COPENHAGEN
I arrived at Copenhagen in August. I went there direct from Paris and
crossed whatever intervening seas lie between Denmark and Germany _via_
Hamburg and Kiel. I had been given an ointment made of tar by a French
hair specialist to check my rapidly increasing baldness, and I applied
it before I went to bed in my cabin, which contained three other berths.
When the other passengers, who had intended to share my cabin, put their
heads into it, they were appalled by the smell of tar, and thought
that they had been given berths in the sail-room by the steward. They
complained loudly, and refused to sleep there, so I had the cabin to
myself.
I stayed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and on the morning of my arrival
presented myself to the Minister, Sir Edward Goschen. He was alone at the
Legation. I took rooms in a street not far from the Legation, and settled
down to the quiet routine of Legation life in a small capital.
Copenhagen in August seemed unusually quiet. The sentries outside the
Amalienborg Palace looked like big wooden dolls in their blue uniforms,
white trousers, white belts, and bearskins.
I immediately began to have Danish lessons from the British Vice-Consul,
who was a Dane, and we soon began to read Hans Andersen in Danish. The
diplomatic world in Copenhagen was a little world by itself. It consisted
of the Russian Minister, Count Benckendorff, who, when I arrived, was
there by himself; the Austrian Minister, Count Wildenbruch, who lived
at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and never went out and rarely saw anybody;
the French Minister, M. Jusserand, one of the most erudite of English
scholars besides being one of the most charming of Frenchmen; and the
German Minister, M. Schön, who had a passion for dressing up in fancy
dress; the Norwegian Minister, M. de Knagenhjelm; and the Italian
Minister.
The diplomatic world mixed little with the Danes. I once heard a Dane say
to another Dane: “Do you receive diplomats?” in the same tone of surprise
as would have been appropriate had the question been: “Do you receive
police-spies?”
I think the theatres were shut when I arrived, and the only amusements
were to go out sailing which I used to do often with Sir Edward, who had
a yacht, and in the evenings to have dinner at the Tivoli music-hall,
which was an out-of-door park full of side-shows and was pleasantly
illuminated.
The staff of the British Legation consisted of a First Secretary, Sir
Alan Johnstone, and a Chancery servant: a Dane called Ole, who was a
charming, simple person like a character in Hans Andersen, vaguely
intoxicated sometimes, paternal, easily upset, and endlessly obliging.
Sir Alan Johnstone had a little house in the country, and there I
often used to spend Sunday, and there I made the acquaintance of Count
Benckendorff. The first time I met him we had a violent argument about
the Dreyfus case. He was a firm believer in Dreyfus’ innocence and so was
I, but that did not prevent us arguing as though we held diametrically
opposite opinions.
In the middle of August, Edmund Gosse paid a visit to Denmark and I went
to him meet at Munkebjerg, which entailed a long cross-country journey
over many canals and in trains that were borne on steamers. Munkebjerg
was a lovely place on the top of a high hill with little woods reaching
down to the water. There, for the first time, I experienced the long,
green, luminous twilights of the north. Edmund Gosse was inspired by the
surroundings to write a book called _Hypolympia_, which he afterwards
dedicated to me. He imagined that the gods of Greece arrived at
Munkebjerg immediately after their exile, and on that theme he wove a
fantasy.
One of the most important duties at Copenhagen was to go to the railway
station to meet the various royalties who used to visit the King of
Denmark, and another one was to receive English Royalties at the door of
the English church when they attended divine service on Sundays. We used
often to see the King of Denmark out riding, and although I think he was
then eighty years old, he looked on horseback, so extraordinarily young
was his figure, like a man of thirty.
I learnt Danish fairly quickly and soon I could follow the plays at the
Kongelige Theatre and at other theatres. The Kongelige Theatre was a
State-supported institution with an ancient tradition and an excellent
troupe of actors and dancers. They performed opera: Gluck, Mozart,
and Wagner; ballets; the classic Danish comedies of Holberg; Molière;
Shakespeare; modern comedies and the dramas of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Holger
Drachman. The Shakespeare productions were particularly interesting and
far more remarkable than any I ever saw in Berlin. They made use of the
Apron Stage; on a small back-cloth at the back of the stage changed with
the changing scene; the back-cloth was framed in a Gothic arch, which
was supported by pillars raised on low steps. A curtain could be lowered
across this arch, and the actors could proceed with the play in front of
this curtain, without necessitating the lowering of the larger curtain.
This small scene was extremely effective. It was just enough to give the
eye the keynote of the play; and in the historical plays of Shakespeare,
in _Richard III._ for instance, it was ideal. I saw _Richard III._, _King
Lear_, and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_; the latter was a beautiful and
gay production; the actor who played Bottom had a rich vein of humour
and a large exuberant personality, and the fairy dances were beautifully
organised and executed. Of the modern drama I saw Tolstoy’s _Powers of
Darkness_, which made a shattering effect, Ibsen’s _Doll’s House_ and
_Hedda Gabler_, and Holger Drachman’s _Gurre_, and some comedies by Otto
Benzon.
The performance of the _Doll’s House_ with Fru Hennings’ Nora was
unforgettable. I have seen many Noras; Eleonora Duse and Réjane and
Agnes Sorma in Berlin; but Fru Hennings played the part as if it had
been written for her; she _was_ Nora; she made the whole play more
than natural, she made it inevitable. “Quelle navrante ironie! quel
désenchantement à fond!” said Jules Lemaître, writing about Duse’s
performance of Magda. In Fru Hennings’ interpretation of Nora, the
irony was indeed harrowing, and the disenchantment complete; but irony,
disillusion, weariness, disgust were all merged into a wonderful harmony,
as the realities of life gradually dawned on the little singing-bird,
and the doll changed into a woman. She made the transformation, which
whenever I had seen the play before seemed so difficult to believe in,
of the Nora of the first act into the Nora of the last act seem the most
natural thing in the world. Then Fru Hennings had the advantage of being
a Dane and of speaking the words of the play in the language in which
they had been written. She had a musical rippling voice and a plaintive
grace of gesture. Holger Drachman’s drama _Gurre_ was a terrible and
intensely dramatic poetic drama, with a love duet of impassioned lyricism
and melody, and an almost unbearable scene, in which the Queen has her
rival scalded to death in a steam-bath. _Hedda Gabler_ I confess to not
being able to endure when I saw it; it was beautifully acted; too well
acted; there seemed to be no difference between what was going on on
the stage and in the audience. I had a sudden uprush of satiety with
Norwegian drama: with Ibsen, with problem plays, with Denmark, with the
North; and I remember going out of the theatre after the second act, in
revolt and disgust, and not being able to stand any more of it. But that
was an accidental impression arising from a surfeit of such things, and
from an overdose of Scandinavian gloom and Norwegian complexity; a short
course of musical comedies would have soon enabled one to appreciate the
drama of Ibsen once more; as it was, I heard it after a year and a half’s
stay at Copenhagen, and at that moment I had had just a drop too much of
that kind of thing.
I also saw _When we dead awaken_ when it was first produced, and this
again had no effect on me, save one of vague and teasing perplexity.
The music at Copenhagen was as interesting as the drama. Mozart’s
operas were admirably given at the Kongelige Theatre. I remember a
fine performance of _Don Giovanni_, the _Nozze di Figaro_, and Gluck’s
_Orpheo_, concerts where Beethoven’s Symphonies were played, and a
recital of Paderewski where he played Liszt’s arrangement of the
_Erlkönig_. When he came to the end of it, the impression was that he
himself had experienced that ride in the night; that he had battled with
the Erl King for the life of the child, and that it was he and not the
child who was dead.
As soon as I could speak Danish, I made several friends among the Danes.
I sometimes spent the evening at Dr. George Brandes’ house, and more
often at that of Otto Benzon, the playwright, who was extremely kind to
me. The _intelligentsia_ of Copenhagen were highly cultivated; they were
well-to-do and had fine collections of modern pictures. The meals were
long and were often followed by a still longer supper. The days were
short in winter at Copenhagen; the sun appeared to set at two; the wind
blew in every direction at once down the Bred Gade. Copenhagen in winter
had depressing elements.
I had, in the meantime, made great friends with the Benckendorffs at the
Russian Legation.
Just as in the art of writing, and in fact in all arts, the best style
is that where there is no style, or rather where we no longer notice the
style, so appropriate and so inevitable, so easy the thing said, sung,
or done is made to appear, so in diplomacy the most delightful diplomats
were those about whom there was no diplomatic style, nothing which
made you think of diplomacy. Michael Herbert was one of these, and so
pre-eminently was Count Benckendorff. When he was Ambassador in London he
took root easily in English life, and made friends instantly and without
effort in many different worlds, so his personality and his services are
well known to Englishmen. I doubt, however, whether they know how great
the services were which he rendered at times both to our country as well
as to his own.
All through the war, till a few days before his death, he was giving
his whole heart and soul to his work, and every nerve of his being
was strained to the utmost. The war killed him as certainly as if
he had fought in the trenches. He was astonishingly far-sighted and
clear-sighted. In 1903 he told me there would be a revolution in Russia
directly there was a war. At the time of the Agadir crisis, he told me
that the future of Europe entirely depended on the policy of the German
Government: on whether the German Emperor and his Government decided or
not to embark on a Louis XIV. policy of ambition and aggression, and try
to make Germany the only European power.
When the Emperor of Russia issued the manifesto of 17th October, and the
Russians were bedecking their cities with flags, because they thought
they had received a constitution, he made it excruciatingly clear that it
was nothing of the kind; and he predicted no less clearly what would be
the results of so ambiguous an act, and so dangerously elastic a charter.
His public career belongs to history. I had the privilege of knowing him
as a private person and of finding in him the kindest and the wisest of
friends.
I think his most striking quality was his keenness. The way he would
throw himself into the discussion, the topic, or the occupation of the
moment, whether it was a book, a play, a picture, a piece of music, a
political question, a wolf-hunt, a speech, a problem, even an acrostic to
be guessed, or the dredging of a pond.
Whenever I wrote anything new he always made me read it aloud to him, and
he was in himself an extraordinarily exhilarating and encouraging public.
He was all for one’s doing more and more, for finding out what one could
not do and then doing it.
He once tried to persuade me to go into Parliament. When I objected that
I had no power of dealing with political questions, and no understanding
of many affairs that a member of Parliament is supposed to understand, he
said: “Rubbish! You could do all that part, just as you wrote a parody of
Anatole France; people would think you knew.”
He hated pessimism. He hated the Oriental, passive view of life,
especially if it was preached by Occidentals. The looking forward to
a Nirvana and a closed door. He hated everything negative. Suicide to
him was the one unpardonable sin. He hated affectation, especially
cosmopolitan affectation, what he used to call “le faux esprit Parisien.”
“Je préfère,” he used to say, “le bon sens anglais.” He was extremely
argumentative and would put his whole soul into an argument on the most
trivial point; and he was as unblushingly unscrupulous as Dr. Johnson in
his use of the weapons of contradiction, although, unlike Dr. Johnson,
however heated the argument, he was never rude, even for a second; he
didn’t know how to be rude. He spoke the most beautiful natural French,
the French of a more elegant epoch than ours, with a slightly classical
tinge in it. He spoke it not only as well as a Frenchman, but better;
that is to say, he spoke without any frills or unnecessary ornament,
either of phrase or accent, with complete ease and naturalness.
He spoke English just as naturally. I remember on one occasion, shortly
after he arrived in London, his being taken for an Englishman throughout
a whole dinner-party by his host. But he used to say that this was sheer
bluff and that his command of the language was limited. His beautiful
manners, and the perfection of his courtesy came from the same absence
of style I have already alluded to. He was natural and unaffected with
everyone, because he was _chez soi partout_; and his distinction, one
felt, was based on a native integrity, a fundamental horror of anything
common, or mean, or unkind, the incapacity of striking a wrong note in
word or deed: the impossibility of hurting anyone’s feelings. A member
of the Russian _intelligentsia_, writing in a provincial newspaper in
Russia, about one of the many European crises that threatened Europe
before the outbreak of the Great War, said: “We should have been dragged
into a war, had we not had at the time, as our Ambassador in London, the
first gentleman in Europe.” That is, I think, his best and most fitting
epitaph.
I shall never have the benefit of his criticism any more, his keenness,
his almost boyish interest, his decided, argumentative disagreement
leaping into a blaze over a trifling point, and never again enjoy that
glow of satisfaction—worth a whole world of praise—which I used to feel
when he said about something, whether a poem, a newspaper article, a
story, or a letter, or the most foolish of rhymes: “C’est très joli.”
I moved from my rooms in the town to the Legation and had most of my
meals with the Goschens. Sir Edward’s inimitable humour, his minute
observation of detail, and his keen eye for the ludicrous, the quaint
and all the absurd incidents of daily life—and especially of diplomatic
life—made all the official side of things, the dinner-parties,
the interviews with ministers, the ceremonies at the station, the
pompousness of the diplomats, extraordinarily amusing. Besides this,
he was childishly fond of every kind of game, such as battledore and
shuttlecock, and cup and ball.
Sir Edward went on leave in the autumn of 1900, and for a fortnight,
from 10th October to 22nd October, I had the glory of being in charge,
of being acting Chargé d’Affaires of the Legation, so that when the
Foreign Office wrote to me they signed dispatches, “Yours with great
truth.” The first thing which had to be done was to leave cards on all
the _Corps Diplomatique_. This duty was always carried out by Ole, the
Chancery servant. I gave him a sheaf of my cards to leave; he left some
of them, but I think he considered that I was altogether too young to be
taken seriously as a Chargé d’Affaires, so he left no cards on the minor
diplomats, who lived out of the immediate radius of the British Legation.
About three days after I had been in charge, Count Benckendorff told me
that the minor diplomats who had received no cards from me had held a
meeting of indignation; I was to lose no time in smoothing down their
ruffled sensibilities, so I left the cards myself. The only diplomatic
interview I remember having was with the future King of Greece, who came
to see me in my room and talked about something I didn’t understand. My
brief era of sole responsibility was put an end to after a fortnight
by the arrival of a new First Secretary in place of Alan Johnson. His
name was Herbert. Shortly after his arrival Ethel Smyth paid a visit to
Copenhagen on her way back to England from Berlin, where she had been
negotiating for the performance of her opera, _Der Wald_. She wanted to
make the acquaintance of the Benckendorffs, and she sang her opera to us,
her Mass, and many songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, besides
many English and Scotch ballads. Count Benckendorff, who was musical,
was enchanted with her singing, with her interpretation of the songs she
sang, “_la richesse de son exécution_,” her vitality, her good humour,
her keenness, her passionate interest in everything. She played golf in
the daytime and made music in the evening.
At Christmas, Sir Edward’s sons arrived and we had a Christmas-tree
in the house, and a treat for the church choir, and endless games of
battledore and shuttlecock in the Legation ballroom. Then, suddenly, came
the unbelievable news that Queen Victoria was dead. A telegram arrived on
the 22nd January, worded thus:
“I am profoundly grieved to inform you that the Queen expired
this evening at six-thirty. Notify melancholy intelligence to
Government.”
I was just going home for a little leave, but now it seemed impossible:
there would be too much to do. But Sir Edward insisted on my going, all
the same. Herbert was arriving back from leave, and he said he could
get on without me; so I went. I saw the funeral procession from a house
near the Marble Arch. The only splash of colour in the greyness and
gloom of the long procession was the regalia and the bright pall on the
gun-carriage that bore the coffin, and everyone agreed that the most
imposing figure in the procession was the German Emperor in a great grey
cloak. But the most impressive feature of the whole ceremony was the
attitude of the crowd: its size, its silence, the universal black. London
was like a dead city, and as someone said at the time: “One went about
feeling as if one had cheated at cards.” I felt that what “Onkel Adolph”
used to say at Hildesheim was true: “_Die Engländer lieben ihre alte
Königin_” (“The English love their old Queen”).
In February I went to Karlsruhe to hear Ethel Smyth’s first opera,
_Fantasio_, performed at the Hofteater with Mottl conducting. _Fantasio_
is an opera in two acts written on Musset’s play. Ethel Smyth wrote
the libretto herself in German. The opera contains some lovely songs,
especially one that begins: “_Reite ohne Sattelpferd_,” and some of
the most delicate music Ethel Smyth ever composed, but the libretto is
undramatic, and there are not enough bones in the framework to support
the musical structure. Mottl conducted the orchestra beautifully; the
opera was respectfully received, but without any great enthusiasm. When
the performance was over, we had supper with the Grand Duchess of Baden,
and there I met a cousin of mine, Charlie d’Otrante, whom I had not seen
since I was a child. He was now, though a Swedish subject—his father was
a Swede—an officer in the German Army.
I stayed at Copenhagen till the spring. The spring in Denmark comes with
a rush. All is wintry, without any hint of the coming change, and then
all of a sudden, and in one night, the beech trees are green, and of so
startling, vivid, and fresh a green that it almost hurts the eye, and
through them you see the sea, a milky haze, and the sky looks as if it
had been washed clean.
In May, I went to London for my first spell of long leave since I had
passed my examination. I stayed all June and July in London, and in
the middle of July I went over to Brittany to stay a few days with
Sarah Bernhardt at her house, the Fort des Poulains on the island of
Belle-Isle, which is at the extreme north of the island. This visit
entailed a terrific journey: first, a long train journey with many
changes, then several hours on board a steamer, and then a two hours’
drive. The house was a little white, square, flat-roofed building among
the rocks and a stone’s-throw from the sea—a great roaring grey sea,
with huge breakers, leaping cataracts of foam, and beaches of grey
pebbles. Sarah Bernhardt’s son was staying there, Clairin, the artist,
and one or two other people. The house was built entirely of pitch-pine
inside. Sarah used to appear at _déjeuner_.
She spent all the morning working. In the afternoon she played
lawn-tennis on a hard court; after dinner we played every kind of game.
She was carrying on at the time a heated discussion by telegraph with
the poet Catulle Mendès about the forthcoming production of a poetical
play of his, called _La Vierge d’Avilon_. The dispute was about the
casting: the poet wished one of the female parts to be played by a
certain actress; Sarah wished otherwise. Telegram after telegram was sent
and received, each of them several pages in length. The poet’s telegrams
were lyrical and beautifully expressed. One of them began: “Vous êtes
puissante et câline,” and another addressed her as “La grande faucheuse
des illusions.” How the matter was settled ultimately, I never knew.
During the whole time I stayed there, Sarah never mentioned the theatre,
acting, or actors, except as far as they concerned this particular
business discussion. On the other hand, she talked a great deal of her
travels all over the world. She talked of Greece, and I quoted to her
the line of some French poet about “des temples roux dans des poussières
d’or,” and asked her whether it was an accurate description. She said:
“Yes, of the Greek temples in Italy”; but, in Greece, she said it was a
case of “des temples roses dans des poussières d’argent.” She said the
most remarkable sight she had ever seen in her life was in Australia,
when, in a large prairie, she had seen the whole sky suddenly filled
with a dense flock of brilliantly coloured birds, which had risen all at
once from the ground and obscured the whole horizon with their dazzling
coloured plumage.
She was irresistibly comic at times, full of bubbling gaiety and spirits,
and an admirable mimic. Jules Huret wrote, while I was at Paris, an
article about her, in which he described this side of her admirably.
“Quand elle veut,” he said, “Sarah est d’un comique extraordinaire, par
l’outrance de ses images toujours justes, et la violence imprévue de ses
reparties. Cette gaieté de Sarah est bien caractéristique de sa force.
C’est évidemment un trop plein de sève qui se résout en joie. Elle a des
trouvailles, des mimiques, des répliques, une verve, des silences mêmes,
qui font irrésistiblement éclater le rire autour d’elle. Elle imite
certains de ses amis avec une vérité comique incroyable.”
What struck me most about her, when I saw her in private life, was her
radiant and ever-present common-sense. There was no nonsense about her,
no pose, and no posturing. She was completely natural. She took herself
as much for granted as being the greatest actress in the world, as Queen
Victoria took for granted that she was Queen of England. She took it for
granted and passed on. She told me once she had never wished to be an
actress—that she had gone on to the stage against her will; she would
greatly have preferred to have been a painter, and all her life she
continued to model as it was, and did some interesting things in this
line, especially some bronze fishes and sea-shapes for which she found
models at Belle-Isle, but when she found she had got to be an actress,
she said to herself: “If it has got to be, then I will be the first.”
She said she had never got over her nervousness in playing a new part,
or for the first time before a new audience; if she felt the audience
was friendly, this knowledge half-paralysed her; if, on the other hand,
she knew or guessed the audience to be hostile, every fibre in her being
tightened for the struggle. She said that first nights at Paris, when she
knew there would be hostile elements and critics ready to say she could
no longer act, always gave her the greatest confidence; she felt then it
was a battle, and a battle she could win; she would force the critics to
acknowledge that she could act. She told me, too, she had never gone an
inch out of her way to seek for friends or admirers; she had always let
them come to her; she had never taken any notice of them till they forced
their attention on her. At Belle-Isle I never once heard her allude to
any of her parts or to any of her triumphs; but she talked a great deal
about current events—of the people and politicians she had met in her
life, in all the countries of Europe—and said some very shrewd things
about the men who were ruling England at that time.
I stayed at Belle-Isle three or four days, then I went back to London,
and at the end of July I started for Russia. I had been invited to
stay with the Benckendorffs at their house in the country, Sosnofka in
the Government of Tambov. I did not yet know one word of Russian. At
Warsaw station I had to get out and change. I left my bag for a moment
on the seat of the carriage. This bag contained my money, my ticket,
my passport, and several other necessaries. When I came back it was
gone. I couldn’t even tell anyone what had happened. As the result of
a conversation in dumb show, I was put into a train; it was not the
express it should have been, but a slow train, and then I had my first
experience of the kindness and obligingness of the Russian people, for a
fellow-traveller registered my luggage, bought me a ticket, telegraphed
to the Benckendorffs for me, to the hotel at Moscow, and supplied me with
food and money for the journey, which in this train took three days.
Thanks to the kindness of this traveller, I arrived safely at Moscow,
and at Sosnofka the next day. It was a blazing hot August that year in
Russia. The country was burnt and parched; the green of the trees had
been burnt away. Sosnofka is a large straggling village, with thatched
houses. Once every seven years the whole village would probably be
burnt down. Russia was very different from what I had expected. I had
read several Russian books in translations—Tolstoy and Tourgenev—but
the background they had formed in my mind was not like Russia at all.
In fact, I had never thought of these books as happening in Russia. The
people they described were so like real people, so like people that I
had known myself, that I had always imagined the action taking place in
England or France. I imagined _Anna Karenina_ happening in London. Not
only did the characters seem real and familiar to me, but they struck me
as being the _only_ characters I had ever met in any books which gave
me the impression that I had myself known them. Dickens’ characters
are real enough, and Thackeray’s characters are realistic enough; I
believe absolutely in Sam Weller, in Mr. Micawber, in Mr. Guppy, in Mrs.
Gamp, Mrs. Nickleby, and any you like to mention; the genius of Dickens
has made me believe in them; I also believe in the existence of Major
Pendennis and Becky Sharp; I feel I might meet people like that, but I
never have; whereas with the characters in Tolstoy’s books I am not sure
whether they belong to bookland at all; I am not at all sure they do not
belong to my own past, my own limbo, which is peopled by real people and
dream people. The background which I called up in my mind was something
quite unconnected with Russian books, and something far removed from
reality. It was the conventional background borrowed from detective
stories, and Jules Verne’s _Michael Strogoff_, and from many melodramas.
That is to say, I imagined barbaric houses, glittering and spangled
bedizened Asiatic people. The reality was so different. Russia seemed
such a natural country. Everybody seemed to be doing what they liked,
without any fuss; to wear any clothes they liked; to smoke when and where
they wished; to live in such simplicity and without any paraphernalia at
all.
As for the landscape, my first impression was that of a large, rolling
plain; a church with blue cupolas; a windmill and another church. The
plain is dotted with villages, and every village is like the last; the
houses are squat, sometimes built of logs and sometimes built of bricks,
and the roofs are thatched with straw. The houses stand at irregular
intervals, sometimes huddled close together and sometimes with wide gaps
between them; it was dusty when I arrived; the broad road, which is not
a real road, but an immense stoneless track like the roads in America
and Australia, was littered with straw and various kinds of messes, and
along it the creaking carts groaned, the peasants driving them leisurely
and sometimes walking beside them. Every now and then there was a well
with a large wooden see-saw pole to draw the water with; and everywhere,
and over everything, the impression of space and leisureliness and the
absence of hurry. The peasants wore loose shirts, with a leather coat
thrown carelessly over their shoulder, or left in the cart, and the women
looked picturesque in their everyday clothes; the folds of their prints
and calicoes, which had something Biblical and statuesque about them,
were more impressive to the eye than the silken finery which they wore
when they went to church on Sunday.
The Benckendorffs lived at Sosnofka in two small separate two-storied
houses, which were close together. The kitchen was in a separate building
apart. In the pantry, the night-watchman, André, would play draughts in
the daytime with Alexei, who cleaned the boots. By night the watchman
watched; and every now and then blew a whistle. The butler, Alexander,
was an old soldier in every sense of the word. His ingenuity had no
end; nor had his resource. He could make anything and do anything;
and in the course of one revolving noon he could be chemist, fiddler,
statesman, and buffoon. He could not only play, but he could make any
musical instrument. He was an expert mixer of fireworks, an inspired
carpenter, and he could mend anything. He bore the traces of an early
military training and drill in his upright shoulders; and about once a
month he would disappear and be drunk for two or three days. The house
was housemaided by two old Russian peasants, Mavra and Masha, who wore
kerchiefs over their heads and speckled calico shawls. Mavra’s devotion
to the Benckendorff children passed all expression; she cared little
for her fate and fortune and for that of her own family as long as they
were alive and well. Michael, the coachman, was another great character;
he wore a black cap with peacocks’ feathers sticking upright in it, and
a black tunic with red sleeves. He drove the _troika_, three horses
abreast, and no road, or rather no absence of road, daunted him; on
the edge of an impossible hill, with no track through it, and nothing
in sight but bushes and logs, and nothing to guess at except holes, if
asked whether it was possible to go on, he would always laconically
answer, “_Moshno_” (“Possible”), and it always was possible. There was an
under-coachman called Fro. He had his qualities too; and one of these was
the way in the winter he would find and recognise a track after there had
been a blizzard, which had entirely obliterated all semblance or trace
of any path or roadway. Sometimes a little bit of paper or a stray twig
would give him the clue. Only one felt just this: that Michael would have
been quite unshaken in face of any catastrophes; the earth might have
opened in front of one, a hostile aeroplane might have barred the way, a
regiment of machine-gunners might have been reported to be in ambush—he
would just have nodded and quietly said, “_Moshno_,” and nothing more.
After dinner, that summer we used to sit on the balcony or on a stone
terrace on one side of the house, and watch the message of light, the
warning halo the rising moon sent up from behind the hill before she rose:
“Perchance an orb more wondrous than the moon
Trembles beneath the rim of the dark hills,”
and listen in the thick dark night, while the peasants in the village
stamped their rhythmical dances to the accompaniment of bleating
accordions or three-stringed balalaikas; some watchman’s rattle beat
time; the frogs croaked, and sometimes a voice—a rather hoarse, high,
slightly sharp voice—began a long-drawn-out, high wail, and other voices
chimed in, singing the same melody in a rough counterpoint. We sat at a
little green garden-table drinking our coffee, and our _nalivka_, the
delicious clean liqueur distilled from cherries. There seemed to be no
time in Russia. People slept when they felt inclined, not necessarily
because it was night. Once when I went to stay with a friend near
Kirsanof he advised me to arrive at four o’clock in the morning, if
possible, as the servants would enjoy the _bustle_ of someone arriving
when it was still dark.
One evening we went out riding through the woods, and over the plains,
and no sooner had we left the front door than my pony, altogether out of
control, galloped away into space. One morning we were called at one, and
went out to the marshes to shoot wild duck before the dawn. It was quite
dark when we started, and after the shooting was over, and I shot two
wild duck dead, we drove home in the dawn across the dewy plains, when
the whole country was awakening, the cocks crowing and the birds singing,
and the plains were bathed in lemon-coloured light, and faint pink and
grey clouds hung like shreds from Aurora’s scarf across the horizon.
One night we camped out in the woods. We took bottles of beer and
water-melons, and playing-cards, and a camera, and many rugs. We slept
little; the wood was full of flies and mosquitoes, but we enjoyed
ourselves much all the same, and came back with that pleasant headache
which is the result of sleeping on straw in the open air on a hot August
night, and covered with bites. The morning after, we had a wolf-shoot,
but it was too early in the year for wolves, and nobody saw one. But
there was a great display, nevertheless; a man rode on a white horse and
blew a trumpet, and there were a multitude of beaters. I remember a short
dialogue bawled slowly, quietly, and sonorously in prolonged accents
across a whole field between André, the night-watchman, and Wassili, the
keeper. “Who is that man yonder?” asked Wassili. “He is a shepherd,”
said André; “he feeds sheep.” “On pastukh, on past korov.” It was so
dignified, so slow, like a fragment of dialogue from the Old Testament.
In the morning we used to have breakfast out of doors, in the garden,
under a tree, with a pleasant after-breakfast interlude of smoking and
conversation; then Alexander and the gardener would stroll into the
garden, and there would be endless discussion about the pulling down of
some paling, or the repairing of some fence or chair, or the painting of
some room or gate; Alexander’s volubility had no limit, and the gardener
was extraordinarily ingenious in twisting the meaning of anything into
the opposite of what had been said. We had luncheon at half-past twelve,
and sat afterwards on the terrace, till the great heat was over, and then
we would go out in the _troika_, and take tea and a samovar with us, or
find a samovar somewhere, and perhaps bathe in the river. After dinner,
when it was too cold to stay out, we would sit indoors and play cards
at the green table, marking the score in chalk on the table; and Pierre
Benckendorff, who was not yet an officer, but still at the cadet college,
used to read out Mark Twain in German, or draw pictures, or make me draw
pictures, while he gave advice, or played the treble of tunes on the
pianoforte.
There were three little rooms on the ground floor of the first house,
which was built of wood. The first room into which the small front hall
led was Count Benckendorff’s sitting-room. It had a writing-table; a
table where there was an array of long pipes, neatly arranged; a round
table with a green cloth on it, and a wooden cup and ball on a plate; a
bookcase full of books of reference, which were constantly consulted,
whenever, as so often occurred, there was a family argument. In this
room, near one of the windows, there was a deal drawing-table. There
were prints on the wall. The next room had some old French wooden
furniture painted with little flowers, and a large grand pianoforte, and
a comfortable corner round the fireplace; in front of a window, which
went down to the ground and opened like a door, there was a stone terrace
with orange trees in pots on it and agapanthus plants (later there were
rose trees as well). Beyond this there was a third room full of books,
old books, the library of Count Benckendorff’s grandfather—the books
that had been modern in the eighteenth century, in their dark brown calf
bindings, and old marbled papers; here was the newest edition of Byron
in French, the poems of Pope and Corneille and Voltaire and Gresset, the
letters of Madame de Sévigné, the memoirs of Madame de Caylus, Napoleonic
memoirs and the poems of Ossian, Schiller’s plays, and an early edition
of Gogol. Upstairs on the landing, there was a cupboard full of every
imaginable kind of novel: the Tauchnitz novels of many ages, and French
novels of every description, the early Zolas, the early Feuillets, and
Maupassant’s first stories. Before going to bed, we would dive into that
cupboard, and one was always sure, even in the dark, of finding something
one could read. I have always thought since then, the ideal bookcase
would be that in which you could plunge a hand into in the dark and be
sure of extracting something readable. In the stone-house, the boys had
each of them a sitting-room on the ground floor, and I had a bedroom
and sitting-room upstairs. Next to the school library at Eton, that
sitting-room proved to be my favourite room in all the world and in all
my life; and at its big table I painted innumerable water-colours, and
wrote four plays in verse, two plays in prose, three long books in prose,
besides translating a book of Leonardo da Vinci and writing endless
letters and newspaper articles. In this room, one had the feeling of the
world forgetting by the world forgot, and one was recalled to reality by
a bell, or by Alexander coming up to the room, as he always did, to say
that tea was ready or dinner, or that the horses were at the door.
I felt the charm of Russia directly I crossed the frontier; and after a
three weeks’ stay there I was so bitten by it that I resolved firstly to
learn Russian, and, secondly, to go back there as soon as I could.
I went back to Copenhagen, and stopped some hours at Moscow on the
way, and saw the Kremlin, and had some amusing adventures at Testoff’s
restaurant. Pierre Benckendorff had written down for me a list of things
to ask for; one of which was caviare, which in Russian is _ikra_. But
when I said _ikra_ the waiters thought I said _igra_, which means play,
and merely turned on the great mechanical organ which that restaurant
then boasted of, and I could not get any caviare.
When I got back to Copenhagen, I at once had lessons in Russian from the
_psalomtchtchik_ at the Russian Church.
On the 19th of September, King Edward VII. arrived in Denmark to pay his
first visit to Denmark as King of England. The King was to arrive at
Elsinore in the _Osborne_. The Staff of the Legation had received orders
to go to Elsinore and meet His Majesty on board the yacht. His Majesty
was to land in time to meet the King of Denmark, the Crown Prince and
all the Danish Royal Family, the King of Greece, Queen Alexandra, the
Emperor and Empress of Russia, the Dowager Empress of Russia, Prince
and Princess Charles of Denmark, and other members of the various Royal
Families. We were to go in uniform. The train started at eight. I have
already said I was living at the Legation, but my rooms were completely
isolated from Sir Edward’s house, and had no connection with them. I had
a Danish servant called Peter. He had been told to call me punctually
at seven. He forgot, or overslept himself. I woke up by accident, and
automatically, and found to my horror it was twenty-five minutes to
eight, and the station was far off, and I had to dress in uniform. I
dressed like lightning, but it is not easy to dress like lightning in a
diplomatic uniform; the tight boots are a special difficulty. I had no
time to shave. I got a cab, and we drove at full gallop to the station,
and I got into Sir Edward’s carriage as the train was moving out of the
station. At Elsinore, we had fortunately some time to spare before going
on board the _Osborne_, and I was able to get shaved in the village. Then
we went on board and were presented to the King, and kissed his hand on
his accession.
That same night there was a banquet at the Palace of Fredensborg for the
King, to which the staff of the Legation were invited. I remember only
one thing about this dinner, and that is that we were given 1600 hock to
drink. It was quite bitter, and had to be drunk with about five lumps of
sugar in a glass.
After dinner, we stood round a large room while the Kings and Queens,
the Emperor and Empresses and Princesses, went round and talked to the
guests; and this was the end of a tiring day.
A few days later the King came to luncheon at the Legation.
There was one other Royal arrival which I shall never forget. I cannot
place its date, but I think it must have been Queen Alexandra’s first
visit as Queen to Copenhagen. But what I remember is this, that while
we were waiting on the station platform, Queen Alexandra descended from
the train all in black, with long floating veils, and threaded her way
through the crowd of Royalties and officials, looking younger than anyone
present, with still the same fairy-tale-like grace of carriage and
movement that I remembered as a child, and with the same youthful smile
of welcome, and with all her delicacy of form and feature heightened
by her mourning and her long black veils, whose floating intricacy were
obedient and docile to the undefinable rhythm of her beauty, and I
remember thinking of Donne’s lines:
“No spring, no summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
I spent that Christmas at Copenhagen, and on the 7th of January 1902 a
dispatch came to say I had been transferred from the post of a Third
Secretary at His Majesty’s Legation at Copenhagen to that of a Third
Secretary of His Majesty’s Embassy at Rome. Before I left Copenhagen I
had finished an article on Taine, an article on modern French literature,
and an article on Sully Prudhomme, for the new edition of the _British
Encyclopædia_.