THEY had discussed the rooms in their new house, and the bridesmaids’
dresses, and Maude’s cooking, and marriage-presents, and the merits of
Brighton, and the nature of love, and volleying at tennis (Maude was the
lady-champion of a tennis club), and season tickets, and the destiny of
the universe—to say nothing of a small bottle of Perrier Jouet. It was
reprehensibly extravagant, but this would be their last unmarried
excursion, and so they drank to the dear days of the past, and the dearer
ones of the future. Good comrades as well as lovers, they talked freely,
and with pleasure. Frank never made the common mistake of talking down,
and Maude justified his confidence by eagerly keeping up. To both of
them silence was preferable to conventional small talk.
‘We’ll just get down there after lunch,’ said Frank, as he paid his bill.
‘You have not seen the Australians, have you?’
‘Yes, dear, I saw them at Clifton four years ago.’
‘But this is a new lot. There are nine of the present team who have
never played in England before.’
‘They are very good, are they not?’
‘Very good indeed. And the dry summer has helped them. It is the sticky
English wickets which put them off. The wickets are very fast over
there. Giffen is their best all-round man, but Darling and Iredale and
young Hill are good enough for anything. Well, then—O Lord, what a
pity!’
He had turned towards the window as he rose, and saw one of those little
surprises by which Nature relieves the monotony of life in these islands.
The sun had gone, a ragged slate-coloured cloud was drifting up from over
the river, and the rain was falling with a soft persistency which is more
fatal than the most boisterous shower. There would be no more cricket
that day.
‘Two coffees and two benedictines,’ cried Frank, and they relapsed into
their chairs. But a half-hour passed and the grey cloud was thicker and
the rain more heavy. The cheerless leaden river flowed slowly under
drifting skies. Beyond an expanse of shining pavement the great black
Abbey towered amidst the storm.
‘Have you ever done the Abbey, Maude?’
‘No, Frank; I should love to.’
‘I have only been once—more shame to me to say so! Is it not a sin that
we young Englishmen should be familiar with every music-hall in London
and should know so little of this which is the centre of the British
race, the most august and tremendous monument that ever a nation owned.
Six hundred years ago the English looked upon it as their holiest and
most national shrine, and since then our kings and our warriors and our
thinkers and our poets have all been laid there, until there is such an
accumulation that the huge Abbey has hardly space for another monument.
Let us spend an hour inside it.’
They made for Solomon’s porch, since it was the nearest and they had but
the one umbrella. Under its shelter they brushed themselves dry before
they entered.
‘Whom does the Abbey belong to, Frank?’
‘To you and me!’
‘Now you are joking!’
‘Not at all. It belongs in the long-run to the British taxpayer. You
have heard the story of the Scotch visitor who came on board one of our
battleships and asked to see the captain. “Who shall I say?” said the
sentry. “One of the proprietors,” said the Scotchman. That’s _our_
position towards the Abbey. Let us inspect our property.’
They were smiling as they entered, but the smile faded from their lips as
the door closed behind them. In this holy of holies, this inner
sanctuary of the race, there was a sense of serene and dignified
solemnity which would have imposed itself upon the most thoughtless.
Frank and Maude stood in mute reverence. The high arches shot up in long
rows upon either side of them, straight and slim as beautiful trees,
until they curved off far up near the clerestory and joined their sister
curves to form the lightest, most delicate tracery of stone. In front of
them a great rose-window of stained glass, splendid with rich purples and
crimsons, shone through a subdued and reverent gloom. Here and there in
the aisles a few spectators moved among the shadows, but all round along
the walls two and three deep were ranged the illustrious dead, the
perishable body within, the lasting marble without, and the more lasting
name beneath. It was very silent in the home of the great dead—only a
distant footfall or a subdued murmur here and there. Maude knelt down
and sank her face in her hands. Frank prayed also with that prayer which
is a feeling rather than an utterance.
Then they began to move round the short transept in which they found
themselves—a part of the Abbey reserved for the great statesmen. Frank
tried to quote the passage in which Macaulay talks about the men worn out
by the stress and struggle of the neighbouring parliament-hall, and
coming hither for peace and rest. Here were the men who had been strong
enough to grasp the helm, and who, sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly,
but always honestly, had tried to keep the old ship before the wind.
Canning and Peel were there, with Pitt, Fox, Grattan and Beaconsfield.
Governments and oppositions moulder behind the walls. Beaconsfield alone
among all the statues showed the hard-lined face of the self-made man.
These others look so plump and smooth one can hardly realise how strong
they were, but they sprang from those ruling castes to whom strength came
by easy inheritance. Frank told Maude the little which he knew of each
of them—of Grattan, the noblest Irishman of them all, of Castlereagh,
whose coffin was pursued to the gates of the Abbey by a raging mob who
wished to tear out his corpse, of Fox the libertine philosopher, of
Palmerston the gallant sportsman, who rode long after he could walk.
They marvelled together at the realism of the sculptor who had pitted
Admiral Warren with the smallpox, and at the absurdity of that other one
who had clad Robert Peel in a Roman toga.
Then turning to the right at the end of the Statesmen’s Transept, they
wandered aimlessly down the huge nave. It was overwhelming, the grandeur
of the roof above and of the contents below. Any one of hundreds of
these tombs was worth a devout pilgrimage, but how could one raise his
soul to the appreciation of them all. Here was Darwin who revolutionised
zoology, and here was Isaac Newton who gave a new direction to astronomy.
Here were old Ben Jonson, and Stephenson the father of railways, and
Livingstone of Africa, and Wordsworth, and Kingsley, and Arnold. Here
were the soldiers of the mutiny—Clyde and Outram and Lawrence,—and
painters, and authors, and surgeons, and all the good sons who in their
several degrees had done loyal service to the old mother. And when their
service was done the old mother had stretched out that long arm of hers
and had brought them home, and always for every good son brought home she
had sent another forth, and her loins were ever fruitful, and her
children loving and true. Go into the Abbey and think, and as the
nation’s past is borne in upon you, you will have no fear for its future.
Frank was delighted with some of the monuments and horrified by others,
and he communicated both his joy and his anger to Maude. They noticed
together how the moderns and the Elizabethans had much in common in their
types of face, their way of wearing the hair, and their taste in
monuments, while between them lie the intolerable affectations—which
culminated towards the end of last century.
‘It all rings false—statue, inscription, everything,’ said Frank. ‘These
insufferable allegorical groups sprawling round a dead hero are of the
same class as the pompous and turgid prose of Doctor Johnson. The
greatest effects are the simplest effects, and so it always was and so it
always will be. But that little bit of Latin is effective, I confess.’
It was a very much defaced inscription underneath a battered Elizabethan
effigy, whose feet had been knocked off, and whose features were blurred
into nothing. Two words of the inscription had caught Frank’s eye.
‘_Moestissima uxor_! It was his “most sad wife” who erected it! Look at
it now! The poor battered monument of a woman’s love. Now, Maude, come
with me, and we shall visit the famous Poets’ Corner.’
What an assembly it would be if at some supreme day each man might stand
forth from the portals of his tomb. Tennyson, the last and almost the
greatest of that illustrious line, lay under the white slab upon the
floor. Maude and Frank stood reverently beside it.
‘“Sunset and evening Star
And one clear call for me.”’
Frank quoted. ‘What lines for a very old man to write! I should put him
second only to Shakespeare had I the marshalling of them.’
‘I have read so little,’ said Maude.
‘We will read it all together after next week. But it makes your reading
so much more real and intimate when you have stood at the grave of the
man who wrote. That’s Chaucer, the big tomb there. He is the father of
British poetry. Here is Browning beside Tennyson—united in life and in
death. He was the more profound thinker, but music and form are
essential also.’
‘What a splendid face!’ cried Maude.
‘It is a bust to Longfellow, the American.’ They read the inscription.
‘This bust was placed among the memorials of the poets of England by
English admirers of an American poet.’
‘I am so glad to have seen that. I know his poems so well,’ said Maude.
‘I believe he is more read than any poet in England.’
‘Who is that standing figure?’
‘It is Dryden. What a clever face, and what a modern type. Here is
Walter Scott beside the door. How kindly and humorous his expression
was! And see how high his head was from the ear to the crown. It was a
great brain. There is Burns, the other famous Scot. Don’t you think
there is a resemblance between the faces? And here are Dickens, and
Thackeray, and Macaulay. I wonder whether, when Macaulay was writing his
essays, he had a premonition that he would be buried in Westminster
Abbey. He is continually alluding to the Abbey and its graves. I always
think that we have a vague intuition as to what will occur to us in
life.’
‘We can guess what is probable.’
‘It amounts to more than that. I had an intuition that I should marry
you from the first day that I saw you, and yet it did not seem probable.
But deep down in my soul I knew that I should marry you.’
‘I knew that I should marry you, Frank, or else that I should never marry
at all.’
‘There now! We both had it. Well, that _is_ really wonderful!’
They stood among the memorials of all those great people, marvelling at
the mysteries of their own small lives. A voice at their elbows brought
them back to the present.
‘This way, if you please, for the kings,’ said the voice. ‘They are now
starting for the kings.’
‘They’ proved to be a curiously mixed little group of people who were
waiting at the entrance through the enclosure for the arrival of the
official guide. There were a tall red-bearded man with a very Scotch
accent and a small gentle wife, also an American father with his two
bright and enthusiastic daughters, a petty-officer of the navy in his
uniform, two young men whose attention was cruelly distracted from the
monuments by the American girls, and a dozen other travellers of various
sexes and ages. Just as Maude and Frank joined them the guide, a young
fresh-faced fellow, came striding up, and they passed through the opening
into the royal burying-ground.
‘This way, ladies and gentlemen,’ cried the hurrying guide, and they all
clattered over the stone pavement. He stopped beside a tomb upon which a
lady with a sad worn face was lying. ‘Mary, Queen of Scots,’ said he,
‘the greatest beauty of her day. This monument was erected by her son,
James the First.’
‘Isn’t she just perfectly sweet?’ said one of the American girls.
‘Well, I don’t know. I expected more of her than that,’ the other
answered.
‘I reckon,’ remarked the father, ‘that if any one went through as much as
that lady did, it would not tend to improve her beauty. Now what age
might the lady be, sir?’
‘Forty-four years of age at the time of her execution,’ said the guide.
‘Ah weel, she’s young for her years,’ muttered the Scotchman, and the
party moved on. Frank and Maude lingered to have a further look at the
unfortunate princess, the bright French butterfly, who wandered from the
light and warmth into that grim country, a land of blood and of psalms.
‘She was as hard as nails under all her gentle grace,’ said Frank. ‘She
rode eighty miles and hardly drew rein after the battle of Langside.’
‘She looks as if she were tired, poor dear!’ said Maude; ‘I don’t think
that she was sorry to be at rest.’
The guide was narrating the names of the owners of the tombs at the
further end of the chapel. ‘Queen Anne is here, and Mary the wife of
William the Third is beside her. And here is William himself. The king
was very short and the queen very tall, so in the sculptures the king is
depicted standing upon a stool so as to bring their heads level. In the
vaults beyond there are thirty-eight Stuarts.’
Thirty-eight Stuarts! Princes, bishops, generals, once the salt of the
earth, the mightiest of men, and now lumped carelessly together as
thirty-eight Stuarts. So Death the Republican and Time the Radical can
drag down the highest from his throne.
They had followed the guide into another small chapel, which bore the
name of Henry VII. upon the door. Surely they were great builders and
great designers in those days! Had stone been as pliable as wax it could
not have been twisted and curved into more exquisite spirals and curls,
so light, so delicate, so beautiful, twining and turning along the walls,
and drooping from the ceiling. Never did the hand of man construct
anything more elaborately ornate, nor the brain of man think out a design
more absolutely harmonious and lovely. In the centre, with all the pomp
of mediæval heraldry, starred and spangled with the Tudor badges, the two
bronze figures of Henry and his wife lay side by side upon their tomb.
The guide read out the quaint directions in the king’s will, by which
they were to be buried ‘with some respect to their Royal dignity, but
avoiding damnable pomp and outrageous superfluities!’ There was, as
Frank remarked, a fine touch of the hot Tudor blood in the adjectives.
One could guess where Henry the Eighth got his masterful temper. Yet it
was an ascetic and priest-like face which looked upwards from the tomb.
They passed the rifled tombs of Cromwell, Blake, and Ireton—the
despicable revenge of the men who did not dare to face them in the
field,—and they marked the grave of James the First, who erected no
monument to himself, and so justified in death the reputation for
philosophy which he had aimed at in his life. Then they inspected the
great tomb of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, as surprising and as
magnificent as his history, cast a glance at the covering of plucky
little George the Second, the last English king to lead his own army into
battle, and so onwards to see the corner of the Innocents, where rest the
slender bones of the poor children murdered in the Tower.
But now the guide had collected his little flock around him again, with
the air of one who has something which is not to be missed. ‘You will
stand upon the step to see the profile,’ said he, as he indicated a
female figure upon a tomb. ‘It is the great Queen Elizabeth.’
It was a profile and a face worth seeing—the face of a queen who was
worthy of her Shakespeares upon the land and her Drakes upon the sea.
Had the Spanish king seen her, he would have understood that she was not
safe to attack—this grim old lady with the eagle nose and the iron lips.
You could understand her grip upon her cash-box, you could explain her
harshness to her lovers, you could realise the confidence of her people,
you could read it all in that wonderful face.
‘She’s splendid,’ said Frank.
‘She’s terrible,’ said Maude.
‘Did I understand you to say, sir,’ asked the American, ‘that it was this
lady who beheaded the other lady, Queen of Scotland, whom we saw ’way
back in the other compartment?’
‘Yes, sir, she did.’
‘Well, I guess if there was any beheading to be done, this was the lady
to see that it was put through with promptness and despatch. Not a
married lady, I gather?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And a fortunate thing for somebody. That woman’s husband would have a
mean time of it, sir, in my opinion.’
‘Hush, poppa,’ said the two daughters, and the procession moved on. They
were entering the inner chapel of all, the oldest and the holiest, in
which, amid the ancient Plantagenet kings, there lies that one old Saxon
monarch, confessor and saint, the holy Edward, round whose honoured body
the whole of this great shrine has gradually risen. A singular erection
once covered with mosaic work, but now bare and gaunt, stood in the
centre.
‘The body of Edward the Confessor is in a case up at the top,’ said the
guide. ‘This hollow place below was filled with precious relics, and the
pilgrims used to kneel in these niches, which are just large enough to
hold a man upon his knees. The mosaic work has been picked out by the
pilgrims.’
‘What is the date of the shrine?’ asked Frank.
‘About 1250, sir. The early kings were all buried as near to it as they
could get, for it was their belief in those days that the devil might
carry off the body, and so the nearer they got to the shrine the safer
they felt. Henry the Fifth, who won the battle of Agincourt, is there.
Those are the actual helmet, shield, and saddle which he used in the
battle upon the crossbeam yonder. That king with the grave face and the
beard is Edward the Third, the father of the Black Prince. The Black
Prince never lived to ascend the throne, but he was the father of the
unfortunate Richard the Second, who lies here—this clean-shaven king with
the sharp features. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will turn this
way, I will show you one of the most remarkable objects in the Abbey.’
The object in question proved to be nothing more singular than a square
block of stone placed under an old chair. And yet as the guide continued
to speak, they felt that he had justified his words.
‘This is the sacred stone of Scone upon which the kings of Scotland have
been crowned from time immemorial. When Edward the First overran
Scotland 600 years ago, he had it brought here, and since then every
monarch of England has also sat upon it when crowned.’
‘The present Queen?’ asked some one.
‘Yes, she also. The legend was that it was the stone upon which Jacob
rested his head when he dreamed, but the geologists have proved that it
is red sandstone of Scotland.’
‘Then I understand, sir, that this other throne is the Scottish throne,’
said the American gentleman.
‘No, sir, the Scottish throne and the English throne are the same throne.
But at the time of William and Mary it was necessary to crown her as well
as him, and so a second throne was needed. But that of course was
modern.’
‘Only a couple of hundred years ago. I wonder they let it in. But I
guess they might have taken better care of it. Some one has carved his
name upon it.’
‘A Westminster boy bet his schoolfellows that he would sleep among the
tombs, and to prove that he had done it, he carved his name upon the
throne.’
‘You don’t say!’ cried the American. ‘Well, I guess that boy ended
pretty high up.’
‘As high as the gallows, perhaps,’ said Frank, and every one tittered,
but the guide hurried on with a grave face, for the dignity of the Abbey
was in his keeping.
‘This tomb is that of Queen Eleanor,’ said he.
Frank twitched Maude by the sleeve. ‘Eleanor of Charing Cross,’ said he.
‘See how one little bit of knowledge links on with another.’
‘And here is the tomb of her husband, Edward the First. It was he who
brought the stone from Scone. At the time of his death the conquest of
Scotland was nearly done, and he gave orders that his burial should be
merely temporary until Scotland was thoroughly subdued. He is still, as
you perceive, in his temporary tomb.’
The big Scotchman laughed loudly and derisively. All the others looked
sadly at him with the pitying gaze which the English use towards the more
excitable races when their emotion gets the better of them. A stream
from a garden hose could not have damped him more.
‘They opened the grave last century,’ said the guide. ‘Inside was an
inscription, which said, “Here lies the hammer of the Scots.” He was a
fine man, six feet two inches from crown to sole.’
They wandered out of the old shrine where the great Plantagenet kings lie
like a bodyguard round the Saxon saint. Abbots lay on one side of them
as they passed, and dead crusaders with their legs crossed, upon the
other. And then, in an instant, they were back in comparatively modern
times again.
‘This is the tomb of Wolfe, who died upon the Heights of Abraham,’ said
the guide. ‘It was due to him and to his soldiers that all America
belongs to the English-speaking races. There is a picture of his
Highlanders going up to the battle along the winding path which leads
from Wolfe’s Cove. He died in the moment of victory.’
It was bewildering, the way in which they skipped from age to age. The
history of England appeared to be not merely continuous, but
simultaneous, as they turned in an instant from the Georgian to the
Elizabethan, the one monument as well preserved as the other. They
passed the stately de Vere, his armour all laid out in fragments upon a
marble slab, as a proof that he died at peace with all men; and they saw
the terrible statue of the onslaught of Death, which, viewed in the
moonlight, made a midnight robber drop his booty and fly panic-stricken
out of the Abbey. So awful and yet so fascinating is it, that the
shuffling feet of the party of sightseers had passed out of hearing
before Maude and Frank could force themselves away from it.
In the base of the statue is an iron door, which has been thrown open,
and the sculptor’s art has succeeded wonderfully in convincing you that
it has been thrown open violently. The two leaves of it seem still to
quiver with the shock, and one could imagine that one heard the harsh
clang of the metal. Out of the black opening had sprung a dreadful
thing, something muffled in a winding-sheet, one bony hand clutching the
edge of the pedestal, the other upraised to hurl a dart at the woman
above him. She, a young bride of twenty-seven, has fallen fainting,
while her husband, with horror in his face, is springing forward, his
hand outstretched, to get between his wife and her loathsome assailant.
‘I shall dream of this,’ said Maude. She had turned pale, as many a
woman has before this monument.
‘It is awful!’ Frank walked backwards, unable to take his eyes from it.
‘What pluck that sculptor had! It is an effect which must be either
ludicrous or great, and he has made it great.’
‘Roubillac is his name,’ said Maude, reading it from the pedestal.
‘A Frenchman, or a man of French descent. Isn’t that characteristic! In
the whole great Abbey the one monument which has impressed us with its
genius and imagination is by a foreigner. We haven’t got it in us. We
are too much afraid of letting ourselves go and of giving ourselves away.
We are heavy-handed and heavy-minded.’
‘If we can’t produce the monuments, we can produce the men who deserve
them,’ said Maude, and Frank wrote the aphorism down upon his shirt-cuff.
‘We are too severe both in sculpture and architecture,’ said he. ‘More
fancy and vigour in our sculptors, more use of gold and more ornament in
our architects—that is what we want. But I think it is past praying for.
It would be better to subdivide the work of the world, according to the
capacity of the different nations. Let Italy and France embellish us.
We might do something in exchange—organise the French colonies, perhaps,
or the Italian exchequer. That is our legitimate work, but we will never
do anything at the other.’
The guide had already reached the end of his round, an iron gate
corresponding to that by which they had entered, and they found him
waiting impatiently and swinging his keys. But Maude’s smile and word of
thanks as she passed him brought content into his face once more. A ray
of living sunshine is welcome to the man who spends his days among the
tombs.
They walked down the North Transept and out through Solomon’s Porch. The
rain-cloud had swept over, and the summer sun was shining upon the wet
streets, turning them all to gold. This might have been that fabled
London of which young Whittington dreamed. In front of them lay the
lawns of vivid green, with the sunlit raindrops gleaming upon the grass.
The air was full of the chirping of the sparrows. Across their vision,
from the end of Whitehall to Victoria Street, the black ribbon of traffic
whirled and circled, one of the great driving-belts of the huge city.
Over it all, to their right, towered those glorious Houses of Parliament,
the very sight of which made Frank repent his bitter words about English
architecture. They stood in the old porch gazing at the scene. It was
so wonderful to come back at one stride from the great country of the
past to the greater country of the present. Here was the very thing
which these dead men lived and died to build.
‘It’s not much past three,’ said Frank. ‘What a gloomy place to take you
to! Good heavens, we have one day together, and I take you to a
cemetery! Shall we go to a matinée to counteract it?’
But Maude laid her hand upon his arm.
‘I don’t think, Frank, that I was ever more impressed, or learned more in
so short a time, in my life. It was a grand hour—an hour never to be
forgotten. And you must not think that I am ever with you to be amused.
I am with you to accompany you in whatever seems to you to be highest and
best. Now before we leave the dear old Abbey, promise me that you will
always live your own highest and never come down to me.’
‘I can very safely promise that I will never come down to you,’ said
Frank. ‘I may climb all my life, and yet there are parts of your soul
which will be like snow-peaks in the clouds to me. But you will be now
and always my own dear comrade as well as my sweetest wife. And now,
Maude, what shall it be, the theatre or the Australians?’
‘Do you wish to go to either very much?’
‘Not unless you do.’
‘Well, then, I feel as if either would be a profanation. Let us walk
together down to the Embankment, and sit on one of the benches there, and
watch the river flowing in the sunshine, and talk and think of all that
we have seen.’