It was in a Surrey churchyard on a grey, damp afternoon--all very
solitary and quiet, with no alien spectators and only a very few
mourners; and no desolating sense of loss, although a very true and
kindly friend was passing from us. A football match was in progress in
a field adjoining the churchyard, and I wondered, as I stood by the
grave, if, were I the schoolmaster, I would stop the game just for the
few minutes during which a body was committed to the earth; and I
decided that I would not. In the midst of death we are in life, just
as in the midst of life we are in death; it is all as it should be in
this bizarre, jostling world. And he whom we had come to bury would
have been the first to wish the boys to go on with their sport.
He was an old scholar--not so very old, either--whom I had known for
some five years, and had many a long walk with: a short and sturdy
Irish gentleman, with a large, genial grey head stored with odd lore
and the best literature; and the heart of a child. I never knew a man
of so transparent a character. He showed you all his thoughts: as some
one once said, his brain was like a beehive under glass--you could
watch all its workings. And the honey in it! To walk with him at any
season of the year was to be reminded or newly told of the best that
the English poets have said on all the phenomena of wood and hedgerow,
meadow and sky. He had the more lyrical passages of Shakespeare at his
tongue's end, and all Wordsworth and Keats. These were his favourites;
but he had read everything that has the true rapturous note, and had
forgotten none of its spirit.
His life was divided between his books, his friends, and long walks. A
solitary man, he worked at all hours without much method, and probably
courted his fatal illness in this way. To his own name there is not
much to show; but such was his liberality that he was continually
helping others, and the fruits of his erudition are widely scattered,
and have gone to increase many a comparative stranger's reputation.
His own _magnum opus_ he left unfinished; he had worked at it for
years, until to his friends it had come to be something of a joke. But
though still shapeless, it was a great feast, as the world, I hope,
will one day know. If, however, this treasure does not reach the
world, it will not be because its worth was insufficient, but because
no one can be found to decipher the manuscript; for I may say
incidentally that our old friend wrote the worst hand in London, and
it was not an uncommon experience of his correspondents to carry his
missives from one pair of eyes to another, seeking a clue; and I
remember on one occasion two such inquirers meeting unexpectedly, and
each simultaneously drawing a letter from his pocket and uttering the
request that the other should put everything else on one side in order
to solve the enigma.
Lack of method and a haphazard and unlimited generosity were not his
only Irish qualities. He had a quick, chivalrous temper, too, and I
remember the difficulty I once had in restraining him from leaping the
counter of a small tobacconist's in Great Portland Street, to give the
man a good dressing for an imagined rudeness--not to himself, but to
me. And there is more than one 'bus conductor in London who has cause
to remember this sturdy Quixotic passenger's championship of a poor
woman to whom insufficient courtesy seemed to him to have been shown.
Normally kindly and tolerant, his indignation on hearing of injustice
was red hot. He burned at a story of meanness. It would haunt him all
the evening. "Can it really be true?" he would ask, and burst forth
again to flame.
Abstemious himself in all things, save reading and writing and helping
his friends and correspondents, he mixed excellent whisky punch, as he
called it. He brought to this office all the concentration which he
lacked in his literary labours. It was a ritual with him; nothing
might be hurried or left undone, and the result, I might say,
justified the means. His death reduces the number of such convivial
alchemists to one only, and he is in Tasmania, and, so far as I am
concerned, useless.
His avidity as a reader--his desire to master his subject--led to some
charming eccentricities, as when, for a daily journey between Earl's
Court Road and Addison Road stations, he would carry a heavy hand-bag
filled with books, "to read in the train." This was no satire on the
railway system, but pure zeal. He had indeed no satire in him; he
spoke his mind and it was over.
It was a curious little company that assembled to do honour to this
old kindly bachelor--the two or three relatives that he possessed, and
eight of his literary friends, most of them of a good age, and for the
most part men of intellect, and in one or two cases of world-wide
reputation, and all a little uncomfortable in unwonted formal black.
We were very grave and thoughtful, but it was not exactly a sad
funeral, for we knew that had he lived longer--he was sixty-three--he
would certainly have been an invalid, which would have irked his
active, restless mind and body almost unbearably; and we knew, also,
that he had died in his first real illness after a very happy life.
Since we knew this, and also that he was a bachelor and almost alone,
those of us who were not his kin were not melted and unstrung by that
poignant sense of untimely loss and irreparable removal that makes
some funerals so tragic; but death, however it come, is a mystery
before which one cannot stand unmoved and unregretful; and I, for one,
as I stood there, remembered how easy it would have been oftener to
have ascended to his eyrie and lured him out into Hertfordshire or his
beloved Epping, or even have dragged him away to dinner and whisky
punch; and I found myself meditating, too, as the profoundly
impressive service rolled on, how melancholy it was that all that
storied brain, with its thousands of exquisite phrases and its perhaps
unrivalled knowledge of Shakespearean philology, should have ceased to
be. For such a cessation, at any rate, say what one will of
immortality, is part of the sting of death, part of the victory of the
grave, which St. Paul denied with such magnificent irony.
And then we filed out into the churchyard, which is a new and very
large one, although the church is old, and at a snail's pace, led by
the clergyman, we crept along, a little black company, for, I suppose,
nearly a quarter of a mile, under the cold grey sky. As I said, many
of us were old, and most of us were indoor men, and I was amused to
see how close to the head some of us held our hats--the merest
barleycorn of interval being maintained for reverence' sake; whereas
the sexton and the clergyman had slipped on those black velvet
skull-caps which God, in His infinite mercy, either completely
overlooks, or seeing, smiles at. And there our old friend was
committed to the earth, amid the contending shouts of the football
players, and then we all clapped our hats on our heads with firmness
(as he would have wished us to do long before), and returned to the
town to drink tea in an ancient hostelry, and exchange memories,
quaint, and humorous, and touching, and beautiful, of the dead.
_E. V. Lucas._