AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXCURSION
At Cambridge the study of archæology had forcibly taken possession of me
by right of love, and at last I was working at that which it was my
business to be occupied in, with devotion to my subject. Roman art, so I
speedily discovered, was an utterly hideous and debased affair in
itself, and the only things of beauty that emerged from Rome were copies
of Greek originals, and even then these copies were probably made by
Greek workmen. In Roman buildings also all that was worth looking at was
stolen from the Greeks, and often marred in the stealing, and the thick
mortar between their roughly hewn stones, the facing of them with a
dishonest veneer of marble, their abominable tessellated pavements, the
odious wall decorations of Pompeii revolted this ardent Hellenist. Now,
too, for the first time since I came up to Cambridge, I came under an
inspired and inspiring teacher; indeed, there were two such, for it was
impossible not to burn when Dr. Waldstein in the Museum of Casts flung
himself into Hellenic attitudes, and communicated his volcanic
enthusiasm. But more inspiring yet was Professor Middleton: he gave me
no formal lectures, but encouraged me to bring my books to his room, and
spend the morning there. He used to walk about in a thick dressing-gown
and a skull-cap, looking like some Oriental magician, and now he would
pull an intaglio ring off his finger and make me perceive the serene
and matchless sobriety of an early gem as compared with the more florid
design, still matchless in workmanship, of a later century, or take half
a dozen Greek coins out of his waistcoat pocket and bid me decipher the
thick decorative letters and tell him where they came from. He had
dozens of notebooks filled with sketches of Greek mouldings and
cornices: there were sections of the columns of the Parthenon that
showed how the drums had been ground round each on the other, till,
without any mess of mortar, they adhered so closely that the joint was
scarcely visible. There were cedar-wood blocks in the centres of them
with bronze pins round which they revolved; the honesty and precision of
the workmanship could never be discovered till the column was in ruins.
But there was the very spirit and ardency of Greece; and as for the
great frieze of horsemen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon it was
so placed that only a mere glimpse of it could be had by those who
walked in the colonnade. Yet in honour of the goddess and in obedience
to the imperious craving for perfection, it, though scarcely to be seen,
must be of a fineness and finish unequalled in all the forums of Rome.
Then Middleton would take a fragment of Greek pottery from a drawer, or
a white _lekythus_ from Eretria, and show me the mark of the potter’s
wheel, and how the white ground was laid on after the baking, and how
the artist with brush delicate and unerring had drawn the raised arm of
the _ephebus_ who laid his garland on the tomb. There were photographs
also from the Street of Tombs; in one there was standing a young girl
with braided hair. She it was who was dead, and the mother stood in
front of her lifting the small face upwards with a hand under her chin,
bending to kiss her for the last time, and such of the inscription as
remained ran ΧΑΙΡΕΠΕΝΘ.... The rest of the letters was gone, but that
was sufficient, and told how her mother gave the final greeting of
Godspeed and of farewell to Penthesilea, for in that beautiful tongue
“Hail”! and “Good-bye” are the same word and affectionately wish
prosperity, whether for one who returns to the home, or goes from the
home on the longest journey of all. And Professor Middleton made me
realize the serenity of those good wishes for Penthesilea: there was a
wistfulness on the part of those who remained, and a wonder and a great
hope, and God knows how that struck home to me.... Or a young man sat
languid on a rock, and his hunting spear was propped behind him, and
beside him just one companion, weary with watching, had fallen asleep.
There was no mother there to send him on his way; his friend and his
hunting-spear were his comrades on earth, and these he must leave behind
him, when to-day he fared out on his new adventure, further afield than
ever his huntings had taken him.... And thus to me, the supreme race of
all who have inhabited this earth became real. They heard the voice of
creation as none other has heard it, and saw as none other has seen.
They realized in dawn and in nightfall the attainment towards which all
others have fruitlessly striven, showing in marble the humanity of the
divine, and the divinity of man; they had birthdays for their gods, and
for their dead, who died not, they had the imperishable love that knows
not fear.
Professor Middleton never alluded in any way to this archæological
tripos which I was to challenge after one year’s work. All the morning,
three times a week or more, I used to sit there with my books that I
never read, because he, in his dressing-gown, produced, one after the
other, little bits of things which would make me love the Greeks for no
other reason than for the artistic joy of their works and days. He knew
of course that there was a tripos impending, and this in his view was
the best way of preparing for it; while for drier stuff he gave me his
notebooks on Vitruvius, which would, with his little exquisite sections
and elevations, explain all that I need know about the bones and
alphabet of architecture. His whole procedure, as I saw then, and his
whole object was to make me want to know, down to their sandals and
their salad-bowls and brooches, all that was to be learned of the brains
of a god-like race. Once, so I remember, a bitter blizzard white with
snow beat against the windows, and from some roof near a slate flew off
and crashed in the small court at King’s where the mulberry tree grew.
“That was Oreithyia,” he said, sucking on his pipe. “Boreas loved her,
and blew her away. Rude Boreas, you know. You should read up the myths.
Most of Greek sculpture illustrates myths.”
Since the days when I was fifteen, since Beesly and the _Trojan Queen’s
Revenge_, there had been no such inspirer. But Beesly dealt only with
language, while under Middleton the dry bones which had come together,
not only stood up “an exceeding great army,” but went about their work,
and returned to their homes of an evening, and lived and loved. Beesly
had brought me to the portals of the house of the people who made Art,
and knocked on the door for me. But Middleton pushed it open, and the
gold standard of the Greeks that, theoretically, seven years ago I knew
to be the only coinage, was now weighed and was found sufficient, and
all else whatever baser stuff might load the opposing balance was found
wanting.
It was at some time during that year that J. K. Stephen, the founder of
the T.A.F., returned to King’s, and instantly for me all the lesser
lights of general influence were eclipsed. In presence and personality
alike he was one of those who without effort or aim impose themselves on
their circle. Had he never said a word, the very fact of his being in
the room must have produced more effect that any conversation that might
go on round him. He was splendidly handsome, big of head, impressive and
regular of feature, and enormously massive in build; slow moving and
shambling when he walked, but somehow monumental. He had an immense fund
of humour, grim and rather savage at times, at others of such froth and
frolic as appeared in the two volumes of verse which he published during
the next year, _Lapsus Calami_, and _Quo Musa tendis_. But this bubbling
lightness was markedly uncharacteristic of his normal self. That it was
there, those two volumes proved, but that particular spring, that
light-hearted Puck-like quality, he certainly reserved for his verse,
which to those who knew him was in no way the flower of his mind. In the
dedication to _Lapsus Calami_, he expresses the desire that the reader
should recognize his debt to “C.S.C.” (Calverley of _Fly Leaves_), he
hopes that some one will think that “of C.S.C. this gentle art he
learned,” and undoubtedly the reader did think so, for it was certainly
C.S.C. whose method inspired some of these poems. But it is just these
poems in which he was obviously indebted to Calverley, that are least
worthy and characteristic of him. Jim Stephen made, at his worst,
amusing neat little rhymes not nearly so good as Calverley’s, but, at
his best, he made poems, such as “The Old School List,” of which
Calverley was quite incapable. Both also were brilliant parodists, but
here J.K.S. had a far subtler art than the man with whom he hoped his
readers would compare him. Calverley’s famous parody of Robert Browning,
“The Cock and the Bull,” does not touch in point of rapier-work J.K.S.’s
poem “Sincere Flattery to R.B.” The one does no more than seize on
ridiculous phrases in Browning, and go a shade further in absurdity: the
other (“Birthdays”) parodies the very essence of the more obscure
lyrics: you cannot read it, however often you have done so, without the
hope that you may this time or the next find out what it means. He was
the inventor, too, of a peculiarly pleasing artifice with regard to
parody, for he put into Wordsworth’s mouth, for instance, in pure
Wordsworthian phrase, the exact opposite of Wordsworth’s teaching, and
produced a lament over the want of locomotive power in the Lake
district. The effect is inimitable: the poet longs to see in those happy
days when Helvellyn’s base is tunnelled, and its peak grimy
The dusky grove of iron rails
Which leads to Euston Square,
and in lines that almost must have been written by Wordsworth exclaims:
I want to hear the porters cry,
“Change here for Ennerdale!”
And I must be forgiven, since so few know the poem, for quoting the
postscript to his parody of Browning, sufficient surely to make the
poet, for whom Jim Stephen had an immense reverence, turn in his grave
in order to laugh more easily. As follows:
P.S.
There’s a Me Society down at Cambridge
Where my works, _cum notis variorum_
Are talked about: well, I require the same bridge
As Euclid took toll at as _Asinorum_.
And as they have got through several ditties
I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall
I’ve composed the above, and a stiff one it is,
A bridge to stop asses at, once for all.
If the art of parody can go further, I do not know who has conducted it
there. The kindly ghost of Robert Browning might perhaps shrug his
shoulders at “The Cock and the Bull,” and say, “Very amusing”: but
reading Jim Stephen’s R.B. he must surely have winced and frowned first,
and thereafter broken into a roar of his most genial laughter.
Often (when not indebted to C.S.C.) Jim Stephen’s most apt and biting
parodies would be written or spouted extempore: I remember for instance
someone reading a rather lamentable verse from F. W. Myers in which he
delicately alludes to the godly procreation of children in the following
lines:
Lo! when a man magnanimous and tender,
Lo! when a woman desperate and true,
Make the irrevocable sweet surrender,
Show to each other what the Lord can do.
upon which Jim Stephen without a moment’s pause exclaimed:
Lo! when a man obscene and superstitious,
Lo! when a woman brainless and absurd,
Strive to idealize the meretricious,
Love one another like a beast or bird.
This could not be included in _Lapsus Calami_, nor unfortunately would
he include one of his most ingenious extravagances, and I cannot find
that it has ever been published. The subject matter was that a burglar
“desperate and true” awoke in the night and found an angel standing in
his room, who asked him whether, being what he was, he would sooner go
to heaven or hell, the choice being entirely his. His admirably logical
conclusion was as follows:
The burning at first no doubt would be worst,
But custom that anguish would soften;
But those who are bored by praising the Lord,
Would be more so by praising him often.
He chooses accordingly.
All that year Jim remained in residence at Cambridge; during one
vacation he stayed with us at Addington, during another I went over to
his Irish home, where, one evening after an argument about Kipling, he
took up his bedroom candle saying, “Well, I wish he would stop kipling.
Good night.” In ten minutes he came back, “I’ve written a poem about
it,” he said, and proceeded to read the two immortal stanzas which end,
When the Rudyards cease from kipling,
And the Haggards ride no more.
Close friends though we were, I was always conscious of a side of him
that was formidable, of the possibility of a sudden blaze of anger
flaring up though quickly extinguished again: there was, too, always
present the knowledge of that “dark tremendous sea of cloud” in the
skirts of which he had been before, and into the heart of which it was
inscrutably decreed that he must go. There came a dark December morning;
that time the breakdown was final, and he lived not many weeks.
* * * * *
Once again I made a triumphant tripos in the matter of archæology, was
given an open scholarship at King’s, and immediately afterwards applied
for one of those grants that seemed to hang like ripe plums on the
delightful tree of knowledge. Hitherto those branches had waved high
above my head, but now they graciously swept downwards and I plucked at
the first plum I saw, and applied for a small grant to excavate in the
town-walls at Chester. There was reason to suppose that quantities of
the Roman tombstones of the legionaries that had been stationed there,
had been utilized in the building of the town-wall, and though there
were only Roman remains to be discovered (would that they had been
Greek!) the search for them would be a very pleasant pursuit for the
autumn, and might yield material for a fellowship-dissertation. To my
intense surprise some grant--from the Würtz Fund, I think--was given me,
for the purpose of discovering, if possible, new facts about the
distribution of Roman legions in Britain.
The family went out to Pontresina that August, and I with them for a
week or two before the work at Chester began. There I had a most
horrible experience with Hugh on the Piz Palu, one of the peaks of the
Bernina. Our plan was to make a “col” of it, that is to ascend it on one
side, pass over the top, and descend on another. We tramped and
perspired up southern slopes in deep snow on the ascent, struck an arête
which led to the top, made the summit, and began to descend by another
route. The way lay over a long ridge swept by the most biting north
wind, from which on the ascent the mountain had screened us, and never
have I encountered so wicked a blast. The loose snow whirled up from the
rocks was driven against us as if it was torrents of icy rain, piercing
and penetrating. Once as we halted, I noticed that Hugh shut his eyes,
and seemed sleepy, but he said that he was all right and on we went. He
was on the rope just in front of me behind the leading guide, and
suddenly, without stumbling, he fell down in a heap. He was just
conscious when we picked him up and said, “I’m only rather sleepy; let
me go to sleep ...” and then collapsed again.
He was alive and little more. Raw brandy, of which we had about half a
pint, stimulated him for a moment, and soon, after another and another
dose, our brandy was gone. There was no question of the inadvisability
of giving him spirits, in order to warm him, which is one of the most
fatal errors when a climber is suffering from mere cold: there was just
the hope of keeping him alive by any stimulant. It was not possible to
go back over the summit, and so to get into more sheltered conditions
again; the best chance, and that a poor one, was to convey him down
somehow along the rest of this bitter ridge, till we could find shelter
from the wind. Very soon he became completely unconscious, he could move
no more at all, and the guide and the porter whom we had with us simply
carried him along the rest of the ridge. The rope was altogether a
hindrance, so we took it off, and proceeded in two separate parties. The
guides carried Hugh between them, and I followed.
I had no idea after we had made this arrangement if Hugh was alive or
not; often I had to wait till they got round some awkward corner, and
then make my way after them. Places that would have been easily
traversed by a roped party, took on a totally different aspect, when two
men unroped were carrying another, and when the fourth of the party had
to traverse them alone. What chiefly occupied my benumbed mind was the
sort of telegram that would be sent to my father when we got down to the
foot of the glacier below, where there was communication with
Pontresina. Should I be sending a telegram that Hugh was dead, or should
I have slipped, and thus be incapable of sending a telegram at all, or
would nobody come back?... For some hour or so this procession went on
its way: after I had waited for the trio to get round some rock or
obstruction on the ridge, I followed, and caught sight of them again a
dozen yards further down. Whether they were carrying a corpse or not I
had no idea.
Gradually we came to the end of this ridge. I had waited for them to
scramble over a difficult passage, and then they disappeared round a
corner. One of the guides had loosened a rock, and when I tried to step
on it, it gave way altogether and rattled down the almost precipitous
slope to the side. I had recovered on to my original standing-ground,
but with that rock gone, and being alone and unroped, it took me some
couple of minutes, I suppose, to find a reliable foothold. When that was
done, a couple of steps more brought me, as it had brought them,
completely out of the wind, and on to a broiling southern slope. Fifty
feet below me there came another corner, which they had already passed,
and I could see nothing further. I went round that corner, and found the
two guides roaring with laughter and Hugh quite drunk. He was making
some sort of ineffectual attempt to sit on the point of his ice-axe. He
was not dead at all: he was only drunk. The moment, apparently, that
they had got out of that icy blast, his heart-action must have
reasserted itself, and there was a half-pint of raw brandy poured into
an empty stomach to render accounts. With thick and stumbling speech, he
staggered along, assuring us that he had only been rather sleepy.... And
so he had, and I emptied the fine snow that had been driven in about my
knees through my knickerbockers, and had no need to send any telegrams.
Except for that adventure, which I would gladly have done without,
Pontresina was an uneventful place, rather picnicky and wearisome. There
was a friend of my sister Maggie there under the sentence of the white
death: there was an elderly bishop who attached himself somewhat to our
party: there was Miss Margot Tennant whom then I met for the first time;
and after a rather dull fortnight, I turned back to England to embrace
the career, at Chester, of a serious archæologist.
* * * * *
Now there was no particular reason why the Corporatn of Chester should
allow a young gentleman from Cambridge University to pull the city walls
about, in the hope of extracting therefrom Roman tombstones, even though
he was quite willing that these monuments, if discovered, should be
presented to the local museum. So with a view to securing a warmer
welcome, I had got my father to write to the Duke of Westminster at
Eaton, and this was a gloriously successful move. I went over to see
him, explained the plan, and got his support. He in turn wrote to the
Mayor urging the claims of archæology on an enlightened town, and gave
me £50 to augment the grant from the Würtz fund. The technical part of
the work, the underpinning of the wall, the subsequent building of it
up again in case we extracted Roman tombstones from it was entrusted to
the city surveyor: local subscriptions came in, and tombstones of
considerable importance came out, for we found that a legion, “_Legio
Decima Valeria Victrix_” (The victorious Valerian), whose presence in
England was hitherto unknown, had been stationed at Chester. Professor
Mommsen, the historian, must be informed about that, and the copies of
these tombstones must be sent him, and these produced a letter of
congratulation and acknowledgment from the great man. I skipped with joy
over that, for was not this an apotheosis for the family dunce, that
Professor Mommsen should applaud his work? And again I skipped when one
of the famous post-cards came from Hawarden, asking me to come over and
tell Mr. Gladstone about these finds. The sense of diplomacy spiced that
adventure, for profoundly ignorant though I was about politics, I had
just the prudence to be aware that Eaton and Hawarden must not be put,
so to speak, into one pocket, since Mr. Gladstone with his policies of
Home Rule for Ireland and the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church had
digged a gulf of liquid fire between himself and the Duke. There must be
nothing said that could tend to stoke that, and strict was the guard
that I set on my lips.
* * * * *
All are agreed on the sense of the terrific latent energy with which
that quiet country-house was stored: there was high tension in its
tranquillity. You felt that if you touched anything a great electric
spark might flare with a cracking explosion towards your extended
finger.... I got there during the morning and was at once taken to see
Mr. Gladstone. He was in his study, sitting at his “political” table:
that other table was the table where he worked at Homer, so he presently
explained to me, suggesting though not actually stating the image which
flew into my mind, of his boiling over, so to speak, at the political
table, that furnace of fierce contention and white-hot enthusiasm, and
of his putting himself to cool off from controversy by the Ionian Sea.
He instantly plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain as
if nothing else really mattered or ever had mattered to him, and pored
over the copies of a few inscriptions I had brought him. But he wanted
more lively evidence than a mere copy.
“I should like to see the squeezes of these,” he said. “Do you know the
only proper way to make squeezes? You take your sheet of blotting-paper,
and after you have washed the stone, you lay it on, pressing the paper
into the letters of the inscription. Then sprinkle it with water, but by
no means wet your paper before you have laid it on the stone, because it
is apt to tear if you do that. Then take a clothes brush--not too stiff
a one--and tap the surface over and over again with the bristles. By
degrees you will get the paper to mould itself into all the letters of
the inscription, and where there are letters apparently quite perished,
it will often show you some faint stroke from which you can conjecture
what the missing letter has been, though it is invisible to the eye. And
let your blotting paper get dry before you remove it. Otherwise again
you may tear it. Yes, we are coming to lunch: we know,” he said to Mrs.
Gladstone, who came in for the second time to say it was ready.
I do not of course pretend to reproduce the precise wording of this
little dissertation on blotting-paper-squeezes, but there or thereabouts
was the substance of it,
[Illustration: E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 22
[Page 269]
full of detail, full of fire and gesticulation, as if he himself had
invented the science of squeezes, and had done nothing all his life but
make them.
After lunch he said he would drive me to St. Deiniol’s, the library,
chiefly theological and philosophical, that he was arranging, largely
with his own hands, from his vast accumulation of books, for the benefit
of the district, and in especial, for that of clerical students whose
Church he had vainly attempted to disestablish. Soon after lunch it was
announced that the carriage was round, and he went to the door. I had
supposed that there would be some brougham or whatnot in charge of a
coachman; instead there was a pony carriage for two, with a groom
holding tight on to the pony’s head. Mr. Gladstone, already very
dim-sighted, peered at the pony, and said to me, “Wait a minute: that
pony’s a beast,” and hurried back into the house reappearing again with
a formidable whip. Then I became aware that he and I were going alone,
and that Mr. Gladstone, armed with this whip in case the pony was
“beastly,” was intending to drive, for he took up the reins, and, as
soon as I was in, said to the groom, “Let go, Charles,” and whacked the
pony over the rump to teach him that there was his master sitting
inside. Under this charioteer, blind and aged and completely intrepid,
we cantered away to St. Deiniol’s, Mr. Gladstone pointing at objects of
interest with his whip, and reminding the pony that he would catch it,
if he misbehaved. From there, I think he drove me to the station and
returned alone. I duly sent him squeezes prepared in the manner he had
prescribed, and received a series of post-cards suggesting the probable
readings of erased letters, and when next I went to Hawarden that
autumn, there were passages he had turned up in the “_Corpus
Inscriptionum Latinarum_” which bore on this tombstone and on that,
discharged at me as if from a volcano....
Six weeks’ exploration was enough to exhaust my funds, and I carried my
squeezes and my sketches back to Cambridge, there to put the results
into shape.... And there I found, and re-read with a suddenly re-kindled
interest those pages of blue foolscap on the first of which was the
heading “Dodo.” I had written them chiefly for my own amusement, but
now, rightly or wrongly, I had the conviction that they might amuse
others as well. But I really had no idea, till I took them out again,
what they were like; now it occurred to me that the people in them were
something like real people, and that the whole in point of agitating
fact was something like a real book, that might be printed and bound....
But I instantly wanted another and if possible a story-teller’s opinion
about it, and sent it off to my mother, asking her to read it first, and
if it seemed to her to provide any species of entertainment, to think
whether she could not manage to induce Mrs. Harrison (Lucas Malet) or
Henry James, to cast a professional eye over it. She managed this with
such success, that a few days afterwards she wrote to me to say that
Henry James had consented to read it, and give his frank opinion. The
packet she had already, on his consent, despatched to him.
Now this MSS. which thus had reached the kindest man in the world, was
written in a furious hurry and covered with erasures, that exploded into
illegible interpolations, and was indited in such a hand as we employ on
a note that has to be dashed off when it is time already to go to the
station. This was genially hinted at when late in November the recipient
announced to me his judgment in the matter; for he prefaced his
criticism with an apology for having kept it so long, and allowed that,
in consenting to read and criticize, he had “rather overestimated the
attention I should be able to give to a production in manuscript of such
substantial length. We live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I
had taken for granted your story would come to me in that form....”
I should like to call the attention of Mr. Max Beerbohm, our national
caricaturist and parodist, to this unique situation. Henry James at that
time had lately evolved the style and the method which makes a deeper
gulf between his earlier books and his later than exists between
different periods of the work of any other artist. Nearest perhaps in
this extent and depth of gulf comes the case of the painter Turner, but
the most sober and quiet example of his early period is not so far
sundered from the most riotous of Venetian sunrises, as is, let us say,
“Roderick Hudson” from “The Ivory Tower.” Just about now Henry James had
realized, as he told my mother, that all his previous work was
“subaqueous”: now, it seemed to him that he had got his head above
water, whereas to those who adored his earlier work he appeared to have
taken a header into some bottomless depth, where no plummet could
penetrate. At this precise moment when he had vowed himself to
psychological analysis so meticulous and intricate that such action as
he henceforth permitted himself in his novels had to be sifted and
searched for and inferred from the motives that prompted it, he found
himself committed to read a long and crabbed MS., roughly and
voluptuously squirted on to the paper. With what sense of outrage as he
deciphered it sentence by sentence must he have found himself
confronted by the high-spirited but hare-brained harangues of my
unfortunate heroine and her wordy friends! Page after page he must have
turned, only to discover more elementary adventures, more nugatory and
nonsensical dialogues. At the stage at which my story then was, I must
tell the reader that the heroine was far more extravagant than she
subsequently became: She was much pruned and tamed before she made her
printed appearance. The greater part of her censored escapades have
faded from my mind, but I still remember some occasion soon after her
baby’s death when she was discovered, I think by Jack, doing a
step-dance with her footman. It must all have seemed to Henry James the
very flower and felicity of hopeless, irredeemable fiction and still he
persevered.... Or did he persevere? He wrote me anyhow the most careful
and kindly of letters, following it by yet another, delicately and
delightfully forbearing to quench the smoking flax.
“I am such a fanatic myself,” he writes in the earlier of these, “on the
subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of
chiselling and hammering out in literary things that I am afraid I am
rather a cold-blooded judge, rather likely to be offensive to a young
story-teller on the question of quality. I’m not sure that yours strikes
me as quite so ferociously literary as my ideal.... Only remember that a
story is, essentially a form, and that if it fails of that, it fails of
its mission.... For the rest, make yourself a style. It is by style we
are saved.”
In case the reader has given a glance to _Dodo_, can he imagine a more
wisely expressed opinion, that opinion, in fact, being no opinion at
all? Never by any possibility could that MS. have seemed to him worth
the paper it was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With what
a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its wrapper again!
I suppose I was incorrigible on this question of scribbling, for I was
not in the least discouraged. But for the time the further adventures of
the book were cut short by its author’s Odysseys, for directly after
Christmas my father and mother, Maggie, Lucy Tait and I started for
Algiers, through which we were to journey together as far as Tunis.
After that I was going on to Athens to spend the spring there studying
at the British School of Archæology, and it was with a light heart that
I clapped Dodo, after this austere outing, back into a drawer again to
wait till I could attend to her.