It is only very gradually that one comes to appreciate Lalage. I had
known her since she was quite a small child. I even recollect her
insisting upon my wheeling her perambulator once when I was a schoolboy,
and naturally resented such an indignity. Yet I had failed to realize
the earnestness and vigour of her character. I did not expect anything
to come of the guarantee which I had signed for her. I might and
ought to have known better; but I was in fact greatly surprised when I
received by post the first copy of the _Anti-Tommy-Rot Gazette_. It was
not a very large publication, but it contained more print than I should
have thought obtainable for the sum of ten pounds. Besides the title of
the magazine and a statement that this issue was Vol. I, No. I., there
was a picture of a young lady, clothed like the goddess Diana in the
illustrations of the classical dictionary, who was urging on several
large dogs of most ferocious appearance. In the distance, evidently
terrified by the dogs, were three animals of no recognized species,
but very disgusting in appearance, which bore on their sides the words
“Tommy Rot.” The huntress was remarkably like Hilda in appearance and
the initials “L.B.” at the bottom left-hand corner of the picture told
me that the artist was Lalage herself. One of the dogs was a highly
idealized portrait of a curly haired retriever belonging to my mother.
The objects of the chase I did not recognize as copies of any beasts
known to me; though there was something in the attitude of the worst of
them which reminded me slightly of the Archdeacon. I never heard what
Hilda’s mother thought of this picture. If she is the kind of woman I
imagine her to be she probably resented the publication of a portrait of
her daughter dressed in a single garment only and that decidedly shorter
than an ordinary night dress.
Opening the magazine at page one, I came upon an editorial article. The
rapid increase of the habit of talking tommyrot was dwelt upon and the
necessity for prompt action was emphasized. The objects of the society
were set forth with a naked directness, likely, I feared, to cause
offence. Then came a paragraph, most disquieting to me, in which
the generous gentleman whose aid had rendered the publication of the
magazine possible was subjected to a good deal of praise. His name
was not actually mentioned, but he was described as a distinguished
diplomatist well known in an important continental court. This made me
uneasy. There are not very many distinguished diplomatists who would
finance a magazine of the kind. I felt that suspicion would fasten
almost at once upon me, in the event of there being any kind of public
inquiry. Next to the editorial article came a page devoted on one side
entirely to the advertisement of the gentleman who wanted second-hand
feather beds. The other side of it was announced as “To Let,” and the
attention of advertisers was called to the unique opportunity offered
to them of making their wishes known to an intelligent and progressive
public. After that came the bishops.
Each bishop had at least half a page to himself. Some had much more, the
amount of space devoted to them being apparently regulated in accordance
with the enormity of their offences. There was a note in italics at the
end of each indictment which ran thus:
“All inquirers after the original sources of the information used in
this article are requested to apply to J. Selby-Harrison, Esq., 175
Trinity College, Dublin, by whom the research in the columns of the
daily papers has been conducted with much ability and disinterested
discretion. P.S.--J. Selby-Harrison has in all cases preserved notes of
the dates, etc., for purposes of verification.” The working up of the
material thus collected was without doubt done by Lalage. I recognized
her style. Hilda probably corrected the proof.
In the letter which Lalage wrote to me at the time of the founding of
the A.T.R.S. she spoke of university life as broadening the mind and
enlarging the horizon. Either Oxford in this respect is inferior to
Trinity College, Dublin, or else my mind has narrowed again since I took
my degree and my horizon has shrunk. I did not feel that the episcopal
pronouncements quoted deserved the eminence to which Lalage promoted
them. They struck me as being simply commonplace. I had grown quite
accustomed to them and had come to regard them as proper and natural
things for bishops to say. For instance, the very first paragraph in
this pillory of Lalage’s was devoted to a bishop, I forget his name and
territorial title, who had denounced Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe.” Some
evil-minded person had put forward this novel as a suitable reading
book for Irish boys and girls in secondary schools, and the bishop had
objected strongly. Lalage was cheerfully contemptuous of him. Without
myself sharing his feeling, I can quite understand that he may have
found it his duty to protest against the deliberate encouragement of
such dangerous reading; and it is seldom right to laugh at a man for
doing his duty. I read “Ivanhoe” when I was a boy and I distinctly
remember that at least one eminent ecclesiastic is presented in a most
unfavourable light. If Irish boys and girls got into the way of thinking
of twelfth-century priors as gay dogs, the step onward to actual
disrespect for contemporary bishops would be quite a short one.
There was another bishop (he appeared a few pages further on in the
_Gazette_) who objected to the education of boys and girls under seven
years of age in the same infant schools. He said that this mixing of
the sexes would destroy the beautiful modesty of demeanour which
distinguishes Irish girls from those of other nations. Lalage poked
fun at this man for a page and a half. I hesitate to say that she was
actually wrong. My own experience of infant schools is very small. I
once went into one, but I did not stay there for more than five minutes,
hardly long enough to form an opinion about the wholesomeness of the
moral atmosphere. But in this case again I can enter into the feelings
of the bishop. He probably knows, having once been six years old
himself, that all boys of that age are horrid little beasts. He also
knows--he distinctly says so in the pastoral quoted by Lalage--that the
charm of maidenhood is a delicate thing, comparable to the bloom on a
peach or the gloss on a butterfly’s wings. Even Miss Battersby, who
must know more about girls than any bishop, felt that Lalage had lost
something not to be regained when she became intimate enough with Tom
Kitterick to rub glycerine and cucumber into his cheeks.
Lalage was, in my opinion, herself guilty of something very like the sin
of tommyrot when she mocked another bishop for a sermon he had preached
on “Empire Day.” He said that wherever the British flag flies there is
liberty for subject peoples and several other obviously true things of
the same kind. I do not see what else, under the circumstances, the poor
man could say. Nor do I blame him in the least for boldly demanding more
battleships to carry something--I think he said the Gospel--to still
remoter lands. Lalage chose to pretend that liberty and subjection are
contradictory terms, but this is plainly absurd. Lord Thormanby talked
over this part of the _Gazette_ with me some months later and gave it
as his opinion that a man whom he knew in the club had put the case very
well by saying that there are several quite distinct kinds of liberty.
I found myself still more puzzled by Lalage’s attitude toward another
man who was not even, strictly speaking, a bishop. He was a moderator,
or an ex-moderator, of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.
He had made a speech in which he set forth reasons why he and others
like him should have a recognized place in the vice-regal court. I am
not myself passionately fond of vice-regal courts, but I know that many
people regard them with great reverence, and I do not see why a man
should be laughed at for wanting to walk through the state rooms in
Dublin Castle in front of somebody else. It is a harmless, perhaps a
laudable, ambition. Lalage chose to see something funny in it, and I am
bound to say that when I had finished her article I too began to catch a
glimpse of the amusing side of it.
I spent a long time over the _Gazette_. The more I read it the greater
my perplexity grew. Many things which I had accepted for years as solemn
and necessary parts of the divine ordering of the world were suddenly
seized, contorted, and made to grin like apes. I felt disquieted,
inclined, and yet half afraid, to laugh. I was rendered acutely
uncomfortable by an editorial note which followed the last jibe at the
last bishop: “The next number of the _Anti-Tommy-Rot Gazette_ will
deal with politicians and may be expected to be lively. Subscribe at
once.--Ed.”
I was so profoundy distrustful of my own judgment in delicate matters
that I determined to find out if I could what Dodds thought of Lalage’s
opinions. Dodds is preeminently a man of the world, very sound,
unemotional and full of common sense. I did not produce the _Gazette_ or
mention Lalage’s name, for Dodds has had a prejudice against her since
the evening on which he played bridge with Miss Battersby. Nor did I
make a special business of asking his advice. I waited until we sat
down to bridge together after dinner and then I put a few typical cases
before him in casual tones, as if they were occurring to me at the
moment.
“Dodds,” I said, holding the cards in my hand, “supposing that a bishop
for whom you always had a respect on account of the dignity of his
office, were to say----”
“I wouldn’t have any respect for a bishop on account of his office,”
said Dodds. “Why don’t you deal?”
“We’re Presbyterians,” said Mrs. Dodds.
“That needn’t prevent you considering this case, for the word bishop
is here used--that is to say, I am using it--to mean any eminent
ecclesiastic. All right, I’m dealing as fast as I can. Supposing that a
man of that kind, call him a bishop or anything else you like, were to
say that boys and girls ought not to read ‘Ivanhoe’ on account of the
danger to their faith and morals contained in that book, would you or
would you not say that he, the bishop, not ‘Ivanhoe,’ was talking what
in ordinary slang is called tommyrot?”
I finished dealing and, after glancing rather inattentively at my cards,
declared hearts.
Dodds, who was sitting on my left, picked up his hand and doubled my
hearts. He did so in a tone that convinced me that I had been rash in
my declaration. He paid no attention whatever to my question about the
bishop and “Ivanhoe.” It turned out that he had a remarkably good hand
and he scored thirty-two below the line, which of course gave him the
game. Mrs. Dodds, who was my partner, seemed temporarily soured, and
while Dodds was explaining to us how well he had played, she took up the
question about the bishop.
“I’d be thinking,” she said, “that that bishop of yours had very little
to do to be talking that way. I’d say he’d be the kind of man who’d
declare hearts with no more than one honour on his hand and that the
queen.”
This rather nettled me, for I quite realized that my hand did not
justify a heart declaration. I had made it inadvertently my mind being
occupied with more important matters.
“Of course,” I said, “you’re prejudiced in favour of Sir Walter Scott.
You Scotch are all the same. A word against Sir Walter or Robbie
Burns is enough for you. But I’ll put another case to you: Supposing a
bishop--understanding the word as I’ve explained it--were to say that
infant schools are a danger to public morality on account of the way
that boys and girls are mixed up together in the same classrooms, would
he, in your opinion----?”
Dodds has a horribly coarse mind. He stopped dealing and grinned. Then
he winked at the young engineer who sat opposite to him. He, I was
pleased to see, had the grace to look embarrassed. Mrs. Dodds, who of
course knows how her husband revels in anything which can be twisted
into impropriety, interrupted me with a question asked in a very biting
tone.
“Is it chess you think you are playing the now, or is it bridge?”
I had to let the next deal pass without any further attempt to discover
Dodds’s opinion about tommyrot. I was trying to think out what Mrs.
Dodds meant by accusing me of wanting to play chess. It struck me as
an entirely gratuitous and, using the word in its original sense,
impertinent suggestion. Nothing I had said seemed in any way to imply
that I was thinking of chess. As a matter of fact, I detest the game and
never play it. I suppose I am slow-witted, but it did not occur to me
for quite a long time, that, being a Scotch Presbyterian, the mention
of bishops was more likely to call up to her mind the pieces which sidle
obliquely across a chessboard than living men of lordly degree. I was
not sure in the end that I had tracked her thought correctly, but I
know that I made several bad mistakes during the next and the following
hands.
When it worked round to my turn to deal again I gave out the cards very
slowly and made another attempt to find out whether Dodds did or did not
agree with Lalage about tommyrot.
“Supposing,” I said, “that a clergyman, an ordinary clergyman, not
a bishop, the kind of clergyman whom you would perhaps describe as a
minister, were to preach a sermon about the British Empire and were to
say----”
“In our church,” said Mrs. Dodds snappily, “the ministers preach the
Gospel.”
“I am convinced of that,” I said, “but you must surely admit that the
great idea of the imperial expansion of the race, Greater Britain beyond
the seas, and--the White Man’s Burden, and all that kind of thing, are
not essentially anti-evangelical, when looked at from the proper point
of view. Suppose, for instance, that our hypothetical clergyman were to
take for his text----”
I laid down the last card in the pack on my own pile and looked
triumphantly at Dodds. I had, at all events, not made a misdeal. Dodds
put his hand down on his cards with a bang. He has large red hands,
which swell out between the knuckles and at the wrists. I saw by the
way his fingers were spread on the table that he was going to speak
strongly. I recollected then, when it was too late, that Dodds is an
advanced Radical and absolutely hates the idea of imperialism. I tried
to diminish his wrath by slipping in an apologetic explanation before he
found words to express his feelings.
“The clergyman I mean,” I said, “isn’t--he’s purely imaginary, but if
he had any real existence he wouldn’t belong to your church. He’d be a
bishop.”
“He’d better,” said Dodds grimly.
I felt so much depressed that I declared spades at once. I gathered
from the tone in which he spoke that if the clergyman who preached
imperialism came within the jurisdiction of Dodds, or for the matter
of that of Mrs. Dodds, it would be the worse for him. By far his
best chance of a peaceful life was to be a bishop and not to live in
Scotland. This was a great deal worse than Lalage’s way of treating him.
She merely sported, pursuing him with gay ridicule, mangling his pet
quotations, smiling at his swelling rotundities. Dodds would have sent
him to the stake without an opportunity for recantation.
I lost altogether seven shillings during the evening, which represents
a considerable run of bad luck, for we never played for more than a
shilling for each hundred points. Mrs. Dodds, of course, lost the
same amount. I tried to make it up to her next day by sending her,
anonymously, six pairs of gloves. She must have known that they came
from me for she was very gracious and friendly next evening. But for a
long time afterward Dodds used to annoy her by proposing to talk about
bishops and infant schools whenever she happened to be my partner.