THE CAPE AND DEVONPORT
On November 12th, 1898, my husband sailed for South Africa, there to
take up the military command, and to act as High Commissioner in place
of Sir Alfred Milner, home on leave. His staff at Dover loved him. Their
send-off brought tears to his eyes. I, C. and the A.D.C. saw him off
from Southampton, to rejoin him in the process of time at the Cape. We
little knew what a dark period in his life awaited him out there,
brought about by the malice of those in power there and at home. It is
too sacred and too painful a subject for me to record it here further
than I have done. The facts will be found in his “Autobiography.” I left
England on February 18th, 1899, with three of the children, leaving the
two eldest boys at college. It was a very painful leave-taking at the
Waterloo Station. My mother was there and all the dear ones, whom I did
not expect to see again for two or three years--my mother perhaps ever
again. Yet in a few months we were back there! My theory that one should
try and not fret about the future, which is an absolutely unknown
quantity, proved justified. I have chronicled our voyage out in my
former little book, and described one night at Madeira--a night of
enchantment under the moon.
I need not go over the days on the “blue water” again, nor our strange
life beyond the Equator, where, though I was filled with admiration for
the beauty of our surroundings, I never felt the happiness which Italy,
Egypt or Palestine had given me. Very absurd, no doubt, and sentimental,
but my love of the old haunts made me feel resentful of the topsy-turvy
state of things I found down there. The crescent moon on what (to me)
was the wrong side of the sunset, the hot north wind, the cold blast
from the south, the shadows all inverted--no, I did not enjoy this
contradiction to my well-beloved traditions. There was, besides, a local
melancholy in that strange beauty I cannot describe. All this may be put
down to sentimentality, but a very real melancholy attaches to South
Africa in my mind in connection with my husband, who suffered there for
his honesty and devotion to the honour of the Empire he served. The
authorities accepted his resignation of the Cape command which he
tendered for fear of embarrassing the Government, and he accepted the
command of the Western District in its place, which meant Devonport. So
on August 22nd we all embarked for Home.
There we found the campaign of calumny, originated in South Africa
against Sir William, in its acutest phase. The Press was letting loose
all the poison with which it was being supplied, and I consequently went
through, at first, the bitter pain of daily trying to intercept the
vilest anonymous letters, many of them beer-stained missives couched in
ill-spelt language from the slums. Not all the reparation offered to my
husband later on--the bestowal of the Grand Cross of the Bath, his
election to the dignity of Privy Councillor, his selection as the safest
judge to investigate the South African war stores scandals, not to name
other acts conveying the _amende honorable_--ever healed the wound.
His offence had been a frank admission of sympathy for a people
tenacious of their independence and, knowing the Boers as he did, he
knew what their resistance would mean in case of attack. He was appalled
at the prospect of a war, not against an army but against a people,
involving the farm-burnings and all the horrors which our armies would
have to resort to. He would fain have seen violence avoided and
diplomacy used instead, knowing, as he did, that the old intransigent
Dopper element would die out in time, and the new generation of Boers,
many of whom were educated at our universities, intermarrying with the
English, as they were already doing, would have brought about that very
union of the two races within the Empire which has been reached to-day
through all that suffering. In case, however, war should be decided on
he employed the utmost vigour allowed to official language to warn those
in power of the necessity for enormous forces in order to ensure
success. Some of his despatches were suppressed. The idea at
Headquarters was an easy march to Pretoria. What I have alluded to as
the malice which prompted the campaign of calumny had caused the report
to be spread that our initial defeats were owing to his wilful neglect
in not warning the directing powers of the gravity of their undertaking.
The chief interest I found in our new appointment was caused by the
frequent arrivals of foreign men-of-war, whose captains were received
officially and socially, and there were admirals, too, when squadrons
came. It was interesting and amusing. Lord and Lady Charles Scott were
at the Admiralty and, later, Sir Edward Seymour, during our appointment.
The foreign sailors prevented the official functions from becoming
monotonous, and we got a certain amount of pleasure out of this
Devonport phase of our experiences. I carried my painting “through thick
and thin,” and did well, on the whole, at the Academy. I had the
“consuming zeal”--a very necessary possession. One year it was a big
tent-pegging picture (I don’t know where its purchaser is now), which
was well lighted at Burlington House. Then a Boer War subject, “Within
Sound of the Guns”--well placed; followed by an Afghan subject, “Rescue
of Wounded,” which to my great pleasure was given an excellent place in
the _Salle d’Honneur_. I also accomplished other smaller works and
exhibited a great number of water colours. It is a medium I like much. I
also prepared for the Press my “Letters from the Holy Land” there which
I have already mentioned. My publishers, Messrs. A. and C. Black,
reproduced the water-colour illustrations very faithfully.
Our French sailor guests were always bright, so were the Italians, but
the Japanese were very heavy in hand, and conversation was uphill work.
It was mainly carried on by repeated smiles and nods on their part. When
their big ships came in on one occasion the Admiralty gave them the
first dinner, of course, and at the end the bandmaster had the happy
thought of giving a few bars out of Arthur Sullivan’s “Mikado” before
the Emperor’s health was drunk, the National Air not being in his
repertory. Some one asked the Jap admiral if he recognised it. “Ah! no,
no, no!” came the usual smiling and nodding answer. At the Port
Admirals’ I was to learn that in the navy you mustn’t stand up for our
Sovereign’s health, by order of William IV. This resulted one evening in
our sitting for “The King” and standing up for “The Kaiser.” There were
the German admiral and officers present. I thought that very
unfortunate.[13]
Well, Devonport in summer was very delightful, but Devonport in winter
had long periods of fog and gloom. I had the blessing of another trip to
Italy, this time with our eldest daughter, starting on a dark wintry day
in early March, 1900. Sir William’s work prevented his coming with us.
_Viâ_ Genoa to Rome lay our happy way. Of course, it wasn’t the Rome I
first knew, but the shock I received when revisiting it four years
before this present visit had already introduced me into the new order,
and I now knew what to see, enjoy, and avoid. There were several new
things to enjoy: above all, the Forum, now all open to the sky! In the
dear old days that space was a rather dreary expanse of waste land where
some poor old paupers were to be daily seen, leisurely labouring under
the delusion that they were excavating. They grubbed up the tufts of
grass and scraped the dust with pocket-knives, and the treasures below
remained comfortably tucked away from public view. Then the much-abused
Embankment. The dignified sweep of its lines leads the eye up, as it
follows the flow of the stream, to the dignity of St. Peter’s, whereas,
formerly, in its place, unbeautiful masses of mouldering houses tottered
over the Tiber and gave that long-suffering river the reflections of
their drainpipes. Then, the two end arches of that most estimable Ponte
Sant’ Angelo are now cleared of the old mud which blocked them up
malodorously and docked the lovely thing of its symmetry. Then, finally,
Rome is clean!
We had the good fortune to be present at two very striking Papal
functions, striking as bringing together Catholics from a wide-flung
circle embracing some remote nationalities unknown by sight to me. The
first was the Pope’s Benediction in St. Peter’s on March 18th. We were
standing altogether about three hours in the crowd at the Tomb, well
placed for seeing the Holy Father. He was taken round the vast basilica
in his _sedia gestatoria_, and blessed a wildly cheering crowd. I never
saw a human being so like a spirit as Leo XIII. He looked as white as
his mitre as he leant forward and stretched his arm out in benediction
from side to side, borne high above the helmets of the Noble Guard. One
heard cheers in all languages, and a curious effect was produced by the
whirling handkerchiefs, which made a white haze above the dark crowd. I
have often heard secular monarchs cheered, and that very heartily, but
for a Pope it seems that more than ordinary loyalty prompts the
cheerers. The people seem to give out their whole being in their voices
and gestures.
The Diary says: “I am glad I have seen that old man’s face and his look,
as though it came to us from beyond the grave. At times the cheers went
up to the highest pitch of both men’s and women’s voices. A strange
sound to hear in a church.”
A spring day spent at the well-known Hadrian’s Villa, under Tivoli, is
not to be allowed to pass without a grateful record. It is a most
exquisite place of old ruins, cypresses, olives and, at this time,
flowering peach trees, violets and anemones. It is an enchanting site
for a country house. Hadrian chose well. From there you see the
delicately-pencilled dome of St. Peter’s on the rim of the horizon to
the west, and behind you, to the north, rise the steep foot-hills of the
mountains, some crowned with old cities. The ruins of the villa are all
_minus_ the lovely outer coating which used to hide the brickwork, and
poor Hadrian would have felt very woeful had he foreseen that all the
white loveliness of his villa was to come to this. But as bits of warm
colour and lovely surface those brick spaces take the sun and shadow
beautifully between the dark masses of the cypresses and feathery grey
cloudiness of the olives. Nowhere is the “touch and go” nature of life
more strikingly put before the mind than in dead Rome, where so much
magnificence in stone and marble and mosaic and bronze has fallen into
lumps of crumbling brick.
On March 26th we attended the Papal Benediction in the Sistine Chapel,
which is a remarkable thing to see. It was a memorable morning. The
floor of the chapel was packed with pilgrims, some of them rough men and
women from remote regions of the north-east, whose outlandish costumes
were especially remarkable for the heavy Cossack boots, reaching to the
knee, worn by both sexes. One wondered how these people journeyed to
Rome. What a gathering of the faithful we looked down on from our
gallery! The same ecstatic cheering we had heard in St. Peter’s
announced the entrance of Leo XIII. There he was, the holy creature,
blessing right and left with that thin alabaster hand, half covered with
a white mitten. With all their hoarse barbaric cheering, I noticed how
those peasants, who had so particularly attracted me, remembered to bend
their heads and most devoutly make the sign of the cross as he passed.
They almost monopolised my study of the motley crowd, but I was aware of
the many nationalities present, and the same enthusiasm came from them
all. At such times a great consolation eases the mind, saddened, as it
often is, by the general atmosphere of declining faith in which one has
to live one’s ordinary life in the world. After the Mass came the
presentation of the pilgrims at the altar steps. The Pope had kind words
for all, bending down to hear and to speak to them, and often stroking
the men’s heads. One huge Muscovite peasant knelt long at his feet, and
the Pope kept patting the rough man’s cheek and speaking to him and
blessing him over and over again. At the sight of this a wild
“_hourah_!” broke from his fellow villagers. Where in the world was
their village? In the mists of remoteness, but here in heart,
unmistakably. Following the swarthy giant three sandy-haired German
students, carrying their plumed caps in their hands and girt with
rapiers, presented some college documents to receive the Papal
benediction, and a great many men and women knelt and passed on, but the
Pope seemed in no way fatigued. As he was borne out again he waved us an
upward blessing with his white and most friendly countenance turned up
to us.
Our Roman wanderings included a visit to the Holy Father’s Vatican
gardens, which are part of the little temporal kingdom a Pope still
possesses, and to his tiny “country house” therein, where he goes for
change of air(!) in the summer, about two stonethrows from the Vatican.
I note: “There are well-trimmed vineyards there; there are pet birds and
beasts in a little ‘zoological gardens’; there is the arbour where he
has his meals on hot days; and, finally, we were conducted to his little
villa bedroom from whose window one of the finest views of Rome is seen,
dominated by the Quirinal, within (let us hope) shaking hands distance.”
We heard the “Miserere” at St. Peter’s on Good Friday--very impressive,
that twilight service in the apse of the great basilica! The
unaccompanied voices of boys sounded in sweetest music--one hardly knew
whence it came--and the air seemed to thrill with the thin angelic sound
in the waning light as one by one the candles at the altar were put out.
At the last Psalm the last light was extinguished, and the vast crowd
with its wan faces remained lighted only by the faint glimmer that came
down from the pale sky through the high windows. Then good-bye to Rome.
We left for Perugia on April 22nd. I certainly ought to be grateful for
having had yet another reception by my Umbrian Hills! And such a
reception that April afternoon, with the low sun gilding everything into
fullest beauty! I did my best to secure that moment in miserably
inadequate paint from the hotel window immediately on arrival. Better
than nothing. But no more of Perugia, nor of dear old Florence on our
way to academic Padua; no more of Verona. I have much yet to record on
getting home, and after!