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MARGOT ASQUITH

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

TWO VOLUMES IN ONE

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY HUSBAND

What? Have you not received powers, to the limits of which you

will bear all that befalls? Have you not received magnanimity?

Have you not received courage? Have you not received endurance?--

EPICTETUS

PREFACE

When I began this book I feared that its merit would depend upon

how faithfully I could record my own impressions of people and

events: when I had finished it I was certain of it. Had it been

any other kind of book the judgment of those nearest me would have

been invaluable, but, being what it is, it had to be entirely my

own; since whoever writes as he speaks must take the whole

responsibility, and to ask "Do you think I may say this?" or

"write that?" is to shift a little of that responsibility on to

someone else. This I could not bear to do, above all in the case

of my husband, who sees these recollections for the first time

now. My only literary asset is natural directness, and that

faculty would have been paralysed if I thought anything that I

have written here would implicate him. I would rather have made a

hundred blunders of style or discretion than seem, even to myself,

let alone the world at large, to have done that.

Unlike many memoirists, the list of people I have to thank in this

preface is short: Lord Crewe and Mr. Texeira de Mattos--who alone

saw my MS. before its completion--for their careful criticisms

which in no way committed them to approving of all that I have

written; Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, for valuable suggestions; and my

typist, Miss Lea, for her silence and quickness.

There are not many then of whom I can truly say, "Without their

approval and encouragement this book would never have been

written"--but those who really love me will forgive me and know

that what I owe them is deeper than thanks.

CONTENTS OF BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

THE TENNANT FAMILY--MARGOT, ONE OF TWELVE CHILDREN--HOME LIFE IN

GLEN, SCOTLAND--FATHER A SELF-CENTRED BUSINESS-MAN; HIS VANITIES;

HIS PRIDE IN HIS CHILDREN--NEWS OF HIS DEATH--HANDSOME LORD

RIBBLESDALE VISITS GLEN--MOTHER DELICATE; HER LOVE OF ECONOMY;

CONFIDENCES--TENNANT GIRLS' LOVE AFFAIRS

CHAPTER II

GLEN AMONG THE MOORS--MARGOT'S ADVENTURE WITH A TRAMP--THE

SHEPHERD BOY--MEMORIES AND ESCAPADES--LAURA AND MARGOT; PROPOSALS

OF MARRIAGE--NEW MEN FRIENDS--LAURA ENGAGED; PROPOSAL IN THE

DUSK--MARGOT'S ACCIDENT IN HUNTING FIELD--LAURA'S PREMONITION OF

DEATH IN CHILDBIRTH--LAURA'S WILL

CHAPTER III

SLUMMING IN LONDON; ADVENTURE IN WHITECHAPEL; BRAWL IN A SALOON;

OUTINGS WITH WORKING GIRLS--MARGOT MEETS PRINCESS OF WALES--GOSSIP

OVER FRIENDSHIP WITH PRINCE OF WALES--LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL'S

BALL--MARGOT'S FIRST HUNT; MEETS ECCENTRIC DUKE OF BEAUFORT; FALLS

IN LOVE AT SEVENTEEN; COMMANDEERS A HORSE

CHAPTER IV

MARGOT AT A GIRLS' SCHOOL--WHO SPILT THE INK?--THE ENGINE DRIVER'S

MISTAKEN FLIRTATION--MARGOT LEAVES SCHOOL IN DISGUST--DECIDES TO

GO TO GERMANY TO STUDY CHAPTER V

A DRESDEN LODGING HOUSE--MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE WITH AN OFFICER AFTER

THE OPERA--AN ELDERLY AMERICAN ADMIRER--YELLOW ROSES, GRAF VON--

AND MOTIFS FROM WAGNER

CHAPTER VI

MARGOT RIDES HORSE INTO LONDON HOME AND SMASHES FURNITURE--SUITOR

IS FORBIDDEN THE HOUSE--ADVISES GIRL FRIEND TO ELOPE; INTERVIEW

WITH GIRL'S FATHER--TETE-A-TETE DINNER IN PARIS WITH BARON HIRSCH

--WINNING TIP FROM FRED ARCHER THE JOCKEY

CHAPTER VII

PHOENIX PARK MURDERS--REMEDIES FOR IRELAND--TELEPATHY AND

PLANCHETTE--VISIT TO BLAVATSKY--SIR CHARLES DILKE'S KISS--VISITS

TO GLADSTONE--THE LATE LORD SALISBURY'S POLITICAL PROPHECIES

CHAPTER VIII

THE BEAUTIFUL KATE VAUGHAN--COACHED BY COQUELIN IN MOLIERE--

ROSEBERY'S POPULARITY AND ELOQUENCE--CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN BON-VIVANT

AND BOULEVARDIER--BALFOUR'S MOT; HIS CHARM AND WIT; HIS TASTES AND

PREFERENCES; HIS RELIGIOUS SPECULATION

CONTENTS OF BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

THE SOULS--LORD CURZON'S POEM AND DINNER PARTY AND WHO WERE THESE

--MARGOT'S INVENTORY OF THE GROUP--TILT WITH THE LATE LADY

LONDONDERRY--VISIT TO TENNYSON; HIS CONTEMPT FOR CRITICS; HIS

HABIT OF LIVING--J. K. S. NOT A SOUL--MARGOT'S FRIENDSHIP WITH

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS; HIS PRAISE OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF

CHAPTER II

CHARACTER SKETCH OF MARGOT--PLANS TO START A MAGAZINE--MEETS

MASTER OF BALLIOL; JOWETT'S ORTHODOXY; HIS INTEREST IN AND

INFLUENCE OVER MARGOT--ROSE IN "ROBERT ELSMERE" IDENTIFIED AS

MARGOT--JOWETT'S OPINION OF NEWMAN--JOWETT ADVISES MARGOT TO

MARRY--HUXLEY'S BLASPHEMY

CHAPTER III

FAST AND FURIOUS HUNTING IN LEICESTERSHIRE--COUNTRY HOUSE PARTY

AND A NEW ADMIRER--FRIENDSHIP WITH LORD AND LADY MANNERS

CHAPTER IV

MARGOT FALLS IN LOVE AGAIN--"HAVOC" IN THE HUNTING FIELD; A FALL

AND A DUCKING--THE FAMOUS MRS. BO; UNHEEDED ADVICE FROM A RIVAL--A

LOVERS' QUARREL--PETER JUMPS IN THE WINDOW--THE AMERICAN TROTTER--

ANOTHER LOVER INTERVENES--PETER RETURNS FROM INDIA; ILLUMINATION

FROM A DARK WOMAN

CHAPTER V

THE ASQUITH FAMILY TREE--HERBERT H. ASQUITH'S MOTHER--ASQUITH'S

FIRST MARRIAGE; MEETS MARGOT TENNANT FOR FIRST TIME--TALK TILL

DAWN ON HOUSE OF COMMONS' TERRACE; OTHER MEETINGS--ENGAGEMENT A

LONDON SENSATION--MARRIAGE AN EVENT

CHAPTER VI

THE ASQUITH CHILDREN BY THE FIRST MARRIAGE--MARGOT'S STEPDAUGHTER

VIOLET--MEMORY OF THE FIRST MRS. ASQUITH--RAYMOND'S BRILLIANT

CAREER--ARTHUR'S HEROISM IN THE WAR

CHAPTER VII

VISIT TO WOMAN'S PRISON--INTERVIEW THERE WITH MRS. MAYBRICK--

SCENE IN A LIFER'S CELL; THE HUSBAND WHO NEVER KNEW THOUGHT WIFE

MADE MONEY SEWING--MARGOT'S PLEA THAT FAILED

CHAPTER VIII

MARGOT'S FIRST BABY AND ITS LOSS--DANGEROUS ILLNESS--LETTER FROM

QUEEN VICTORIA--SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT'S PLEASANTRIES--ASQUITH

MINISTRY FALLS--VISIT FROM DUCHESS D'AOSTA

CHAPTER IX

MARGOT IN 1906 SUMS UP HER LIFE; A LOT OF LOVE-MAKING, A LITTLE

FAME AND MORE ABUSE: A REAL MAN AND GREAT HAPPINESS

MARGOT ASQUITH

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BOOK ONE

"Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid wooed by incapacity."--Blake.

CHAPTER I

THE TENNANT FAMILY--MARGOT, ONE OF TWELVE CHILDREN--HOME LIFE IN

GLEN, SCOTLAND--FATHER A SELF-CENTRED BUSINESS-MAN; HIS VANITIES;

HIS PRIDE IN HIS CHILDREN--NEWS OF HIS DEATH--HANDSOME LORD

RIBBLESDALE VISITS GLEN--MOTHER DELICATE; HER LOVE OF ECONOMY;

CONFIDENCES--TENNANT GIRLS' LOVE AFFAIRS

I was born in the country of Hogg and Scott between the Yarrow and

the Tweed, in the year 1864.

I am one of twelve children, but I only knew eight, as the others

died when I was young. My eldest sister Pauline--or Posie, as we

called her--was born in 1855 and married on my tenth birthday one

of the best of men, Thomas Gordon Duff. [Footnote: Thomas Gordon

Duff, of Drummuir Castle, Keith.] She died of tuberculosis, the

cruel disease by which my family have all been pursued. We were

too different in age and temperament to be really intimate, but

her goodness, patience and pluck made a deep impression on me.

My second sister, Charlotte, was born in 1858 and married, when I

was thirteen, the present Lord Ribblesdale, in 1877. She was the

only member of the family--except my brother Edward Glenconner--

who was tall. My mother attributed this--and her good looks--to

her wet-nurse, Janet Mercer, a mill-girl at Innerleithen, noted

for her height and beauty. Charty--as we called her--was in some

ways the most capable of us all, but she had not Laura's genius,

Lucy's talents, nor my understanding. She had wonderful grace and

less vanity than any one that ever lived; and her social courage

was a perpetual joy. I heard her say to the late Lord Rothschild,

one night at a dinner party:

"And do you still believe the Messiah is coming, Lord Natty?"

Once when her husband went to make a political speech in the

country, she telegraphed to him:

"Mind you hit below the belt!"

She was full of nature and impulse, free, enterprising and

unconcerned. She rode as well as I did, but was not so quick to

hounds nor so conscious of what was going on all round her.

One day when the Rifle Brigade was quartered at Winchester,

Ribblesdale--who was a captain--sent Charty out hunting with old

Tubb, the famous dealer, from whom he had hired her mount. As he

could not accompany her himself, he was anxious to know how her

ladyship had got on; the old rascal-wanting to sell his horse--

raised his eyes to heaven and gasped:

"Hornamental palings! My lord!!"

It was difficult to find a better-looking couple than Charty and

Ribblesdale; I have often observed people following them in

picture-galleries; and their photographs appeared in many of the

London shop-windows.

My next sister, Lucy, [Footnote: Mrs. Graham Smith, of Easton

Grey, Malmesbury.] was the most talented and the best educated of

the family. She fell between two stools in her youth, because

Charty and Posie were of an age to be companions and Laura and I;

consequently she did not enjoy the happy childhood that we did and

was mishandled by the authorities both in the nursery and the

schoolroom. When I was thirteen she made a foolish engagement, so

that our real intimacy only began after her marriage. She was my

mother's favourite child--which none of us resented--and, although

like my father in hospitality, courage and generous giving, she

had my mother's stubborn modesty and delicacy of mind. Her fear of

hurting the feelings of others was so great that she did not tell

people what she was thinking; she was truthful but not candid. Her

drawings--both in pastel and water-colour--her portraits,

landscapes and interiors were further removed from amateur work

than Laura's piano-playing or my dancing; and, had she put her

wares into the market, as we all wanted her to do years ago, she

would have been a rich woman, but like all saints she was

uninfluenceable. I owe her too much to write about her: tormented

by pain and crippled by arthritis, she has shown a heroism and

gaiety which command the love and respect of all who meet her.

Of my other sister, Laura, I will write later.

The boys of the family were different from the girls, though they

all had charm and an excellent sense of humour. My mother said the

difference between her boys and girls came from circulation, and

would add, "The Winsloes always had cold feet"; but I think it lay

in temper and temperament. They would have been less apprehensive

and more serene if they had been brought up to some settled

profession; and they were quite clever enough to do most things

well.

My brother Jack [Footnote: The Right Hon. H. J. Tennant] was

petted and mismanaged in his youth. He had a good figure, but his

height was arrested by his being allowed, when he was a little

fellow, to walk twelve to fifteen miles a day with the shooters;

and, however tired he would be, he was taken out of bed to play

billiards after dinner. Leather footstools were placed one on the

top of the other by a proud papa and the company made to watch

this lovely little boy score big breaks; excited and exhausted, he

would go to bed long after midnight, with praises singing in his

ears.

"You are more like lions than sisters!" he said one day in the

nursery when we snubbed him.

In making him his Parliamentary Secretary, my husband gave him his

first chance; and in spite of his early training and teasing he

turned his life to good account.

In the terrible years 1914, 1915 and 1916, he was Under-Secretary

for War to the late Lord Kitchener and was finally made Secretary

for Scotland, with a seat in the Cabinet. Like every Tennant, he

had tenderness and powers of emotion and showed much affection and

generosity to his family. He was a fine sportsman with an

exceptionally good eye for games.

My brother Frank [Footnote: Francis Tennant, of Innes.] was the

artist among the boys. He had a perfect ear for music and eye for

colour and could distinguish what was beautiful in everything he

saw. He had the sweetest temper of any of us and the most

humility.

In his youth he had a horrible tutor who showed him a great deal

of cruelty; and this retarded his development. One day at Glen, I

saw this man knock Frank down. Furious and indignant, I said, "You

brute!" and hit him over the head with both my fists. After he had

boxed my ears, Laura protested, saying she would tell my father,

whereupon he toppled her over on the floor and left the room.

When I think of our violent teachers--both tutors and governesses

--and what the brothers learnt at Eton, I am surprised that we knew

as much as we did and my parents' helplessness bewilders me.

My eldest brother, Eddy, [Footnote: Lord Glenconner, of Glen,

Innerleithen.] though very different from me in temperament and

outlook, was the one with whom I got on best. We were both

devoured by impatience and punctuality and loved being alone in

the country. He hated visiting, I enjoyed it; he detested society

and I delighted in it. My mother was not strong enough to take me

to balls; and as she was sixty-three the year I came out, Eddy was

by way of chaperoning me, but I can never remember him bringing me

back from a single party. We each had our latch-keys and I went

home either by myself or with a partner.

We shared a secret and passionate love for our home, Glen, and

knew every clump of heather and every birch and burn in the place.

Herbert Gladstone told me that, one day in India, when he and Eddy

after a long day's shooting were resting in silence on the ground,

he said to him:

"What are you thinking about, Eddy?"

To which he answered:

"Oh, always the same ... Glen! ..."

In all the nine years during which he and I lived there together,

in spite of our mutual irascibility of temper and uneven spirits,

we never had a quarrel. Whether we joined each other on the moor

at the far shepherd's cottage or waited for grouse upon the hill;

whether we lunched on the Quair or fished on the Tweed, we have a

thousand common memories to keep our hearts together.

My father [Footnote: Sir Charles Tennant, 1823-1906.] was a man

whose vitality, irritability, energy and impressionability

amounted to genius.

When he died, June 2nd, 1906, I wrote this in my diary:

"I was sitting in Elizabeth's [Footnote: My daughter, Elizabeth

Bibesco.] schoolroom at Littlestone yesterday--Whit-Monday--after

hearing her recite Tartuffe at 7 p.m., when James gave me a

telegram; it was from my stepmother:

"'Your father passed away peacefully at five this afternoon.'

"I covered my face with my hands and went to find my husband. My

father had been ill for some time, but, having had a letter from

him that morning, the news gave me a shock.

"Poor little Elizabeth was terribly upset at my unhappiness; and I

was moved to the heart by her saying with tear-filled eyes and a

white face:

"'Darling mother, he had a VERY happy life and is very happy now

... he will ALWAYS be happy.'

"This was true. ... He had been and always will be happy, because

my father's nature turned out no waste product: he had none of

that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He

took his own happiness with him, and was self-centred and self-

sufficing: for a sociable being, the most self-sufficing I have

ever known; I can think of no one of such vitality who was so

independent of other people; he could golf alone, play billiards

alone, walk alone, shoot alone, fish alone, do everything alone;

and yet he was dependent on both my mother and my stepmother and

on all occasions loved simple playfellows. ... Some one to carry

his clubs, or to wander round the garden with, would make him

perfectly happy. It was at these times, I think, that my father

was at his sweetest. Calm as a sky after showers, he would discuss

every topic with tenderness and interest and appeared to be

unupsettable; he had eternal youth, and was unaffected by a

financial world which had been spinning round him all day.

"The striking thing about him was his freedom from suspicion.

Thrown from his earliest days among common, shrewd men of

singularly unspiritual ideals--most of them not only on the make

but I might almost say on the pounce--he advanced on his own lines

rapidly and courageously, not at all secretively--almost

confidingly--yet he was rarely taken in.

"He knew his fellow-creatures better in the East-end than in the

West-end of London and had a talent for making men love him; he

swept them along on the impulse of his own decided intentions. He

was never too busy nor too prosperous to help the struggling and

was shocked by meanness or sharp practice, however successful.

"There were some people whom my father never understood, good,

generous and high-minded as he was: the fanatic with eyes turned

to no known order of things filled him with electric impatience;

he did not care for priests, poets or philosophers; anything like

indecision, change of plans, want of order, method or punctuality,

forgetfulness or carelessness--even hesitation of voice and

manner--drove him mad; his temperament was like a fuse which a

touch will explode, but the bomb did not kill, it hurt the

uninitiated but it consumed its own sparks. My papa had no self-

control, no possibility of learning it: it was an unknown science,

like geometry or algebra, to him; and he had very little

imagination. It was this combination--want of self-control and

want of imagination--which prevented him from being a thinker.

"He had great character, minute observation, a fine memory and all

his instincts were charged with almost superhuman vitality, but no

one could argue with him. Had the foundation of his character been

as unreasonable and unreliable as his temperament, he would have

made neither friends nor money; but he was fundamentally sound,

ultimately serene and high-minded in the truest sense of the word.

He was a man of intellect, but not an intellectual man; he did not

really know anything about the great writers or thinkers, although

he had read odds and ends. He was essentially a man of action and

a man of will; this is why I call him a man of intellect. He made

up his mind in a flash, partly from instinct and partly from will.

"He had the courage for life and the enterprise to spend his

fortune on it. He was kind and impulsively generous, but too hasty

for disease to accost or death to delay. For him they were

interruptions, not abiding sorrows.

"He knew nothing of rancour, remorse, regret; they conveyed much

the same to him as if he had been told to walk backwards and

received neither sympathy nor courtesy from him.

"He was an artist with the gift of admiration. He had a good eye

and could not buy an ugly or even moderately beautiful thing; but

he was no discoverer in art. Here I will add to make myself clear

that I am thinking of men like Frances Horner's father, old Mr.

Graham, [Footnote: Lady Horner, of Mells, Frome.] who discovered

and promoted Burne-Jones and Frederick Walker; or Lord Battersea,

who was the first to patronise Cecil Lawson; or my sister, Lucy

Graham Smith, who was a fine judge of every picture and recognised

and appreciated all schools of painting. My father's judgment was

warped by constantly comparing his own things with other people's.

"The pride of possession and proprietorship is a common and a

human one, but the real artist makes everything he admires his

own: no one can rob him of this; he sees value in unsigned

pictures and promise in unfinished ones; he not only discovers and

interprets, but almost creates beauty by the fire of his

criticisms and the inwardness of his preception. Papa was too

self-centred for this; a large side of art was hidden from him;

anything mysterious, suggestive, archaic, whether Italian, Spanish

or Dutch, frankly bored him. His feet were planted firmly on a

very healthy earth; he liked art to be a copy of nature, not of

art. The modern Burne-Jones and Morris school, with what he

considered its artificiality and affectations, he could not

endure. He did not realise that it originated in a reaction from

early-Victorianism and mid-Victorianism. He lost sight of much

that is beautiful in colour and fancy and all the drawing and

refinement of this school, by his violent prejudices. His opinions

were obsessions. Where he was original was not so much in his

pictures but in the mezzotints, silver, china and objets d'art

which he had collected for many years.

"Whatever he chose, whether it was a little owl, a dog, a nigger,

a bust, a Cupid in gold, bronze, china or enamel, it had to have

some human meaning, some recognisable expression which made it

lovable and familiar to him. He did not care for the fantastic,

the tortured or the ecclesiastical; saints, virgins, draperies and

crucifixes left him cold; but an old English chest, a stout little

chair or a healthy oriental bottle would appeal to him at once.

"No one enjoyed his own possessions more naively and

enthusiastically than my father; he would often take a candle and

walk round the pictures in his dressing-gown on his way to bed,

loitering over them with tenderness--I might almost say emotion.

"When I was alone with him, tucked up reading on a sofa, he would

send me upstairs to look at the Sir Joshuas: Lady Gertrude

Fitz-Patrick, Lady Crosbie or Miss Ridge.

"'She is quite beautiful to-night,' he would say. 'Just run up to

the drawing-room, Margot, and have a look at her.'

"It was not only his collections that he was proud of, but he was

proud of his children; we could all do things better than any one

else! Posie could sing, Lucy could draw, Laura could play, I could

ride, etc.; our praises were stuffed down newcomers' throats till

every one felt uncomfortable. I have no want of love to add to my

grief at his death, but I much regret my impatience and lack of

grace with him.

"He sometimes introduced me with emotional pride to the same man

or woman two or three times in one evening:

"'This is my little girl--very clever, etc., etc. Colonel

Kingscote says she goes harder across country than any one, etc.,

etc.'

"This exasperated me. Turning to my mother in the thick of the

guests that had gathered in our house one evening to hear a

professional singer, he said at the top of his voice while the

lady was being conducted to the piano:

"'Don't bother, my dear, I think every one would prefer to hear

Posie sing.'

"I well remember Laura and myself being admonished by him on our

returning from a party at the Cyril Flowers' in the year 1883,

where we had been considerably run by dear Papa and twice

introduced to Lord Granville. We showed such irritability going

home in the brougham that my father said:

"'It's no pleasure taking you girls out.'

"This was the only time I ever heard him cross with me.

"He always told us not to frown and to speak clearly, just as my

mother scolded us for not holding ourselves up. I can never

remember seeing him indifferent, slack or idle in his life. He was

as violent when he was dying as when he was living and quite

without self-pity.

"He hated presents, but he liked praise and was easily flattered;

he was too busy even for MUCH of that, but he could stand more

than most of us. If it is a little simple, it is also rather

generous to believe in the nicest things people can say to you;

and I think I would rather accept too much than repudiate and

refuse: it is warmer and more enriching.

"My father had not the smallest conceit or smugness, but he had a

little child-like vanity. You could not spoil him nor improve him;

he remained egotistical, sound, sunny and unreasonable; violently

impatient, not at all self-indulgent--despising the very idea of a

valet or a secretary--but absolutely self-willed; what he intended

to do, say or buy, he would do, say or buy AT ONCE.

"He was fond of a few people--Mark Napier, [Footnote: The Hon.

Mark Napier, of Ettrick.] Ribblesdale, Lord Haldane, Mr.

Heseltine, Lord Rosebery and Arthur Balfour--and felt friendly to

everybody, but he did not LOVE many people. When we were girls he

told us we ought to make worldly marriages, but in the end he let

us choose the men we loved and gave us the material help in money

which enabled us to marry them. I find exactly the opposite plan

adopted by most parents: they sacrifice their children to loveless

marriages as long as they know there is enough money for no demand

ever to be made upon themselves.

"I think I understood my father better than the others did. I

guessed his mood in a moment and in consequence could push further

and say more to him when he was in a good humour. I lived with

him, my mother and Eddy alone for nine years (after my sister

Laura married) and had a closer personal experience of him. He

liked my adventurous nature. Ribblesdale's [Footnote: Lord

Ribblesdale, of Gisburne.] courtesy and sweetness delighted him

and they were genuinely fond of each other. He said once to me of

him:

"'Tommy is one of the few people in the world that have shown me

gratitude.'"

I cannot pass my brother-in-law's name here in my diary without

some reference to the effect which he produced on us when he first

came to Glen.

He was the finest-looking man that I ever saw, except old Lord

Wemyss, [Footnote: The Earl of Wemyss and March, father of the

present Earl.] the late Lord Pembroke, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and Lord

D'Abernon. He had been introduced to my sister Charty at a ball in

London, when he was twenty-one and she eighteen. A brother-officer

of his in the Rifle Brigade, seeing them waltzing together, asked

him if she was his sister, to which he answered:

"No, thank God!"

I was twelve when he first came to Glen as Thomas Lister: his fine

manners, perfect sense of humour and picturesque appearance

captivated every one; and, whether you agreed with him or not, he

had a perfectly original point of view and was always interested

and suggestive. He never misunderstood but thoroughly appreciated

my father. ...

Continuing from my diary:

"My papa was a character-part; and some people never understood

character-parts.

"None of his children are really like him; yet there are

resemblances which are interesting and worth noting.

"Charty on the whole resembles him most. She has his transparent

simplicity, candour, courage laid want of self-control; but she is

the least selfish woman I know and the least self-centred. She is

also more intolerant and merciless in her criticisms of other

people, and has a finer sense of humour. Papa loved things of good

report and never believed evil of any one. He had a rooted

objection to talking lightly of other people's lives; he was not

exactly reverent, but a feeling of kindly decent citizenship

prevented him from thinking or speaking slightingly of other

people.

"Lucy has Papa's artistic and generous side, but none of his self-

confidence or decisiveness; all his physical courage, but none of

his ambition.

"Eddy has his figure and deportment, his sense of justice and

emotional tenderness, but none of his vitality, impulse or hope.

Jack has his ambition and push, keenness and self-confidence; but

he is not so good-humoured in a losing game. Frank has more of his

straight tongue and appreciation of beautiful things, but none of

his brains.

"I think I had more of Papa's moral indignation and daring than

the others; and physically there were great resemblances between

us: otherwise I do not think I am like him. I have his carriage,

balance and activity--being able to dance, skip and walk on a

rope--and I have inherited his hair and sleeplessness, nerves and

impatience; but intellectually we look at things from an entirely

different point of view. I am more passionate, more spiritually

perplexed and less self-satisfied. I have none of his powers of

throwing things off. I should like to think I have a little of his

generosity, humanity and kindly toleration, some of his

fundamental uprightness and integrity, but when everything has

been said he will remain a unique man in people's memory."

Writing now, fourteen years later, I do not think that I can add

much to this.

Although he was a business man, he had a wide understanding and

considerable elasticity.

In connection with business men, the staggering figures published

in the official White Book of November last year showed that the

result of including them in the Government has been so remarkable

that my memoir would be incomplete if I did not allude to them. My

father and grandfather were brought up among City people and I am

proud of it; but it is folly to suppose that starting and

developing a great business is the same as initiating and

conducting a great policy, or running a big Government Department.

It has been and will remain a puzzle over which intellectual men

are perpetually if not permanently groping:

"How comes it that Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown made such a vast

fortune?"

The answer is not easy. Making money requires FLAIR, instinct,

insight or whatever you like to call it, but the qualities that go

to make a business man are grotesquely unlike those which make a

statesman; and, when you have pretensions to both, the result is

the present comedy and confusion.

I write as the daughter of a business man and the wife of a

politician and I know what I am talking about, but, in case Mr.

Bonar Law--a pathetic believer in the "business man"--should

honour me by reading these pages and still cling to his illusions

on the subject, I refer him to the figures published in the

Government White Book of 1919.

Intellectual men seldom make fortunes and business men are seldom

intellectual.

My father was educated in Liverpool and worked in a night school;

he was a good linguist, which he would never have been had he had

the misfortune to be educated in any of our great public schools.

I remember some one telling me how my grandfather had said that he

could not understand any man of sense bringing his son up as a

gentleman. In those days as in these, gentlemen were found and not

made, but the expression "bringing a man up as a gentleman" meant

bringing him up to be idle.

When my father gambled in the City, he took risks with his own

rather than other people's money. I heard him say to a South

African millionaire:

"You did not make your money out of mines, but out of mugs like

me, my dear fellow!"

A whole chapter might be devoted to stories about his adventures

in speculation, but I will give only one. As a young man he was

put by my grandfather into a firm in Liverpool and made L30,000 on

the French Bourse before he was twenty-four. On hearing of this,

his father wrote and apologised to the head of the firm, saying he

was willing to withdraw his son Charles if he had in any way

shocked them by risking a loss which he could never have paid. The

answer was a request that the said "son Charles" should become a

partner in the firm.

Born a little quicker, more punctual and more alive than other

people, he suffered fools not at all. He could not modify himself

in any way; he was the same man in his nursery, his school and his

office, the same man in church, club, city or suburbs.

[Footnote: My mother, Emma Winsloe, came of quite a different

class from my father. His ancestor of earliest memory was factor

to Lord Bute, whose ploughman was Robert Burns, the poet. His

grandson was my grandfather Tennant of St. Rollox. My mother's

family were of gentle blood. Richard Winsloe (b. 1770, d. 1842)

was rector of Minster Forrabury in Cornwall and of Ruishton, near

Taunton. He married Catherine Walter, daughter of the founder of

the Times. Their son, Richard Winsloe, was sent to Oxford to study

for the Church. He ran away with Charlotte Monkton, aged 17. They

were caught at Evesham and brought back to be married next day at

Taunton, where Admiral Monkton was living. They had two children:

Emma, our mother, and Richard, my uncle.]

My mother was more unlike my father than can easily be imagined.

She was as timid, as he was bold, as controlled as he was

spontaneous and as refined, courteous and unassuming as he was

vibrant, sheer and adventurous.

Fond as we were of each other and intimate over all my love-

affairs, my mother never really understood me; my vitality,

independent happiness and physical energies filled her with

fatigue. She never enjoyed her prosperity and suffered from all

the apprehension, fussiness and love of economy that should by

rights belong to the poor, but by a curious perversion almost

always blight the rich.

Her preachings on economy were a constant source of amusement to

my father. I made up my mind at an early age, after listening to

his chaff, that money was the most overrated of all anxieties; and

not only has nothing occurred in my long experience to make me

alter this opinion but everything has tended to reinforce it.

In discussing matrimony my father would say:

"I'm sure I hope, girls, you'll not marry penniless men; men

should not marry at all unless they can keep their wives,' etc.

To this my mother would retort:

"Do not listen to your father, children! Marrying for money has

never yet made any one happy; it is not blessed."

Mamma had no illusions about her children nor about anything else;

her mild criticisms of the family balanced my father's obsessions.

When Charty's looks were praised, she would answer with a fine

smile:

"Tant soit peu mouton!"

She thought us all very plain, how plain I only discovered by

overhearing the following conversation.

I was seventeen and, a few days after my return from Dresden, I

was writing behind the drawing room screen in London, when an

elderly Scotch lady came to see my mother; she was shown into the

room by the footman and after shaking hands said:

"What a handsome house this is. ..."

MY MOTHER (IRRELEVANTLY): "I always think your place is so nice.

Did your garden do well this year?"

ELDERLY LADY: "Oh, I'm not a gardener and we spend very little

time at Auchnagarroch; I took Alison to the Hydro at Crieff for a

change. She's just a growing girl, you know, and not at all clever

like yours."

MY MOTHER: "My girls never grow! I am sure I wish they would!"

ELDERLY LADY: "But they are so pretty! My Marion has a homely

face!"

MY MOTHER: "How old is she?"

ELDERLY LADY: "Sixteen."

MY MOTHER: "L'AGE INGRAT! I would not trouble myself, if I were

you, about her looks; with young people one never can tell;

Margot, for instance (with a resigned sigh), a few years ago

promised to be so pretty; and just look at her now!"

When some one suggested that we should be painted it was almost

more than my mother could bear. The poorness of the subject and

the richness of the price shocked her profoundly. Luckily my

father--who had begun to buy fine pictures--entirely agreed with

her, though not for the same reasons:

"I am sure I don't know where I could hang the girls, even if I

were fool enough to have them painted!" he would say.

I cannot ever remember kissing my mother without her tapping me on

the back and saying, "Hold yourself up!" or kissing my father

without his saying, "Don't frown!" And I shall never cease being

grateful for this, as a l'heure qu'il est I have not a line in my

forehead and my figure has not changed since my marriage.

My mother's indifference to--I might almost say suspicion of--

other people always amused me:

"I am sure I don't know why they should come here! unless it is to

see the garden!" Or, "I cannot help wondering what was at the back

of her mind."

When I suggested that perhaps the lady she referred to had no

mind, my mother would say, "I don't like people with ARRIERE--

PENSEES"; and ended most of her criticisms by saying, "It looks to

me as if she had a poor circulation."

My mother had an excellent sense of humour. Doll Liddell

[Footnote: The late A.G.C. Lidell.] said: "Lucy has a touch of

mild genius." And this is exactly what my mother had.

People thought her a calm, serene person, satisfied with pinching

green flies off plants and incapable of deep feeling, but my

mother's heart had been broken by the death of her first four

children, and she dreaded emotion. Any attempt on my part to

discuss old days or her own sensations was resolutely discouraged.

There was a lot of fun and affection but a tepid intimacy between

us, except about my flirtations; and over these we saw eye to eye.

My mother, who had been a great flirt herself, thoroughly enjoyed

all love-affairs and was absolutely unshockable. Little words of

wisdom would drop from her mouth:

MY MOTHER: "Men don't like being run after ..."

MARGOT: "Oh, don't you believe it, mamma!"

MY MOTHER: "You can do what you like in life if you can hold your

tongue, but the world is relentless to people who are found out."

She told my father that if he interfered with my love-affairs I

should very likely marry a groom.

She did me a good turn here, for, though I would not have married

a groom, I might have married the wrong man and, in any case,

interference would have been cramping to me.

I have copied out of my diary what I wrote about my mother when

she died.

"January 21st, 1895.

"Mamma is dead. She died this morning and Glen isn't my home any

more: I feel as if I should be 'received' here in future, instead

of finding my own darling, tender little mother, who wanted

arranging for and caring for and to whom my gossipy trivialities

were precious and all my love-stories a trust. How I WISH I could

say sincerely that I had understood her nature and sympathised

with her and never felt hurt by anything she could say and had

EAGERLY shown my love and sought hers. ... Lucky Lucy! She CAN say

this, but I do not think that I can.

"Mamma's life and death have taught me several things. Her

sincerity and absence of vanity and worldliness were her really

striking qualities. Her power of suffering passively, without

letting any one into her secret, was carried to a fault. We who

longed to share some part, however small, of the burden of her

emotion were not allowed to do so. This reserve to the last hour

of her life remained her inexorable rule and habit. It arose from

a wish to spare other people and fear of herself and her own

feelings. To spare others was her ideal. Another characteristic

was her pity for the obscure, the dull and the poor. The postman

in winter ought to have fur-lined gloves; and we must send our

Christmas letters and parcels before or after the busy days. Lord

Napier's [Footnote: Lord Napier and Ettrick, father of Mark

Napier.] coachman had never seen a comet; she would write and tell

him what day it was prophesied. The lame girl at the lodge must be

picked up in the brougham and taken for a drive, etc. ...

"She despised any one who was afraid of infection and was

singularly ignorant on questions of health; she knew little or

nothing of medicine and never believed in doctors; she made an

exception of Sir James Simpson, who was her friend. She told me

that he had said there was a great deal of nonsense talked about

health and diet:

"'If the fire is low, it does not matter whether you stir it with

the poker or the tongs.'

"She believed firmly in cold water and thought that most illnesses

came from 'checked perspiration.'

"She loved happy people--people with courage and go and what she

called 'nature'--and said many good things. Of Mark Napier: 'He

had so much nature, I am sure he had a Neapolitan wet-nurse' (here

she was right). Of Charty: 'She has so much social courage.' Of

Aunt Marion [Footnote: My father's sister, Mrs. Wallace.]: 'She is

unfortunately inferior.' Of Lucy's early friends: 'Lucy's trumpery

girls.'

"Mamma was not at all spiritual, nor had she much intellectual

imagination, but she believed firmly in God and was profoundly

sorry for those who did not. She was full of admiration for

religious people. Laura's prayer against high spirits she thought

so wonderful that she kept it in a book near her bed.

"She told me she had never had enough circulation to have good

spirits herself and that her old nurse often said:

"'No one should ever be surprised at anything they feel.'

"My mamma came of an unintellectual family and belonged to a

generation in which it was not the fashion to read. She had lived

in a small milieu most of her life, without the opportunity of

meeting distinguished people. She had great powers of observation

and a certain delicate acuteness of expression which identified

all she said with herself. She was fine-mouche and full of tender

humour, a woman of the world, but entirely bereft of worldliness.

"Her twelve children, who took up all her time, accounted for some

of her a quoi bon attitude towards life, but she had little or no

concentration and a feminine mind both in its purity and

inconsequence.

"My mother hardly had one intimate friend and never allowed any

one to feel necessary to her. Most people thought her gentle to

docility and full of quiet composure. So much is this the general

impression that, out of nearly a hundred letters which I received,

there is not one that does not allude to her restful nature. As a

matter of fact, Mamma was one of the most restless creatures that

ever lived. She moved from room to room, table to table, and topic

to topic, not, it is true, with haste or fretfulness, but with no

concentration of either thought or purpose; and I never saw her

put up her feet in my life.

"Her want of confidence in herself and of grip upon life prevented

her from having the influence which her experience of the world

and real insight might have given her; and her want of expansion

prevented her own generation and discouraged ours from approaching

her closely.

"Few women have speculative minds nor can they deliberate: they

have instincts, quick apprehensions and powers of observation; but

they are seldom imaginative and neither their logic nor their

reason are their strong points. Mamma was in all these ways like

the rest of her sex.

"She had much affection for, but hardly any pride in her children.

Laura's genius was a phrase to her; and any praise of Charty's

looks or Lucy's successes she took as mere courtesy on the part of

the speaker. I can never remember her praising me, except to say

that I had social courage, nor did she ever encourage me to draw,

write or play the piano.

"She marked in a French translation of "The Imitation of Christ"

which Lucy gave her:

"'Certes au jour du jugement on ne nous demandera point ce que

nous avons lu, mais ce que nous avons fait; ni si nous avons bien

parle mais si nous avons bien vecu.'

"She was the least self-centred and self-scanned of human beings,

unworldly and uncomplaining. As Doll Liddell says in his admirable

letter to me, 'She was often wise and always gracious.'"

CHAPTER II

GLEN AMONG THE MOORS--MARGOT'S ADVENTURE WITH A TRAMP--THE

SHEPHERD BOY--MEMORIES AND ESCAPADES--LAURA AND MARGOT; PROPOSALS

OF MARRIAGE--NEW MEN FRIENDS--LAURA ENGAGED; PROPOSAL IN THE

DUSK--MARGOT'S ACCIDENT IN HUNTING FIELD--LAURA'S PREMONITION OF

DEATH IN CHILD-BIRTH--LAURA'S WILL

My home, Glen, is on the border of Peeblesshire and Selkirkshire,

sixteen miles from Abbotsford and thirty from Edinburgh. It was

designed on the lines of Glamis and Castle Fraser, in what is

called Scottish baronial style. I well remember the first shock I

had when some one said: "I hate turrets and tin men on the top of

them!" It unsettled me for days. I had never imagined that

anything could be more beautiful than Glen. The classical style of

Whittingehame--and other fine places of the sort--appeared to me

better suited for municipal buildings; the beams and flint in

Cheshire reminded me of Earl's Court; and such castles as I had

seen looked like the pictures of the Rhine on my blotting-book. I

was quite ignorant and "Scottish baronial" thrilled me.

What made Glen really unique was not its architecture but its

situation. The road by which you approached it was a cul-de-sac

and led to nothing but moors. This--and the fact of its being ten

miles from a railway station--gave it security in its wildness.

Great stretches of heather swept down to the garden walls; and,

however many heights you climbed, moor upon moor rose in front of

you.

Evan Charteris [Footnote: The Hon. Evan Charteris] said that my

hair was biography: as it is my only claim to beauty, I would like

to think that this is true, but the hills at Glen are my real

biography.

Nature inoculates its lovers from its own culture; sea, downs and

moors produce a different type of person. Shepherds, fishermen and

poachers are a little like what they contemplate and, were it

possible to ask the towns to tell us whom they find most

untamable, I have not a doubt that they would say, those who are

born on the moors.

I married late--at the age of thirty--and spent all my early life

at Glen. I was a child of the heather and quite untamable. After

my sister Laura Lyttelton died, my brother Eddy and I lived alone

with my parents for nine years at Glen.

When he was abroad shooting big game, I spent long days out of

doors, seldom coming in for lunch. Both my pony and my hack were

saddled from 7 a.m., ready for me to ride, every day of my life. I

wore the shortest of tweed skirts, knickerbockers of the same

stuff, top-boots, a covert-coat and a coloured scarf round my

head. I was equipped with a book, pencils, cigarettes and food.

Every shepherd and poacher knew me; and I have often shared my

"piece" with them, sitting in the heather near the red burns, or

sheltered from rain in the cuts and quarries of the open road.

After my first great sorrow--the death of my sister Laura--I was

suffocated in the house and felt I had to be out of doors from

morning till night.

One day I saw an old shepherd called Gowanlock coming up to me,

holding my pony by the rein. I had never noticed that it had

strayed away and, after thanking him, I observed him looking at me

quietly--he knew something of the rage and anguish that Laura's

death had brought into my heart--and putting his hand on my

shoulder, he said:

"My child, there's no contending. ... Ay--ay"--shaking his

beautiful old head--"THAT IS SO, there's no contending. ..."

Another day, when it came on to rain, I saw a tramp crouching

under the dyke, holding an umbrella over his head and eating his

lunch. I went and sat down beside him and we fell into desultory

conversation. He had a grand, wild face and I felt some curiosity

about him; but he was taciturn and all he told me was that he was

walking to the Gordon Arms, on his way to St. Mary's Loch. I asked

him every sort of question--as to where he had come from, where he

was going to and what he wanted to do--but he refused to gratify

my curiosity, so I gave him one of my cigarettes and a light and

we sat peacefully smoking together in silence. When the rain

cleared, I turned to him and said:

"You seem to walk all day and go nowhere; when you wake up in the

morning, how do you shape your course?"

To which he answered:

"I always turn my back to the wind."

Border people are more intelligent than those born in the South;

and the people of my birthplace are a hundred years in advance of

the Southern English even now.

When I was fourteen, I met a shepherd-boy reading a French book.

It was called "Le Secret de Delphine." I asked him how he came to

know French and he told me it was the extra subject he had been

allowed to choose for studying in his holidays; he walked eighteen

miles a day to school--nine there and nine back--taking his

chance of a lift from any passing vehicle. I begged him to read

out loud to me, but he was shy of his accent and would not do it.

The Lowland Scotch were a wonderful people in my day.

I remember nothing unhappy in my glorious youth except the

violence of our family quarrels. Reckless waves of high and low

spirits, added to quick tempers, obliged my mother to separate us

for some time and forbid us to sleep in the same bedroom. We raged

and ragged till the small hours of the morning, which kept us thin

and the household awake.

My mother told me two stories of myself as a little child:

"When you were sent for to come downstairs, Margot, the nurse

opened the door and you walked in--generally alone--saying,

'Here's me! ...'"

This rather sanguine opening does not seem to have been

sufficiently checked. She went on to say:

"I was dreadfully afraid you would be upset and ill when I took

you one day to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum in Glasgow, as you felt

things with passionate intensity. Before starting I lifted you on

to my knee and said, 'You know, darling, I am going to take you to

see some poor people who cannot speak.' At which you put your arms

round my neck and said, with consoling emphasis, 'I will soon make

them speak!'"

The earliest event I can remember was the arrival of the new baby,

my brother Jack, when I was two years old. Dr. Cox was spoiling my

mother's good-night visit while I was being dried after my bath.

My pink flannel dressing-gown, with white buttonhole stitching,

was hanging over the fender; and he was discussing some earnest

subject in a low tone. He got up and, pinching my chin said:

"She will be very angry, but we will give her a baby of her own,"

or words to that effect.

The next day a huge doll obliterated from my mind the new baby

which had arrived that morning.

We were left very much alone in our nursery, as my mother

travelled from pillar to post, hunting for health for her child

Pauline. Our nurse, Mrs. Hills--called "Missuls" for short--left

us on my tenth birthday to become my sister's lady's-maid, and

this removed our first and last restriction.

We were wild children and, left to ourselves, had the time of our

lives. I rode my pony up the front stairs and tried to teach my

father's high-stepping barouche-horses to jump--crashing their

knees into the hurdles in the field--and climbed our incredibly

dangerous roof, sitting on the sweep's ladder by moonlight in my

nightgown. I had scrambled up every tree, walked on every wall and

knew every turret at Glen. I ran along the narrow ledges of the

slates in rubber shoes at terrific heights. This alarmed other

people so much that my father sent for me one day to see him in

his "business room" and made me swear before God that I would give

up walking on the roof; and give it up I did, with many tears.

Laura and I were fond of acting and dressing up. We played at

being found in dangerous and adventurous circumstances in the

garden. One day the boys were rabbit-shooting and we were acting

with the doctor's daughter. I had spoilt the game by running round

the kitchen-garden wall instead of being discovered--as I was

meant to be--in a Turkish turban, smoking on the banks of the

Bosphorus. Seeing that things were going badly and that the others

had disappeared, I took a wild jump into the radishes. On landing

I observed a strange gentleman coming up the path. He looked at my

torn gingham frock, naked legs, tennis shoes and dishevelled curls

under an orange turban; and I stood still and gazed at him.

"This is a wonderful place," he said; to which I replied:

"You like it?"

HE: "I would like to see the house. I hear there are beautiful

things in it."

MARGOT: "I think the drawing-rooms are all shut up."

HE: "How do you know? Surely you could manage to get hold of a

servant or some one who would take me round. Do you know any of

them?"

I asked him if he meant the family or the servants.

"The family," he said.

MARGOT: "I know them very well, but I don't know you."

"I am an artist," said the stranger; "my name is Peter Graham. Who

are you?"

"I am an artist too!" I said. "My name is Margot Tennant. I

suppose you thought I was the gardener's daughter, did you?"

He gave a circulating smile, finishing on my turban, and said:

"To tell you the honest truth, I had no idea what you were!"

My earliest sorrow was when I was stealing peaches in the

conservatory and my little dog was caught in a trap set for rats.

He was badly hurt before I could squeeze under the glass slides to

save him. I was betrayed by my screams for help and caught in the

peach-house by the gardener. I was punished and put to bed, as the

large peaches were to have been shown in Edinburgh and I had eaten

five.

We had a dancing-class at the minister's and an arithmetic-class

in our schoolroom. I was as good at the Manse as I was bad at my

sums; and poor Mr. Menzies, the Traquair schoolmaster, had

eventually to beg my mother to withdraw me from the class, as I

kept them all back. To my delight I was withdrawn; and from that

day to this I have never added a single row of figures.

I showed a remarkable proficiency in dancing and could lift both

my feet to the level of my eyebrows with disconcerting ease. Mrs.

Wallace, the minister's wife, was shocked and said:

"Look at Margot with her Frenchified airs!"

I pondered often and long over this, the first remark about myself

that I can ever remember. Some one said to me:

"Does your hair curl naturally?"

To which I replied:

"I don't know, but I will ask."

I was unaware of myself and had not the slightest idea what

"curling naturally" meant.

We had two best dresses: one made in London, which we only wore on

great occasions; the other made by my nurse, in which we went down

to dessert. These dresses gave me my first impression of civilised

life. Just as the Speaker, before clearing the House, spies

strangers, so, when I saw my black velvet skirt and pink Garibaldi

put out on the bed, I knew that something was up! The nursery

confection was of white alpaca, piped with pink, and did not

inspire the same excitement and confidence.

We saw little of our mother in our youth and I asked Laura one day

if she thought she said her prayers; I would not have remembered

this had it not been that Laura was profoundly shocked. The

question was quite uncalled for and had no ulterior motive, but I

never remembered my mother or any one else talking to us about the

Bible or hearing us our prayers. Nevertheless we were all deeply

religious, by which no one need infer that we were good. There was

one service a week, held on Sundays, in Traquair Kirk, which every

one went to; and the shepherds' dogs kept close to their masters'

plaids, hung over the high box-pews, all the way down the aisle. I

have heard many fine sermons in Scotland, but our minister was not

a good preacher; and we were often dissolved in laughter, sitting

in the square family pew in the gallery. My father closed his eyes

tightly all through the sermon, leaning his head on his hand.

The Scottish Sabbath still held its own in my youth; and when I

heard that Ribblesdale and Charty played lawn tennis on Sunday

after they were married, I felt very unhappy. We had a few Sabbath

amusements, but they were not as entertaining as those described

in Miss Fowler's book, in which the men who were heathens went

into one corner of the room and the women who were Christians into

the other and, at the beating of a gong, conversion was

accomplished by a close embrace. Our Scottish Sabbaths were very

different, and I thought them more than dreary. Although I love

church music and architecture and can listen to almost any sermon

at any time and even read sermons to myself, going to church in

the country remains a sacrifice to me. The painful custom in the

Church of England of reading indistinctly and in an assumed voice

has alienated simple people in every parish; and the average

preaching is painful. In my country you can still hear a good

sermon. When staying with Lord Haldane's mother--the most

beautiful, humorous and saintly of old ladies--I heard an

excellent sermon at Auchterarder on this very subject, the

dullness of Sundays. The minister said that, however brightly the

sun shone on stained glass windows, no one could guess what they

were really like from the outside; it was from the inside only

that you should judge of them.

Another time I heard a man end his sermon by saying:

"And now, my friends, do your duty and don't look upon the world

with eyes jaundiced by religion."

My mother hardly ever mentioned religion to us and, when the

subject was brought up by other people, she confined her remarks

to saying in a weary voice and with a resigned sigh that God's

ways were mysterious. She had suffered many sorrows and, in

estimating her lack of temperament, I do not think I made enough

allowance for them. No true woman ever gets over the loss of a

child; and her three eldest had died before I was born.

I was the most vital of the family and what the nurses described

as a "venturesome child." Our coachman's wife called me "a little

Turk." Self-willed, excessively passionate, painfully truthful,

bold as well as fearless and always against convention, I was, no

doubt, extremely difficult to bring up.

My mother was not lucky with her governesses--we had two at a

time, and of every nationality, French, German, Swiss, Italian and

Greek--but, whether through my fault or our governesses', I never

succeeded in making one of them really love me. Mary Morison,

[Foot note: Miss Morison, a cousin of Mr. William Archer's.] who

kept a high school for young ladies in Innerleithen, was the first

person who influenced me and my sister Laura. She is alive now and

a woman of rare intellect and character. She was fonder of Laura

than of me, but so were most people.

Here I would like to say something about my sister and Alfred

Lyttelton, whom she married in 1885.

A great deal of nonsense has been written and talked about Laura.

There are two printed accounts of her that are true: one has been

written by the present Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, in generous and

tender passages in the life of her husband, and the other by A. G.

C. Liddell; but even these do not quite give the brilliant, witty

Laura of my heart. I will quote what my dear friend, Doll Liddell,

wrote of her in his Notes from the Life of an Ordinary Mortal:

My acquaintance with Miss Tennant, which led to a close intimacy

with herself, and afterwards with her family, was an event of such

importance in my life that I feel I ought to attempt some

description of her. This is not an easy task, as a more

indescribable person never existed, for no one could form a

correct idea of what she was like who had not had opportunities of

feeling her personal charm. Her looks were certainly not striking

at first sight, though to most persons who had known her some

weeks she would often seem almost beautiful. To describe her

features would give no idea of the brightness and vivacity of her

expression, or of that mixture of innocence and mischief, as of a

half-child, half-Kelpie, which distinguished her. Her figure was

very small but well made, and she was always prettily and daintily

dressed. If the outward woman is difficult to describe, what can

be said of her character?

To begin with her lighter side, she had reduced fascination to a

fine art in a style entirely her own. I have never known her meet

any man, and hardly any woman, whom she could not subjugate in a

few days. It is as difficult to give any idea of her methods as to

describe a dance when the music is unheard. Perhaps one may say

that her special characteristic was the way in which she combined

the gaiety of a child with the tact and aplomb of a grown woman.

... Her victims, after their period of enchantment, generally

became her devoted friends.

This trifling was, however, only the ripple on the surface. In the

deeper parts of her nature was a fund of earnestness and a

sympathy which enabled her to throw herself into the lives of

other people in a quite unusual way, and was one of the great

secrets of the general affection she inspired. It was not,

however, as is sometimes the case with such feelings, merely

emotional, but impelled her to many kindnesses and to constant,

though perhaps somewhat impulsive, efforts to help her fellows of

all sorts and conditions.

On her mental side she certainly gave the impression, from the

originality of her letters and sayings, and her appreciation of

what was best in literature, that her gifts were of a high order.

In addition, she had a subtle humour and readiness, which made her

repartees often delightful and produced phrases and fancies of

characteristic daintiness. But there was something more than all

this, an extra dose of life, which caused a kind of electricity to

flash about her wherever she went, lighting up all with whom she

came in contact. I am aware that this description will seem

exaggerated, and will be put down to the writer having dwelt in

her "Aeaean isle" but I think that if it should meet the eyes of

any who knew her in her short life, they will understand what it

attempts to convey.

This is good, but his poem is even better; and there is a

prophetic touch in the line, "Shadowed with something of the

future years."

A face upturned towards the midnight sky,

Pale in the glimmer of the pale starlight,

And all around the black and boundless night,

And voices of the winds which bode and cry.

A childish face, but grave with curves that lie

Ready to breathe in laughter or in tears,

Shadowed with something of the future years

That makes one sorrowful, I know not why.

O still, small face, like a white petal torn

From a wild rose by autumn winds and flung

On some dark stream the hurrying waves among:

By what strange fates and whither art thou borne?

Laura had many poems written to her from many lovers. My daughter

Elizabeth Bibesco's godfather, Godfrey Webb--a conspicuous member

of the Souls, not long since dead--wrote this of her:

"HALF CHILD, HALF WOMAN."

Tennyson's description of Laura in 1883:

"Half child, half woman"--wholly to be loved

By either name she found an easy way

Into my heart, whose sentinels all proved

Unfaithful to their trust, the luckless day

She entered there. "Prudence and reason both!

Did you not question her? How was it pray

She so persuaded you?" "Nor sleep nor sloth,"

They cried, "o'ercame us then, a CHILD at play

Went smiling past us, and then turning round

Too late your heart to save, a woman's face we found."

Laura was not a plaster saint; she was a generous, clamative,

combative little creature of genius, full of humour, imagination,

temperament and impulse.

Some one reading this memoir will perhaps say:

"I wonder what Laura and Margot were really like, what the

differences and what the resemblances between them were."

The men who could answer this question best would be Lord

Gladstone, Arthur Balfour, Lord Midleton, Sir Rennell Rodd, or

Lord Curzon (of Kedleston). I can only say what I think the

differences and resemblances were.

Strictly speaking, I was better-looking than Laura, but she had

rarer and more beautiful eyes. Brains are such a small part of

people that I cannot judge of them as between her and me; and, at

the age of twenty-three, when she died, few of us are at the

height of our powers, but Laura made and left a deeper impression

on the world in her short life than any one that I have ever

known. What she really had to a greater degree than other people

was true spirituality, a feeling of intimacy with the other world

and a sense of the love and wisdom of God and His plan of life.

Her mind was informed by true religion; and her heart was fixed.

This did not prevent her from being a very great flirt. The first

time that a man came to Glen and liked me better than Laura, she

was immensely surprised--not more so than I was--and had it not

been for the passionate love which we cherished for each other,

there must inevitably have been much jealousy between us.

On several occasions the same man proposed to both of us, and we

had to find out from each other what our intentions were.

I only remember being hurt by Laura on one occasion and it came

about in this way. We were always dressed alike, and as we were

the same size; "M" and "L" had to be written in our clothes as we

grew older.

One day, about the time of which I am writing, I was thirteen; I

took a letter out of the pocket of what I thought was my skirt and

read it; it was from Laura to my eldest sister Posie and, though I

do not remember it all, one sentence was burnt into me:

"Does it not seem extraordinary that Margot should be teaching a

Sunday class?"

I wondered why any one should think it extraordinary! I went

upstairs and cried in a small black cupboard, where I generally

disappeared when life seemed too much for me.

The Sunday class I taught need have disturbed no one, for I regret

to relate that, after a striking lesson on the birth of Christ,

when I asked my pupils who the Virgin was, one of the most

promising said:

"Queen Victoria!"

The idea had evidently gone abroad that I was a frivolous

character; this hurt and surprised me. Naughtiness and frivolity

are different, and I was always deeply in earnest.

Laura was more gentle than I was; and her goodness resolved itself

into greater activity.

She and I belonged to a reading-class. I read more than she did

and at greater speed, but we were all readers and profited by a

climate which kept us indoors and a fine library. The class

obliged us to read an hour a day, which could not be called

excessive, but the real test was doing the same thing at the same

time. I would have preferred three or four hours' reading on wet

days and none on fine, But not so our Edinburgh tutor.

Laura started the Girls' Friendly Society in the village, which

was at that time famous for its drunkenness and immorality. We

drove ourselves to the meetings in a high two-wheeled dog-cart

behind a fast trotter, coming back late in pitch darkness along

icy roads. These drives to Innerleithen and our moonlight talks

are among my most precious recollections.

At the meetings--after reading aloud to the girls while they sewed

and knitted--Laura would address them. She gave a sort of lesson,

moral, social and religious, and they all adored her. More

remarkable at her age than speaking to mill-girls were her Sunday

classes at Glen, in the housekeeper's room. I do not know one girl

now of any age--Laura was only sixteen--who could talk on

religious subjects with profit to the butler, housekeeper and

maids, or to any grown-up people, on a Sunday afternoon.

Compared with what the young men have written and published during

this war, Laura's literary promise was not great; both her prose

and her poetry were less remarkable than her conversation.

She was not so good a judge of character as I was and took many a

goose for a swan, but, in consequence of this, she made people of

both sexes--and even all ages--twice as good, clever and

delightful as they would otherwise have been.

I have never succeeded in making any one the least different from

what they are and, in my efforts to do so, have lost every female

friend that I have ever had (with the exception of four). This was

the true difference between us. I have never influenced anybody

but my own two children, Elizabeth and Anthony, but Laura had such

an amazing effect upon men and women that for years after she died

they told me that she had both changed and made their lives. This

is a tremendous saying. When I die, people may turn up and try to

make the world believe that I have influenced them and women may

come forward whom I adored and who have quarrelled with me and

pretend that they always loved me, but I wish to put it on record

that they did not, or, if they did, their love is not my kind of

love and I have no use for it.

The fact is that I am not touchy or impenitent myself and forget

that others may be and I tell people the truth about themselves,

while Laura made them feel it. I do not think I should mind

hearing from any one the naked truth about myself; and on the few

occasions when it has happened to me, I have not been in the least

offended. My chief complaint is that so few love one enough, as

one grows older, to say what they really think; nevertheless I

have often wished that I had been born with Laura's skill and tact

in dealing with men and women. In her short life she influenced

more people than I have done in over twice as many years. I have

never influenced people even enough to make them change their

stockings! And I have never succeeded in persuading any young

persons under my charge--except my own two children--to say that

they were wrong or sorry, nor at this time of life do I expect to

do so.

There was another difference between Laura and me: she felt sad

when she refused the men who proposed to her; I pitied no man who

loved me. I told Laura that both her lovers and mine had a very

good chance of getting over it, as they invariably declared

themselves too soon. We were neither of us au fond very

susceptible. It was the custom of the house that men should be in

love with us, but I can truly say that we gave quite as much as we

received.

I said to Rowley Leigh [Footnote: The Hon. Rowland Leigh, of

Stoneleigh Abbey.]--a friend of my brother Eddy's and one of the

first gentlemen that ever came to Glen--when he begged me to go

for a walk with him:

"Certainly, if you won't ask me to marry you."

To which he replied:

"I never thought of it!"

"That's all right!" said I, putting my arm confidingly and

gratefully through his.

He told me afterwards that he had been making up his mind and

changing it for days as to how he should propose.

Sir David Tennant, a former Speaker at Cape Town and the most

distant of cousins, came to stay at Glen with his son, a young man

of twenty. After a few days, the young man took me into one of the

conservatories and asked me to marry him. I pointed out that I

hardly knew him by sight, and that "he was running hares." He took

it extremely well and, much elated, I returned to the house to

tell Laura. I found her in tears; she told me Sir David Tennant

had asked her to marry him and she had been obliged to refuse. I

cheered her up by pointing out that it would have been awkward had

we both accepted, for, while remaining my sister, she would have

become my mother-in-law and my husband's stepmother.

We were not popular in Peeblesshire, partly because we had no

county connection, but chiefly because we were Liberals. My father

had turned out the sitting Tory, Sir Graham Montgomery, of Stobo,

and was member for the two counties Peeblesshire and Selkirkshire.

As Sir Graham had represented the counties for thirty years, this

was resented by the Montgomery family, who proceeded to cut us.

Laura was much worried over this, but I was amused. I said the

love of the Maxwell Stuarts, Maxwell Scotts, Wolfe Murrays and Sir

Thomas--now Lord--Carmichael was quite enough for me and that if

she liked she could twist Sir Graham Montgomery round her little

finger; as a matter of fact, neither Sir Graham nor his sons

disliked us. I met Basil Montgomery at Traquair House many years

after my papa's election, where we were entertained by Herbert

Maxwell--the owner of one of the most romantic houses in Scotland,

and our most courteous and affectionate neighbour. Not knowing who

he was, I was indignant when he told me he thought Peeblesshire

was dull; I said where we lived it was far from dull and asked him

if he knew many people in the county. To which he answered:

"Chiefly the Stobo lot."

At this I showed him the most lively sympathy and invited him to

come to Glen. In consequence of this visit he told me years

afterwards his fortune had been made. My father took a fancy to

him and at my request employed him on the Stock Exchange.

Laura and I shared the night nursery together till she married;

and, in spite of mixed proposals, we were devoted friends. We read

late in bed, sometimes till three in the morning, and said our

prayers out loud to each other every night. We were discussing

imagination one night and were comparing Hawthorne, De Quincey,

Poe and others, in consequence of a dispute arising out of one of

our pencil-games; and we argued till the housemaid came in with

the hot water at eight in the morning.

I will digress here to explain our after-dinner games. There were

several, but the best were what Laura and I invented: one was

called "Styles," another "Clumps"--better known as "Animal,

Vegetable or Mineral"--a third, "Epigrams" and the most dangerous

of all "Character Sketches." We were given no time-limit, but sat

feverishly silent in different corners of the room, writing as

hard as we could. When it was agreed that we had all written

enough, the manuscripts were given to our umpire, who read them

out loud. Votes were then taken as to the authorship, which led to

first-rate general conversation on books, people and manner of

writing. We have many interesting umpires, beginning with Bret

Harte and Laurence Oliphant and going on to Arthur Balfour, George

Curzon, George Wyndham, Lionel Tennyson, [Footnote: Brother of

the present Lord Tennyson.] Harry Cust and Doll Liddell: all good

writers themselves.

Some of our guests preferred making caricatures to competing in

the more ambitious line of literature. I made a drawing of the

Dowager Countess of Aylesbury, better known as "Lady A."; Colonel

Saunderson--a famous Orangeman--did a sketch of Gladstone for me;

while Alma Tadema gave me one of Queen Victoria, done in four

lines.

These games were good for our tempers and a fine training; any

loose vanity, jealousy, or over-competitiveness were certain to be

shown up; and those who took the buttons off the foils in the duel

of argument--of which I have seen a good deal in my life--were

instantly found out. We played all our games with much greater

precision and care than they are played now and from practice

became extremely good at them. I never saw a playing-card at Glen

till after I married, though--when we were obliged to dine

downstairs to prevent the company being thirteen at dinner--I

vaguely remember a back view of my grandpapa at the card-table

playing whist.

Laura was a year and a half older than I was and came out in 1881,

while I was in Dresden. The first party that she and I went to

together was a political crush given by Sir William and Lady

Harcourt. I was introduced to Spencer Lyttleton and shortly after

this Laura met his brother Alfred.

One day, as she and I were leaving St. Paul's Cathedral, she

pointed out a young man to me and said:

"Go and ask Alfred Lyttelton to come to Glen any time this

autumn," which I promptly did.

The advent of Alfred into our family coincided with that of

several new men, the Charterises, Balfours, George Curzon, George

Wyndham, Harry Cust, the Crawleys, Jack Pease, "Harry" Paulton,

Lord Houghton, Mark Napier, Doll Liddell and others. High hopes

had been entertained by my father that some of these young men

might marry us, but after the reception we gave to Lord Lymington

--who, to do him justice, never proposed to any of us except in the

paternal imagination--his nerve was shattered and we were left to

ourselves.

Some weeks before Alfred's arrival, Laura had been much disturbed

by hearing that we were considered "fast"; she told me that

receiving men at midnight in our bedroom shocked people and that

we ought, perhaps, to give it up. I listened closely to what she

had to say, and at the end remarked that it appeared to me to be

quite absurd. Godfrey Webb agreed with me and said that people who

were easily shocked were like women who sell stale pastry in

cathedral towns; and he advised us to take no notice whatever of

what any one said. We hardly knew the meaning of the word "fast"

and, as my mother went to bed punctually at eleven, it was

unthinkable that men and women friends should not be allowed to

join us. Our bedroom had been converted by me out of the night-

nursery into a sitting-room. The shutters were removed and book-

shelves put in their place, an idea afterwards copied by my

friends. The Morris carpet and chintzes I had discovered for

myself and chosen in London; and my walls were ornamented with

curious objects, varying from caricatures and crucifixes to prints

of prize-fights, fox-hunts, Virgins and Wagner. In one of the

turrets I hung my clothes; in the other I put an altar on which I

kept my books of prayer and a skull which was given to me by the

shepherd's son and which is on my bookshelf now; we wore charming

dressing-jackets and sat up in bed with coloured cushions behind

our backs, while the brothers and their friends sat on the floor

or in comfortable chairs round the room. On these occasions the

gas was turned low, a brilliant fire made up and either a guest or

one of us would read by the light of a single candle, tell ghost-

stories or discuss current affairs: politics, people and books.

Not only the young, but the old men came to our gatherings. I

remember Jowett reading out aloud to us Thomas Hill Green's lay

sermons; and when he had finished I asked him how much he had

loved Green, to which he replied:

"I did not love him at all."

That these midnight meetings should shock any one appeared

fantastic; and as most people in the house agreed with me, they

were continued.

It was not this alone that disturbed Laura; she wanted to marry a

serious, manly fellow, but as she was a great flirt, other types

of a more brilliant kind obscured this vision and she had become

profoundly undecided over her own love-affairs; they had worked so

much upon her nerves that when Mr. Lyttelton came to Glen she was

in bed with acute neuralgia and unable to see him.

My father welcomed Alfred warmly, for, apart from his charming

personality, he was Gladstone's nephew and had been brought up in

the Liberal creed.

On the evening of his arrival, we all went out after dinner. There

had been a terrific gale which had destroyed half a wood on a hill

in front of the library windows and we wanted to see the roots of

the trees blown up by dynamite. It was a moonlight night, but the

moon is always brighter in novels than in life and it was pitch

dark. Alfred and I, walking arm in arm, talked gaily to each other

as we stumbled over the broken brushwood by the side of the Quair

burn. As we approached the wood a white birch lay across the water

at a slanting angle and I could not resist leaving Alfred's side

to walk across it. It was, however, too slippery for me and I

fell. Alfred plunged into the burn and scrambled me out. I landed

on my feet and, except for sopping stockings, no harm was done.

Our party had scattered in the dark and, as it was past midnight,

we walked back to the house alone. When we returned, we found

everybody had gone to their rooms and Alfred suggested carrying me

up to bed. As I weighed under eight stone, he lifted me up like a

toy and deposited me on my bed. Kneeling down, he kissed my hand

and said good night to me.

Two days after this my brother Eddy and I travelled North for the

Highland meeting. Laura, who had been gradually recovering, was

well enough to leave her room that day; and I need hardly say that

this had the immediate effect of prolonging Alfred's visit.

On my return to Glen ten days later she told me she had made up

her mind to marry Alfred Lyttleton.

After what Mrs. Lyttelton has written of her husband, there is

little to add, but I must say one word of my brother-in-law as he

appeared to me in those early days.

Alfred Lyttelton was a vital, splendid young man of fervent

nature, even more spoilt than we were. He was as cool and as

fundamentally unsusceptible as he was responsive and emotional.

Every one adored him; he combined the prowess at games of a Greek

athlete with moral right-mindedness of a high order. He was

neither a gambler nor an artist. He respected discipline, but

loathed asceticism.

What interested me most in him was not his mind--which lacked

elasticity--but his religion, his unquestioning obedience to the

will of God and his perfect freedom from cant. His mentality was

brittle and he was as quick-tempered in argument as he was sunny

and serene in games. There are people who thought Alfred was a man

of strong physical passions, wrestling with temptation till he had

achieved complete self-mastery, but nothing was farther from the

truth. In him you found combined an ardent nature, a cool

temperament and a peppery intellectual temper. Alfred would have

been justified in taking out a patent in himself as an Englishman,

warranted like a dye never to lose colour. To him most foreigners

were frogs. In Edward Lyttelton's admirable monograph of his

brother, you will read that one day, when Alfred was in the train,

sucking an orange, "a small, grubby Italian, leaning on his

walking-stick, smoking a cheroot at the station," was looked

upon, not only by Alfred but by his biographer, as an

"irresistible challenge to fling the juicy, but substantial,

fragment full at the unsuspecting foreigner's cheek." At this we

are told that "Alfred collapsed into noble convulsions of

laughter." I quote this incident, as it illustrates the difference

between the Tennant and the Lyttelton sense of humour. Their

laughter was a tornado or convulsion to which they succumbed; and

even the Hagley ragging, though, according to Edward Lyttelton's

book, it was only done with napkins, sounds formidable enough.

Laura and Alfred enjoyed many things together--books, music and

going to church--but they did not laugh at the same things. I

remember her once saying to me in a dejected voice:

"Wouldn't you have thought that, laughing as loud as the

Lytteltons do, they would have loved Lear? Alfred says none of

them think him a bit funny and was quite testy when I said his was

the only family in the world that didn't."

It was his manliness, spirituality and freedom from pettiness that

attracted Alfred to Laura; he also had infinite charm. It might

have been said of him what the Dowager Lady Grey wrote of her

husband to Henry when thanking him for his sympathy:

"He lit so many fires in cold rooms."

After Alfred's death, my husband said this of him in the House of

Commons:

It would not, I think, be doing justice to the feelings which are

uppermost in many of our hearts, if we passed to the business of

the day without taking notice of the fresh gap which has been made

in our ranks by the untimely death of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton. It is

a loss of which I hardly trust myself to speak; for, apart from

ties of relationship, there had subsisted between us for thirty-

three years, a close friendship and affection which no political

differences were ever allowed to loosen, or even to affect. Nor

could I better describe it than by saying that he, perhaps, of all

men of this generation, came nearest to the mould and ideal of

manhood, which every English father would like to see his son

aspire to, and, if possible, to attain. The bounty of nature,

enriched and developed not only by early training, but by constant

self-discipline through life, blended in him gifts and graces

which, taken alone, are rare, and in such attractive union are

rarer still. Body, mind and character, the schoolroom, the cricket

field, the Bar, the House of Commons--each made its separate

contribution to the faculty and the experience of a many-sided and

harmonious whole. But what he was he gave--gave with such ease

and exuberance that I think it may be said without exaggeration

that wherever he moved he seemed to radiate vitality and charm. He

was, as we here know, a strenuous fighter. He has left behind him

no resentments and no enmity; nothing but a gracious memory of a

manly and winning personality, the memory of one who served with

an unstinted measure of devotion his generation and country. He

has been snatched away in what we thought was the full tide of

buoyant life, still full of promise and of hope. What more can we

say? We can only bow once again before the decrees of the Supreme

Wisdom. Those who loved him--and they are many, in all schools of

opinion, in all ranks and walks of life--when they think of him,

will say to themselves:

This is the happy warrior, this is he

Who every man in arms should wish to be.

On the occasion of Alfred Lyttelton's second visit to Glen, I will

quote my diary:

"Laura came into my bedroom. She was in a peignoir and asked me

what she should wear for dinner. I said:

"'Your white muslin, and hurry up. Mr. Lyttelton is strumming in

the Doo'cot and you had better go and entertain him, poor fellow,

as he is leaving for London tonight.'

"She tied a blue ribbon in her hair, hastily thrust her diamond

brooch into her fichu and then, with her eyes very big and her

hair low and straight upon her forehead, she went into our

sitting-room (we called it the Doo'cot, because we all quarrelled

there). Feeling rather small, but, half-shy, half-bold, she shut

the door and, leaning against it, watched Alfred strumming. He

turned and gazed at the little figure so near him, so delicate in

her white dress.

"The silence was broken by Alfred asking her if any man ever left

Glen without telling her that he loved her; but suddenly all talk

stopped and she was in his arms, hiding her little face against

his hard coat. There was no one to record what followed; only the

night rising with passionate eyes:

'The hiding, receiving night that talks not.'

"They were married on the 10th of May, 1885. "In April of 1886,

Laura's baby was expected any day; and my mother was anxious that

I should not be near her when the event took place. The Lytteltons

lived in Upper Brook Street; and, Grosvenor Square being near, it

was thought that any suffering on her part might make a lasting

and painful impression on me, so I was sent down to Easton Grey to

stay with Lucy and hunt in the Badminton country. Before going

away, I went round to say good-bye to Laura and found her in a

strange humour.

"LAURA: 'I am sure I shall die with my baby.'

"MARGOT: 'How can you talk such nonsense? Every one thinks that.

Look at mamma! She had twelve children without a pang!'

"LAURA: 'I know she did; but I am sure I shall die.'

"MARGOT: 'I am just as likely to be killed out hunting as you are

to die, darling! It makes me miserable to hear you talk like

this.'

"LAURA: 'If I die, Margot, I want you to read my will to the

relations and people that will be in my bedroom. It is in that

drawer. Promise me you will not forget.'

"MARGOT: 'All right, darling, I will; but let us kneel down and

pray that, whether it is me or you who die first, if it is God's

will, one of us may come to the other down here and tell us the

truth about the next world and console us as much as possible in

this!'"

We knelt and prayed and, though I was more removed from the world

and in the humour both to see and to hear what was not material,

in my grief over Laura's death, which took place ten days later, I

have never heard from her or of her from that day to this.

Mrs. Lyttelton has told the story of her husband's first marriage

with so much perfection that I hesitate to go over the same ground

again, but, as my sister Laura's death had more effect on me than

any event in my life, except my own marriage and the birth of my

children, I must copy a short account of it written at that time:

'On Saturday, 17th April, 1886, I was riding down a green slope in

Gloucestershire while the Beaufort hounds were scattered below

vainly trying to pick up the scent; they were on a stale line and

the result had been general confusion. It was a hot day and the

woods were full of children and primroses.

"The air was humming with birds and insects, nature wore an

expectant look and all the hedge-rows sparkled with the spangles

of the spring. There was a prickly gap under a tree which divided

me from my companions. I rode down to jump it, but, whether from

breeding, laziness or temper, my horse turned round and refused to

move. I took my foot out of the stirrup and gave him a slight

kick. I remember nothing after that till I woke up in a cottage

with a tremendous headache. They said that the branch was too low,

or the horse jumped too big and a withered bough had caught me in

the face. In consequence I had concussion of the brain; and my

nose and upper lip were badly torn. I was picked up by my early

fiance. He tied my lip to my hair--as it was reposing on my chin--

and took me home in a cart. The doctor was sent for, but there was

no time to give me chloroform. I sat very still from vanity while

three stitches were put through the most sensitive part of my

nose. When it was all over, I looked at myself in the looking-

glass and burst into tears. I had never been very pretty ("worse

than that," as the Marquis of Soveral [Footnote: The Late

Portuguese Minister.] said) but I had a straight nose and a look

of intelligence; and now my face would be marked for life like a

German student's.

"The next day a telegram arrived saying: "'Laura confined--a boy--

both doing well.'

"We sent back a message saying: "'Hurrah and blessing!'

On Sunday we received a letter from Charty saying Laura was very

ill and another on Monday telling us to go to London. I was in a

state of acute anxiety and said to the doctor I must go and see

Laura immediately, but he would not hear of it:

"'Impossible! You'll get erysipelas and die. Most dangerous to

move with a face like that,' he said.

"On the occasion of his next visit, I was dressed and walking up

and down the room in a fume of nervous excitement, for go I WOULD.

Laura was dying (I did not really think she was, but I wanted to

be near her). I insisted upon his taking the stitches out of my

face and ultimately he had to give in. At 6 p.m. I was in the

train for London, watching the telegraph-posts flying past me.

"My mind was going over every possibility. I was sitting near her

bed with the baby on my arm, chattering over plans, arranging

peignoirs, laughing at the nurse's anecdotes, talking and

whispering over the thousand feminine things that I knew she would

be longing to hear. ... Or perhaps she was dying... asking for me

and wondering why I did not come... thinking I was hunting instead

of being with her. Oh, how often the train stopped! Did any one

really live at these stations? No one got out; they did not look

like real places; why should the train stop? Should I tell them

Laura was dying? ... We had prayed so often to die the same day.

... Surely she was not going to die... it could not be... her

vitality was too splendid, her youth too great... God would not

allow this thing. How stiff my face felt with its bandages; and if

I cried they would all come off!

"At Swindon I had to change. I got out and sat in the vast eating-

room, with its atmosphere of soup and gas. A crowd of people were

talking of a hunting accident: this was mine. Then a woman came in

and put her bag down. A clergyman shook hands with her; he said

some one had died. I moved away.

"'World! Trewth! The Globe! Paper, miss? Paper? ...'

"'No, thank you.'

"'London train!' was shouted and I got in. I knew by the loud

galloping sound that we were going between high houses and at each

gallop the wheels seemed to say, 'Too late--too late!' After a

succession of hoarse screams we dashed into Paddington.

"It was midnight. I saw a pale, grave face, and recognised Evan

Charteris, who had come in Lady Wemyss' brougham to meet me. I

said:

'"Is she dead?' "To which he answered: "'No, but very, very ill.'

"We drove in silence to 4 Upper Brook Street.

Papa, Jack and Godfrey Webb stood in the hall. They stopped me as

I passed and said: 'She is no worse'; but I could not listen. I

saw Arthur Balfour and Spencer Lyttelton standing near the door of

Alfred's room. They said: "'You look ill. Have you had a fall?'

"I explained the plaster on my swollen face and asked if I might

go upstairs to see Laura; and they said they thought I might. When

I got to the top landing, I stood in the open doorway of the

boudoir. A man was sitting in an arm-chair by a table with a

candle on it. It was Alfred and I passed on. I saw the silhouette

of a woman through the open door of Laura's room; this was Charty.

We held each other close to our hearts... her face felt hot and

her eyes were heavy.

"'Don't look at her to-night, sweet. She is unconscious,' she

said.

"I did not take this in and asked to be allowed to say one word to

her. ... I said:

"'I know she'd like to see me, darling, if only just to nod to,

and I promise I will go away quickly. Indeed, indeed I would not

tire her! I want to tell her the train was late and the doctor

would not let me come up yesterday. Only one second, PLEASE,

Charty! ...'

"'But, my darling heart, she's unconscious. She has never been

conscious all day. She would not know you!'

"I sank stunned upon the stair. Some one touched my shoulder:

"'You had better go to bed, it is past one. No, you can't sleep

here: there's no bed. You must lie down; a sofa won't do, you are

too ill. Very well, then, you are not ill, but you will be to-

morrow if you don't go to bed.'

"I found myself in the street, Arthur Balfour holding one of my

arms and Spencer Lyttelton the other. They took me to 40 Grosvenor

Square. I went to bed and early next morning I went across to

Upper Brook Street. The servant looked happy:

"'She's better, miss, and she's conscious.'

"I flew upstairs, and Charty met me in her dressing-gown. She was

calm and capable as always, but a new look, less questioning and

more intense, had come into her face. She said:

"'You can go in now.'

"I felt a rushing of my soul and an over-eagerness that half-

stopped me as I opened the door and stood at the foot of the

wooden bed and gazed at what was left of Laura.

"Her face had shrunk to the size of a child's; her lashes lay a

black wall on the whitest of cheeks; her hair was hanging dragged

up from her square brow in heavy folds upon the pillow. Her mouth

was tightly shut and a dark blood-stain marked her chin. After a

long silence, she moved and muttered and opened her eyes. She

fixed them on me, and my heart stopped. I stretched my hands out

towards her, and said, 'Laura!'... But the sound died; she did not

know me. I knew after that she could not live.

"People went away for the Easter Holidays: Papa to North Berwick,

Arthur Balfour to Westward Ho! and every day Godfrey Webb rode a

patient cob up to the front door, to hear that she was no better.

I sat on the stairs listening to the roar of London and the clock

in the library. The doctor--Matthews Duncan--patted my head

whenever he passed me on the stair and said, in his gentle Scotch

accent:

"'Poor little girl! Poor, poor little girl!'

"I was glad he did not say that 'while there was life there was

hope,' or any of the medical platitudes, or I would have replied

that he LIED. There was no hope--none! ...

"One afternoon I went with Lucy to St. George's, Hanover Square.

The old man was sweeping out the church; and we knelt and prayed.

Laura and I have often knelt side by side at that altar and I

never feel alone when I am in front of the mysterious Christ-

picture, with its bars of violet and bunches of grapes.

"On my return I went upstairs and lay on the floor of Laura's

bedroom, watching Alfred kneeling by her side with his arms over

his head. Charty sat with her hands clasped; a single candle

behind her head transfigured her lovely hair into a halo. Suddenly

Laura opened her eyes and, turning them slowly on Charty, said:

"'You are HEAVENLY! . . .'

"A long pause, and then while we were all three drawing near her

bed we heard her say:

"'I think God has forgotten me.'

"The fire was weaving patterns on the ceiling; every shadow seemed

to be looking with pity on the silence of that room, the long

silence that has never been broken.

"I did not go home that night, but slept at Alfred's house. Lucy

had gone to the early Communion, but I had not accompanied her,

as I was tired of praying. I must have fallen into a heavy sleep,

when suddenly I felt some one touching my bed. I woke with a start

and saw nurse standing beside me. She said in a calm voice:

"'My dear, you must come. Don't look like that; you won't be able

to walk.'

"Able to walk! Of course I was! I was in my dressing-gown and

downstairs in a flash and on to the bed. The room was full of

people. I lay with my arm under Laura, as I did in the old Glen

days, when after our quarrels we crept into each other's beds

to'make it up.' Alfred was holding one of her hands against his

forehead; and Charty was kneeling at her feet.

"She looked much the same, but a deeper shadow ran under her brow

and her mouth seemed to be harder shut. I put my cheek against her

shoulder and felt the sharpness of her spine. For a minute we lay

close to each other, while the sun, fresh from the dawn, played

upon the window-blinds. ... Then her breathing stopped; she gave a

shiver and died. ... The silence was so great that I heard the

flight of Death and the morning salute her soul.

"I went downstairs and took her will out of the drawer where she

had put it and told Alfred what she had asked me to do. The room

was dark with people; and a tall man, gaunt and fervid, was

standing up saying a prayer. When he had finished I read the will

through:

My Will [Footnote: The only part of the will I have left out is a

few names with blank spaces which she intended to fill up.], made

by me, Laura Mary Octavia Lyttelton, February, 1886.

"I have not much to leave behind me, should I die next month,

having my treasure deep in my heart where no one can reach it, and

where even Death cannot enter. But there are some things that have

long lain at the gates of my Joy House that in some measure have

the colour of my life in them, and would, by rights of love,

belong to those who have entered there. I should like Alfred to

give these things to my friends, not because my friends will care

so much for them, but because they will love best being where I

loved to be.

"I want, first of all, to tell Alfred that all I have in the world

and all I am and ever shall be, belongs to him, and to him more

than any one, so that if I leave away from him anything that

speaks to him of a joy unknown to me, or that he holds dear for

any reason wise or unwise, it is his, and my dear friends will

forgive him and me.

"So few women have been as happy as I have been every hour since I

married--so few have had such a wonderful sky of love for their

common atmosphere, that perhaps it will seem strange when I write

down that the sadness of Death and Parting is greatly lessened to

me by the fact of my consciousness of the eternal, indivisible

oneness of Alfred and me. I feel as long as he is down here I must

be here, silently, secretly sitting beside him as I do every

evening now, however much my soul is the other side, and that if

Alfred were to die, we would be as we were on earth, love as we

did this year, only fuller, quicker, deeper than ever, with a

purer passion and a wiser worship. Only in the meantime, whilst my

body is hid from him and my eyes cannot see him, let my trivial

toys be his till the morning comes when nothing will matter

because all is spirit.

"If my baby lives I should like it to have my pearls. I do not

love my diamond necklace, so I won't leave it to any one.

"I would like Alfred to have my Bible. It has always rather

worried him to hold because it is so full of things; but if I know

I am dying, I will clean it out, because, I suppose, he won't like

to after. I think I am fonder of it--not, I mean, because it's the

Bible--but because it's such a friend, and has been always with

me, chiefly under my pillow, ever since I had it--than of anything

I possess, and I used to read it a great deal when I was much

better than I am now. I love it very much, so, Alfred, you must

keep it for me.

"Then the prayer book Francie [Footnote: Lady Horner, of Mells.]

gave me is what I love next, and I love it so much I feel I would

like to take it with me. Margot wants a prayer book, so I leave it

to her. It is so dirty outside, but perhaps it would be a pity to

bind it. Margot is to have my darling little Daily Light, too.

"Then Charty is to have my paste necklace she likes, and any two

prints she cares to have, and my little trefeuille diamond brooch

--oh! and the Hope she painted for me. I love it very much, and my

amethyst beads.

"Little Barbara is to have my blue watch, and Tommy my watch--

there is no chain.

"Then Lucy is to have my Frances belt, because a long time ago the

happiest days of my girlhood were when we first got to know

Francie, and she wore that belt in the blue days at St. Moritz

when we met her at church and I became her lover; and I want Lucy

to have my two Blakes and the dear little Martin Schongaun Madonna

and Baby--dear little potbellied baby, sucking his little sacred

thumb in a garden with a beautiful wall and a little pigeon-house

turret. I bought it myself, and do rather think it was clever of

me--all for a pound.

"And Posie is to have my little diamond wreaths, and she must

leave them to Joan, [Footnote: My niece, Mrs. Jamie Lindsay.] and

she is to have my garnets too, because she used to like them, and

my Imitation and Marcus Aurelius.

"I leave Eddy my little diamond necklace for his wife, and he must

choose a book.

"And Frank is just going to be married, so I would like him to

have some bit of my furniture, and his wife my little silver

clock.

"I leave Jack the little turquoise ring Graham gave me. He must

have it made into a stud.

"Then I want Lavinia [Footnote: Lavinia Talbot is wife of the

present Bishop of Winchester] to have my bagful of silver

dressing-things Papa gave me, and the little diamond and sapphire

bangle I am so fond of; and tell her what a joy it has been to

know her, and that the little open window has let in many sunrises

on my married life. She will understand.

"Then I want old Lucy [Footnote: Lady Frederick Cavendish, whose

husband was murdered in Ireland] to have my edition of the

"Pilgrim's Progress," that dear old one, and my photograph in the

silver frame of Alfred, if my baby dies too, otherwise it is to

belong to him (or her). Lucy was Alfred's little proxy-mother, and

she deserves him. He sent the photograph to me the first week we

were engaged, and I have carried it about ever since. I don't

think it very good. It always frightened me a little; it is so

stern and just, and the 'just man' has never been a hero of mine.

I love Alfred when he is what he is to me, and I don't feel that

is just, but generous.

"Then I want Edward [Footnote: The late Head Master of Eton] to

have the "Days of Creation," and Charles [Footnote: The present

Lord Cobham, Alfred's eldest brother] to have my first editions of

Shelley, and Arthur [Footnote: The late Hon. Arthur Temple

Lyttelton, Bishop of Southampton] my first edition of Beaumont and

Fletcher; and Kathleen [Footnote: The Late Hon. Mrs. Arthur

Lyttelton.] is to have my little silver crucifix that opens, and

Alfred must put in a little bit of my hair, and Kathleen must keep

it for my sake--I loved her from the first.

"I want Alfred to give my godchild, Cicely Horner,[Footnote: The

present Hon. Mrs. George Lambton.], the bird-brooch Burne Jones

designed, and the Sintram Arthur [Footnote: The Right Hon. Arthur

Balfour.], gave me. I leave my best friend, Frances, my grey

enamel and diamond bracelet, my first edition of Wilhelm Meister,

with the music folded up in it, and my Burne Jones ''spression'

drawings. Tell her I leave a great deal of my life with her, and

that I never can cease to be very near her.

"I leave Mary Elcho [Footnote: The present Countess of Wemyss.]

my Chippendale cradle. She must not think it bad luck. I suppose

some one else possessed it once, and, after all, it isn't as if I

died in it! She gave me the lovely hangings, and I think she will

love it a little for my sake, because I always loved cradles and

all cradled things; and I leave her my diamond and red enamel

crescent Arthur gave me. She must wear it because two of her dear

friends are in it, as it were. And I would like her to have oh!

such a blessed life, because I think her character is so full of

blessed things and symbols. ...

"I leave Arthur Balfour--Alfred's and my dear, deeply loved

friend, who has given me so many happy hours since I married, and

whose sympathy, understanding, and companionship in the deep sense

of the word has never been withheld from me when I have sought it,

which has not been seldom this year of my blessed Vita Nuova--I

leave him my Johnson. He taught me to love that wisest of men--and

I have much to be grateful for in this. I leave him, too, my

little ugly Shelley--much read, but not in any way beautiful; if

he marries I should like him to give his wife my little red enamel

harp--I shall never see her if I die now, but I have so often

created her in the Islands of my imagination--and as a Queen has

she reigned there, so that I feel in the spirit we are in some

measure related by some mystic tie."

Out of the many letters Alfred received, this is the one I liked

best:

HAWARDEN CASTLE,

April 27th, 1886. MY DEAR ALFRED,

It is a daring and perhaps a selfish thing to speak to you at a

moment when your mind and heart are a sanctuary in which God is

speaking to you in tones even more than usually penetrating and

solemn. Certainly it pertains to few to be chosen to receive such

lessons as are being taught you. If the wonderful trials of

Apostles, Saints and Martyrs have all meant a love in like

proportion wonderful, then, at this early period of your life,

your lot has something in common with theirs, and you will bear

upon you life-long marks of a great and peculiar dispensation

which may and should lift you very high. Certainly you two who are

still one were the persons whom in all the vast circuit of London

life those near you would have pointed to as exhibiting more than

any others the promise and the profit of BOTH worlds. The call

upon you for thanksgiving seemed greater than on any one--you will

not deem it lessened now. How eminently true it is of her that in

living a short she fulfilled a long time. If Life is measured by

intensity, hers was a very long life--and yet with that rich

development of mental gifts, purity and singleness made her one of

the little children of whom and of whose like is the Kingdom of

Heaven. Bold would it indeed be to say such a being died

prematurely. All through your life, however it be prolonged, what

a precious possession to you she will be. But in giving her to

your bodily eye and in taking her away the Almighty has specially

set His seal upon you. To Peace and to God's gracious mercy let us

heartily, yes, cheerfully, commend her. Will you let Sir Charles

and Lady Tennant and all her people know how we feel with and for

them?

Ever your affec.

W. E. GLADSTONE.

Matthew Arnold sent me this poem because Jowett told him I said it

might have been written for Laura:

REQUIESCAT

Strew on her roses, roses,

And never a spray of yew!

In quiet she reposes;

Ah, would that I did too!

Her mirth the world required;

She bathed it in smiles of glee.

But her heart was tired, tired,

And now they let her be.

Her life was turning, turning,

In mazes of heat and sound,

But for peace her soul was yearning,

And now peace laps her round.

Her cabin'd, ample spirit,

It flutter'd and fail'd for breath.

To-night it doth inherit

The vasty hall of death.

CHAPTER III

SLUMMING IN LONDON; ADVENTURE IN WHITECHAPEL; BRAWL IN A SALOON;

OUTINGS WITH WORKING GIRLS--MARGOT MEETS THE PRINCESS OF WALES--

GOSSIP OVER FRIENDSHIP WITH PRINCE OF WALES--LADY RANDOLPH

CHURCHILL'S BALL--MARGOT'S FIRST HUNT; ECCENTRIC DUKE OF BEAUFORT;

FALLS IN LOVE AT SEVENTEEN; COMMANDEERS A HORSE

After Laura's death I spent most of my time in the East End of

London. One day, when I was walking in the slums of Whitechapel, I

saw a large factory and girls of all ages pouring in and out of

it. Seeing the name "Cliffords" on the door, I walked in and asked

a workman to show me his employer's private room. He indicated

with his finger where it was and I knocked and went in. Mr.

Cliffords, the owner of the factory, had a large red face and was

sitting in a bare, squalid room, on a hard chair, in front of his

writing-table. He glanced at me as I shut the door, but did not

stop writing. I asked him if I might visit his factory once or

twice a week and talk to the work-girls. At this he put his pen

down and said:

"Now, miss, what good do you suppose you will do here with my

girls?"

MARGOT: "It is not exactly THAT. I am not sure I can do any one

any good, but do you think I could do your girls any harm?"

CLIFFORDS: "Most certainly you could and, what is more, you WILL"

MARGOT: "How?"

CLIFFORDS: "Why, bless my soul! You'll keep them all jawing and

make them late for their work! As it is, they don't do overmuch.

Do you think my girls are wicked and that you are going to make

them good and happy and save them and all that kind of thing?"

MARGOT: "Not at all; I was not thinking of them, _I_ am so very

unhappy myself."

CLIFFORDS (RATHER MOVED AND LOOKING AT ME WITH CURIOSITY): "Oh,

that's quite another matter! If you've come here to ask me a

favour, I might consider it."

MARGOT (HUMBLY): "That is just what I have come for. I swear I

would only be with your girls in the dinner interval, but if by

accident I arrive at the wrong time I will see that they do not

stop their work. It is far more likely that they won't listen to

me at all than that they will stop working to hear what I have to

say."

CLIFFORDS: "Maybe!"

So it was fixed up. He shook me by the hand, never asked my name

and I visited his factory three days a week for eight years when I

was in London (till I married, in 1894).

The East End of London was not a new experience to me. Laura and I

had started a creche at Wapping the year I came out; and in

following up the cases of deserving beggars I had come across a

variety of slums. I have derived as much interest and more benefit

from visiting the poor than the rich and I get on better with

them. What was new to me in Whitechapel was the head of the

factory.

Mr. Cliffords was what the servants describe as "a man who keeps

himself to himself," gruff, harsh, straight and clever. He hated

all his girls and no one would have supposed, had they seen us

together, that he liked me; but, after I had observed him blocking

the light in the doorway of the room when I was speaking, I knew

that I should get on with him.

The first day I went into the barn of a place where the boxes were

made, I was greeted by a smell of glue and perspiration and a roar

of wheels on the cobblestones in the yard. Forty or fifty women,

varying in age from sixteen to sixty, were measuring, cutting and

glueing cardboard and paper together; not one of them looked up

from her work as I came in.

I climbed upon a hoarding, and kneeling down, pinned a photograph

of Laura on a space of the wall. This attracted the attention of

an elderly woman who turned to her companions and said:

"Come and have a look at this, girls! why, it's to the life!"

Seeing some of the girls leave their work and remembering my

promise to Cliffords, I jumped up and told them that in ten

minutes' time they would be having their dinners and then I would

like to speak to them, but that until then they must not stop

their work. I was much relieved to see them obey me. Some of them

kept sandwiches in dirty paper bags which they placed on the floor

with their hats, but when the ten minutes were over I was

disappointed to see nearly all of them disappear. I asked where

they had gone to and was told that they either joined the men

packers or went to the public-house round the corner.

The girls who brought sandwiches and stayed behind liked my visits

and gradually became my friends. One of them--Phoebe Whitman by

name--was beautiful and had more charm than the others for me; I

asked her one day if she would take me with her to the public-

house where she always lunched, as I had brought my food with me

in a bag and did not suppose the public-house people would mind my

eating it there with a glass of beer. This request of mine

distressed the girls who were my friends. They thought it a

terrible idea that I should go among drunkards, but I told them I

had brought a book with me which they could look at and read out

loud to each other while I was away--at which they nodded gravely

--and I went off with my beautiful cockney.

The "Peggy Bedford" was in the lowest quarter of Whitechapel and

crowded daily with sullen and sad-looking people. It was hot,

smelly and draughty. When we went in I observed that Phoebe was a

favourite; she waved her hand gaily here and there and ordered

herself a glass of bitter. The men who had been hanging about

outside and in different corners of the room joined up to the

counter on her arrival and I heard a lot of chaff going on while

she tossed her pretty head and picked at potted shrimps. The room

was too crowded for any one to notice me; and I sat quietly in a

corner eating my sandwiches and smoking my cigarette. The frosted-

glass double doors swung to and fro and the shrill voices of

children asking for drinks and carrying them away in their mugs

made me feel profoundly unhappy. I followed one little girl

through the doors out into the street and saw her give the mug to

a cabman and run off delighted with his tip. When I returned I was

deafened by a babel of voices; there was a row going on: one of

the men, drunk but good-tempered, was trying to take the flower

out of Phoebe's hat. Provoked by this, a young man began jostling

him, at which all the others pressed forward; the barman shouted

ineffectually to them to stop; they merely cursed him and said

that they were backing Phoebe. A woman, more drunk than the

others, swore at being disturbed and said that Phoebe was a

blasted something that I could not understand. Suddenly I saw her

hitting out like a prize-fighter; and the men formed a ring round

them. I jumped up, seized an under-fed, blear-eyed being who was

nearest to me and flung him out of my way. Rage and disgust

inspired me with great physical strength; but I was prevented from

breaking through the ring by a man seizing my arm and saying:

"Let be or her man will give you a damned thrashing!"

Not knowing which of the women he was alluding to, I dipped down

and, dodging the crowd, broke through the ring and flung myself

upon Phoebe; my one fear was that she would be too late for her

work and that the promise I had made to Cliffords would be broken.

Women fight very awkwardly and I was battered about between the

two. I turned and cursed the men standing round for laughing and

doing nothing and, before I could separate the combatants, I had

given and received heavy blows; but unexpected help came from a

Cliffords packer who happened to look in. We extricated ourselves

as well as we could and ran back to the factory. I made Phoebe

apologise to the chief for being late and, feeling stiff all over,

returned home to Grosvenor Square.

Cliffords, who was an expert boxer, invited me into his room on my

next visit to tell him the whole story and my shares went up.

By the end of July all the girls--about fifty-two--stayed with me

after their work and none of them went to the "Peggy Bedford."

The Whitechapel murders took place close to the factory about that

time, and the girls and I visited what the journalists call "the

scene of the tragedy." It was strange watching crowds of people

collected daily to see nothing but an archway.

I took my girls for an annual treat to the country every summer,

starting at eight in the morning and getting back to London at

midnight. We drove in three large wagonettes behind four horses,

accompanied by a brass band. On one occasion I was asked if the

day could be spent at Caterham, because there were barracks there.

I thought it a dreary place and strayed away by myself, but Phoebe

and her friends enjoyed glueing their noses to the rails and

watching the soldiers drill. I do not know how the controversy

arose, but when I joined them I heard Phoebe shout through the

railings that some one was a "bloody fish!" I warned her that I

should leave Cliffords for ever, if she went on provoking rows and

using such violent language, and this threat upset her; for a

short time she was on her best behaviour, but I confess I find the

poor just as uninfluenceable and ungrateful as the rich, and I

often wonder what became of Phoebe Whitman.

At the end of July I told the girls that I had to leave them, as I

was going back to my home in Scotland.

PHOEBE: "You don't know, lady, how much we all feels for you

having to live in the country. Why, when you pointed out to us on

the picnic-day that kind of a tower-place, with them walls and

dark trees, and said it reminded you of your home, we just looked

at each other! 'Well, I never!' sez I; and we all shuddered!"

None of the girls knew what my name was or where I lived till they

read about me in the picture-papers, eight years later at the

time of my marriage.

When I was not in the East-end of London, I wandered about looking

at the shop-windows in the West. One day I was admiring a

photograph of my sister Charty in the window of Macmichael's, when

a footman touched his hat and asked me if I would speak to "her

Grace" in the carriage. I turned round and saw the Duchess of

Manchester [Footnote: Afterwards the late Dutchess of Devonshire];

as I had never spoken to her in my life, I wondered what she could

possibly want me for. After shaking hands, she said:

"Jump in, dear child! I can't bear to see you look so sad. Jump in

and I'll take you for a drive and you can come back to tea with

me."

I got into the carriage and we drove round Hyde Park, after which

I followed her upstairs to her boudoir in Great Stanhope Street.

In the middle of tea Queen Alexandra--then Princess of Wales--

came in to see the Duchess. She ran in unannounced and kissed her

hostess.

My heart beat when I looked at her. She had more real beauty, both

of line and expression, and more dignity than any one I had ever

seen; and I can never forget that first meeting.

These were the days of the great beauties. London worshipped

beauty like the Greeks. Photographs of the Princess of Wales, Mrs.

Langtry, Mrs. Cornwallis West, Mrs. Wheeler and Lady Dudley

[Footnote: Georgiana, Countess of Dudley.] collected crowds in

front of the shop windows. I have seen great and conventional

ladies like old Lady Cadogan and others standing on iron chairs in

the Park to see Mrs. Langtry walk past; and wherever Georgiana

Lady Dudley drove there were crowds round her carriage when it

pulled up, to see this vision of beauty, holding a large holland

umbrella over the head of her lifeless husband.

Groups of beauties like the Moncrieffes, Grahams, Conynghams, de

Moleynses, Lady Mary Mills, Lady Randolph Churchill, Mrs. Arthur

Sassoon, Lady Dalhousie, Lady March, Lady Londonderry and Lady de

Grey were to be seen in the salons of the 'eighties. There is

nothing at all like this in London to-day and I doubt if there is

any one now with enough beauty or temperament to provoke a fight

in Rotten Row between gentlemen in high society: an incident of my

youth which I was privileged to witness and which caused a

profound sensation.

Queen Alexandra had a more perfect face than any of those I have

mentioned; it is visible even now, because the oval is still

there, the frownless brows, the carriage and, above all, the grace

both of movement and of gesture which made her the idol of her

people.

London society is neither better nor worse than it was in the

'eighties; there is less talent and less intellectual ambition and

much less religion; but where all the beauty has gone to I cannot

think!

When the Princess of Wales walked into the Duchess of Manchester's

boudoir that afternoon, I got up to go away, but the Duchess

presented me to her and they asked me to stay and have tea, which

I was delighted to do. I sat watching her, with my teacup in my

hand, thrilled with admiration.

Queen Alexandra's total absence of egotism and the warmth of her

manner, prompted not by consideration, but by sincerity, her

gaiety of heart and refinement--rarely to be seen in royal people

--inspired me with a love for her that day from which I have never

departed.

I had been presented to the Prince of Wales--before I met the

Princess--by Lady Dalhousie, in the Paddock at Ascot. He asked me

if I would back my fancy for the Wokingham Stakes and have a

little bet with him on the race. We walked down to the rails and

watched the horses gallop past. One of them went down in great

form; I verified him by his colours and found he was called

Wokingham. I told the Prince that he was a sure winner; but out of

so many entries no one was more surprised than I was when my horse

came romping in. I was given a gold cigarette-case and went home

much pleased.

King Edward had great charm and personality and enormous prestige;

he was more touchy than King George and fonder of pleasure. He and

Queen Alexandra, before they succeeded, were the leaders of London

society; they practically dictated what people could and could not

do; every woman wore a new dress when she dined at Marlborough

House; and we vied with each other in trying to please him.

Opinions differ as to the precise function of royalty, but no one

doubts that it is a valuable and necessary part of our

Constitution. Just as the Lord Mayor represents commerce, the

Prime Minister the Government, and the Commons the people, the

King represents society. Voltaire said we British had shown true

genius in preventing our kings by law from doing anything but

good. This sounds well, but we all know that laws do not prevent

men from doing harm.

The two kings that I have known have had in a high degree both

physical and moral courage and have shown a sense of duty

unparalleled in the Courts of Europe; it is this that has given

them their stability; and added to this their simplicity of nature

has won for them our lasting love.

They have been exceptionally fortunate in their private

secretaries: Lord Knollys and Lord Stamfordham are liberal-minded

men of the highest honour and discretion; and I am proud to call

them my friends.

Before I knew the Prince and Princess of Wales, I did not go to

fashionable balls, but after that Ascot I was asked everywhere. I

was quite unconscious of it at the time, but was told afterwards

that people were beginning to criticise me; one or two incidents

might have enlightened me had I been more aware of myself.

One night, when I was dining tete-a-tete with my beloved friend,

Godfrey Webb, in his flat in Victoria Street, my father sent the

brougham for me with a message to ask if I would accompany him to

supper at Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill's, where we had been

invited to meet the Prince of Wales. I said I should be delighted

if I could keep on the dress that I was wearing, but as it was

late and I had to get up early next day I did not want to change

my clothes; he said he supposed my dress would be quite smart

enough, so we drove to the Randolph Churchills' house together.

I had often wanted to know Lord Randolph, but it was only a few

days before the supper that I had had the good fortune to sit next

to him at dinner. When he observed that he had been put next to a

"miss," he placed his left elbow firmly on the table and turned

his back upon me through several courses. I could not but admire

the way he appeared to eat everything with one hand. I do not know

whether it was the lady on his right or what it was that prompted

him, but he ultimately turned round and asked me if I knew any

politicians. I told him that, with the exception of himself, I

knew them all intimately. This surprised him, and after discussing

Lord Rosebery--to whom he was devoted--he said:

"Do you know Lord Salisbury?"

I told him that I had forgotten his name in my list, but that I

would like above everything to meet him; at which he remarked that

I was welcome to all his share of him, adding:

"What do you want to know him for?"

MARGOT: "Because I think he is amazingly amusing and a very fine

writer."

LORD RANDOLPH (muttering something I could not catch about

Salisbury lying dead at his feet): "I wish to God that I had NEVER

known him!"

MARGOT: "I am afraid you resigned more out of temper than

conviction, Lord Randolph." At this he turned completely round

and, gazing at me, said:

"Confound your cheek! What do you know about me and my

convictions? I hate Salisbury! He jumped at my resignation like a

dog at a bone. The Tories are ungrateful, short-sighted beasts. I

hope you are a Liberal?"

I informed him that I was and exactly what I thought of the Tory

party; and we talked through the rest of dinner. Towards the end

of our conversation he asked me who I was. I told him that, after

his manners to me in the earlier part of the evening, it was

perhaps better that we should remain strangers. However, after a

little chaff, we made friends and he said that he would come and

see me in Grosvenor Square.

On the night of the supper-party, I was wearing a white muslin

dress with transparent chemise sleeves, a fichu and a long skirt

with a Nattier blue taffeta sash. I had taken a bunch of rose

carnations out of a glass and pinned them into my fichu with three

diamond ducks given me by Lord Carmichael, our delightful

Peeblesshire friend and neighbour.

On my arrival at the Churchills', I observed all the fine ladies

wearing ball-dresses off the shoulder and their tiaras. This made

me very conspicuous and I wished profoundly that I had changed

into something smarter before going out.

The Prince of Wales had not arrived and, as our hostess was giving

orders to the White Hungarian Band, my father and I had to walk

into the room alone.

I saw several of the ladies eyeing my toilette, and having

painfully sharp ears I heard some of their remarks:

"Do look at Miss Tennant! She is in her night-gown!"

"I suppose it is meant to be 'ye olde Englishe pictury!' I wonder

she has not let her hair down like the Juliets at the Oakham

balls!"

Another, more charitable, said:

"I daresay no one told her that the Prince of Wales was coming.

... Poor child! What a shame!"

And finally a man said:

"There is nothing so odd as the passion some people have for self-

advertisement; it only shows what it is to be intellectual!"

At that moment our hostess came up to us with a charming accueil.

The first time I saw Lady Randolph was at Punchestown races, in

1887, where I went with my new friends, Mrs. Bunbury, Hatfield

Harter and Peter Flower. I was standing at the double when I

observed a woman next to me in a Black Watch tartan skirt, braided

coat and astrachan hussar's cap. She had a forehead like a

panther's and great wild eyes that looked through you; she was so

arresting that I followed her about till I found some one who

could tell me who she was.

Had Lady Randolph Churchill been like her face, she could have

governed the world.

My father and I were much relieved at her greeting; and while we

were talking the Prince of Wales arrived. The ladies fell into

position, ceased chattering and made subterranean curtsies. He

came straight up to me and told me I was to sit on the other side

of him at supper. I said, hanging my head with becoming modesty

and in a loud voice:

"Oh no, Sir, I am not dressed at all for the part! I had better

slip away, I had no notion this was going to be such a smart party

... I expect some of the ladies here think I have insulted them by

coming in my night-gown!"

I saw every one straining to hear what the Prince's answer would

be, but I took good care that we should move out of earshot. At

that moment Lord Hartington [Footnote: The late Duke of

Devonshire.] came up and told me I was to go in to supper with

him. More than ever I wished I had changed my dress, for now every

one was looking at me with even greater curiosity than hostility.

The supper was gay and I had remarkable talks which laid the

foundation of my friendship both with King Edward and the Duke of

Devonshire. The Prince told me he had had a dull youth, as Queen

Victoria could not get over the Prince Consort's death and kept up

an exaggerated mourning. He said he hoped that when I met his

mother I should not be afraid of her, adding, with a charming

smile, that with the exception of John Brown everybody was. I

assured him with perfect candour that I was afraid of no one. He

was much amused when I told him that before he had arrived that

evening some of the ladies had whispered that I was in my night-

gown and I hope he did not think me lacking in courtesy because I

had not put on a ball-dress. He assured me that on the contrary he

admired my frock very much and thought I looked like an old

picture. This remark made me see uncomfortable visions of the

Oakham ball and he did not dispel them by adding:

"You are so original! You must dance the cotillion with me."

I told him that I could not possibly stay, it would bore my father

stiff, as he hated sitting up late; also I was not dressed for

dancing and had no idea there was going to be a ball. When supper

was over, I made my best curtsy and, after presenting my father to

the Prince, went home to bed.

Lord Hartington told me in the course of our conversation at

supper that Lady Grosvenor [Footnote: The Countess of Grosvenor.]

was by far the most dangerous syren in London and that he would

not answer for any man keeping his head or his heart when with

her, to which I entirely agreed.

When the London season came to an end we all went up to Glen.

Here I must retrace my steps.

In the winter of 1880 I went to stay with my sister, Lucy Graham

Smith, in Wiltshire.

I was going out hunting for the first time, never having seen a

fox, a hound or a fence in my life; my heart beat as my sisters

superintending my toilette put the last hair-pin into a crinkly

knot of hair; I pulled on my top-boots and, running down to the

front door, found Ribblesdale, who was mounting me, waiting to

drive me to the meet. Hounds met at Christian Malford station.

Not knowing that with the Duke of Beaufort's hounds every one wore

blue and buff, I was disappointed at the appearance of the field.

No one has ever suggested that a touch of navy blue improves a

landscape; and, although I had never been out hunting before, I

had looked forward to seeing scarlet coats.

We moved off, jostling each other as thick as sardines, to draw

the nearest cover. My mount was peacocking on the grass when

suddenly we heard a "Halloa!" and the whole field went hammering

like John Gilpin down the hard high road.

Plunging through a gap, I dashed into the open country. Storm

flung herself up to the stars over the first fence and I found

myself seated on the wettest of wet ground, angry but unhurt; all

the stragglers--more especially the funkers--agreeably diverted

from pursuing the hunt, galloped off to catch my horse. I walked

to a cottage; and nearly an hour afterwards Storm was returned to

me.

After this contretemps my mount was more amenable and I determined

that nothing should unseat me again. Not being hurt by a fall

gives one a sense of exhilaration and I felt ready to face an arm

of the sea.

The scattered field were moving aimlessly about, some looking for

their second horses, some eating an early sandwich, some in groups

laughing and smoking and no one knowing anything about the hounds;

I was a little away from the others and wondering--like all

amateurs--why we were wasting so much time, when a fine old

gentleman on a huge horse came up to me and said, with a sweet

smile:

"Do you always whistle out hunting?"

MARGOT: "I didn't know I was whistling ... I've never hunted

before."

STRANGER: "Is this really the first time you've ever been out with

hounds?"

MARGOT: "Yes, it is."

STRANGER: "How wonderfully you ride! But I am sorry to see you

have taken a toss."

MARGOT: "I fell off at the first fence, for though I've ridden all

my life I've never jumped before."

STRANGER: "Were you frightened when you fell?"

MARGOT: "No, my horse was ..."

STRANGER: "Would you like to wear the blue and buff?"

MARGOT: "It's pretty for women, but I don't think it looks

sporting for men, though I see you wear it; but in any case I

could not get the blue habit."

STRANGER: "Why not?"

MARGOT: "Because the old Duke of Beaufort only gives it to women

who own coverts; I am told he hates people who go hard and after

today I mean to ride like the devil."

STRANGER: "Oh, do you? But is the 'old Duke,' as you call him, so

severe?"

MARGOT: "I've no idea; I've never seen him or any other duke!"

STRANGER: "If I told you I could get you the blue habit, what

would you say?"

MARGOT (with a patronising smile): "I'm afraid I should say you

were running hares!"

STRANGER: "You would have to wear a top-hat, you know, and you

would not like that! But, if you are going to ride like the devil,

it might save your neck; and in any case it would keep your hair

tidy."

MARGOT (anxiously pushing back her stray curls): "Why, is my hair

very untidy? It is the first time it has ever been up; and, when I

was 'thrown from my horse,' as the papers call it, all the hair-

pins got loose."

STRANGER: "It doesn't matter with your hair; it is so pretty I

think I shall call you Miss Fluffy! By the bye, what is your

name?"

When I told him he was much surprised:

"Oh, then you are a sister-in-law of the Ancestor's, are you?"

This was the first time I ever heard Ribblesdale called "the

Ancestor"; and as I did not know what he meant, I said:

"And who are you?"

To which he replied:

"I am the Duke of Beaufort and I am not running hares this time. I

will give you the blue habit, but you know you will have to wear a

top-hat."

MARGOT: "Good gracious! I hope I've said nothing to offend you? Do

you always do this sort of thing when you meet any one like me for

the first time?"

DUKE OF BEAUFORT (with a smile, lifting his hat): "Just as it is

the first time you have ever hunted, so it is the first time I

have ever met any one like you."

On the third day with the Beaufort hounds, my horse fell heavily

in a ditch with me and, getting up, galloped away. I was picked up

by a good-looking man, who took me into his house, gave me tea

and drove me back in his brougham to Easton Grey; I fell

passionately in love with him. He owned a horse called Lardy

Dardy, on which he mounted me.

Charty and the others chaffed me much about my new friend, saying

that my father would never approve of a Tory and that it was lucky

he was married.

I replied, much nettled, that I did not want to marry any one and

that, though he was a Tory, he was not at all stupid and would

probably get into the Cabinet.

This was my first shrewd political prophecy, for he is in the

Cabinet now.

I cannot look at him without remembering that he was the first man

I was ever in love with, and that, at the age of seventeen, I said

he would be in the Cabinet in spite of his being a Tory.

For pure unalloyed happiness those days at Easton Grey were

undoubtedly the most perfect of my life. Lucy's sweetness to me,

the beauty of the place, the wild excitement of riding over fences

and the perfect certainty I had that I would ride better than any

one in the whole world gave me an insolent confidence which no

earthquake could have shaken.

Off and on, I felt qualms over my lack of education; and when I

was falling into a happy sleep, dreaming I was overriding hounds,

echoes of "Pray, Mamma" out of Mrs. Markham, or early punishments

of unfinished poems would play about my bed.

On one occasion at Easton Grey, unable to sleep for love of life,

I leant out of the window into the dark to see if it was thawing.

It was a beautiful night, warm and wet, and I forgot all about my

education.

The next day, having no mount, I had procured a hireling from a

neighbouring farmer, but to my misery the horse did not turn up at

the meet; Mr. Golightly, the charming parish priest, said I might

drive about in his low black pony-carriage, called in those days a

Colorado beetle, but hunting on wheels was no role for me and I

did not feel like pursuing the field.

My heart sank as I saw the company pass me gaily down the road,

preceded by the hounds, trotting with a staccato step and their

noses in the air.

Just as I was turning to go home, a groom rode past in mufti,

leading a loose horse with a lady's saddle on it. The animal gave

a clumsy lurch; and the man, jerking it violently by the head,

bumped it into my phaeton. I saw my chance.

MARGOT: "Hullo, man! ... That's my horse! Whose groom are you?"

MAN (rather frightened at being caught jobbing his lady's horse in

the mouth): "I am Mrs. Chaplin's groom, miss."

MARGOT: "Jump off; you are the very man I was looking for; tell

me, does Mrs. Chaplin ride this horse over everything?"

MAN (quite unsuspicious and thawing at my sweetness and

authority): "Bless your soul! Mrs. Chaplin doesn't 'unt this

'orse! It's the Major's! She only 'acked it to the meet."

MARGOT (apprehensively and her heart sinking): "But can it jump?

... Don't they hunt it?"

MAN (pulling down my habit skirt): "It's a 'orse that can very

near jump anythink, I should say, but the Major says it shakes

every tooth in 'is gums and she says it's pig-'eaded."

It did not take me long to mount and in a moment I had left the

man miles behind me. Prepared for the worst, but in high glee, I

began to look about me: not a sign of the hunt! Only odd remnants

of the meet, straggling foot-passengers, terriers straining at a

strap held by drunken runners--some in old Beaufort coats, others

in corduroy--one-horse shays of every description by the sides of

the road and sloppy girls with stick and tammies standing in gaps

of the fences, straining their eyes across the fields to see the

hounds.

My horse with a loose rein was trotting aimlessly down the road

when, hearing a "Halloa!" I pulled up and saw the hounds streaming

towards me all together, so close that you could have covered them

with a handkerchief.

What a scent! What a pack! Have I headed the fox? Will they cross

the road? No! They are turning away from me! Now's the moment!!

I circled the Chaplin horse round with great resolution and

trotted up to a wall at the side of the road; he leapt it like a

stag; we flew over the grass and the next fence; and, after a

little scrambling, I found myself in the same field with hounds.

The horse was as rough as the boy said, but a wonderful hunter; it

could not put a foot wrong; we had a great gallop over the walls,

which only a few of the field saw.

When hounds checked, I was in despair; all sorts of ladies and

gentlemen came riding towards me and I wondered painfully which of

them would be Mr. and which Mrs. Chaplin. What was I to do?

Suddenly remembering my new friend and patron, I peered about for

the Duke; when I found him and told him of the awkward

circumstances in which I had placed myself, he was so much amused

that he made my peace with the Chaplins, who begged me to go on

riding their horse. They were not less susceptible to dukes than

other people and in any case no one was proof against the old Duke

of Beaufort. At the end of the day I was given the brush--a

fashion completely abandoned in the hunting-field now--and I went

home happy and tired.

CHAPTER IV

MARGOT AT A GIRLS' SCHOOL--WHO SPILT THE INK?--THE ENGINE

DRIVER'S MISTAKEN FLIRTATION--MARGOT LEAVES SCHOOL IN DISGUST--

DECIDES TO GO TO GERMANY TO STUDY

Although I did not do much thinking over my education, others did

it for me.

I had been well grounded by a series of short-stayed governesses

in the Druids and woad, in Alfred and the cakes, Romulus and Remus

and Bruce and the spider. I could speak French well and German a

little; and I knew a great deal of every kind of literature from

Tristram Shandy and The Antiquary to Under Two Flags and The

Grammarian's Funeral; but the governesses had been failures and,

when Lucy married, my mother decided that Laura and I should go to

school.

Mademoiselle de Mennecy--a Frenchwoman of ill-temper and a lively

mind--had opened a hyper-refined seminary in Gloucester Crescent,

where she undertook to "finish" twelve young ladies. My father had

a horror of girls' schools (and if he could "get through"--to use

the orthodox expression of the spookists--he would find all his

opinions on this subject more than justified by the manners,

morals and learning of the young ladies of the present day) but as

it was a question of only a few months he waived his objection.

No. 7 Gloucester Crescent looked down on the Great Western

Railway; the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep and sudden

shrill whistles and other odd sounds kept me awake, and my bed

rocked and trembled as the vigorous trains passed at uncertain

intervals all through the night. This, combined with sticky food,

was more than Laura could bear and she had no difficulty in

persuading my papa that if she were to stay longer than one week

her health would certainly suffer. I was much upset when she left

me, but faintly consoled by receiving permission to ride in the

Row three times a week; Mlle. de Mennecy thought my beautiful hack

gave prestige to her front door and raised no objections.

Sitting alone in the horsehair schoolroom, with a French patent-

leather Bible in my hands, surrounded by eleven young ladies, made

my heart sink. "Et le roi David deplut a l' Eternel," I heard in a

broad Scotch accent; and for the first time I looked closely at my

stable companions.

Mlle. de Mennecy allowed no one to argue with her; and our first

little brush took place after she informed me of this fact.

"But in that case, mademoiselle," said I, "how are any of us to

learn anything? I don't know how much the others know, but I know

nothing except what I've read; so, unless I ask questions, how am

I to learn?"

MLLE. DE MENNECY: "Je ne vous ai jamais defendu de me questionner;

vous n'ecoutez pas, mademoiselle. J'ai dit qu'il ne fallait pas

discuter avec moi."

MARGOT (keenly): "But, mademoiselle, discussion is the only way of

making lessons interesting."

MLLE. DE MENNECY (with violence): "Voulez-vous vous taire?"

To talk to a girl of nearly seventeen in this way was so

unintelligent that I made up my mind I would waste neither time

nor affection on her.

None of the girls were particularly clever, but we all liked each

other and for the first time--and I may safely say the last--I was

looked upon as a kind of heroine. It came about in this way: Mlle.

de Mennecy was never wrong. To quote Miss Fowler's admirable

saying a propos of her father, "She always let us have her own

way." If the bottle of ink was upset, or the back of a book burst,

she never waited to find out who had done it, but in a torrent of

words crashed into the first girl she suspected, her face becoming

a silly mauve and her bust heaving with passion. This made me so

indignant that, one day when the ink was spilt and Mlle. de

Mennecy as usual scolded the wrong girl, I determined I would

stand it no longer. Meeting the victim of Mademoiselle's temper in

the passage, I said to her:

"But why didn't you say you hadn't done it, ass!"

GIRL (catching her sob): "What was the good! She never listens;

and I would only have had to tell her who really spilt the ink."

This did seem a little awkward, so I said to her:

"That would never have done! Very well, then, I will go and put

the thing right for you, but tell the girls they must back me.

She's a senseless woman and I can't think why you are all so

frightened of her."

GIRL: "It's all very well for you! Madmozell is a howling snob,

you should have heard her on you before you came! She said your

father would very likely be made a peer and your sister Laura

marry Sir Charles Dilke." (The thought of this overrated man

marrying Laura was almost more than I could bear, but curiosity

kept me silent, and she continued.) "You see, she is far nicer to

you than to us, because she is afraid you may leave her."

Not having thought of this before, I said:

"Is that really true? What a horrible woman! Well, I had better go

and square it up; but will you all back me? Now don't go fretting

on and making yourself miserable."

GIRL: "I don't so much mind what you call her flux-de-bouche

scolding, but, when she flounced out of the room, she said I was

not to go home this Saturday."

MARGOT: "Oh, that'll be all right. Just you go off." (Exit girl,

drying her eyes.)

It had never occurred to me that Mlle. de Mennecy was a snob: this

knowledge was a great weapon in my hands and I determined upon my

plan of action. I hunted about in my room till I found one of my

linen overalls, heavily stained with dolly dyes. After putting it

on, I went and knocked at Mlle. de Mennecy's door and opening it

said:

"Mademoiselle, I'm afraid you'll be very angry, but it was I who

spilt the ink and burst the back of your dictionary. I ought to

have told you at once, I know, but I never thought any girl would

be such an image as to let you scold her without telling you she

had not done it." Seeing a look of suspicion on her sunless face,

I added nonchalantly, "Of course, if you think my conduct sets a

bad example in your school, I can easily go!"

I observed her eyelids flicker and I said:

"I think, before you scolded Sarah, you might have heard what she

had to say."

MLLE. DE MENNECY: "Ce que vous dites me choque profondement; il

m'est difficile de croire que vous avez fait une pareille lachete,

mademoiselle!"

MARGOT (protesting with indignation): "Hardly lachete,

Mademoiselle! I only knew a few moments ago that you had been so

amazingly unjust. Directly I heard it, I came to you; but as I

said before, I am quite prepared to leave."

MLLE. DE MENNECY (feeling her way to a change of front): "Sarah

s'est conduite si heroiquement que pour le moment je n'insiste

plus. Je vous felicite, mademoiselle, sur votre franchise; vous

pouvez rejoindre vos camarades."

The Lord had delivered her into my hands.

One afternoon, when our instructress had gone to hear Princess

Christian open a bazaar, I was smoking a cigarette on the

schoolroom balcony which overlooked the railway line.

It was a beautiful evening, and a wave of depression came over me.

Our prettiest pupil, Ethel Brydson, said to me:

"Time is up! We had better go in and do our preparation. There

would be the devil to pay if you were caught with that cigarette."

I leant over the balcony blowing smoke into the air in a vain

attempt to make rings, but, failing, kissed my hand to the sky and

with a parting gesture cursed the school and expressed a vivid

desire to go home and leave Gloucester Crescent for ever.

ETHEL (pulling my dress): "Good gracious, Margot! Stop kissing

your hand! Don't you see that man?"

I looked down and to my intense amusement saw an engine-driver

leaning over the side of his tender, kissing his hand to me. I

strained over the balcony and kissed both mine back to him, after

which I returned to the school-room.

Our piano was placed in the window and, the next morning, while

Ethel was arranging her music preparatory to practising, it

appeared my friend the engine-driver began kissing his hand to

her. It was eight o'clock and Mlle. de Mennecy was pinning on her

twists in the window.

I had finished my toilette and was sitting in the reading-room,

learning the passage chosen by our elocution master for the final

competition in recitation.

My fingers were in my ears and I was murmuring in dramatic tones:

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury

Caesar, not to praise him. ..."

The girls came in and out, but I never noticed them; and when the

breakfast bell rang, I shoved the book into my desk and ran

downstairs to breakfast. I observed that Ethel's place was empty;

none of the girls looked at me, but munched their bread and sipped

their tepid tea while Mademoiselle made a few frigid general

remarks and, after saying a French grace, left the room.

"Well," said I, "what's the row?"

Silence.

MARGOT (looking from face to face): "Ah! The mot d'ordre is that

you are not to speak to me. Is that the idea?"

Silence.

MARGOT (vehemently, with bitterness): "This is exactly what I

thought would happen at a girls' school--that I should find myself

boycotted and betrayed."

FIRST GIRL (bursting out): "Oh, Margot, it's not that at all! It's

because Ethel won't betray you that we are all to be punished to-

day!"

MARGOT: "What! Collective punishment? And I am the only one to get

off? How priceless! Well, I must say this is Mlle. de Mennecy's

first act of justice. I've been so often punished for all of you

that I'm sure you won't mind standing me this little outing! Where

is Ethel? Why don't you answer? (Very slowly) Oh, all right! I

have done with you! And I shall leave this very day, so help me

God!"

On hearing that Mlle. de Mennecy had dismissed Ethel on the spot

because the engine-driver had kissed his hand to her, I went

immediately and told her the whole story; all she answered was

that I was such a liar she did not believe a word I said.

I assured her that I was painfully truthful by nature, but her

circular and senseless punishments had so frightened the girls

that lying had become the custom of the place and I felt in honour

bound to take my turn in the lies and the punishments. After which

I left the room and the school.

On my arrival in Grosvenor Square I told my parents that I must go

home to Glen, as I felt suffocated by the pettiness and

conventionality of my late experience. The moderate teaching and

general atmosphere of Gloucester Crescent had depressed me, and

London feels airless when one is out of spirits: in any case it

can never be quite a home to any one born in Scotland.

The only place I look upon as home which does not belong to me is

Archerfield [Footnote: Archerfield belonged to Mrs. Hamilton

Ogilvie, of Beale.]--a house near North Berwick, in which we

lived for seven years. After Glen and my cottage in Berkshire,

Archerfield is the place I love best in the world. I was both

happier and more miserable there than I have ever been in my life.

Just as William James has written on varieties of religious

experience, so I could write on the varieties of my moral and

domestic experiences at that wonderful place. If ever I were to be

as unhappy again as I was there, I would fly to the shelter of

those Rackham woods, seek isolation on those curving coasts where

the gulls shriek and dive and be ultimately healed by the beauty

of the anchored seas which bear their islands like the Christ

Child on their breasts.

Unfortunately for me, my father had business which kept him in

London. He was in treaty with Lord Gerard to buy his uninteresting

house in an uninteresting square. The only thing that pleased me

in Grosvenor Square was the iron gate. When I could not find the

key of the square and wanted to sit out with my admirers, after

leaving a ball early, I was in the habit of climbing over these

gates in my tulle dress. This was a feat which was attended by

more than one risk: if you did not give a prominent leap off the

narrow space from the top of the gate, you would very likely be

caught up by the tulle fountain of your dress, in which case you

might easily lose your life; or, if you did not keep your eye on

the time, you would very likely be caught by an early house-maid,

in which case you might easily lose your reputation. No one is a

good judge of her own reputation, but I like to think that those

iron gates were the silent witnesses of my milder manner.

My father, however, loved Grosvenor Square and, being anxious that

Laura and I should come out together, bought the house in 1881.

No prodigal was ever given a warmer welcome than I was when I left

the area of the Great Western Railway; but the problem of how to

finish my education remained and I was determined that I would not

make my debut till I was eighteen. What with reading, hunting and

falling in love at Easton Grey, I was not at all happy and wanted

to be alone.

I knew no girls and had no friends except my sisters and was not

eager to talk to them about my affairs; I never could at any time

put all of myself into discussion which degenerates into gossip. I

had not formed the dangerous habit of writing good letters about

myself, dramatizing the principal part. I shrank then, as I do

now, from exposing the secrets and sensations of life. Reticence

should guard the soul and only those who have compassion should be

admitted to the shrine. When I peer among my dead or survey my

living friends, I see hardly any one with this quality. For the

moment my cousin Nan Tennant, Mrs. Arthur Sassoon, Mrs. James

Rothschild, Antoine Bibesco, and my son and husband are the only

people I can think of who possess it.

John Morley has, in carved letters of stone upon his chimney-

piece, Bacon's fine words, "The nobler a soul, the more objects of

compassion it hath."

When I first read them, I wondered where I could meet those souls

and I have wondered ever since. To have compassion you need

courage, you must fight for the objects of your pity and you must

feel and express tenderness towards all men. You will not meet

disinterested emotion, though you may seek it all your life, and

you will seldom find enough pity for the pathos of life.

My husband is a man of disinterested emotion. One morning, when he

and I were in Paris, where we had gone for a holiday, I found him

sitting with his head in his hands and the newspaper on his knee.

I saw he was deeply moved and, full of apprehension, I put my arm

round him and asked if he had had bad news. He pointed to a

paragraph in the paper and I read how some of the Eton boys had

had to break the bars of their windows to escape from fire and

others had been burnt to death. We knew neither a boy nor the

parent of any boy at Eton at that time, but Henry's eyes were full

of tears, and he could not speak.

I had the same experience with him over the wreck of the Titanic.

When we read of that challenging, luxurious ship at bay in the

ice-fields and the captain sending his unanswered signals to the

stars, we could not sit through dinner.

I knew no one of this kind of sympathy in my youth, and my father

was too busy and my mother too detached for me to have told them

anything. I wanted to be alone and I wanted to learn. After

endless talks it was decided that I should go to Germany for four

or five months and thus settle the problem of an unbegun but

finishing education.

Looking back on this decision, I think it was a remarkable one. I

had a passion for dancing and my father wanted me to go to balls;

I had a genius for horses and adored hunting; I had such a

wonderful hack that every one collected at the Park rails when

they saw me coming into the Row; but all this did not deflect me

from my purpose and I went to Dresden alone with a stupid maid at

a time when--if not in England, certainly in Germany--I might

have passed as a moderate beauty.

CHAPTER V

A DRESDEN LODGING HOUSE--MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE WITH AN OFFICER AFTER

THE OPERA----AN ELDERLY AMERICAN ADMIRER--YELLOW ROSES, GRAF VON--

VON--AND MOTIFS FROM WAGNER

Frau von Mach kept a ginger-coloured lodging-house high up in

Luttichau-strasse. She was a woman of culture and refinement; her

mother had been English and her husband, having gone mad in the

Franco-Prussian war, had left her penniless with three children.

She had to work for her living and she cooked and scrubbed without

a thought for herself from dawn till dark.

There were thirteen pianos on our floor and two or three permanent

lodgers. The rest of the people came and went--men, women and boys

of every nationality, professionals and amateurs--but I was too

busy to care or notice who went or who came.

Although my mother was bold and right to let me go as a bachelor

to Dresden, I could not have done it myself. Later on, like every

one else, I sent my stepdaughter and daughter to be educated in

Germany for a short time, but they were chaperoned by a woman of

worth and character, who never left them: my German nursery-

governess, who came to me when Elizabeth was four.

In parenthesis, I may mention that, in the early terrible days of

the war, our thoughtful Press, wishing to make money out of public

hysteria, had the bright idea of turning this simple, devoted

woman into a spy. There was not a pressman who did not laugh in

his sleeve at this and openly make a stunt of it, but it had its

political uses; and, after the Russians had been seen with snow on

their boots by everyone in England, the gentlemen of the Press

calculated that almost anything would be believed if it could be

repeated often enough. And they were right: the spiteful and the

silly disseminated lies about our governess from door to door with

the kind of venom that belongs in equal proportions to the

credulous, the cowards and the cranks. The greenhorns believed it

and the funkers, who saw a plentiful crop of spies in every bush,

found no difficulty in mobilising their terrors from my governess

--already languishing in the Tower of London--to myself, who

suddenly became a tennis-champion and an habituee of the German

officers' camps!

The Dresden of my day was different from the Dresden of twenty

years after. I never saw an English person the whole time I was

there. After settling into my new rooms, I wrote out for myself a

severe Stundenplan, which I pinned over my head next to my alarm-

clock. At 6 every morning I woke up and dashed into the kitchen to

have coffee with the solitary slavey; after that I practised the

fiddle or piano till 8.30, when we had the pension breakfast; and

the rest of the day was taken up by literature, drawing and other

lessons. I went to concerts or the opera by myself every night.

One day Frau von Mach came to me greatly disdressed by a letter

she had received from my mother begging her to take in no men

lodgers while I was in the pension, as some of her friends in

England had told her that I might elope with a foreigner. To this

hour I do not know whether my mother was serious; but I wrote and

told her that Frau von Mach's life depended on her lodgers, that

there was only one permanent lodger--an old American called

Loring, who never spoke to me--and that I had no time to elope.

Many and futile were the efforts to make me return home; but,

though I wrote to England regularly, I never alluded to any of

them, as they appeared childish to me.

I made great friends with Frau von Mach and in loose moments sat

on her kitchen-table smoking cigarettes and eating black cherries;

we discussed Shakespeare, Wagner, Brahms, Middlemarch, Bach and

Hegel, and the time flew.

One night I arrived early at the Opera House and was looking about

while the fiddles were tuning up. I wore my pearls and a scarlet

crepe-de-chine dress and a black cloth cape with a hood on it,

which I put on over my head when I walked home in the rain. I was

having a frank stare at the audience, when I observed just

opposite me an officer in a white uniform. As the Saxon soldiers

wore pale blue, I wondered what army he could belong to.

He was a fine-looking young man, with tailor-made shoulders, a

small waist and silver and black on his sword-belt. When he turned

to the stage, I looked at him through my opera-glasses. On closer

inspection, he was even handsomer than I had thought. A lady

joined him in the box and he took off her cloak, while she stood

up gazing down at the stalls, pulling up her long black gloves.

She wore a row of huge pearls, which fell below her waist, and a

black jet decollete dress. Few people wore low dresses at the

opera and I saw half the audience fixing her with their glasses.

She was evidently famous. Her hair was fox-red and pinned back on

each side of her temples with Spanish combs of gold and pearls;

she surveyed the stalls with cavernous eyes set in a snow-white

face; and in her hand she held a bouquet of lilac orchids. She was

the best-looking woman I saw all the time I was in Germany and I

could not take my eyes off her. The white officer began to look

about the opera-house when my red dress caught his eye. He put up

his glasses, and I instantly put mine down. Although the lights

were lowered for the overture, I saw him looking at me for some

time.

I had been in the habit of walking about in the entr'actes and,

when the curtain dropped at the end of the first act, I left the

box. It did not take me long to identify the white officer. He was

not accompanied by his lady, but stood leaning against the wall

smoking a cigar and talking to a man; as I passed him I had to

stop for a moment for fear of treading on his outstretched toes.

He pulled himself erect to get out of my way; I looked up and our

eyes met; I don't think I blush easily, but something in his gaze

may have made me blush. I lowered my eyelids and walked on.

The Meistersinger was my favourite opera and so it appeared to be

of the Dresdeners; Wagner, having quarrelled with the authorities,

refused to allow the Ring to be played in the Dresden Opera House;

and every one was tired of the swans and doves of Lohengrin and

Tannhauser.

There was a great crowd that night and, as it was raining when we

came out, I hung about, hoping to get a cab; I saw my white

officer with his lady, but he did not see me; I heard him before

he got into the brougham give elaborate orders to the coachman to

put him down at some club.

After waiting for some time, as no cab turned up, I pulled the

hood of my cloak over my head and started to walk home; when the

crowd scattered I found myself alone and I turned into a little

street which led into Luttichau-strasse. Suddenly I became aware

that I was being followed; I heard the even steps and the click of

spurs of some one walking behind me; I should not have noticed

this had I not halted under a lamp to pull on my hood, which the

wind had blown off. When I stopped, the steps also stopped. I

walked on, wondering if it had been my imagination, and again I

heard the click of spurs coming nearer. The street being deserted,

I was unable to endure it any longer; I turned round and there was

the officer. His black cloak hanging loosely over his shoulders

showed me the white uniform and silver belt. He saluted me and

asked me in a curious Belgian French if he might accompany me

home. I said:

"Oh, certainly! But I am not at all nervous in the dark."

OFFICER (stopping under the lamp to light a cigarette): "You like

Wagner? Do you know him well? I confess I find him long and loud."

MARGOT: "He is a little long, but so wonderful!"

OFFICER: "Don't you feel tired? (With emphasis) _I_ DO!"

MARGOT: "No, I'm not at all tired."

OFFICER: "You would not like to go and have supper with me in a

private room in a hotel, would you?"

MARGOT: "You are very kind, but I don't like supper; besides, it

is late. (Leaving his side to look at the number on the door) I am

afraid we must part here."

OFFICER (drawing a long breath): "But you said I might take you

home!!"

MARGOT (with a slow smile): "I know I did, but this is my home."

He looked disappointed and surprised, but taking my hand he kissed

it, then stepping back saluted and said:

"Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle."

My second adventure occurred on my way back to England. After a

little correspondence, my mother allowed me to take Frau von Mach

with me to Berlin to hear the Ring der Nibelungen. She and I were

much excited at this little outing, in honour of which I had

ordered her a new black satin dress. German taste is like German

figures, thick and clumsy, and my dear old friend looked like a

hold-all in my gift.

When we arrived in Berlin I found my room in the hotel full of

every kind of flower; and on one of the bouquets was placed the

card of our permanent lodger, Mr. Loring. I called out to Frau von

Mach, who was unpacking:

"Do come here, dearest, and look at my wonderful roses! You will

never guess who they come from!"

FRAU VON MACH (looking rather guilty): "I think I can guess."

MARGOT: "I see you know! But who would have dreamt that an old

maid like Loring would have thought of such gallantry?"

FRAU VON MACH: "But surely, dear child, you knew that he admired

you?"

MARGOT: "Admired me! You must be cracked! I never remember his

saying a civil word to me the whole time I was in Dresden. Poor

mamma! If she were here now she would feel that her letter to you

on the danger of my elopement was amply justified!"

Frau von Mach and I sat side by side at the opera; and on my left

was a German officer. In front of us there was a lady with

beautiful hair and diamond grasshoppers in it; her two daughters

sat on either side of her.

Everything was conducted in the dark and it was evident that the

audience was strung up to a high pitch of expectant emotion, for,

when I whispered to Frau von Mach, the officer on my left said,

"Hush!" which I thought extremely rude. Several men in the stalls,

sitting on the nape of their necks, had covered their faces with

pocket-handkerchiefs, which I thought infinitely ridiculous,

bursting as they were with beef and beer. My musical left was only

a little less good-looking than the white officer. He kept a rigid

profile towards me and squashed up into a corner to avoid sharing

an arm of the stall with me. As we had to sit next to each other

for four nights running, I found this a little exaggerated.

I was angry with myself for dropping my fan and scent-bottle; the

lady picked up the bottle and the officer the fan. The lady gave

me back my bottle and, when the curtain fell, began talking to me.

She had turned round once or twice during the scene to look at me.

I found her most intelligent; she knew England and had heard

Rubinstein and Joachim play at the Monday Pops. She had been to

the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud's and Lord's.

The officer kept my fan in his hands and, instead of going out in

the entr'acte, stayed and listened to our conversation. When the

curtain went up and the people returned to their seats, he still

held my fan. In the next interval the lady and the girls went out

and my left-hand neighbour opened conversation with me. He said in

perfect English:

"Are you really as fond of this music as you appear to be?"

To which I replied:

"You imply I am humbugging! I never pretend anything; why should

you think I do? I don't lean back perspiring or cover my face with

a handkerchief as your compatriots are doing, it is true, but..."

HE (interrupting): "I am very glad of that! Do you think you would

recognise a motif if I wrote one for you?"

Feeling rather nettled, I said:

"You must think me a perfect gowk if you suppose I should not

recognise any motif in any opera of Wagner!"

I said this with a commanding gesture, but I was far from

confident that he would not catch me out. He opened his cigarette-

case, took out a visiting card and wrote the Schlummermotif on the

back before giving it to me. After telling him what the motif was,

I looked at his very long name on the back of the card: Graf von--

.

Seeing me do this, he said with a slight twinkle:

"Won't you write me a motif now?"

MARGOT: "Alas! I can't write music and to save my life could not

do what you have done; are you a composer?"

GRAF VON--: "I shan't tell you what I am--especially as I have

given you my name--till you tell me who you are."

MARGOT: "I'm a young lady at large!"

At this, Frau von Mach nudged me; I thought she wanted to be

introduced, so I looked at his name and said seriously:

"Graf von--, this is my friend Frau von Mach."

He instantly stood up, bent his head and, clicking his heels, said

to her:

"Will you please introduce me to this young lady?"

FRAU VON MACH (with a smile): "Certainly. Miss Margot Tennant."

GRAF VON--: "I hope, mademoiselle, you will forgive me thinking

your interest in Wagner might not be as great as it appeared, but

it enabled me to introduce myself to you."

MARGOT: "Don't apologise, you have done me a good turn, for I

shall lie back and cover my face with a handkerchief all through

this next act to convince you."

GRAF VON--: "That would be a heavy punishment for me... and

incidentally for this ugly audience."

On the last night of the Ring, I took infinite trouble with my

toilette. When we arrived at the theatre neither the lady, her

girls, nor the Graf were there. I found an immense bouquet on my

seat, of yellow roses with thick clusters of violets round the

stalk, the whole thing tied up with wide Parma violet ribbons. It

was a wonderful bouquet. I buried my face in the roses, wondering

why the Graf was so late, fervently hoping that the lady and her

daughters would not turn up: no Englishman would have thought of

giving one flowers in this way, said I to myself. The curtain! How

very tiresome! The doors would all be shut now, as late-comers

were not allowed to disturb the Gotterdammerung. The next day I

was to travel home, which depressed me; my life would be different

in London and all my lessons were over for ever! What could have

happened to the Graf, the lady and her daughters? Before the

curtain rose for the last act, he arrived and, flinging off his

cloak, said breathlessly to me:

"You can't imagine how furious I am! To-night of all nights we had

a regimental dinner! I asked my colonel to let me slip off early,

or I should not be here now; I had to say good-bye to you. Is it

true then? Are you really off to-morrow?"

MARGOT (pressing the bouquet to her face, leaning faintly towards

him and looking into his eyes): "Alas, yes! I will send you

something from England so that you mayn't quite forget me. I won't

lean back and cover my head with a handkerchief to-night, but if I

hide my face in these divine roses now and then, you will forgive

me and understand."

He said nothing but looked a little perplexed. We had not observed

the curtain rise but were rudely reminded of it by a lot of angry

"Hush's" all round us. He clasped his hands together under his

chin, bending his head down on them and taking up both arms of the

stall with his elbows. When I whispered to him, he did not turn

his head at all but just cocked his ear down to me. Was he

pretending to be more interested in Wagner than he really was?"

I buried my face in my roses, the curtain dropped. It was all

over.

GRAF VON--(turning to me and looking straight into my eyes): "If

it is true what you said, that you know no one in Berlin, what a

wonderful compliment the lady with the diamond grasshoppers has

paid you!"

He took my bouquet, smelt the roses and, giving it back to me with

a sigh, said:

"Good-bye."

CHAPTER VI

MARGOT RIDES A HORSE INTO LONDON HOME AND SMASHES FURNITURE--

SUITOR IS FORBIDDEN THE HOUSE--ADVISES GIRL FRIEND TO ELOPE;

INTERVIEW WITH GIRL'S FATHER--TETE-A-TETE DINNER IN PARIS WITH

BARON HIRSCH--WINNING TIP FROM FRED ARCHER, THE JOCKEY

When I first came out in London we had no friends of fashion to

get me invitations to balls and parties. The Walters, who were my

mother's rich relations, in consequence of a family quarrel were

not on speaking terms with us; and my prospects looked by no means

rosy.

One day I was lunching with an American to whom I had been

introduced in the hunting-field and found myself sitting next to a

stranger. Hearing that he was Arthur Walter, I thought that it

would be fun to find out his views upon my family and his own. He

did not know who I was, so I determined I would enjoy what looked

like being a long meal. We opened in this manner:

MARGOT: "I see you hate Gladstone!"

ARTHUR WALTER: "Not at all. I hate his politics."

MARGOT: "I didn't suppose you hated the man."

ARTHUR WALTER: "I am ashamed to say I have never even seen him or

heard him speak, but I entirely agree that for the Duke of

Westminster to have sold the Millais portrait of him merely

because he does not approve of Home Rule shows great pettiness! I

have of course never seen the picture as it was bought privately."

MARGOT: "The Tennants bought it, so I suppose you could easily see

it."

ARTHUR WALTER: "I regret to say that I cannot ever see this

picture."

MARGOT: "Why not?"

ARTHUR WALTER: "Because though the Tennants are relations of mine,

our family quarrelled."

MARGOT: "What did they quarrel over?"

ARTHUR WALTER: "Oh, it's a long story! Perhaps relations quarrel

because they are too much alike."

MARGOT: "You are not in the least like the Tennants!"

ARTHUR WALTER: "What makes you say that? Do you know them?"

MARGOT: "Yes, I do."

ARTHUR WALTER: "In that case perhaps you could take me to see the

picture."

MARGOT: "Oh, certainly! ... And I know Mr. Gladstone too!"

ARTHUR WALTER: "What a fortunate young lady! Perhaps you could

manage to take me to see him also."

MARGOT: "All right. If you will let me drive you away from lunch

in my phaeton, I will show you the Gladstone picture."

ARTHUR WALTER: "Are you serious? Do you know them well enough?"

MARGOT (nodding confidently): "Yes, yes, don't you fret!"

After lunch I drove him to 40 Grosvenor Square and, when I let

myself in with my latch-key, he guessed who I was, but any

interest he might have felt in this discovery was swamped by what

followed.

I opened the library door. Mr. Gladstone was sitting talking to my

parents under his own portrait. After the introduction he

conversed with interest and courtesy to my new relation about the

Times newspaper, its founder and its great editor, Delane.

What I really enjoyed most in London was riding in the Row. I

bought a beautiful hack for myself at Tattersalls, 15.2, bright

bay with black points and so well-balanced that if I had ridden it

with my face to its tail I should hardly have known the

difference. I called it Tatts; it was bold as a lion, vain as a

peacock and extremely moody. One day, when I was mounted to ride

in the Row, my papa kept me waiting so long at the door of 40

Grosvenor Square that I thought I would ride Tatts into the front

hall and give him a call; it only meant going up one step from the

pavement to the porch and another through the double doors held

open by the footman. Unluckily, after a somewhat cautious approach

by Tatts up the last step into the marble hall, he caught his

reflection in a mirror. At this he instantly stood erect upon his

hind legs, crashing my tall hat into the crystal chandelier. His

four legs all gave way on the polished floor and down we went with

a noise like thunder, the pony on the top of me, the chandelier on

the top of him and my father and the footman helpless spectators.

I was up and on Tatts' head in a moment, but not before he had

kicked a fine old English chest into a jelly. This misadventure

upset my father's temper and my pony's nerve, as well as

preventing me from dancing for several days.

My second scrape was more serious. I engaged myself to be married.

If any young "miss" reads this autobiography and wants a little

advice from a very old hand, I will say to her, when a man

threatens to commit suicide after you have refused him, you may be

quite sure that he is a vain, petty fellow or a great goose; if

you felt any doubts about your decision before, you need have none

after this and under no circumstances must you give way. To marry

a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to

influence the kind of fellow who has "never had a chance, poor

devil," you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the

strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of

vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of any one. My

fiance was neither petty nor a goose, but a humorist; I do not

think he meant me to take him seriously, but in spite of my high

spirits I was very serious, and he was certainly more in love with

me than any one had ever been before. He was a fine rider and gave

me a mount with the Beaufort hounds.

When I told my mother of my engagement, she sank upon a settee,

put a handkerchief to her eyes, and said:

"You might as well marry your groom!"

I struggled very hard to show her how worldly she was. Who wanted

money? Who wanted position? Who wanted brains? Nothing in fact was

wanted, except my will!

I was much surprised, a few days later, to hear from G., whom I

met riding in the Row, that he had called every day of the week

but been told by the footman that I was out. The under-butler, who

was devoted to me, said sadly, when I complained:

"I am afraid, miss, your young gentleman has been forbidden the

house."

Forbidden the house! I rushed to my sister Charty and found her

even more upset than my mother. She pointed out with some truth

that Lucy's marriage and the obstinacy with which she had pursued

it had gone far towards spoiling her early life; but "the squire,"

as Graham Smith was called, although a character-part, was a man

of perfect education and charming manners. He had beaten all the

boys at Harrow, won a hundred steeplechases and loved books;

whereas my young man knew little about anything but horses and,

she added, would be no companion to me when I was ill or old.

I flounced about the room and said that forbidding him the house

was grotesque and made me ridiculous in the eyes of the servants.

I ended a passionate protest by telling her gravely that if I

changed my mind he would undoubtedly commit suicide. This awful

news was received with an hilarity which nettled me.

CHARTY: "I should have thought you had too much sense of humour

and Mr. G. too much common sense for either of you to believe

this. He must think you very vain. ..."

I did not know at all what she meant and said with the utmost

gravity:

"The terrible thing is I believe that I have given him a false

impression of my feelings for him; for, though I love him very

much, I would never have promised to marry him if he had not said

he was going to kill himself." Clasping my two hands together and

greatly moved, I concluded, "If I break it off now and ANYTHING

SHOULD happen, my life is over and I shall feel as if I had

murdered him."

CHARTY (looking at me with a tender smile): "I should risk it,

darling."

A propos of vanity, in the interests of my publisher I must here

digress and relate the two greatest compliments that I ever had

paid to me. Although I cannot listen to reading out loud, I have

always been fond of sermons and constantly went to hear Canon

Eyton, a great preacher, who collected large and attentive

congregations in his church in Sloane Street. I nearly always went

alone, as my family preferred listening to Stopford Brooke or

going to our pew in St. George's, Hanover Square.

One of my earliest recollections is of my mother and father taking

me to hear Liddon preach; I remember nothing at all about it

except that I swallowed a hook and eye during the service: not a

very flattering tribute to the great divine!

Eyton was a striking preacher and his church was always crowded. I

had to stand a long time before I could ever get a seat. One

morning I received this letter:

DEAR MISS TENNANT,

I hope you will excuse this written by a stranger. I have often

observed you listening to the sermon in our church. My wife and I

are going abroad, so we offer you our pew; you appear to admire

Eyton's preaching as much as we do--we shall be very glad if you

can use it.

Yours truly,

FRANCIS BUXTON.

The other compliment was also a letter from a stranger. It was

dirty and misspelt, and enclosed a bill from an undertaker; the

bill came to seven pounds and the letter ran as follows:

Honoured Miss father passed away quite peaceful last Saturday, he

set store by his funeral and often told us as much sweeping a

crossing had paid him pretty regular, but he left nothing as one

might speak of, and so we was put to it for the funeral, as it

throws back so on a house not to bury your father proper, I

remember you and all he thought of you and told the undertaker to

go ahead with the thing for as you was my fathers friend I hoped

you would understand and excuse me.

This was from the son of our one-legged crossing-sweeper, and I

need hardly say I owed him a great deal more than seven pounds. He

had taken all our love-letters, presents and messages to and fro

from morning till night for years past and was a man who

thoroughly understood life.

To return to my fiance, I knew things could not go on as they

were; scenes bored me and I was quite incapable of sustaining a

campaign of white lies; so I reassured my friends and relieved my

relations by telling the young man that I could not marry him. He

gave me his beautiful mare, Molly Bawn, sold all his hunters and

went to Australia. His hair when he returned to England two years

later was grey. I have heard of this happening, but have only

known of it twice in my life, once on this occasion and the other

time when the boiler of the Thunderer burst in her trial trip; the

engine was the first Government order ever given to my father's

firm of Humphreys & Tennant and the accident made a great

sensation. My father told me that several men had been killed and

that young Humphreys' hair had turned white. I remember this

incident very well, as when I gave Papa the telegram in the

billiard room at Glen he covered his face with his hands and sank

on the sofa in tears.

About this time Sir William Miller, a friend of the family,

suggested to my parents that his eldest son--a charming young

fellow, since dead--should marry me. I doubt if the young man knew

me by sight, but in spite of this we were invited to stay at

Manderston, much to my father's delight.

On the evening of our arrival my host said to me in his broad

Scottish accent:

"Margy, will you marry my son Jim?"

"My dear Sir William," I replied, "your son Jim has never spoken

to me in his life!"

SIR WILLIAM: "He is shy."

I assured him that this was not so and that I thought his son

might be allowed to choose for himself, adding:

"You are like my father, Sir William, and think every one wants to

marry."

SIR WILLIAM: "So they do, don't they?" (With a sly look.) "I am

sure they all want to marry you."

MARGOT (mischievously): "I wonder!"

SIR WILLIAM: "Margy, would you rather marry me or break your leg?"

MARGOT: Break both, Sir William."

After this promising beginning I was introduced to the young man.

It was impossible to pay me less attention than he did.

Sir William had two daughters, one of whom was anxious to marry a

major quartered in Edinburgh, but he was robustly and rudely

against this, in consequence of which the girl was unhappy. She

took me into her confidence one afternoon in their schoolroom.

It was dark and the door was half open, with a bright light in the

passage; Miss Miller was telling me with simple sincerity exactly

what she felt and what her father felt about the major. I suddenly

observed Sir William listening to our conversation behind the

hinges of the door. Being an enormous man, he had screwed himself

into a cramped posture and I was curious to see how long he would

stick it out. It was indique that I should bring home the

proverbial platitude that "listeners never hear any good of

themselves."

MISS MILLER: "You see, there is only one real objection to him, he

is not rich!"

I told her that as she would be rich some day, it did not matter.

Why should the rich marry the rich? It was grotesque! I intended

to marry whatever kind of man I cared for and papa would

certainly find the money.

MISS MILLER (not listening): "He loves me so! And he says he will

kill himself if I give him up now."

MARGOT (with vigour): "Oh, if he is THAT sort of man, a really

brave fellow, there is only one thing for you both to do!"

MISS MILLER (leaning forward with hands clasped and looking at me

earnestly): "Oh, tell me, tell me!"

MARGOT: "Are you sure he is a man of dash? Is he really unworldly

and devoted? Not afraid of what people say?"

MISS MILLER (eagerly): "No, no! Yes, yes! He would die for me,

indeed he would, and is afraid of no one!"

MARGOT (luring her on): "I expect he is very much afraid of your

father."

MISS MILLER (hesitating): "Papa is so rude to him."

MARGOT (with scorn): "Well, if your major is afraid of your

father, I think nothing of him!" (Slight movement behind the

door.)

MISS MILLER (impulsively): "He is afraid of no one! But Papa never

talks to him."

MARGOT (very deliberately): "Well, there is only one thing for you

to do; and that is to run away!" (Sensation behind the door.)

MISS MILLER (with determination, her eyes sparkling): "If he will

do it, I WILL! But oh, dear! ...What will people say? How they

will talk!"

MARGOT (lightly): "Oh, of course, if you care for what people say,

you will be done all through life!"

MISS MILLER: "Papa would be furious, you know, and would curse

fearfully!"

To this I answered:

"I know your father well and I don't believe he would care a

damn!"

I got up suddenly, as if going to the door, at which there was a

sound of a scuffle in the corridor.

MISS MILLER (alarmed and getting up): "What was that noise? Can

any one have been in the passage? Could they have heard us? Let us

shut the door."

MARGOT: "No, don't shut the door, it's so hot and we shan't be

able to talk alone again."

Miss MILLER (relieved and sitting down): "You are very good. ... I

must think carefully over what you have said."

MARGOT: "Anyhow, tell your major that _I_ know your father; he is

really fond of me."

MISS MILLER: "Oh, yes, I heard him ask your father if he would

exchange you for us."

MARGOT: "That's only his chaff; he is devoted to you. But what he

likes about me is my dash: nothing your papa admires so much as

courage. If the major has pluck enough to carry you off to

Edinburgh, marry you in a registrar's office and come back and

tell your family the same day, he will forgive everything, give

you a glorious allowance and you'll be happy ever after! ... Now,

my dear, I must go."

I got up very slowly, and, putting my hands on her shoulders,

said:

"Pull up your socks, Amy!"

I need hardly say the passage was deserted when I opened the door.

I went downstairs, took up the Scotsman and found Sir William

writing in the hall. He was grumpy and restless and at last,

putting down his pen, he came up to me and said, in his broad

Scotch accent:

"Margy, will you go round the garden with me?"

"MARGY": "Yes, if we can sit down alone and have a good talk."

SIR WILLIAM (delighted): "What about the summerhouse?"

"MARGY": "All right, I'll run up and put on my hat and meet you

here."

When we got to the summer-house he said:

"Margy, my daughter Amy's in love with a pauper."

"MARGY": "What does that matter?"

SIR WILLIAM: "He's not at all clever."

"MARGY": "How do you know?"

SIR WILLIAM: "What do you mean?"

"MARGY": "None of us are good judges of the people we dislike."

SIR WILLIAM (cautiously): "I would much like your advice on all

this affair and I want you to have a word with my girl Amy and

tell her just what you think on the matter."

"MARGY": "I have."

SIR WILLIAM: "What did she say to you?"

"MARGY": "Really, Sir William, would you have me betray

confidences?"

SIR WILLIAM: "Surely you can tell me what YOU said, anyway,

without betraying her."

"MARGY" (looking at him steadily): "Well, what do you suppose you

would say in the circumstances? If a well-brought-up girl told you

that she was in love with a man that her parents disliked, a man

who was unable to keep her and with no prospects..."

SIR WILLIAM (interrupting): "Never mind what I should say! What

did YOU say?"

"MARGY" (evasively): "The thing is unthinkable! Good girls like

yours could never go against their parents' wishes! Men who can't

keep their wives should not marry at all. ..."

SIR WILLIAM (with great violence, seizing my hands): "WHAT DID YOU

SAY?"

"MARGY" (with a sweet smile): "I'm afraid, Sir William, you are

changing your mind and, instead of leaning on my advice, you begin

to suspect it."

SIR WILLIAM (very loud and beside himself with rage): "WHAT DID

YOU SAY?"

"MARGY" (coolly, putting her hand on his): "I can't think why you

are so excited! If I told you that I had said, 'Give it all up, my

dear, and don't vex your aged father,' what would you say?"

SIR WILLIAM (getting up and flinging my hand away from him):

"Hoots! You're a liar!"

"MARGY": "No, I'm not, Sir William; but, when I see people

listening at doors, I give them a run for their money."

I had another vicarious proposal. One night, dining with the

Bischoffheims, I was introduced for the first time to Baron

Hirsch, an Austrian who lived in Paris. He took me in to dinner

and a young man whom I had met out hunting sat on the other side

of me.

I was listening impressively to the latter, holding my champagne

in my hand, when the footman in serving one of the dishes bumped

my glass against my chest and all its contents went down the front

of my ball-dress. I felt iced to the bone; but, as I was thin, I

prayed profoundly that my pink bodice would escape being marked. I

continued in the same position, holding my empty glass in my hand

as if nothing had happened, hoping that no one had observed me and

trying to appear interested in the young man's description of the

awful dangers he had run when finding himself alone with hounds.

A few minutes later Baron Hirsch turned to me and said:

"Aren't you very cold?"

I said that I was, but that it did not matter; what I really

minded was spoiling my dress and, as I was not a kangaroo, I

feared the worst. After this we entered into conversation and he

told me among other things that, when he had been pilled for a

sporting club in Paris, he had revenged himself by buying the club

and the site upon which it was built, to which I observed:

"You must be very rich."

He asked me where I had lived and seemed surprised that I had

never heard of him.

The next time we met each other was in Paris. I lunched with him

and his wife and he gave me his opera box and mounted me in the

Bois de Boulogne.

One day he invited me to dine with him tete-a-tete at the Cafe

Anglais and, as my father and mother were out, I accepted. I felt

a certain curiosity about this invitation, because my host in his

letter had given me the choice of several other dates in the event

of my being engaged that night. When I arrived at the Cafe Anglais

Baron Hirsch took off my cloak and conducted me into a private

room. He reminded me of our first meeting, said that he had been

much struck by my self-control over the iced champagne and went on

to ask if I knew why he had invited me to dine with him. I said:

"I have not the slightest idea!"

BARON HIRSCH: "Because I want you to marry my son, Lucien. He is

quite unlike me, he is very respectable and hates money; he likes

books and collects manuscripts and other things, and is highly

educated."

MARGOT: "Your son is the man with the beard, who wears glasses and

collects coins, isn't he?"

BARON HIRSCH (thinking my description rather dreary): "Quite so!

You talked to him the other day at our house. But he has a

charming disposition and has been a good son; and I am quite sure

that, if you would take a little trouble, he would be devoted to

you and make you an excellent husband: he does not like society,

or racing, or any of the things that I care for."

MARGOT: "Poor man! I don't suppose he would even care much for me!

I hate coins!"

BARON HIRSCH: "Oh, but you would widen his interests! He is shy

and I want him to make a good marriage; and above all he must

marry an Englishwoman."

MARGOT: "Has he ever been in love?"

BARON HIRSCH: "No, he has never been in love; but a lot of women

make up to him and I don't want him to be married for his money by

some designing girl."

MARGOT: "Over here I suppose that sort of thing might happen; I

don't believe it would in England."

BARON HIRSCH: "How can you say such a thing to me? London society

cares more for money than any other in the world, as I know to my

cost! You may take it from me that a young man who will be as rich

as Lucien can marry almost any girl he likes."

MARGOT: "I doubt it! English girls don't marry for money!"

BARON HIRSCH: "Nonsense, my dear! They are like other people; it

is only the young that can afford to despise money!"

MARGOT: "Then I hope that I shall be young for a very long time."

BARON HIRSCH (smiling): "I don't think you will ever be

disappointed in that hope; but surely you wouldn't like to be a

poor man's wife and live in the suburbs? Just think what it would

be if you could not hunt or ride in the Row in a beautiful habit

or have wonderful dresses from Worth! You would hate to be dowdy

and obscure!"

"That," I answered energetically, "could never happen to me."

BARON HIRSCH: "Why not?"

MARGOT: "Because I have too many friends."

BARON HIRSCH: "And enemies?"

MARGOT (thoughtfully): "Perhaps. ...I don't know about that. I

never notice whether people dislike me or not. After all, you took

a fancy to me the first time we met; why should not other people

do the same? Do you think I should not improve on acquaintance?"

BARON HIRSCH: "How can you doubt that, when I have just asked you

to marry my son?"

MARGOT: "What other English girl is there that you would like for

a daughter-in-law?"

BARON HIRSCH: "Lady Katie Lambton,[Footnote: The present Duchess

of Leeds.] Durham's sister."

MARGOT: "I don't know her at all. Is she like me?"

BARON HIRSCH: "Not in the least; but you and she are the only

girls I have met that I could wish my son to marry."

I longed to know what my rival was like, but all he could tell me

was that she was lovely and clever and mignonne, to which I said:

"But she sounds exactly like me!"

This made him laugh:

"I don't believe you know in the least what you are like," he

said.

MARGOT: "You mean I have no idea how plain I am? But what an odd

man you are! If I don't know what I'm like, I am sure you can't!

How do you know that I am not just the sort of adventuress you

dread most? I might marry your son and, so far from widening his

interests, as you suggest, keep him busy with his coins while I

went about everywhere, enjoying myself and spending all your

money. In spite of what you say, some man might fall in love with

me, you know! Some delightful, clever man. And then Lucien's

happiness would be over."

BARON HIRSCH: "I do not believe you would ever cheat your

husband."

MARGOT: "You never can tell! Would Lady Katie Lambton many for

money?"

BARON HIRSCH: "To be perfectly honest with you, I don't think she

would."

MARGOT: "There you are! I know heaps of girls who wouldn't;

anyhow, _I_ never would!"

BARON HIRSCH: "You are in love with some one else, perhaps, are

you?"

It so happened that in the winter I had fallen in love with a man

out hunting and was counting the hours till I could meet him

again, so the question annoyed me; I thought it vulgar and said,

with some dignity:

"If I am, I have never told him so."

My dignity was lost, however, on my host, who persisted. I did not

want to give myself away, so, simulating a tone of light banter, I

said:

"If I have not confided in the person most interested, why should

I tell YOU?" This was not one of my happiest efforts, for he

instantly replied:

"Then he IS interested in you, is he? Do I know him?"

I felt angry and told him that, because I did not want to marry

his son, it did not at all follow that my affections were engaged

elsewhere; and I added:

"I only hope that Mr. Lucien is not as curious as you are, or I

should have a very poor time; there is nothing I should hate as

much as a jealous husband."

BARON HIRSCH: "I don't believe you! If it's tiresome to have a

jealous husband, it must be humiliating to have one who is not."

I saw he was trying to conciliate me, so I changed the subject to

racing. Being a shrewd man, he thought he might find out whom I

was in love with and encouraged me to go on. I told him I knew

Fred Archer well, as we had hunted together in the Vale of White

Horse. He asked me if he had ever given me a racing tip. I told

him the following story:

One day, at Ascot, some of my impecunious Melton friends,--having

heard a rumour that Archer, who was riding in the race, had made a

bet on the result--came and begged me to find out from him what

horse was going to win. I did not listen much to them at first, as

I was staring about at the horses, the parasols and the people,

but my friends were very much in earnest and began pressing me in

lowered voices to be as quick as I could, as they thought that

Archer was on the move. It was a grilling day; most men had

handkerchiefs or cabbages under their hats; and the dried-up grass

in the Paddock was the colour of pea-soup. I saw Fred Archer

standing in his cap and jacket with his head hanging down, talking

to a well-groomed, under-sized little man, while the favourite--a

great, slashing, lazy horse--was walking round and round with the

evenness of a metronome. I went boldly up to him and reminded him

of how we had cannoned at a fence in the V.W.H. Fred Archer had a

face of carved ivory, like the top of an umbrella; he could turn

it into a mask or illuminate it with a smile; he had long thin

legs, a perfect figure and wonderful charm. He kept a secretary, a

revolver and two valets and was a god among the gentry and the

jockeys. After giving a slight wink at the under-sized man, he

turned away from him to me and, on hearing what I had to say,

whispered a magic name in my ear. ...

I was a popular woman that night in Melton.

Baron Hirsch returned to the charge later on; and I told him

definitely that I was the last girl in the world to suit his son.

It is only fair to the memory of Lucien Hirsch to say that he

never cared the least about me. He died a short time after this

and some one said to the Baron:

"What a fool Margot Tennant was not to have married your son! She

would be a rich widow now."

At which he said:

"No one would die if they married Margot Tennant."

CHAPTER VII

PHOENIX PARK MURDERS--REMEDIES FOR IRELAND--TELEPATHY AND

PLANCHETTE--VISIT TO BLAVATSKY--SIR CHARLES DILKE'S KISS--VISITS

TO GLADSTONE--THE LATE LORD SALISBURY'S POLITICAL PROPHECIES

The political event that caused the greatest sensation when I was

a girl was the murder of Mr. Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish on

May 6, 1882. We were in London at the time; and the news came

through on a Sunday. Alfred Lyttelton told me that Lady Frederick

Cavendish's butler had broken it to her by rushing into the room

saying:

"They have knifed his lordship!"

The news spread from West to East and North to South; groups of

people stood talking in the middle of the streets without their

hats and every one felt that this terrible outrage was bound to

have consequences far beyond the punishment of the criminals.

These murders in the Phoenix Park tended to confirm Gladstone in

his belief that the Irish were people whom we did not understand

and that they had better be encouraged to govern themselves. He

hoped to convert his colleagues to a like conviction, but Mr.

Chamberlain and he disagreed.

Just as I ask myself what would have been the outcome of the Paris

Conference if the British had made the League of Nations a genuine

first plank in their programme instead of a last postscript, so I

wonder what would have happened if Chamberlain had stuck to

Gladstone at that time. Gladstone had all the playing cards--as

President Wilson had--and was not likely to under-declare his

hand, but he was a much older man and I cannot but think that if

they had remained together Chamberlain would not have been thrown

into the arms of the Tories and the reversion of the Premiership

must have gone to him. It seems strange to me that the leaders of

the great Conservative party have so often been hired bravos or

wandering minstrels with whom it can share no common conviction. I

never cease wondering why it cannot produce a man of its own

faith. There must be something inherent in its creed that produces

sterility.

When Mr. Gladstone went in for Home Rule, society was rent from

top to bottom and even the most devoted friends quarrelled over

it. Our family was as much divided as any other.

One day, when Lord Spencer was staying at Glen, I was sent out of

the room at dinner for saying that Gladstone had made a Balaclava

blunder with his stupid Home Rule; we had all got so heated over

the discussion that I was glad enough to obey my papa. A few

minutes later he came out full of penitence to see if he had hurt

my feelings; he found me sitting on the billiard-table smoking one

of his best cigars. I gave him a good hug, and told him I would

join him when I had finished smoking; he said he was only too glad

that his cigars were appreciated and returned to the dining-room

in high spirits.

Events have proved that I was quite wrong about Home Rule. Now

that we have discovered what the consequences are of withholding

from Ireland the self-government which for generations she has

asked for, can we doubt that Gladstone should have been vigorously

backed in his attempt to still the controversy? As it is, our

follies in Ireland have cursed the political life of this country

for years. Some one has said, "L'Irlande est une maladie incurable

mais jamais mortelle"; and, if she can survive the present regime,

no one will doubt the truth of the saying.

In May, June and July, 1914, within three months of the war, every

donkey in London was cutting, or trying to cut us, for wishing to

settle this very same Irish question. My presence at a hall with

Elizabeth--who was seventeen--was considered not only provocative

to others but a danger to myself. All the brains of all the

landlords in Ireland, backed by half the brains of half the

landlords in England, had ranged themselves behind Sir Edward

Carson, his army and his Covenant. Earnest Irish patriots had

turned their fields into camps and their houses into hospitals;

aristocratic females had been making bandages for months, when von

Kuhlmann, Secretary of the German Embassy in London, went over to

pay his first visit to Ireland. On his return he told me with

conviction that, from all he had heard and seen out there during a

long tour, nothing but a miracle could avert civil war, to which I

replied:

"Shocking as that would be, it would not break England."

Our follies in Ireland have cursed not only the political but the

social life of this country.

It was not until the political ostracisms over Home Rule began all

over again in 1914 that I realised how powerful socially my

friends and I were in the 'eighties.

Mr. Balfour once told me that, before our particular group of

friends--generally known as the Souls--appeared in London,

prominent politicians of opposite parties seldom if ever met one

another; and he added:

"No history of our time will be complete unless the influence of

the Souls upon society is dispassionately and accurately

recorded."

The same question of Home Rule that threw London back to the old

parochialisms in 1914 was at its height in 1886 and 1887; but at

our house in Grosvenor Square and later in those of the Souls,

everyone met--Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Asquith, Morley,

Chamberlain, Balfour, Rosebery, Salisbury, Hartington, Harcourt

and, I might add, jockeys, actors, the Prince of Wales and every

ambassador in London. We never cut anybody--not even our friends

--or thought it amusing or distinguished to make people feel

uncomfortable; and our decision not to sacrifice private

friendship to public politics was envied in every capital in

Europe. It made London the centre of the most interesting society

in the world and gave men of different tempers and opposite

beliefs an opportunity of discussing them without heat and without

reporters. There is no individual or group among us powerful

enough to succeed in having a salon of this kind to-day.

The daring of that change in society cannot be over-estimated. The

unconscious and accidental grouping of brilliant, sincere and

loyal friends like ourselves gave rise to so much jealousy and

discussion that I shall devote a chapter of this book to the

Souls.

It was at No. 40 Grosvenor Square that Gladstone met Lord Randolph

Churchill. The latter had made himself famous by attacking and

abusing the Grand Old Man with such virulence that every one

thought it impossible that they could ever meet in intimacy again.

I was not awed by this, but asked them to a luncheon party; and

they both accepted. I need hardly say that when they met they

talked with fluency and interest, for it was as impossible for

Gladstone to be gauche or rude as it was for any one to be ill at

ease with Randolph Churchill. The news of their lunching with us

spread all over London; and the West-end buzzed round me with

questions: all the political ladies, including the Duchess of

Manchester, were torn with curiosity to know whether Randolph was

going to join the Liberal Party. I refused to gratify their

curiosity, but managed to convey a general impression that at any

moment our ranks, having lost Mr. Chamberlain, were going to be

reinforced by Lord Randolph Churchill.

The Duchess of Manchester (who became the late Duchess of

Devonshire) was the last great political lady in London society as

I have known it. The secret of her power lay not only in her

position--many people are rich and grand, gay and clever and live

in big houses--but in her elasticity, her careful criticisms, her

sense of justice and discretion. She not only kept her own but

other people's secrets; and she added to a considerable effrontery

and intrepid courage, real kindness of heart. I have heard her

reprove and mildly ridicule all her guests, both at Compton Place

and at Chatsworth, from the Prince of Wales to the Prime Minister.

I asked her once what she thought of a certain famous lady, whose

arrogance and vulgarity had annoyed us all, to which she answered:

"I dislike her too much to be a good judge of her."

One evening, many years after the time of which I am writing, she

was dining with us, and we were talking tete-a-tete.

"Margot," she said, "you and I are very much alike."

It was impossible to imagine two more different beings than myself

and the Duchess of Devonshire--morally, physically or

intellectually--so I asked her what possible reason she had for

thinking so, to which she answered:

"We have both married angels; when Hartington dies he will go

straight to Heaven"--pointing her first finger high above her

head--"and when Mr. Asquith dies he will go straight there, too;

not so Lord Salisbury," pointing her finger with a diving movement

to the floor.

You met every one at her house, but she told me that before 1886-

1887 political opponents hardly ever saw one another and society was

much duller.

One day in 1901 my husband and I were staying at Chatsworth. There

was a huge house-party, including Arthur Balfour and Chamberlain.

Before going down to dinner, Henry came into my bedroom and told

me he had had a telegram to say that Queen Victoria was very ill

and he feared the worst; he added that it was a profound secret

and that I was to tell no one. After dinner I was asked by the

Duchess' granddaughters--Lady Aldra and Lady Mary Acheson--to join

them at planchette, so, to please them, I put my hand upon the

board. I was listening to what the Duchess was saying, and my mind

was a blank. After the girls and I had scratched about for a

little time, one of them took the paper off the board and read out

loud:

"The Queen is dying." She added, "What Queen can that be?"

We gathered round her and all looked at the writing; and there I

read distinctly out of a lot of hieroglyphics:

"The Queen is dying."

If the three of us had combined to try to write this and had poked

about all night, we could not have done it.

I have had many interesting personal experiences of untraceable

communication and telepathy and I think that people who set

themselves against all this side of life are excessively stupid;

but I do not connect them with religion any more than with Marconi

and I shall always look upon it as a misfortune that people can be

found sufficiently material to be consoled by the rubbish they

listen to in the dark at expensive seances.

At one time, under the influence of Mr. Percy Wyndham, Frederic

Myers and Edmund Gurney (the last-named a dear friend with whom I

corresponded for some months before he committed suicide), Laura

and I went through a period of "spooks." There was no more

delightful companion than Mr. Percy Wyndham; he adored us and,

though himself a firm believer in the spirit world, he did not

resent it if others disagreed with him. We attended every kind of

seance and took the matter up quite seriously.

Then, as now, everything was conducted in the dark. The famous

medium of that day was a Russian Jewess, Madame Blavatsky by name.

We were asked to meet her at tea, in the dining-room of a private

house in Brook Street, a non-professional affair, merely a little

gathering to hear her views upon God. On our arrival I had a good

look at her heavy, white face, as deeply pitted with smallpox as a

solitaire board, and I wondered if she hailed from Moscow or

Margate. She was tightly surrounded by strenuous and palpitating

ladies and all the blinds were up. Seeing no vacant seat near her,

I sat down upon a low, stuffed chair in the window. After making a

substantial tea, she was seen to give a sobbing and convulsive

shudder, which caused the greatest excitement; the company closed

up round her in a circle of sympathy and concern. When pressed to

say why her bust had heaved and eyelids flickered, she replied:

"A murderer has passed below our windows." The awe-struck ladies

questioned her reverently but ardently as to how she knew and what

she felt. Had she visualised him? Would she recognise the guilty

one if she saw him and, after recognising him, feel it on her

conscience if she did not give him up to the law? One lady

proposed that we should all go round to the nearest police-station

and added that a case of this kind, if proved, would do more to

dispell doubts on spirits than all the successful raps, taps,

turns and tables. Being the only person in the window at the time,

I strained my eyes up and down Brook Street to see the murderer,

but there was not a creature in sight.

Madame Blavatsky turned out to be an audacious swindler.

To return to Chatsworth: our host, the Duke of Devonshire, was a

man whose like we shall never see again; he stood by himself and

could have come from no country in the world but England. He had

the figure and appearance of an artisan, with the brevity of a

peasant, the courtesy of a king and the noisy sense of humour of a

Falstaff. He gave a great, wheezy guffaw at all the right things,

and was possessed of endless wisdom. He was perfectly disengaged

from himself, fearlessly truthful and without pettiness of any

kind.

Bryan, the American politician, who came over here and heard all

our big guns speak--Rosebery, Chamberlain, Asquith, etc.--when

asked what he thought, said that a Chamberlain was not unknown to

them in America, and that they could produce a Rosebery or an

Asquith, but that a Hartington no man could find. His speaking was

the finest example of pile-driving the world had ever seen.

After the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke and his wife were

the great social, semi-political figures of my youth. One day

they came to pay us a visit in Cavendish Square, having heard that

our top storey had been destroyed by fire. They walked round the

scorched walls of the drawing-room, with the blue sky overhead,

and stopped in front of a picture of a race-horse, given to me on

my wedding day by my habit-maker, Alexander Scott (a Scotchman who

at my suggestion had made the first patent safety riding-skirt).

The Duke said:

"I am sorry that your Zoffany and Longhi were burnt, but I myself

would far rather have the Herring." [Footnote: A portrait by J. F.

Herring, sen., of Rockingham, winner of the St. Leger Stakes,

1833, ridden by Sam Darling.]

The Duchess laughed at this and asked me if my baby had suffered

from shock, adding:

"I should be sorry if my little friend, Elizabeth, has had a

fright."

I told her that luckily she was out of London at the time of the

fire. When the Duchess got back to Devonshire House, she sent

Elizabeth two tall red wax candles, with a note in which she said:

"When you brought your little girl here, she wanted the big red

candles in my boudoir and I gave them to her; they must have

melted in the fire, so I send her these new ones."

I was walking alone on the high road at Chatsworth one afternoon

in winter, while the Duchess was indoors playing cards, when I saw

the family barouche, a vast vehicle which swung and swayed on C-

springs, stuck in the middle of a ploughed field, the horses

plunging about in unsuccessful efforts to drag the wheels out of

the mud. The coachman was accompanied by a page, under life size.

Observing their dilemma, I said:

"Hullo, you're in a nice fix! What induced you to go into that

field?"

The coachman, who knew me well, explained that they had met a

hearse in the narrow part of the road and, as her Grace's orders

were that no carriage was to pass a funeral if it could be

avoided, he had turned into the field, where the mud was so deep

and heavy that they were stuck. It took me some time to get

assistance; but, after I had unfastened the bearing-reins and

mobilised the yokels, the coachman, carriage and I returned safely

to the house.

Death was the only thing of which I ever saw the Duchess afraid

and, when I referred to the carriage incident and chaffed her

about it, she said:

"My dear child, do you mean to tell me you would not mind dying?

What do you feel about it?"

I answered her, in all sincerity, that I would mind more than

anything in the world, but not because I was afraid, and that

hearses did not affect me in the least.

She asked me what I was most interested in after hunting and I

said politics. I told her I had always prophesied I would marry a

Prime Minister and live in high political circles. This amused her

and we had many discussions about politics and people. She was

interested in my youth and upbringing and made me tell her about

it.

As I have said before, we were not popular in Peeblesshire. My

papa and his vital family disturbed the country conventions; and

all Liberals were looked upon as aliens by the Scottish

aristocracy of those days. At election times the mill-hands of

both sexes were locked up for fear of rows, but in spite of this

the locks were broken and the rows were perpetual. When my father

turned out the sitting Tory, Sir Graham Montgomery, in 1880, there

were high jinks in Peebles. I pinned the Liberal colours, with the

deftness of a pick-pocket, to the coat-tails of several of the

unsuspecting Tory landlords, who had come from great distances to

vote. This delighted the electors, most of whom were feather-

stitching up and down the High Street, more familiar with drink

than jokes.

The first politicians of note that came to stay with us when I was

a girl were Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke. Just as, later on,

my friends (the Souls) discussed which would go farthest, George

Curzon, George Wyndham or Harry Cust, so in those days people were

asking the same question about Chamberlain and Dilke. To my mind

it wanted no witch to predict that Chamberlain would beat not only

Dilke but other men; and Gladstone made a profound mistake in not

making him a Secretary of State in his Government of 1885.

Mr. Chamberlain never deceived himself, which is more than could

be said of some of the famous politicians of that day. He also

possessed a rare measure of intellectual control. Self-mastery was

his idiosyncrasy; it was particularly noticeable in his speaking;

he encouraged in himself such scrupulous economy of gesture,

movement and colour that, after hearing him many times, I came to

the definite conclusion that Chamberlain's opponents were snowed

under by his accumulated moderation. Whatever Dilke's native

impulses were, no one could say that he controlled them. Besides a

defective sense of humour, he was fundamentally commonplace and

had no key to his mind, which makes every one ultimately dull. My

father, being an ardent Radical, with a passion for any one that

Gladstone patronised, had made elaborate preparations for Dilke's

reception; when he arrived at Glen he was given a warm welcome;

and we all sat down to tea. After hearing him talk uninterruptedly

for hours and watching his stuffy face and slow, protruding eyes,

I said to Laura:

"He may be a very clever man, but he has not a ray of humour and

hardly any sensibility. If he were a horse, I would certainly not

buy him!"

With which she entirely agreed.

On the second night of his visit, our distinguished guest met

Laura in the passage on her way to bed; he said to her:

"If you will kiss me, I will give you a signed photograph of

myself."

To which she answered:

"It is awfully good of you, Sir Charles, but I would rather not,

for what on earth should I do with the photograph?"

Mr. Gladstone was the dominating politician of the day, and

excited more adoration and hatred than any one.

After my first visit to Hawarden, he sent me the following poem,

which he had written the night before I left:

MARGOT

When Parliament ceases and comes the recess,

And we seek in the country rest after distress,

As a rule upon visitors place an embargo,

But make an exception in favour of Margot.

For she brings such a treasure of movement and life,

Fun, spirit and stir, to folk weary with strife.

Though young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo

Of all the good qualities going as Margot?

Up hill and down dale,'tis a capital name

To blossom in friendship, to sparkle in fame;

There's but one objection can light upon Margot,

Its likeness in rhyming, not meaning, to argot.

Never mind, never mind, we will give it the slip,

'Tis not argot, the language, but Argo, the ship;

And by sea or by land, I will swear you may far go

Before you can hit on a double for Margot.

W. E. G. December 17th, 1889.

I received this at Glen by the second post on the day of my

arrival, too soon for me to imagine my host had written it, so I

wrote to our dear old friend, Godfrey Webb--always under suspicion

of playing jokes upon us--to say that he had overdone it this

time, as Gladstone had too good a hand-writing for him to

caricature convincingly. When I found that I was wrong, I wrote to

my poet:

Dec. 19th, 1889. VERY DEAR AND HONOURED MR. GLADSTONE,

At first I thought your poem must have been a joke, written by

some one who knew of my feelings for you and my visit to Hawarden;

but, when I saw the signature and the post-mark, I was convinced

it could be but from you. It has had the intoxicating effect of

turning my head with pleasure; if I began I should never cease

thanking you. Getting four rhymes to my name emphasizes your

uncommon genius, I think! And Argo the ship is quite a new idea

and a charming one. I love the third verse; that Margot is a

capital name to blossom in friendship and sparkle in fame. You

must allow me to say that you are ever such a dear. It is

impossible to believe that you will be eighty to-morrow, but I

like to think of it, for it gives most people an opportunity of

seeing how life should be lived without being spent.

There is no blessing, beauty or achievement that I do not wish

you.

In truth and sincerity, Yours,

MARGOT TENNANT

A propos of this, twelve years later I received the following

letter from Lord Morley:

THE RED HOUSE, HAWARDEN, CHESTER,

July 18th, 1901.

I have just had such a cheerful quarter-of-an-hour--a packet of

YOUR letters to Mr. G. Think--! I've read them all!--and they

bring the writer back to me with queer and tender vividness. Such

a change from Bishops!!! Why do you never address me as "Very dear

and honoured Sir"? I'm not quite eighty-five yet, but I soon shall

be.

Ever yours, JOHN MORLEY.

I have heard people say that the Gladstone family never allowed

him to read a newspaper with anything hostile to himself in it;

all this is the greatest rubbish; no one interfered with his

reading. The same silly things were said about the great men of

that day as of this and will continue to be said; and the same

silly geese will believe them. I never observed that Gladstone was

more easily flattered than other men. He WAS more flattered and by

more people, because he was a bigger man and lived a longer life;

but he was remarkably free from vanity of any kind. He would

always laugh at a good thing, if you chose the right moment in

which to tell it to him; but there were moods in which he was not

inclined to be amused.

Once, when he and I were talking of Jane Welsh Carlyle, I told him

that a friend of Carlyle's, an old man whom I met at Balliol, had

told me that one of his favourite stories was of an Irishman who,

when asked where he was driving his pig to, said:

"Cark. ..." (Cork.)

"But," said his interlocutor, "your head is turned to Mullingar

... !"

To which the man replied:

"Whist! He'll hear ye!"

This delighted Mr. Gladstone. I also told him one of Jowett's

favourite stories, of how George IV. went down to Portsmouth for

some big function and met a famous admiral of the day. He clapped

him on the back and said in a loud voice:

"Well, my dear Admiral, I hear you are the greatest blackguard in

Portsmouth!"

At which the Admiral drew himself up, saluted the King and said:

"I hope, Sir, YOU have not come down to take away my reputation."

I find in an old diary an account of a drive I had with Gladstone

after my sister Laura died. This is what I wrote:

"On Saturday, 29th May, 1886, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came to pay

us a visit at 40 Grosvenor Square. Papa had been arranging the

drawing-room preparatory to their arrival and was in high

spirits. I was afraid he might resent my wish to take Mr.

Gladstone up to my room after lunch and talk to him alone.

However, Aunty Pussy--as we called Mrs. Gladstone--with a great

deal of winking, led papa away and said to mamma:

"'William and Margot are going to have a little talk!'

"I had not met or seen Mr. Gladstone since Laura's death.

"When he had climbed up to my boudoir, he walked to the window and

admired the trees in the square, deploring their uselessness and

asking whether the street lamp--which crossed the square path in

the line of our eyes--was a child.

"I asked him if he would approve of the square railings being

taken away and the glass and trees made into a place with seats,

such as you see in foreign towns, not merely for the convenience

of sitting down, but for the happiness of invalids and idlers who

court the shade or the sun. This met with his approval, but he

said with some truth that the only people who could do this--or

prevent it--were 'the resident aristocracy.'

"He asked if Laura had often spoken of death. I said yes and that

she had written about it in a way that was neither morbid nor

terrible. I showed him some prayers she had scribbled in a book,

against worldliness and high spirits. He listened with reverence

and interest. I don't think I ever saw his face wear the

expression that Millais painted in our picture as distinctly as

when, closing the book, he said to me:

"'It requires very little faith to believe that so rare a creature

as your sister Laura is blessed and with God.'

"Aunty Pussy came into the room and the conversation turned to

Laurence Oliphant's objection to visiting the graves of those we

love. They disagreed with this and he said:

"'I think, on the contrary, one should encourage oneself to find

consolation in the few tangible memories that one can claim; it

should not lessen faith in their spirits; and there is surely a

silent lesson to be learnt from the tombstone.'

"Papa and mamma came in and we all went down to tea. Mr. G.,

feeling relieved by the change of scene and topic, began to talk

and said he regretted all his life having missed the opportunity

of knowing Sir Walter Scott, Dr. Arnold and Lord Melbourne. He

told us a favourite story of his. He said:

"'An association of ladies wrote and asked me to send them a few

words on that unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. In the penury of my

knowledge and the confusion arising from the conflicting estimates

of poor Mary, I thought I would write to Bishop Stubbs. All he

replied was, "Mary is looking up."'

"After this I drove him back to Downing Street in my phaeton,

round the Park and down Knights bridge. I told him I found it

difficult to judge of people's brains if they were very slow.

"MR. GLADSTONE: "I wish, then, that you had had the privilege of

knowing Mr. Cobden; he was at once the slowest and quite one of

the cleverest men I ever met. Personally I find it far easier to

judge of brains than character; perhaps it is because in my line

of life motives are very hard to fathom, and constant association

with intelligence and cultivation leads to a fair toleration and

criticism of all sorts and conditions of men.'

"He talked of Bright and Chamberlain and Lord Dalhousie,[Footnote:

The late Earl of Dalhousie.] who, he said, was one of the best

and most conscientious men he had ever known. He told me that,

during the time he had been Prime Minister, he had been personally

asked for every great office in the State, including the

Archbishopric of Canterbury, and this not by maniacs but by highly

respectable men, sometimes even his friends. He said that

Goschen's critical power was sound and subtle, but that he spoilt

his speeches by a touch of bitterness. Mr. Parnell, he said, was a

man of genius, born to great things. He had power, decision and

reserve; he saw things as they were and had confidence in himself.

(Ten days after this drive, Mr. Gladstone made his last great

speech on Irish Home Rule.)

"I made him smile by telling him how Lord Kimberley told me that,

one day in Dublin, when he was Viceroy, he had received a letter

which began:

"'My Lord, To-morrow we intend to kill you at the corner of

Kildare Street; but we would like you to know there is nothing

personal in it!'

"He talked all the way down Piccadilly about the Irish character,

its wit, charm, grace and intelligence. I nearly landed my phaeton

into an omnibus in my anxiety to point out the ingratitude and

want of purpose of the Irish; but he said that in the noblest of

races the spirit of self-defence had bred mean vices and that

generation after generation were born in Ireland with their blood

discoloured by hatred of the English Governments.

"'Tories have no hope, no faith,' he continued, 'and the best of

them have class-interest and the spirit of antiquity, but the last

has been forgotten, and only class-interest remains. Disraeli was

a great Tory. It grieves me to see people believing in Randolph

Churchill as his successor, for he has none of the genius,

patience or insight which Dizzy had in no small degree.'

"Mr. Gladstone told me that he was giving a dinner to the Liberal

party that night, and he added:

"'If Hartington is in a good humour, I intend to say to him,

"Don't move a vote of want of confidence in me after dinner, or

you will very likely carry it."'

"'He laughed at this, and told me some days after that Lord

Hartington had been delighted with the idea.

"He strongly advised me to read a little book by one Miss Tollet,

called Country Conversations, which had been privately printed,

and deplored the vast amount of poor literature that was

circulated, 'when an admirable little volume like this cannot be

got by the most ardent admirers now the authoress is dead.'" (In

parenthesis, I often wish I had been able to tell Mr. Gladstone

that Jowett left me this little book and his Shakespeare in his

will.)

"We drove through the Green Park and I pulled up on the Horse

Guards Parade at the garden-gate of 10 Downing Street. He got out

of the phaeton, unlocked the gate and, turning round, stood with

his hat off and his grey hair blowing about his forehead, holding

a dark, homespun cape close round his shoulders. He said with

great grace that he had enjoyed his drive immensely, that he hoped

it would occur again and that I had a way of saying things and a

tone of voice that would always remind him of my sister Laura. His

dear old face looked furrowed with care and the outline of it was

sharp as a profile. I said good-bye to him and drove away; perhaps

it was the light of the setting sun, or the wind, or perhaps

something else, but my eyes were full of tears."

My husband, in discussing with me Gladstone's sense of humour,

told me the following story:

"During the Committee Stage of the Home Rule Bill in the session

of 1893, I was one evening in a very thin House, seated by the

side of Mr. Gladstone on the Treasury Bench, of which we were the

sole occupants. His eyes were half-closed, and he seemed to be

absorbed in following the course of a dreary discussion on the

supremacy of Parliament. Suddenly he turned to me with an air of

great animation and said, in his most solemn tones, 'Have you ever

considered who is the ugliest man in the party opposite?

"MR. ASQUITH: 'Certainly; it is without doubt X' (naming a famous

Anglo-Indian statesman).

"MR. GLADSTONE: 'You are wrong. X is no doubt an ugly fellow, but

a much uglier is Y' (naming a Queen's Counsel of those days).

"MR. ASQUITH: 'Why should you give him the preference?'

"MR. GLADSTONE: 'Apply a very simple test. Imagine them both

magnified on a colossal scale. X's ugliness would then begin to

look dignified and even impressive, while the more you enlarged Y

the meaner he would become.'"

I have known seven Prime Ministers--Gladstone, Salisbury,

Rosebery, Campbell-Bannerman, Arthur Balfour, Asquith and Lloyd

George--every one of them as different from the others as

possible. I asked Arthur Balfour once if there was much difference

between him and his uncle. I said:

"Lord Salisbury does not care fanatically about culture or

literature. He may like Jane Austen, Scott or Sainte-Beuve, for

all I know, BUT HE IS NOT A SCHOLAR; he does not care for Plato,

Homer, Virgil or any of the great classics. He has a wonderful

sense of humour and is a beautiful writer, of fine style; but I

should say he is above everything a man of science and a

Churchman. All this can be said equally well of you."

To which he replied:

"There is a difference. My uncle is a Tory... and I am a Liberal."

I delighted in the late Lord Salisbury, both in his speaking and

in his conversation. I had a kind of feeling that he could always

score off me with such grace, good humour and wit that I would

never discover it. He asked me once what my husband thought of his

son Hugh's speaking, to which I answered:

"I will not tell you, because you don't know anything about my

husband and would not value his opinion. You know nothing about

our House of Commons either, Lord Salisbury; only the other day

you said in public that you had never even seen Parnell."

LORD SALISBURY (pointing to his waistcoat): "My figure is not

adapted for the narrow seats in your peers' gallery, but I can

assure you you are doing me an injustice. I was one of the first

to predict, both in private and in public, that Mr. Asquith would

have a very great future. I see no one of his generation, or even

among the younger men, at all comparable to him. Will you not

gratify my curiosity by telling me what he thinks of my son Hugh's

speaking?"

I was luckily able to say that my husband considered Lord Hugh

Cecil the best speaker in the House of Commons and indeed

anywhere, at which Lord Salisbury remarked:

"Do you think he would say so if he heard him speak on subjects

other than the Church?"

I assured him that he had heard him on Free Trade and many

subjects and that his opinion remained unchanged. He thought that,

if they could unknot themselves and cover more ground, both he and

his brother, Bob Cecil, had great futures.

I asked Lord Salisbury if he had ever heard Chamberlain speak

(Chamberlain was Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time).

LORD SALISBURY: "It is curious you should ask me this. I heard him

for the first time this afternoon."

MARGOT: "Where did you hear him? And what was he speaking about?"

LORD SALISBURY: "I heard him at Grosvenor House. Let me see...what

was he speaking about? ... (reflectively) Australian washer-

women? I think...or some such thing. ..."

MARGOT: "What did you think of it?"

LORD SALISBURY: "He seems a good, business-like speaker."

MARGOT: "I suppose at this moment Mr. Chamberlain is as much hated

as Gladstone ever was?"

LORD SALISBURY: "There is a difference. Mr. Gladstone was hated,

but he was very much loved. Does any one love Mr. Chamberlain?"

One day after this conversation he came to see me, bringing with

him a signed photograph of himself. We of the Liberal Party were

much exercised over the shadow of Protection which had been

presented to us by Mr. Ritchie, the then Chancellor of the

Exchequer, putting a tax upon corn; and the Conservative Party,

with Mr. Balfour as its Prime Minister, was not doing well. We

opened the conversation upon his nephew and the fiscal question.

I was shocked by his apparent detachment and said:

"But do you mean to tell me you don't think there is any danger of

England becoming Protectionist?"

LORD SALISBURY (with a sweet smile): "Not the slightest! There

will always be a certain number of foolish people who will be

Protectionists, but they will easily be overpowered by the wise

ones. Have you ever known a man of first-rate intellect in this

country who was a Protectionist?"

MARGOT: "I never thought of it, but Lord Milner is the only one I

can think of for the moment."

He entirely agreed with me and said:

"No, you need not be anxious. Free Trade will always win against

Protection in this country. This will not be the trouble of the

future."

MARGOT: "Then what will be?"

LORD SALISBURY: "The House of Lords is the difficulty that I

foresee."

I was surprised and incredulous and said quietly:

"Dear Lord Salisbury, I have heard of the House of Lords all my

life! But, stupid as it has been, no one will ever have the power

to alter it. Why do you prophesy that it will cause trouble?"

LORD SALISBURY: "You may think me vain, Mrs. Asquith, but, as long

as I am there, nothing will happen. I understand my lords

thoroughly; but, when I go, mistakes will be made: the House of

Lords will come into conflict with the Commons."

MARGOT: "You should have taught it better ways! I am afraid it

must be your fault!"

LORD SALISBURY (smiling): "Perhaps; but what do YOU think will be

the next subject of controversy?"

MARGOT: "If what you say is true and Protection IS impossible in

this country, I think the next row will be over the Church of

England; it is in a bad way."

I proceeded to denounce the constant building of churches while

the parsons' pay was so cruelly small. I said that few good men

could afford to go into the Church at all; and the assumed voices,

both in the reading and in the preaching, got on the nerves of

every one who cared to listen to such a degree that the churches

were becoming daily duller and emptier.

He listened with patience to all this and then got up and said:

"Now I must go; I shall not see you again."

Something in his voice made me look at him.

"You aren't ill, are you?" I asked with apprehension.

To which he replied:

"I am going into the country."

I never saw him again and, when I heard of his death, I regretted

I had not seen him oftener.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BEAUTIFUL KATE VAUGHAN--COACHED BY COQUELIN IN MOLIERE--

ROSEBERY'S POPULARITY AND ELOQUENCE--CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN BON-VIVANT

AND BOULEVARDIER--BALFOUR'S MOT; HIS CHARM AND WIT; HIS TASTES AND

PREFERENCES; HIS RELIGIOUS SPECULATION

The next Prime Minister, whom I knew better than either Mr.

Gladstone or Lord Salisbury, was Lord Rosebery.

When I was a little girl, my mother took us to stay at Thomas's

Hotel, Berkeley Square, to have a course of dancing lessons from

the fashionable and famous M. d'Egville. These lessons put me in

high spirits, because my master told me I could always make a

living on the stage. His remarks were justified by a higher

authority ten years later: the beautiful Kate Vaughan of the

Gaiety Theatre.

I made her acquaintance in this way: I was a good amateur actress

and with the help of Miss Annie Schletter, a friend of mine who is

on the English stage now, I thought we might act Moliere's

Precieuses ridicules together for a charity matinee. Coquelin--the

finest actor of Moliere that ever lived--was performing in London

at the time and promised he would not only coach me in my part but

lend his whole company for our performance. He gave me twelve

lessons and I worked hard for him. He was intensely particular;

and I was more nervous over these lessons than I ever felt riding

over high timber. My father was so delighted at what Coquelin said

to him about me and my acting that he bought a fine early copy of

Moliere's plays which he made me give him. I enclose his letter of

refusal:

MY DEAREST LITTLE MARGOT,

Je suis tres mecontent de vous. Je croyais que vous me traitiez

tout a fait en ami, car c'etait en ami que j'avais accepte de vous

offrir quelques indications sur les Precieuses...et voila que vous

m'envoyez un enorme cadeau...imprudence d'abord parce que j'ai

tous les beaux Moliere qui existent et ensuite parce qu'il ne

fallait pas envoyer ombre de quoi que ce soit a votre ami Coq.

Je vais tout faire, malgre cela, pour aller vous voir un instant

au'jourd'hui, mais je ne suis pas certain d'y parvenir.

Remerciez votre amie Madelon et dites-lui bien qu'elle non plus ne

me doit absolument rien.

J'aime mieux un tout petit peu de la plus legere gratitude que

n'importe quoi. Conservez, ma chere Margot, un bon souvenir de ce

petit travail qui a du vous amuser beaucoup et qui nous a reunis

dans les meilleurs sentiments du monde; continuons nous cette

sympathie que je trouve moi tout a fait exquise--et croyez qu'en

la continuant de votre cote, vous serez mille fois plus que quitte

envers votre tres devoue

COQ.

Coquelin the younger was our stage-manager, and acted the

principal part. When it was over and the curtain went down,

"Freddy Wellesley's [Footnote: The Hon. F. Wellesley, a famous

bean and the husband of Kate Vaughan.] band" was playing Strauss

valses in the entr'acve, while the audience was waiting for Kate

Vaughan to appear in a short piece called The Dancing Lesson, the

most beautiful solo dance ever seen. I was alone on the stage and,

thinking that no one could see me, I slipped off my Moliere hoop

of flowered silk and let myself go, in lace petticoats, to the

wonderful music. Suddenly I heard a rather Cockney voice say from

the wings:

"My Lord! How you can dance! Who taught you, I'd like to know?"

I turned round and saw the lovely face of Kate Vaughan. She wore a

long, black, clinging crepe-de-chine dress and a little black

bonnet with a velvet bow over one ear; her white throat and

beautiful arms were bare.

"Why," she said, "you could understudy me, I believe! You come

round and I'll show you my parts and YOU will never lack for

goldie boys!"

I remember the expression, because I had no idea what she meant by

it. She explained that, if I became her under-study at the Gaiety,

I would make my fortune. I was surprised that she had taken me for

a professional, but not more so than she was when I told her that

I had never had a lesson in ballet-dancing in my life.

My lovely coach, however, fell sick and had to give up the stage.

She wrote me a charming letter, recommending me to her own

dancing-master, M. d'Auban, under whom I studied for several

years.

One day, on returning from my early dancing-lesson to Thomas's

Hotel, I found my father talking to Lord Rosebery. He said I had

better run away; so, after kissing him and shaking hands with the

stranger I left the room. As I shut the door, I heard Lord

Rosebery say:

"Your girl has beautiful eyes."

I repeated this upstairs, with joy and excitement, to the family,

who, being in a good humour, said they thought it was true enough

if my eyes had not been so close together. I took up a glass, had

a good look at myself and was reluctantly compelled to agree.

I asked my father about Lord Rosebery afterwards, and he said:

"He is far the most brilliant young man living and will certainly

be Prime Minister one day."

Lord Rosebery was born with almost every advantage: he had a

beautiful smile, an interesting face, a remarkable voice and

natural authority. When at Oxford, he had been too much interested

in racing to work and was consequently sent down--a punishment

shared at a later date and on different grounds by another

distinguished statesman, the present Viscount Grey--but no one

could say he was not industrious at the time that I knew him and a

man of education. He made his fame first by being Mr. Gladstone's

chairman at the political meetings in the great Midlothian

campaign, where he became the idol of Scotland. Whenever there was

a crowd in the streets or at the station, in either Glasgow or

Edinburgh, and I enquired what it was all about, I always received

the same reply:

"Rozbury!"

I think Lord Rosebery would have had a better nervous system and

been a happier man if he had not been so rich. Riches are over-

estimated in the Old Testament: the good and successful man

receives too many animals, wives, apes, she-goats and peacocks.

The values are changed in the New: Christ counsels a different

perfection and promises another reward. He does not censure the

man of great possessions, but He points out that his riches will

hamper him in his progress to the Kingdom of Heaven and that he

would do better to sell all; and He concludes with the penetrating

words:

"Of what profit is it to a man if he gain the whole world and lose

his own soul?"

The soul here is freedom from self.

Lord Rosebery was too thin-skinned, too conscious to be really

happy. He was not self-swayed like Gladstone, but he was self-

enfolded. He came into power at a time when the fortunes of the

Liberal party were at their lowest; and this, coupled with his

peculiar sensibility, put a severe strain upon him. Some people

thought that he was a man of genius, morbidly sensitive shrinking

from public life and the Press, cursed with insufficient ambition,

sudden, baffling, complex and charming. Others thought that he was

a man irresistible to his friends and terrible to his enemies,

dreaming of Empire, besought by kings and armies to put countries

and continents straight, a man whose notice blasted or blessed

young men of letters, poets, peers or politicians, who at once

scared and compelled every one he met by his freezing silence, his

playful smile, or the weight of his moral indignation: the truth

being that he was a mixture of both.

Lord Salisbury told me he was the best occasional speaker he had

ever heard; and certainly he was an exceptionally gifted person.

He came to Glen constantly in my youth and all of us worshipped

him. No one was more alarming to the average stranger or more

playful and affectionate in intimacy than Lord Rosebery.

An announcement in some obscure paper that he was engaged to be

married to me came between us in later years. He was seriously

annoyed and thought I ought to have contradicted this. I had never

even heard the report till I got a letter in Cairo from Paris,

asking if I would not agree to the high consideration and

respectful homages of the writer and allow her to make my

chemises. After this, the matter went completely out of my head,

till, meeting him one day in London, I was greeted with such

frigid self-suppression that I felt quite exhausted. A few months

later, our thoughtful Press said I was engaged to be married to

Arthur Balfour. As I had seen nothing of Lord Rosebery since he

had gone into a period of long mourning, I was acclimatised to

doing without him, but to lose Arthur's affection and friendship

would have been an irreparable personal loss to me. I need not

have been afraid, for this was just the kind of rumour that

challenged his insolent indifference to the public and the Press.

Seeing me come into Lady Rothschild's ball-room one night, he left

the side of the man he was conversing with and with his elastic

step stalked down the empty parquet floor to greet me. He asked me

to sit down next to him in a conspicuous place; and we talked

through two dances. I was told afterwards that some one who had

been watching us said to him:

"I hear you are going to marry Margot Tennant."

To which he replied:

"No, that is not so. I rather think of having a career of my own."

Lord Rosebery's two antagonists, Sir William Harcourt and Sir

Henry Campbell-Bannerman, were very different men.

Sir William ought to have lived in the eighteenth century. To

illustrate his sense of humour: he told me that women should be

played with like fish; only in the one case you angle to make them

rise and in the other to make them fall. He had a great deal of

wit and nature, impulsive generosity of heart and a temperament

that clouded his judgment. He was a man to whom life had added

nothing; he was perverse, unreasonable, brilliant, boisterous and

kind when I knew him; but he must have been all these in the

nursery.

At the time of the split in our party over the Boer War, when we

were in opposition and the phrase "methods of barbarism" became

famous, my personal friends were in a state of the greatest

agitation. Lord Spencer, who rode with me nearly every morning,

deplored the attitude which my husband had taken up. He said it

would be fatal to his future, dissociating himself from the

Pacifists and the Pro-Boers, and that he feared the Harcourts

would never speak to us again. As I was devoted to the latter, and

to their son Lulu [Footnote: The present Viscount Harcourt.] and

his wife May--still my dear and faithful friends--I felt full of

apprehension. We dined with Sir Henry and Lady Lucy one night and

found Sir William and Lady Harcourt were of the company. I had no

opportunity of approaching either of them before dinner, but when

the men came out of the dining-room, Sir William made a bee-line

for me. Sitting down, he took my hand in both of his and said:

"My dear little friend, you need not mind any of the quarrels! The

Asquith evenings or the Rosebery afternoons, all these things will

pass; but your man is the man of the future!"

These were generous words, for, if Lord Morley, my husband and

others had backed Sir William Harcourt instead of Lord Rosebery

when Gladstone resigned, he would certainly have become Prime

Minister.

I never knew Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman well, but whenever we

did meet we had great laughs together. He was essentially a bon

vivant, a boulevardier and a humorist. At an official luncheon

given in honour of some foreign Minister, Campbell-Bannerman, in

an admirable speech in French--a language with which he was

familiar--described Arthur Balfour, who was on one side of him,

as l'enfant gate of English politics and Chamberlain, who was also

at the lunch, as l'enfant terrible.

On the opening day of Parliament, February the 14th, 1905, he made

an amusing and telling speech. It was a propos of the fiscal

controversy which was raging all over England and which was

destined to bring the Liberal party into power at the succeeding

two general elections. He said that Arthur Balfour was "like a

general who, having given the command to his men to attack, found

them attacking one another; when informed of this, he shrugs his

shoulders and says that he can't help it if they will

misunderstand his orders!"

In spite of the serious split in the Liberal Party over the Boer

War, involving the disaffection of my husband, Grey and Haldane,

Campbell-Bannerman became Prime Minister in 1905.

He did not have a coupon election by arrangement with the

Conservative Party to smother his opponents, hut asked Henry,

before he consulted any one, what office he would take for himself

and what he thought suitable for other people in his new Cabinet.

Only men of a certain grandeur of character can do these things,

but every one who watched the succeeding events would agree that

Campbell-Bannerman's generosity was rewarded.

When C.B.--as he was called--went to Downing Street, he was a

tired man; his wife was a complete invalid and his own health had

been undermined by nursing her. As time went on, the late hours in

the House of Commons began to tell upon him and he relegated more

and more of his work to my husband.

One evening he sent for Henry to go and see him at 10 Downing

Street and, telling him that he was dying, thanked him for all he

had done, particularly for his great work on the South African

constitution. He turned to him and said:

"Asquith, you are different from the others, and I am glad to have

known you ... God bless you!"

C.B. died a few hours after this.

I now come to another Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.

When Lord Morley was writing the life of Gladstone, Arthur Balfour

said to me:

"If you see John Morley, give him my love and tell him to be bold

and indiscreet."

A biography must not be a brief either for or against its client

and it should be the same with an autobiography. In writing about

yourself and other living people you must take your courage in

both hands. I had thought of putting as a motto on the title-page

of this book, "As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb"; but I

gave it up when my friends gave me away and I saw it quoted in the

newspapers; and I chose Blake and the Bible.

If I have written any words here that wound a friend or an enemy,

I can only refer them to my general character and ask to be judged

by it. I am not tempted to be spiteful and have never consciously

hurt any one in my life; but in this book I must write what I

think without fear or favour and with a strict regard to

unmodelled truth.

Arthur Balfour was never a standard-bearer. He was a self-

indulgent man of simple tastes. For the average person he was as

puzzling to understand and as difficult to know as he was easy

for me and many others to love. You may say that no average man

can know a Prime Minister intimately; but most of us have met

strangers whose minds we understood and whose hearts we reached

without knowledge and without effort; and some of us have had an

equally surprising and more painful experience when, after years

of love given and received, we find the friend upon whom we had

counted has become a stranger.

He was difficult to understand, because I was never sure that he

needed me; and difficult to know intimately, because of his

formidable detachment. The most that many of us could hope for was

that he had a taste in us as one might have in clocks or

furniture.

Balfour was blessed or cursed at his birth, according to

individual opinion, by two assets: charm and wits. The first he

possessed to a greater degree than any man, except John Morley,

that I have ever met. His social distinction, exquisite attention,

intellectual tact, cool grace and lovely bend of the head made him

not only a flattering listener, but an irresistible companion. The

disadvantage of charm--which makes me say cursed or blessed--is

that it inspires every one to combine and smooth the way for you

throughout life. As the earnest housemaid removes dust, so all his

friends and relations kept disagreeable things from his path; and

this gave him more leisure in his life than any one ought to have.

His wits, with which I say that he was also cursed or blessed--

quite apart from his brains--gave him confidence in his

improvisings and the power to sustain any opinion on any subject,

whether he held the opinion or not, with equal brilliance,

plausibility and success, according to his desire to dispose of

you or the subject. He either finessed with the ethical basis of

his intellect or had none. This made him unintelligible to the

average man, unforgivable to the fanatic and a god to the

blunderer.

On one occasion my husband and I went to a lunch, given by old Mr.

McEwan, to meet Mr. Frank Harris. I might have said what my sister

Laura did, when asked if she had enjoyed herself at a similar

meal. "I would not have enjoyed it if I hadn't been there," as,

with the exception of Arthur Balfour, I did not know a soul in the

room. He sat like a prince, with his sphinx-like imperviousness to

bores, courteous and concentrated on the languishing

conversation. I made a few gallant efforts and my husband, who is

particularly good on these self-conscious occasions, did his best

... but to no purpose.

Frank Harris, in a general disquisition to the table, at last

turned to Arthur Balfour and said, with an air of finality:

"The fact is, Mr. Balfour, all the faults of the age come from

Christianity and journalism."

To which Arthur replied with rapier quickness and a child-like

air:

"Christianity, of course ... but why journalism?"

When men said, which they have done now for over thirty years,

that Arthur Balfour was too much of a philosopher to be really

interested in politics, I always contradicted them. With his

intellectual taste, perfect literary style and keen interest in

philosophy and religion, nothing but a great love of politics

could account for his not having given up more of his time to

writing. People thought that he was not interested because he had

nothing active in his political aspirations; he saw nothing that

needed changing. Low wages, drink, disease, sweating and

overcrowding did not concern him; they left him cold, and he had

not the power to express moral indignation which he was too

detached to feel.

He was a great Parliamentarian, a brilliant debater and a famous

Irish Secretary in difficult times, but his political energies lay

in tactics. He took a Puck-like pleasure in watching the game of

party politics, not in the interests of any particular political

party, nor from esprit de corps, but from taste. This was very

conspicuous in the years 1903 to 1906, during the fiscal

controversy; but any one with observation could watch this

peculiarity carried to a fine art wherever and whenever the

Government to which he might be attached was in a tight place.

Politically, what he cared most about were problems of national

defence. He inaugurated the Committee of Defence and appointed as

its permanent Chairman the Prime Minister of the day; everything

connected with the size of the army and navy interested him. The

size of your army, however, must depend on the aims and quality of

your diplomacy; and, if you have Junkers in your Foreign Office

and jesters on your War Staff, you must have permanent

conscription. It is difficult to imagine any one in this country

advocating a large standing army plus a navy, which is vital to

us; but such there were and such there will always be. With the

minds of these militarists, protectionists and conscriptionists,

Arthur Balfour had nothing in common at any time. He and the men

of his opinions were called the Blue Water School; they deprecated

fear of invasion and in consequence were violently attacked by the

Tories. But, in spite of an army corps of enthusiasts kept upon

our coasts to watch the traitors with towels signalling to the sea

with full instructions where to drive the county cows to, no

German army during the great War attempted to land upon our

shores, thus amply justifying Arthur Balfour's views.

The artists who have expressed with the greatest perfection human

experience, from an external point of view, he delighted in. He

preferred appeals to his intellect rather than claims upon his

feelings. Handel in music, Pope in poetry, Scott in narration,

Jane Austen in fiction and Sainte-Beuve in criticism supplied him

with everything he wanted. He hated introspection and shunned

emotion.

What interested me most and what I liked best in Arthur Balfour

was not his charm or his wit--and not his politics--but his

writing and his religion.

Any one who has read his books with a searching mind will perceive

that his faith in God is what has really moved him in life; and no

one can say that he has not shown passion here. Religious

speculation and contemplation were so much more to him than

anything else that he felt justified in treating politics and

society with a certain levity.

His mother, Lady Blanche Balfour, was a sister of the late Lord

Salisbury and a woman of influence. I was deeply impressed by her

character as described in a short private life of her written by

the late minister of Whittingehame, Mr. Robertson. I should be

curious to know, if it were possible, how many men and women of

mark in this generation have had religious mothers. I think much

fewer than in mine. My husband's mother, Mr. McKenna's and Lord

Haldane's were all profoundly religious.

This is part of one of Lady Blanche Balfour's prayers, written at

the age of twenty-six:

From the dangers of metaphysical subtleties and from profitless

speculation on the origin of evil--Good Lord deliver me.

From hardness of manner, coldness, misplaced sarcasm, and all

errors and imperfections of manner or habit, from words and deeds

by which Thy good may be evil-spoken, of through me, or not

promoted to the utmost of my ability--Good Lord deliver me.

Teach me my duties to superiors, equals and inferiors. Give me

gentleness and kindliness of manner and perfect tact; a thoughtful

heart such as Thou lovest; leisure to care for the little things

of others, and a habit of realising in my own mind their positions

and feelings.

Give me grace to trust my children--with the peace that passeth

all understanding--to Thy love and care. Teach me to use my

influence over each and all, especially children and servants,

aright, that I may give account of this, as well as of every other

talent, with joy--and especially that I may guide with the love

and wisdom which are far above the religious education of my

children.

By Lady Blanche Balfour, 1851.

Born and bred in the Lowlands of Scotland, Arthur Balfour avoided

the narrowness and materialism of the extreme High Church; but he

was a strong Churchman. I wrote in a very early diary: "I wish

Arthur would write something striking on the Established Church,

as he could express better than any one living how much its

influence for good in the future will depend on the spirit in

which it is worked."

His mind was more critical than constructive; and those of his

religious writings which I have read have been purely analytical.

My attention was first arrested by an address he delivered at the

Church Congress at Manchester in 1888. The subject which he chose

was Positivism, without any special reference to the peculiarities

of Comte's system. He called it The Religion of Humanity.

[Footnote: An essay delivered at the Church Congress, Manchester,

and printed in a pamphlet] In this essay he first dismisses the

purely scientific and then goes on to discuss the Positivist view

of man. The following passages will give some idea of his manner

and style of writing:

Man, so far as natural science itself is able to teach us, is no

longer the final cause of the universe, the heaven-descended heir

of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his history a

brief and discreditable episode in the life of one of the meanest

of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted

a piece or pieces of unorganised jelly into the living progenitors

of humanity, science indeed, as yet, knows nothing. It is enough

that from such beginnings, Famine, Disease, and Mutual Slaughter,

fit nurses of the future lord of creation, have gradually evolved,

after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to know that

it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is

insignificant. We survey the past and see that its history is of

blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid

acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn

that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but

short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our

investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of

the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no

longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its

solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will

perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has

for a brief space broken the contented silence of the Universe,

will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable

monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, and love stronger than

death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything

that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius,

devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless

generations to effect.

He continues on Positivism as an influence that cannot be

disregarded:

One of the objects of the "religion of humanity," and it is an

object beyond all praise, is to stimulate the imagination till it

lovingly embraces the remotest fortunes of the whole human family.

But in proportion as this end is successfully attained, in

proportion as we are taught by this or any other religion to

neglect the transient and the personal, and to count ourselves as

labourers for that which is universal and abiding, so surely must

be the increasing range which science is giving to our vision over

the time and spaces of the material universe, and the decreasing

importance of the place which man is seen to occupy in it, strike

coldly on our moral imagination, if so be that the material

universe is all we have to do with. My contention is that every

such religion and every such philosophy, so long as it insists on

regarding man as merely a phenomenon among phenomena, a natural

object among other natural objects, is condemned by science to

failure as an effective stimulus to high endeavour. Love, pity,

and endurance it may indeed leave with us; and this is well. But

it so dwarfs and impoverishes the ideal end of human effort, that

though it may encourage us to die with dignity, it hardly permits

us to live with hope.

Apart from the unvarying love I have always had for Arthur

Balfour, I should be untrue to myself if I did not feel deeply

grateful for the unchanging friendship of a man who can think and

write like this.

Of the other two Prime Ministers I cannot write, though no one

knows them better than I do. By no device of mine could I conceal

my feelings; both their names will live with lustre, without my

conscience being chargeable with frigid impartiality or fervent

partisanship, and no one will deny that all of us should be

allowed some "private property in thought."

END OF BOOK ONE

MARGOT ASQUITH

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BOOK TWO

PSALM XXXIX

5. Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.

6. Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are

disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who

shall gather them.

7. And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in Thee.

CHAPTER I

THE SOULS--LORD CURZON's POEM AND DINNER PARTY AND WHO WERE THERE

--MARGOT'S INVENTORY OF THE GROUP--TILT WITH THE LATE LADY

LONDONDERRY--VISIT TO TENNYSON; HIS CONTEMPT FOR CRITICS; HIS

HABIT OF LIVING--J. K. S. NOT A SOUL--MARGOT'S FRIENDSHIP WITH

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS; HIS PRAISE OF MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF

No one ever knew how it came about that I and my particular

friends were called "the Souls." The origin of our grouping

together I have already explained: we saw more of one another than

we should probably have done had my sister Laura Lyttelton lived,

because we were in mourning and did not care to go out in general

society; but why we were called "Souls" I do not know.

The fashionable--what was called the "smart set"--of those days

centred round the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII, and

had Newmarket for its head-quarters. As far as I could see, there

was more exclusiveness in the racing world than I had ever

observed among the Souls; and the first and only time I went to

Newmarket the welcome extended to me by the shrewd and select

company there made me feel exactly like an alien.

We did not play bridge or baccarat and our rather intellectual and

literary after-dinner games were looked upon as pretentious.

Arthur Balfour--the most distinguished of the Souls and idolised

by every set in society--was the person who drew the enemy's fire.

He had been well known before he came among us and it was

considered an impertinence on our part to make him play pencil-

games or be our intellectual guide and critic. Nearly all the

young men in my circle were clever and became famous; and the

women, although not more intelligent, were less worldly than their

fashionable contemporaries and many of them both good to be with

and distinguished to look at.

What interests me most on looking back now at those ten years is

the loyalty, devotion and fidelity which we showed to one another

and the pleasure which we derived from friendships that could not

have survived a week had they been accompanied by gossip, mocking,

or any personal pettiness. Most of us had a depth of feeling and

moral and religious ambition which are entirely lacking in the

clever young men and women of to-day. Our after-dinner games were

healthier and more inspiring than theirs. "Breaking the news," for

instance, was an entertainment that had a certain vogue among the

younger generation before the war. It consisted of two people

acting together and conveying to their audience various ways in

which they would receive the news of the sudden death of a friend

or a relation and was considered extraordinarily funny; it would

never have amused any of the Souls. The modern habit of pursuing,

detecting and exposing what was ridiculous in simple people and

the unkind and irreverent manner in which slips were made material

for epigram were unbearable to me. This school of thought--which

the young group called "anticant"--encouraged hard sayings and

light doings, which would have profoundly shocked the most

frivolous among us. Brilliance of a certain kind may bring people

together for amusement, but it will not keep them together for

long; and the young, hard pre-war group that I am thinking of was

short-lived.

The present Lord Curzon [Footnote: Earl Curzon of Kedleston.] also

drew the enemy's fire and was probably more directly responsible

for the name of the Souls than any one.

He was a conspicuous young man of ability, with a ready pen, a

ready tongue, an excellent sense of humour in private life and

intrepid social boldness. He had appearance more than looks, a

keen, lively face, with an expression of enamelled selfassurance.

Like every young man of exceptional promise, he was called a prig.

The word was so misapplied in those days that, had I been a clever

young man, I should have felt no confidence in myself till the

world had called me a prig. He was a remarkably intelligent person

in an exceptional generation. He had ambition and--what he claimed

for himself in a brilliant description--"middle-class method"; and

he added to a kindly feeling for other people a warm corner for

himself. Some of my friends thought his contemporaries in the

House of Commons, George Wyndham and Harry Cust, would go farther,

as the former promised more originality and the latter was a finer

scholar, but I always said--and have a record of it in my earliest

diaries--that George Curzon would easily outstrip his rivals. He

had two incalculable advantages over them: he was chronically

industrious and self-sufficing; and, though Oriental in his ideas

of colour and ceremony, with a poor sense of proportion, and a

childish love of fine people, he was never self-indulgent. He

neither ate, drank nor smoked too much and left nothing to chance.

No one could turn with more elasticity from work to play than

George Curzon; he was a first-rate host and boon companion and

showed me and mine a steady and sympathetic love over a long

period of years. Even now, if I died, although he belongs to the

more conventional and does not allow himself to mix with people of

opposite political parties, he would write my obituary notice.

At the time of which I am telling, he was threatened with lung

trouble and was ordered to Switzerland by his doctors. We were

very unhappy and assembled at a farewell banquet, to which he

entertained us in the Bachelors' Club, on the 10th of July, 1889.

We found a poem welcoming us on our chairs, when we sat down to

dinner, in which we were all honourably and categorically

mentioned. Some of our critics called us "the Gang"--to which

allusion is made here--but we were ultimately known as the Souls.

This famous dinner and George's poem caused a lot of fun and

friction, jealousy, curiosity and endless discussion. It was

followed two years later by another dinner given by the same host

to the same guests and in the same place, on the 9th of July,

1891.

The repetition of this dinner was more than the West End of London

could stand; and I was the object of much obloquy. I remember

dining with Sir Stanley and Lady Clarke to meet King Edward--then

Prince of Wales--when my hostess said to me in a loud voice,

across the table:

"There were some clever people in the world, you know, before you

were born, Miss Tennant!"

Feeling rather nettled, I replied:

"Please don't pick me out, Lady Clarke, as if I alone were

responsible for the stupid ones among whom we find ourselves

to-day."

Having no suspicion of other people, I was seldom on the

defensive and did not mean to be rude but I was young and

intolerant. This was George Curzon's poem:

[Editor's Note: See footnotes at bottom of poem]

10th JULY, 1889.

Ho! list to a lay

Of that company gay,

Compounded of gallants and graces,

Who gathered to dine,

In the year '89,

In a haunt that in Hamilton Place is.

There, there where they met,

And the banquet was set

At the bidding of GEORGIUS CURZON;

Brave youth! 'tis his pride,

When he errs, that the side

Of respectable licence he errs on.

Around him that night--

Was there e'er such a sight?

Souls sparkled and spirits expanded;

For of them critics sang,

That tho' christened the Gang,

By a spiritual link they were banded.

Souls and spirits, no doubt

But neither without

Fair visible temples to dwell in!

E'en your image divine

Must be girt with a shrine,

For the pious to linger a spell in.

There was seen at that feast

Of this band, the High Priest,

The heart that to all hearts is nearest;

Him may nobody steal

From the true Common weal,

Tho' to each is dear ARTHUR the dearest. [1]

America lends,

Nay, she gives when she sends

Such treasures as HARRY and DAISY; [2]

Tho' many may yearn,

None but HARRY can turn

That sweet little head of hers crazy.

There was much-envied STRATH [3]

With the lady who hath [3]

Taught us all what may life be at twenty;

Of pleasure a taste,

Of duty no waste,

Of gentle philosophy plenty.

KITTY DRUMMOND was there-- [4]

Where was LAWRENCE, oh! where?--

And my Lord and my Lady GRANBY; [5]

Is there one of the Gang

Has not wept at the pang

That he never can VIOLET'S man be?

From WILTON, whose streams

Murmur sweet in our dreams,

Come the Earl and his Countess together; [6]

In her spirit's proud flights

We are whirled to the heights,

He sweetens our stay in the nether.

Dear EVAN was there, [7]

The first choice of the fair,

To all but himself very gentle!

And ASHRIDGE'S lord [8]

Most insufferably bored

With manners and modes Oriental.

The Shah, I would bet,

In the East never met

Such a couple as him and his consort. [8]

If the HORNERS you add, [9]

That a man must be mad

Who complains that the Gang is a wrong sort.

From kindred essay

LADY MARY to-day [10]

Should have beamed on a world that adores her.

Of her spouse debonair [10]

No woman has e'er

Been able to say that he bores her.

Next BINGY escorts [11]

His dear wife, to our thoughts [11]

Never lost, though withdrawn from our vision,

While of late she has shown

That of spirit alone

Was not fashioned that fair composition.

No, if humour we count,

The original fount

Must to HUGO be ceded in freehold,

Tho' of equal supplies

In more subtle disguise

Old GODFREY has far from a wee hold! [12]

MRS. EDDY has come [13]

And we all shall be dumb

When we hear what a lovely voice Emmy's is;

SPENCER, too, would show what [14]

He can do, were it not

For that cursed laryngeal Nemesis.

At no distance away

Behold ALAN display [15]

That smile that is found so upsetting;

And EDGAR in bower, [16]

In statecraft, in power,

The favourite first in the betting.

Here a trio we meet,

Whom you never will beat,

Tho' wide you may wander and far go;

From what wonderful art

Of that Gallant Old Bart,

Sprang CHARTY and LUCY and MARGOT?

To LUCY he gave [17]

The wiles that enslave,

Heart and tongue of an angel to CHARTY; [18]

To MARGOT the wit [19]

And the wielding of it,

That make her the joy of a party.

LORD TOMMY is proud [20]

That to CHARTY he vowed

The graces and gifts of a true man.

And proud are the friends

Of ALFRED, who blends [21]

The athlete, the hero, the woman!

From the Gosford preserves

Old ST. JOHN deserves [22]

Great praise for a bag such as HILDA; [22]

True worth she esteemed,

Overpowering he deemed

The subtle enchantment that filled her.

Very dear are the pair,

He so strong, she so fair,

Renowned as the TAPLOVITE WINNIES;

Ah! he roamed far and wide,

Till in ETTY he spied [23]

A treasure more golden than guineas.

Here is DOLL who has taught [24]

Us that "words conceal thought"

In his case is a fallacy silly;

HARRY CUST could display [25]

Scalps as many, I lay,

From Paris as in Piccadilly.

But some there were too--

Thank the Lord they were few!

Who were bidden to come and who could not:

Was there one of the lot,

Ah! I hope there was not,

Looked askance at the bidding and would not.

The brave LITTLE EARL [26]

Is away, and his pearl-

Laden spouse, the imperial GLADYS; [26]

By that odious gout

Is LORD COWPER knocked out. [27]

And the wife who his comfort and aid is. [27]

Miss BETTY'S engaged,

And we all are enraged

That the illness of SIBELL'S not over; [28]

GEORGE WYNDHAM can't sit [29]

At our banquet of wit,

Because he is standing at Dover.

But we ill can afford

To dispense with the Lord

Of WADDESDON and ill HARRY CHAPLIN; [30, 31]

Were he here, we might shout

As again he rushed out

From the back of that "d--d big sapling."

We have lost LADY GAY [32]

'Tis a price hard to pay

For that Shah and his appetite greedy;

And alas! we have lost--

At what ruinous cost!--

The charms of the brilliant Miss D.D. [33]

But we've got in their place,

For a gift of true grace,

VIRGINIA'S marvellous daughter. [34]

Having conquered the States,

She's been blown by the Fates

To conquer us over the water.

Now this is the sum

Of all those who have come

Or ought to have come to that banquet.

Then call for the bowl,

Flow spirit and soul,

Till midnight not one of you can quit!

And blest by the Gang

Be the Rhymester who sang

Their praises in doggrel appalling;

More now were a sin--

Ho, waiters, begin!

Each soul for consomme is calling!

[Footnotes:

1 The Right Eton A. J. Balfour.

2 Mr. and Mrs White.

3 The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

4 Col. and Mrs L. Drummond.

5 Now the Duke and Duchess of Rutland.

6 Earl and Countess of Pembroke.

7 Hon. Evan Charteris.

8 Earl and Countess Brownlow.

9 Sir J. and Lady Horner.

10 Lord and Lady Elcho (now Earl and Countess of Wemyss).

11 Lord and Lady Wenlock.

12 Mr. Godfrey Webb.

13 The Hon. Mrs. E. Bourke.

14 The Hon. Spencer Lyttelton.

15 The Hon. Alan Charteris.

16 Sir E. Vincent (now Lord D'Abernon).

17 Mrs. Graham Smith.

18 Lady Ribblesdale.

19 Mrs. Asquith.

20 Lord Ribblesdale.

21 The Hon. Alfred Lyttelton.

22 The Hon. St. John Brodrick (now Earl of Midleton) and Lady

Hilda Brodrick.

23 Mr. and Mrs. Willy Grenfell (now Lord and Lady Desborough).

24 Mr. A. G. Liddell.

25 Mr. Harry Cust.

26 Earl and Countess de Grey.

27 Earl and Countess Cowper.

28 Countess Grosvenor.

29 The late Right Hon. George Wyndham.

30 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild.

31 Now Viscount Chaplin.

32 Lady Windsor (now Marchioness of Plymouth).

33 Miss E. Balfour (Widow of the Hon. Alfred Lyttelton).

34 Mrs. Chanler, the American novelist (now Princess Troubetzkoy).]

For my own and the children's interest I shall try, however

imperfectly, to make a descriptive inventory of some of the Souls

mentioned in this poem and of some of my friends who were not.

Gladstone's secretary, Sir Algernon West, [Footnote: The Right

Hon. Sir Algernon West.] and Godfrey Webb had both loved Laura and

corresponded with her till she died and they spent all their

holidays at Glen. I never remember the time when Algy West was not

getting old and did not say he wanted to die; but, although he is

ninety, he is still young, good-looking and--what is even more

remarkable--a strong Liberal. He was never one of the Souls, but

he was a faithful and loving early friend of ours.

Mr. Godfrey Webb was the doyen of the Souls. He was as intimate

with my brothers and parents as he was with my sisters and self.

Godfrey--or Webber as some called him--was not only a man of

parts, but had a peculiar flavour of his own: he had the sense of

humour and observation of a memoirist and his wit healed more than

it cut. For hours together he would poke about the country with a

dog, a gun and a cigar, perfectly independent and self-sufficing,

whether engaged in sport, repartee, or literature. He wrote and

published for private circulation a small book of poems and made

the Souls famous by his proficiency at all our pencil-games. It

would be unwise to quote verses or epigrams that depend so much

upon the occasion and the environment. Only a George Meredith can

sustain a preface boasting of his heroine's wit throughout the

book, but I will risk one example of Godfrey Webb's quickness. He

took up a newspaper one morning in the dining-room at Glen and,

reading that a Mr. Pickering Phipps had broken his leg on rising

from his knees at prayer, he immediately wrote this couplet:

On bended knees, with fervent lips, Wrestled with Satan Pickering

Phipps, But when for aid he ceased to beg, The wily devil broke

his leg!

He spent every holiday with us and I do not think he ever missed

being with us on the anniversary of Laura's death, whether I was

at home or abroad. He was a man in a million, the last of the

wits, and I miss him every day of my life.

Lord Midleton [Footnote: The Right Hon. the Earl of Midleton, of

Peper, Harow, Godalming.]--better known as St. John Brodrick--was

my first friend of interest; I knew him two years before I met

Arthur Balfour or any of the Souls. He came over to Glen while he

was staying with neighbours of ours.

I wired to him not long ago to congratulate him on being made an

Earl and asked him in what year it was that he first came to Glen;

this is his answer:

Jan. 12th, 1920. DEAREST MARGOT,

I valued your telegram of congratulation the more that I know you

and Henry (who has given so many and refused all) attach little

value to titular distinctions. Indeed, it is the only truly

democratic trait about YOU, except a general love of Humanity,

which has always put you on the side of the feeble. I am relieved

to hear you have chosen such a reliable man as Crewe--with his

literary gifts--to be the only person to read your autobiography.

My visit to Glen in R--y's company was October, 1880, when you

were sixteen. You and Laura flashed like meteors on to a dreary

scene of empty seats at the luncheon table (the shooting party

didn't come in) and filled the room with light, electrified the

conversation and made old R--y falter over his marriage vows

within ten minutes. From then onwards, you have always been the

most loyal and indulgent of friends, forgetting no one as you

rapidly climbed to fame, and were raffled for by all parties--from

Sandringham to the crossing-sweeper.

Your early years will sell the book.

Bless you.

ST. JOHN.

St. John Midleton was one of the rare people who tell the truth.

Some people do not lie, but have no truth to tell; others are too

agreeable--or too frightened--and lie; but the majority are

indifferent: they are the spectators of life and feel no

responsibility either towards themselves or their neighbour.

He was fundamentally humble, truthful and one of the few people I

know who are truly loyal and who would risk telling me, or any one

he loved, before confiding to an inner circle faults which both he

and I think might be corrected. I have had a long experience of

inner circles and am constantly reminded of the Spanish proverb,

"Remember your friend has a friend." I think you should either

leave the room when those you love are abused or be prepared to

warn them of what people are thinking. This is, as I know to my

cost, an unpopular view of friendship, but neither St. John nor I

would think it loyal to join in the laughter or censure of a

friend's folly.

Arthur Balfour himself--the most persistent of friends--remarked

laughingly:

"St. John pursues us with his malignant fidelity." [Footnote: The

word malignity was obviously used in the sense of the French

malin.]

This was only a coloured way of saying that Midleton had none of

the detachment commonly found among friends; but, as long as we

are not merely responsible for our actions to the police, so long

must I believe in trying to help those we love.

St. John has the same high spirits and keenness now that he had

then and the same sweetness and simplicity. There are only a few

women whose friendships have remained as loving and true to me

since my girlhood as his--Lady Horner, Miss Tomlinson [Footnote:

Miss May Tomlinson, of Rye.], Lady Desborough, Mrs. Montgomery,

Lady Wemyss and Lady Bridges [Footnote: J Lady Bridges, wife of

General Sir Tom Bridges.]--but ever since we met in 1880 he has

taken an interest in me and all that concerns me. He was much

maligned when he was Secretary of State for War and bore it

without blame or bitterness. He had infinite patience, intrepid

courage and a high sense of duty; these combined to give him a

better place in the hearts of men than in the fame of newspapers.

His first marriage was into a family who were incapable of

appreciating his particular quality and flavour; even his mother-

in-law--a dear friend of mine--never understood him and was amazed

when I told her that her son-in-law was worth all of her children

put together, because he had more nature and more enterprise. I

have tested St. John now for many years and never found him

wanting.

Lord Pembroke [Footnote: George, 13th Earl of Pembroke.] and

George Wyndham were the handsomest of the Souls. Pembroke was the

son of Sidney Herbert, famous as Secretary of State for War during

the Crimea. I met him first the year before I came out. Lord

Kitchener's friend, Lady Waterford--sister to the present Duke of

Beaufort--wrote to my mother asking if Laura could dine with her,

as she had been thrown over at the last minute and wanted a young

woman. As my sister was in the country, my mother sent me. I sat

next to Arthur Balfour; Lord Pembroke was on the other side, round

the corner of the table; and I remember being intoxicated with my

own conversation and the manner in which I succeeded in making

Balfour and Pembroke join in. I had no idea who the splendid

stranger was. He told me several years later that he had sent

round a note in the middle of that dinner to Blanchie Waterford,

asking her what the name of the girl with the red heels was, and

that, when he read her answer, "Margot Tennant," it conveyed

nothing to him. This occurred in 1881 and was for me an eventful

evening. Lord Pembroke was one of the four best-looking men I ever

saw: the others, as I have already said, were the late Earl of

Wemyss, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt--whose memoirs have been recently

published--and Lord D'Abernon [Footnote: Our Ambassador in

Berlin.]. He was six foot four, but his face was even more

conspicuous than his height. There was Russian blood in the

Herbert family and he was the eldest brother of the beautiful Lady

Ripon [Footnote: The late wife of the present Marquis of Ripon.].

He married Lady Gertrude Talbot, daughter of the twentieth Earl of

Shrewsbury and Talbot, who was nearly as fine to look at as he

himself. He told me among other things at that dinner that he had

known Disraeli and had been promised some minor post in his

government, but had been too ill at the time to accept it. This

developed into a discussion on politics and Peeblesshire, leading

up to our county neighbours; he asked me if I knew Lord Elcho,

[Footnote: The father of the present Earl of Wemyss and March.] of

whose beauty Ruskin had written, and who owned property in my

county.

"Elcho," said he, "always expected to be invited to join the

government, but I said to Dizzy, 'Elcho is an impossible

politician; he has never understood the meaning of party

government and looks upon it as dishonest for even three people to

attempt to modify their opinions sufficiently to come to an

agreement, leave alone a Cabinet! He is an egotist!' To which

Disraeli replied, 'Worse than that! He is an Elchoist!'"

Although Lord Pembroke's views on all subjects were remarkably

wide--as shown by the book he published called Roots--he was a

Conservative. We formed a deep friendship and wrote to one another

till he died a few years after my marriage. In one of his letters

to me he added this postscript:

Keep the outer borders of your heart's sweet garden free from

garish flowers and wild and careless weeds, so that when your

fairy godmother turns the Prince's footsteps your way he may not,

distrusting your nature or his own powers, and only half-guessing

at the treasure within, tear himself reluctantly away, and pass

sadly on, without perhaps your ever knowing that he had been near.

This, I imagine, gave a correct impression of me as I appeared to

some people. "Garish flowers" and "wild and careless weeds"

describe my lack of pruning; but I am glad George Pembroke put

them on the "outer," not the inner, borders of my heart.

In the tenth verse of Curzon's poem, allusion is made to Lady

Pembroke's conversation, which though not consciously pretentious,

provoked considerable merriment. She "stumbled upwards into

vacuity," to quote my dear friend Sir Walter Raleigh.

There is no one left to-day at all like George Pembroke. His

combination of intellectual temperament, gregariousness, variety

of tastes--yachting, art, sport and literature--his beauty of

person and hospitality to foreigners made him the distinguished

centre of any company. His first present to me was Butcher and

Lang's translation of the Odyssey, in which he wrote on the fly-

leaf, "To Margot, who most reminds me of Homeric days, 1884," and

his last was his wedding present, a diamond dagger, which I always

wear close to my heart.

Among the Souls, Milly Sutherland [Footnote: The Dowager Duchess

of Sutherland.], Lady Windsor [Footnote: The present Countess of

Plymouth.] and Lady Granby [Footnote: The present Duchess of

Rutland.] were the women whose looks I admired most. Lady Brownlow

[Footnote: Countess Brownlow, who died a few years ago.],

mentioned in verse eleven, was Lady Pembroke's handsome sister and

a famous Victorian beauty. Lady Granby--the Violet of verse nine,

Gladys Ripon [Footnote: My friend Lady de Grey.] and Lady Windsor

(alluded to as Lady Gay in verse twenty-eight), were all women of

arresting appearance: Lady Brownlow, a Roman coin; Violet Rutland,

a Burne-Jones Medusa; Gladys Ripon, a court lady; Gay Windsor, an

Italian Primitive and Milly Sutherland, a Scotch ballad. Betty

Montgomery was a brilliant girl and the only unmarried woman,

except Mrs. Lyttelton, among us. She was the daughter of Sir Henry

Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's famous private secretary, and one of

the strongest Liberals I ever met. Her sister Maggie, though

socially uncouth, had a touch of her father's genius; she said of

a court prelate to me one day at Windsor Castle:

"There goes God's butler!"

It was through Betty and Maggie Ponsonby that I first met my

beloved friend, Lady Desborough. Though not as good-looking as the

beauties I have catalogued, nor more intellectual than Lady Horner

or Lady Wemyss, Lady Desborough was the cleverest of us. Her

flavour was more delicate, her social sensibility finer; and she

added to chronic presence of mind undisguised effrontery. I do not

suppose she was ever unconscious in her life, but she had no self-

pity and no egotism. She was not an artist in any way: music,

singing, flowers, painting and colour left her cold. She was not a

game-player nor was she sporting and she never invested in parlour

tricks; yet she created more fun for other people than anybody.

She was a woman of genius, who, if subtly and accurately

described, either in her mode of life, her charm, wits or

character, would have made the fortune of any novelist. To an

outsider she might--like all over-agreeable femmes du monde--give

an impression of light metal, but this would be misleading. Etty

Desborough was fundamentally sound, and the truest friend that

ever lived. Possessed of social and moral sang-froid of a high

order, she was too elegant to fall into the trap of the candid

friend, but nevertheless she could, when asked, give both counsel

and judgment with the sympathy of a man and the wisdom of a god.

She was the first person that I sought and that I would still seek

if I were unhappy, because her genius lay in a penetrating

understanding of the human heart and a determination to redress

the balance of life's unhappiness. Etty and I attracted the same

people. She married Willy Grenfell,[Footnote: Lord Desborough of

Taplow Court.] a man to whom I was much attached and a British

gladiator capable of challenging the world in boating and boxing.

Of their soldier sons, Julian and Billy, I cannot write. They and

their friends, Edward Horner, Charles Lister and Raymond Asquith

all fell in the war. They haunt my heart; I can see them in front

of me now, eternal sentinels of youth and manliness.

In spite of a voracious appetite for enjoyment and an expert

capacity in entertaining, Etty Desborough was perfectly happy

either alone with her family or alone with her books and could

endure, with enviable patience, cold ugly country-seats and

fashionable people. I said of her when I first knew her that she

ought to have lived in the days of the great King's mistresses. I

would have gone to her if I were sad, but never if I were guilty.

Most of us have asked ourselves at one time or another whom we

would go to if we had done a wicked thing; and the interesting

part of this question is that in the answer you will get the best

possible indication of human nature. Many have said to me, "I

would go to So-and-so, because they would understand my temptation

and make allowances for me"; but the majority would choose the

confidante most competent to point to the way of escape. Etty

Desborough would be that confidante.

She had neither father nor mother, but was brought up by two

prominent and distinguished members of the Souls, my life-long and

beloved friends, Lord and Lady Cowper of Panshanger, now, alas,

both dead. Etty had eternal youth and was alive to everything in

life except its irony.

If for health or for any other reason I had been separated from my

children when they were young, I would as soon have confided them

to the love of Etty and Willy Desborough as to any of my friends.

To illustrate the jealousy and friction which the Souls caused, I

must relate a conversational scrap I had at this time with Lady

Londonderry,[Footnote: The late Marchioness of Londonderry.] which

caused some talk among our critics.

She was a beautiful woman, a little before my day, happy,

courageous and violent, with a mind which clung firmly to the

obvious. Though her nature was impulsive and kind, she was not

forgiving. One day she said to me with pride:

"I am a good friend and a bad enemy. No kiss-and-make-friends

about me, my dear!"

I have often wondered since, as I did then, what the difference

between a good and a bad enemy is.

She was not so well endowed intellectually as her rival Lady de

Grey, but she had a stronger will and was of sounder temperament.

There was nothing wistful, reflective or retiring about Lady

Londonderry. She was keen and vivid, but crude and impenitent.

We were accused entre autres of being conceited and of talking

about books which we had not read, a habit which I have never had

the temerity to acquire. John Addington Symonds--an intimate

friend of mine--had brought out a book of essays, which were not

very good and caused no sensation.

One night, after dinner, I was sitting in a circle of fashionable

men and women--none of them particularly intimate with me--when

Lady Londonderry opened the talk about books. Hardly knowing her,

I entered with an innocent zest into the conversation. I was taken

in by her mention of Symonds' Studies in Italy, and thought she

must be literary. Launching out upon style, I said there was a

good deal of rubbish written about it, but it was essential that

people should write simply. At this some one twitted me with our

pencil-game of "Styles" and asked me if I thought I should know

the author from hearing a casual passage read out aloud from one

of their books. I said that some writers would be easy to

recognise--such as Meredith, Carlyle, De Quincey or Browning--but

that when it came to others--men like Scott or Froude, for

instance--I should not be so sure of myself. At this there was an

outcry: Froude, having the finest style in the world, ought surely

to be easily recognised! I was quite ready to believe that some of

the company had made a complete study of Froude's style, but I had

not. I said that I could not be sure, because his writing was too

smooth and perfect, and that, when I read him, I felt as if I was

swallowing arrow-root. This shocked them profoundly and I added

that, unless I were to stumble across a horseman coming over a

hill, or something equally fascinating, I should not even be sure

of recognising Scott's style. This scandalised the company. Lady

Londonderry then asked me if I admired Symonds' writing. I told

her I did not, although I liked some of his books. She seemed to

think that this was a piece of swagger on my part and, after

disagreeing with a lofty shake of her head, said in a challenging

manner:

"I should be curious to know, Miss Tennant, what you have read by

Symonds!"

Feeling I was being taken on, I replied rather chillily:

"Oh, the usual sort of thing!"

Lady Londonderry, visibly irritated and with the confident air of

one who has a little surprise in store for the company, said:

"Have you by any chance looked at Essays, Suggestive and

Speculative?"

MARGOT: "Yes, I've read them all."

LADY LONDONDERRY: "Really! Do you not approve of them?"

MARGOT: "Approve? I don't know what you mean." LADY LONDONDERRY:

"Do you not think the writing beautiful ... the style, I mean?"

MARGOT: "I think they are all very bad, but then I don't admire

Symonds' style."

LADY LONDONDERRY: "I am afraid you have not read the book."

This annoyed me; I saw the company were enchanted with their

spokeswoman, but I thought it unnecessarily rude and more than

foolish.

I looked at her calmly and said:

"I am afraid, Lady Londonderry, you have not read the preface. The

book is dedicated to me. Symonds was a friend of mine and I was

staying at Davos at the time he was writing those essays. He was

rash enough to ask me to read one of them in manuscript and write

whatever I thought upon the margin. This I did, but he was

offended by something I scribbled. I was so surprised at his

minding that I told him he was never to show me any of his

unpublished work again, at which he forgave me and dedicated the

book to me."

After this flutter I was not taken on by fashionable ladies about

books.

Lady Londonderry never belonged to the Souls, but her antagonist,

Lady de Grey, was one of its chief ornaments and my friend. She

was a luxurious woman of great beauty, with perfect manners and a

moderate sense of duty. She was the last word in refinement,

perception and charm. There was something septic in her nature and

I heard her say one day that the sound of the cuckoo made her feel

ill; but, although she was not lazy and seldom idle, she never

developed her intellectual powers or sustained herself by reading

or study of any kind. She had not the smallest sense of proportion

and, if anything went wrong in her entertainments--cold plates, a

flat souffle, or some one throwing her over for dinner--she became

almost impotent from agitation, only excusable if it had been some

great public disaster. She and Mr. Harry Higgins--an exceptionally

clever and devoted friend of mine--having revived the opera,

Bohemian society became her hobby; but a tenor in the country or a

dancer on the lawn are not really wanted; and, although she spent

endless time at Covent Garden and achieved considerable success,

restlessness devoured her. While receiving the adoration of a

small but influential circle, she appeared to me to have tried

everything to no purpose and, in spite of an experience which

queens and actresses, professionals and amateurs might well have

envied, she remained embarrassed by herself, fluid, brilliant and

uneasy. The personal nobility with which she worked her hospital

in the Great War years brought her peace.

Frances Horner [Footnote: Lady Horner, of Mells, Frome.] was more

like a sister to me than any one outside my own family. I met her

when she was Miss Graham and I was fourteen. She was a leader in

what was called the high art William Morris School and one of the

few girls who ever had a salon in London.

I was deeply impressed by her appearance, it was the fashion of

the day to wear the autumn desert in your hair and "soft shades"

of Liberty velveteen; but it was neither the unusualness of her

clothes nor the sight of Burne-Jones at her feet and Ruskin at her

elbow that struck me most, but what Charty's little boy, Tommy

Lister, called her "ghost eyes" and the nobility of her

countenance.

There may be women as well endowed with heart, head, temper and

temperament as Frances Horner, but I have only met a few: Lady de

Vesci (whose niece, Cynthia, married our poet-son, Herbert), Lady

Betty Balfour[Footnote: Sister of the Earl of Lytton and wife of

Mr. Gerald Balfour.] and my daughter Elizabeth. With most women

the impulse to crab is greater than to praise and grandeur of

character is surprisingly lacking in them; but Lady Horner

comprises all that is best in my sex.

Mary Wemyss was one of the most distinguished of the Souls and was

as wise as she was just, truthful, tactful, and generous. She

might have been a great influence, as indeed she was always a

great pleasure, but she was both physically and mentally badly

equipped for coping with life and spent and wasted more time than

was justifiable on plans which could have been done by any good

servant. It would not have mattered the endless discussion whether

the brougham fetching one part of the family from one station and

a bus fetching another part of it from another interfered with a

guest catching a five or a five-to-five train--which could or

could not be stopped--if one could have been quite sure that Mary

Wemyss needed her friend so much that another opportunity would be

given for an intimate interchange of confidences; but plan-weaving

blinds people to a true sense of proportion and my beloved Mary

never had enough time for any of us. She is the only woman I know

or have ever known without smallness or touchiness of any kind.

Her juste milieu, if a trifle becalmed, amounts to genius; and I

was--and still am--more interested in her moral, social and

intellectual opinions than in most of my friends'. Some years ago

I wrote this in my diary about her:

"Mary is generally a day behind the fair and will only hear of my

death from the man behind the counter who is struggling to clinch

her over a collar for her chow."

One of the less prominent of the Souls was my friend, Lionel

Tennyson.[Footnote: Brother of the present Lord Tennyson.] He was

the second son of the poet and was an official in the India

Office. He had an untidy appearance, a black beard and no manners.

He sang German beer-songs in a lusty voice and wrote good verses.

He sent me many poems, but I think these two are the best. The

first was written to me on my twenty-first birthday, before the

Souls came into existence:

What is a single flower when the world is white

with may?

What is a gift to one so rich, a smile to one so gay?

What is a thought to one so rich in the loving

thoughts of men?

How should I hope because I sigh that you will

sigh again?

Yet when you see my gift, you may

(Ma bayadere aux yeux de jais)

Think of me once to-day.

Think of me as you will, dear girl, if you will let

me be

Somewhere enshrined within the fane of your pure

memory;

Think of your poet as of one who only thinks of

you,

That you ARE all his thought, that he were happy

if he knew--

You DID receive his gift, and say

(Ma bayadere aux yeux de jais)

"He thinks of me to-day."

And this is the second:

She drew me from my cosy seat,

She drew me to her cruel feet,

She whispered, "Call me Sally!"

I lived upon her smile, her sigh,

Alas, you fool, I knew not I

Was only her pis-aller.

The jade! she knew her business well,

She made each hour a heaven or hell,

For she could coax and rally;

She was SO loving, frank and kind,

That no suspicion crost my mind

That I was her pis-aller.

My brother says "I told you so!

Her conduct was not comme il faut,

But strictly comme il fallait;

She swore that she was fond and true;

No doubt she was, poor girl, but you

Were only her pis-aller."

He asked me what I would like him to give me for a birthday

present, and I said:

"If you want to give me pleasure, take me down to your father's

country house for a Saturday to Monday."

This Lionel arranged; and he and I went down to Aldworth,

Haslemere, together from London.

While we were talking in the train, a distinguished old lady got

in. She wore an ample black satin skirt, small black satin

slippers in goloshes, a sable tippet and a large, picturesque lace

bonnet. She did not appear to be listening to our conversation,

because she was reading with an air of concentration; but, on

looking at her, I observed her eyes fixed upon me. I wore a

scarlet cloak trimmed with cock's feathers and a black, three-

cornered hat. When we arrived at our station, the old lady tipped

a porter to find out from my luggage who I was; and when she died

--several years later--she left me in her will one of my most

valuable jewels. This was Lady Margaret Beaumont; and I made both

her acquaintance and friendship before her death.

Lady Tennyson was an invalid; and we were received on our arrival

by the poet. Tennyson was a magnificent creature to look at. He

had everything: height, figure, carriage, features and expression.

Added to this he had what George Meredith said of him to me, "the

feminine hint to perfection." He greeted me by saying:

"Well, are you as clever and spurty as your sister Laura?"

I had never heard the word "spurty" before, nor indeed have I

since. To answer this kind of frontal attack one has to be either

saucy or servile; so I said nothing memorable. We sat down to tea

and he asked me if I wanted him to dress for dinner, adding:

"Your sister said of me, you know, that I was both untidy and

dirty."

To which I replied:

"Did you mind this?"

TENNYSON: "I wondered if it was true. Do you think I'm dirty?"

MARGOT: "You are very handsome."

TENNYSON: "I can see by that remark that you think I am. Very well

then, I will dress for dinner. Have you read Jane Welsh Carlyle's

letters?"

MARGOT: "Yes, I have, and I think them excellent. It seems a

pity," I added, with the commonplace that is apt to overcome one

in a first conversation with a man of eminence, "that they were

ever married; with any one but each other, they might have been

perfectly happy."

TENNYSON: "I totally disagree with you. By any other arrangement

four people would have been unhappy instead of two."

After this I went up to my room. The hours kept at Aldworth were

peculiar; we dined early and after dinner the poet went to bed. At

ten o'clock he came downstairs and, if asked, would read his

poetry to the company till past midnight.

I dressed for dinner with great care that first night and, placing

myself next to him when he came down, I asked him to read out loud

to me.

TENNYSON: "What do you want me to read?"

MARGOT: "Maud."

TENNYSON: "That was the poem I was cursed for writing! When it

came out no word was bad enough for me! I was a blackguard, a

ruffian and an atheist! You will live to have as great a contempt

for literary critics and the public as I have, my child!"

While he was speaking, I found on the floor, among piles of books,

a small copy of Maud, a shilling volume, bound in blue paper. I

put it into his hands and, pulling the lamp nearer him, he began

to read.

There is only one man--a poet also--who reads as my host did; and

that is my beloved friend, Professor Gilbert Murray. When I first

heard him at Oxford, I closed my eyes and felt as if the old poet

were with me again.

Tennyson's reading had the lilt, the tenderness and the rhythm

that makes music in the soul. It was neither singing, nor

chanting, nor speaking, but a subtle mixture of the three; and the

effect upon me was one of haunting harmonies that left me

profoundly moved.

He began, "Birds in the high Hall-garden," and, skipping the next

four sections, went on to, "I have led her home, my love, my only

friend," and ended with:

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear,

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"

And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"

The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"

And the lily whispers, "I wait."

She is coming, my own, my sweet;

Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthly bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

And blossom in purple and red.

When he had finished, he pulled me on to his knee and said:

"Many may have written as well as that, but nothing that ever

sounded so well!"

I could not speak.

He then told us that he had had an unfortunate experience with a

young lady to whom he was reading Maud.

"She was sitting on my knee," he said, "as you are doing now, and

after reading,

Birds in the high Hall-garden

When twilight was falling,

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

They were crying and calling,

I asked her what bird she thought I meant. She said, 'A

nightingale.' This made me so angry that I nearly flung her to the

ground: 'No, fool! ... Rook!' said I."

I got up, feeling rather sorry for the young lady, but was so

afraid he was going to stop reading that I quickly opened The

Princess and put it into his hands, and he went on.

I still possess the little Maud, bound in its blue paper cover,

out of which he read to us, with my name written in it by

Tennyson.

The morning after my arrival I was invited by our host to go for a

walk with him, which flattered me very much; but after walking at

a great pace over rough ground for two hours I regretted my

vanity. Except my brother Glenconner I never met such an easy

mover. The most characteristic feature left on my mind of that

walk was Tennyson's appreciation of other poets.

Writing of poets, I come to George Wyndham. [Footnote: The late

Right Hon. George Wyndham.] It would be superfluous to add

anything to what has already been published of him, but he was

among the best-looking and most lovable of my circle.

He was a young man of nature endowed with even greater beauty than

his sister, Lady Glenconner, but with less of her literary talent.

Although his name will always be associated with the Irish Land

Act, he was more interested in literature than politics, and, with

a little self-discipline, might have been eminent in both.

Mr. Harry Cust is the last of the Souls that I intend writing

about and was in some ways the rarest end the most brilliant of

them all. Some one who knew him well wrote truly of him after he

died:

"He tossed off the cup of life without fear of it containing any

poison, but like many wilful men he was deficient in will-power."

The first time I ever saw Harry Cust was in Grosvenor Square,

where he had come to see my sister Laura. A few weeks later I

found her making a sachet, which was an unusual occupation for

her, and she told me it was for "Mr. Cust," who was going to

Australia for his health.

He remained abroad for over a year and, on the night of the

Jubilee, 1887, he walked into our house where we were having

supper. He had just returned from Australia, and was terribly

upset to hear that Laura was dead.

Harry Cust had an untiring enthusiasm for life. At Eton he had

been captain of the school and he was a scholar of Trinity. He had

as fine a memory as Professor Churton Collins or my husband and an

unplumbed sea of knowledge, quoting with equal ease both poetry

and prose. He edited the Pall Mall Gazette brilliantly for several

years. With his youth, brains and looks, he might have done

anything in life; but he was fatally self-indulgent and success

with my sex damaged his public career. He was a fastidious critic

and a faithful friend, fearless, reckless and unforgettable.

He wrote one poem, which appeared anonymously in the Oxford Book

of English Verse:

Not unto us, O Lord,

Not unto us the rapture of the day,

The peace of night, or love's divine surprise,

High heart, high speech, high deeds 'mid

honouring eyes;

For at Thy word

All these are taken away.

Not unto us, O Lord:

To us Thou givest the scorn, the scourge, the scar,

The ache of life, the loneliness of death,

The insufferable sufficiency of breath;

And with Thy sword

Thou piercest very far.

Not unto us, O Lord:

Nay, Lord, but unto her be all things given--

My light and life and earth and sky be blasted--

But let not all that wealth of love be wasted:

Let Hell afford

The pavement of her Heaven!

I print also a letter in verse sent to me on October 20th, 1887:

I came in to-night, made as woful as worry can,

Heart like a turnip and head like a hurricane,

When lo! on my dull eyes there suddenly leaped a

Bright flash of your writing, du Herzensgeliebte;

And I found that the life I was thinking so leavable

Had still something in it made living conceivable;

And that, spite of the sores and the bores and the

flaws in it,

My own life's the better for small bits of yours in it;

And it's only to tell you just that that I write to

you,

And just for the pleasure of saying good night to

you:

For I've nothing to tell you and nothing to talk

about,

Save that I eat and I sleep and I walk about.

Since three days past does the indolent I bury

Myself in the British Museum Lib'ary,

Trying in writing to get in my hand a bit,

And reading Dutch books that I don't understand

a bit:

But to-day Lady Charty and sweet Mrs. Lucy em-

Broidered the dusk of the British Museum,

And made me so happy by talking and laughing on

That I loved them more than the frieze of the

Parthenon.

But I'm sleepy I know and don't know if I silly

ain't;

Dined to-night with your sisters, where Tommy

was brilliant;

And, while I the rest of the company deafened, I

Dallied awhile with your auntlet of seventy,

While one, Mr. Winsloe, a volume before him,

Regarded us all with a moody decorum.

No, I can't keep awake, and so, bowing and blessing

you,

And seeing and loving (while slowly undressing)

you,

Take your small hand and kiss, with a drowsed

benediction, it

Knowing, as you, I'm your ever affectionate

HARRY C. C.

I had another friend, James Kenneth Stephen, too pagan, wayward

and lonely to be available for the Souls, but a man of genius. One

afternoon he came to see me in Grosvenor Square and, being told by

the footman that I was riding in the Row, he asked for tea and,

while waiting for me wrote the following parody of Kipling and

left it on my writing-table with his card:

P.S. THE MAN WHO WROTE IT.

We all called him The Man who Wrote It. And we called It what the

man wrote, or IT for short--all of us that is, except The Girl

who Read It. She never called anything "It." She wasn't that sort

of girl, but she read It, which was a pity from the point of view

of The Man who Wrote It.

The man is dead now.

Dropped down a cud out beyond Karachi, and was brought home more

like broken meat in a basket. But that's another story.

The girl read It, and told It, and forgot all about It, and in a

week It was all over the station. I heard it from Old Bill Buffles

at the club while we were smoking between a peg and a hot weather

dawn.

J. K. S.

I was delighted with this. Another time he wrote a parody of

Myers' "St. Paul" for me. I will only quote one verse out of the

eight:

Lo! what the deuce I'm always saying "Lo!" for

God is aware and leaves me uninformed.

Lo! there is nothing left for me to go for,

Lo! there is naught inadequately formed.

He ended by signing his name and writing:

Souvenez-vous si les vers que je trace

Fussent parfois (je l'avoue!) l'argot,

Si vous trouvez un peu trop d'audace

On ose tout quand on se dit

"Margot."

My dear friend J.K.S. was responsible for the aspiration

frequently quoted:

When the Rudyards cease from Kipling

And the Haggards ride no more.

Although I can hardly claim Symonds as a Soul, he was so much

interested in me and my friends that I must write a short account

of him.

I was nursing my sister, Pauline Gordon Duff, when I first met

John Addington Symonds, in 1885, at Davos.

I climbed up to Am Hof[Footnote: J. A. Symonds's country house.]

one afternoon with a letter of introduction, which was taken to

the family while I was shown into a wooden room full of charming

things. As no one came near me, I presumed every one was out, so I

settled down peacefully among the books, prepared to wait. In a

little time I heard a shuffle of slippered feet and some one

pausing at the open door.

"Has he gone?" was the querulous question that came from behind

the screen.

And in a moment the thin, curious face of John Addington Symonds

was peering at me round the corner.

There was nothing for it but to answer:

"No I am afraid she is still here!"

Being the most courteous of men, he smiled and took my hand; and

we went up to his library together.

Symonds and I became very great friends.

After putting my sister to bed at 9.30, I climbed every night by

starlight up to Am Hof, where we talked and read out loud till one

and often two in the morning. I learnt more in those winter nights

at Davos than I had ever learnt in my life. We read The Republic

and all the Plato dialogues together; Swift, Voltaire, Browning,

Walt Whitman, Edgar Poe and Symonds' own Renaissance, besides

passages from every author and poet, which he would turn up

feverishly to illustrate what he wanted me to understand.

I shall always think Lord Morley [Footnote: Viscount Morley of

Blackburn.] the best talker I ever heard and after him I would say

Symonds, Birrell and Bergson. George Meredith was too much of a

prima donna and was very deaf and uninterruptable when I knew him,

but he was amazingly good even then. Alfred Austin was a friend of

his and had just been made Poet Laureate by Lord Salisbury, when

my beloved friend Admiral Maxse took me down to the country to see

Meredith for the first time. Feeling more than usually stupid, I

said to him:

"Well Mr. Meredith, I wonder what your friend Alfred Austin thinks

of his appointment?"

Shaking his beautiful head he replied:

"It is very hard to say what a bantam is thinking when it is

crowing."

Symonds' conversation is described in Stevenson's essay on Talks

and Talkers, but no one could ever really give the fancy, the

epigram, the swiftness and earnestness with which he not only

expressed himself but engaged you in conversation. This and his

affection combined to make him an enchanting companion.

The Swiss postmen and woodmen constantly joined us at midnight and

drank Italian wines out of beautiful glass which our host had

brought from Venice; and they were our only interruptions when

Mrs. Symonds and the handsome girls went to bed. I have many

memories of seeing our peasant friends off from Symonds' front

door, and standing by his side in the dark, listening to the crack

of their whips and their yodels yelled far down the snow roads

into the starry skies.

When I first left him and returned to England, Mrs. Symonds told

me he sat up all night, filling a blank book with his own poems

and translations, which he posted to me in the early morning. We

corresponded till he died; and I have kept every letter that he

ever wrote to me.

He was the first person who besought me to write. If only he were

alive now, I would show him this manuscript and, if any one could

make any thing of it by counsel, sympathy and encouragement; my

autobiography might become famous.

"You have l'oreille juste" he would say, "and I value your

literary judgment."

I will here insert some of his letters, beginning with the one he

sent down to our villa at Davos a propos of the essays over which

Lady Londonderry and I had our little breeze:

I am at work upon a volume of essays in art and criticism,

puzzling to my brain and not easy to write. I think I shall ask

you to read them.

I want an intelligent audience before I publish them. I want to

"try them on" somebody's mind--like a dress--to see how they fit.

Only you must promise to write observations and, most killing

remark of all, to say when the tedium of reading them begins to

overweigh the profit of my philosophy.

I think you could help me.

After the publication he wrote:

I am sorry that the Essays I dedicated to you have been a failure

--as I think they have been--to judge by the opinions of the

Press. I wanted, when I wrote them, only to say the simple truth

of what I thought and felt in the very simplest language I could

find.

What the critics say is that I have uttered truisms in the

baldest, least attractive diction.

Here I find myself to be judged, and not unjustly. In the pursuit

of truth, I said what I had to say bluntly--and it seems I had

nothing but commonplaces to give forth. In the search for

sincerity of style, I reduced every proposition to its barest form

of language. And that abnegation of rhetoric has revealed the

nudity of my commonplaces.

I know that I have no wand, that I cannot conjure, that I cannot

draw the ears of men to listen to my words.

So, when I finally withdraw from further appeals to the public, as

I mean to do, I cannot pose as a Prospero who breaks his staff. I

am only a somewhat sturdy, highly nervous varlet in the sphere of

art, who has sought to wear the robe of the magician--and being

now disrobed, takes his place quietly where God appointed him, and

means to hold his tongue in future, since his proper function has

been shown him.

Thus it is with me. And I should not, my dear friend, have

inflicted so much of myself upon you, if I had not, unluckily, and

in gross miscalculation of my powers, connected your name with the

book which proves my incompetence.

Yes, the Master [Footnote: Dr. Jowett, Master of Balliol.] is

right: make as much of your life as you can: use it to the best

and noblest purpose: do not, when you are old and broken like me,

sit in the middle of the ruins of Carthage you have vainly

conquered, as I am doing now.

Now good bye. Keep any of my letters which seem to you worth

keeping. This will make me write better. I keep a great many of

yours. You will never lose a warm corner in the centre of the

heart of your friend

J. A. SYMONDS.

P.S. Live well. Live happy. Do not forget me. I like to think of

you in plenitude of life and activity. I should not be sorry for

you if you broke your neck in the hunting field. But, like the

Master, I want you to make sure of the young, powerful life you

have--before the inevitable, dolorous, long, dark night draws

nigh.

Later on, a propos of his translation of the Autobiography of

Benvenuto Cellini, he wrote:

I am so glad that you like my Cellini. The book has been a

success; and I am pleased, though I am not interested in its sale.

The publisher paid me L210 for my work, which I thought very good

wages.

MY DEAR MARGOT,

I wrote to you in a great hurry yesterday, and with some bothering

thoughts in the background of my head.

So I did not tell you how much I appreciated your critical insight

into the points of my Introduction to Cellini. I do not rate that

piece of writing quite as highly as you do. But you "spotted" the

best thing in it--the syllogism describing Cellini's state of mind

as to Bourbon's death.

It is true, I think, what you say: that I have been getting more

nervous and less elaborate in style of late years. This is very

natural. One starts in life with sensuous susceptibilities to

beauty, with a strong feeling for colour and for melodious

cadence, and also with an impulsive enthusiastic way of expressing

oneself. This causes young work to seem decorated and laboured,

whereas it very often is really spontaneous and hasty, more

instructive and straightforward than the work of middle life. I

write now with much more trouble and more slowly, and with much

less interest in my subject than I used to do. This gives me more

command over the vehicle, language, than I used to have. I write

what pleases myself less, but what probably strikes other people

more.

This is a long discourse; but not so much about myself as appears.

I was struck with your insight, and I wanted to tell you how I

analyse the change of style which you point out, and which

results, I think, from colder, more laborious, duller effort as

one grows in years.

The artist ought never to be commanded by his subject, or his

vehicle of expression. But until he ceases to love both with a

blind passion, he will probably be so commanded. And then his

style will appear decorative, florid, mixed, unequal, laboured. It

is the sobriety of a satiated or blunted enthusiasm which makes

the literary artist. He ought to remember his dithyrambic moods,

but not to be subject to them any longer, nor to yearn after them.

Do you know that I have only just now found the time, during my

long days and nights in bed with influenza and bronchitis, to read

Marie Bashkirtseff? (Did ever name so puzzling grow upon the

Ygdrasil of even Russian life?)

By this time you must be quite tired of hearing from your friends

how much Marie Bashkirtseff reminds them of you.

I cannot help it. I must say it once again. I am such a fossil

that I permit myself the most antediluvian remarks--if I think

they have a grain of truth in them. Of course, the dissimilarities

are quite as striking as the likenesses. No two leaves on one

linden are really the same. But you and she, detached from the

forest of life, seem to me like leaves plucked from the same sort

of tree.

It is a very wonderful book. If only messieurs les romanciers

could photograph experience in their fiction as she has done in

some of her pages! The episode of Pachay, short as that is, is

masterly--above the reach of Balzac; how far above the laborious,

beetle--flight of Henry James! Above even George Meredith. It is

what James would give his right hand to do once. The episode of

Antonelli is very good, too, but not so exquisite as the other.

There is something pathetic about both "Asolando" and "Demeter,"

those shrivelled blossoms from the stout old laurels touched with

frost of winter and old age. But I find little to dwell upon in

either of them. Browning has more sap of life--Tennyson more ripe

and mellow mastery. Each is here in the main reproducing his

mannerism.

I am writing to you, you see, just as if I had not been silent for

so long. I take you at your word, and expect Margot to be always

the same to a comrade.

If you were only here! Keats said that "heard melodies are sweet,

but those unheard are sweeter." How false!

Yes, thus it is: somewhere by me

Unheard, by me unfelt, unknown,

The laughing, rippling notes of thee

Are sounding still; while I alone

Am left to sit and sigh and say--

Music unheard is sweet as they.

This is no momentary mood, and no light bubble-breath of

improvisatory verse. It expresses what I often feel when, after a

long night's work, I light my candle and take a look before I go

to bed at your portrait in the corner of my stove.

I have been labouring intensely at my autobiography. It is blocked

out, and certain parts of it are written for good. But a thing of

this sort ought to be a master's final piece of work--and it is

very exhausting to produce.

AM HOF, DAVOS PLATZ, SWITZERLAND, Sept. 27th, 1891.

MY DEAR MARGOT,

I am sending you back your two typewritten records. They are both

very interesting, the one as autobiographical and a study of your

family, the other as a vivid and, I think, justly critical picture

of Gladstone. It will have a great literary value sometime. I do

not quite feel with Jowett, who told you, did he not? that you had

made him UNDERSTAND Gladstone. But I feel that you have offered an

extremely powerful and brilliant conception, which is impressive

and convincing because of your obvious sincerity and breadth of

view. The purely biographical and literary value of this bit of

work seems to me very great, and makes me keenly wish that you

would record all your interesting experiences, and your first-hand

studies of exceptional personalities in the same way.

Gradually, by doing this, you would accumulate material of real

importance; much better than novels or stories, and more valuable

than the passionate utterances of personal emotion.

Did I ever show you the record I privately printed of an evening

passed by me at Woolner, the sculptor's, when Gladstone met

Tennyson for the first time? If I had been able to enjoy more of

such incidents, I should also have made documents. But my

opportunities have been limited. For future historians, the

illuminative value of such writing will be incomparable.

I suppose I must send the two pieces back to Glen. Which I will

do, together with this letter. Let me see what you write. I think

you have a very penetrative glimpse into character, which comes

from perfect disengagement and sympathy controlled by a critical

sense. The absence of egotism is a great point.

When Symonds died I lost my best intellectual tutor as well as one

of my dearest friends. I wish I had taken his advice and seriously

tried to write years ago, but, except for a few magazine sketches,

I have never written a line for publication in my life. I have

only kept a careful and accurate diary, [Footnote: Out of all my

diaries I have hardly been able to quote fifty pages, for on re-

reading them I find they are not only full of Cabinet secrets but

jerky, disjointed and dangerously frank.] and here, in the

interests of my publishers and at the risk of being thought

egotistical, it is not inappropriate that I should publish the

following letters in connection with these diaries and my writing:

21 CARLYLE MANSIONS, CHEYNE WALK, S.W.

April 9th, 1915.

MY DEAR MARGOT ASQUITH,

By what felicity of divination were you inspired to send me a few

days ago that wonderful diary under its lock and key?--feeling so

rightly certain, I mean, of the peculiar degree and particular

PANG of interest that I should find in it? I don't wonder, indeed,

at your general presumption to that effect, but the mood, the

moment, and the resolution itself conspired together for me, and I

have absorbed every word of every page with the liveliest

appreciation, and I think I may say intelligence. I have read the

thing intimately, and I take off my hat to you as to the very

Balzac of diarists. It is full of life and force and colour, of a

remarkable instinct for getting close to your people and things

and for squeezing, in the case of the resolute portraits of

certain of your eminent characters, especially the last drop of

truth and sense out of them--at least as the originals affected

YOUR singularly searching vision. Happy, then, those who had, of

this essence, the fewest secrets or crooked lives to yield up to

you--for the more complicated and unimaginable some of them

appear, the more you seem to me to have caught and mastered them.

Then I have found myself hanging on your impression in each case

with the liveliest suspense and wonder, so thrillingly does the

expression keep abreast of it and really translate it. This and

your extraordinary fullness of opportunity, make of the record a

most valuable English document, a rare revelation of the human

inwardness of political life in this country, and a picture of

manners and personal characters as "creditable" on the whole (to

the country) as it is frank and acute. The beauty is that you

write with such authority, that you've seen so much and lived and

moved so much, and that having so the chance to observe and feel

and discriminate in the light of so much high pressure, you

haven't been in the least afraid, but have faced and assimilated

and represented for all you're worth.

I have lived, you see, wholly out of the inner circle of political

life, and yet more or less in wondering sight, for years, of many

of its outer appearances, and in superficial contact--though this,

indeed, pretty anciently now--with various actors and figures,

standing off from them on my quite different ground and neither

able nor wanting to be of the craft of mystery (preferring, so to

speak, my own poor, private ones, such as they have been) and yet

with all sorts of unsatisfied curiosities and yearnings and

imaginings in your general, your fearful direction. Well, you take

me by the hand and lead me back and in, and still in, and make

things beautifully up to me--ALL my losses and misses and

exclusions and privation--and do it by having taken all the right

notes, apprehended all the right values and enjoyed all the right

reactions--meaning by the right ones, those that must have

ministered most to interest and emotion; those that I dimly made

you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop

window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say,

or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken

all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned

increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or

three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past);

but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed,

and the torch you play over them is often luridly illuminating. I

find my experience, therefore, the experience of simply reading

you (you having had all t'other) veritably romantic. But I want so

to go on that I deplore your apparent arrest--Saint Simon is in

forty volumes--why should Margot be put in one? Your own portrait

is an extraordinarily patient and detached and touch-upon-touch

thing; but the book itself really constitutes an image of you by

its strength of feeling and living individual tone. An admirable

portrait of a lady, with no end of finish and style, is thereby

projected, and if I don't stop now, I shall be calling it a

regular masterpiece. Please believe how truly touched I am by your

confidence in your faithful, though old, friend,

HENRY JAMES.

My dear and distinguished friend Lord Morley sent me the following

letter of the 15th of September, 1919, and it was in consequence

of this letter that, two months afterwards, on November the 11th,

1919, I began to write this book:

FLOWERMEAD, PRINCES ROAD, WIMBLEDON PARK, S.W., SEPTEMBER 15TH,

1919.

DEAR MRS. ASQUITH,

Your kindest of letters gave me uncommon pleasure, both personal

and literary. Personal, because I like to know that we are still

affectionate friends, as we have been for such long, important and

trying years. Literary--because it is a brilliant example of that

character-writing in which the French so indisputably beat us. If

you like, you can be as keen and brilliant and penetrating as

Madame de Sevigne or the best of them, and if I were a publisher,

I would tempt you by high emoluments and certainty of fame. You

ask me to leave you a book when I depart this life. If I were your

generous well-wisher, I should not leave, but give you, my rather

full collection of French Memoirs now while I am alive. Well, I am

in very truth your best well-wisher, but incline to bequeath my

modern library to a public body of female ladies, if you pardon

that odd and inelegant expression. I have nothing good or

interesting to tell you of myself. My strength will stand no tax

upon it.

The bequest from my old friend [Footnote: Andrew Carnegie.] in

America was a pleasant refresher, and it touched me, considering

how different we were in training, character, tastes, temperament.

I was first introduced to him with commendation by Mr. Arnold--a

curious trio, wasn't it? He thought, and was proud of it, that he,

A. C., introduced M. A. and me to the United States.

I watch events and men here pretty vigilantly, with what good and

hopeful spirits you can imagine. When you return do pay me a

visit. There's nobody who would be such a tonic to an

octogenarian.

Always, always, your affectionate friend,

J. M.

When I had been wrestling with this autobiography for two months I

wrote and told John Morley of my venture, and this is his reply:

FLOWERMEAD, PRINCES ROAD, WIMBLEDON PARK, S.W. (JAN., 1920).

DEAR MRS. ASQUITH,

A bird in the air had already whispered the matter of your

literary venture, and I neither had nor have any doubt at all that

the publisher knew very well what he was about. The book will be

bright in real knowledge of the world; rich in points of life;

sympathetic with human nature, which in strength and weakness is

never petty or small.

Be sure to TRUST YOURSELF; and don't worry about critics. You need

no words to tell you how warmly I am interested in your great

design. PERSEVERE.

How kind to bid me to your royal [Footnote: I invited him to meet

the Prince of Wales.] meal. But I am too old for company that

would be so new, so don't take it amiss, my best of friends, if I

ask to be bidden when I should see more of YOU. You don't know how

dull a man, once lively, can degenerate into being.

Your always affectionate and grateful

J. MORLEY.

To return to my triumphant youth: I will end this chapter with a

note which my friend, Lady Frances Balfour--one of the few women

of outstanding intellect that I have known--sent me from her

father, the late Duke of Argyll, the wonderful orator of whom it

was said that he was like a cannon being fired off by a canary.

Frances asked me to meet him at a small dinner and placed me next

to him. In the course of our conversation, he quoted these words

that he had heard in a sermon preached by Dr. Caird:

"Oh! for the time when Church and State shall no longer be the

watchword of opposing hosts, when every man shall be a priest and

every priest shall be a king, as priest clothed with

righteousness, as king with power!"

I made him write them down for me, and we discussed religion,

preachers and politics at some length before I went home.

The next morning he wrote to his daughter:

ARGYLL LODGE, KENSINGTON.

DEAR FRANCES,

How dare you ask me to meet a syren.

Your affectionate,

A.