. Though older and greyer, his strong intellectual face more deeply lined by thought, and, as I feared, by care, Braithwaite himself confronted me.

‘Thou hast found me, O mine enemy,’ he exclaimed, while the clasp of his hand gave the lie to this doubtful form of greeting. ‘And, to tell the truth, I hoped you might do so; though I was in two minds about seeking you out and calling on you myself.’

I returned the clasp of his hand; but, for the moment, my heart was almost too full for speech.

‘Enemy, neither now nor at any time in our acquaintance,’ I faltered.

‘I know, I know,’ he answered. ‘But until you were your own master, and had finally cut adrift from certain high folks in high places, I reckoned we were best apart.’

‘And you were right. Now, for good or evil, all that is over and done with’—and truly and honestly I believed what I said.

‘So much the better,’ he replied heartily. ‘Then we can start our friendship afresh—that is, of course, if an ornament of this ancient seat of learning, a full-fledged don like yourself, is not too fine and fastidious a person to associate with a plain middle-class man such as me.’

I bade him not be foolish—he had a better opinion of me, [16] I hoped, than that—asked what of ‘the pride which apes humility,’ and so forth; and all the while questions about Nellie, her health, her well-being, her present whereabouts, scorched my tongue. I invited him to my rooms—which I think pleased him—so that we might talk more at our ease; but he told me he had the better part of a twenty-mile drive before him, back to Westrea, a farm which he had lately bought on the Suffolk border. We therefore agreed that, when I had sent my horse back to the stable, I should join him at the inn, just off the Market Place, where his gig was put up.

And in the dingy inn parlour, some quarter of an hour later, I at last found courage and voice to enquire for Nellie. His face clouded, I thought.

‘In answering you frankly, I give you the strongest proof of friendship which I can give,’ he said.

I thanked him.

‘It went hard with her at first, poor lass,’ he continued, ‘brave and dutiful though she is. And that’s what has brought me further south. I judged it best to get her right away from the Yorkshire country and sound of Yorkshire speech. So I threw up my tenancy of the place I had taken on leaving Mere Ban. I may tell you I came into some little money through the death of a relative, last year, which enabled me to buy this Westrea farm. I took Nellie with me to view it, and the house caught her fancy. ’Tis a pretty old red-brick place, and my gift to her. I want her to make a home of it, and interest herself in the development of the property—about nine hundred acres in all. She has an excellent head for business; and, in my opinion, there’s no better medicine than keeping hands and brain occupied in such a case as hers.’

He broke off abruptly, as though unwilling to pursue the subject further, adding:

‘But there, come and see for yourself what our new quarters are like, Brownlow. No purple wind-swept fells piled up to high heaven behind it, truly; still, a pleasant enough spot in its way, and fine corn-land too. I can offer you a comfortable bed and a good plain dinner; and a horse you needn’t be ashamed to ride, notwithstanding your free run of his Lordship’s stud at Hover. Come during the vacation. Easter falls late this year; and the orchard trees should be in blossom, supposing we get a fine spring, as I believe we shall. It’ll do you no harm to drop your classics and mathematics, part company with your scandalous old heathen [17] poets and divinities and take the living world of to-day by the hand for forty-eight hours or so. I’ll be bound your radicalism has deteriorated in this academic dry-as-dust atmosphere too, and will be none the worse for a little wholesome rubbing up.’

So to Westrea I promised to go, his invitation having been given so spontaneously and kindly. A dangerous experiment perhaps, but the temptation was too strong for me. At last I should see Nellie again, and learn how matters really stood with her. That thought threw me into a fever of excitement.

To go in to hall, with the chance of meeting Halidane and having the fellow saddle his unctuous, not to say oily, presence upon me for the rest of the evening, was intolerable. So, after starting Braithwaite upon his homeward journey, I got a scratch meal at the inn, and then made my way to The Backs across bridge, and wandered in the softly deepening twilight under the trees beside the river. I tried—but alas how vainly!—to calm my excitement, and school myself into rejection alike of the wild hopes and dark forebodings which assailed me. I lost count of time, and wandered thus until the lamps were lit and the moonlight touched the stately masses of college buildings, rising pale from their lawns and gardens, on the other side of the placid slow-flowing stream. Hence it was comparatively late when, at length, I climbed the creaking, foot-worn oaken stairs leading to my rooms.

Immediately on entering I saw that a letter lay upon the table. It was in Hartover’s handwriting. Trembling, I tore it open.

Why should he write to me after so long a silence? Had he heard of my visit to St. James’s Palace? Of my visit to Church Lane? About Fédore surely it must be; and when I began to read I found that so indeed it was.

My head fairly spun round. Faint and dizzy, I sank into the nearest chair, and read on with staring eyes.

Was that a reproach, and a merited one? Whether or not, it cut me to the quick.

Should I not? The woman had greater faith in my leniency—or stupidity, which?—than I myself had. No harshness was too [19] great, surely, in face of the wrong she had done the boy by marrying him. Yet two things were true. For that she loved him—according to her own conception of love—I did not doubt; and that she had rescued him from the demon of drink—for the time being—I did not doubt either. And this last—let me try to be just—this last must be counted to her, in some degree at all events, for righteousness whatever her ulterior object in so rescuing him might have been.

But admitting that much, I had admitted all that was possible in her favour. She had hunted the boy, trapped him, pinned him down, making his extremity her own opportunity; cleverly laying him under an obligation, moreover, which could not but evoke all his native sensibility and chivalry.

The more I thought of it, the more disastrous, the more abominable did the position appear. So much so that, going back to his letter, I read it over and over to see if I could make it belie itself and find any loop-hole of escape. But what was written was written. In Hartover’s belief he had made Fédore, and done right in making her, his wife.

And there were those, then, who would gladly compass his death! The last scene with Colonel Esdaile flashed across me; and other scenes, words, gestures, both of his and of her ladyship’s. Was the boy really and actually the victim of some shameful conspiracy? Only one life stood between the Colonel and the title, the great estates, the great wealth. Was her ladyship playing some desperate game to secure these for him and—for herself, and for her children as his wife? She was still young enough to bear children.—In this ugly coil that cardinal point must never be forgotten. But how could Fédore’s marrying Hartover forward this? Had the woman been set on as her ladyship’s tool, and then betrayed her employer and intrigued on her own account?

Good Heavens! and Nellie was free now. At that thought I sprang up; but only to sink back into my chair again, broken by the vast perplexity, the vast complexity, of it all. Free? Did I not know better than that? Had not her father’s tone, her father’s words in speaking of her, told me her heart was very far from free? Should I so fall from grace as to trade on her despair, and tempt her to engage herself to me while she still loved Hartover? Would not that be to follow Fédore’s example—almost; and take a leaf out of her very questionably virtuous or high-minded book? Besides, how did I know Nellie would ever be [20] willing to engage herself to me? Vain dream—for, after all, what did the whole thing amount to?—Hartover was not of age. His marriage was null—if he so chose. He could find means to dissolve it himself, surely, when he found out Fédore, and saw her in her true colours.—And he should see. My temper rose. I would expose her. I would appeal to Lord ⸺. I would move heaven and earth till I could prove her complicity in Marsigli’s felony—and her connection with him, her real marriage. I would⸺

But alas! what could I do, with so many persons—powerful, rich, unscrupulous—arrayed against me?—Hartover himself, more than likely, protecting, in a spirit of chivalry, the woman who had nursed and befriended him, and to whom—as he believed—he had given his name in wedlock. I, on the other hand, armed but with light and broken threads of suspicion and of theory. For so far, as the Colonel had reminded me, I possessed no actual evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, against her.

No; it was impossible to break the web in which she and others—to their shame—had entangled him. I would put the whole deplorable business from me, and go quietly to Westrea for the Easter vacation. And Nellie?—I would never tell her. If she hoped still, I would never undeceive her. The dark cloud might blow over, the foul bubble burst—and then!—Meanwhile I would be to her as a brother. I would help her, strengthen her; in a sense, educate her. For what? For whom?—God knew⸺

But, just there, I was startled out of my painful reverie by shouts, confused tumult in the usually silent court below, and rush of feet upon the stair.

( To be continued. )

I.

A child who was, I suppose, once myself sat on the stairs in an old house at Twickenham with a thrill of respectful adventure looking up at the carved oaken figure of a Bishop with benedictory hands standing in a niche in the panelled wall. The house was Chapel House in Montpelier Row, inhabited in those days by a Captain Alexander who had fought in the Peninsular War, and who christened his children by the names of the battles, and my sister and I were spending the summer there while my father was in Germany. We enjoyed the old house and garden, and the youthful companionship of Vittoria Alexander, my contemporary. When I read the address on some letters which have been lately shown me by the present Lord Tennyson, one of those wonderful mental cinemas we all carry in our minds flashed me back to the panelled rooms and the dark hall and the oak staircase and the benedictory Bishop. Among those who passed before him treading the broad steps after the Alexanders had left, came the Poet Laureate and his wife, who lived for a time at Chapel House, where their son Hallam was born. But Tennyson wished to live in the country, and they did not stay very long at Twickenham. An early letter written from thence, introduces a whole party of friends living in those days of peace. It is dated June 25, 1852, and was despatched by Mrs. Tennyson to Mrs. Cameron, her neighbour at Sheen.

This was but the beginning of the long life’s friendship and confidence between the two friends. As one reads on through letter after letter it almost seems as if the writers were actually present.

They were ladies something in looks like those familiar paintings by Watts or by some of the old Italian masters he loved. Watts has painted Mrs. Tennyson more than once and recorded her beautiful spiritual aspect and delicate features, and he has also painted her correspondent Mrs. Cameron, a woman of a noble plainness, carrying herself with dignity and expression, and well able to set off the laces and Indian shawls she wore so carelessly. Mrs. Tennyson was more daintily attired: she wore a quaint little gimp high to her throat; her dresses were of violet and grey and plum colour; a white net coif fell over her brown hair. Her hair never turned grey; she remained to us all, a presence sweet and unchanged in that special and peaceful home shrine to which no votary ever came more warmly true and responsive than Julia Cameron, her neighbour in the Island for so many years. Mrs. Cameron was one of the well-known family of Pattle sisters, beautiful and gifted women who were able to illustrate their own theories. They were unconscious artists with unconventional rules for life which excellently suited themselves.

My own first meeting with Mrs. Cameron was not very long after that youthful stay in Chapel House, one summer’s day when my father took my sister and myself to Sheen to see his old friend. I remember her, a strange apparition in a flowing red velvet dress although it was summer time, cordially welcoming us to a fine house and to some belated meal, where the attendant butler was addressed by her as ‘Man’ and was ordered to do many things for our benefit; to bring back luncheon-dishes and curries for which she and her family had a speciality. When we left she came with us bareheaded, with trailing draperies, part of the way to the station as her kind habit was. A friend of mine told me how on one occasion she accompanied her in the same way, carrying a cup of tea which she stirred as she walked along. My father, who had known her first as a girl in Paris, laughed and said [23] ‘She is quite unchanged,’ and unchanged she remained to the end of her days; generous, unconventional, a more loyal friend never lived.

Alfred Tennyson, writing to his wife in 1855, says ‘I dined with Mrs. Cameron last night, she is more wonderful than ever in her wild beaming benevolence.’

There are several mentions of this most interesting, most emphatic lady in Sir Henry Taylor’s ‘Autobiography.’ Sir Henry, who was her chosen ideal among many, says:

It is very difficult to describe Mrs. Cameron. She played the game of life with such vivid courage and disregard for ordinary rules, she entered into other people’s interests with such warmhearted sympathy and determined devotion, that, though her subjects may have occasionally rebelled, they generally ended by gratefully succumbing to her rule, laughing and protesting all the time.

Sir Henry quotes her saying to someone with whom she had disagreed: ‘before the year is out you will love me as a sister,’ and he adds that she proved the truth of this prophecy. She must have been a trying sister at times, especially when her relations and adopted relations were ill. She longed to cure them on the spot; she would fly in an agony from one great doctor to another, demanding advice and insisting on instant prescription and alleviation. ‘Culpable carelessness, profound ignorance,’ were the least of her criticisms of family physicians whom she had not sent in herself. She would eloquently describe the anxious hours she spent in waiting-rooms, obtaining opinions from great authorities who had not even seen the patient. Sir Henry’s stepmother (Mrs. Cameron had barely known her) says:

[24]

II.

The real neighbours in life do not depend on vicinity only, they have a way of continuing to be neighbours quite irrespective of their different addresses. The Tennysons had ever a very faithful following of old friends wherever they happened to be, none more faithful than Julia Cameron.

As I have said the first letter quoted from Twickenham was followed by a life-long correspondence. Mrs. Tennyson had hurt her wrist in early youth and writing was often difficult to her; though until her son grew up almost the whole of her husband’s correspondence depended upon her.

Mrs. Cameron on the contrary loved her pen. She wrote a large and flowing hand. She allowed herself more space in life and on paper than is usually accorded to other people. I remember her offering to write for my father. ‘Nobody writes as well as I do’ she said.

It was in 1854 that the Tennysons first settled at Farringford. Those must have been happy days for Mrs. Tennyson, though the trial of delicate health was always there. She sends to her friend, describing the sights to be seen from her drawing-room windows:

Again:

Of her two boys she writes:

We get a pretty glimpse of Alfred one Christmas time putting on little Hallam’s coatee, a present from Mrs. Cameron, needless to say.

Another Christmas brings more acknowledgments for other gifts, and also friendly reproaches. ‘The only drawback is the old complaint that you will rain down precious things upon us, not drop by drop, but in whole Golconda mines at once.’ Mrs. Cameron pays little attention to such warnings, for the next letter from Mrs. Tennyson begins with thanks again. ‘Why will you send us these beautiful things which are so beautiful?’

Mrs. Tennyson was afraid of wounding her friend; she tried reprisals perhaps, which we may guess at as we read Mrs. Cameron’s own reproaches and eulogies combined in a letter concerning an Easter gift:

Her name for Jowett was ‘little Benjamin their ruler.’ Her picture of him in her gallery will be remembered.

Mrs. Cameron the Martha friend loved to work for the Mary friend. We read of a hat with a long feather and broad blue ribbons to be ordered in London—then messages and details about furniture from the mistress of Farringford.

Then she goes on to give news of her home, of the bay-window being added to the study, ‘that dear little room hallowed by so many associations which should scarcely be touched even in improvement.’

One letter dated January 1, 1855, might have been written word for word to-day.

Mrs. Tennyson envies someone who has sent out a shipload of help.

[27]

III.

Mrs. Cameron sometimes writes to Tennyson as well as to his wife. Here is a quotation from a long letter written in 1855.

(After this digression the writer returns to Mrs. Hambro.)

[28]

The letter also goes on to describe at length each of the ten members of the Guest family and many more visitors and relations, and is too long to quote in its entirety; but I cannot omit the description of:

This was the year in which ‘Maud’ was published.

Poets always feel criticism, and the reviews of the poem stung Tennyson cruelly, with their misunderstanding of his personal attitude towards war.

[29]

Mrs. Cameron’s daughter Julia was engaged to Charles Norman in 1858.

In 1859 the Camerons were still on Putney Heath, but Mr. Cameron was preparing to visit his estates in Ceylon, of which disquieting news had reached him.

‘Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flower could ever seem,’ so Mrs. Cameron used to exclaim pathetically, and she wrote to her friend:

Mr. Cameron was seized with illness about this time.

Here is Mrs. Cameron’s menu when the invalid, her husband, was recovering. What would nurses of to-day say to it?

[30]

Notwithstanding home comforts and his wife’s remonstrance, the invalid started with one of his sons while she remained with the younger children. To add to her troubles Sir Henry Taylor was also very ill at this time and suffering terribly from the complications of asthma.

Mrs. Cameron says:

Julia Cameron’s chief comfort seems to have come from her correspondence with Mrs. Tennyson.

This was an eventful year for the Camerons. The first grandchild, their daughter’s child, was born.

Already in 1859, not burglars on the lawn such as those Horace Walpole describes, but Cockneys were beginning to wander across the Farringford grounds. We read of two who are sitting on one of the gates in the garden, watching Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson under the cedars. Alfred is actually speaking of moving, so averse is he to these incursions. Later on he went for a change to Staffa and Iona. Mrs. Tennyson stayed at home with her young children, urging him to prolong his tour.

Her nerves were not able to bear much strain nor the fatigue of journeys—we read of great surges of pain when she tries to write, of sleepless nights and weakness. Hospitable as she was by nature and by a sense of duty also, the entertaining of guests was very tiring at times.

We hear of many visitors, familiar names—Lushingtons, Frank Palgrave, Simeons, Edward Lear (who called his house at San Remo Villa Emily after the most ideal woman he had ever known), Woolner the sculptor, who stays for some time, and we read of the portraits he was taking of his hosts.

She goes on to say:

Among her guests Mrs. Tennyson specially enjoyed Jowett’s visits. She says:

One year there is a mention of a very important personage departing from Farringford to London—‘“Tithonus,” the companion poem of “Ulysses,” going to-day to Thackeray for the Cornhill .’

There had been a plan for buying a house at Freshwater for the Camerons, and the Tennysons are helping in the negotiation for securing the land before Mr. Cameron’s return. Lawyers, business agents, purchases, furnishings take up much of the correspondence. Some people look upon business as a bore, Mrs. Cameron took it as the battle of life.

Then Mrs. Cameron writes:

Then she continues:

[32]

It is a pretty account of Mrs. Cameron going to meet the postman through the pouring rain to get news of her husband: ‘It was as if heaven’s blessing descended on me when I read of his well-being.’

She adds:

IV.

The Prince Consort came to see the Tennysons when they first arrived at Farringford, and found them in confusion, the departing occupant being still there with some of his furniture.

There is a letter from Mrs. Tennyson to Matilda Tennyson written in the spring of 1862 after the Prince’s death, in which we read:

Then again:

When the dedication of the ‘Idylls’ came out the Princess Royal wrote:

The following letter was written by Mrs. Tennyson to [33] Tennyson’s mother, describing the first visit from Farringford to the widowed Queen.

There is a sentence concerning another ruler then living whose reign is not over.

One quaint story is connected with the meeting of Garibaldi and Mrs. Cameron. She longed to add a portrait of the Liberator to those she had already taken of the other great men of the time. Hearing that he was to come again to the Island she begged the Tennysons to invite him to sit to her. Mrs. Tennyson wrote in reply that he was only coming for a few hours. The Seelys were driving him over, and that during his brief visit to Farringford he could not be asked to spend most of the time posing in a dark room; they were sure Mrs. Cameron would understand the impossibility of suggesting such an arrangement. Garibaldi came with cordial interest, spoke in Italian, planted a tree, and was talking quietly to Tennyson, when Mrs. Cameron joined them unannounced, and then quite suddenly went down upon her knees, holding up her two hands in supplication. ‘Who is this poor woman? What does she want?’ asks Garibaldi much puzzled by Mrs. Cameron’s entreaties, not the less when she exclaims to explain her stained finger-tips, ‘General, listen to me! This is honourable Art, not Dirt!’ Alas! the moment was inopportune and we have no portrait of Garibaldi by Mrs. Cameron!

[34]

V.

The gaiety and youth of Freshwater in the ’seventies still reaches one as one thinks back. The place was full of young people. Two of Mrs. Cameron’s five sons lived at home and Hardinge, her special friend and adviser, used to come over from Ceylon from time to time to gladden his mother’s warm heart, to add up her bills, to admonish her, to cheer and enliven the home.

The two Tennyson boys were at Farringford. The Prinseps were at the Briary with a following of nephews and charming girls belonging to the family; neighbours joined in, such as Simeons from Swainston, Croziers from Yarmouth; officers appeared from the forts, and as one remembers it all, a succession of romantic figures come to one’s mind, still to be seen in the pictures of Mrs. Cameron’s devising. In those days she seemed to be omnipresent—organising happy things, calling out, summoning one person and another, ordering all the day, and long into the night, for of an evening came impromptu plays and waltzes in the wooden ball-room, and young partners dancing out under the stars. One warm moonlight night I remember the whole company of lads and lasses streaming away across fields and downs, past silvery sheepfolds to the very cliffs overhanging the sea. Farringford, too, gave its balls, more stately and orderly in their ways. The rhythmical old-fashioned progress of the poet’s waltz delighted us all. An impression remains of brightest colour and animation, of romantic graceful figures, a little fanciful—perfectly natural, even when under Mrs. Cameron’s rule.

She was a masterful woman, a friend with enough of the foe in her generous composition to make any of us hesitate who ventured to cross her decree. The same people returned to the little bay again and again. Some members of my own family, christened by her with names out of Tennyson and Wordsworth, or from her favourite Italian poets—Madonna this, Madonna that—used to join us Easter after Easter—and the friendly parties went roaming the Downs to the Beacon or towards the Briary.

The Briary, where the Prinseps from Little Holland House were living, belonged to Watts the painter, for whom Philip Webb had built it. They were interesting people, all living there, and curiously picturesque in their looks and habits, to which the influence of the Signor, as we called Mr. Watts, contributed unconsciously.

He and Mr. Prinsep wore broad hats and cloaks, and so did [35] Tennyson himself and his brothers. People walking in the lanes would stand to see them all go by.

Meanwhile Mrs. Cameron’s correspondence never ceased, however interesting her visitors were and whatever the attractions of the moment might be. She would sit at her desk until the last moment of the despatch. Then, when the postman had hurried off, she would send the gardener running after him with some extra packet labelled ‘immediate.’ Then, soon after, the gardener’s boy would follow pursuing the gardener with an important postscript, and, finally, I can remember the donkey being harnessed and driven galloping all the way to Yarmouth, arriving as the post-bags were being closed. Even when she was away from Freshwater, Mrs. Cameron still chose to rule time and circumstance.

She sends word to Tennyson:

(Then come many pages of the reasons which prevent her from writing.)

After she came to live near the Tennysons, Mrs. Cameron had no sense of ever having done enough for them or more than enough. She would arrive at Farringford at all hours, convenient and inconvenient, entering by the door, by the drawing-room window, always bringing goodwill and life in her train. She would walk in at night, followed by friends, by sons carrying lanterns, by nieces, by maids bearing parcels and photographs. Hers was certainly a gift for making life and light for others, though at times I have known her spirits sink into deepest depths as do those of impressionable people. Torch-bearers sometimes consume themselves and burn some of their own life and spirit in the torches they carry. When Julia Cameron took to photography, her enthusiasm was infectious and her beautiful pictures seemed a revelation. She was [36] an artist at heart and she had never felt satisfied till she found her own channel of expression in these new developments. Watts greatly encouraged her, and I heard him say of one of her pictures of himself, that he knew no finer portrait among the old Masters.

One of her admirers, F. D. Maurice, wrote:

Browning, Darwin, Carlyle, Lecky, Sir John Herschell, Henry Taylor with his flowing beard were all among her sitters and still reveal themselves to us through her. She photographed without ceasing, in season and out of season, and she summoned everyone round about to watch the process.

Miss Marie Spartali, a very beautiful young lady who had come over to pose to Mrs. Cameron, described finding her absorbed in another sitter—her own parlourmaid, Mary Hillier, draped and patient, representing some mythological personage. There was a ring at the outer bell (focussing in those days took long and anxious minutes), and as Mary Hillier could not be allowed to move, Miss Spartali went to the door, where the visitor, seeing this stately lovely apparition dressed in wonderful attire, exclaimed ‘Are you then the beautiful parlourmaid?’ This little ancient joke is still quoted against the beautiful lady.

How familiar to all, who were forced by the photographer into the little studio, is the remembrance of the mingled scent of chemicals and sweetbriar already meeting one in the road outside Dimbola! The terrors of the studio itself are still remembered, the long painful waiting, when we would have trembled had we dared to do so, under her impetuous directions to be still.

This is her own description of her art, writing to Mrs. Tennyson:

The coffee crop had failed in Ceylon several years and the money difficulties became very serious for the Camerons. Photography might have paid better if the photographer had been less lavish in her gifts and ways. She was a true artist in her attitude towards money.

She, the most recklessly generous of women, was able to write:

To these remonstrances the photographer would answer: ‘I have always tried to get my husband to share my feelings—so long as illness and death are mercifully spared us. Death is as to deeper wounds—only a grain.’ Julia Cameron was not a woman of to-day. She seemed to belong to some heroic past. She has told me how as a girl she and her sister, the dearest of them all, used to wander forth and kneel to pray on the country-roadsides.

Once when her eldest son went through a painful operation, which lasted some time, she had held his hand in hers through it all, and he said he could not have endured it if she had not been present. ‘As to my bearing it,’ she said simply, ‘what is there one cannot bear if one can give one grain of helpful support to any sufferer?’

Of a friend in great trouble she writes:

It was during her husband’s absence that she wrote:

[38]

VII.

The legends are endless of Mrs. Cameron’s doings at Freshwater, and to this day the older villagers tell of them—of the window she built and equipped in the room destined for Sir Henry Taylor. It was an east room; she thought it looked dark in the afternoon and she determined that a western window should be there when her guest arrived next day. The village carpenter and his assistant builder sawed and worked late into the night, in the early morning the glazier was summoned; when the passengers arrived from the three o’clock boat the window was there, the western light was pouring in into the spare room through the panes, and Mrs. Cameron’s faithful maid was putting the last stitches to the muslin blind. Another inspiration of hers was a lawn, also spread in a single night, for Mr. Cameron to stroll along when he went for his morning walk next day.

She used to bring wayfarers of every sort in from the roads outside. We still may recognise some of the models living at Freshwater—the beautiful parlourmaid, King Arthur who in robes and armoured dignity appears so often in her camera, and who still meets travellers from the little steamer that runs from Lymington to Yarmouth Pier. Indeed wayfarers of every sort were made welcome by her. After my father’s death she welcomed us to her cottage, where fires of hospitality and sympathy were lighted and endless kindness and helping affection surrounded us from her and from Farringford through that cold and icy winter. When spring had passed and when at last summer was over, we gratefully returned to the sheltering bay where such good friends were to be found.

The Camerons’ departure for Ceylon in 1875 will long be remembered—the farewells, the piles of luggage. Mrs. Cameron grave and valiant, with a thousand cares and preoccupations. Mr. Cameron with long white locks falling over his shoulders and dark eyes gleaming through spectacles, holding his carved, ivory cane in his hand and looking quietly at the preparations. There [39] were animals—a cow I have been told among them, bales and boxes without number, their faithful maid Ellen and their son Hardinge, that spirited prop and adviser, ordering and arranging everything. He travelled with them, for he was on his way back to his post in the Civil Service at Colombo. Many of us came down to Southampton to see them off in the vast ship manned by Lascars, crowded with passengers and heaving from confusion into order.

I can still see Mr. Cameron in his travelling dress looking quietly up and down the quay at the piles of luggage, at the assembled friends; he held a beautiful pink rose which Mrs. Tennyson had given him when he stopped at Farringford to take leave of her. A member of Mr. Cameron’s family whom I had never seen before, for he had lived in India, had come from London with his wife and was standing taking leave with the rest of us. He was strangely like Mr. Cameron, with white hair and bright fixed eyes; and even then, starting though they were for the great venture, Mrs. Cameron came forward and said to me that I must go back to town with her step-son and he would look after me.... I remember presently finding myself sitting in the railway carriage sadly flying home, away from the good friends of many a year, and vaguely wondering at the likeness of Mr. Cameron sitting on the opposite seat. Then at Waterloo, after putting me into a hansom, even the likeness departed and I never saw either of the two again.

VIII.

It is pleasant to read of the happy progress of the travellers.

( They travel on to Malta. )

Her sympathy for the ship’s captain must not be omitted:

She raises subscriptions for a harmonium on board as a token of gratitude to the captain—‘one in a thousand.’

Mr. Cameron would not land at Malta; it had painful memories for him, he had been there as a child with his beautiful mother, Lady Margaret, and his father who was Governor of the Island. ‘Our voyage is fabulously beautiful,’ she says, and she dwells on the pleasure it gives them to make it easier for an invalid on board by bestowing their most comfortable chair upon the suffering lady.

As they glide through the Suez Canal Mrs. Cameron writes:

As she finishes her letter the young moon is hanging over the vessel.

Here is another letter written a year later to Mrs. Tennyson:

After describing Ceylon and its beauties, the mother returns to the theme she loves best of all, that of her son Hardinge, who had just paid her a visit.

It was in her youngest son’s bungalow on the Glencairn estate that Mrs. Cameron died, early in 1879, only a short time after her second return to Ceylon. She had been warned not to return, but she longed to be near ‘her boys.’ The illness only lasted ten days. When she lay dying, her bed faced the wide-open window; it was a glorious evening and some big stars were shining. She looked out and just said ‘ Beautiful ’ and died, her last word, a fitting end to her reverent soul on earth. Her body was taken in a low open cart, drawn by two great white bullocks, and all covered with white cloth, over two ridges of mountains, and buried in the little churchyard at the bottom of the valley, between Galle and Colombo, where Hardinge was living. After this Hardinge took his father and his mother’s maid, the faithful Ellen Ottingnon, ‘old E,’ to live with him there. It was in May of the following year that Mr. Cameron died, and he too was carried over the mountains and buried in the same churchyard.

Lady Tennyson survived her friend seventeen years:

wrote Edith Sichel at the time.

And some one who loved her, speaking lately, said to me:

[43]

She had a gift we all felt, of harmonising and quieting by her presence alone; often too tired to say much, she could contribute the right word to the talk for which Farringford was always notable. I have a special memory of once dining with the Tennysons in the company of George Eliot and Lord Acton, but it was Mrs. Tennyson’s gentle voice which seemed to take the lead.

Tennyson had said: ‘I felt the peace of God come into my life at the altar before which I married her.’ And after more than forty years of marriage he dedicated his last book to her.

The following paper left by Lady Tennyson concerning her husband might seem almost too intimate to quote here, if it did not give so truly the atmosphere at Farringford that one does not venture to omit it.

April 25, Tuesday. —On Saturday we were going to tea with friends at Bray when just as we were starting H. (my husband) got an ‘official’ from the Castle, so I went alone and he went to the Castle. News had come that a boat had been taken off the Kerry coast, landing ammunition, and a very important arrest had been made. Easter Sunday passed off in absolute calm, and yesterday (Easter Monday) morning H. said he had a lot of letters to write and he would go and write them at his Club, almost next door to the Sackville Street General Post Office. He found he wanted to answer some letters that were in his desk at the G.P.O. so he walked over to his room and was just sitting down when his ’phone went, an urgent message to go at once to the Castle.

He had only just arrived there and was in consultation with Sir M. N. when suddenly a volley of shots rang out at the Castle Gate, and it was found armed bodies of men were in possession of the City Hall and other houses that commanded the other gates to the Castle, and anyone attempting to leave the Castle was shot. All the officials in the Castle were prisoners.

When N. (my son) came in about 12.30 I said we would walk down to the Club and meet H. The streets were quiet and deserted till we crossed O’Connell Bridge, when N. remarked there was a dense crowd round Nelson’s Pillar, but we supposed it was a bank-holiday crowd waiting for trams. We were close to the General Post Office, when two or three shots were fired, followed by a volley, and the crowd began rushing down towards the bridge, the people calling out ‘Go back, go back, the Sinn Feiners are firing.’ N. said ‘You’d better go back, mother; there’s going to be a row; I’ll go on to the Club and find Dad.’ So I turned and fled with the crowd and got back safely to the hotel.

About 1.30 N. returned, having failed to find H., and we had an anxious lunch. During lunch a telephone message came through saying H. was at the Castle but could not leave.

At 3 P.M. N. told me all was quiet in Sackville Street and begged me to go out and see the G.P.O.

I quaked rather, but we set off and reached Sackville Street safely.

[45]

Over the fine building of the G.P.O. floated a great green flag with ‘Irish Republic’ on it. Every window on the ground floor was smashed and barricaded with furniture, and a big placard announced ‘The Headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.’ At every window were two men with rifles, and on the roof the parapet was lined with men. H.’s room appeared not to have been touched and there were no men at his windows.

We stood opposite and were gazing when suddenly two shots were fired, and, seeing there was likely to be an ugly rush, I fled again.

At 11.30 P.M. H. walked in, to my immense relief. The troops had arrived, 2000 of them from the Curragh, at about 5 P.M. , and had promptly stormed the City Hall, which commanded the main gate of the Castle, and had taken it after fierce fighting.

Tuesday. —This morning we hear the military are pouring into the city.

All our valuables were stored in H.’s safe and cupboards when we gave up our house, and all our dear F.’s books, sword, and all his possessions, which we value more than anything else in the world; we would not trust them with the stored furniture.

Yesterday afternoon the mob broke all the windows in various streets, and looted all the shops. The streets were strewn with clothes, boots, furniture, tram cushions, and everything you can imagine.

While I am writing now there is incessant firing in St. Stephen’s Green, and we fear there may be street fighting in this street.

Tuesday Evening. —H. and N. have just come in, having seen Dr. (now Major) W., Surgeon to the Forces in Ireland. He told them that so far we had had about 500 casualties, two-thirds of them being civilians shot in the streets.

The first thing Dr. W. heard of the outbreak was a ’phone message telling him to go at once to the Shelbourne, as a man had been shot. He supposed it was a case of suicide, so jumped into his car and went off, fortunately in mufti. In Nassau Street his car was stopped and he was ordered by rebels to get out; he attempted to argue, and was told if he did not obey instantly he would be shot. Had he been in uniform he would have been shot at sight; as a civilian doctor they allowed him to go, and he took his bag and ran. He found three men shot in the Shelbourne, and a boy was shot as he reached the door.

After we got into bed a ’phone came that H. was to go at [46] once to the Viceregal Lodge in the Phœnix Park, so he dressed and tried every way to get a motor; but of course no motor would go out. After some delay he got the Field Ambulance of the Fire Brigade, at Dr. W.’s suggestion, but when it came the men told H. they had been carrying wounded all day, and that they had been constantly stopped by pickets, and the car searched, and if they went, and the car was stopped and found to contain H., they would undoubtedly all be shot. So H. considered it too risky and it had to be abandoned, and eventually his Excellency gave his instructions over the ’phone, first in French, but that particular ’phone did not speak French! So eventually he took the risk of the ’phone being tapped and gave them in English.

While we were dressing a terrific bombardment with field guns began, the first we had heard, and gave me cold shivers. It went on for a quarter of an hour—awful! big guns and machine guns—and then ceased, but we hear they were bombarding Liberty Hall, the headquarters of Larkin and the strikers two years ago. The guns were on H.M.S. Hecla , that came up the river and smashed it from within about fifty yards. It made one feel quite sick.

H. has just been summoned to the Castle, and there is no knowing when he will be back. All who go out carry their lives in their hands.

N. did a fine thing yesterday. After the Green had been raked by our machine guns’ fire, he strolled up, in his casual way, to see the result. In front of one of the side gates in the railings, which are seven feet high and spiked three ways, he saw a small group of men peering into the Green; he went to see what they were looking at. The rebels had barricaded the gate, which opened inwards, by putting one of the heavy garden seats against it upside down and on the top of it another right side up, and lying full length on the seat, face downwards, was a man, a civilian, with all his lower jaw blown away, and bleeding profusely! N. immediately climbed the railings and dropped down on the Sinn Fein side, and found that the man was still alive; he then turned and fairly cursed the men who were looking on, and asked if there was not one man enough to come over the railings and help him. Whereupon three men climbed over and together they lifted down the seat with the poor creature on it, and dragged away the other seat, when they were able to open the gate, and they brought out the seat and the man on it, and carried him to the nearest hospital, where he died in about five minutes.

[47]

N.’s theory is that he was probably one of the civilians taken prisoner by the Sinn Fein the previous day, and was trying to escape from the awful machine-gun fire when he was shot down and fell back on to the seat. It was a terrible case.

Friday , 10 A.M. —N. is of course safer attached to the Red Cross than roaming the streets making rescues on his own, and if he was killed one should at least hear of it; but the risks are many and great, as in street fighting the ambulances are constantly under fire.

Among other things they enter houses where there are known to be wounded Sinn Feiners, and bring them out and take them to the hospitals.

This N. was doing yesterday. One of the most awful things in this terrible time is that there must be scores of dead and dying Sinn Feiners, many of them mere lads, that no one can get at in the houses, where they will remain till after the rebellion; and in some cases the houses take fire and they are burnt. However, whatever is possible is being done.

All the afternoon an awful battle raged in the neighbourhood of the river and quays, and the din of the great guns and machine guns was tremendous. We now have 30,000 troops and plenty of artillery and machine guns, so the result cannot be uncertain, though there is desperate work to be done before the end is in sight.

I cannot give you any idea of what it was like when I went to bed; I sent for Mrs. B., the manager’s wife, and together we watched it from my window.

It was the most awe-inspiring sight I have ever seen. It seemed as if the whole city was on fire, the glow extending right across the heavens and the red glare hundreds of feet high, while above the roar of the fires the whole air seemed vibrating with the noise of the great guns and machine guns. It was an inferno! We remained spellbound.

Yesterday Lord S. had a narrow escape from a sniper who has been worrying this street for two days and could not be located. He was picking off soldiers during the fighting in Grafton Street, but later turned his attention to the cross streets between this and Grafton Street and there as nearly as possible got Lord S., who was coming back to us from the Castle.

The military thought the man was on our roof, which made us all whistle with indignation—the mere idea of the wretch being on [48] our hotel; but a thorough search proved he was not here, though he evidently had access to some roof.

Yesterday afternoon, when the firing in Grafton Street was over, the mob appeared and looted the shops, clearing the great provision shops and others.

From the windows we watched the proceedings, and I never saw anything so brazen! The mob were chiefly women and children, with a sprinkling of men; they swarmed in and out of the side door, bearing huge consignments of bananas, the great bunches on the stalk, to which the children attached a cord and ran away dragging it along; other boys had big orange boxes, which they filled with tinned and bottled fruits. Women with their skirts held up received showers of apples and oranges and all kinds of fruit which were thrown from the upper windows by their pals; and ankle deep on the ground was all the pink and white and silver paper and paper shavings used for packing choice fruits. It was an amazing sight! And nothing daunted these people. Higher up, at another shop, we were told a woman was hanging out of a window dropping down loot to a friend, when she was shot through the head by a sniper, probably our man. The body dropped into the street and the mob cleared. In a few minutes a cart appeared and gathered up the body, and instantly all the mob swarmed back to continue the joyful proceedings!

H. and Lord S. were sitting at the window for a few minutes yesterday when the fruit shop was being looted and saw one of the funniest sights they had ever seen. A very fat, very blowsy old woman emerged from the side street and staggered on to the pavement, laden with far more loot than she could carry; in her arms she had an orange box full of fruit, and under her shawl she had a great bundle tied up, which kept slipping down; having reached the pavement, she put her box down and sat on it! And from her bundle rolled forth many tins of fruit; these she surveyed ruefully, calling on the Almighty and all the Saints to help her! From these she solemnly made her selection, which she bound up in her bundle and hoisted, with many groans and lamentations, on her back and made off with, casting back many longing looks at the pile of things left on the pavement, which were speedily disposed of by small boys!

Humour and tragedy are so intermixed in this catastrophe! A very delicate elderly lady who is staying here said to me this morning, in answer to my inquiry as to how she had slept:

[49]

‘I could not sleep at all; when the guns ceased the awful silence made me so nervous!’

I know exactly what she meant; when the roar of the guns ceases you can feel the silence.

5 p.m. —Colonel C. has just come in, having been in the thick of it for 48 hours. He tells us the Post Office has been set on fire by the Sinn Feiners who have left it. If this is true, and it probably is, I fear we have lost all our valuable possessions, including my diamond pendant which was in my jewel-case in H.’s safe.

To-day, about lunch-time, a horrid machine gun gave voice very near us, also the sniper reappeared on the roofs and this afternoon was opposite my bedroom window, judging from the sound. A man might be for weeks on the roofs of these houses among the chimney-stacks and never be found as long as he had access to some house for food. When we were working in my room this afternoon he fired some shots which could not have been more than twenty yards away.

I was almost forgetting to tell you how splendidly one of H.’s men behaved when the G.P.O. was taken. When the rebels took possession they demanded the keys from the man who had them in charge. He quietly handed over the keys, having first abstracted the keys of H.’s room! Imagine such self-possession at such a terrible moment.

6.30 p.m. —A party of soldiers and a young officer have just arrived to search the roof for the sniper. They say he is on the roof of the annexe, which is connected with the main building by covered-in bridges. They are now on the roof and shots are being fired, so I expect they have spotted him.

When N. was out last night another ambulance had a bad experience. They had fetched three wounded Sinn Feiners out of a house and were taking them to hospital, when they came under heavy fire; the driver was killed, so the man beside him took the wheel and was promptly wounded in both legs; the car then ran away and wrecked itself on a lamp-post. Another ambulance had to run the gauntlet and go to the rescue! On the whole, as far as possible the rebels have respected the Red Cross, but not the white flag.

Guinness’s brewery have made three splendid armoured cars by putting great long boilers, six feet in diameter, on to their great motor lorries. Holes are bored down the sides to let in air, and they are painted grey; the driver sits inside too; they each carry [50] twenty-two men or a ton of food in absolute security. N. saw them at the Castle being packed with men; nineteen got in, packed like herrings, and three remained outside; up came the sergeant.

‘Now then, gentlemen, move up, move up; the car held twenty-two yesterday, it must hold twenty-two to-day,’ and in the unfortunate three were stuffed. It must have been suffocating, but they were taken to their positions in absolute safety!

29th, Saturday, 4 p.m. —Sir M. N. has just rung up to say the rebels have surrendered unconditionally. We have no details, and the firing continues in various parts of the town; but if the leaders have surrendered it can only be a question of a few hours before peace is restored and we can go forth and look on the wreck and desolation of this great city. So ends, we hope, this appalling chapter in the history of Ireland, days of horror and slaughter comparable only to the Indian Mutiny.

April 30, Sunday, 10 a.m. —This morning we hear the reports of the burning of the whole of Sackville Street were exaggerated. The Imperial Hotel, Clery’s great shop, and one or two others were burnt, but the street as a whole escaped, and the Accountant’s Office and the Sackville Street Club were not touched.

Here I must tell you how absolutely heroic the telephone girls have been at the Exchange. It is in a building a considerable distance from the G.P.O., and the Sinn Feiners have made great efforts to capture it. The girls have been surrounded by firing; shots have several times come into the switch-room, where the men took down the boards from the back of the switch-boards and arranged them as shelters over the girls’ heads to protect them from bullets and broken glass. Eight snipers have been shot on buildings commanding the Exchange, and one of the guard was killed yesterday, and these girls have never failed. They have been on duty since yesterday, sleeping when possible in a cellar, and with indifferent food, and have cheerfully and devotedly stuck to their post, doing the work of forty. Only those on duty at the outbreak of the rebellion could remain, those in their homes could never get back, so with the few men who take the night duty these girls have kept the whole service going; all telegrams have had to be sent by ‘’phone,’ and they have simply saved the situation. It has been magnificent!

The shooting is by no means over, as many of the Sinn Fein strongholds refuse to surrender. Jacob’s biscuit factory is very strongly held, and when the rebels were called on to surrender [51] they refused unless they were allowed to march out carrying their arms!

It is said that when Jacob was told that the military might have to blow up the factory he replied:

‘They may blow it to blazes for all I care; I shall never make another biscuit in Ireland.’

I don’t know if this is true, but it very well may be, for he has been one of the model employers in Dublin. He almost gave up the factory at the time of the Larkin strike, and only continued it for the sake of his people, and so it will be with the few great industries in the city. Dublin is ruined!

Yesterday I made a joyful discovery. When we came back from Italy in March, H. brought back from the office my large despatch-case, in which I keep all F.’s letters. I did not remember what else was in it, so I investigated and found my necklace with jewelled cross and the pink topaz set—both of these, being in large cases, would not go into the jewel-case,—also the large old paste buckle, so I am not absolutely destitute of jewelry. But, best of all, there were the three little handkerchiefs F. sent me from Armentières with my initial worked on them; for these I was grieving more than for anything, and when I found them the relief was so great I sat with them in my hand and cried!

This week has been a wonderful week for N. Never before has a boy of just seventeen had such an experience. Yesterday morning he was at the Automobile Club filling cans of petrol from casks for the Red Cross ambulances; he came in to lunch reeking of petrol! In the afternoon he went round with the Lord Mayor in an ambulance collecting food for forty starving refugees from the burnt-out district, housed in the Mansion House, and after tea went out for wounded and brought in an old man of seventy-eight shot through the body. He was quite cheery over it and asked N. if he thought he would recover. ‘Good Lord! Yes; why not?’ said N., and bucked the old man up!

There is intermittent firing in all directions. I doubt if it will quite cease for some days, as their strongholds will not surrender.

May 1, 11 a.m. —I had no time to continue this yesterday, but during the afternoon three of the rebel strongholds surrendered, Jacob’s, Boland’s, and the College of Surgeons on St. Stephen’s Green. From this last building 160 men surrendered and were marched down Grafton Street. It is said that among them was [52] Countess Marcovitz, dressed in a man’s uniform; it is also said that the military made her take down the green Republican flag flying over the building herself and replace it by a white one. When she surrendered she took off her bandolier and kissed it and her revolver before handing them to the officer. She has been one of the most dangerous of the leaders. People who saw them marched down Grafton Street said they held themselves erect, and looked absolutely defiant!

Yesterday H. revisited the Telephone Exchange and a point was cleared up that had mystified everyone; and that is why, when the rebels on Easter Monday took every building of importance and every strategic position, did they overlook the Telephone Exchange? Had they taken it we should have been absolutely powerless, unable to send messages or telegrams for troops. The Exchange is situated in Crown Alley, off Dame Street, and the Superintendent told H. an extraordinary story. It seems when they had taken the G.P.O. they marched a detachment to take the Exchange, when just as they were turning into Crown Alley an old woman rushed towards them with arms held up calling out ‘Go back, go back; the place is crammed with military.’ And, supposing it to be in the hands of our troops, they turned back! This was at noon; at 5 P.M. our troops arrived and took it over.

This saved the whole situation! Whether the woman was on our side, or if she thought she had seen soldiers, will never be known....

I have just returned from walking round the G.P.O. and Sackville Street with H. and some of the officials. It passes all my powers of description; only one word describes it: ‘desolation.’ If you look at pictures of Ypres or Louvain after the bombardment, it will give you some idea of the scene.

We looked up through the windows of the G.P.O. and saw the safe that was in H.’s room still in the wall, and the door does not appear to have been opened or the safe touched; but the whole place has been such an inferno, one would think that door must have been red-hot. Among all the débris the fire was still smouldering, and we could not penetrate inside. Do you realise that out of all H.’s library he does not possess a single book, except one volume of his Dante, and I not even a silver teaspoon!

Everything belonging to F. has gone; as he gave his life in the war, so an act of war has robbed us of everything belonging to him, our most precious possession!

[53]

May 2, 10 a.m. —Last evening I walked all round the ruined district. The streets were thronged with people, and threading their way among the crowd were all sorts of vehicles—carts carrying the bodies of dead horses, that had been shot the first day and lain in the streets ever since; Fire Brigade ambulances followed by Irish cars bringing priests and driven by Fire Brigade men. The motors with Red Cross emblems, carrying white-jacketed doctors, would dart along, followed by a trail of Red Cross nurses on bicycles, in their print dresses and white overalls, their white cap ends floating behind them, all speeding on their errand of mercy to the stricken city.

From time to time we came across on the unwashed pavement the large dark stain telling its own grim story, and in some places the blood had flowed along the pavement for some yards and down into the gutters; but enough of horrors. We came sadly back, and on the steps we met Mr. O’B. returning from a similar walk. He could hardly speak of it, and said he stood in Sackville Street and cried, and many other men did the same.

Out of all the novel experiences of the last eight days, two things struck me very forcibly. The first is that under circumstances that might well have tried the nerves of the strongest, there has been no trace of fear or panic among the people in the hotel, either among the guests or staff. Anxiety for absent friends of whom no tidings could be heard, though living only in the next square, one both felt and heard, but of fear for their own personal safety I have seen not one trace, and the noise of battle after the first two days seemed to produce nothing but boredom. The other fact is a total absence of thankfulness at our own escape.

It may come, I don’t know; others may feel it, I don’t. I don’t pretend to understand it, but so it is. Life as it has been lived for the last two years in the midst of death seems to have blunted one’s desire for it, and completely changed one’s feelings towards the Hereafter.

‘Our artillery and automobiles have saved Verdun,’ French officers and soldiers were continually telling me. And as I look back on two months of ambulance-driving in the attack, it seems to me that automobiles played a larger part than even the famous ‘seventy-fives,’ for without motor transport there would have been no ammunition and no food. One shell, accurately placed, will put a railway communication out of the running, but automobiles must be picked off one by one as they come within range.

The picture of the attack that will stay with me always is that of the Grande Route north from Bar-le-Duc, covered with the snow and ice of the last days of February. The road was always filled with two columns of trucks, one going north and the other coming south. The trucks, loaded with troops, shells, and bread, rolled and bobbled back and forth with the graceless, uncertain strength of baby elephants. It was almost impossible to steer them on the icy roads. Many of them fell by the wayside, overturned, burned up, or were left apparently unnoticed in the ceaseless tide of traffic that never seemed to hurry or to stop.

All night and all day it continued. Soon the roads began to wear out. Trucks brought stones from the ruins of the Battle of the Marne and sprinkled them in the ruts and holes; soldiers, dodging in and out of the moving cars, broke and packed the stones or sprinkled sand on the ice-covered hillsides. But the traffic was never stopped for any of these things. The continuous supply had its effect on the demand. There were more troops than were needed for the trenches, so they camped along the road or in the fields. Lines of camions ran off the road and unloaded the reserve of bread; the same thing was done with the meat, which kept well enough in the snow; and the shells, which a simple camouflage of white tarpaulins effectually hid from the enemy airmen.

At night, on the main road, I have watched for hours the dimmed lights of the camions , winding away north and south like the coils of some giant and luminous snake which never stopped and never ended. It was impressive evidence of a great organisation that depended and was founded on the initiative of its members. Behind each light was a unit, the driver, whose momentary negligence [55] might throw the whole line into confusion. Yet there were no fixed rules to save him from using his brain quickly and surely as each crisis presented itself. He must be continually awake to avoid any one of a thousand possible mischances. The holes and ice on the road, his skidding car, the cars passing in the same and opposite directions, the cars in front and behind, the cars broken down on the sides of the road—all these and many other things he had to consider before using brake or throttle in making his way along. Often snow and sleet storms were added to make driving more difficult. Objects six feet away were completely invisible, and it was only by watching the trees along the side of the road that one could attempt to steer.

I was connected with the Service des Autos as a driver in Section No. 2 of the Field Service of the American Ambulance of Neuilly. We had the usual French section of twenty ambulances and one staff car, but, unlike the other sections, we had only one man to a car. There were two officers, one the Chief of Section, Walter Lovell, a graduate of Harvard University and formerly a member of the Boston Stock Exchange; and George Roder, Mechanical Officer, in charge of the supply of parts and the repair of cars. Before the war, he was a promising bacteriologist in the Rockefeller Institute. Our section was one of five which compose the field service of the American Ambulance, and are located at various points along the front from Dunkirk to the Vosges. The general direction of the Field Service is in the hands of A. Piatt Andrew, formerly professor at Harvard and Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury. He has organised the system by which volunteers and funds are obtained in America, and is the responsible link between the work of the service and the will of the French authorities.

In each of the five sections there are twenty drivers, all Americans and volunteers. Most of them are college men who have come over from the United States to ‘do their bit’ for France and see the war at the same time. Certainly our section was gathered from the four corners of the ‘States.’ One, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, had worked for two years on the Panama Canal as an engineer; another, an Alaskan, had brought 200 dogs over for the French Government, to be used for transportation in the Vosges; a third was a well-known American novelist who had left his home at Florence to be a chauffeur for France. There were also two architects, a New York undertaker, several soi-disant students, and a man who owned a Mexican ranch that was not sufficiently flourishing to keep him at home.

[56]

The term of service required by the French authorities is now six months, though, of course, some of the men have been in the section since the Battle of the Marne. We all got five sous a day and rations as privates in the French army, which was represented in our midst by a lieutenant, a maréchal de logis , a mechanic, and a cook.

On February 22 our French lieutenant gave us our ‘order to move,’ but all he could tell us about our destination was that we were going north. We started from Bar-le-Duc about noon, and it took us six hours to make forty miles through roads covered with snow, swarming with troops, and all but blocked by convoys of food carts and sections of trucks. Of course, we knew that there was an attack in the neighbourhood of Verdun, but we did not know who was making it or how it was going. Then about four o’clock in the short winter twilight we passed two or three regiments of French colonial troops on the march with all their field equipment. I knew who and what they were by the curious Eastern smell that I had always before associated with camels and circuses. They were lined up on each side of the road around their soup kitchens, which were smoking busily, and I had a good look at them as we drove along.

It was the first time I had seen an African army in the field, and though they had had a long march they were cheerful and in high spirits at the prospect of battle. They were all young, active men, and of all colours and complexions, from blue-eyed blonds to shiny blacks. They all wore khaki and brown shrapnel casques bearing the trumpet insignia of the French sharpshooter. We were greeted with laughter and chaff, for the most part, in an unknown chatter, but now and again some one would say, ‘Hee, hee, Ambulance Americaine,’ or ‘Yes, Ingliish, Good-bye.’

I was fortunate enough to pick up one of their non-commissioned officers with a bad foot who was going our way. He was born in Africa, which accounted for his serving in the colonials, though his mother was American and his father French. From him I learned that the Germans were attacking at Verdun, and that, to everyone’s surprise, they were trying to drive the point of the salient south instead of cutting it off from east to west. As we were passing along, one of his men shouted something to him about riding in an ambulance, and I remarked that they all seemed in a very good humour. ‘Oh yes,’ he answered; ‘we’re glad to be on the move, as we’ve been en repos since autumn in a small quiet place south of Paris.’ ‘But it means trouble,’ he added proudly, ‘their sending us up, for we are never used except in attacks, and were [57] being saved for the summer. Six hundred have been killed in my company since the beginning, so I have seen something of this war. Now my regiment is mixed up with two others, and altogether we make about 4000 men.’

As we talked, I realised that his was a different philosophy from that of the ordinary poilu that I had been carrying. Certainly he loved France and was at war for her; but soldiering was his business and fighting was his life. Nothing else counted. He had long since given up any thought of coming out alive, so the ordinary limitations of life and death did not affect him. He wanted to fight and last as long as possible to leave a famous name in his regiment, and to add as many citations as possible to the three medals he had already gained. He was the only man I ever met who was really eager to get back to the trenches, and he said to me with a smile when I stopped to let him off, ‘Thanks for the lift, my old, but I hope you don’t have to carry me back.’

After that we rode north along the Meuse, through a beautiful country where the snow-covered hills, with their sky-lines of carefully pruned French trees, made me think of masterpieces of Japanese art. In the many little villages there was much excitement and activity with troops, artillery, and munitions being rushed through to the front, and the consequent wild rumours of great attacks and victories. Curiously enough, there were few who thought of defeat. They were all sure, even when a retreat was reported, that the French were winning, and that spirit of confidence had much to do with stopping the Germans.

At about six in the evening we reached our destination some forty miles north-east of Bar-le-Duc. The little village where we stopped had been a railroad centre until the day before, when the Germans started bombarding it. Now the town was evacuated, and the smoking station deserted. The place had ceased to exist, except for a hospital which was established on the southern edge of the town in a lovely old chateau, overlooking the Meuse. We were called up to the hospital as soon as we arrived to take such wounded as could be moved to the nearest available railhead, which was ten miles away, on the main road, and four miles south of Verdun. We started out in convoy, but with the then conditions of traffic, it was impossible to stick together, and it took some of us till five o’clock the next morning to make the trip. That was the beginning of the attack for us, and the work of ‘evacuating’ the wounded to the railway stations went steadily on until March 15. It was left to the driver to decide how many trips it was physically [58] possible for him to make in each twenty-four hours. There were more wounded than could be carried, and no one could be certain of keeping any kind of schedule with the roads as they then were.

Sometimes we spent five or six hours waiting at a cross-road, while columns of troops and their equipment filed steadily by. Sometimes at night we could make a trip in two hours that had taken us ten in daylight. Sometimes, too, we crawled slowly to a station only to find it deserted, shells falling, and the hospital moved to some still more distant point of the line. Situations and conditions changed from day to day—almost from hour to hour. One day it was sunshine and spring, with roads six inches deep in mud, no traffic, and nothing to remind one of war, except the wounded in the car and the distant roar of the guns, which sounded like a giant beating a carpet. The next day it was winter again, with mud turned to ice, the roads blocked with troops, and the Germans turning hell loose with their heavy guns.

In such a crisis as those first days around Verdun, ammunition and fresh men are the all-essential things. The wounded are the déchets , the ‘has-beens’, and so must take second place. But the French are too gallant and tender-hearted not to make sacrifices. I remember one morning I was slapped off the road into a ditch with a broken axle, while passing a solitary camion . The driver got down, came over, and apologised for the accident, which was easily half my fault. Then we unloaded four cases of ‘seventy-five’ shells that he was carrying, and put my three wounded in on the floor of his car. He set out slowly and carefully up the ice-covered road, saying to me with a smile as he left, ‘Don’t let the Boches get my marmites while I’m gone.’ For some time I sat there alone on the road, watching the shells break on a hill some miles away to the north, and wondering when I could get word back to the ‘base’ of my mishap. Then a staff car appeared down the road making its way along slowly and with difficulty, because, being without chains, it skidded humorously with engine racing and the chauffeur trying vainly to steer. There was a captain of the Service des Autos sitting on the front seat, and he was so immaculately clean and well groomed that he seemed far away from work of any kind. But when the car stopped completely about half-way up the little hill on which I was broken down, he jumped out, took off his fur coat, and using it to give the rear wheels a grip on the ice, he swung it under the car. As the wheels passed over it, he picked it up and swung it under again. So the car climbed the hill and slid down the other slope round the curve [59] and out of sight. It was just another incident that made me realise the spirit and energy of the French Automobile Service. But the captain had not solved any of my difficulties. He had been too busy to notice me or wonder why an American ambulance was sprawled in a ditch with four cases of shells alongside.

I had been waiting there in the road about two hours when another American came by and took back word of my accident and of the parts necessary to set it right. Then about noon my friend came back in his camion to take up his cases of shells and report my wounded safe at the railway station. We lunched together on the front seat of the camion on bread, tinned ‘monkey meat,’ and red wine, while he told me stories about his life as a driver. He had been on his car then for more than twenty days without leaving it for food or sleep. That morning his ‘partner’ had been wounded by a shell, so he had to drive all that day alone. Usually the two men drive two hours, turn and turn about; while one is driving, the other can eat, sleep, or read the day before yesterday’s newspaper. The French camions are organised in sections of twenty. Usually each section works in convoy, and has its name and mark painted on its cars. I saw some with elephants or ships, some with hearts or diamonds, clubs or spades, some with dice—in fact every imaginable symbol has been used to distinguish the thousands of sections in the service. The driver told me there were more than ten thousand trucks working between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. There is great rivalry between the men of the several sections in matters of speed and load—especially between the sections of French and those of American or Italian cars. The American product has the record for speed, which is, however, offset by its frequent need of repair.

My friend told me about trips he had made up as far as the third line trenches, and how they were using ‘seventy-fives’ like machine-guns in dug-outs, where the shells were fired at ‘zero’ so that they exploded immediately after leaving the mouth of the gun. The French, he said, would rather lose guns than men, and according to him, there were so many guns placed in the ‘live’ parts of the sector that the wheels touched, and so formed a continuous line.

As soon as we had finished lunch he left me, and I waited for another two hours until the American staff car (in other surroundings I should call it an ordinary Ford touring car with a red cross or so added), came along loaded with an extra ‘rear construction,’ and driven by the chief himself. It took us another [60] four hours to remove my battered rear axle and put in the new parts, but my car was back in service by midnight.

That was a typical instance of the kind of accident that was happening, and there were about three ‘Ford casualties’ every day. Thanks to the simplicity of the mechanism of the Ford, and to the fact that, with the necessary spare parts, the most serious indisposition can be remedied in a few hours, our section has been at the front for a year—ten months in the Bois-le-Prêtre, and two months at Verdun—without being sent back out of service for general repairs. In the Bois-le-Prêtre we had carried the wounded from the dressing stations to the first hospital, while at Verdun we were on service from the hospital to the railheads. In this latter work of évacuation the trips were much longer, thirty to ninety miles, so the strain on the cars was correspondingly greater. As our cars, being small and fast, carried only three wounded on stretchers or five seated, our relative efficiency was low in comparison with the wear and tear of the ‘running gear’ and the amount of oil and petrol used. But in the period from February 22 to March 13, twenty days, with an average of eighteen cars working, we carried 2046 wounded 18,915 miles. This would be no record on good open roads, but with the conditions I have already described I think it justified the existence of our volunteer organisation—if it needed justification. Certainly the French thought so, but they are too generous to be good judges.

Except for our experiences on the road, there was little romance in the daily routine. True, we were under shell fire, and had to sleep in our cars or in a much-inhabited hayloft, and eat in a little inn, half farmhouse and half stable, where the food was none too good and the cooking none too clean; but we all realised that the men in the trenches would have made of such conditions a luxurious paradise, so that kept us from thinking of it as anything more than a rather strenuous ‘camping out.’

During the first days of the attack, the roads were filled with refugees from the town of Verdun and the country north of it. As soon as the bombardment started, civilians were given five hours to leave, and we saw them—old men, women, and children—struggling along through the snow on their way south. It was but another of those sad migrations that occur so often in the ‘Zone des Armées.’ The journey was made difficult and often dangerous for them by the columns of skidding trucks, so the more timid took to the fields or the ditches at the roadside. They were for the most part the petits bourgeois who had kept their shops open until the last minute, to make the town gay for the troops, who filed through the [61] Promenade de la Digue in an endless queue on their way to and from the trenches. Most of them had saved nothing but the clothes on their backs, though I saw one old woman courageously trundling a barrow overflowing with laces, post cards, bonbons (doubtless the famous Dragées Verdunoises ), and other similar things which had been part of her stock-in-trade, and with which she would establish a Verdun souvenir shop when she found her new home. There were many peasant carts loaded with every imaginable article of household goods from stoves to bird cages, but no matter what else a cart might contain, there was always a mattress with the members of the family, old and young, bouncing along on top. So ubiquitous was this mattress that I asked about it, and was told that the French peasant considers it the most important of his Lares, for it is there his babies are born and his old people die—there too, is the family bank, the hiding-place for the bas de laine .

All the people, no matter what their class or station, were excited. Some were resigned, some weeping, some quarrelling, but every face reflected terror and suffering, for these derelicts had been suddenly torn from the ruins of their old homes and their old lives after passing through two days of the heaviest bombardment the world has ever seen.

I did not wonder at their grief or terror when I had seen the town from which they fled. Sometimes it is quiet, with no shells and no excitement; at others it is a raging hell, a modern Pompeii in the ruining. Often I passed through the town, hearing and seeing nothing to suggest that any enemy artillery was within range. But one morning I went up to take a doctor to a near-by hospital, and had just passed under one of the lovely old twelfth-century gates, with its moat and towers, when the Germans commenced their morning hate. I counted 150 shells, ‘arrivés,’ in the first quarter of an hour.

After making my way up on the old fortifications in the north-eastern quarter, I had an excellent view of the whole city—a typical garrison town of Northern France spreading over its canals and river up to the Citadel and Cathedral on the heights. Five and six shells were shrieking overhead at the same time, and a corresponding number of houses in the centre of the town going up in dust and débris, one after another, almost as fast as I could count.

During this bedlam a military gendarme strolled up as unconcerned as if he had been looking out for a stranger in the Champs Elysées. He told me about a dug-out that was somewhere ‘around the corner.’ But we both got so interested watching the shells [62] and their effect that we stayed where we were. The gendarme had been in the town long enough to become an authority on bombardments, and he could tell me the different shells and what they were hitting, from the coloured smoke which rose after each explosion and hung like a pall over the town in the windless spring air. When the shells fell on the Cathedral—often there were three breaking on and around it at the same time—there sprang up a white cloud, while on the red tiles and zinc roofs they exploded in brilliant pink and yellow puffs. The air was filled with the smell of the burning celluloid and coal-tar products used in the manufacture of the high explosive and incendiary shells. It was very impressive, and even my friend the gendarme said, ‘ C’est chic, n’est-ce pas? It’s the heaviest rain we have had for several days.’ Then he pointed to the left where a column of flame and smoke, heavier than that from the shells, was rising, and said, ‘Watch them now, and you’ll understand their system, the cochons . That’s a house set afire with their incendiary shells, and now they will throw shrapnel around it to keep our firemen from putting it out.’ And so they did, for I could see the white puffs of the six-inch shrapnel shells breaking in and around the column of black smoke, which grew denser all the time. Then two German Taubes, taking advantage of the smoke, came over and dropped bombs, for no other reason than to add terror to the confusion. But the eighty firemen, a brave little band brought up from Paris with their hose-carts and engine, refused to be confused or terrified. Under the shells and smoke we could see the streams of water playing on the burning house. ‘They are working from the cellars,’ said the gendarme. It was fortunate there was no wind, for that house was doomed, and but for the fact that all the buildings were stone, the fire would have spread over all that quarter of the town despite the gallantry of the firemen.

The bombardment continued steadily for about two hours and a half, until several houses were well alight and many others completely destroyed. Then about noon it stopped as suddenly as it had started. I wanted to go down and watch the firemen work, but the gendarme, who had produced an excellent bottle of no ordinary ‘ pinard ,’ said, ‘Wait awhile, my old, that is part of the system. They have only stopped to let the people come out. In a few minutes it will start again, when they will have more chance of killing somebody.’

But for once he was wrong, and after waiting with him for half an hour, I went down to the first house I had seen catch fire. The firemen were still there, working with hose and axe to prevent the [63] fire from spreading. The four walls of the house were still standing, but inside there was nothing but a furnace which glowed and leapt into flame with every draught of air, so that the sparks flew over the neighbouring houses, and started other fires which the firemen were busy controlling. These pompiers are no longer civilians. The black uniform and gay brass and leather helmet of Paris fashion have been replaced with the blue-grey of the poilu , with the regulation steel shrapnel casque or bourguignotte . The French press has had many accounts of their heroism since the beginning of the attack. Certainly if any of the town is left, it will be due to their efforts among the ruins. There are only eighty of them in the town. Half of them are men too old for ‘ active service ,’ yet they have stayed there for two months working night and day under the shells, with the strain of the bombardment added to the usual dangers from falling walls and fire. They are still as gay and eager as ever. Their spirit and motto is the same as that of every soldier and civilian who is doing hard work in these hard times. They all say, ‘It is war,’ or more often, ‘It is for France.’

I left them saving what they could of the house, and walked on over the river through the town. It is truly the Abomination of Desolation. The air was heavy and hot with the smell of explosives and the smoke from the smouldering ruins. Not a sound broke the absolute quiet and not a soul was in sight. I saw two dogs and a cat all slinking about on the search for food, and evidently so crazed with terror that they could not leave their old homes. Finally, crossing over the canal, where the theatre, now a heap of broken beams and stones, used to stand, I met an old bearded Territorial leaning over the bridge with a net in his hand to dip out fish killed by the explosion of the shells in the water. He did not worry about the danger of his position on the bridge, and, like all true fishermen, when they have had good luck, he was happy and philosophical. ‘One must live,’ said he, ‘and it’s very amiable of the Boches to keep us in fish with their marmites, n’est-ce pas, mon vieux ?’ We chatted for a while of bombardments, falling walls, and whether the Germans would reach Verdun. He, of course, like every soldier in that region, was volubly sure they would not. Then I went on up the hill towards the Cathedral, by the old library, which was standing with doors and windows wide open, and with the well-ordered books still on the tables and in the shelves. As yet it is untouched by fire or shell, but too near the bridge to escape for long.

I continued my way through streets filled with fallen wires, broken glass, and bits of shell. Here and there were dead horses [64] and broken waggons caught in passing to or from the lines. There is nothing but ruins left of the lovely residential quarter below the Cathedral. The remaining walls of the houses, gutted by flame and shell, stand in a wavering line along a street, blocked with débris, and with furniture and household articles that the firemen have saved. The furniture is as safe in the middle of the street as anywhere else in the town. As I passed along I could hear from time to time the crash and roar of falling walls, and see the rising clouds of white stone dust that has settled thickly everywhere.

The Cathedral, with its Bishop’s Palace and cloisters—all fine old structures of which the foundations were laid in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—must from its commanding position overlooking the town, be singled out for destruction. I watched ten shells strike the Cathedral that one morning, and some of them were the terrible ‘380’s,’ the shells of the 16-inch mortars, which make no noise as they approach and tear through to the ground before their explosion.

The interior of the Cathedral, blurred with a half-inch layer of stone dust, is in most ‘unchurchly’ disorder. Four or five shells have torn large holes through the roof of the nave, and twice as many more have played havoc with the chapels and aisles at the side. One has fallen through the gilded canopy over the high altar and broken one of the four supporting columns, which before were monoliths like those of St. Peter’s at Rome. Of course, most of the stained glass windows are scattered in fragments over the floor, and through the openings on the southern side I could see the ruins of the cloisters, with some chairs and a bed literally falling into them from a room of the Bishop’s Palace above.

This destruction of the Cathedral is typical of the purposeless barbarity of the whole proceeding. The wiping out of the town can serve no military purpose. There are no stores of munitions or railway communications to be demolished. Naturally there are no troops quartered in the town, and now all extensive movements of convoys are conducted by other roads than those leading through the town. Yet the bombardment continues day after day, and week after week. The Germans are sending in about £5,000,000 worth of shells a month. ‘It’s spite,’ a poilu said to me; ‘they have made up their minds to destroy the town since they can’t capture it; but it will be very valuable as an iron mine after the war.’

Never in the cinema of all time have there been such films to record as on the stage of Egypt. Certain localities are preordained to attract the come and go of the world, and before all others the Nile delta has this property. Its strategical location in the world’s assembling has compelled the holders of power and might and majesty and dominion to crowd therein. No decay of empires can affect the significance of geographical siting. Mena and Cheops and Khefren give place to Amenemhats and Thotmes and a host of Rameses, who yield in turn to such modernities as the Ptolemies, but the Nile remains the Nile, and the Red Sea the waterway from East to West.

As Darius and Xerxes and Alexander were compelled by the call of strategical law, so came Salah-ud-Din and Napoleon and Ferdinand de Lesseps and Sir Garnet Wolseley. And here, too, would come William of Hohenzollern, boasting to break the spine of the British Empire, in the vertebræ that Chesney planned and De Lesseps made.

Between Alexander the Great and William of Hohenzollern the host of moderns has been legion, but it was for Napoleon and his dreams of Eastern Empire to bring the British into the scene to short circuit their sea routes. Since the Corsican brought his legions, his savants, and his artists to the Pyramids, the English have entered into the joint control of the Levant, and to help them have brought the armies of India. With Abercromby came David Baird and his sepoys. Sir Garnet Wolseley, in Egypt and in the Soudan, had Indian troops to help him, and now, lest William of Hohenzollern and his Ottoman allies should ‘break the British spine,’ [66] and disturb the peace and plenty of Egypt, not only has India sent troops, but all elements of the Empire far and near. Never, even in the days of Alexander’s armies, had so many varied contingents garrisoned Egypt, as came when the Hun threatened the Canal in force.

In the late autumn of 1915, what time Serbia was broken on the wheel, the Hun determined to overrun Egypt and Sinai and Goshen, breaking thereby the British spine. But the Mistress of the Sea said No. The army of Gallipoli was conjured back from the Hellespont and the outer Empire sent its levies, and the great plans of the All-Highest were ‘postponed.’

The force gathered in Egypt was the most wonderful combination of the Empire that can be imagined. To the gathering came first and most famous a division of the old army, the army that has held the line from the Yser to the Aisne, and lies in a grave and lives in a memory for its guerdon, the world round. With them were Territorial divisions, and divisions of the new army, brigades of yeomen, divisions from Australia and New Zealand, the Maoris cheek by jowl with the white, a model in this respect to the rest of the Empire. Not only was the Indian army proper there—Gurkha, Sikh, and Pathan in due and ancient form—but the armies of the protected states, those imperial service contingents, the wisdom of their conception yearly more apparent. But the tally of Empire ended not with Gwalior, Mysore, and Bikaneer. Hospitals from Canada, Sambo from the West Indies cleaning his rifle to Moody and Sankey hymns, and the Afrikander corps of Dutch and English added to that pageant of Empire, standing four-square with the troops of the Sultan himself.

Strategically to the world’s power and commerce, the situation of Egypt is as favourable now as in the days of Alexander, and troops are as well placed there against emergency as anywhere, and as the danger to Egypt lessened were ready to be sent by those who rule the sea North, South, East, or West. Troops can come and go and be switched back quicker than foes can assemble.

The defending of the canal, a waterless tract, void of roads in its immediate vicinity, is no easy matter and a subject of much controversy, the manner of its defence depending, like that of most other localities, on the troops available and the strength of the enemy threat. The difficulties have been overcome by a herculean effort. Atkins bathes happily in its water, and watches the ships of allies and of neutrals—those lesser breeds who wait—pass us safely.

[67]

To most of the English the canal has seemed a desert track dotted with lonely gares , akin in their solitude to a Red Sea lighthouse. A further acquaintance with them has dispelled many imaginings. The gares , the friendly chefs de gare , and their brimming quivers have assumed a different aspect from their ancient one of milestones on the road to India.

British patrols thread the ancient course of the Nile now dry, the Pelusiac and Tanaitic channels that found the sea east of the canal and explain the delta-like lagoons that still remain. The ruins of Pelusium and the ancient channel explain how Cleopatra, defeated on the high seas, escaped by water inland to Damietta, and how the Holy Family found the road to Egypt far easier than it is now. Across Lake Menzalah from Port Said lie the ruins of Tanais, the capital of the Pharaohs in the time of Moses. El Qantara, a British post, closes the road from Palestine to Egypt that has run since time was, and that has seen in our own time the legions of Napoleon march by the bridge over the arm of the marsh for Syria. ‘ Partant pour la Syrie ’ with a vengeance, many, poor souls, to die miserably.

And no doubt over the El Qantara rode also the savants in their high hats and veils, their long directoire coats and their striped pantaloons—like any member of the various royal societies of to-day, but with the chill off—while the escorting chasseurs chaffed them and their umbrellas.

So to-day Port Said and Suez and Ismailia and Cairo are full of the soldiery, and a wide camp is spread under the Pyramid of Ghizr, and young officers walk along the groyne at Port Said, asking ‘what is the history of that funny old green statue’ which stands a wonder of the world, like the Phare in ancient Alexandria. Shades of Ferdinand de Lesseps and Rawdon Chesney! What, indeed, is the history of that ‘funny old green statue,’ and the ‘spine of the British Empire’ as the Hun has immortalised it? It is a phrase for which we may thank William of Hohenzollern.

The mass of the force in Egypt transferred from Gallipoli, rage the ‘ unterseebote ’ never so fiercely, is resting and retraining. If you’ve been six months on Gallipoli you’ll run a mile to see a nursing sister, and both Atkins and his officers are soft of heart. Graceful Cairenes in French cut skirts of black crépe de chine with ever the topmost button undone, with black head-shawls of the same material, and evanescent veils that faintly cloud to distraction the face below the eyes, are strong wine for young soldiers. So attractive is the dress that the old hand will tell you [68] that many another than Cairenes will don the dress when out for a spree—a disguise that also enhances attraction is a good find, mesdames !

Atkins himself and Hotspur the yeoman are nothing if not gallant. Here is a true story from Port Said. Time about 8 P.M. Attractive English lady hears two soldiers walking fast behind who come up one on either side.

First Soldier. Beg pardon, miss, do you speak English?

Attractive Lady. Yes.

Both Soldiers. Oh, you are English!

First Soldier. I think we saw you waving out of the window.

Attractive Lady. I think you are mistaking me for Mrs. Brown’s nursemaid!

Second Soldier ( severely ). You must be an ass to take this young lady for a nursemaid!

Both Soldiers. Perhaps we ought not to have spoken, but we are very lonely—may we walk with you?

Attractive Lady. I am going this way.

First Soldier. Would you tell us who you are, miss?

Attractive Lady. I am the chaplain’s sister. ( Sensation and silence. )

First Soldier ( plucking up courage ). We never saw a chaplain’s sister like you before.

Second Soldier. No, indeed, only one I knew was enough to give you the ’orrors.

Attractive Lady ( somewhat flattered, stopping at door of a house under a street lamp ). I must say good-night now. I live here.

Both Soldiers. Now we see you we are sorry we spoke to you, for we can see you are more one for the officers than for us.

( Exit. )

And so it runs from Putney to Port Said, and from Cambridge to Cairo. Soldiers are very susceptible gents, as the late Francis Bacon knew and so stated.

And while one big army has delved and dug and built on the canal and taken toll of Sinai, another force has chased the Senussi up and down the Western desert, and yeomen from the shires have watered their horses at the garden steps of the week-end villa at Matrush, where Antony entertained Cleopatra. This is no doubt foretold by one of the minor prophets whom Voltaire considered capable de tout . It is certainly a dramatic event for those who moralise on empires’ rise and wane.

Hardly less striking is the prolonged pursuit and charge of [69] the Senussi by His Grace of Westminster at the head of the motor bandits—as the army will call the armoured motor-car—in that same Western desert. The hyacinth and the iris grew for a wonder on surface free from shifting sands, and the armoured car trick was brought off in a fashion and with a dash that its promoters could hardly have hoped for in their most enthusiastic moments.

War has brought many surprises and troubles to the desert and its denizens. In Sinai, where the Bedouin lives by the date palm, there has come starvation, and why? Because the female date must be fertilised by hand, and the male dates are few and far between. The date fertiliser is a skilled professional and lives in Egypt, and Turks in Sinai have meant that date trees go unwed. The which is a parable. There is no remedy save perhaps one similar to that suggested by the American mayor to the man who complained that the ‘wather had come into me back cellar and drowned all me hins.’ ‘Young man, I should advise you to keep ducks,’ and the Bedouin might grow the hermaphrodite date. In the country of the scarabæus it might well be found as Alexander’s soldiers left it on the Indus. If war has brought harm to some, it has in Egypt brought profit to the many, and the Greek is ever ready to trade, and merchants one and all have risen to the occasion and waxed fat. In Alexandria the Greek influence is very great and sympathy with the Allies considerable. The Greek will tell you they come of a northern stock, and will quote the body worship of the bel âge to illustrate affinity with the English, and that Greeks alone of all Levantine races or Latin races either have pronounced ‘ th ’ since time was like the English—which, be it true or false, all makes for good trade. The soldiery all the year are better than the Americans in the winter, and Young Australia has money to spend.

Another wonder of the ages is that Egypt from the Pyramids to Tel el Kebir should be the Aldershot of the Australians and New Zealanders, where Tommy Cornstalk learns to obey for a common cause and to let off steam in the process.

And over it all grin in the morning sun the Ethiopian lips of the Sphinx—noting one more trivial mark of chalk on granite, one more grain of sand in the hour-glass, one more struggle of the captains and the kings, one more grim grin at peoples rending themselves—perhaps the thousand-year-long grin sprang from the knowledge that it had only to endure long enough to see William of Hohenzollern show the world the way of peace, while the very sand mocked back again.

Was ever a name less appropriately given? I have heard of a Paradise Court in a grimy city slum and a dilapidated whitewashed house on the edge of a Connaught bog which had somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain sadness. Sweet Lavender is a sheer astonishment. I hear the words and think of the edgings of old garden borders, straggling spiky little bushes with palely, unobtrusive flowers. I think of linen cupboards, of sheets and pillow-cases redolent with very delicate perfume. I think of the women who wander through such gardens, who find a pride in their store of scented house-linen, delicately nurtured ladies, very gentle, a little tinged with melancholy, innocent, sweet. My thoughts wander through memories and guesses about their ways of life. Nothing in the whole long train of thought prepares me for, or tends in any way to suggest this Sweet Lavender.

It is a building. In the language of the Army—the official language—it is a hut; but hardly more like the hut of civil life than it is like the flower from which it takes its name. The walls are of thin wood. The roof is corrugated iron. It contains two long low halls. Glaring electric lights hang from the rafters. They must glare if they are to shine at all, for the air is thick with tobacco smoke. Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of soldiers. In one, that which we enter first, the men are sitting, packed close together at small tables. They turn over the pages of illustrated papers. They drink tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns and slices of bread and butter. They write those letters home which express so little and, to those who understand, mean so much. Of the letters written home from camp, half at least are on paper which bear the stamp of the Y.M.C.A.—paper given to all who ask in this hut and a score of others. Reading, eating, drinking, writing, chatting, or playing draughts, everybody smokes. Everybody, such is the climate, reeks with damp. Everybody is hot. The last thing that the air suggests to the nose of one who enters is the smell of Sweet Lavender.

In the other, the inner hall, there are more men, still more [71] closely packed together, smoking more persistently, and the air is even denser. Here no one is eating, no one reading. Few attempt to write. The evening’s entertainment is about to begin. On a narrow platform at one end of the hall is a piano. A pianist has taken possession of it. He has been selected by no one in authority, elected by no committee. He has occurred, emerged from the mass of men; by virtue of some energy within him has made good his position in front of the instrument. He flogs the keys and above the babel of talk sounds some rag-time melody, once popular, now forgotten or despised at home. Here or there a voice takes up the tune and sings or chants it. The audience begin to catch the spirit of the entertainment. Some one calls the name of Corporal Smith. A man struggles from his seat and leaps on to the platform. He is greeted with applauding cheers. There is a short consultation between him and the pianist. A tentative chord is struck. Corporal Smith nods approval and turns to the audience. His song begins. If it is the kind of song which has a chorus the audience shouts it, and Corporal Smith conducts the singing with wavings of his arm.

Corporal Smith is a popular favourite. We know his worth as a singer, demand and applaud him. But there are other candidates for favour. Before the applause has died away, while still acknowledgments are being bowed, another man takes his place on the platform. He is a stranger, and no one knows what he will sing. But the pianist is a man of genius. Whisper to him the name of a song, give even a hint of its nature, let him guess at the kind of voice, bass, baritone, tenor, and he will vamp an accompaniment. He has his difficulties. A singer will start at the wrong time, will for a whole verse perhaps make noises in a different key; the pianist never fails. Somehow, before very long, instrument and singer get together—more or less. There is no dearth of singers, no bashful hanging back, no waiting for polite pressure. Everyone who can sing, or thinks he can, is eager to display his talent. There is no monotony. A boisterous comic song is succeeded by one about summer roses, autumn leaves, and the kisses of a maiden at a stile. The vagaries of a drunkard are a matter for roars of laughter. A song about the beauty of the rising moon pleases us all equally well. An original genius sings a song of his own composition, rough-hewn verses set to a familiar tune, about the difficulty of obtaining leave and the longing that is in all our hearts for a return to ‘Blighty; dear old Blighty.’ [72] Did ever men before fix such a name on the standard for which they fight? Now and again some one comes forward with a long narrative song, a kind of ballad chanted to a tune very difficult to catch. It is about as hard to keep track with the story as to pick up the tune. Words—better singers fail in the same way—are not easily distinguished, though the man does his best, clears his throat carefully between each verse and spits over the edge of the platform to improve his enunciation. No one objects to that. About manners and dress the audience is very little critical. But about the merits of the songs and the singers the men express their opinions with the utmost frankness. The applause is genuine, and the singer who wins it is under no doubt about its reality. The song which makes no appeal is simply drowned by loud talk, and the unfortunate singer will crack his voice in vain in an endeavour to regain the attention he has lost.

Encores are rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one, unmistakably, with an imitation of a drunkard singing ‘Alice, where art Thou?’ The pianist fails to keep in touch with the hiccoughing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight and continues to yell till the singer comes forward again. This time he gives us a song about leaving home, a thing of heart-rending pathos, and we wail the chorus:

The entertainment draws to its close about 8 o’clock. Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the réveillé at 5.30 in the morning. The end is always the same, but always comes strangely, always as a surprise. We sing a hymn, for choice a very sentimental hymn. We say a short prayer, often as rugged and unconventional as the entertainment itself. Then ‘The King.’ In these two words we announce the national anthem, and the men stand stiffly to attention while they sing. At half-past eight, by order of the supreme authorities, Sweet Lavender hut must close its doors. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a last glass of Horlick’s Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud to our tents. This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the [73] outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served. Dripping cups and sticky buns are passed to them with inconceivable rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for, something whose value to them is above all measuring with pennies—the friendly smile, the kindly word, of a woman. We can partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this work—servile, sticky, dull work—for men who are neither kith nor kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do; without praise, pay, or hope of honours, often without thanks. If ‘the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom,’ surely these deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance of surpassing sweetness. Perhaps, after all, the hut is well-named Sweet Lavender. The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies. It is not every Y.M.C.A. which is honoured with a name. Sweet Lavender stands alone here among huts distinguished only by numbers. But surely they should all be called after flowers, for in them grow the sweetest blooms of all.

I.

In some equine Elysium where there are neither flies nor dust nor steep hills nor heavy loads; where there is luscious young grass unlimited with cool streams and shady trees; where one can roam as one pleases and rest when one is tired: there, far from the racket of gun wheels on hard roads and the thunder of opposing artillery, oblivious of all the insensate folly of this warring human world, reposes, I doubt it not, the soul of Bilfred.

His was a humble part. He was never richly caparisoned with embroidered bridle and trappings of scarlet and gold. He never swept over the desert beneath some Arab sheikh with the cry ‘Allah for all!’ ringing in his ears. He bore no general to victory, no king to his coronation. But he served his country faithfully, and in the end, when he had helped to make some history, he died for it.

It is eight years since he joined the battery—a woolly-coated, babyish remount straight from an Irish dealer’s yard. Examining him carefully we found that beneath his roughness he was not badly shaped; a trifle long in the back perhaps, and a shade too tall—but then perfection is not attainable at the government price. There was no denying that his head was plain and his face distinctly ugly. From his pink and flabby muzzle a broad streak of white ran upwards to his forehead, widening on the near side so as almost to reach his eye. The grotesquely lop-sided effect of this was enhanced by a tousled forelock which straggled down between his ears.

[75]

The question of naming him arose and some one said: ‘Except for his face, which is like nothing on earth, he’s the image of old Alfred that we cast last year.’

Now a system prevailed in the battery by which horses were called by names which began with the letter of their subsection.

‘Well,’ said some one else, ‘he’s been posted to B sub; why not call him Bilfred?’

And Bilfred he became.

Our rough-rider at the time was a patient man, enthusiastic enough over his job to take endless trouble with young horses. This was fortunate for the new-comer, who proved at first an obdurate pupil. Scientists tell us, of course, that in relative brain-power the horse ranks low in the animal scale—lower than the domestic pig, in fact. This may be so, but Bilfred was certainly an exception. It was obvious, too obvious, that he thought , that he definitely used his brain to question the advisability of doing any given thing. To his rebellious Celtic nature there must have been added a percentage of Scotch caution. When any new performance was demanded of him he would ask himself, ‘Is there any personal risk in this, and even if not, is there any sense in doing it?’ Unless satisfied on these points he would plead ignorance and fear and anger alternately until convinced that it would be less unpleasant to acquiesce. For instance, being driven round in a circle in the riding school at the end of a long rope struck him as a silly business; but when he discovered (after a week) that he could neither break the rope nor kick the man who was holding it, he (metaphorically) shrugged his shoulders and trotted or walked, according to orders, with a considerable show of willing intelligence. It took four men half a day to shoe him for the first time, and he was in a white lather when they had finished. But on the next and on every subsequent occasion he was as docile as any veteran.

A saddle was first placed upon him, at a moment when his attention was distracted by a handful of corn offered to him by a confederate of the rough-rider’s. He even allowed himself to be girthed up without protest. But when, suddenly and without due warning, he felt the weight of a man upon his back, his horror was apparent. For a moment he stood stock still, trembling slightly and breathing hard. Then he made a mighty bound forward and started to kick his best. To no purpose; he could not get his head down, and the more he tried, the more it hurt him. [76] The weight meanwhile remained upon his back. Exhausted, he stood still again and gave vent to a loud snort. His face depicted his thoughts. ‘I’m done for,’ he felt, ‘this thing is here for ever.’ He was soothed and petted until his first panic had subsided; then coaxed into a good humour again with oats. At the end of a minute or so he was induced to move forward—cautiously, nervously at first, and then with more confidence. ‘Unpleasant but not dangerous’ was his verdict. In half an hour he was resigned to his burden.

Yet not entirely. Every day when first mounted he gave two or three hearty kicks. He hated the cold saddle on his back for one thing, and for another there was always a vague hope.... One day, about a fortnight afterwards, this hope fructified. A loose-seated rider, in a moment of bravado, got upon him and immediately the customary performance began. At the second plunge the man shot up into space and landed heavily on the tan. Bilfred, palpably as astonished as he was pleased, tossed his head, snorted in triumph and bolted round the school, kicking at intervals. For five thrilling minutes he enjoyed the best time he had had since he left Connemara. Then, ignominiously, he succumbed to the temptation of a proffered feed tin and was caught, discovering too late, to his chagrin, that the tin was empty. It was his first experience of the deceitfulness of man, and he did not forget it.

Six weeks later he had become a most accomplished person. He could walk and trot and even canter in a lumbering way; he answered to rein and leg, could turn and twist, go sideways and backwards; greatest miracle of all, he had been taught to lurch in ungainly fashion over two-foot-six of furze.

But he had accomplished something beyond all this. He had acquired a reputation. It had become known throughout the battery that there were certain things which could not be done to Bilfred with impunity. If you were his stable companion, for example, you could not try to steal his food without getting bitten, neither could you nibble the hairs of his tail without getting kicked. If you were a human being you could not approach him in his stall until you had spoken to him politely from outside it. You could not attempt to groom him until you had made friends with him, and even then you had to keep your eyes open. You got used to the way he gnashed his teeth and tossed his head about, but occasionally, when you were occupied with the ticklish under-part of him, he would show his dislike of the operation by catching [77] you unawares by the slack of your breeches and throwing you out of his stall.

But there was no vice in him. He was always amenable to kindness, and prepared to accept gifts of sugar and bread with every symptom of gratitude and approval. Rumour even had it that he had once eaten the stable-man’s dinner with apparent relish. And he flourished exceedingly in his new environment. His baby roundness had disappeared and been replaced by hard muscle. He no longer moved with an awkward sprawling gait, but with confidence and precision. His dark-bay coat was sleek and smooth, his mane hogged, his heels neatly trimmed. Only his tail remained the difficulty. It was long and its hairs were coarse and curly. Moreover, he persisted in carrying it slightly inclined towards the off side, as if to draw attention to it. Frankly it was a vulgar tail. But, on the whole, Bilfred was presentable.

When the time came to complete his education by putting him in draught he surprised an expectant crowd of onlookers by going up into his collar at once and pulling as if he had done that sort of work for years. And so, as a matter of fact, he had. Irish horses are often put into the plough as two-year-olds—a fact which had been forgotten. But he would not consent to go in the wheel. He made this fact quite clear by kicking so violently that he broke two traces, cut his hocks against the foot-board and lamed himself. Since ploughs do not run downhill on to one’s heels, he saw no reason why a gun or wagon should. Persuasion was found to be useless, and for once his obstinacy triumphed. But he did not abuse his victory nor seek to extend his gains. He proved himself a willing worker in any other position, and soon, on his merits as much as on his looks, he was promoted from the wagon to the gun and definitely took his place as off leader. It was a good team; some said the show one of the battery. The wheelers were Beatrice and Belinda, who knew their job as well as did their driver, whom they justly loved. Being old and dignified they never fretted, but took life calmly and contentedly. In the centre Bruno and Binty, young, both of them, and rather excitable, needed watching or they lost condition, but both had looks. The riding leader was old Bacchus, tall and strong and honest, a good doer and a veteran of some standing. Moreover, he was a perfect match for Bilfred. All six of them were of the same mottled dark-bay colour.

In course of time Bilfred, quick, like most horses, to pick up habits, exhibited all the characteristics of the typical ‘hairy.’ [78] (It is to be observed that the term is not one of abuse but of esteem and affection.) He became frankly and palpably gluttonous, stamping and whinnying for his food and bolting it ravenously when he got it. At exercise he shied extravagantly at things which did not frighten him in the least. He displayed an obstinate disinclination to leave other horses when required to do so; and at riding drill he quickly discovered that to skimp the corners as much as possible tends to save exertion. Artillery horses are not as a rule well bred; one finds in their characters an astonishing mixture of cunning, vulgarity, and docile good-tempered willingness which makes them altogether lovable. Their condition reflects their treatment as in a mirror. Properly looked after they thrive; neglected, their appearance betrays the fact to every experienced eye. They have an enormous contempt for ‘these ’ere mufti ’orses,’ as our farrier once described someone’s private hunter. Watch a subsection out at water when a contractor’s cart pulls up in the lines; note the way they prick their ears and stare, then drop their heads to the trough again with a sniff. It is as if they said in so many words ‘Who the deuce are you? Oh! a mere civilian!’

Bilfred was like them all in many ways. But, in spite of everything, he never lost his personality. He invariably kicked three times when he was first mounted—and never afterwards on that particular day; he hated motors moving or stationary; and he was an adept at slipping his head collar and getting loose. It was never safe to let go his head for an instant. With ears forward and tail straight up on end, he was off in a flash at a trot that was vulgarly fast. He never galloped till his angry pursuers were close, and then he could dodge like a Rugby three-quarter. If he got away in barracks he always made straight for the tennis-lawns, where his soup-plate feet wrought untold havoc. And no longer was he to be lured to capture with an empty feed tin. Everybody knew him, most people cursed him at times, but for all that everybody loved him.

II.

I think that when a new history of the Regiment comes to be written honourable mention should be made therein of a certain team of dark bays that pulled the same gun of the same battery for so many years. They served in England and in Ireland, in France and in the Low Countries; they thundered over the grassy [79] flats of Salisbury Plain; they toiled up the steep rocky roads of Glen Imaal; they floundered in the bogs of Okehampton. They stood exposed in all weathers; they stifled in close evil-smelling billets, in trains, and on board ship. They were present at Mons; they were all through the Great Retreat; they swept forward to the Marne and on to the Aisne; they marched round to Flanders in time for the first battle of Ypres. They were never sick nor sorry, even when fodder was short and the marches long, even when there was no time to slake their raging thirsts. They pulled together in patience and in dumb, pathetic trust of their lords and masters, knowing nothing, understanding nothing, until at last Fate overtook them.

At the beginning of August 1914 the battery had just returned to its station after a month’s hard work at practice camp. Bilfred, a veteran now of more than seven years’ service, had probably never been in better condition in his life. Ordinarily he would have been given an easy time for some weeks, with plenty of food and just enough exercise and collar work to keep him fit for the strain of the big manœuvres in September.

But there were to be no 1914 manœuvres. About August 6 things quite beyond Bilfred’s comprehension began to happen. Strange men arrived to join the battery and in their ignorance took liberties with him which he resented. Every available space in the lines became crowded with unkempt, queer-looking horses, obviously of a low caste. Bilfred was shod a fortnight before his time by a new shoeing-smith, for whom he made things as unpleasant as possible. His harness, which usually looked like polished mahogany decorated with silver, was dubbed and oiled until it looked (and smelt) disgusting. When the battery went out on parade, all these absurd civilian horses with bushy tails (some even with manes!) went with it, and for a day or two behaved disgracefully. The whole place was in confusion and everybody worked all day long. Bilfred, ignorant of the term ‘mobilisation,’ was completely mystified.

A week or so later he was harnessed up in the middle of the night, hooked in and marched to the station. Now it had been his habit for years to object to being entrained. On this occasion he was doubly obstinate and wasted much precious time. Other horses, even his own team-mates, went in quietly in front of him; it made no difference, he refused to follow them. A rope was put round his quarters and he was hauled towards the truck. He dug his toes in and tried to back. Then, suddenly, his hind legs slipped [80] and he sat down on his haunches like a dog, tangled in the rope and unable to move. In the dim light of the station-siding his white face and scared expression moved us to laughter in spite of our exasperation. He struggled to his feet again, the cynosure of all eyes, and the subject of many curses. Then, for no apparent reason whatever, he changed his mind and allowed himself to be led into the next truck, which was empty, just as though it was his own stall in barracks. And once inside he tried by kicking to prevent other horses being put in with him.

He continued in this contrary mood for some time and upheld his reputation for eccentricity. Some horses made a fuss about embarking. He made none. He showed his insular contempt for foreigners by making a frantic effort to bite the first French soldier he saw—a sentry on the landing quay, who, in his enthusiasm for his Allies, came too close. He got loose during the night we spent at the rest camp, laid flat about an acre of standing corn, and was found next morning in the lines of a cavalry regiment, looking wofully out of place.

On the railway journey up to the concentration area, he slipped down in the truck several times and was trampled on by the other horses. The operation of extricating him was dangerous and lengthy. When we detrained he refused food and water, to our great concern. But he took his place in the team during the twenty-mile march that followed and was himself again in the evening.

Where everybody was acutely conscious of the serious nature of the business during the first day or so, it was something of a relief to watch the horses behaving exactly as they normally did at home. We, Heaven help us! knew little enough of what was in store for us, but they, poor brutes, knew nothing. Oats were plentiful—what else mattered? Bilfred rolled over and over on his broad back directly his harness was removed, just as he always did; he plunged his head deep into his water and pushed his muzzle to and fro washing his mouth and nostrils; he raised his head when he had drunk, stretched his neck and yawned, staring vacantly into space as was his wont. For him the world was still at peace. Of course it was—he knew no better. But we who did, we whose nerves were on edge with an excitement half-fearful half-exultant, saw these things and were somehow soothed by them.

Bilfred’s baptism of fire came early. A few rounds of shrapnel burst over the wagon-line on the very first occasion that we were [81] in action. Fortunately, the range was just too long and no damage was done. Some of the horses showed momentary signs of fear, but the drivers easily quieted them; and, besides, they were in a clover field—an opportunity too good to be wasted in worrying about strange noises. Bilfred, either because he despised the German artillery or because he imagined that the reports were those of his own guns, to which he was quite accustomed, never even raised his head. His curly tail flapped regularly from side to side, protecting him from a swarm of flies whilst he reached out as far as his harness would allow and tore up great mouthfuls of grass. He had always been a glutton, and it was as if he knew, shells or no shells, that this was to be his last chance for some time. It was; there followed four days of desperate strain for man and beast. Through clouds of powdery, choking dust, beneath a blazing August sun, parched with thirst, often hungry and always weary, Bilfred and his fellows pulled the two tons of steel and wood and complicated mechanism called a gun along those straight interminable roads of northern France. Thousands of horses in dozens of batteries were doing the same thing—and none knew why.

Then, on the fifth day, our turn came to act as rear-guard artillery. The horses, tucked away behind a convenient wood when we came into action just before dawn, had an easy morning—and there were many, especially amongst the new-comers received on mobilisation, who were badly in need of it. Now the function of a rear-guard is to gain time, and this we did. But, when at last the order to withdraw was given, our casualties were numerous and the enemy was close. Moreover, his artillery had got our range. The teams issuing from the shelter of their wood had to face a heavy fire, and it was at this juncture that the seasoned horses, the real old stagers, who knew as much about limbering up as most drivers and more than some, set an example to the less experienced ones. Bilfred (and I take him as typical of the rest) seemed with a sudden flash of intuition to realise that his apprenticeship and all his previous training had been arranged expressly that he might bear himself courageously in just such a situation as this. Somehow, in some quite inexplicable fashion, he knew that this was the supreme moment of his career. Regardless of bursting shells and almost without guidance from his driver he galloped straight for his gun, with ears pricked and nostrils dilated, the muscles rippling under his dark coat and his traces taut as bow-strings as he strained at his collar with every thundering stride. He wheeled with precision exactly over the [82] trail eye, checked his pace at the right moment, and ‘squared off’ so as to allow the wheelers to place the limber in position. It was his job, he knew what to do and he did it perfectly. B was the first gun to get away and the only one to do so without a casualty....

More marching, more fighting, day after day, night after night; men were killed and wounded; horses, dropping from utter exhaustion, were cut loose and left where they lay—old friends, some of them, that it tore one’s heart to abandon thus. But there could be no tarrying, the enemy was too close to us for that.

Then came the day when the terrible retreat southwards ceased as abruptly and as unexpectedly as it had begun. Rejoicing in an advance which soon developed into a pursuit we forgot our weariness and all the trials and hardships of the past. And I think we forgot, too, in our eagerness, that for the horses there was no difference between the advance and the retirement—the work was as hard, the loads as heavy. For our hopes were high. We knew that the flood of invasion was stemmed at last. We believed that final victory was in sight. Reckless of everything we pushed on, faster and still faster, until our strength was nearly exhausted. It mattered not, we felt; the enemy retreating in disorder before us must be in far worse plight.

And then, on the Aisne, we ran up against a strong position, carefully prepared and held by fresh troops. Trench warfare began, batteries dug themselves in as never before, and the horses were taken far to the rear to rest. They had come through a terrible ordeal. Some were lame and some were galled; staring coats, hollow, wasted backs, and visible ribs told their own tale. A few, at least, were little more than skeletons for whom the month’s respite that followed was a godsend. Good forage in plenty, some grazing and very light work did wonders, and when the moment came for the move round to Flanders the majority were ready for a renewed effort. Compared with what they had already done the march was easy work. They arrived on the Yser fit and healthy.

But the first battle of Ypres took its toll. Bringing up ammunition one dark night along a road which, though never safe, had perforce to be used for lack of any other, the teams were caught by a salvo of high explosive shell and suffered heavily. Four drivers and nine horses were killed, seven drivers and thirteen horses were wounded. Bilfred escaped unhurt, but he was the only one in his team who did. A direct hit on the limber brought [83] instantaneous death to the wheelers and their beloved driver. A merciful revolver shot put an end to Binty’s screaming agony. Bruno and Bacchus were fortunate in only getting flesh wounds from splinters. It was a sad breaking-up of the team which had held together through so many vicissitudes. It comforted us, though, to think that at least they had died in harness....

The winter brought hardship for horse as well as man. We built stables of hop-poles and sacking, but they were only a slight protection against the biting winds, and it was impossible to cope with the sea of slimy mud which was euphemistically termed the horse lines. In spite of all our precautions coughs and colds were rampant. About Christmas-time Bruno, always rather delicate, succumbed with several others to pneumonia, and a month later Bacchus strained himself so badly, when struggling to pull a wagon out of holding mud whilst the rest of the team (all new horses) jibbed, that he passed out of our hands to a veterinary hospital and was never seen again. Bilfred alone remained, and Nature, determined to do her best for him, provided him with the most amazingly woolly coat ever seen upon a horse. The robustness of his constitution made him impervious to climatic conditions, but the loss of Bacchus, his companion for so long, distressed him, and he was at pains to show his dislike of the substitute provided by biting him at all times except when in harness; then, and then only, was he Dignity personified.

The end came one day in early spring. The battery was in action in a part of the line where it was impossible to have the horses far away, for in those days we had to be prepared for any emergency. It so happened that the enemy, in the course of his usual morning ‘ strafe ,’ whether by luck or by intention, put an eight-inch howitzer shell into the middle of the secluded field where a few of our horses were sunning themselves in the warm air and picking at the scanty grass. Fortunately, they had been hobbled so that there was no stampede. The cloud of smoke and dust cleared away and we thought at first that no harm had been done. Then we noticed Bilfred lying on his side ten yards or so from the crater, his hind quarters twitching convulsively. As we went towards him, he lifted his head and tried to look at the gaping, jagged wound in his flank and back. There was agony in his soft brown eyes, but he made no sound. He made a desperate effort to get up, but could only raise his forehand. He remained thus for a moment, swaying unsteadily and in terrible distress. [84] Then he dropped back and lay still. A minute later he gave one long deep sigh—and it was over.

Our old farrier, who in his twenty years’ service had seen many horses come and go and who was not often given to sentiment, looked at him sadly.

‘’E’s gone,’ he said. ‘A good ’oss—won’t see the like of him again in the batt’ry this trip, I reckon.’

And Bilfred’s driver, the man who had been with him from the start, ceased his futile efforts to stem the flow of blood with a dirty handkerchief.

‘Oh! Gawd!’ he muttered in a voice of despair, and turned his back upon us all to hide his grief.

We kept a hoof, to be mounted for the battery mess when peace comes, for he was the last of the old lot and his memory must not be allowed to fade. The fatigue party digging his grave did not grumble at their task. He was an older member of the battery than them all and a comrade rather than a beast of burden.

I like to imagine that Bilfred had a soul—not such a soul as we try to conceive for ourselves perhaps—but still I like to picture him in some heaven suitable to his simple needs, dwelling in quiet peacefulness among the departed of his race. What a company would be his and what tales he would hear!—Tales of the chariots of Assyria and Rome, of the fleet Parthians and the ravaging hosts of Attila; stories of Charlemagne and King Arthur, of the lists and all the pomp of chivalry. And so down through the centuries to the crossing of the Alps in 1800 and the grim tragedy of Moscow twelve years later. Would he stamp his feet and toss his head proudly when he heard of the Greys at Waterloo or the Light Brigade at Balaclava? But stories of the guns would delight him more, I think—Fuentes D’Onoro, Maiwand, Néry, and Le Cateau.

It pleases me to think of him meeting Bacchus and Binty and the rest and arguing out the meaning of it all. Does he know now, I wonder, the colossal issues that were at stake during that terrible fortnight between Mons and the Marne, and does he forgive us our seeming cruelty?

I hope so. I like to think that Bilfred understands.

We had been away from our area for several days on a special mission and were the guests of the French Staff at X. The programme for the day included a visit to an observation post, the exact position of which was not known to our guide, and it was necessary to call at a French battery and pick up someone to show us the way. A very cheering description of the situation at Verdun by an officer who had just come from there had kept us rather later than usual at lunch, a fact to which we owed our escape from a very unpleasant bit of ‘strafing.’ We had still some 200 yards to go to reach the battery when the Huns started shelling it furiously. A few ‘overs’ came within about 100 yards of us and there was rather an unpleasant whirr of splinters, so we took refuge behind a house.

The crash of the first salvo had aroused a good woman and her baby and she came out, smiling, to see what was happening. Carrying the baby, she went out into the road and stood in the line of fire watching the fun. She occasionally dodged back behind the wall when the bits flew too near, just as a child would run from a snowball. She said her man was in the ‘Chasseurs Alpins’ and had been in the Vosges since the beginning—he was not afraid of the Boches, why should she be? A French ‘poilu’ passing by scolded her for exposing the child and she disappeared.

After five minutes of hot shelling the Huns stopped, and Lieutenant M., our guide, proposed that we should continue. The Hun usually caters for those people who ‘carry on’ at once, so we decided to visit a friend whose office was only two doors off. Lieutenant R. was delighted to see us. Yes, this particular Boche battery was ‘dégoûtant.’ It fired like a mitrailleuse, yes, and some of the ‘overs’ came this way. He had the honour to announce to us that ‘there was an unexploded 77-shell in his ceiling—no, it had not been there long and was probably still warm.’ Two more rounds battery fire then came over and we judged the trouble past for the time being. When we reached the battery we found they had had a bad time. It was an old territorial field battery—there [86] was probably not a gunner less than forty in it. One of the guns had had a direct hit. The wheel and part of the carriage were smashed. Two of the other gun emplacements had been knocked in. The German battery responsible for this had been located, and the bearded old Frenchmen were getting ready for retaliation. Three of the guns were already ready for action, and efforts were being made to heave the broken one up on to a temporary carriage so that at least one more shot might be got out of it! A telephone message had been sent up from the brigade asking them to have a guide ready for us, but the matter had been forgotten. There was far more excitement about this than about the bombardment. Lieutenant M. called up the Sergeant-Major and ‘strafed’ him unmercifully. The Sergeant-Major was ‘désolé,’ but at the moment he had been ‘très occupé.’ He was ‘confus’ and would ‘mon capitaine’ accept his apology—the ‘cochons de Bosches’ were far more responsible than he was. Lieutenant M. said it was all right, called him ‘mon vieux,’ and we departed for our post with a fit-up guide who persisted that he did not know the way, but who nevertheless got us there in the end and we had a good look at the enemy lines and the country beyond. On our return we passed a small cottage which had been hit by something big. More than half of it had been blown away and there was no roof left at all. The chimney, however, was still there and it poured forth a defiant stream of smoke as the owner cooked his dinner in a temporary shelter near the fireplace.

The French Headquarters mess was more than usually cheery that evening. The enemy had had another setback at Verdun.

The British, too, were going to take over more line from the French, and this brought the subject round to Great Britain and what she was doing in the war. This was a point I should have preferred to have left undiscussed at a time when the French were engaged in perhaps the greatest struggle in the war with, apparently, no direct assistance from us. Our hosts, however, insisted that, under the circumstances, we were doing a good deal more than could be expected of us. They were unanimous that the most remarkable achievement of this greatest of all wars was the raising of our large Imperial army. It was one thing to make good use of a working organisation as the Germans had, but, as staff officers, they would have believed it impossible for any country to have done what we have done. Each one was able to show the [87] insuperable difficulties that would have arisen in his own department, and there was nothing one could do but bow and agree with them.

Next morning we were off again on our rounds, this time with a different guide, Captain R.

We had a good view of the enemy’s lines from what had once been a child’s nursery. Poor kid! if she could see her playroom now! On the floor were a dismembered doll and part of a brick puzzle. The only furniture was a broken chair by the window and a toy cot in the corner of the room; the rest had been taken for some neighbouring billet. Near the window was a field telephone, and, on the wall near by, some printed instructions to artillery observers. The walls were decorated with numerous sketches, some of them quite well done, of French artillerymen and famous generals. A large hole in the wall and the familiar sickly smell of ‘tear shell’ showed that the enemy had detected the post and that it was no place to loiter in.

After seeing many interesting things that one cannot write about we reached one of the big ruined towns near the line, where we were entertained to lunch by two French officers. This lunch was one of the most memorable of my experiences at the front.

These officers, being engaged on very special and important work, were persona grata in the town and had a free hand in the matter of billets. At the time of our visit they were living in a house that might have been in Park Lane. A marble hall and staircase, luxuriously furnished rooms and all modern appointments—central heating, electric light, electric bells. The dining-room had every aspect of peace, wealth, and comfort. The table linen and service were of the best. The captain’s servant had evidently been a chef in private life. There were four courses and a variety of the best wines. All this was within less than a mile of the German front line, a fact which it would have been impossible to realise had it not been for the occasional desultory crack of a rifle and the regular crash and swirl of the French batteries firing over our heads! Our hosts were excellent fellows, as amusing and full of ‘esprit’ as only the French can be. They had been in the town over a year and had been shelled out of two other billets. They showed us the remains of their last home which had been even more luxurious than the present one. One could only gather some vague idea of what it had been like from the carved oak mantel-piece showing over a pile of débris at the end of the drawing-room [88] and the torn tapestry hanging from the walls. They had taken to the cellar just in time!

Experience had taught our friends to gauge the Hun’s intentions to a nicety. A shell would pass close to the house and burst on the other side of the road. ‘That’s all right—only a short one for such and such a public building.’ The Frenchmen put another tune on the gramophone and the next ‘marmite’ goes several streets away. On another occasion a heavy shell is heard coming over from another direction. It explodes with a resounding ‘crump’ a long way down the street. That comes from one of the batteries that shell this part of the town and our two officers have their coffee served in the cellar!

This knowing when to take to the cellar is a distinct characteristic of the French. They are not for taking any unnecessary risks as some of us are, but, when a dangerous job has to be done, they will go about it with a careless gaiety that is wholly unforced. It is this spirit which is holding up the French soldier to the admiration of the whole world; the spirit that has kept the German hordes out of Verdun, and that will continue to keep them at bay till the time is ripe for a concerted effort of the allied forces.

In theory we are all on saving bent just now, for it is only by saving that many of us can do anything towards winning the great fight; and that each one of us must do something, everyone agrees. Unfortunately, in practice, to us as a nation saving does not come easily: we have not the instinct to save. We know no more, indeed, than sparrows, of the art of making sixpence do the work of a shilling. Quite a fair number of the petty economies we pride ourselves on having effected, of late, are ending in something nearly akin to waste. Evidently we shall have to learn from other nations, nations more thrifty than ourselves, if we are ever to do anything really worth doing in the way of saving. And there is hardly a nation in Europe from which we might not learn if we would. The Germans are experts in all that concerns economy: were it otherwise the war would be nearer its end than it is. The Austrians, too, although by nature as wasteful as we are, have been driven by lack of means into cunning devices for making money go far. These are enemy nations, it is true; still, that is no reason, surely, why we should not learn from them, even though we may not buy with them, sell with them, or even talk.

Quite recently the Relief Committee in Strassburg issued a most instructive public notice. It is an appeal to parents to show their patriotism, as well as their thrift and care for public health, by seeing to it that their children go barefoot this summer. ‘By economising in boots you save leather, and thus render valuable service to your country,’ they are informed.

Now if our School Authorities could be induced to issue some such notice as this, and to address it imperatively to parents of all classes alike, not only would much leather be saved, and with it much money, but many poor little children would have a much better chance than they have, of living and thriving, while many poor mothers would be able to face the world more cheerily. It is safer by far to go barefoot, as everyone who has ever tried it knows, than to wear shoes unless they be good; and in normal times, for every child who wears good shoes, shoes into which water cannot make its way, there are legions who wear shoes that leak, that have gaps through which toes poke out, soles that serve no purpose. And the end of this is wet stockings, entailing coughs [90] and colds, croup, and even pneumonia. Really good shoes are expensive, it must be remembered: to keep a family of sturdy, active youngsters well shod costs more than to keep them well dressed. ‘We should get along fine if it was not for the shoes,’ I am always being told by working-class mothers. ‘It’s the shoes that take all the money.’

‘Not a week goes by but there’s mending to be done, even if there’s no shoes to be bought,’ a very trustworthy woman assures me. ‘Blakies, it’s true, are a help; but one must have something to fasten them on to.’

‘It’s just heart-breaking work trying to keep them all dry-shod,’ a mother of five children declares. ‘They have always, one or other of them, their toes or heels sticking out.’

‘One might think lads had hoofs instead of feet from the way their shoes go,’ another mother once informed me. ‘These were new a fortnight ago, and just see! There’s hardly a bit of sole left.’ Tears came into her eyes as she held the shoes up for me to look at.

Among the respectable poor, not only of the hand-working class, but of the lower-middle class, and this is the poorer of the two in these war days, the great trouble in life is the finding of shoes, the hopeless struggle to keep children’s feet well covered. Year by year, in every town in England, women are worried into their graves, because, let them do what they will, one pair of shoes wears out before they have the wherewithal to buy another. In every town, too, women lose their health and strength because, when they ought to be asleep, they will persist in working, that they may have the money to pay the cobbler. To see their boys and girls going about without even a patch to hide the holes in their shoes, seems to be more than most mothers can bear. And the saddest part of the business is they are sacrificing themselves quite uselessly, to a mere fetish. For very few of them have any thought of hygiene in their heads, when they toil and moil, pinch and save, that their children may have shoes: their thought is all of respectability. They are firmly convinced that to let them go barefoot would be to rob them of all claim to rank with the respectable, would be to dub them little ragamuffins in fact, and thus render them pariahs. And better than that work all night, no matter what it may lead to.

If these mothers were forced to let their children go barefoot, things would of course be otherwise; and they would be [91] forced, practically, were they called upon to do so for patriotism’s sake, for the sake of saving leather that the soldiers might have plenty of good shoes. There would be no loss of caste then in banishing shoes and stockings; on the contrary, it would be the correct thing to do, the ‘just so’; and they would do it right gladly, thankful that they could do it without exciting comment. And by doing it, they would both lighten immeasurably the heavy burden they themselves bear, and add to their children’s chance of developing into sturdy men and women, men and women able to do good work for their country, securing for themselves a fair share of life’s comfort and pleasure the while. For there is proof and to spare that boys and girls alike are better off all round, stronger, more vigorous, more active, without shoes than with them, unless the shoes be of better quality than those most of the respectable poor can afford to buy. Never would the Strassburg Committee have ventured to call upon parents to let their offspring go barefoot had they not known that, even so far as health was concerned, quite apart from the saving of leather, good, not harm, would result. For in Germany, whoever else may go on short commons, children, the Fatherland’s future defenders, are always well cared for. One of the reasons, indeed, that the Committee give for issuing their notice is that going barefoot is not only economical, and therefore, as things are, patriotic, but also hygienic. And that it is, most of us can see for ourselves.

There are districts both in Scotland and Ireland, to say nothing of Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, where there is hardly a shoe to be found. Yet the people there are more stalwart than in any district in England where every foot has its shoe. The finest lads I have ever come across are certainly the Montenegrin; and not one in twenty of them has either a shoe or a stocking. The only reformatory I have known where the little inmates are physically quite on a par with other children, as strong, alert, and light-hearted as other children, is the Eggenburg Reformatory, in Lower Austria, where both boys and girls all go barefoot, in winter as well as in summer.

Eggenburg is the one public institution, so far as I know, where the going-barefoot experiment has been tried, on a large scale, for the express purpose of benefiting the health of the inmates. And it was tried there under conditions that were just about as unfavourable as any conditions the wit of man could have devised. For the Eggenburg children are for the most part of the poorest of [92] the poor class, the most demoralised, the criminal or semi-criminal class; and such children almost always start life heavily handicapped physically, as well as morally. Everyone who goes to this Reformatory must have given proof, before he—or she—goes, that his natural bent is to do what is wrong; that he turns to the left rather than the right instinctively; that he takes to evil ways, in fact, just as a duckling takes to water. There were nearly 400 inmates the first time I was there; and among them, although the eldest was under sixteen, there were sixty convicted thieves, nine incendiaries, and a murderer. One boy had been forty times in the hands of the police before he went to Eggenburg; another, a tiny little fellow, was suffering from alcoholism when he arrived there. Nor was that all: very many of the children were being cruelly ill-treated, beaten, tortured, or starved, when the police took possession of them. Thus to try this experiment with such material as they were was to invite failure. And to try it in the Eggenburg district was certainly not to invite success. For the climate there is bitterly cold in winter. I have seen snow five feet deep around the Reformatory, and it lies there for months together. If folk can go barefoot there with impunity, they can assuredly go barefoot anywhere in England.

To make matters worse, the very officials who were told off to try the experiment were against it: they resented being called upon to try it, so sure were they that it was foredoomed. Not one among them was inclined, therefore, to do his best to render it a success. I very much doubt, indeed, judging by what they themselves told me later, whether anyone among them had even the wish that it should be a success. When Dr. Schöffel, the Provincial Home Minister, informed them that their charges were to go barefoot, every man in the institution, every woman too, rose up indignantly and denounced his project as quite wicked. The Directress of the girls’ wing stoutly refused to have lot or parcel with any such doings. If he chose to kill the boys, that was no concern of hers, but kill her girls he should not, she told him roundly. And to make them go barefoot would be to kill them, it would be downright murder, she declared; and she had never a doubt in her mind but that it would.

The storm spread from Eggenburg to Vienna, where public opinion was strongly on the side of the officials and against their Chief. The Viennese professed themselves quite shocked at his meanness. Questions were asked in the Landtag. ‘Is Lower [93] Austria so poor that she cannot buy shoes for her own adopted children?’ member after member demanded indignantly. Dr. Schöffel stood his ground firmly, however. That the experiment should be tried, he was determined; and for the children’s sake, not the rate-payers’. He was responsible for the children; it was his duty to see that the best that could be done for them should be done; and the best was not being done, he declared. When they arrived at Eggenburg they were almost all physically below the average of children of their age; they were lacking in stamina even when not tainted with disease. That in itself was bad, he maintained; but, what was worse, most of them were still below the average when they left. These children must each one of them, while at the Reformatory, be put on a par so far as in them lay with other children, he insisted. Otherwise they would later, when out in the world, be handicapped in the struggle for life, unable, therefore, to hold their own and earn their daily bread. It was, as he told me himself, for the express purpose of trying to put them physically on a par with other children, and thus give them a fair chance of making their way in the world, that he had determined they should go barefoot.

Consumption is terribly prevalent among the very poor in Lower Austria, it must be remembered; and it was at that time very prevalent at Eggenburg. The doctors had long been insisting that the little inmates ought to live practically out of doors the whole year round, working on the land, tending cattle. Arrangements had already been made for them to do so, but a difficulty had arisen. Working on the land and tending cattle in deep snow meant wet feet, wet stockings as well as wet shoes; and that for many of them spelt disaster. Dr. Schöffel was convinced, however, that it was not the wet feet that did the harm, but the wet shoes and stockings; and many of the doctors whom he consulted agreed with him. It was with their warm approval that he had decided to banish stockings and shoes and leave feet to take care of themselves—to try the going-barefoot experiment, in fact.

The experiment had long passed the experimental stage when I paid my first visit to Eggenburg; for, by that time, the inmates had already been going barefoot for some ten years. From the first it had proved a marked success, the very officials who had done everything they could to prevent its being tried, frankly admitted; so marked a success, indeed, that they had all become hearty supporters of the new system. Even the Directress of the girls’ [94] wing, who had almost broken her heart when the change was made, and would have resigned her post forthwith but for her devotion to her charges, spoke enthusiastically of the good it had wrought among them. Most of them were at a trying age, between twelve and sixteen; and most of them were delicate, never free from coughs and colds. She was as sure as of life itself, therefore, the first day they went barefoot, that they would all be ill in bed on the morrow. To her amazement, however, as she told me, when the morrow came, there was no sign of special illness among them. On the contrary, instead of coughing more than usual, they coughed less, and were in less urgent need of pocket-handkerchiefs. Before a week had passed the great majority of them had ceased coughing at all, and not one of them had a cold in her head.

The Director told me much the same tale; as it was with the girls so was it with the boys. By banishing shoes and stockings, he declared, Dr. Schöffel had practically banished colds with all their attendant evils. Under the new system, it was a rare thing for any boy to develop a cold after being at Eggenburg a week. The general health of all the children had improved quite wonderfully, both he and the Directress assured me, since going barefoot had become the order of the day. And what they said was confirmed by what I heard from every doctor I came across who knew Eggenburg; was confirmed, too, by what I saw there with my own eyes. For a finer set of youngsters than the boys and girls there I have never seen in any institution, and have not often seen anywhere else.

I had hardly crossed the threshold of Eggenburg before I heard, what I rarely hear in institutions, peal after peal of hearty laughter; and I saw little urchins flying as the wind in pursuit of something, I could not tell what. The very way they threw up their heels as they ran, the speed with which they went, showed the stuff of which they were made, the strength of their legs and backs; while the cries they raised left no doubt as to the strength of their lungs. There was not a laggard among them, not a weakling. Some of them, it is true, would have been all the better for more flesh on their bones, I found when I came to examine them; and some few were not quite so well grown as they ought to have been. Still they were a wonderfully vigorous set, considering the handicap with which they had started in life; and they were as alert as they were vigorous. They swarmed up poles and twirled themselves [95] round bars, in quite professional style; and went through their drill with head erect and soldierly swing. Evidently they were not troubled with nerves at all, nor had they any fear at all of strangers. They met my advances in the most friendly fashion; and answered my questions intelligently without hesitation, looking at me straight the while. Their eyes, I noticed, were not only bright, but, oddly enough, full of fun, many of them. They were a light-hearted set, it was easy to see, bubbling over with delight at being alive; they were a kindly sociable set, too, on good terms with themselves, one another, and even the officials.

This Eggenburg experiment certainly proves that both boys and girls are the better, not the worse, for going barefoot. Why, then, should they wear shoes? The wearing of them is sheer waste, surely; and in war days waste of any sort is unpatriotic, especially waste in shoes. For leather is none too plentiful, and is becoming scarcer and scarcer from day to day; while it is only by straining every nerve that shoemakers can keep the men at the Front even decently well shod. Were all the children in England to go barefoot, even if only for the next three months, our soldiers would many of them have much better shoes than they have. And most children would be delighted to go barefoot; and very many mothers would be delighted to save the money they now spend on shoes, if only the School Authorities, by appealing to them to do so for their country’s sake, would give them the chance of doing so without offence to their fetish, respectability. Unfortunately, many of these Authorities seem to prefer the worst of leaking, toe-crippling shoes to bare feet.

I once asked a certain Head Master to let a little Gipsy, who was sojourning in his district, go to his school without shoes. She had never worn them and did not wish to wear them. He was quite shocked. Such a thing was impossible, he assured me. The tone of the whole school would be lowered were a barefoot child to cross its threshold!

Edith Sellers.

This story belongs to an officer of the Canadians who at the time of its happening was playing a part in the opening months of the war as a private in the French Foreign Legion. In that capacity he saw a good deal of the men of our first Expeditionary Force, and although he is full of good stories of their amazing doings, he tells this particular one as perhaps the best and most typical example he met of the cold-blooded contempt of certain death, the calm indifference to consequences, the matter-of-fact tackling of the impossible which were such commonplaces with the old Regular Army in the first days, and which perhaps were the main factors in the performance of so many historic feats of arms.

It was during the Retreat, in the middle of that constant series of forced marches and hard fighting, when the remnants of retiring regiments were inextricably mixed, when the wounded were left behind, and the unwounded who were unable to keep up with their column or who strayed from it in the darkness found themselves blundering about the countryside, dodging groups of enemy cavalry and columns of enemy infantry, being fed and guided by the French villagers, working always towards the sound of the guns and struggling to rejoin their own army, that three just such stragglers after a careful reconnaissance ventured into the outskirts of a tiny French hamlet. One, the Canadian (who had been in Paris on the outbreak of war and, fearing that it would be months before a British force could take the field, had signed on in the French Foreign Legion and so made sure of an early and ample dose of the fighting), wore the picturesque dress of a private of the Legion; another was a French infantry of the Lines-man, and the third a private of a British infantry regiment. The ‘khaki,’ for no particular reason, except that he apparently took it for granted that it should be so, more or less took command of the party, while the Canadian, who spoke fluent French, acted as interpreter both between the party and the French ‘civvies,’ as the local inhabitants were indiscriminately described by the Englishman, and in conveying the orders of the self-appointed C.O. to the non-English-speaking ‘piou-piou.’

Enquiry of the villagers brought the information that there were no Germans in the hamlet, that a party of Uhlans had ridden [97] through towards the south an hour before, and that nothing had been seen of any Germans since.

‘Good enough,’ said the khaki man on hearing this. ‘I’m just about ready for a shut-eye myself after trekkin’ all last night. We’d better lie up till it’s gettin’ dark again, and then shove on an’ see if we can get the touch with our own push. You might ask ’em if this dorp has anythin’ goin’ in the way o’ rations—rooty an’ cheese an’ a pot o’ beer would just suit my present complaint.’

But the village did better than bread and cheese. The village—women, old men, and children—escorted the three warriors to the estaminet in the main street and with voluble explanations handed them over to the estaminet keeper.

‘Food? But assuredly yes—soup, good strong soup, and all ready and hot; an omelette, a very large omelette for three, to be ready the moment the soup was finished with; and then a veal stew, and cream cheese, and wine—wine white or red, whichever messieurs preferred.’

‘Fust class. Canada, tell ’er fust bloomin’ class. I’ll give up dinin’ at the Carlton an’ Savoy an’ come ’ere reg’lar in future, tell ’er. An’ how long before the bugle sounds for dinner?’

At once, they were told. If they would enter, the soup would be served as soon as they were seated. But the khaki demurred at that. ‘I must ’ave a wash first,’ he declared. ‘I ’aven’t ’ad a decent wash for days. Just ask ’er if she’ll show me where the pump is.’ He extracted soap and a very dirty towel from his haversack and followed his conductress out to the back, whence presently came the sound of pumping water, a vigorous splashing and mighty blowing.

‘Come on, Tommy,’ said the Canadian when the other appeared again clean, save for the stubble on his chin, glowing and rosy. ‘We’ve started the soup. Good goods too. Pitch in.’

‘That looks good,’ said Tommy sniffing hungrily. He pulled down his shirt-sleeves and carefully deposited in the corner near his chair the rifle, haversack, and ammunition-pouches he had carried with him out to the pump and in again. ‘But we don’t want them Oo-lans ’oppin’ in an’ spoilin’ the dessert. There ain’t enough o’ us to post proper pickets an’ outposts, but wot’s the matter wi’ enlistin’ some o’ them kids for temporary duty? I’ll bet they’d spot a Oo-lan a mile off an’ tip us the wink if they was comin’ this way.’

There were plenty of volunteers for the duty, and half a dozen of the old men of the village hobbled off to post themselves at [98] various points, each with several enthusiastic small boy gallopers in attendance to carry urgent despatches as required.

Then Tommy sat down, and the three ate and drank ravenously. They devoured the soup, the omelette, and the stew, and were proceeding with the cheese when they heard the patter and rush of flying feet outside. Next instant one boy burst into the room, another followed in a whirlwind rush, and the two broke into breathless and excited speech.

The first dozen words were enough for the Canadian. ‘They’re coming,’ he said abruptly to the others and jumped from his seat. ‘Very many Germans, the kid says. Come on, we must hustle out of this quick.’

He ran to the door and looked out, the small boys following, still talking rapidly and pointing and gesticulating. The Canadian took one look and stepped back instantly under cover, the French piou-piou, who had followed close on his heels, doing the same. ‘They’re not in sight yet, but from what the kids say they should be round the corner and in sight in minutes. They’re coming from the north, so we’d better slide out south—or hike out into the fields and find a hole to hide up in.’

‘Comin’ from the north, eh?’ said the Englishman. He was quickly but methodically stowing the remains of the long loaf in his haversack, and that done slipped quickly into his accoutrements. ‘That means they’re goin’ on the way we was tryin’ to stop ’em goin’, an’ pushin’ up into the firin’ line.’

The Canadian and the piou-piou were engaged in rapid talk with the landlady and a few other women and a couple of old men who had hurried in. Tommy walked over to the door, stepped outside, and had a careful look round. ‘Look ’ere,’ he said calmly, stepping back into the room. ‘There’s a good ditch on both sides o’ the road. You an’ Froggy ’ad better take a side each. I’ll take the middle o’ the road, an’ there’s a barrel outside I can roll out there for cover.’

The Canadian stared at him blankly. ‘What d’ you mean?’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Why, we’re goin’ to stop them, of course,’ said Tommy, looking at him with an air of slight surprise. ‘You said they was Germans an’ goin’ south. That means they’re goin’ to reinforce their firin’ line, so we’ll ’ave to stop their reinforcin’ game. Come on, you two ’ad better take cover, an’ we’ll give ’em socks as they come round the corner.’

[99]

He walked outside and proceeded to roll the empty barrel into the middle of the road a little way down from the estaminet, which was the last house of the village. He left an utterly dumbfounded Canadian and an impatient and non-comprehending Frenchman who was rapidly reduced to a state of incredulous amazement by the information which the Canadian, after a long breath and a longer pause, proceeded to impart to him.

Now the Canadian, who is responsible for this story, openly confesses that the last thing on earth he should have thought of attempting was any resistance of the German advance, and more than that, that it was with the greatest possible reluctance he did finally join the imperturbable Tommy in the impossible task. He tried first to point out the folly of it.

‘See here, Tommy,’ he called from the inn door. ‘You don’t rightly understand. There’s hundreds of these chaps coming, thousands of ’em for all I know, but at least a regiment from what the old man says who saw them. We can’t do anything to a lot like that. We’d far better get off the grass while we’ve a chance.’

But Tommy had planted his empty barrel fairly in the middle of the road and was settling himself snugly at full length behind it, his legs spread wide and left shoulder well advanced after the approved fashion of his musketry instructor. ‘They’re goin’ south,’ he called back. ‘An’ we come over ’ere to stop ’em going south. So we’ll just ’ave to stop ’em.’ And he commenced to lay cartridges in a convenient little pile at his elbow and push a clip into his rifle magazine.

Even then the Canadian hesitated. The whole thing was so utterly mad, such a senseless throwing away of their three lives that he was still inclined to clear out and away. But that prone figure in the road held him. He felt, as he puts it himself, that he couldn’t decently leave the beggar there and run away. And a call from outside settled the matter by the calm assurance it held that the two of them were going to stand by and see the game through. ‘You two ’ad better be jildi . [3] I can see the dust risin’ just round the corner.’

The Canadian flung a last hurried sentence to the piou-piou, ran out and across the road and dropped into the ditch in line with the barrel. The Frenchman looked round at the women and old men, shrugged his shoulders and laughed shortly. ‘These mad English,’ he said hopelessly, ‘but, name of a name, what can a Frenchman do but die along with them?’ and he too ran out and took his place in the nearer ditch in line with the others.

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Tommy looked over his shoulder at him and nodded encouragingly. ‘Good man, Froggy,’ he said loudly, and then turning to the Canadian and lowering his voice to a confidential undertone, ‘I’m glad to see Froggy roll up, for the credit of ’is reg’ment’s sake—whatever ’is reg’ment may be. ’E was so long, I was beginnin’ to think ’e was funkin’ it.’ The Canadian admits to a queer relief that he himself had not ‘funked it,’ but he had little time to think about it.

A thin dust rose slowly from the road at the distant bend, and ‘’Ere they come,’ said Tommy. ‘Don’t begin shootin’ till I do. We want to get into the brown of ’em before we start, an’ we haven’t cartridges enough to keep goin’ long. I think about four ’undred should be near enough the range, but I’ll try a sightin’ shot first at that an’ you’ll see where it lands.’

For long interminably dragging minutes the three lay there, and then suddenly, in a bang that made him jump, the Canadian heard the soldier’s first shot. ‘Just short,’ said Tommy coolly. ‘Better put your sights four fifty an’ take a fine sight. Come on, let ’em ’ave it.’

The three rifles opened in a crackle of rapid fire, and far down the road a swirl of dust and a stampede of grey-coated figures to the sides of the road showed the alarm that the sudden onslaught had raised. It took several minutes for the crowd to get to any sort of cover, and before they did so they evidently began to understand how weak was the force opposed to them. The grey mass dropped to the road and next minute a steady drum of rifle fire and a storm of bullets came beating down on the three. The road was pavé , floored with the flat cobble-stones common on first-class French roads, and on these the bullets cracked and smacked with vicious emphasis, ricochetted and rose with ugly screams and whirrs and singings. A dozen times in that first minute the hollow barrel banged to the blow of a bullet, but the figure behind it kept on firing steadily and without a pause. And presently the Germans, impatient of the delay perhaps, or angered by the impudence of the attack of such a handful as they were now sure blocked the way, began to climb over the fence along the roadside and move along the fields firing as they came, while another group commenced to trot steadily straight down the road. ‘Now then, Canada,’ called Tommy, ‘pick your target an’ tell Froggy we’ll fire in turns. We can’t afford to waste shots.’

So the three commenced to fire steadily and in turn, each waiting after the other’s shot to see if a man fell, each calling to the others in triumph if a man went down after their shot, growling angrily [101] if the shot missed. They made good shooting amongst them, the man in the middle of the road an unmistakable best and the Canadian second. Their shooting in fact was so good that it broke the attack down the road, and presently the remainder of this force ran crouching to the ditches, jumped into them, and stayed there.

But because the ammunition of the three was almost gone the affair was almost over, and now there appeared a new factor that looked like ending it even before their cartridges gave out. Back in the ranks of the main body three or four men grouped about a machine-gun opened a rapid fire, and the hailing bullets clashed on the walls of the estaminet, swept down on to the stones of the pavé , found their range and began drumming and banging on the barrel. The soldier beside it quietly laid down his empty rifle and looked towards the Canadian. ‘I’m done in,’ he called. ‘Punctured ’arf a dozen places.... You two better keep down ... let ’em come close, then finish it ... wi’ the bayonet.’

That struck the Canadian as the last word in lunacy; but before he could speak, he saw the barrel dissolved in splintering wreckage about the figure lying on the road. Tommy raised his head a little and called once more, but faintly. ‘Good fight. We did all we could ... to stop ’em. We did stop ’em all a good time ... an’ we stopped a lot for good.’ A gust of bullets swept lower, clattered on the stones, set the broken barrel staves dancing, hailed drumming and thudding on the prone figure in the road.

Both the Canadian and the Frenchman were wounded severely, but they still had the strength to crawl back along the ditch, and the luck to emerge from it amongst the houses in time to be hidden away by the villagers before the Germans arrived. And that night after they had passed through and gone, the Canadian went back and found the body of the soldier where it had been flung in the ditch—a body riddled and rent to pieces with innumerable bullet wounds.

The Canadian had the villagers bury the body there close outside the village, and wrote on a smooth board the number and name he took from the identity disc about the dead man’s neck. And underneath it he wrote in indelible pencil ‘A good fighting man,’ and the last words he had heard the fighter gasp—‘We did all we could to stop them; stopped them all a good time, and stopped a lot for good.’

And as the Canadian said afterwards, ‘That same, if you remember their record and their fate, being a fairly close fitting epitaph for the old Contemptible Little Army.’

A short time ago an unknown friend, ‘thinking it may interest you,’ sent me what turned out to be a precious volume. Its full title runs thus: ‘Random Recollections of the House of Commons from the Year 1830 to the Close of 1835, including Personal Sketches of the Leading Members of all Parties; by One of No Party.’ Readers of the Cornhill will be not the less attracted by it since, as the imprint shows, it was published in 1836 by the eminent firm of Smith, Elder & Co., at that date located at Cornhill.

Throughout the volume ‘One of No Party,’ whom, for the sake of brevity, I will in future refer to by the letter Q, preserves his anonymity. In a modest preface he describes himself as ‘during a very regular attendance in the House of Commons for several years past being in the habit of taking notes of what was most interesting in the proceedings, as well as of the personal and oratorical peculiarities of the leading members.’ As ‘One of No Party’ and all the historical personages who live again under the magic of his graphic pen have long since passed on to another state, it would not be indiscreet if the day-books of the old firm in Cornhill for the year 1835 were looked through and his identity revealed.

Alas, poor Yorick! The final—to be precise, the penultimate—chapter of the life-story of his book has something touching in its sadness. Its price on the day of publication is not mentioned. Pencil memoranda on the fly-sheet indicate that fourscore years later the second-hand bookseller to whom its possession fell temptingly offered it at the price of one shilling. There being apparently no bidding, the shilling was crossed out and sixpence substituted. Finally, oh ye who pass by remaining obdurate or worse still indifferent, the volume, with its old-fashioned brown paper back bound with a strip of cloth, was thrown into the fourpenny box, receptacle of many unrecognised but memorable treasures. As affording a vivid peep at an historic Parliament, few have exceeded the intrinsic value of this time-and-weather-stained volume.

Beginning his record in the Unreformed Parliament of 1830, Q indulged himself in the production of a series of thumb-nail sketches [103] of eminent members long since gone to another place, whose names live in history. Here we have the men as they lived and dressed, moved or spoke, depicted by a keen-sighted independent looker-on. In this Parliament Sir Charles Wetherell, Member for Bristol, high Tory of a type now extinct, held a prominent and popular place.

His personal appearance sufficed to attract attention.

There is a story about the famous Member for Bristol which Q must have heard but does not relate. When with frequent gestures he addressed the House his unbraced trousers parted from his waistcoat, displaying a considerable rim of shirt. A member, gravely rising to a point of order, once called the attention of the Speaker to the lapse. Manners Sutton, who filled the Chair at the time, with equal gravity declined to interfere. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the hon. gentleman’s only lucid interval.’

Leaving the House at a quarter past seven one morning, having fought the Reform Bill in Committee through a long series of divisions, Wetherell discovered it was raining heavily. ‘By G—,’ he said, ‘if I had known this we would have had a few more divisions.’

A contemporary of Wetherell’s, an active fellow-worker against the Reform Bill, was Croker, object of Macaulay’s particular aversion, a prejudice shared by Disraeli. Q describes him as tall, well-made, full six feet in height.

Through a series of weeks Croker spoke every night against clauses of the Reform Bill. Some nights he made as many as twenty speeches occupying three hours of the sitting. His apprehension of disastrous results accruing from the passing of the Bill, fear shared by Sir Charles Wetherell, was justified by the event. In both cases the enlarged constituencies rejected their candidature.

At the date of this fascinating record, which closes with the session of 1835, neither Disraeli nor Gladstone was yet in the House. Sir Robert Peel, unconscious of what was in store for him in the way of personal connection with them, was Leader of the Tory party in the House of Commons, a post to which he succeeded on the death of Canning. Q gives us one of his vivid sketches of the living man:

It was Peel’s custom to remain in the House till one or two o’clock in the morning, later if necessary. Nor was he a quiescent listener, following the debate with tireless attention and occasionally intervening. In this respect Disraeli and Gladstone, brought up at his feet, were equally close in their attendance and attention. Up to the last both, whether in office or in Opposition, seated themselves when the Speaker took the Chair, and with brief interval for dinner remained till the House was up. The fashion of to-day is widely different, the habit of the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition (when there was one) being to withdraw to the privacy of their respective rooms as soon as questions are over, an example loyally followed by their colleagues.

I don’t know why, but it is something of a surprise to learn that Sir Robert Peel was a red-haired man. His son Arthur, who for many years added grace and authority to the Speaker’s Chair, had [105] raven locks. The circumstance lends support to Q’s quaint theory that in the House of Commons red hair is the concomitant of supreme ability. There is none in the present House.

It is curious and interesting to find in this close contemporaneous study of Sir Robert Peel two mannerisms strongly marked in his most famous disciple when in due time he filled his master’s official place in the House of Commons. Q describes how Sir Robert, when speaking on any great question, was accustomed to strike at regular intervals the brass-bound box which lies on the table, in front of which a Minister is habituated to stand whilst addressing the House. Nothing if not precise, Q, with his eye on the clock, reckoned that Peel smote the box at the rate of two strokes a minute. Old members of the House of Commons will recall this curious habit as practised by Gladstone. It was occasionally varied by another trick of driving home his argument by smiting the open palm of his left hand with his right. The consequence was that he frequently drowned in the clamour the concluding words of his leading sentences.

Another trick of Peel’s, unconsciously imitated by his pupil, was that of turning his back on the Speaker and addressing passages of his speech directly to supporters on the bench behind him or seated below the gangway. This is a violation of the fundamental rule of order requiring a member on his legs to address himself directly to the Chair. In Gladstone’s case it afforded opportunity for welcome diversion on the part of members on the benches opposite, who lustily cried ‘Order! Order!’ Interrupted in the flow of his argument and not immediately recognising the cause, he added to the merriment by turning round with inquiring look at his tormentors.

Ten years later Peel, counting upon this deference, and believing with Q that the Tory Party was in all matters submissive to his command, declared himself a Free Trader. Whereupon, as happened in the old potter’s shop visited by Omar Khayyam, there was revolt by the clay population.

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And suddenly one more impatient cried:

‘Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?’

The awkward question was answered by Peel’s former vassals uprising and turning out his Government.

The name of Colonel Sibthorpe lingers in the Parliamentary gallery of notabilities of the Unreformed Parliament. Q describes him as woefully deficient in judgment.

Like the maid in the pastoral poem, Colonel Sibthorpe’s face was his fortune, at least the early making of it.

This personal peculiarity elicited from O’Connell a fair example of the sort of humour that in these past times appealed to an assembly grateful for temporary deliverance from a state of boredom. Sibthorpe, making one of his incoherent attacks upon the Liberal majority, said:

O’Connell, following, retorted amid what Q describes as peals of laughter:

Macaulay, seated in the Commons as Member for Leeds, a connection broken when he went out to India as a Member of [107] Council, did not escape Q’s searching and shrewd observation. He gives a description of his personal appearance founded on the style of the ‘Police News’ circulating particulars respecting an absconded criminal:

Passing through the stately hall of the Reform Club, I often stop to look at a portrait of Macaulay hung on the wall at the foot of the stairway. One would not recognise it from this minute description of the Member for Leeds who sat in the Parliament in the early ’thirties of the last century. But between the printed letter and the painted canvas a period of thirty years stretched.

In his incomparable biography of his uncle, Sir George Trevelyan tells of the success of his maiden speech. Q, who heard it, describes it as electrifying the House. He adds that by refraining from early reappearance in debate Macaulay shrewdly preserved his laurels.

Whilst the late Duke of Devonshire sat in the House of Commons as Lord Hartington, I frequently found in him curiously close resemblance, mental and physical, to Lord Althorpe, Leader of the House of Commons during Lord Grey’s premiership, and the short duration of the first administration of Lord Melbourne. The impression is confirmed by Q’s description.

This is an exaggerated description of Lord Hartington’s manner of speech. In later days he with sedulous practice improved. His speeches, found to be surprisingly good when read from verbatim report, suffered considerably by ineffective delivery.

We come nearer to Lord Hartington as Q proceeds with his study of Lord Althorpe.

This might have been written of Lord Hartington through many a stormy scene in the House of Commons, as he sat on the front Opposition Bench, one hand in his trouser pocket, his hat tilted over his nose, his face as stony as that of the Sphinx.

It is common experience in modern Parliaments that men who have attained the highest position at the Bar have been failures in the House of Commons. Illustrations of the rule are provided in the cases of Lord Davey and Lord Russell of Killowen. The former, who probably never opened his mouth in a Court of Law under a fee of one hundred guineas, when as Sir Horace Davey he spoke in the House of Commons was as successful as the traditional dinner bell in emptying the Chamber. During a long parliamentary career Sir Charles Russell only once rose to the height of his fame as an advocate at the Bar. It was when in debate he pleaded the cause of Home Rule, whose final triumph he did not live to see. Exceptions are found in the cases of Sir John Herschell, who, entering the House of Commons as an unknown barrister, won his way to the Woolsack, and Sir Edward Clarke, who, if he had set his mind on the same goal, would certainly have reached it.

That this state of things, though paradoxical, is not new appears from the case of Lord Jeffrey as narrated by this shrewd observer. Apart from his pre-eminence at the Scottish Bar, Jeffrey’s editorship of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ invested him with [109] double personal interest. His maiden speech was looked forward to with absorbing interest. He rose in a crowded House. According to the implacable Q, the effort was a failure so lamentable that he never repeated it, content with briefly taking part in debate only when the duty was imposed upon him in connection with his office as Lord Advocate. In delivering his maiden speech he spoke for an hour and twenty minutes with unparalleled rapidity of delivery. Unfaltering, he proceeded to the end.

Jeffrey was approaching his fiftieth year when he entered Parliament. He is described as being

Cobbett, who at the age of seventy-three sat in the same Parliament with Jeffrey, was of a different physical type. Six foot two in height, he was one of the stoutest men in the House.

Lord John Russell, at this time a member of Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet equally with Jeffrey, had nothing in common with Cobbett except a light-coloured waistcoat and kerseymere trousers of a sandy complexion. His height was even less than that attained by the famous editor of the ‘Edinburgh.’ Q describes him as

He is roundly described as one of the worst speakers in the House. His voice was weak and his enunciation imperfect, hampered by stammer or stutter at every fourth or fifth sentence. He had a habit of repeating frequently three or four times the first two or three words of a sentence. His oratorical style was further embellished by a hesitating cough. Q supplies a verbatim note taken down as Lord John stood inanimate at the table, his voice inaudible to one-half of his audience. ‘I—I—I—hem—think the motion of the honourable member is—is ill-timed at the—at the—hem—present moment.’

Q is inexplicably hard on Palmerston, who at the early age of forty-five attained the position of Foreign Secretary.

He is described as an indifferent speaker, handicapped like his colleague Lord John Russell by a vocal trick of stuttering and stammering. ‘He is very indolent, irregular in his attendance upon his parliamentary duties, and when in the House by no means active in defence of his principles or his friends.’

Tall and handsome in person, he was always dressed in the height of fashion, a habit which we are told suggested to The Times the sobriquet of ‘Cupid,’ by which, with levity unknown in Printing House Square in these later days, it was accustomed to make editorial allusion to the Foreign Secretary.

Hume is described as head of the country Liberal Party.

Hume was impervious to ridicule or sarcasm, heedless of abuse however virulent. It was calculated that in the course of a session he delivered more speeches than the aggregate of any other three members. On a May night, when the House was in Committee on Civil Service Estimates, he spoke for forty minutes. His hat played a prominent part in these parliamentary incursions. He invariably [111] brought it into the House cram-full of papers. When he rose to speak he planted it out on the bench or floor within arm’s length, as if it were a cabbage. When he interposed to make a passing remark, he had an odd trick of putting his hat under his left arm at an angle that dexterously precluded its contents tumbling out on the floor. There is somewhere in existence a caricature sketch of him by H.B. thus possessed of his hat. In his ordinary attire he lightened up his speeches, which though learned were a little dull, by presentation of a compact costume of a blue coat, a tartan waistcoat, and the apparently popular light-coloured ‘cassimere trousers.’

Roebuck, in his thirty-third year, was a member of this House. Here is a pen-picture of him:

Q evidently did not like Roebuck, who, when more than forty years later he reappeared on the parliamentary scene as Member for Sheffield, disclosed a natural talent for getting himself disliked. He came back with the flood of Toryism that in the General Election of 1874 swamped Mr. Gladstone. Dillwyn, an old and generally esteemed member, secured the corner seat below the gangway on the Opposition side, a place made historic in a later Parliament by the occupancy of Lord Randolph Churchill. Roebuck hankered after this seat, which he might have obtained by the regulation process of attendance at prayer-time. He preferred to arrive later and turn out Dillwyn, making himself otherwise pleasant by prodding his stick along the back of the bench, regardless of the presence of honourable members.

Dillwyn stood this for a long time. At length his patience was exhausted. I remember one afternoon when Roebuck, arriving as usual midway in the course of questions, made for the corner seat and stood there expecting Dillwyn to rise. The Member for Swansea, studiously unaware of his presence, made no sign. After a pause watched with eager eyes by a crowded House, Roebuck turned about and amid a ringing cheer from the Ministerialists crossed over to the Tory camp, where politically he was more at home.

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In the days when Roebuck represented Bath, Q describes him as

‘A man of fair talent but nothing more,’ is Q’s summing-up of one who, alike in his early prime and in his old age, filled a prominent place in the House of Commons.

O’Connell was closer to Q’s heart. He devotes an exceptional number of pages to a study of the Great Beggarman. Tall and athletic in person, O’Connell’s complexion had about it a freshness and ruddiness indicative of good health and excellent spirits. In a voice clear and strong he spoke with broad Irish accent. Occasionally he stammered, not from physical defect, but because he had upon his mind two or more ideas struggling for priority of expression. He was known occasionally to break off in the middle of a sentence, leaving it unfinished whilst he expounded a brilliant thought that struck him as he spoke.

His gestures and attitude were of endless variety. He had a trick of stretching out his neck and making wry faces at the Speaker. The next moment his arms were raised above his head, his fists firmly clenched as he declaimed a passionate passage of denunciation. He wore a wig, which suffered greatly in the course of a busy session. He would suddenly seize it with both hands as if about to tear it to pieces. He was merely half-consciously intent upon adjusting it. During a memorable speech advocating the repeal of the Union in 1834 he amazed the House by untying his cravat, taking it off, and laying it on the bench beside him. In the height of oratorical happiness he felt incommoded by the tightening of his neckcloth, and the simplest thing to do obviously was to remove it.

Among Irish members of this epoch Sheil ranked next to O’Connell. His eloquence commanded attention on both sides of the House. It was, however, hampered by several eccentricities. Mr. Gladstone, who preserved to the last a vivid impression of him, told me that when addressing the House he started on a loud key and rather screeched than spoke. Another tradition coming down to modern Parliaments describes him as bending down to scrape the floor with his thumbnail and thanking God he had no [113] gestures. This reads like fable, but it is confirmed from Q’s personal observation.

Feargus O’Connor, best known in connection with the Chartist movement, by favour of O’Connell represented County Cork in the session of 1834. Among stories told in the smoking-room of the House of Commons during the Parliament of 1874-80 was one that does not seem to have reached Q’s ear. It ran to the effect that, strolling about behind the Speaker’s Chair in the old House of Commons, O’Connor observed through the open door of the Speaker’s private room preparations for the right hon. gentleman’s early evening meal. Feargus, so the story ran, whether in a moment of absence of mind or in a preliminary state of mental defection that some years later necessitated incarceration in an asylum for the insane, seated himself at the table and ate the Speaker’s chop.

Differing in all ways from these illustrious unconventional Irishmen was Edward Bulwer Lytton, who sat in the session of 1835 as Member for Lincoln. Q describes him as

CHAPTER XV.

Douglas Falloden was sitting alone in his father’s library surrounded by paper and documents. He had just concluded a long interview with the family lawyer; and a tray containing the remains of their hasty luncheon was on a side table. The room had a dusty, dishevelled air. Half of the house-servants had been already dismissed; the rest were disorganised. Lady Laura had left Flood the day before. To her son’s infinite relief she had consented to take the younger children and go on a long visit to some Scotch relations. It had been left vague whether she returned to Flood or not; but Douglas hoped that the parting was already over—without her knowing it; and that he should be able to persuade her, after Scotland, to go straight to the London house—which was her own property—for the winter.

Meanwhile he himself had been doing his best to wind up affairs. The elaborate will of twenty years earlier, with its many legacies and bequests, had been cancelled by Sir Arthur only six weeks before his death. A very short document had been substituted for it, making Douglas and a certain Marmaduke Falloden, his uncle and an eminent K.C., joint executors, and appointing Douglas and Lady Laura guardians of the younger children. Whatever property might remain ‘after the payment of my just debts’ was to be divided in certain proportions between Douglas and his brother and sister.

The estates, with the exception of the lands immediately surrounding the Castle, were to be sold to the tenants, and the dates of the auction were already fixed. For the Castle itself, negotiations had been opened with an enormously successful soap-boiler from the north, but the American proprietor of a dry-goods store in Chicago was also in the market, and the Falloden solicitors were skilfully playing the two big fish against each other. The sale of the pictures would come before the Court early in October. Meanwhile the beautiful Romney—the lady in black—still looked down upon her stripped and impoverished descendant; and Falloden, [115] whose sole companion she often was through dreary hours, imagined her sometimes as tragic or reproachful, but more commonly as mocking him with a malicious Irish glee.

There would be some few thousand pounds left for himself when all was settled. He was determined to go into Parliament, and his present intention was to stand for a Merton Fellowship, and read for the Bar. If other men could make three or four thousand a year within three years or so of being called, why not he? His character had steeled under the pressure of disaster. He realised with a clearer intelligence, day by day, all that had gone from him—his father—his inheritance—the careless ease and self-assurance that goes with the chief places at the feast of life. But if he must now drop to the lower rooms, it would not be ‘with shame’ that he would do that, or anything else. He felt within himself a driving and boundless energy; an iron will to succeed. There was even a certain bitter satisfaction in measuring himself against the world without the props and privileges he had hitherto possessed. He was often sore and miserable to his heart’s depths; haunted by black regrets and compunction he could not get rid of. All the same it was his fixed resolve to waste no thoughts on mere happiness. His business was to make a place for himself as an able man among able men, to ask of ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the sharpening of brain on brain, the satisfaction he had once hoped to get out of marriage with Constance Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great wealth.

He turned to look at the clock.

She had asked him for five. He had ordered his horse accordingly, the only beast still left in the Flood stables, and his chief means of escape, during a dreary fortnight, from his peevish co-executor, who was of little or no service, and had allowed himself already to say unpardonable things about his dead brother, even to that brother’s son.

It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers aside impatiently. The mere prospect of seeing Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb and troubled excitement. Under its impulse he left the library, and began to walk aimlessly through the dreary and deserted house, for the mere sake of movement. The pictures were still on the walls, for the sale of them had not yet been formally sanctioned by the Court; but all Lady Laura’s private and personal possessions had been removed to London, and [116] dust-sheets covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had been already sold, and workmen were busy packing in the great hall, amid a dusty litter of paper and straw. The clocks had run down; the flowers had gone, and with them all the other signs of normal life which make the character of a house; what remained was only the débris of a once animated whole. Houses have their fate no less than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden possessor the whole of the great many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth-century foundations beneath the central tower to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt under the fourth George had disfigured the garden front, had often, since his father’s death, seemed to speak with an almost human voice of lamentation and distress.

But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of his surroundings. Why had she written to him?

Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers had written to him—letters that he was now wearily answering. But there had been nothing perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had seemed to hear her very voice saying the soft touching things in it—things that women say so easily and men can’t hit upon; and to be looking into her changing face, and the eyes that could be so fierce, and then again so childishly sweet and sad—as he had seen them, at their last meeting on the moor, while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet there was not a word in the letter that might not have been read on the house-tops—not a trace in it of her old alluring, challenging self. Simplicity—deep feeling—sympathy—in halting words, and unfinished sentences:—and yet—something conspicuously absent and to all appearance so easily, unconsciously absent, that all the sweetness and the pity brought him more smart than soothing. Yes, she had done with him—for all her wish to be kind to him. He saw it plainly; and he turned back thirstily to those past hours in Lathom Woods, when he had felt himself, if only for a moment, triumphant master of her thoughts if not her heart; rebelled against, scolded, flouted, yet still tormentingly necessary and important. All that delicious friction, those disputes that are the fore-runner of passion, were gone—for ever. She was sorry for him—and very kind. His touchy pride recoiled, reading into her letter what she had never dreamt of putting into it, just because of the absence of that something—that old tremor—those old signs of his influence over her, which, of course, she would never let him see again.

All the same he had replied at once, asking if he might come [117] and say good-bye before she left Scarfedale. And she had sent him a telegram—‘Delighted—to-morrow—five o’clock.’

And he was going—out of a kind of recklessness—a kind of obstinate recoil against the sorrowful or depressing circumstance of life. He had given up all thoughts of trying to win her back—even if there were any chance of it. His pride would not let him sue as a pauper; and of course the Langmoors, to whom she was going—he understood—from Scarfedale, would take good care she did not throw herself away. Quite right too. Very likely the Tamworths would capture her; and Bletchley was quite a nice fellow.

When he did see her, what could they talk about? Radowitz?

He would like to send a message through her to Radowitz—to say something—

What could he say? He had seen Radowitz for a few minutes after the inquest—to thank him for his evidence—and for what he had done for Sir Arthur. Both had hurried through it. Falloden had seemed to himself stricken with aphasia. His mouth was dry, his tongue useless. And Radowitz had been all nerves, a flickering colour—good God, how deathly he looked!

Afterwards he had begun a letter to Radowitz, and had toiled at it, sometimes at dead of night, and in a feverish heat of brain. But he had never finished or sent it. What was the use? Nothing was changed. That black sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard facts that no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could get over.

‘I wish to God I had let him alone!’

That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden’s inmost being. Trouble and the sight of trouble—sorrow—and death—had been to him, as to other men, sobering and astonishing facts. The most decisive effect of them had been to make him vulnerable, to break through the hard defences of pride and custom, so that he realised what he had done. And this realisation was fast becoming a more acute and haunting thing than anything else. It constantly drove out the poignant recollection of his father’s death, or the dull sense of financial loss and catastrophe. Loss and catastrophe might be at some distant time made good. But what could ever give Radowitz back his art—his career—his natural object in life? The hatches of the present had just got to be closed over this ugly, irreparable thing. ‘I can’t undo it—nothing can ever be undone. But I can’t spend my life in repenting it; one [118] must just go forward, and not let that, or anything else, hamstring a man who has got his fight to fight, and can’t get out of it.’

Undo it? No. But were no, even partial, amends possible?—nothing that could be offered, or done, or said?—nothing that would give Constance Bledlow pleasure, or change her opinion?—efface that shrinking in her, of which he hated to think?

He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing.

Money, of course, was of no use, even if he still possessed it. Radowitz, in all matters connected with money, was hyper-sensitive and touchy. It was well known that he had private means; and it was certainly probable that he was now the richer man of the two.

No—there was nothing to be done. He had maimed for ever the vital energising impulse in another human being, and it could never be repaired. ‘His poor music!— murdered ’—the words from Constance Bledlow’s horror-stricken letter were always in his mind. And the day after the inquest on Sir Arthur he had had some conversation on the medical points of his father’s case, and on the light thrown on them by Radowitz’s evidence, with the family doctor who was then attending Lady Laura, and had, it appeared, been several times called in by Sorell during the preceding weeks to see Radowitz and report on the progress of the hand. ‘A bad business!’ said the young man, who had intelligence and was fresh from hospital—‘and awful hard luck!—he might have hurt his hand in a score of ways and still have recovered the use of it, but this particular injury’—he shook his head—‘nothing to be done! And the worst of it is that a trouble like this, which cuts across a man’s career, goes so deep. The thing I should be most afraid of is his general health. You can see that he’s delicate—narrow-chested—a bundle of nerves. It might be phthisis—it might be’—he shrugged his shoulders—‘well, depression, bad neurasthenia. And the poor lad seems to have no family—no mother or sisters—to look after him. But he’ll want a lot of care if he’s to pull round again. An Oxford row, wasn’t it? Abominable!’

But here the sudden incursion of Lady Laura’s maid, to ask a question for her mistress, had diverted the doctor’s thoughts and spared Falloden reply.

A little later, he was riding slowly up the side of the moor towards Scarfedale, looking down on a landscape which since his childhood had been so intimate and familiar a part of himself [119] that the thought of being wrenched away from it, immediately and for good, seemed merely absurd.

September was nearly gone; and the trees had long passed out of their August monotony, and were already prophetic of the October blaze. The level afternoon light was searching out the different planes of distance, giving to each hedgerow, elm or oak, a separate force and kingship: and the golden or bronze shades, which were day by day stealing through the woods, made gorgeous marriage with the evening purple. The Castle, as he gazed back upon it, had sunk into the shadows, a dim magnificent ghost, seen through mist, like the Rhine Maidens through the blue water.

And there it would stand, perhaps for generations yet, long after he and his kindred knew it no more. What did the plight of its last owner matter to it, or to the woods and hills? He tried to think of that valley a hundred years hence—a thousand!—and felt himself the merest insect crawling on the face of this old world, which is yet so young. But only for a moment. Rushing back, came the proud, resisting sense of personality—of man’s dominance over Nature—of the Nietzschean ‘will to power.’ To be strong, to be sufficient to oneself; not to yield, but to be for ever counter-attacking circumstance, so as to be the master of circumstance, whatever blows it might choose to strike—that seemed to be the best, the only creed left to him.

When he reached the Scarfedale house, and a gardener had taken his horse, the maid who opened the door told him he would find Lady Constance on the lawn. The old ladies were out driving.

Very decent of the old ladies, he thought, as he followed the path into the garden.

There she was!—her light form lost, almost, in a deep chair, under a lime tree. The garden was a tangle of roses and heliotrope; everything growing rank and fast, as though to get as much out of the soil and the sun as possible, before the first frost made execution. It was surrounded by old red walls that held the dropping sun, and it was full of droning bees, and wagtails stepping daintily over the lawns.

Connie rose and came towards him. She was in black, with pale pink roses in her hat. In spite of her height, she seemed to him the slightest, gracefullest thing, and as she neared him she lifted her deep brown eyes, and it was as though he had never seen before how beautiful they were.

‘It was kind of you to come!’ she said shyly.

[120]

He made no reply till she had placed him beside her under the lime. Then he looked round him, a smile twitching his lip.

‘Your aunts are not at home?’

‘No. They have gone for their drive. Did you wish to see them?’

‘I am in terror of your Aunt Winifred. She and I had many ructions when I was small. She thought our keepers used to shoot her cats.’

‘They probably did!’

‘Of course. But a keeper who told the truth about it would have no moral sense.’

They both laughed, looking into each other’s faces with a sudden sense of relief from tension. After all the tragedy and the pain, there they were, still young, still in the same world together. And the sun was still shining and the roses blooming. Yet, all the same, there was no thought of any renewal of their old relation on either side. Something unexpressed, yet apparently final, seemed to stand between them; differing very much in his mind from the something in hers, yet equally potent. She, who had gone through agonies of far too tender pity for him, felt now a touch of something chill and stern in the circumstance surrounding him, that seemed to put her aside. ‘This is not your business,’ it seemed to say; so that she saw herself as an inexperienced child playing with that incalculable thing—the male. Attempts at sympathy or advice died away—she rebelled—and submitted.

Still there are things—experiments—that even an inexperienced child, a child ‘of good will,’ may venture. All the time that she was talking to Falloden, a secret expectation, a secret excitement ran through her inner mind. There was a garden door to her left, across a lawn. Her eyes were often on it, and her ear listened for the click of the latch.

Meanwhile Falloden talked very frankly of the family circumstances and his own plans. How changed the tone was, since they had discussed the same things, riding through the Lathom Woods in June! There was little less self-confidence, perhaps; but the quality of it was not the same. Instead of alienating, it began to touch and thrill her. And her heart could not help its sudden tremor when he spoke of wintering ‘in or near Oxford.’ There was apparently a Merton prize Fellowship in December, on which his hopes were set, and the first part of his Bar examination to read for, whether he got a Fellowship or no.

[121]

‘And Parliament?’ she asked him.

‘Yes—that’s my aim,’ he said, quietly. ‘Of course it’s the fashion just now, especially in Oxford, to scoff at politics and the House of Commons. It’s like the art-for-arters in town. As if you could solve anything by words—or paints!’

‘Your father was in the House for some time?’

She bent towards him, as she mentioned his father, with a lovely unconscious gesture that sent a tremor through him. He seemed to perceive all that shaken feeling in her mind to which she found it so impossible to give expression; on which his own action had placed so strong a curb.

He replied that his father had been in Parliament for some twelve years, and had been a Tory Whip part of the time. Then he paused, his eyes on the grass, till he raised them to say abruptly:—

‘You heard about it all—from Radowitz?’

She nodded.

‘He came here that same night.’ And then suddenly, in the golden light, he saw her flush vividly. Had she realised that what she had said implied a good deal?—or might be thought to imply it? Why should Radowitz take the trouble—after his long and exhausting experience—to come round by the Scarfedale manor-house?

‘It was an awful time for him,’ he said, his eyes on hers. ‘It was very strange—that he should be there.’

And again he looked down—poking at the grass with his stick.

She hesitated. Her lips trembled.

‘He was very glad—to be there. Only he was sorry—for you.’

‘You mean he was sorry that I wasn’t there sooner—with my father?’

‘I think that was what he felt—that there was only—a stranger.’

‘I was just in time,’ said Falloden, slowly. ‘And I wonder—whether anything matters, to the dying?’

There was a pause, after which he added, with sudden energy—

I thought—at the inquest—he himself looked pretty bad.’

‘Otto Radowitz?’ Constance covered her eyes with her hands a moment—a gesture of pain. ‘Mr. Sorell doesn’t know what to do for him. He has been losing ground lately. The doctors say he ought to live in the open air. He and Mr. Sorell talk of a cottage near Oxford, where Mr. Sorell can go often and see him. But he can’t live alone.’

As she spoke Falloden’s attention was diverted. He had raised [122] his head and was looking across the lawn, towards the garden entrance. There was the sound of a clicking latch. Constance turned, and saw Radowitz entering.

The young musician paused and wavered at the sight of the two under the lime. It seemed as though he would have taken to flight. But, instead, he came on with hesitating step. He had taken off his hat, as he often did when walking; and his red-gold hair en brosse was as conspicuous as ever. But otherwise what a change from the youth of three months before! Falloden, now that the immediate pressure of his own tragedy was relaxed, perceived the change even more sharply than he had done at the inquest; perceived it, at first with horror, and then with a wild sense of recoil and denial, as though some hovering Erinnys advanced with Radowitz over the leaf-strewn grass.

Radowitz grew paler still as he reached Connie. He gave Falloden a short, embarrassed greeting, and then subsided into the chair that Constance offered him. The thought crossed Falloden’s mind—‘Did she arrange this?’

Her face gave little clue—though she could not restrain one quick, hesitating glance at Falloden. She pressed tea on Radowitz, who accepted it to please her, and then, schooled as she was in all the minor social arts, she had soon succeeded in establishing a sort of small-talk between the three. Falloden, self-conscious and on the rack, could not imagine why he stayed. But this languid boy had ministered to his dying father! And to what, and to whom, were the languor, the tragic physical change, due? He stayed—in purgatory—looking out for any chance to escape.

‘Did you walk all the way?’

The note in Connie’s voice was softly reproachful.

‘Why, it’s only three miles!’ said Radowitz, as though defending himself, but he spoke with an accent of depression. And Connie remembered how, in the early days of his recovery from his injury, he had spent hours rambling over the moors, by himself or with Sorell. Her heart yearned to him. She would have liked to take his poor hands in hers, and talk to him, tenderly, like a sister. But there was that other dark face and those other eyes opposite—watching. And to them too her young sympathy went out—how differently!—how passionately! A kind of rending and widening process seemed to be going on within her own nature. Veils were falling between her and life; and feelings, deeper and stronger than any she had ever known, were fast developing the woman in the girl. How [123] to heal Radowitz!—how to comfort Falloden! Her mind ached under the feelings that filled it—feelings wholly disinterested and pure.

‘You really are taking the Boar’s Hill cottage?’ she asked, addressing Radowitz.

‘I think so. It is nearly settled. But I am trying to find some companion. Sorell can only come occasionally.’

As he spoke, a wild idea flashed into Falloden’s brain. It seemed to have entered without—or against—his will; as though suggested by some imperious agency outside himself. His intelligence laughed at it. Something else in him entertained it—breathlessly.

Radowitz stooped down to try and tempt Lady Marcia’s dachshund with a piece of cake.

‘I must anyhow have a dog,’ he said, as the pampered Max accepted the cake, and laid his head gratefully on the donor’s knee:—‘they’re always company.’

He looked wistfully into the dog’s large friendly eyes.

Connie rose.

‘Please don’t move!’ she said, flushing, ‘I shall be back directly. But I must put up a letter. I hear the postman!’ She ran across the grass, leaving the two men in acute discomfort. Falloden thought again, with rising excitement: ‘She planned it! She wants me to do something—to take some step⸺ But what?’

An awkward pause followed. Radowitz was still playing with the dog, caressing its beautiful head with his uninjured hand, and talking to it in a half whisper. As Constance departed, a bright and feverish red had rushed into his cheeks; but it had only made his aspect more ghostly, more unreal.

Again the absurd idea emerged in Falloden’s consciousness; and this time it seemed to find its own expression, and to be merely making use of his voice, which he heard as though it were someone else’s.

He bent over towards Radowitz.

‘Would you care to share the cottage with me?’ he said abruptly. ‘I want to find a place to read in—out of Oxford.’

Radowitz looked up, amazed—speechless! Falloden’s eyes met Otto’s steadily. The boy turned away. Suddenly he covered his face with his free hand.

‘Why did you hate me so?’ he said, breathing quick. ‘What had I done to you?’

[124]

‘I didn’t hate you,’ said Falloden, thickly. ‘I was mad.’

‘Because you were jealous? What a fool you were! She never cared a brass farthing for me—except as she does now. She would like to nurse me—and give me back my music. But she can’t—and you can’t.’

There was silence again. Otto’s chest heaved. As far as he could with his one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion. And at last he shook off emotion—with a laugh in which there was no mirth.

‘Well, at least, I shouldn’t make such a row now as I used to do—practising.’

Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade, by which the ‘bloods,’ in their first attack upon him, had tried to silence his piano.

‘Can’t you play at all?’ he said, at last; choosing the easiest of several remarks that presented themselves.

‘I get about somehow on the keys. It’s better than nothing. And I’m writing something for my degree. It’s rather good. If I could only keep well!’ said the boy impatiently. ‘It’s this damned health that gets in the way.’

Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his face suddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.

‘Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they’re now talking about—could you stand that?’

‘I would have a room where I didn’t hear it. That would be all right.’

‘There’s a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago,’ said Otto excitedly—‘a marvellous electric invention a man’s at work on, where you only turn a handle, or press a button, and you get Rubinstein—or Madame Schumann or my countryman, Paderewski, who’s going to beat everybody. It isn’t finished yet. But it won’t be for the likes of me. It’ll cost at least a thousand pounds.’

‘They’ll get cheaper,’ said Falloden, his chin in his hands, elbows on knees—eyes fixed on his companion. It seemed to him he was talking in a dream, so strange was this thing he had proposed; which apparently was going to come to pass. At any rate Radowitz had not refused. He sat with the dachshund on his knees, alternately pulling out and folding its long ears. He seemed to be, all in a moment, in high spirits, and when he saw Connie coming back through the garden gate, with a shy, hesitating [125] step, he sprang up eagerly to greet her. But there was another figure behind her. It was Sorell; and at sight of him ‘something sealed’ the boy’s lips. He looked round at Falloden, and dropped back into his chair.

Falloden rose from his seat abruptly. A formal and scarcely perceptible greeting passed between him and Sorell. All Falloden’s irritable self-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St. Cyprian’s tutor. He was not going to stay and cry peccavi any more, in the presence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world. But it was bitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden and Connie Bledlow’s company.

‘Thank you—I must go,’ he said brusquely, as Connie tried to detain him. ‘There is so much to do nowadays. I shall be leaving Flood next week. The agent will be in charge.’

‘Leaving—for good?’ she asked, in her appealing voice as they stood apart.

‘Probably—for good.’

‘I don’t know how to say—how sorry I am!’

‘Thank you. But I am glad it’s over. When you get back to Oxford—I shall venture to come and call.’

‘That’s a promise,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Where will you be?’

‘Ask Otto Radowitz! Good-bye.’

Her start of surprise pleased him. He approached Radowitz. ‘Shall I hear from you?’ he said stiffly.

‘Certainly!’ The boy looked up. ‘I will write to-morrow.’

The garden door had no sooner closed on Falloden than Radowitz threw himself back and went into a fit of laughter, curious, hollow laughter.

Sorell looked at him anxiously.

‘What’s the meaning of that, Otto?’

‘You’ll laugh, when you hear! Falloden and I are going to set up house together, in a cottage on Boar’s Hill—when we’ve found one. He’s going to read—and I’m to be allowed a piano, and a pianola. Queer, isn’t it?’

‘My dear Otto!’ cried Sorell, in dismay. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well, he offered it—said he’d come and look after me. I don’t know what possessed him—nor me either. I didn’t exactly accept. But I shall accept. Why shouldn’t I?’

[126]

‘Because Falloden’s the last person in the world to look after anybody—least of all, you!’ said Sorell with indignant energy. ‘But of course it’s a joke! You mean it for a joke. If he proposed it, it was like his audacity. Nobody would, who had a shred of delicacy. I suppose he wants to disarm public opinion!’

Radowitz looked oddly at Sorell, from under his finely-marked eyebrows.

‘I don’t believe he cares a hang for public opinion,’ he said slowly. ‘Nor do I. If you could come, Alexis, of course that would settle it. And if you won’t come to see me, supposing Falloden and I do share diggings, that settles it too. But you will come, old man—you will come!’

And he nodded, smiling, at his quasi-guardian. Neither of them noticed Connie. Yet she had hung absorbed on their conversation, the breath fluttering on her parted lips. And when their talk paused she bent forward, and laid her hand on Sorell’s arm.

‘Let him!’ she said pleadingly—‘let him do it!’

Sorell looked at her in troubled perplexity. ‘Let Douglas Falloden make some amends to his victim; if he can and will. Don’t be so unkind as to prevent it!’ That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him the mere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe that there is any irrevocableness in things at all, till life teaches her.

Radowitz too! What folly, what mistaken religiosity could make him dream of consenting to such a housemate through this winter which might very well be his last!

Monstrous! What kind of qualities had Falloden to fit him for such a task? All very well, indeed, that he should feel remorse! Sorell hoped he might feel it a good deal more sharply yet. But that he should ease his remorse at Otto’s expense, by offering what he could never fulfil, and by taking the place of someone on whom Otto could have really leaned: that seemed to Sorell all of a piece with the man’s egotism, his epicurean impatience of anything that permanently made him uncomfortable or unhappy. He put something of this into impetuous words as well as he could. But Otto listened in silence. So did Constance. And Sorell presently felt that there was a secret bond between them.

Before the aunts returned, the rectory pony-carriage came for [127] Radowitz, who was not strong enough to walk both ways. Sorell and Constance were left alone.

Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother’s soul showed through the girl’s slighter temperament. The old satiric aloofness in Connie’s brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not her mother’s, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella Risborough’s sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough’s bright sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What can a man friend do for a young girl in these fermenting years of her youth? And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt himself powerless—in all the greater matters—and was inclined to think that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own youth. They had been reading Homer together—parts both of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’; and through ‘that ageless mouth of all the world,’ what splendid things had spoken to her!—Hector’s courage, and Andromache’s tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the bitter pity of Achilles, mother-love and wife-love, death and the scorn of death. He had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for himself he had found her, especially of late, the dearest and most responsive of pupils.

But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the men of Sorell’s type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden’s type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women of the other.

Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation—if it was a reconciliation. She wanted, no doubt, to heal Falloden’s conscience, and so to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice [128] Otto, if need be, in the process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.

Connie eyed him wistfully. Confidences seemed to be on her very lips, and then stopped there. In the end she neither explained nor confessed. But when he was gone she walked up and down the lawn under the evening sky, her hands behind her—passionately dreaming.

She had never thought of any such plan as had actually sprung to light. And she understood Sorell’s opposition.

All the same, her heart sang over it. When she had asked Radowitz and Douglas to meet, each unbeknown to the other, when she had sent away the kind old aunts and prepared it all, she had reckoned on powers of feeling in Falloden, in which apparently only she and Aunt Marcia believed; and she had counted on the mystical and religious fervour she had long since discovered in Radowitz. That night—after Sir Arthur’s death—she had looked trembling into the boy’s very soul, had perceived his wondering sense of a special message to him, through what had happened, from a God who suffered and forgives.

Yes, she had tried—to make peace.

And she guessed—the tears blinding her as she walked—at the true meaning of Falloden’s sudden impulse, and Otto’s consent. Falloden’s was an impulse of repentance; and Otto’s had been an impulse of pardon, in the Christian sense. ‘If I am to die, I will die at peace with him.’ Was that the thought—the tragic and touching thought, in the boy’s mind?

As to Falloden, could he do it?—could he rise to the height of what was offered him? She prayed he might; she believed he could.

Her whole being was aflame. Douglas was no longer in love with her; that was clear. What matter, if he made peace with his own soul? As for her, she loved him with her whole heart, and meant to go on loving him, whatever anyone might say. And that being so, she would of course never marry.

Could she ever make Nora understand the situation? By letter, it was certainly useless to try!

( To be continued. )