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THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY
[Illustration: COOMBE COTTAGE]
THE PUPPET SHOW
OF MEMORY
BY
MAURICE BARING
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1922
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
NOTE
My thanks are due to Messrs. Methuen for allowing me to use in Chapters
XVI.-XIX. some matter which has already appeared in _A Year in Russia_
and _Russian Essays_, two books published by them; to Mr. Leo Maxse for
allowing me to use an article on Sarah Bernhardt which appeared in the
_National Review_, and has been re-written for this book; to Father C. C.
Martindale and Mr. Desmond MacCarthy for kindly correcting the proofs.
M. B.
TO J.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE NURSERY 1
II. THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM 14
III. MEMBLAND 31
IV. MEMBLAND 46
V. SCHOOL 68
VI. ETON 87
VII. GERMANY 118
VIII. ITALY, CAMBRIDGE, GERMANY, LONDON 138
IX. OXFORD AND GERMANY 165
X. PARIS 181
XI. COPENHAGEN 208
XII. SARAH BERNHARDT 227
XIII. ROME 245
XIV. RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA 263
XV. BATTLES 287
XVI. LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA 305
XVII. RUSSIA: THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION 332
XVIII. ST. PETERSBURG 356
XIX. TRAVEL IN RUSSIA 367
XX. SOUTH RUSSIA, JOURNALISM, LONDON 386
XXI. CONSTANTINOPLE (1909) 397
XXII. THE BALKAN WAR, 1912 406
XXIII. CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE (1912) 418
XXIV. THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 430
INDEX 439
ILLUSTRATIONS
COOMBE COTTAGE _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
PORTRAITS OF SARAH BERNHARDT BY THE AUTHOR
(AGE 7), DRAWN IN 1881 228
SARAH BERNHARDT IN THE ’EIGHTIES 229
THE PUPPET SHOW OF MEMORY
CHAPTER I
THE NURSERY
When people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with
regret, “If only I had kept a diary, what a rich store of material I
should now have at my disposal!” I remember one of the masters at Eton
telling me, when I was a boy, that if I wished to make a fortune when I
was grown up, I had only to keep a detailed diary of every day of my life
at Eton. He said the same thing to all the boys he knew, but I do not
remember any boy of my generation taking his wise advice.
On the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past memories,
the absence of diaries and notebooks has its compensations. Memory,
as someone has said, is the greatest of artists. It eliminates the
unessential, and chooses with careless skill the sights and the sounds
and the episodes that are best worth remembering and recording. The
first thing I can remember is a Christmas tree which I think celebrated
the Christmas of 1876. It was at Shoreham in Kent, at a house belonging
to Mr. H. B. Mildmay, who married one of my mother’s sisters. I was two
years old, and I remember my Christmas present, a large bird with yellow
and red plumage, which for a long time afterwards lived at the top of
the nursery wardrobe. It was neither a bird of Paradise nor a pheasant;
possibly only a somewhat flamboyant hen; but I loved it dearly, and it
irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years.
The curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 37 Charles
Street, Berkeley Square, London. The nursery epoch, which lasted till
promotion to the schoolroom and lessons began, seems to children as long
as a lifetime, just as houses and places seem to them infinitely large.
The nursery was on the third floor of the house, and looked out on to
the street. There was a small night-nursery next door to it, which had
coloured pictures of St. Petersburg on the wall.
I can remember the peculiar roar of London in those days; the
four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pavement through
the fog, except when there was straw down in the street for some sick
person; and the various denizens of the streets, the lamplighter and
the muffin-man; often a barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and
sometimes a Punch and Judy. During the war, when the streets began to be
darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 1917, London
looked at night very much as it was in my childhood. But the strange
rumbling noise had gone for ever. Sometimes on one of the houses opposite
there used to be an heraldic hatchment. The nursery was inhabited by my
brother Hugo and myself, our nurse, Hilly, and two nurserymaids, Grace
Hetherington, and Annie. Grace was annexed by me; Annie by Hugo. Hilly
had been nurse to my sisters and, I think, to my elder brothers too. She
had the slightly weather-beaten but fresh agelessness of Nannies, and
her most violent threat was: “I’ll bring my old shoe to you,” and one of
her most frequent exclamations: “Oh, you naughty boy, you very naughty
boy!” The nursery had Landseer pictures in gilt frames, and on the chest
of drawers between the two windows a mechanical toy of an entrancing
description. It was a square box, one side of which was made of glass,
and behind this glass curtain, on a small platform, a lady sat dressed
in light blue silk at an open spinet; a dancing master, in a red silk
doublet with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one side
of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short skirts
of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to dance. When you
wound up the toy, the lady played, the man conducted elegantly with an
open score in one hand and a baton in the other, and the little girl
pirouetted. It only played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely
refined dance-tune.
At one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little girl used to
appear sometimes. Hugo and I used to exchange signals with her, and we
called her Miss Rose. Our mute acquaintance went on for a long time,
but we never saw her except across the street and at her window. We did
not wish to see more of her. Nearer acquaintance would have marred the
perfect romance of the relation.
There were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to the nursery,
and probably to all nurseries: one was Albert biscuits, and the other
toast-in-water. Children call for an Albert biscuit as men ask for
a whisky-and-soda at a club, not from hunger, but as an adjunct to
conversation and a break in monotony. At night, after we had gone to
bed, we used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of
water. “Hilly, I want a drink of water”; but this meant, not that one was
thirsty, but that one was frightened and wanted to see a human being. All
my brothers and sisters, I found out afterwards, had done the same thing
in the same way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been
handed down quite unconsciously. I can’t remember how the nursery epoch
came to an end; it merges in my memory without any line of division, into
the schoolroom period; but the first visits in the country certainly
belonged to the nursery epoch.
We used to go in the summer to Coombe Cottage, near Malden, an
ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one end, a cool oak hall
and staircase, a drawing-room full of water-colours, a room next to it
full of books, with a drawing-table and painting materials ready, and a
long dining-room, of which the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a
verandah looking out on to the garden. There was also a kitchen garden,
lawns, a dairy, a gardener, Mr. Baker, who made nosegays, a deaf-and-dumb
under-gardener who spoke on his fingers, a farmyard, and a duck-pond into
which I remember falling.
Coombe was an enchanted spot for us. My recollection of it is that of a
place where it was always summer and where the smell of summer and the
sounds of summer evening used to make the night-nursery a fairy place;
and sometimes in the morning, red-coated soldiers used to march past
playing “The Girl I left behind me,” with a band of drums and fifes. The
uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the field, and
that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. I never forgot
it. I can remember losing my first front tooth at Coombe by tying it
on to a thread and slamming the door, and I can remember my sisters
singing, “Where are you going to, my pretty Maid?” one of them acting
the milkmaid, with a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. Best of
all, I remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt on a
bird’s tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in the hayfields.
We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives
to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when
time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and Nature
is steeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious
sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by
the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the
shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to
say to the fleeting moment what Faust challenged and defied the devil to
compel him to cry out: “Verweile, Du bist schön.”
It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made
permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: Shakespeare, in the end
of the _Merchant of Venice_, when Lorenzo and Jessica let the sounds of
music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the
floor of heaven; Keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no
pain; Musset, in the “Nuit de Mai”; Victor Hugo, when, on their lovely
brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Doña Sol fancy in the moonlight
that sleeping Nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians
speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of
words: Beethoven, in his Sonata; Chopin, again and again; Schumann, in
his lyrics, especially “Frühlingsnacht”; Schubert, in his “Serenade.”
I have known many such nights: the dark nights of Central Russia before
the harvest ends, when the watchman’s rattle punctuates and intensifies
the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating
accordion outdo Shakespeare and Schubert in magic; June nights in
Florence, when you couldn’t see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking
of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon,
when streaks of red still hung in the west; May nights by the Neckar
at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with
lilac; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, when large trees, dim lawns,
and antlered shapes seemed to be part of a fairy revel; and nights in
South Devon, when the full September moon made the garden and the ilex
tree as unreal as Prospero’s island.
But I never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in the summer
evenings in the night nursery at Coombe Cottage, when we went to bed
by daylight and lay in our cots guessing at the pattern on the wall,
to wake up later when it was dark, half conscious of the summer scents
outside, and of a bird’s song in the darkness. The intense magic of that
moment I have never quite recaptured, except when reading Keats’ “Ode to
the Nightingale” for the first time, when the door on to the past was
opened wide once more and the old vision and the strange sense of awe,
unreality, and enchantment returned.
But to go back to nursery life. Our London life followed the ritual,
I suppose, of most nurseries. In the morning after our breakfast we
went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, into the dining-room,
where breakfast was at nine, and kissed our father before he drove to
the city in a phaeton, and played at the end of the dining-room round
a pedestalled bust of one of the Popes. Then a walk in the Park, and
sometimes as a treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to
Cremer’s, the toy-shop in Bond Street. Hugo and I detested the Park, and
the only moment of real excitement I remember was when one day Hilly told
me not to go near the flower-beds, and I climbed over the little railing
and picked a towering hyacinth. Police intervention was immediately
threatened, and I think a policeman actually did remonstrate; but
although I felt for some hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none
the less an aftertaste of triumph in the tears; attrition, perhaps, but
no contrition.
When we got to be a little older … older than what? I don’t know … but
there came our moment when we joined our sisters every morning to say our
prayers in my mother’s bedroom, every day before breakfast. They were
short and simple prayers—the “Our Father” and one other short prayer.
Nevertheless, for years the “Our Father” was to me a mysterious and
unintelligible formula, all the more so, as I said it entirely by the
sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that “Whichartinheaven” was
one word and “Thykingdomcome” another. I never asked what it meant. I
think in some dim way I felt that, could I understand it, something of
its value as an invocation would be lost or diminished. I also remember
learning at a very early age the hymn, “There is a green hill far away,”
and finding it puzzling. I took it for granted that most green hills had
city walls round them, though this particular one hadn’t. Besides going
to Coombe we went at the end of the summer to Devonshire, to Membland,
near the villages of Noss Mayo, and Newton, and not far from the river
Yealm, an arm of the sea. It was when getting ready for the first of
these journeys that I remember, while I was being dressed in the nursery,
my father’s servant, Mr. Deacon, came up to the nursery and asked me
whether I would like a ticket. He then gave me a beautiful green ticket
with a round hole in it. I asked him what one could do with it, and he
said, “In return for that ticket you can get Bath buns, Banbury cakes,
jam-rolls, crackers, and pork sausages.” In the bustle of departure I
lost it. Paddington Station resounded with the desperate cries of the
bereaved ticket-holder. In vain I was given half a white first-class
ticket. In vain Mr. Bullock, the guard, offered every other kind of
ticket. It was not the same thing. That ticket, with the round hole, had
conjured up visions of wonderful possibilities and fantastic exchanges.
Sausages and Banbury cakes and Bath buns (all of them magic things), I
knew, would be forthcoming to no other ticket. The loss was irreparable.
I remember thinking the grown-up people so utterly wanting in
understanding when they said: “A ticket? Of course, he can have a ticket.
Here’s a ticket for the dear little boy.” As if that white ticket was
anything like the unique passport to gifts new and unheard of, anything
like that real green ticket with the round hole in it. At the end of one
of these journeys, at Kingsbridge Road, the train ran off the line. We
were in a saloon carriage, and I remember the accident being attributed
to that fact by my mother’s maid, who said saloon carriages were always
unsafe. It turned out to be an enjoyable accident, and we all got out and
I was given an orange.
Mr. Bullock, the guard, was a great friend of all of us children; and our
chief pleasure was to ask him a riddle: “Why is it dangerous to go out
in the spring?” I will leave it to the reader to guess the answer, with
merely this as a guide, that the first part of the answer to the riddle
is “Because the hedges are shooting,” and the second part of the answer
is peculiarly appropriate to Mr. Bullock. I am afraid Mr. Bullock never
saw why, although no doubt he enjoyed the riddle.
I have already said that I cannot fix any line of division between the
nursery and the schoolroom epochs, but before I get on to the subject of
the schoolroom I will record a few things which must have belonged to the
pre-schoolroom period.
One incident which stands out clearly in my mind is that of the
fifty-shilling train. There were at that time in London two toy-shops
called Cremer. One was in New Bond Street, No. 27, I think, near
Tessier’s, the jeweller; another in Regent Street, somewhere between
Liberty’s and Piccadilly Circus.
In the window of the Regent Street shop there was a long train with
people in it, and it was labelled fifty shillings. In the year 1921 it is
only a small mechanical train that can be bought for fifty shillings. I
can’t remember whether I had reached the schoolroom when this happened,
but I know I still wore a frock and had not yet reached the dignity of
trousers. I used constantly to ask to go and look at this shop window and
gaze at the fifty-shilling train, which seemed first to be miraculous for
its size, and, secondly, for its price. Who in the world could have fifty
shillings all at once?
I never went so far as thinking it was possible to possess that train;
but I used to wonder whether there were people in the world who could
store up fifty shillings. We were each of us given sixpence every
Saturday, but it was always spent at once, nor could I calculate or even
conceive how long it would take to save enough sixpences to make fifty
shillings.
One evening, when we were at Coombe, in the summer, I was sent for to the
drawing-room and then told to go into the dining-room. I opened the door,
and there, on the floor, was the fifty-shilling train. If a fairy had
flown into the room and lifted me to the ceiling I could not have thought
a fact more miraculous. From that moment I knew for certain that miracles
could happen and do happen, and subsequent experience has confirmed the
belief. Alas! the funnel of the engine was soon broken, and Mr. Toombs,
the carpenter, was said to be able to mend it, and I looked forward to
another miracle. He did, but in a way which was hardly satisfactory
considered as a miracle, although perfect for practical usage. He turned
on a lathe a solid funnel made of black wood, but not hollow, and he
stuck it in where the funnel ought to be. I pretended I was satisfied,
but my private belief was that Mr. Toombs didn’t know how to make funnels.
Another thing which happened when I was six years old was a visit to
the Drury Lane pantomime, which was _Mother Goose_. This, of course,
with a transformation scene with a large fairy with moving emerald
butterfly-like wings and Arthur Roberts who, when playing a trumpet, spat
out all his teeth on to the floor as if they were an encumbrance, was an
ecstasy beyond words.
Another event almost more exciting was the arrival of a doll’s house. I
played with dolls, but not as girls do, mothering them and dressing them.
Mine were little tiny dolls, and could not be dressed or undressed, and
they were used as puppets. I made them open Parliament, act plays and
stories, and most frequently take the part of the French Merovingian
kings. This was at the beginning of the schoolroom period, and the dolls
were called Chilpéric, Ermengarde, Clothilde, Blanche de Castille,
Frédégonde, Brunehaut, Galswinthe, and Pépin le Bref, and other names
belonging to the same remote period of history. One day I was told that
a doll’s house was coming. I couldn’t sleep for excitement, and Hilly,
Grace, and Annie gravely held a conclave one night when I was in bed
and supposed to be asleep, over their supper, and said that so exciting
a thing as a doll’s house ought not to be allowed me. It would ruin my
health. I feigned deep sleep, and the next day pretended to have lost all
interest in dolls’ houses, but when it came, all its furniture was taken
out, put on the floor, and arranged in two long rows, with a throne at
one end, to enable Chilpéric and Frédégonde to open Parliament.
One year in London I actually saw Queen Victoria drive to the opening of
Parliament in a gilded coach with a little crown perched on her head and
an ermine tippet. It was not quite a satisfactory crown, but still it was
a crown, and the coach had the authentic Cinderella quality.
To go back to the dolls for a moment. I used to go to Membland sometimes
for Easter with my father and mother when the rest of the family stayed
in London, and Margaret used to write me letters from the dolls,
beginning “Cher Papa” and ending “Ermengarde” or “Chilpéric,” as the case
might be. These letters used to cover me with confusion and mortification
before the grown-up people, as I kept it a secret that I ever played
with dolls, knowing it to be thought rather eccentric, and liable to be
misunderstood, especially when there were other boys about, which there
were.
Of course, in the nursery, Hugo and I had endless games of pretending,
especially during bath-time (baths were hip-baths), and I remember Hugo
refusing to have his bath because when we were playing at fishes I seized
the shark’s part and wouldn’t let him be a shark. “Hilly,” he wailed, “I
_will_ be a shark.” But no, I wouldn’t hear of it, and he had to be a
whale, which the shark, so I said, easily mastered.
Promotion to the schoolroom meant lessons and luncheon downstairs. The
schoolroom was inhabited by my three sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, and
Susan, and ruled over by the French governess, Chérie. I thought Chérie
the most beautiful, the cleverest, and altogether the most wonderful
person in the world. My earliest recollection of her almost magical
powers was when she took a lot of coloured silks and put them behind
a piece of glass and said this was _une vision_. I believed there
was nothing she didn’t know and nothing she couldn’t do. I was also
convinced that one day I would marry her. This dream was sadly marred by
the conduct of my sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the eldest, Margaret
the second, and Susan the third, of my sisters. I firmly believed in
fairies. Elizabeth and Margaret fostered the belief by talking a great
deal about their powers as fairies, and Elizabeth said she was Queen of
the fairies. One day she said: “Just as you are going to be married to
Chérie, and when you are in church, I will turn you into a frog.” This
was said in the schoolroom in London. The schoolroom was on the floor
over the nursery. No sooner had Elizabeth made this ominous remark when
I ran to the door and howled in a manner which penetrated the whole
house from the housemaids’ rooms upstairs to the housekeeper’s room in
the basement. Screams and yells startled the whole house. Hilly came
rushing from the nursery; Chérie came from her bedroom, where she had
been doing some sewing; Dimmock, my mother’s maid, whom we called D.,
came downstairs, saying: “Well, I never”; Sheppy, the housekeeper, peered
upwards from the subterranean housekeeper’s room; and, lastly, my mother
came from the drawing-room. The cause of the crisis was explained by
me through sobs. “She says” … sob, sob, yell … “that she’s a fairy” …
sob, sob … “and that she’ll turn me into a frog” … sob, sob … “when I
marry Chérie…” All attempts to calm me were in vain. Elizabeth was then
appealed to, and the whole house in chorus said to her, “Say you’re not
a fairy.” But Elizabeth became marble-constant. She said, “How can I say
I’m not a fairy when I am one?” A statement which I felt to be all too
true and well founded. More sobs and yells. Universal indignation against
Elizabeth. My paroxysm was merely increased by all the efforts everyone
made to soothe me. Elizabeth was cajoled, persuaded, argued with, bribed,
threatened, exhorted, blamed, anathematised, entreated, appealed to,
implored, but all in vain. She would not budge from her position, which
was that she _was_ a fairy.
The drama proceeded. Nothing stopped the stream of convulsive sobs, the
flood of anguish—not all Chérie’s own assurances that the wedding would
be allowed to take place.
Elizabeth was taken downstairs to be reasoned with, and after an hour and
a half’s argument, and not before she had been first heavily bribed with
promises and then sent to bed, she finally consented to compromise. She
said, as a final concession, “I’ll say I’m not a fairy, but I am.” When
this concession was wrung from her the whole relieved household rushed
up to tell me the good news that Elizabeth had said she was not a fairy.
The moment I heard the news my tears ceased, and perfect serenity was
restored. But although Elizabeth capitulated, Margaret was firmer, and
she continued to mutter (like Galileo) for the rest of the afternoon,
“But _I_ am a fairy all the same.”
Margaret was the exciting element in the schoolroom. She was often
naughty, and I remember her looking through the schoolroom window at
Coombe, while I was doing lessons with Chérie, and making faces. Chérie
said to her one day: “Vous feriez rougir un régiment.” Elizabeth was
pleasantly frivolous, and Susan was motherly and sensible, and supposed
to be the image of her father, but Margaret was dramatic and imaginative,
and invincibly obstinate.
She knew that for Chérie’s sake I didn’t like admitting that the English
had ever defeated the French in battle, so every now and then she would
roll out lists of battles fought by the English against the French
and won, beginning with Creçy, Poitiers, getting to Agincourt with a
crescendo, and ending up in a tremendous climax with Waterloo. To which
I used to retort with a battle called Bouvines, won by Philippe Auguste,
in some most obscure period over one of the Plantagenet kings, and with
Fontenoy. I felt them both to be poor retorts.
Another invention of Margaret’s was a mysterious Princess called
Louiseaunt, who often came to see her, but as it happened always when we
were out. If we suddenly came into the room, Margaret would say, “What a
pity! Louiseaunt has just been here. She’ll be so sorry to have missed
you.” And try as we would, we always just missed Louiseaunt.
If we went out without Margaret, Louiseaunt was sure to come that day. We
constantly just arrived as Louiseaunt had left, and the inability ever to
hit off Louiseaunt’s precise visiting hours was a lasting exasperation.
Another powerful weapon of Margaret’s was recitation. She used to recite
in English and in French, and in both languages the effect on me was
a purge of pity and terror. I minded most “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,”
declaimed with melodramatic gesture, and nearly as much a passage from
_Hernani_, beginning—
“Monts d’Aragon! Galice! Estramadoure!
Oh! Je porte malheur à tout ce qui m’entoure!”
which she recited, rolling her eyes in a menacing attitude.
“Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” said with the help of Susan, whose rendering had
something reassuringly comfortable and homely about it—Susan couldn’t
say her “r’s,” and pronounced them like “w’s”—in contradistinction to
Margaret’s sombre and vehement violence, did a little to mitigate the
effect, but none the less it frightened me so much that it had to be
stopped. Hugo was not yet in the schoolroom then.
Lessons in London began soon after breakfast. They were conducted by
Chérie and by an English governess, Mrs. Christie, who used to arrive
in a four-wheeler, always the same one, from Kentish Town, and teach us
English, Arithmetic, and Latin. Mrs. Christie was like the pictures of
Thackeray, with spectacles, white bandeaux, and a black gown. During
lessons she used to knit. She was in permanent mourning, and we knew we
must never ask to learn “Casabianca,” as her little boy who had died had
learnt it. She used to arrive with a parcel of books from the London
Library, done up in a leather strap. She was the first of a long line of
teachers who failed to teach me Arithmetic. She used to stay the whole
morning, or sometimes only part of it. During lessons she used to have a
small collation, a glass of claret, and a water biscuit. She also taught
other families.
At Coombe the schoolroom looked out on the lawn, a long, flat lawn which
went down by steps on a lower lawn, at the bottom of which we had our
own gardens and where there was a summer-house. I remember sitting in
the schoolroom next to Chérie while, with a large knitting needle, she
pointed out the words _pain_ and _vin_ written large in a copy-book, with
a picture of a bottle of red wine and a picture of a piece of bread, to
show what the words meant, while Margaret was copying out Clarence’s
dream in a copy-book and murmuring something about skulls, and all the
time through the window framed with clematis came the sound, the magic
sound of the mowing-machine, the noise of bees, and a smell of summer,
tea-roses and of hayfields.
On certain days of the week Mademoiselle Ida Henry used to come and give
us music lessons. Our house was saturated with an atmosphere of music.
My mother played the violin and was a fine concertina player, and almost
before I could walk I had violin lessons from no less a person than Mr.
Ries. Until I was three I was called _Strad_, and I think my mother
cherished the dream that I would be a violinist, but I showed no aptitude.
My first music lesson I received from Mademoiselle Ida over Stanley
Lucas’ music shop in Bond Street. I was alone in London with my mother
and father, one November, and I suppose about six. Mademoiselle Ida was
very encouraging, and—unduly, as it turned out—optimistic, and said:
“Il a des mains faites pour jouer le piano,” and soon my _morceau_ was
Diabelli’s duets. While I was learning Diabelli’s duets, Susan was
learning a Fantasia by Mozart, which I envied without malice. It had
one particular little run in it which I learnt to play with one finger.
One day I played this downstairs in the drawing-room. A few days later
Mademoiselle Ida came to luncheon, and my mother said: “Play that little
bar out of the Mozart to Mademoiselle Ida.” I was aghast, feeling
certain, and quite rightly, that Mademoiselle Ida would resent my having
encroached on a more advanced _morceau_, and indeed, as it became clear
to her what the bar in question was, she at once said: “Je ne veux pas
que tu te mêles des morceaux des autres.” That was what I had feared. My
mother was quite unconscious of the solecism that she was committing,
and pressed me to play it. Finally I hummed the tune, which satisfied
both parties.
I never liked music lessons then or ever afterwards, but I enjoyed
Mademoiselle Ida’s conversation and company almost more than anything.
Every word she ever said was treasured. One day she said to Mrs.
Christie: “Bonjour, Madame Christé. J’ai bien mal à la tête.” “Je suis
très fachée de le savoir, Mademoiselle Henri,” said Mrs. Christie in icy
tones, and this little dialogue was not destined ever to be forgotten by
any of us. We used often afterwards to enact the scene.
Elizabeth and Susan learnt the piano, and Margaret was taught the violin
by Herr Ludwig, a severe German master. John, my eldest brother, was an
accomplished pianist and organist; Everard, my third brother, played the
piccolo. Cecil sang, and my mother was always bewailing that he had not
learnt music at Eton, because his house-master said it would be more
useful for him to learn how to shoe a horse. This, alas! did not prove
to be the case, as he has seldom since had the opportunity of making use
of his skill as a blacksmith. The brothers were all at Eton when I first
went into the schoolroom, but they often used to visit us in the evening
at tea-time, and sometimes they used to listen when Chérie read aloud
after tea.
Echoes of the popular songs of the day reached both the nursery and the
schoolroom, and the first I can remember the tunes of are: “Pop goes
the Weasel,” which used to be sung to me in the nursery; “Tommy, make
room for your Uncle”; “My Grandfather’s Clock”; “Little Buttercup” from
_Pinafore_, which used to be played on a musical box; “Oh where and oh
where is my little wee Dog?” with its haunting refrain.
Later we used to sing in chorus and dancing a _pas de trois_, a song from
a Gaiety burlesque:
“We’ll never come back any more, boys,
We’ll never come back any more.”
And, later still, someone brought back to London for Christmas the
unforgettable tune of “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” which in after-life I
heard all over the world—on the lagoon of Venice and in the villages of
Mongolia.
One day after luncheon—on Sunday—John played the “Two Grenadiers” at the
pianoforte, and I remember the experience being thrilling, if a little
alarming, but a revelation, and a first introduction into the world of
music.