LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON
While I was still in my second year at Marlborough a thoroughly exciting
and delightful thing happened at home, for my father was appointed
Archbishop of Canterbury, and up trooped his pleased and approving
family to take possession of Lambeth Palace and Addington Park with, so
far as I was concerned, a feeling that he had done great credit to us.
Delightful as Truro had been, we all welcomed the idea of these expanded
grandeurs, and felt colossally capable of taking advantage of them to
the utmost. How great a man my father had become was most pointedly
brought home to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marlborough
soon after his appointment for my confirmation, I could, then and there,
measure the altitude of his pinnacle by the fact that there appeared on
the school notice-board next day an inscription to the effect that His
Grace had asked that a whole holiday should be given to the school in
honour of his visit. He had just asked for it, so it appeared, and in
honour of his visit, it was granted. “Can’t you be confirmed again?” was
the gratifying comment of friends. “I say, do be confirmed again.”
To me, personally, all the splendour and dignity of his office signified
nothing: what concerned a boy in the orgy of his holidays, was the new
sumptuousness of his surroundings.
Stupendous though my father had become, we knew but little of his work
and of its national significance, and it was my mother who to us, far
more than he, was exalted into the zenith. Often since has she told me
how shy and inadequate she felt on entering London, as she now did for
the first time, in such a position, but never can I conceive of her
otherwise than as filling it with the supremest enjoyment, which, after
all, is the first of a hostess’s qualities. Her wisdom, her
conversational brilliance, above all her intense love of people, just as
such, nobly filled and fitted the new sphere. The management of the
great house, with the added concern of the second house at Addington,
appeared in her a natural and effortless instinct: she took the reins
and cracked her whip, and the whole equipage bowled swift and smooth
along the road. The stables were under her control as well; she arranged
all the comings and goings of my father: out rolled his landau with its
tall black high-stepping horses and gilded harness to take him to the
House of Lords, and scarce had the great gates below Morton’s tower
clanged open for him, than Maggie and I set out on our horses for a ride
round the Row, very stiff in top-hats, and riding habit and strapped
trousers, and then round came my mother’s victoria, and woe be to the
carriage-cleaner if the japanned panels failed to reflect with the
unwavering quality of glass. She would be going to pay a couple of calls
and visit a dentist, and while she was there, the victoria would take
Hugh and Nellie to the Zoo, and drop them with strict injunctions that
in an hour precisely they were to pick her up at a fatal door in Old
Burlington Street, and so proceed homewards to tea. Meanwhile the
carriage that deposited my father at the House could take Arthur to some
other rendezvous, and once at any rate, the hansom containing the
Archbishop was prevented from entering the Lambeth Gate, because the
Archbishop’s carriage (containing Hugh and me) must be admitted first.
Never were children so indulged in the matter of equine locomotion, for
the riding horses clattered in and out, and Hugh returning from a
straw-hatted visit to the Zoo must in three minutes hurl himself into
the top-hatted and black-coated garb which in those days was current in
the Row, in order to ride with my father on his return from the House.
One of the five of us, at any rate, was kept on tap for a rather stately
ride with him whenever during the busy day he found an hour to spare,
and it was a pompous pleasure to see the traffic stopped at Hyde Park
Corner, so that we might ride past saluting policemen through the arch.
Physically I suppose we enjoyed our fraternal scampers more, but it
could not help being great fun for a boy of fifteen to steer a rather
fretful horse that went sideways across the street and behaved itself
unseemly, while tall buses waited for his esteemed progress. After all,
if you happened to be riding with your father, for whose passage in
those days all traffic was stayed, you might as well enjoy it....
All such arrangements, all such “fittings in” were a pure delight to my
mother. She revelled in her dexterity, and revelled no less in the
multitude of her engagements. She loved, after a busy day, to dine at
some political house, and hear the talk of the hour, and follow that up
with some party at the Foreign Office, for though she cared very little
if at all about political questions themselves, she delighted in the
froth and bustle and movement. She was great friends with Mr. Gladstone,
though she cared not one atom about the Home Rule question, and he in
turn had the greatest appreciation of her wit, her humour which would
strike a spark out of the most humdrum of happenings: and I believe it
is authentically told that when once at Hawarden there was discussion as
to the identity of the cleverest woman in England, and someone suggested
my mother as the fittest candidate for the post, he said in that
impressive voice, reinforced with the pointed forefinger, “No, you’re
wrong: she’s the cleverest woman in Europe.” Quite unfatigued, she would
be up and dressed in her very oldest clothes before seven next morning,
and walk for a full hour before breakfast, since the rest of the day
held for her no leisure for exercise. Never was there anyone so acutely
observant as she, and at breakfast there would be some grotesque or
comic side-show of the streets for narration. Parks and open places were
of no use to her at all in those rambles; Lambeth Walk, or the humours
of Covent Garden Market were her diversion, and refreshed by these
humours she tackled her new and delightful day. Never by any chance did
she go out to lunch, but never by any chance did we lunch _en famille_;
guests were invariably there. Even more to her mind were her
dinner-parties, in the selection and arrangement of which she took an
infinity of rapturous trouble, and the bigger they were the more I think
she enjoyed them. There was, of course, a great deal of clerical
entertainment, but half a dozen times in the season she gave more
secular dinner-parties of about thirty guests, when literature and
science, and art and politics, and the great world magnificently
assembled. And when the last guest had gone, a piece of invariable
ritual was that she with any of us children who were at home, executed a
wild war-dance all over the drawing-room in a sort of general
jubilation. I remember Lord Halsbury coming back unexpectedly to tell
my mother some story which he had forgotten to mention, and finding us
all at it.
But however full was the day, my mother seemed possessed of complete and
unlimited leisure for talk with any of us who wanted her. I can remember
no occasion on which she was too busy for a talk. Her letters could
wait; anything could wait, and she would slew round from her
writing-table, saying, “Hurrah! Oh, this is nice!” She would listen
alert and eager to some infinitesimal problem, some critical
observation, and say, “Now tell me exactly why you think that. I don’t
agree at all. Let’s have it out.” It seemed that nothing in the world
interested her nearly as much as the point in question, and verily I
believe that it was so. She projected her whole self on to it: she
desired nothing so much, just then, as to put herself completely in your
place, and realize, before she formed an opinion of her own, precisely
what your opinion was. Then invariably the magic of her sympathy seized
on any point with which she agreed, “Quite so: I see that, yes I feel
that,” she would say. “But how about this? Let me see if I can put it to
you.”
It was no wonder that the closeness of her special, particular relation
to each of us was ever growing. The primary desire of her heart was to
give love: when it was given her (and who ever had it in larger
abundance?) she welcomed and revelled in it, but her business above all
was to give. And her love was no soft indulgent thing: there was even an
austerity in its intenseness, and it burned with that lambent quality,
which was so characteristic of her. Never was anyone so like a flame as
she: her light illuminated you, her ardour warmed and stimulated.
Withal, there was never anyone who less resembled a saint, for she was
much too human to be anything of the kind; she had no atom of asceticism
in her, and without being at all artistic she adored beauty.
Spiritual beauty came first, for she loved God more than she loved any
of His works, but how close to her heart was intellectual beauty, things
subtly and finely observed, things humorously and delicately touched!
How, too, she hated spiritual ugliness, as expressed by priggishness
with regard to the Kingdom of Heaven, and mental ugliness as expressed
by conceit or narrowness, and hardly less did she dislike physical
ugliness. Her tones would rise from a calmness which she found quite
impossible to maintain, into a _crescendo_ of violent emphasis and
capital letters as she said something to the following effect:
“Yes, I know: I’m sure he’s a very good man, and that’s so trying,
because he is such a prig, and always does his duty, and, my dear, that
awful mouth, and the Beautiful sentiments that come out of it. Besides
he’s so Very, Very Plain!”
No one was ever more beset with human frailties. She was afraid of
getting stout, and in her diary recorded solemn vows that she would
_not_ eat more than two dishes at dinner, nor take sugar. Then came an
entry, “Soup, fish, pheasant and soufflé. What a Pig I am!”... Or again
if she found herself in some difficulty, where a precise statement of
what had really occurred would make things worse, she would say, “I
shall have to be very diplomatic about it,” and a perfectly well
justified chorus went up from her irreverent family, “That means that
Ma’s going to tell a lie about it.” With all her intense spirituality,
she had no use for conventional worship,
[Illustration: “HIS GRACE” (A DOMESTIC CARICATURE)
[Page 169]
and I can hear her say, on an occasion when my father was out, “We won’t
have prayers to-night for a treat.” Similarly she could never take any
emotional interest (and I think gave up trying) in Synods and
Pan-Anglican Conferences, and Bishops’ meetings, though she knew that
her tepidity about these things that concerned my father so intimately
was a distress to him. But while he drove on his fervent way along the
roads of organization, tradition, ritual and ecclesiastical practice,
her religion was on quite other lines: prayer and meditation were the
solitary methods of it, and in the world which she delighted in, love
and sympathy. And whatever she sought for and gathered there, with all
her own temptations and fallings and new resolves, she brought with
humble confident hands and laid them at the feet of Christ.
Though the beauty of living and sentient beings--whether in the region
of the soul, the mind or the body--made so irresistible an appeal to
her, she never really cared for the beauty of plants or trees or skies
or scenery. Just there a firm frontier-line was drawn round the
territory of her real sympathies, and it accorded very fitly with her
lack of touch with mere organizations. Just as she cared not two straws
for the Pan-Anglican Conference, yet delighted in the human members of
it, so, when standing in front of the west façade of, say Rheims
Cathedral, or looking across from the Riffel Alp to the Matterhorn, her
real attention would not be devoted to these silent sublimities, but
much rather to a cat blinking in the sun, or a sparrow building in the
eaves. Things must move or think or form opinions or commit voluntary
actions to enchant her, and in the Swiss holidays which often followed
the end of the London season, I doubt if she ever looked with eagerness
or wonder at the Matterhorn, except on the day when she knew that one
of her sons was somewhere near the summit in the early morning. On such
another day her eye was glued with enthusiasm on the Rothhorn because
two of us were making the ascent, but towards the Rothhorn in itself, or
towards the waving of poplars, or the flame of a sunset, she never felt
the emotional heart-leap. Thus, when August in Switzerland or elsewhere
was over, the ensuing five months or so at Addington, with its delights
for us of shooting and riding and all the genial thrill of country life,
made no appeal to her. As far as they affected us, she threw herself
into them, but at any moment, she would have chosen to be in the swim
and the thick of things again, and have taken those early morning walks
down the Lambeth Road with the interest of fishshops and costermongers
to enlighten her, rather than walk under the flaming autumn beech trees,
or see the frail white children of the spring beginning to prick through
the thawing earth of January. There had to be a beating heart in that
which enchained her; she could not bother about primroses. That may have
been a limitation, but such limitation as that merely stored her force
of sympathy and discernment towards the rest. She did not attempt to let
it dribble out in exiguous channels, but conserved the whole vigour of
it for the supply of the mansions where her treasure and her heart lay.
In the country also, she was a far more defenceless victim against the
one strong foe of her triumphal banners, and that foe was fear.
In real trouble, especially when the trouble was concerned with those
she loved best, she walked boldly; no one faced the large sorrows and
bereavements that fell to her destiny with a more courageous front. The
magnitude called forth the faith which unwaveringly supported her, but
when all seemed peaceful and prosperous, she was often a prey to acute
imaginative apprehensions. She could not bear, for instance, to see us
all start out riding together, and when the announcement came that the
half-dozen of riding horses were at the front door, she went back to her
room on the other side of the house. Certainly she had some slight basis
for her feelings, for among those steeds there was a bad bucker and a
rearer. None of the riders minded that in the slightest, and away went
the cavalcade at a violent gallop up the long slope of turf in front of
the house with “Braemar” in the shape of a comma, and “Quentin” playing
the piano in the air with his forelegs, and “Ajax” kicking up behind,
and “Peggy” going sideways, just because my father had mounted first and
smacked “Columba” over the rump while the rest of us were betwixt and
between the gravel and the saddle. There were hurdles stuck up on the
slope, and Braemer, shrilly squealing, bucked over the first and Ajax
ran out, and Peggy trod solemnly on the top of one, and Quentin still
hopping on his hind legs refused and was whacked, and my father went
pounding on ahead as we rocketed after him. He was not a good horseman,
but he had no knowledge of fear, and, though he avoided the hurdles, he
went tobogganing down the steep sides of Croham Hurst with Columba
slipping and sliding on the pebbles and putting her foot into rabbit
holes, while her rider with slack rein enjoyed it all enormously. In the
meantime my mother had dreadful visions of two or three of us being
brought back on hurdles, and carried into the house. But exactly at that
point her essential courage knocked her nervousness on the head, for she
would not at any price have had any one of us not go out riding. Only,
she didn’t want to see the start.
It was this vague fear that was her enemy all her life, and it could
pounce on any quarry. She did not really believe that the corpses of her
children were soon to be brought back to her, any more than she really
believed that when my father had a bad cold, it was speedily to develop
into double pneumonia, but she was prey in imagination to these
disastrous possibilities. Hardly ever did she suffer under them as
regards herself; once only do I remember her conjuring up a personal
spectre. On that occasion she got the idea that she was going to die
before the end of the month, a prognostication which she unfortunately
made public. Thereupon, as the days went by, some one of her children
hurried from the tea-table every evening, and stood spectre-like in the
corner of the room, and in a sepulchral voice said, “Nine days now”: or
“Eight days now,” until the fatal and last evening of her prophetic
intuition arrived. The “To-night” was received with roars of laughter,
and she was in brilliant health and spirits next morning, when she ought
to have been a corpse. She laughed at her fears herself (which is just
the reason why I treat them humorously now) but, for all her laughter,
they were year after year a miserable bugbear to her, mostly and mainly
during the leisurely months at Addington. Oftenest they were quite
vague, but couched to pounce on any excuse for definiteness: if my
father had a cold she would evoke the image of pneumonia, if he was
tired she would conjure up visions of a breakdown. She kept these
groundless imaginings to herself, and no one could ever have guessed how
often she was a victim to them, or how heavily they rode her. They did
not, except quite occasionally, get between her and the sunlight, for
she forced them into the shadow, caught them and shut them in cupboards,
steadily and continually disowned them. And when any real trouble came
they haunted her no more; she rose serene and faithful to any great
occasion, welcoming it almost, as she had done with Martin’s death, as a
direct dealing from God, receiving it sacramentally.
* * * * *
I wonder if children ever ran so breathless a race in pursuit of
manifold interests and enjoyments as did we in those years when our ages
ranged from the early twenties to the early teens, and the Christmas
holidays in particular, brought us together. One year, about 1884, a
snowfall was succeeded by a week’s frost, and that by another week of
icy fog, and the foggy week I look back on as having given us the
fullest scope of hazardous activity in hopeless circumstances, for
shooting and riding were impossible. We made a toboggan-run which soon
became unmitigated ice, down a steep hill in the park among Scotch firs
that loomed dim and menacing through the mist. Half-way down the hill,
just where the pace was swiftest, and the toboggan skidding most
insanely, grew one of these firs close to the track, and on the other
side was a bramble-bush. From the top you could not see this gut at all,
and with eyes peering agonizedly through the thick air you waited for
the appearance of this opening somewhere ahead. Sometimes you saw so
late that the bramble-bush or the Scotch fir must inevitably receive
you, and there was just time to slide off behind, be rolled on the hard
glazed snow, and hear the plunge of the toboggan in the bramble-bush, or
its crash against the Scotch fir. If you got through safely, a second
and more open slope succeeded and you pursued your way across the path
between the church and the house, and bumped into the kitchen-garden
fence. Bruised and unwearied we took the injured toboggans to the
estate carpenter, whose time at Christmas must have been chiefly
occupied with repairing these fractures, and played golf over the nine
holes which we had made along the slope in front of the house, on the
snow and in a fog. The greens, which were about as large as tablecloths,
had been swept, and the boy who had the honour whacked his ball in the
conjectured direction, and ran like mad after it. When he had found it,
he shouted and his opponent drove in the direction of his voice. If he
sliced or pulled, he too ran like mad in the conjectured direction; if
he drove straight his ball was probably marked by the first driver. The
thrillingest excitement was when, driving first, you topped your ball or
spouted it in the air, for then you crouched as you heard the crack of
the second ball, which whizzed by you unseen. Football in the top
passage with bedroom doors for goals ushered in lunch and after lunch we
skated on dreadful skates called “Acmes” or “Caledonians,” which clipped
themselves on to the heels and soles of the boot, and came off and
slithered across the ice at the moment when you proposed to execute a
turn. Hugh despised my figure-skating (and I’m sure I don’t wonder) and
christened himself a speed skater. The pond was of no great extent and
fringed on one side by tall rhododendron thickets, into which he crashed
when unable to negotiate a corner.
The evening closing in early was the dawn of the intellectual labours of
the day. _The Saturday Magazine_ made frequent appearances, burgeoning
like Aaron’s rod into miraculous blossom of prose and poetry:
between-whiles Arthur composed voluntaries to be played on the organ in
the chapel at prayers, Nellie studied the violin, Hugh produced a
marionette theatre, and wrote a highly original play for it, called
_The Sandy Desert; or, Where is the Archbishop?_ and Maggie made oil
pictures of her family of Persian cats. Once at least during Christmas
holidays we all jointly wrote a play: it was _The Spiritualist_ one
year, in which there was a slashing exposure of mediums; another year we
dramatized _The Rose and the Ring_ in operatic form with original lyrics
set to popular tunes. With the exception of Nellie, our voices were
singularly inefficient and completely untrained, which was part of the
fun of it. To these plays the neighbourhood was invited, and all the
servants and lodge-keepers formed a solid mass at the back. At one of
them, Arthur for some reason, must be disguised as a young woman, six
feet two high, with a yard or so of trousers showing below the skirt.
This impersonation made a kitchen-maid laugh so hysterically, that the
play had to pause while she was taken out by two housemaids, and her
yells died away as she retreated down the back-stairs.
Life in those holidays was an orgy, celebrated in an atmosphere of
absolutely ceaseless argument and discussion. Every question rose to
boiling-point: for while we regarded each other with strong and quite
unsentimental affection we were violently critical of each other. We
drew biting caricatures of my father going to sleep after tea, of my
mother keenly observant above and not through her spectacles, of Hugh
falling off Ajax, of any ludicrous and humorous posture. But above all
it was writing that most enthralled us, and innumerable were the quires
of sermon-paper that yielded up their fair white lives to our
scribblings. These were now beginning to enter a more professional arena
than the _Saturday Magazine_; Nellie, then at Lady Margaret’s Hall in
Oxford, had, before she was twenty, published an article on Crabbe in
_Temple Bar_; Arthur, a year or two older, had written his first book,
_Arthur Hamilton_, in the form of an imaginary memoir, and Maggie and I
were in the throes of a joint story, in which I can perceive the infancy
of a novel called _Dodo_. This was abandoned before completion, but in a
moraine of forgotten dustinesses, I came across some few pages of it the
other day and really felt that there was some notion in it, some
conscious attempt anyhow, to convey character by means of conversation
rather than by analysis, an achievement in the direction of which, in
spite of dispiriting results, I am still grubbing away. There certainly,
in that heap of ancient manuscript fortuitously preserved, was the
conscious striving after psychical dialogue, in which the interlocutors
revealed themselves. Trivial as might be the personalities revealed, the
idea of the excited authors was to avoid narrated analysis, and to
convict and justify their characters out of their own mouths. There was
a crisis of creativeness in the writing of it, for we firmly and
designedly intended that a certain middle-aged lady, at whose feet
everybody else fell flat in adoration of her tact and her sympathy and
her comprehension, should “be” my mother. But, such is the waywardness
of idealistic portraiture, we found, about Chapter VI, that though she
was already supposedly installed on the throne of tact and
comprehension, before which everybody else bowed the knee, she had not
justified the part which we had cast for her, for she really had said
little more than “I feel so deeply for you,” or “Pass the mustard.” We
were determined that she should reveal her incomparable humanity by the
sympathetic dialogues in which we engaged her, but she was so tactful
that she never said anything at all that bore on the problems which were
submitted to her. In the book to which I have alluded, she certainly
appears as “Mrs. Vivian,” who, as may faintly be remembered, is supposed
to be possessed of super-human tact and insight, taking painful
situations with calming and yet exhilarating effect. For the
satisfaction of the curious, it may be stated that Mrs. Vivian was the
one live model in the book and was completely unrecognisable. When first
we enthusiastically scribbled at its earlier incarnation, my sister and
I were at the ages of nineteen and seventeen, and for the very reason,
namely, that we thought of my mother in our adoring limning of her, the
presentment is not only unlike her, but unlike anybody at all.
We went to Addington for a few weeks at Easter, and the sojourn then
was, according to my mother, of the nature of a picnic. As a matter of
fact there was not really anything very picnicky about it; the
drawing-room, it is true, was not used, but we managed with the
ante-room, the Chinese room, the schoolroom, my father’s study and her
own room, by way of sitting-rooms, and perhaps part of the household
remained at Lambeth. But to her vivid sense, to her delight of using all
things to the utmost, this constituted a very informal way of life, for
when she was running a house, everything must be, in its own scale,
spick-and-span and complete. You might, for instance, dine on bread and
cheese and a glass of beer, but the cheese must be the best cheese, the
bread of the crispest, and the beer must be brimmed with froth. Short of
completeness and perfection, whatever your scale was, you were roughing
it, you were picnicking. She did not at all dislike picnicking, but It
Was picnicking, and why not say so? For herself, with her passion for
people (like Dr. Johnson she thought that one green field was like
another green field, and would prefer a walk down Fleet Street) she
would sooner have stopped in London, but my father needed this break in
the six months of his busy London life. But to his volcanic energy and
vitality, such a holiday was of the nature of a compulsion and a
medicine rather than an enjoyment. In the long run he was refreshed by
it, but the getting out of the shafts was always trying to him, and
usually resulted in a fit of depression, such as I have described
before. When he was very hard worked, he never suffered from this; it
was when he was obliged to rest that these irritable glooms descended on
him, and I particularly connect them, during these years, with the
Easter holiday. All the time, as he once told me when talking of them,
he would be struggling and agonizing to get his head out of those deep
waters, but was unable to until the nervous reaction had spent itself,
and the pendulum swung back again. By now we children had begun to
understand that, and though this mood of his was a damper on mirth and
generally an awful bore, we no longer feared him when he was like that
but “carried on,” very sorry for him, and sincerely hoping he would be
better next day. The person who felt it most was undoubtedly my mother:
he was miserable and she knew it, and knew the pathos of his futile
strivings to get rid of it, and her picnic was a melancholy and anxious
one till that cloud lifted. Often, however, she and my father went to
Florence for Easter, where they stayed with Lady Crawford at the Villa
Palmieri, and of all the holiday sojournings it was that which he
enjoyed most keenly. He was absolutely indefatigable where churches or
sacred art were concerned, because of the cause which had inspired
painter and architect. To him the achievement for which the architect
builded, the sculptor chiselled, the musicians composed, and the artist
painted, must be the palpable and direct service of God, and just as he
would gaze in genuine rapture at a second-rate Madonna, whereas a
portrait or even a Primavera would leave him cold, so, without any
knowledge or appreciation of music he would listen to Handel’s
_Messiah_, while a Wagner opera, or a symphony by Beethoven, had he ever
listened or heard such, would have been meaningless to him. Of
ecclesiastical architecture, again, its periods or its characteristics,
he had a profound knowledge, but whether a house was Elizabethan or
Georgian was a matter of much smaller interest to him. He did not truly
care, to put it broadly, who built a column and when and how, or painted
a picture and when and how, so long as those monuments of art were only
directed towards human and æsthetic enjoyment. The natural works of God,
the woods at Addington, the mountain ranges of Switzerland, he
admiringly loved as being in themselves direct divine expressions, but
if the work of man insinuated itself, he liked it in proportion as it
was religious in its aims.
One exception he made, and that was in favour of Greek and Roman
antiquities and the language of the classics, and I am sure he enjoyed
making a translation of some English poem into Virgilian hexameters or
Sophoclean iambics fully as much as he enjoyed the original version.
Latin and Greek, especially Greek, were to him only a little below the
Pentecostal tongues: of all human achievements they were the noblest
flowers. To him a classical education was the only education: he rated a
boy’s abilities largely by his power to translate and to imitate
classical lore, and to wander himself in these fields was his chiefest
intellectual recreation. He loved to unpack, so to speak, some Greek
word compounded with prepositions, and insist on the value of each,
overloading the dissected members of it with meanings that never
conceivably entered into the mind of its author, and his own style in
weighed and deliberate composition was founded on the model of these
interpretations; the sentences were overloaded with meanings beyond what
the language could bear; he packed his phrases till they creaked. But
highest of all in the beloved language, with a great gulf fixed below it
and above the masterpieces of classical literature, came the New
Testament, which he studied and interpreted to us as under a microscope.
That eager reverence was like a lover’s adoration: his interpretations
might be fanciful, and such as he would never have made in any other
commentings, but here his search for hidden meanings in simple phrases
had just that quality of tender and exquisite scrutiny. The subject of
this study was his life, and the smallest of its details must be
searched out, and squeezed to yield a drop more of sacred essence.... On
any other topic he would have criticized the Hellenistic Greek, as
falling far below classical standards, but, as it was, he accepted it as
verbally inspired, and no enquiry was too minute. Rather curiously,
collations of differing texts did not engage him, nor did he touch on
Higher Criticism. The text of his own Greek Testament was all that
concerned him, there was the whole matter, and on to it he turned the
full light of his intellect and his enthusiasm, without criticism but
minutely and lovingly poring over it, as it actually and traditionally
was.
From Monday morning until Saturday night these weeks at Addington,
especially at Christmas, were to us a whirl of delightful activities
from the moment that chapel service and Bible lesson were over in the
morning, till evening service at ten o’clock at night. But Sunday was a
day set so much apart from the rest that it hardly seemed to belong to
Addington at all. There was early communion in the chapel, unless it was
celebrated after the eleven o’clock service in church; morning service
in church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family walk during
which my father read George Herbert to us; the walk was succeeded by a
Bible reading with him, and then came tea. After tea was evening service
in church, and after Sunday supper, he read the _Pilgrim’s Progress_
aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up intervals we might
read certain Sunday books, the more mature successors of Bishop Heber
and _The Rocky Island_ and _Agathos_. No shoal of relaxation emerged
from the roaring devotional flood; if at meals the conversation became
too secular, it was brought back into appropriate channels; there was
even a set of special graces before and after meals to be used on
Sunday, consisting of short versicles and responses quite bewildering to
any guest staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were
played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf entailed no labour
on the part of servants. However fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no
toboggan that day made its perilous descent, and though the pond might
be spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on the Day of
Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly to this prohibition on
reasonable relaxation, became a day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like
“ducks and drakes,” from one religious exercise to another, relentlessly
propelled.
To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely devotional mind, this
strenuous Sunday was a time of refreshment. It is perfectly true that
he often went to sleep in church, and if on very hot Sundays, the walk
was abandoned, and we read aloud in turns from some saintly chronicle,
under the big cedar on the lawn, not only he, but every member of the
family, except the reader (we read in turn), went to sleep too. But he
dozed off to the chronicle of St. Francis and came back to it again;
nothing jarred. Thus ordered, Sunday was a perfect day for one of his
temperament; no work was done on it, no week-day breeze ruffled its
devotional stillness, but his appreciation of it postulated that all of
us should share to the full in its spiritual benefits. He did not
believe that for himself Sunday could be spent more profitably, and so
we were all swept, regardless of its private effect on us, into the
tide. What he did not allow for was that on other temperaments, that
which so aptly fulfilled the desires of his own produced a totally
different impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing boredom and
unutterable fatigue. Certain humorous gleams occasionally relieved the
darkness, as when the devil entered into me on one occasion when _Lives
of the Saints_ came to me by rotation, for reading aloud. There was the
serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar, positively gilding the
tennis court, there was the croquet lawn starving for the crack of
balls, and there too, underneath the cedar was my somnolent family, Hugh
with swoony eyes, laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie primly and
decorously listening, their eyelids closed, like Miss Matty’s, because
they listened better so, and my father, for whom and by whom this treat
was arranged, with head thrown back and mouth nakedly open.... And then
came Satan, or at least Puck.... I read four lines of the page to which
we had penetrated, then read a few sentences out of the page that had
already been read. Deftly and silently, but keeping a prudent finger in
the proper place, I turned over a hundred pages, and droned a paragraph
about a perfectly different saint. Swiftly turning back I read some few
lines out of the introduction to the whole volume, and then, sending
prudence to the winds, found the end of the chapter on which we were
engaged. I gave them a little more about St. Catherine of Siena, a
little more from the introduction, then in case anyone happened to be
awake read the concluding sentences of the chapter about St. Francis and
stopped.
The cessation of voice caused Nellie to awake, and with an astounding
hypocrisy, subsequently brought home to her, she exclaimed:
“Oh, how interesting!”
Her voice aroused my father. There we all were sitting under the cedar,
reading about St. Francis. Hugh had awoke, Maggie had awoke: it was a
peaceful devotional Sunday afternoon.
“Wonderful!” he said. “Is that the end, Fred?”
“Yes, that’s all,” said Fred.
Fred was also a passive actor in another Sunday humour. My father had
noticed in me a certain restlessness at readings, some twitching of the
limbs at a Bible lesson, or whatnot, and in order to confirm me in the
right practice of the day, had looked out a book in his library about
Sunday, which he recommended me to read, without having sufficiently
ascertained the contents of it himself. Judge of my rapture when I found
a perfectly convincing chapter, showing how the sad, joyless, unrelaxed
English Sunday was purely an invention of Puritan times. My father had
given me the book to convince me of the antique sanctity of the
Addington use: the book told me that from the patristic times onwards,
no such idea of Sunday as we religiously practised had ever entered into
the heads of Christians, or had ever dawned on the world until the
sourness of Puritans robbed the day of its traditional joy. It had been
a day of _festa_, of relaxation from the tedious round of business, and
all the faithful dressed themselves in their best clothes for fun, and
village sports were held, and hospitality enlivened the drab week. Sure
enough they went to church in the morning, and after that abandoned
themselves to jollity. With suppressed giggles I flew to my mother’s
room to tell her the result of this investigation, and she steered a
course so wonderful that not even then could I chart it. Her sympathetic
amusement I knew was all mine, but somehow she abandoned no whit of her
loyalty to my father’s purpose in giving me the book. I had imagined
myself (with rather timorous glee, for which I wanted her support)
pronouncing sentence on his Sunday upon the very evidence which he had
given me to judge it by, but some consummate stroke of tact on my
mother’s part made all that to be quite out of the question. How she did
it I have no idea, but surely the very test of tact lies in the fact
that you don’t know how it is done. Tact explained ceases to be tact,
and degenerates into reason on the one hand or futility on the other.
Certainly I never confronted my father with this evidence, and Sunday
went on precisely as usual. Sometimes Hugh and I played football in the
top passage, but you mightn’t kick hard for fear of detected
reverberations through the skylight of the central hall.
* * * * *
There is a play by some Italian dramatist, which I once saw Dusé act:
perhaps it is by D’Annunzio, but I cannot identify it. In the second
act anyhow, the curtain went up on Dusé, alone on the stage. She wrote a
letter, she put some flowers in a vase without speech, and still without
speech, she opened a window at the back, and leaned out of it. She
paused long with her back to the audience, and then turning round again
said, half below her breath, “Aprile.” After that the action of the play
proceeded but not till, in that long pause and that one word, she had
given us the magic of spring.... Not otherwise, but just so, were those
Addington holidays, when I was sixteen and seventeen, my April, and thus
the magic of spring in those seasons of Christmas and Easter and
September came to me. Bulbs and seeds buried in my ground began to spike
the earth, and the soft buds and leaves to burst their woolly sheaths.
It was the time for the rooting up, in that spring-gardening, of certain
weeds; it was the time also of planting the seedlings which should
flower later, and of grafting fresh slips on to a stem that was forming
fibre in the place of soft sappy shoots. Above all it was the time of
receiving more mature and indelible impressions, and there is scarcely
anything which in later life I have loved or hated, or striven for or
avoided that is not derivable from some sprig of delight or distaste
planted during those seasons of first growth. Childhood and earlier
boyhood were more of a greenhouse, where early growths were nurtured in
a warmed windlessness; now they were pricked out and put in the beds,
where they had to learn the robustness which would make them resist the
inclemencies of a less sheltered life. Some died, scorched by the sun or
battered by the rain; the rest, I suppose, had enough vitality to make
sun and rain alike serve their growth. Above all it was the time of
learning to enjoy, no longer in the absolutely unreflective manner of a
child, but in a manner to some extent reasoned and purposed. Some kind
of philosophy, some conscious digestive process began to stir below mere
receptivity. I looked not only at what the experiences with which I fed
the lusty appetites of life were at the moment, but at the metabolism
they would undergo when I had eaten them. But of all mental habits then
forming, the one for which I most bless those lovely years, was the
habit of enjoyment, of looking for (and finding) in every environment
some pleasure and interest. That habit, no doubt, with all our games,
our collections, our scribblings had long been churned at: about now it
solidified. And by far the most active and assiduous of external
agencies that caused this--the dairymaid, so to speak, who was never
weary of this magnificent churning--was my mother.