CHAPTER XXXVII.

Of the half-hour which followed I can give no coherent account. As I try

to recall it, after the lapse of many years, details start into vivid

relief, but without sequence or any clear relation of cause and effect.

I have an impression of helping Lavender to raise Fédore from the ground,

and of his muttering—‘A foul blow, before God a foul blow,’ as we laid

her, quivering but apparently unconscious, upon the couch. An impression

of sultry, copper-coloured sunshine suddenly and harshly lighting up

the disordered room, the grim assembly of men, and the woman’s pale

recumbent figure, as with a glare of widespread conflagration. I have

an impression of Marsigli, too, and that a very strange one, coolly

holding out his hands—the right hand horribly splashed and stained—while

Lavender clapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. The fury of primitive

passion seemed assuaged in him by his hideous act of vengeance, and he

had become impassive, courtly even in manner, as I remembered him when

waiting on her Magnificence at table or ushering in her guests. He had

given himself up, as I heard later, without any struggle or attempt

at escape. But above all I have an impression, nauseating and to me

indescribably dreadful, which—though I trust I am not unduly squeamish—I

shall, I believe, carry with me to the day of my death, an impression of

the sight, the sense, the smell of fresh shed blood. Upon that I will not

dwell further, since, however deeply affecting to myself, it can serve no

useful purpose.

Finally—summoned, I suppose, by the younger of Lavender’s underlings,

who had reappeared after locking the servant, Marie, in some room

below—a surgeon arrived. Then I slipped away downstairs and out into

the comparatively cool untainted atmosphere of the shabby little garden.

If I was wanted, they must call me. Not voluntarily could I witness

a professional examination of what, less than an hour ago, had been

a strong and very beautiful if very sinful woman, and was now but a

helpless corpse.

All my thought had softened towards Fédore. Her evildoings—evil even in

respect of her accomplice—were manifest. For, let us be just, Marsigli’s

crime was not without provocation. But she had played for great stakes

and had lost. The pathos of irremediable failure was upon her. And I

was awe-stricken by the swiftness of her punishment, the relentless and

appalling haste with which she had been thrust out of life. Into what

uncharted regions of being had her astute, ambitious, and voluptuous

spirit now passed? Regardless of the prohibitions of my Church, I

prayed—and how earnestly!—her sins might be forgiven; and that through

the Eternal Mercy—so far broader, deeper, more abiding, as I confidently

believe, than any man-made definition of it—she might even yet find a

place for repentance and peace at the last.

Under the plane-tree I found a rickety garden seat, on which, being now

very tired, I was glad enough to rest.

How long I remained there in solitude—hearing the distant roar of London

and a confused movement and noise of voices from the street, in which I

judged a crowd had now gathered—I know not. But, finally, I beheld the

stalwart form of Lavender, his hands clasped behind him and his head bent

as in deep thought, coming up the wet garden path between the straggling

row of little fruit-trees. His aspect struck me as depressed.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, when he reached me, ‘I think we have done all we

can for to-night. I have disposed of Mr. Marsigli, and I and my men have

been pretty thoroughly through the house. Some of what I take to be the

stolen jewels are there, and a certain amount of plate; but no letters or

papers that I can discover.’

He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.

‘This is strictly between ourselves, sir,’ he went on, ‘you understand of

course?’

I assured him I did.

‘Then I think I may say that in my opinion you can make your mind easy as

to the existence of a previous marriage. You remember the conversation

we overheard? Her answer, you may have observed, was not a denial of the

fact but of the existence of proof—a very different story. However, if

we fail to find proofs nearer home it will be simple to take a run over

to Paris. We shall have no difficulty with the prisoner. It is in his

interest to give all the information he can, and he is sharp enough to

know that. A rum customer, though, as I have ever had to deal with—one

minute a mad savage and the next close on a fine gentleman. Trying

cattle these foreigners, always springing some trick on you! He’ll have

to swing for her, I expect—still she must have led him a pretty lively

dance. Something to be said on both sides, sir, as in my experience there

usually is.’

Much of the above was welcome hearing; yet the detective’s aspect

remained depressed. Again he wiped his face.

‘And now I dare say you’ll not be sorry to be moving, sir,’ he remarked.

Then as I rose, stiff and weary, and walked beside him along the garden

path, the real source of his trouble was disclosed.

‘I feel I am bound to apologise, sir, for letting you in for so much

unpleasantness. I blame myself; I was over-confident, and have got a

well-deserved slap to my professional pride as the result.’

‘How so?’ I asked him.

‘Why, I delayed too long before opening those double doors in my

eagerness to secure all the evidence I could—a mistake which might be

excusable in a youngster, but not in one of my standing. The very secret

of our business is to know the moment for action to a tick. I let them

both get too worked up. And, worked up as they were, he being Italian,

I ought to have foreseen the likelihood of that knife. No, sir, look at

it what way I will, I am bound to blame myself. It is a discredit, in my

opinion, and a grave one, for a man in my position to have a murder—and

in broad daylight too—committed within three yards of his nose. The less

said the better, I’m afraid, for some time to come, sir, about Lavender’s

luck.’

I consoled the mortified and over-conscientious hunter of criminals and

crime to the best of my ability; and then, thankfully bidding farewell

to that blood-stained and tragic little house, pushed my way, with

Lavender’s help, through the gaping and curious crowd in the street, and,

bestowing myself in the coach one of his men had called for me, rumbled

and jolted back to Grosvenor Square through the hot, thundery dusk.

(_To be continued._)

_WAR AND DIPLOMACY IN SHAKESPEARE._

An address given to the Ancoats Brotherhood, April 2, 1916.

BY SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK, BART.

Being bidden to set down a subject for your entertainment, advised that

it should have some relation to Shakespeare, and unable to distract my

thoughts from war and the state of Europe for long together, I combined

war, diplomacy, and Shakespeare at a venture; I had never considered

Shakespeare’s work, as bearing on either of those topics, with any

particular attention, and had no settled expectation of what might be the

outcome.

In the result I confess that I am surprised, and, as that result is

largely negative and therefore incapable of demonstrative proof, I do

not feel much confidence that I shall be believed. When Shakespeare was

growing up and beginning to know the world, both war and diplomacy were

full of fresh matter for curiosity. Diplomacy, as we now understand

it, was an invention of the Renaissance, and especially the Italian

Renaissance, flourishing in an exuberant youth and wearing the ornaments

of humanist learning not always free from pedantry, and humanist

accomplishment often straying into over-ingenious conceits. The letters

of Elizabethan statesmen and scholars, even on ordinary business, often

conceal their real point from a modern’s first reading by their refined

excess of caution. Here, it would seem, the comic Muse might find

profitable matter, if only it came within her range of observation.

War, again, was ancient enough in itself, and so indeed were the

fundamental rules of military art; but the outward face of war and the

whole scheme of manœuvres, tactics, and fortification, had passed or

were still passing through critical change due to the general use of

fire-arms. Henry VIII.’s castles embodied the latest designs of Italian

engineers, and English archery was already decaying though shooting at

butts was still a matter of legal duty. Many details of armament and

the like were in a state of transition, and came to rest only about the

end of the seventeenth century, a rest which was little troubled for a

century more. I need hardly remind you that Marlborough would have found

very few novelties in Wellington’s army, save for such trifles as the

cock of a hat, and the recognition—still not wholly without grudging—of

gunners as being soldiers and not mere auxiliary artificers. Shakespeare

found the art of war in such a swift new growth as was not to happen

again till the times of which I can remember the beginning.

It would seem offhand, therefore, as if we ought to find, in the writing

of so keen an observer as Shakespeare, considerable marks of these

innovations, and some evidence of intelligent curiosity about their

working: not so much, indeed, as would prove Shakespeare either an

ambassador or a soldier, though I believe some ingenious persons have

let their fancy go so far even as that. But in fact my search up and

down the plays has led me to think that Shakespeare the playwright could

do nothing with the modern diplomatic art, even if he had any knowledge

of it, and that he never troubled himself much about the revolution in

the art of war. Observe, I say Shakespeare the playwright. We have very

little evidence of Shakespeare’s private pursuits and tastes outside the

theatre, and for aught we know he may have been interested in matters for

which the stage had no use, or which he did not choose to show there for

other reasons. Observe also that beyond question the externals of both

diplomacy and war figure in Shakespeare’s works, and those of war rather

abundantly. You shall find passages of embassies and ambassadors, many

fighting men, a fair number of fights on the stage, not counting brawls

and private encounters, and plenty of talk about guns and gunpowder.

Fire-arms might still have a smack of novelty at Stratford-on-Avon when

William Shakespeare was a lad. And yet he thought them (if he thought at

all) older than they were, for we read of cannon in ‘King John’ a century

and more before they came into use, and about half a century before

Roger Bacon made a cracker. As there is not a word about Magna Carta in

‘King John,’ nor in the older play on which Shakespeare worked, some

persons may guess that ‘the troublesome raigne of John, King of England’

was a very dark age to Elizabethan playwrights. But for my part I would

rather believe the omission to be a deliberate touch of dramatic fitness.

John’s crimes and defaults could not be concealed; nevertheless he is

exhibited as becoming at the last a champion of England against foreign

encroachment, and it would have spoilt that effect to bring in his

differences with the barons on constitutional points. It is true that the

Great Charter had not yet become a popular rallying cry, but knowledge

of its existence can hardly have been confined to antiquarian scholars.

This, however, is not to the purpose here; and in truth the anachronism

of the cannon is only a conspicuous example of a kind fairly common in

Shakespeare. Thus King Henry V. is made to speak of the Grand Turk as

holding Constantinople a full generation too soon.

To return to our theme, the treatment of public affairs and negotiation

in Shakespeare is wholly subordinate to stage effect, the Elizabethan

stage effect which depended largely on rhetorical set speeches in the

more serious passages, and it is therefore rudimentary from a political

point of view. Shakespeare knew the conceits of the fashionable

epistolary style well enough, and could make sport with them. But when

princes and their ministers discourse on affairs of state, contentiously

or otherwise, we have no play of dialectic or development of argument.

Every speaker gives his own view with little regard to conviction or

reply, the matter being taken just as it came to hand in the chronicle

or other authority relied upon, and the manner worked up more or

less according to the importance of the scene and personages and the

opportunity given by the situation. Recrimination is not uncommon,

but there is no real critical discussion. Still less is there any

indication of what Shakespeare himself thought of the merits. At the

beginning of ‘Henry V.’ we find the King’s clerical advisers deliberately

encouraging a foreign war of ambition to divert an attack on swollen

church revenues,[1] and the Archbishop of Canterbury giving transparently

bad reasons (as at this day they seem to us) for the English claim to

the crown of France. There is no suggestion of anyone seeing anything

wrong in such conduct; not that this is any ground for inferring that

Shakespeare approved it. He followed his chronicle, here as elsewhere,

mistakes and all.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a live negotiation on the stage is the

conference of Hotspur, Glendower, and Mortimer over the map of England,

already partitioned in their imagination, in the third act of ‘Henry

IV.,’ Part I. The scene is admirably contrived to bring out Hotspur’s

reckless ambition and Glendower’s pride, and for that very reason there

is no scope for Italian subtilties. Hotspur blurts out his objection to

the proposed boundary without reserve or preparation of any kind:—

Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here,

In quantity equals not one of yours:

See how this river comes me cranking in,

And cuts me from the best of all my land

A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out.

The course of the river, he says, must be changed to give a juster line.

After a short and heated bandying of words both Hotspur and Glendower

suddenly think better of it. Glendower offers to yield:—

‘Come, you shall have Trent turn’d’

and Hotspur magnificently waives the whole quarrel:—

‘I do not care;

I’ll give thrice so much land to any well-deserving[2] friend;

But in the way of bargain, mark you me,

I’ll cavil to the ninth part of a hair.’

This is not a sample of diplomacy—nor would diplomatic art have been in

place—but it is great play-writing which the mysterious dispensations of

modern theatrical management compel us to enjoy only with the mind’s ear

‘in the closet,’ as our ancestors said. I have seen Phelps in Falstaff,

but ‘Henry IV.’ does not keep the stage.

Outside the region of public affairs the intricate combinations of

device and accident which formed the staple of the Italian novel were

familiar enough to Shakespeare. They were plastic in his hands, assuming

a farcical aspect in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ a purely comic one in

the higher sense of comedy in Portia’s caskets and her secret expedition

to Venice, and a serio-comic one in ‘Twelfth Night,’ though in spirit, as

Mr. Masefield has finely observed, that is the most English of the great

comedies; while in Iago the same instrument sounds the deepest of tragic

notes. I do not count the catastrophe of Shylock in ‘The Merchant of

Venice,’ where all reason, justice, and probability are violated with a

superb audacity that never fails to carry the spectator on a magic flood

of illusion in even a passable performance. Therefore I see no need to

set down Shakespeare’s eschewing of diplomacy to personal ignorance or

indifference. It is true that he did not consort much with ambassadors

or secretaries of state, neither were state papers accessible in print

as they now are. But the very simplest explanation seems like to be the

right one, that such material would not serve his turn. The game of

diplomacy, being mostly played with pens and ink, and a leisurely game in

those days, was not presentable to an audience. Exchange of dispatches

and notes may make good reading for posterity, but is not good stuff for

actors; and Shakespeare’s business was to produce acting stage-plays,

which is an elementary truth forgotten by too many commentators.

Turn we then to the more bustling field of war. If anyone expects to

find a general moral judgment about war in Shakespeare he will be

disappointed. Shakespeare, like Justinian—a person to whom it would

be hard to find any other resemblance in him—accepts war among the

inevitable facts of life. Princes and nations fight, and arms are the

natural profession of a gentleman. One of man’s seven ages, according to

Jaques, is to be a soldier, ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the

pard’; and we are told that Bassanio was a soldier, seemingly because

otherwise something would be lacking to him, for nothing turns on it. The

reasons for making war, be they better or worse, are as a rule not too

plainly bad to be plausible to the common understanding; a fair mark,

it may be, for satirical quips, but that is not the main business. What

really matters is that war must needs come in the dramatist’s way if

he presents histories ancient or modern, and offers not only stirring

incidents but precious occasions for developing every kind of character.

Without the field of Shrewsbury we should not know Falstaff as we do

know him; it gives us the exact measure of his braggadocio and the

full wealth of the measureless ironical humour which he turns freely

on himself, being resolved, since he may be no better than he is, to

make himself out rather worse. He is the very contrary of that actual

braggart who, having no humour, bragged sincerely and was a valiant man

notwithstanding, Benvenuto Cellini.—One might fall to wondering what

Shakespeare would have made of Benvenuto, had he ever heard of him;

but the perpetual trouble with Shakespeare, as with the Oxford English

Dictionary, is that at every turn one is tempted to stray and browse in

by-ways.—Accordingly it was very well for a solemn Byzantine emperor, and

his learned assessors who added the precepts of the Church to the Roman

lawyers’ humane Stoic tradition, to deprecate war in set terms, along

with slavery, as a lamentable departure from the ideal rule of natural

reason, though in fact inveterate by the common custom of mankind: but

a Renaissance playwright, who would be no dramatist without his share

of unreasonable human nature, could hardly wish himself deprived of the

material that war furnished him both for action and rhetoric. Such lines

as

‘The royal banner and all quality,

Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war’

explain better than any commentary why the military pageant of history

had a warm place in an Elizabethan actor-manager’s professional

affections. Shakespeare would have liked to display it better. The

Chorus in ‘Henry V.’ apologises for the ‘four or five most vile and

ragged’—_i.e._ battered—‘foils’ which were the best the Globe Theatre’s

armoury could produce for the campaign of Agincourt. Of that play there

will be a word more to say anon.

Considering the need of rapid action on the Shakespearean stage, and

its limited spectacular resources, it is obvious that actual warfare

could be indicated only in a series of personal episodes, confining the

visible symbols to a Homeric or at least a frankly medieval pattern.

One might think, as far as the text went, that battles were decided by

single combats; and probably those who begin to read Shakespeare young

enough do think so. In ‘Henry V.’ we are told nothing of the military

dispositions preceding the battle of Agincourt but the bare fact that a

small and wearied English army was opposed by a larger and over-confident

French one, and there is not one word about the English archery.[3] There

is proof, however, though not too much, that Shakespeare had some notion

of the offices of higher command in war, and could describe an episode

of minor tactics not seen on the stage in a perfectly clear way. Yet it

is noticeable that these proofs are not found in the historical plays.

For the recognition of military science we have to go to the satirical

romantic drama of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ and for the business-like

anecdote to the very late legendary play of ‘Cymbeline,’ which, for

whatever reason, seems to pay less regard to stage effect than any other

work of Shakespeare’s.

In the first act of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ the Greek chieftains, who

conform only in the roughest way to their traditional characters, and

quote Aristotle as if on purpose to show that the action has no relation

even to accepted legend,[4] are discussing the state of affairs before

Troy. Ulysses speaks of the discontented Ajax and his followers:—

‘They tax our policy and call it cowardice,

Count wisdom as no member of the war,

Forestall prescience and esteem no act

But that of hand: the still and mental parts

That do contrive how many hands shall strike

When fitness calls them on, and know by measure

Of their observant toil the enemies’ weight—

Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity:

They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war;

So that the ram that batters down the wall,

For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,

They place before his hand that made the engine,

Or those that with the fineness of their souls

By reason guide his execution.’

We shall do no excess of violence to the difference of the times if we

call this a staff officer’s view; and, all things considered, I think it

goes near to be Shakespeare’s own, or at least that which he conceived

to be the better opinion among those who had served in the wars of the

Low Countries: as who should say ‘We can beat the Spaniard with any fair

proportion of numbers, but you are not to think it is to be done without

brains.’ Doubtless the opposite opinion, that of the rule-of-thumb

soldier who thinks meanly of scientific warfare, made itself heard too,

perhaps more loudly, at the Mermaid and elsewhere, and Shakespeare

gives us a glimpse of it when Iago sneers at Michael Cassio as a great

arithmetician who knows nothing of real fighting. But if Shakespeare

had thought it sound he could have put it in a better mouth. The more

familiar phrase of Mercutio’s dying speech: ‘a rogue, a villain, that

fights by the book of arithmetic,’ is remote from this context as it

belongs not to the art of war at large but to the contrast between the

old English sword-play and the tricks of the new fangled Italian rapier:

a topic which, I think, interested both Shakespeare and his audience

more. In the same scene of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ we may find other

military aphorisms: Nestor speaks of the uses of disappointment in war:—

‘In the reproof of chance

Lies the true proof of men: the sea being smooth,

How many shallow bauble boats dare sail

Upon her patient breast, making their way

With those of nobler bulk—’

and he almost anticipates the doctrine, now proverbial, that victory is

for the side that makes fewest mistakes:—

‘Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.’

There may just possibly be an allusion here to the ‘Islands Voyage’ and

other poorly managed expeditions against the Spanish West Indies, then

fairly recent.

Nestor has also a sharp word for Thersites the professional pessimist:—

‘A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint.’

We cannot all be as wise as Nestor; but we can at least refuse to lend

our ears to Thersites.

In this connexion we may note some lines given to the Messenger at the

opening of ‘King Henry VI.,’ which may have been touched by Shakespeare’s

revising hand, though I would not vouch for it:—

‘Amongst the soldiers this is muttered,

That here you maintain several factions,

And while a field should be dispatch’d and fought,

You are disputing of your generals:

One would have lingering wars with little cost;

Another would fly swift, but wanteth wings;

A third[5] thinks, without expense at all,

By guileful fair words peace may be obtain’d.’

The first ‘faction,’ curiously enough, is not far from Queen Elizabeth’s

own policy. The second falls pat for our very latest variety of

politician, the ‘air service candidate,’ and the third for those who want

to discuss terms of peace in detail before the enemy is beaten, except

that in our time they are highly conscientious persons who would be

shocked by any suggestion of guile.

Later in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ the Greek and Trojan leaders exchange

elaborate compliments which savour more of the Middle Ages than the

Renaissance; they have no military significance.

Before leaving ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ produced when the state of war

with Spain was coming to an end, it may be observed that, so far as I

know, direct mention of Spain as a hostile power does not occur anywhere

in the plays.

In the last act of ‘Cymbeline’ we hear how the banished Belarius and the

young princes who pass for his sons have rallied the Britons, flying from

Roman invaders, at the head of a narrow lane, checked the pursuit, and

led a successful counter-attack. The nature of the ground is explained

with some detail:—

‘Where was this lane?

—Close by the battle, ditch’d, and wall’d with turf;

Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,

An honest one, I warrant....’

The rest of the description, which is rather involved in style and may

not have received the author’s last touches, adds nothing definite. The

questioner, an unnamed ‘British lord,’ seems hardly to see the point:—

‘This was strange chance:

A narrow lane, an old man, and two boys.’

It is well attested by experience that a few determined men, or even one,

may stop a panic if once they can get a rallying point; and I am much

disposed to think that Shakespeare used in this passage an incident heard

from someone who had actually seen it, or been very near it, ‘somewhere

in Flanders.’

The most military of Shakespeare’s plays is ‘Henry V.’; there are other

plays with much fighting in them, but neither within nor without the

chronicle series is there one with so little of other interest in it.

Henry V. is the only Shakespearean king who is a typical soldier, so

much so that the type all but swallows up individual character. Mr.

Masefield, who is always ingenious and often profound, thinks that

Shakespeare did not admire the type; that he studied it with full

knowledge and carefully framed the so-called heroic figure, a competent

but no more than sufficiently competent leader, carrying on with fine

animal spirits, unthinking, just and fair according to his lights, keen

on playing the game as he knows it and scorning those who do otherwise

with a scorn capable of being merciless, living by custom and not seeking

ideas, never doubting that he is right—I am not using Mr. Masefield’s

own words, but putting his judgment in a slightly less severe form;

and then, Mr. Masefield will have it, Shakespeare holds up a piece of

our own image to us in the jolly, obtuse soldier-king, with a whisper

in his sleeve for the more knowing:—These be your gods, O Englishmen! I

will not say there is nothing in Mr. Masefield’s point, but I cannot go

all the way with him, the rather that if I am wrong it is in Sir Walter

Raleigh’s company. Shakespeare’s command of human nature included other,

richer, more complex, and more interesting characters; he knew very well

that a prince always posing like Richard II., who is an accomplished

_cabotin_, or always thinking like Hamlet, who fails not because he

is weak but because he knows too much, would not have done Henry V.’s

business; it does not follow that he thought ill of that business, and

for my part I conceive that he admired Henry V. as the right man for his

place and meant the audience to admire him. King Henry V.’s ostentatious

repudiation of Prince Hal’s ways and companions is violent and awkward,

and to a modern judgment unpleasant, as Mr. Masefield says. But that was

forced on Shakespeare by the tale which he had to accept as history.

Another difficulty is to see why a war of conquest against France should

have been glorified on the stage at a time when France and England were

not only at peace but in all but formal alliance against Spain: to which

I see no answer except that chronicle plays were in fashion, a good play

was a good play, and people did not go to the Globe to learn current

European politics. We have not to consider whether Shakespeare thought

Henry V. was in truth such a man as he put on the stage; or whether he

did or did not stop to think that the real Henry V. must have known

French quite well, if not as well as English, from his infancy; or other

little puzzles that any observant reader may put, and get no certain

answer, in this and most of the plays: for these things are not to our

present purpose.

Shakespeare’s Henry V. is most human when he talks with his own soldiers

as a plain gentleman, and they reason of the king’s responsibility in a

thoroughly medieval fashion. The point is not whether a king who goes

to war may have to reproach himself with the horrors of war as commonly

understood, the temporal evils of death, destruction, and rapine. What is

urged—and by a private soldier—is the risk that men slain in battle may

die in mortal sin: ‘if these men do not die well.’ The king’s answer is a

fine sample of Shakespeare’s grave prose dialogue, and, to the best of my

belief, very sound moral theology. ‘Every subject’s duty is the king’s;

but every subject’s soul is his own.’ It is obvious that the principle

is by no means confined to warlike enterprise. Did Shakespeare write this

scene to justify the Archbishop of Canterbury’s praise, at the opening of

the play, of Henry’s learning in divinity?

As for the usages of war, Henry V. accepts them as he finds them: that

is, as Shakespeare—not to say Grotius—found them. When he summons

Harfleur to surrender he is clear that the consequences of further

resistance will be the governor’s fault and not his. Everybody is aware

that a town taken by storm is pillaged; there is just a hint that no

known discipline could prevent it; and indeed we moderns know what ado

Wellington had in that matter little more than a century ago, and in a

friendly country too. As a point of strict military rule, defence of an

untenable position forfeited the defenders’ right to quarter down to the

Peninsular War, and Wellington thought there was much to be said for it

on the ground that the existence of the rule operated to prevent useless

waste of life. This, however, is not explicit in Shakespeare.

Fluellen, the Welsh captain, is really a more distinct and human

character than the king, though a minor one. He is a martinet, and

probably would be a bore if he were allowed to expound the disciplines of

the wars and the rules of Pompey’s camp at large; but he is a thoroughly

good soldier, and a good friend. If it entered into Shakespeare’s plans

to show off any knowledge of military science, here was a chance; the

difference between the early fifteenth and the late sixteenth century

would give no trouble, as in some details not worth particularising it

certainly did not. We get nothing of this kind, however, from Fluellen

beyond a few words about mines and countermines, which may be paralleled

by the metaphorical use of the same matter in a still better known speech

of Hamlet’s.[6]

Let us take leave of Henry V. with the remark that Shakespeare by his

mouth anticipates Wellington’s policy and rebukes the Prussian devil’s

gospel of frightfulness. ‘We give express charge that in our marches

through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing

taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful

language; for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest

gamester is the soonest winner.’ And this is the Shakespeare whom the

Germans pretend to understand better than his own countrymen.

It is curious that the longest string of military terms in Shakespeare,

if I mistake not, is delivered by a woman, when Lady Percy tells Hotspur

(I. ‘King Henry IV.’ ii. 3) that he has talked in his sleep

‘Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,

Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,

Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,

Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain,

And all the currents of a heady fight.’

Some of the plays, like ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Coriolanus,’ are martial, inasmuch

as there are combats and ‘excursions,’ but not military, inasmuch as

the fighting is but the inducement or vehicle of some greater tragic

event. Plutarch furnishes brave Roman sayings, or the politic sense of

Elizabethan elders is condensed in aphoristic lines; but all this is

secondary; what really concerns the poet is a spiritual conflict of

eternal import, a soul triumphing though at the cost of life or wrecked.

War and peace, conquest and exile, are the transitory matter the spirit

works in, and Shakespeare troubles himself no more about the details than

is needful for preserving a congruous atmosphere.

In Shakespeare’s time there was no English army in any proper sense, but

only occasional levies. His illustration of English military method,

such as it then was, is to be found in Falstaff’s immortal exploits as a

recruiting officer. It is common knowledge that there was a very ancient

tradition of compulsory service in time of war within the realm, but the

operation of the principle was rough and inefficient. We may believe if

we like that Falstaff knew his business when he chose; it is certain

that the way he does choose is not only to be a corruptible and corrupt

officer, but to sell exemptions shamelessly. By his own confession he

‘misused the king’s press damnably’ and ‘got in exchange of a hundred and

fifty soldiers three hundred and odd pounds.’ If we consider him with

a cold military eye—which is the last thing Shakespeare intended—it is

clear that he deserved to be shot. We gather from the great recruiting

scene in the third act of the second part of ‘King Henry IV.’ that

officers chose their own subalterns and raised their own men with a

pretty uncontrolled discretion. One would like to quote the whole scene,

but paper is scarce, and it is better for the reader to enjoy it in the

full text. Doubtless it is a caricature, but I would not wager any great

odds on the exaggeration being gross. The impudence of taking ‘three

pound to free Mouldy and Bullcalf’ and then magnifying the quality of the

scarecrows who are left is as delightful as any of Shakespeare’s humours.

‘Care I for the limb, the thewes, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance

of a man! Give me the spirit, Master Shallow. Here’s Wart; you see what

a ragged appearance it is.... O, give me the spare men, and spare me the

great ones. Put me a caliver[7] into Wart’s hand, Bardolph.... Come,

manage me your caliver. So: very well: go to: very good, exceeding good.

O, give me always a little, lean, old, chapt, bald shot....’ We may yet

hear news of Falstaff in the trenches, for there be many pretty wits at

the front.

There remains a question of which I have said nothing because it is too

plain for discussion. Did Shakespeare think England worth fighting for?

As to that, the answer is written all over his work; not only in such

splendid passages as John of Gaunt utters in ‘Richard II.,’ which have

quite properly been repeated many times, in print and on platforms, in

the course of this year, but in the whole tone and colour of all his

pictures of country life, whether the nominal scene be at Athens, or in

the forest of Arden, or in Illyria. Besides, there are some questions

really too impertinent to be put to any honest English gentleman, even

when he is dead and immortalised these three hundred years.

FOOTNOTES

[1] There is apparently no real foundation for this; in fact there were

serious commercial quarrels of some standing.

[2] One is much tempted to regard this epithet as inserted by some

dull-pated player who did not see that in Hotspur’s eyes to be Hotspur’s

friend would be desert enough without addition. The lines would then

read, to the advantage of the metre:—

‘_Glend._ Come, you shall have Trent turn’d.

_Hot._ I do not care:

I’ll give thrice so much land to any friend.’

The metrical reason would be of little weight if it stood alone; still

the irregularity of the verse as printed is particularly jarring, however

one tries to arrange the lines.

[3] It is conspicuous in Drayton’s ‘The Battaile of Agincourt.’

[4] There were limits to Shakespeare’s carelessness, and I believe this

enormous anachronism to be wilful.

[5] The insertion of ‘man’—actually made in the later folios—or ‘one’ is

an obvious but not obviously necessary emendation.

[6] It may be irreverent to doubt whether Shakespeare knew or regarded

the difference between a petard and a mine; yet it is certain that a

petard was not fitted to _hoist_ anything, but was a special contrivance

for blowing in gates and the like. It was a novelty in the third quarter

of the sixteenth century (Littré, _s.v._). Drayton understood its use,

but by a slip as bad as any of Shakespeare’s brought ‘the Engineer

providing the Petar, to breake the strong Percullice’ into Henry V.’s

war: ‘The Battaile of Agincourt,’ ed. Garnett, p. 22.

[7] A considerable anachronism, but these are trifles.

_THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE REARGUARD._

BY BOYD CABLE.

All day long Papa Laval had been wandering about the streets of the

little town, listening restlessly to the distant thunder of the guns,

questioning eagerly the first of the fugitive peasantry who came

streaming through in their flight towards safety. Papa Laval with his

one arm and his cripple leg and his tales of ’70-’71 was naturally

an authority on matters of war, and his fellow-townsmen listened

deferentially to all he had to say about affairs. Papa was scornful of

the first tales the fugitives told of a German victory and an Allies’

retreat; but the first rumble of heavy transport wagons through the

cobbled streets in the middle of the night brought him quickly from his

bed and down the narrow stairs to find out what it meant. He could learn

nothing much because the transport drivers were English, could only take

some comfort from the calm with which they steered through the crowded

street, laughed and called jokes which none understood down to the

staring townsfolk. But Papa had seen too much of war not to understand

the meaning of the swelling tide of transport, to mark as the light grew

the jaded horses and the sleep-worn looks of the drivers. His dismay

grew when the khaki regiments began to flood through after the toiling

transport, while out behind them the growling thunder of the guns rolled

louder and louder.

And by noon he was in utter despair. The street through the town was by

then choked from end to end with a seething mass of men and cattle and

vehicles, military transport and ammunition wagons, soldiers, old peasant

men and boys, women with children clutching their skirts or wailing in

their arms, country carts piled with bedding and furniture, squealing

pigs and squawking leg-tethered poultry, with huddled clinging old crones

and round-eyed infants. And when Papa was told that the road was blocked

in the same way for miles back, that the Germans were coming fast, that

the whole army was retiring as fast as it could, he groaned in despair.

He watched the slow torrent struggling and scrambling along the choked

street, the impatience of the officers and dull apathy of the men in the

marching regiments as they progressed a few yards and halted for the head

of the column to clear a way; and he pictured to himself visions of a

squadron of Uhlans swooping down on the crowded road back there and the

havoc they would make in the packed masses under their lances.

About noon he found a new interest and fresh food for thought. A regiment

arrived and, instead of pushing on through the town as the others had

done, sought billets there and halted. Six men were billeted on Papa

Laval, and between the smattering of broken French that one of them

spoke and Papa’s equally broken English it was possible to hold some

conversation and glean some understanding of the recent battle. But

the men were too worn out, too dead beat, too utterly fatigued to talk

much. They ate and drank and then flung themselves down to sleep, and

all that Papa learned was that in truth a big battle had been fought,

that the Germans had been held, but that for some reason the English

were retreating. Fugitives from Maubeuge direction had told a similar

tale of the retreat of the French, and Papa groaned again and wandered

out into the street to curse impotently as he watched the struggling

tide of fugitives that still poured with desperate slowness through the

town. ‘Perhaps it would be better,’ he told his daughter at last and

very reluctantly, ‘for you to go away while there is yet time. Not for

yourself, but for the sake of the little ones. There will be fighting

here, as I see it. This regiment remaining while all the others pass

through means a rearguard action, an attempt to cover the retreat of the

others. But that is a plan without hope. There is only a handful of men

left to hold the town, and they are worn to the edge of exhaustion with

marching and fighting. The Germans will attack in force, they will sweep

through the town and take the bridge. That no doubt is the plan, and

holding the town and the bridge they will sever the English army and the

retreat will be a rout. Yes, my child, you had better go now.’

But the woman refused to go, to leave their little house, to drag her

children out into the crowded roads on the way to nowhere; and after a

little Papa gave up trying to persuade her.

It was a bare four hours after the weary men had found their billets

when the alarm came that the enemy were coming. Papa shook his head as

he watched the six men in his house rouse slowly and reluctantly, yawn

and stretch and rub their eyes. ‘Four hours,’ he thought. ‘Of what use

is a little four hours to men exhausted by battle and marching? If it

had been eight hours’ sleep now, who knows—they say these English are

good fighters, and they might have held the town a few hours. But four

hours....’

The men themselves took it differently. ‘That shut-eye done me good,’

said one. ‘If I’d a decent wash now I’d be as good as ever.’

‘Glad we’re goin’ to ’old ’em up here,’ said another. ‘This retreatin’

game don’t suit me none. I’d sooner stop an’ fight it out.’

‘Dunno wot the blank we retreated for at all,’ grumbled a third. ‘They

couldn’t ’ave pushed us out o’ that last position in a month.’

‘They do say the Frenchies on the right broke,’ said a corporal, the man

with the smattering of French, ‘an’ we had to fall back ’cause they’d

left our flank open. Fancy it must ha’ been something o’ that sort too.’

They were hastily buckling on their kits when Papa came in to them.

‘Cheer up, Daddy,’ they told him. ‘We’re not letting ’em come any

further. But there’s goin’ to be a scrap here an’ you’d better keep your

tuppenny tucked well in or you may get hurt by a stray lump o’ lead.’

‘Noos restey ici—compronney?’ said the corporal, and Papa nodded his

understanding. ‘Mais not posseebl’ for to make victoire,’ he demurred.

‘Anglais ver’ few; Allemands plenty, ver’ plenty.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Daddy,’ said the corporal heartily. ‘Beaucoo

Anglaise to stop—haltey les Allemong. You’ll see,’ and he got his men

together and hurried off.

Papa had to admire the smart and business-like fashion in which the town

was set in a state of defence, the houses commanding the roads loopholed,

the street entrances blocked with barricades of transport wagons, the men

distributed to the various vantage-points. But he had little or no hope

of the result, because he saw how few the men were, how they had to be

split up into small companies to cover all the many points which might

be attacked. It was true that the defenders held the advantage of cover

in the houses, but that would avail little against artillery; and the

enemy had the advantage of being able to choose their point of attack and

mass on it against the weakness of the distributed defence. Papa gave the

defence half an hour at most to hold out after the real attack developed.

As it happened, he was perfectly right in his surmise that a mere section

of the defence would have to bear the full brunt of the attack, although

he was quite wrong as to how long they could withstand it.

The attack came soon after the early darkness had fallen.

At first there was a quick rumour running round that a mistake had

been made, that it was a French column that was approaching. It may

have been this that deceived the defenders into allowing the enemy to

come almost to hand-grips before the fighting began, and anyhow it is

certain that the first sounds of conflict that Papa heard were not, as

he had expected, a long-drawn rapid rifle fire, but one single and then

a few scattered shots, shoutings, and the clash of steel on steel. For

the moment it looked as if the first rush was to swamp the defence and

break through it, since a seething mass of men fighting fiercely with

butt and bayonet eddied slowly back and actually into the street of the

town. Rifles began to blaze and bang from some of the upper windows, and

then with a wild cheer a rush of khaki swept out from a side street and

plunged into the fight. The fresh weight told, and although the defence

was still outnumbered by two to one it was the stronger at close-quarter

work, and the attack was driven slowly back and back until at last it

broke and ran, leaving the street and the road about the outside of the

town heaped with dead and wounded.

Papa Laval ran out into the street and began to give what help he could

to carry in the wounded British, when he heard a whistling screech and

the crash of a shell on one of the outer houses of the town. He ran

crouching in to the shadow of one of the houses, and presently his

straining eyes caught the quick leaping flash of the German piece and

another shell hurtled over and burst in a hail of shrapnel about the

entrance to the town. Papa ran back, and in a side street found a young

officer and a dozen men breaking in the door of a deserted house. Papa

guessed their intention, and since the officer fortunately was able to

speak French, Papa could tell him a better house to choose, one taller

and with a better and more commanding outlook on the point of attack.

He led the way to the house and to the upper rooms, and pointed out the

best windows, and watched them pile bedding at the windows and break

out loopholes in the wall. All the time shell after shell was smashing

and crashing down somewhere outside, and now the Germans began to fire

star-shells that floated down in a blaze of dazzling light, blinding the

defenders and exposing them as visible targets to the hail of bullets

that came drumming and rattling in from their unseen foes.

Then came another fierce rush against the barricaded streets and the

rifle fire rose to a full deep-noted roar, punctuated by the crashing

reports of the shells and the boom of a gun that began to fire back from

somewhere in the town. Down in the street the attack pushed home again

to the barricades, and men pulled and dragged at the overturned carts

and leaped and scrambled to cross them, and fired in each other’s faces;

and, where the barricade was gapped for a moment, thrust and stabbed with

the bayonet and smashed with the butt and tore and beat at one another,

until slowly the attack gave again and the barricade was made good. In

the rooms upstairs where Papa Laval was, the men pumped bullets from the

loopholes and the windows down on to the struggling mass that pushed

in to the barricade, until a machine-gun was turned on the house and

hailed a storm of bullets back and forward, across and across its front.

The storm caught several of the men at the windows, and they fell back

killed or badly wounded for the most part. A group of the enemy turned

from the barricade, ran across and began beating at the door and the

barred and shuttered windows. Half a dozen of the garrison, on a command

from the officer, jumped from their loopholes and poured clattering

down the stairs, just as a rifle thrust into the lock and fired blew it

away and the door swung open. As the Germans rushed in they were met by

the men plunging headlong down the stair, and in the passage and about

the stair-foot commenced a wild and desperate hand-to-hand scrimmage.

Somewhere outside a building had caught fire, and in the dim light

reflected into the house-passage from the leaping flames the fighters

scuffled and raged, scarcely seeing each other, stabbing and striking and

singling friend from foe by blind instinct. The passage was a pandemonium

of shouts and cries and oaths, of trampling scuffling feet, of clashing

steel and thudding blows, with every now and then the thunderous report

of the officer’s revolver reverberating in the confined space. The

advantage of numbers was largely with the Germans, but the narrowness

of doorway and passage made it difficult for this weight of numbers to

come at the defenders and beat them down; and the British were not only

holding their own but were even driving the invaders slowly backward,

when the sound of rapid blows, the riving and crashing of woodwork, the

clash and tinkle of breaking glass told that one of the shuttered windows

had been forced.

‘Get back! Get back and hold the stair,’ the officer was yelling; and

his men, with one last fierce rush, drove the Germans further along

the passage, turned and made good their retreat to the stair-foot. Then

when the position looked to be too desperate for hope, there came from

outside a burst of rifle fire, a fresh clamour of fighting noises, a

hoarse yell of English cheers. A mixed mob of the fighters swirled past

the open doorway, and a rush of khaki swung past and licked in after it,

followed closely by a line of British swarming across the width of the

street and running forward with bayonets at the level. Inside the house

the panting remnant of the defence slammed the door shut, piled a tangle

of furniture—tables, chairs, chests of drawers—into the passage, busied

themselves re-securing the broken window, wedging a big table and the

heaviest articles of furniture they could find against it, and making all

ready for a renewal of the attack.

But the attack was not again successful in reaching a point level with

the house. Another attempt, made twenty minutes later, succeeded in

coming almost level with the house, but it was too fiercely swept by

the fire from the barricade, by a tempest of bullets from a couple of

machine-guns placed in position in some of the houses commanding the

approach, and had to fall back without any result beyond an increase in

the piled bodies littered about the street, the wounded crawling and

writhing away as best they could out of the line of fire.

The fighting continued throughout most of the night, but never reached

again the savage ferocity of the first hour, never came within such

measurable distance of success for the attack. And at dawn the enemy

withdrew and left the defence time to collect its wounded and tally its

dead, and make all ready for continuing the fight.

And when Papa Laval came back an hour after to his daughter’s house he

found her busy making coffee for the corporal and one other man—the only

ones left, as it turned out, from the six who had billeted there. The

corporal’s head was tied up, his sleeve and shirt-sleeve were slit their

full length and stained a dull brown from a wound, the red-wet bandage of

which showed round his upper arm when the slit sleeve fell back from it.

But he was quite cheerful and turned triumphantly to Papa Laval when he

came in. ‘Wot did I tell you, Daddy? Ici noos restey, eh?’

‘You ’ave spik true,’ said Papa warmly. ‘Ze Anglais—ah, zey are ze brav

mans—mos’ brav—magnifique. I no tink it posseebl’—it was not posseebl’,

but zey do heem, zis imposseebl’, and make ze victoire.’

‘It was a good scrap,’ assented the corporal modestly. The Frenchman

assented warmly after he had had the meaning of ‘scrap’ explained to him.

‘Good, good, ver’ good,’ he said. ‘I, Papa Laval, who have seen much

fighting in ’70 and ’71, say it was ver’ good. So much Allemands an’ so

leetle—so not-much Anglais an’ so fatigue, so tire they. Ver’ much kill,

ver’ much blessés, what you say wounds, but zey fight on an’ zey make

victoire. I see ze Anglais to-morrow—no, yesterday—an’ I say ze grande

armée anglaise is feenish, is defeat. Mais, now I onnerstand heem no

defeat, heem yet make ze good fight.’

‘Oh, we’ll make a fight all right when the time comes,’ said the corporal.

By now the coffee was ready, and the two men drank it hurriedly and ate

hastily of the meal the woman set before them. Papa Laval was concerned

about this haste. He would have had them sit down and wait till a good

breakfast was cooked and then eat it at leisure and in comfort. The

corporal shuffled a little uneasily. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we got to be

movin’ on. Orders, voo savvy—les instruckshions à marchey; noos continuey

le moshion à la sud.’

Papa stared at him in bewilderment. ‘Mais—zat ees ze retreat,’ he

stammered. ‘Pourquoi ze retreat après la victoire?’

‘Wot’s ’e say?’ asked the other soldier through a huge mouthful of bread

and butter.

‘Says why should we bolt again after lickin’ the Germans,’ explained the

corporal.

‘An’ that’s exackly wot I wants to know,’ said the private disgustedly.

‘We ’as the bloomin’ company near wiped out, an’ B Company the same, and

stands off the attack all right; an’ when we’ve chased ’em off good an’

handsome we has to up stick an’ run away again. Bloomin’ rot, I calls it.’

‘Steady on,’ cautioned the corporal. ‘You don’t want these bloomin’

French people to get no wrong notion about our runnin’ away. Look ’ere,

Papa, it’s like this: Up there,’ he waved his hand towards the north,

‘we have le grand fight, battle. We win, voo savvy, la victoire c’est

à noos. I dunno why we retreat after it—je ne comprong pas pourquoi le

retreat, but—I mean, mais les instructions they says retreat. (Dashed if

I know the French for “they says.”) Voo savvy, noos make le retiremong

because⸺(An’ I’ve forgot the word for “because” now! Oh, dash this French

language!)’

‘I onnerstand, m’sieu,’ broke in Papa. ‘The ordaire it is retreat and,

parbleu! ze good soldat he obey ze ordaire. Quand ze ordaire ees fight,

ze good soldat he fight; eh, is it not?’

‘Egg-zackly,’ said the corporal. ‘Certimong, Papa.’

‘Bien,’ said Papa. ‘I know you spik true. I have seen ze Anglais fight.

Zey are keel, peut-être, mais nevaire—how you say it?—run away. I have

seen, and I know. I go now to spik it to ze peoples in la ville who is

disconsole, peut-être, when ze retreat continue.’

‘That’s it, Papa,’ said the corporal. ‘An’ you tell ’em this army is

never goin’ to run away. When the order is retreat, we retreat, even

though we don’t like it. But one day the order will be to advance, an’

then we’ll show ’em. You tell ’em not to be afraid. The French is bound

to win this war. We’ve come over to see it through with them, an’ we’re

not goin’ ’ome till we’ve chased every dash German back to Germany. You

savvy, when the time comes, en avong is the order, an’ avong we goes.’

It is very doubtful if Papa caught all the meaning of this harangue, but

he got the sense of it and the last words at least.

‘En avant!’ he cried, leaping to his feet. ‘Vivent les Alliés! Vivent les

Anglais!’

‘If you two ’as finished ’andin’ out bookays to each other,’ said the

private, ‘p’raps you’ll ask Madam ’ere if she’s got a spare loaf we can

put in our ’aversacks. There’s the fall-in sounding.’

_LLEWELYN DAVIES AND THE WORKING MEN’S COLLEGE._

BY SIR CHARLES P. LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.

The death of John Llewelyn Davies in May last took from us a man of great

strength of character and power of mind. He was in his ninety-first year

when he died, and had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. Through his

long life he was known to the few rather than to the many; but to those

who knew him he was a notable figure, connoting high and pure aims, firm

will, deep religious faith, and elimination of self in the service of his

fellow-men. The outer man in his case did not tell the full story of his

nature. No one had a warmer or kinder heart, a greater fund of sympathy,

or more real and abiding enthusiasm for the causes in which he believed,

and for which he zealously contended. Fire was there and humour too, but

there was no effusiveness in manner or in speech. Strong feeling was held

in restraint by stronger self-control.

He was a man of varied interests and claims to distinction, without

being in the ordinary sense a many-sided man. He was a Fellow of Trinity

College, Cambridge, as in later years were three of his sons; and he took

his degree in company with a singularly able body of men, comprising, for

instance, Bishop Westcott, the great Latin scholar Professor Mayor, and

Lord Stanley, as he then was, afterwards Lord Derby, Foreign Minister

under Disraeli, Colonial Minister under Gladstone. Four years later the

soundness of his scholarship was abundantly proved by giving to the world

the well-known translation of Plato’s ‘Republic,’ used and implicitly

trusted as hardly any other translation of a classical author before or

since. His colleague in the work was the Rev. David Vaughan, brother

of the great headmaster of Harrow, who was afterwards Master of the

Temple and Dean of Llandaff. Llewelyn Davies and David Vaughan had been

bracketed in the Tripos, and as Llewelyn Davies was one of the Founders

of the Working Men’s College in London, so Vaughan a little later founded

a Working Men’s College at Leicester on the same lines.

As a theologian, he belonged to the sane, masculine Cambridge school,

which included his friends Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, and others—a race

of men who were not afraid to bring scholarly criticism to bear upon

theological writings and doctrines, strengthening the faith by broadening

its basis. On sacred subjects, as on Plato, he wrote with acknowledged

authority. The man whom he followed above all others, and whose views

he embodied, was Frederick Denison Maurice. He read the last words over

Maurice’s grave, and, until he himself was laid to rest, he preached and

practised the life which Maurice led and taught.

Virile in mind, he was virile in body also. One of the original members

of the Alpine Club, and a pioneer in some notable ascents, he lived to

attend the jubilee dinner of the Club, and was well over eighty when

he visited Switzerland for the last time. A hard-working clergyman

of the Church of England, hard-working whether in town or country,

for his benefices ranged from Whitechapel and Marylebone to Kirkby

Lonsdale in Westmorland, he was all the time not a clergyman only, but

a citizen, holding that the one implied the other; that the preacher of

the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man must practise what he

preaches; that you cannot guide the people unless you know them, not as a

member of an exclusive caste, but being among them as one that serveth.

At one time he was a member of the London School Board: he was a staunch

supporter of the co-operative movement: he laboured for the cause of

women, was Principal of Queen’s College, Harley Street, and Chairman of

the governing body of the Working Women’s College. So strong was his

sense of public duty that a friend described him as the only man who had

ever been known to take a positive pleasure in paying rates and taxes.

Like Maurice, he was wholly indifferent to worldly gain, and the last man

to solicit preferment in any shape. His own words on the subject were,

that he would rather that people asked why he was not made a bishop than

why he was. The story goes that Mr. Gladstone once attended his church

in Marylebone, in order to judge for himself of the vicar’s fitness for

promotion. The Prime Minister was so depressed by the discourse which he

heard and the small attendance, that all chance of promotion vanished.

The great man did not know that, as a matter of fact, he had been

listening to another preacher altogether, that, as it happened, Llewelyn

Davies was away on a holiday and not in the church that day. It is true

that the latter was somewhat cold in manner and measured in address, not

by any means a preacher to electrify large congregations and appeal to

popular audiences, one who convinced rather than attracted—a guide to

thinking men, not a master of the rhetoric which moves the multitude.

Still, in a worldly sense, he never received his due. Our Church of

England seems to have considerable capacity for leaving its best and

wisest sons out in the cold. Maurice and Llewelyn Davies kept numbers

in the faith who would otherwise have drifted from it, because their

teaching and their lives proved to demonstration that breadth of view,

intellectual power, and democratic sympathies are wholly compatible with

intense religious belief, conspicuous before all men every day and all

day.

He took his degree in what he himself styled the ‘fateful year’ 1848,

a time of social and industrial upheaval. Then it was that what was

known as the Christian Socialist Movement came into being, and six

years later, in 1854, the Christian Socialists founded the Working

Men’s College. Llewelyn Davies was one of them; and when he died, the

last of the founders passed away after nearly sixty-two years of the

life of the College. They were a great band of men, these Christian

Socialists. Charles Kingsley was prominent among them. So was John

Ruskin, so were Tom Hughes, John Malcolm Ludlow, the father of Friendly

Societies, Professor Westlake, the International lawyer, and many other

men of note. They were poles asunder from one another in character, in

pursuits, in a hundred ways; but they all had the betterment of their

fellow-men in mind, and one man held them all together, the greatest but

most humble-minded of them all, Maurice, a leader in spite of himself.

I came into the College years after Maurice had died, but I found that

some rare and potent influence had been and still was at work, that some

personality had left an impress, which was different in kind and greater

in degree than anything in ordinary life. Men of all religions and of no

religion seemed to have become infected with a kind of noble contagion,

and in turn to be infecting others. One old student explained to me that

the secret of Maurice’s influence was his transparent truthfulness,

that he taught ‘No lie ever had done or ever could do any conceivable

good in the world.’ Another found the explanation in his burning sense

of brotherhood. The truth was that a man had come among them who, as no

other man they ever saw or heard of, gave the message and lived the life

of Christ.

Charles Kingsley did not take much active part in founding and fashioning

the College, and after Maurice died the clerical element among the

founders was represented by Llewelyn Davies. I have said that the

founders were of the most divers views, in religion as in other respects.

Notwithstanding, the College was cradled in religion; the influence

of Maurice was paramount; and to Ludlow or Tom Hughes, laymen both,

religious faith was as the breath of life. Of all the founders, other

than Maurice himself, Hughes was probably Llewelyn Davies’ closest

friend. The two men were of the most different types. Hughes was

sanguine, trustful, impulsive, carrying on into old age all the warmth

and buoyancy and charm of youth. Davies was calm, thoughtful, reserved,

weighing men and things in the balance with the utmost care. But their

very diversities seemed to bring them together, and they loved one

another. In the Jubilee volume of the College, which Davies edited, he

wrote of his friend Hughes as ‘the man of childlike heart, of knightly

loyalty, of the most humane geniality, and of the simplest Christian

faith.’

Hughes was Principal of the College, in succession to Maurice, when I

joined it: many were the stories which he told himself, and many gathered

round him. He used to tell with glee his experience as a teacher, when

the College first opened its doors. Professor Westlake’s account of what

happened is as follows: ‘His teaching of English law, not by his fault,

but by that of the subject, never, I think, attracted the numbers which

the value of the study ought to command.’ Hughes’ own account was far

more racy: he took a law class, which was a complete failure, upon which

he converted it into a boxing class, which was an unbounded success. One

evening Hughes impressed upon us that the great object of the College was

to teach what were known in old days as ‘the Humanities.’ Lord Justice

Bowen, who was present and spoke after him, pertinently asked whether he

included boxing among the Humanities.

A great friend of Hughes and his circle, and a warm friend of the

College, was James Russell Lowell, who, it will be remembered, was at one

time American ambassador in this country—not the only American ambassador

to whom the College owes a debt, for Mr. Choate at a later date gave us

a notable address on Benjamin Franklin. I remember an annual gathering

at which both Hughes and Lowell spoke. Hughes in his speech recalled

the beginnings of the College and of the co-operative movement, the two

having been closely associated with each other, and told the story of a

certain brushmaker who had been a student of the College. The brushmaker

had fallen on evil times, and his business had collapsed. Hughes and

other co-operators and Christian Socialists clubbed together to set him

up again, and in gratitude the brushmaker made them all brushes which,

according to Hughes, had exceedingly hard bristles. Now Hughes had a

most shiny bald head, and, with his eye on that head, Lowell, who spoke

afterwards, in stately and measured terms, expressed a hope that all the

students of the College did their work as thoroughly and effectively as

the brushmaker had done his. On this same occasion Hughes referred to

the fact that some time before Nathaniel Hawthorne had come to tea at

the College. Again Lowell saw and took his opportunity. ‘I think,’ he

said, ‘Mr. Hughes has made a slip; it cannot have been tea that my friend

Hawthorne came to, for Hawthorne was a man of robuster fibre.’

I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful

English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him,

I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many

other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went

there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I

could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and

numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I

received infinitely more than I ever gave. Apart from friendships made

for life, apart from having become, I hope, infected with the contagion

of which I have spoken, simply and solely from the point of view of

getting on in the world, it was a distinct gain to a young man to be

thrown into association with great men or the intimate friends of great

men, and to be constantly in an atmosphere of wide interests, high aims,

and tolerant views. My start in the teaching line was even more unlucky

than Tom Hughes’. Apparently he got some kind of class together, who then

deserted him until he took to boxing. My recollection is that I put out

an elaborate prospectus of what I was going to teach, and that no class

turned up at all. Subsequently, however, I did manage to scrape together

a small class, and supplemented teaching, not by boxing, but by becoming

an active member of the Maurice Cricket Club, the President of which

was Alfred Lyttelton, who, like Hughes, took a law class, but with much

greater success.

If, as some people fondly imagine and like to insist, there is a

difference between the Oxford and Cambridge type of man and cast of mind,

Hughes and Llewelyn Davies may be taken as excellent representatives of

their respective Universities. Oxford gave to the Working Men’s College

the more emotional Hughes, with his all-round views and interests.

Davies contributed the thoroughness and accuracy of Cambridge thought

and methods. On the other hand, Charles Kingsley, another Cambridge man,

would certainly be classed with Tom Hughes rather than with Llewelyn

Davies. The author of ‘Westward Ho!’ might well have written ‘Tom Brown’s

Schooldays,’ or vice versa; but it is impossible to picture Llewelyn

Davies as the author of ‘Tom Brown,’ or Hughes as the translator of

Plato’s ‘Republic.’ In a later generation at the College, the counterpart

of Hughes, with less genius but greater practical ability, was again a

Cambridge man, the dearly loved Alfred Lyttelton, to whom I have already

referred. The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the

product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders

and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities,

and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they

had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to

manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere

which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The

College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its

models. Year after year Oxford and Cambridge have welcomed parties

of Working Men’s College students; and year after year, without any

intermission, a constant stream of new teachers has flowed in from the

two Universities—sometimes in greater volume from the one, sometimes

from the other. It would be impossible to decide to which University we

owe the greater debt. Maurice himself can be claimed by both, though

Cambridge has the prior and, I think, the stronger claim to him. Of

four past Principals, Maurice is in the balance, Lord Avebury belonged

to neither University, and the other two, Tom Hughes, and Professor

Dicey most admirable and effective of Principals, must be credited to

Oxford. On the whole, perhaps, I must, as an Oxford man, reluctantly but

gratefully acknowledge that Trinity College, Cambridge, stands out in our

annals as having been from first to last our greatest benefactor. The two

latest survivors of the founders, Westlake and Llewelyn Davies, had both

been Fellows of Trinity.

I have spoken of Davies’ strong sense of civic duty. To compare him

again with Hughes, there was as great devotion to duty in the latter,

but with a somewhat different colouring. In Hughes’ case the sense of

duty was not so sharply defined, or clearly thought out, nor so much a

matter of reason. With him it was rather a feeling, an instinct, part

of his nature, such a sense of duty as comes into being at a great

public school, in the form of _esprit de corps_, loyalty to a community

of comrades and friends. All these men had this sense of obligation in

different shades and forms; all heard the call of duty, each in his

own way—the clergyman, the scholar, the public official, the merchant,

the lawyer, the artist—and all obeyed the call by giving of their own

particular store of knowledge.

To the Greeks of old duty and goodness presented themselves in the guise

of the beautiful, and this may be one reason why so many artists of fame

gave their help to the College. In the list of art teachers of the past

are the names of Ruskin, D. G. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Burne Jones,

Thomas Woolner, Stacy Marks, and others. One of the longest lived and

best loved of the founders was Lowes Dickinson, who taught in the art

class for many years, and, as all who knew him will testify, never lost

sight of the connection between goodness and beauty. But it was not to be

expected that the students, or would-be students, would be all of this

type, until they had been duly inoculated. For instance, in the account

of art teaching at the College in early days, which is given in the

Jubilee volume, there is a story of a man coming to Ruskin’s class with a

request to be taught how to draw a cart-wheel. He explained that he was a

wheelwright, and that it would pay him in his business if he could draw

a wheel as it looked lying on the ground. He wanted no art or anything

of the kind, but simply to learn how to draw a wheel. This limited

aspiration was not at all to Ruskin’s mind, and the wheelwright appears

to have gone away sorrowing. The man came, quite naturally and laudably,

in order to obtain some technical instruction, which would bring him in

more money. No set of men were ever more anxious than the Founders of

the College that their poorer brethren should rise and prosper, hence

their staunch support of the Co-operative Movement. But they did not

found it to give technical instruction; they founded it to teach the

‘humanities’ in the widest sense (including boxing), to give to poor men

more human lives, to widen and multiply their interests, to open their

understanding, to make them better citizens. They were democrats, but

not democrats of the utilitarian type. They taught duty, the faith that

was in them, more than rights or claims. They never taught the working

man to try everything by the test question, What am I going to get by

it in pounds, shillings, and pence? nor did they for one moment appeal

to the manual workers as a class with interests distinct from those of

the community. The spirit of class was to them anathema, the negation of

brotherhood and of true citizenship, the enemy of the State. They taught

that men should have their full living wage, if they earned it; that true

citizen life implied conditions under which honest labour would always

ensure to the labourer sufficiency of good food and a decent home; but

they taught also that pounds, shillings, and pence are not the one thing

needful; that possessions mean something more and something better than

lands or wealth; that knowledge and wisdom, the manifold interests which

come from knowledge, the intelligent appreciation of the world around, of

men and things, are what life has to give, and are available to poor as

well as to rich; that, if a man has knowledge, with bread to eat and a

human home, it is a matter of indifference whether he is rich or whether

he is poor: he is an equal among equals. So they taught, and so the

students learnt and lived their lives accordingly.

These men founded a college. Here is Maurice’s conception of a college,

as given by Llewelyn Davies: ‘The name College had a significance on

which Maurice loved to dwell.... A college was an association of teachers

and learners; and that was what Maurice desired the Working Men’s College

to be. It was not to be an institution to which the uneducated might

resort, to pick up knowledge which might be of pecuniary benefit to them.

The idea of fellowship was to run through all its work; every teacher

was to assume that he might learn as well as teach; every student was to

be made to feel that, in coming to the College, he was entering into a

society in which he might hope to become more of a citizen and more of

a man.’ This was no conception of a visionary, which ended in a dream.

These were the lines laid down for practical guidance and application,

and on these lines to this day the College lives and moves and has its

being. My experience of the world at large has been that the rich man

is apt to patronise the poor, and that working men in their turn are

somewhat inclined to look askance upon would-be benefactors with good

intent. But when I first went to the College a great many years ago, I

found no signs of patronising, or being patronised. Nothing of the kind

was in the minds of students or teachers: it was all natural. They were

not troubling their heads as to social standing or worldly equipment;

nor, on the other hand, was there the slightest affectation of studied

equality or absence of the ordinary courtesies of life. There they were

in their own College, friends among friends, all engaged in the same

pursuit, the pursuit of knowledge, all ready to help and grateful for

being helped. I found that a large proportion of the teachers were, as

is still the case, student teachers; men who, having owed to the College

all their store of knowledge, and much more also, had come back to repay

the debt in kind, taking classes for years together, usually after a

heavy day’s work in their trade or profession; and I found, again, that

there was an attachment to the place, an _animus revertendi_—at least as

strong as in the case of the old Public Schools or Universities. To put

it bluntly, the Working Men’s College was founded to turn out gentlemen

in the truest and best sense of the term, and it is turning them out,

according to the original sample, to the present time.

To take one among numberless examples which might be given of the College

spirit, I call to mind an old student who was a very great favourite with

us all and a constant attendant at the College, until age and infirmity

limited the number of his visits. He was a wood-turner by trade; always

a poor man, but the happiest, as he was the friendliest, of men, for he

was master of a science which he needed no riches to follow up: he was

a most expert botanist, and when not earning his bread, he was studying

his subject or collecting new specimens on country walks. What did he

care about class distinctions or political parties or social upheavals?

Nothing at all. On the other hand, he illustrated the truth that a

live and wholesome community, which is at unity with itself, is a most

fruitful field for good stories and humorous sayings. He had the most

delightful gift of dry humour. A man of portly carriage, he had been

listening at one of our festive gatherings to a speaker who enlarged on

the subject of all-round men—I forget in what connection, but presumably

on the product which was to be expected from the College. Speaking later,

my old friend described himself as not an all-round man but bulging out

on one side. On another occasion the Lubbock Field Club—the natural

history club of the College—gathered to do him honour, and the speakers

indulged in exuberance of sentiment. In acknowledging his reception, the

honoured guest botanically remarked, ‘The Field Club is all heart, like

winter cabbages.’

Ever setting duty and citizenship before their own eyes, and the eyes

of those whom they guided and taught, the Founders of the College were

intensely good Englishmen and whole-hearted lovers of their country

without any reservations. That the claims of class should ever compete

with duty to the State would have been abhorrent to them. Nor were

they scared by any bogey of militarism. The members of the College

entered heart and soul into the Volunteer movement of 1859, and a corps

was formed, one of the earliest of all the volunteer corps, which

became the 19th Middlesex. As might be expected, Tom Hughes was the

commandant; prominent among the officers were John Martineau, pupil and

intimate friend of Charles Kingsley, and the Anglo-Saxon scholar, Dr.

Furnivall, most bellicose of men; while Maurice himself became chaplain

of the regiment. In these days of conscientious objectors, many might

with advantage read a letter which Maurice wrote to his soldier son,

afterwards the distinguished military writer, Sir Frederick Maurice,

and in which the nobility of the soldier’s calling is set forth by one

who had been brought up in tenets of a widely different kind, but had

renounced them on the principles which governed his whole life—duty

to man and fear of God. The letter is published in the memoir of Sir

Frederick Maurice by his son, now also General Maurice, who in the third

generation is adding new distinction to a great and honoured name.

During his thirty-six years of parish work in London, Llewelyn Davies

had little time to give to the teaching or management of the College;

and for the nineteen years when he held the living of Kirkby Lonsdale,

he was necessarily cut off from it, save for occasional visits, as was

Tom Hughes in his County Court Judgeship at Chester. He had taken a Bible

class in early days, in 1866; and after he came back from Westmorland

to end his days in retirement in London, again, a very old but still

vigorous man, he took the Bible class for a short time. His last words

spoken at the College were at our annual supper in the Maurice Hall, in

December 1910. He testified that ‘the College had always opened its arms

to those who came to it with the idea of not merely getting personal

advantage, but of becoming better citizens of their country, and better

members of the great human family, and who desired to serve their country

and kind to the best of their power’; and he claimed that ‘every one who

had been associated with the College, either as teacher or as student,

had felt in some degree that they were honoured by their connection

with it.’ It probably never entered into his head that the College was

honoured by association with him. His speech ended with what he said

and felt might be a parting benediction, ‘God bless the Working Men’s

College.’ He was never able to come among us again, but as each Founder’s

Day came round we remembered him, and he remembered us. And we shall

ever remember him and his work. He lies in Hampstead Churchyard, as his

master, Maurice, at Highgate. The line of founders has now died out, but

their memorial is a living memorial—better and nobler lives of men.

_THE PORTRAIT OF THE BELOVED._

The tall, young, frock-coated librarian came into the ladies’

reading-room with a noiseless, gliding step and an air of apology. He

moved a library ladder against the high shelves of calf-bound volumes,

ran up the ladder with a gentle swiftness, selected a tall folio from the

top shelf and came down again, leaving the room by the half-glass door as

unobtrusively as he had entered it.

There were only two people in the reading-room. One was an elderly woman,

who sat in front of a splendid fire, dozing, her head to one side. She

rested her cheek in her hand. She was elderly and had a disordered,

tousled look. Her hair, which had been a colourless fair, and was now an

indeterminate grey, was falling loose about her ears. Yet there was a

suggestion of lost beauty and grace, something evanescent, something of

youth, of the wreck of loveliness, about the drooped head and the huddled

figure.

Outside, the streets were miserable. The flagged courtyard beneath the

windows showed a dull surface of glimmering wet reflection. No hope of

its clearing. The skies were muddy, and beyond the courtyard in the

narrow street there passed now and again an oilskinned figure under

an umbrella, or a depressed cab-horse, behind an ancient driver and

disgracefully rickety vehicle—himself, poor beast, only fit for the

knacker’s yard. It was comfortable in the ladies’ reading-room, where

very few people came except the two who now occupied it. There was

something that appealed to Esther Denison, the younger of the two ladies,

in the rooms which had been undisturbed since Lord Edward Fitzgerald had

moved about them, his head full of rare dreams, more than a century ago.

That was the Beloved himself in the portrait above the magnificently

carved mantelpiece, set amid the backs of the old volumes on their

shelves, glimmering out of the soberly rich surroundings with a

suggestion of eternal gaiety and tender charm.

Such colour and vivacity! The brown eyes of the portrait drew Esther

Denison from her books and manuscripts, in spite of herself. She was

working at ‘Middle Irish’ for a University studentship. Now and again

she had to tinkle the little bell for a librarian to find something she

wanted. There were several librarians, but it was always the same one

who answered her bell. She was hardly conscious of him while she thanked

him so sweetly for finding what she wanted. She was hardly aware how

painstaking he was, how anxious to help. There never was more than a

murmured word between them. They observed the rule of silence of the

reading-room, although there was never anyone there but Esther Denison,

and that queer old Miss Brooke, who in her waking hours read nothing but

eighteenth-century memoirs, with now and again a volume of poetry or a

romance.

The ladies’ reading-room was a very good place for such work as Esther

Denison’s. The quiet was unbroken, because of the thick walls and the

retired situation of the great house between the courtyard and the

gardens at the back. All the corridors were lined with books,—such books

as no one ever asks to read—old calf and leather-bound volumes, which

were never taken from their shelves. Those Transactions of Parliament had

been there when the Beloved was young and in love, when he went to and

fro between this house and the House of Commons in College Green. The

deep walls of books seemed to deaden all rumour of life in the ladies’

reading-room, while downstairs the men’s reading-room was crowded, and

the swing-doors went from morn till even.

Esther Denison used to forget that there was any presence in the room but

her own while she worked. The work absorbed her: she delighted in it,

difficult as it was. Hour after hour she would sit there, her delicate

Muse-like head bent over the abstruse page. Her face was as soft in

colour, as delicately and firmly moulded, as a pink sweet-pea. She wore

her fair hair plaited, and twisted like a laurel-wreath around her small

head. She never looked round, nor glanced up, when the librarian came in

noiselessly. He went away carrying with him an impression of the pure

profile, the softly opening lips, the head filleted with pale gold, which

drew him to return against his will.

Little by little something of intimacy sprang up between Esther Denison

and Miss Brooke. At first the girl had sent the elder woman a pitying

glance and thought. She was half crazed or whole crazed, poor thing. She

talked in her sleep, and she was often asleep. When she woke up, she

talked to herself or to the picture above the fireplace. Some girls might

have been afraid of this strange companion. Not so Esther Denison. She

had become accustomed to the odd figure sitting in the chair in front of

the fire. She would have missed it if it had not been there.

One very grey, very dull afternoon, the fire sank low in the grate while

Miss Brooke slept. Esther realised with a start that the room was cold.

She had opened a window and the damp chill had entered. It was nearly

time for the lights. She stood up and went to replenish the fire, putting

on the coal gently, bit by bit, so as not to disturb the sleeper.

Kneeling between her and the fire, Miss Brooke’s face seemed to glimmer

out of the dark. The rooms were always full of mysterious shadows.

Glancing at her, as a little flame sprang up in the grate and died

away, Esther Denison had a queer illusion. The withered face was for

the moment the face of a girl, soft and round and purely tinted—not so

unlike the face of which she had caught a careless glimpse in the glass

as she arranged her hat before coming out that morning. Then the illusion

vanished. Miss Brooke woke up with a weary sigh and shivered. She was

elderly and cracked-looking again. Esther stirred up the fire and went to

the window, which she closed before returning to her work.

Every afternoon, about five, a bright face would appear framed in the

glass of the door, and there would come a sharp little tapping on the

pane. Then Esther would nod, close her book, and lay it aside; gather

her things together and go off home through the wet streets—they were

nearly always wet that winter—with her brother, Bobby, who was a student

at Trinity College. Bobby would wait, cooling his heels in the corridor,

while his sister put on her outdoor things in an inner room of the

ladies’ reading-room. That too had its roaring fire and deep, shabby,

easy chairs. It also was walled with books. The ordinary reader, whenever

she came—which was seldom—seemed unaware of the inner room which you

entered by a door that simulated book-shelves, continuing the long line

of books by dummy backs, painted on the door. People had occasionally

been startled to see that door open.

Esther would go home with her brother to the house in the suburbs and

the pretty faded mother, who lamented that she had a blue-stocking for a

daughter.

‘You grow old-maidish already,’ she would say. ‘Your indifference has

cooled off the men your pretty face attracted. You will be old before

your time, working in that fusty room at something that will never be any

good to you. Men hate a blue-stocking.’

Esther only laughed. She was very fond of the pretty complaining mother

with whom she had so little in common. She merely remarked that the

reading-room was the most comfortable place in Dublin during these winter

days. By and by, when the spring came, she would go out into the fields.

It did not matter to her about men. She was only interested in them

when they were grey and scholarly—except, of course, Bobby, who was her

darling and always stood up for her. She had not met the young man who

mattered to her.

As she said it she remembered the face of the portrait in the

reading-room, and her pulses quickened a little. Men like that did not

live nowadays.

‘King Pandion he is dead,

All his friends are lapped in lead.’

Her lips curled a little scornfully. There were none like the Beloved in

these prosperous days of a peaceful dullness. She remembered his eyes,

brown as salmon-pools in their amber depths, his quick sideways smile,

the light on his brown head. Why, there were moments in the high dim room

full of shadows when the portrait had looked alive! It was a brilliant

bit of painting—the green of the cravat, the scarlet of the waistcoat,

the brown face with the touch of carmine in the cheeks. Odd, how they lit

the room!

Every morning now she returned to the reading-room with an ever growing

sense of pleasant anticipation. No matter how early she arrived Miss

Brooke was already there, in her accustomed place. If another reader came

by any chance, Miss Brooke would go off into the inner room and remain

there till the intruder had gone. Her meals were brought to her in that

inner room from some place outside. They were very light meals—tea, a

boiled egg, a little fruit, some hot cakes.

The time came when, with an air of friendliness, she brought a cup of tea

and placed it by Esther’s elbow.

‘You forget to go out for your lunch,’ she said. ‘That is not good for

the young. You spend too much time over those queer characters. You will

lose the brightness of your eyes; your back will bend. I like to look up

and see you there when I am awake. But⸺I was once as pretty as you. Do

not come here too much. This place is full of dreams. _I_ have found it

worth while to give up all things, but⸺’

She would be quite sensible and coherent for a while; then she would

wander off into something unintelligible.

While they were talking one day the librarian came in. He greeted Miss

Brooke in a murmur as he passed on to find the thing he needed. He

seemed to need many books from those otherwise undisturbed shelves.

‘That is a pleasant young man,’ Miss Brooke said as he went out, closing

the door behind him. ‘He is in and out here a great deal since you began

to read here, much more than formerly.’

She fixed her rather mad, bright eyes on Esther, who, to her annoyance,

felt the colour come to her cheeks; she always coloured very easily.

‘Ah, that is right,’ Miss Brooke said. ‘Mr. Tyrrell is an excellent young

man. You do not know him. I must make you known to each other. I was

afraid that you were going to follow me. You are so exactly like a girl I

once knew. I am disappointed in you, but it is best so. One should grasp

at the happiness near at hand, even though grace and beauty—and more than

that—are dead a hundred years.’

She stopped suddenly as though she listened, and went on again.

‘What was I talking about?’ she asked. ‘My poor head! It is full moon. I

always talk nonsense when there is a full moon. Is that your brother come

for you, my dear?’

It was not Bobby. It was the librarian. He brought a message from Bobby,

who was unable to come for her. She was to take a cab home with her books

and papers.

Having delivered his message the librarian waited while Esther put on her

hat. She dressed very prettily, in the picturesque fashion of a day which

had an artistic movement all to itself. Her cloak and flat cap of green

velvet were like the sheathing of a flower. As she came from the inner

room so attired, the librarian’s eyes fluttered as though he had seen a

vision.

‘I will carry these for you,’ he said, lifting the parcel of books.

Miss Brooke did not appear to notice. She had a queer way of suddenly

leaving realities behind. The librarian replenished the fire. She did

not seem to notice the noise he made. Her eyes were fixed on the picture

above the fireplace.

‘What time does she go home?’ Esther Denison asked, as they went out into

the dim corridor where the lights were not yet on. ‘It seems so lonely,

leaving her there.’

‘As a matter of fact’—the librarian had the slightest hesitation of

speech, which gave him the air of a gentle deference—‘she does not go

home. I do not believe she has any home to go to.’

‘Then she lives here?’

‘I believe she sleeps in front of the fire. It was a long time before we

discovered that she remained here at night, after every one was gone.

When we discovered—it is an irregularity of course—but—we wink at it. We

could not discover that she had anywhere to go to or any friends. She

does no harm. She is always about—as though she has just arrived—when the

servants begin to arrange the rooms in the morning. She is not really

mad, you know. She has only hallucinations. She has been coming here so

long that she seems to belong to the house.’

‘It is a beautiful house to belong to,’ Esther said, as though she were

talking to herself. ‘I am glad you let her stay.’

A little later a thought came to her. Supposing Miss Brooke were to be

taken ill in the night? Some one, she supposed, slept on the premises.

Only the front of the house—the main block, in which had been the

reception-rooms—was used as library and reading-rooms. There was the

underground story, in which no servant would sleep nowadays; but there

was also abundant room at the back, or at the top of the house—not

accessible from this part. She had already ascertained that there was no

communication between these rooms and a great portion of the old house.

The rooms suddenly ceased in a wall of books. The communication must have

been blocked up.

She was working very hard at this time. The annoying thing was that, as

the examination came near, she began to find it difficult to concentrate

her thoughts. Perhaps she had been working too hard. It could not be

that ‘Middle Irish’ was losing its fascination for her; but, little by

little, she found that something was coming between her and the folios

and manuscripts. The something was—it took the shape of—the portrait of

the Beloved. Once or twice she fell asleep, just as Miss Brooke did, and

slept, her face upon her folded arms, amid the scattered learning on the

table.

‘The room was so hot,’ she said apologetically to the librarian, who had

wakened her and seemed more perturbed about her drowsiness than need be.

‘You are overworking,’ he answered, with a sharpness in his voice. ‘You

will have to give it up, or have a nervous breakdown.’

She forgot to wonder at the something like anger in his voice.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’ she said, ‘so near the exam.! Afterwards, I

shall take a good rest. I shall read nothing but novels for a month.’

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘There are cobwebs here that get into people’s

brains. Look at Miss Brooke! You must go away into the country and not

touch a book. The Spring will be here soon. Although it is wet to-night

there is a west wind that brings the fields.’

‘I must get through my exam. first,’ she said. ‘Afterwards, I dare say it

will be best for me.’

‘You will break down before,’ he replied gloomily, and she was frightened.