My second selection was the Dent Blanche, but after starting for it a blizzard made the ascent impossible. So for fear of losing my second big peak altogether—things like the Breithorn, ascents of the Riffelhorn from the glacier, and a subsequent crossing of the eastern face of the Matterhorn were picked up by the way—I chose the Zienal Rothhorn, and with Nellie made an entrancing ascent. There was a huge cowl of snow on the summit, and sheltered by this from the wind we sat for nearly an hour in the blaze of the translucent day. Coming down an ill-fitting boot tore the base of one of her nails, and she was in bed next day with considerable pain. But with what scorn she answered my query as to whether, on her part, the expedition had been worth such a payment. Simultaneously there began a week’s bad weather, and we produced a stupendous Swiss Saturday Magazine.
My third year at Cambridge, it may be remembered, I had resolved to devote to a strenuous course of the classical tongues, and the autumn of 1889 saw me provided with a shelf of interleaved Latin and Greek authors (in order to make quantities of profound notes on the opposite page); with a firm determination to remember every crabbed phrase in case of finding some approximate English equivalent in passages set for translation from English into Baboo Latin or Greek, and triumphantly dragging it in; with pots of red ink to underline them, and with an optimistic determination of getting a first in my Classical Tripos. Eustace Miles who could work longer and more steadily than anyone I ever came across before or since, became the anchor to keep me moored on the rock of industry, despite the engaging tides and currents that made me long to drift away, and I would take my books to his room and vow that I would remain glued to them as long as he. If I worked alone my infirmity of purpose was something ghastly to contemplate, but the living proximity of a friend who set so shining an example shamed me into industry. He was bound for the same port as I, namely, a first in the Classical Tripos, and was a master in the art of inventing ludicrous phrases which contained the key to dates, and memorized the events of the Peloponnesian War for me in a few unforgettable sentences. We had intervals when we set the table on its side to serve as a back wall for some diminutive game of squash, and then refreshed and dusty we followed the odious symptoms that attended the plague in Athens. I quite lost sight again of the beauty of the classical languages, for just now the learning of them was the mere grinding of the mills that should produce a particular grist. It was no leisurely artistic appreciation, like that which had fitfully inspired me under Beesly and during my last year at school; I but wanted to commit a sort of highway robbery on Sophocles and Virgil, and take from them the purse that should pay my way for a first-class ticket. After two terms of this, for the only time in my life, I was considered to be in danger of growing stale from sheer industry, and for a fortnight of the Easter vacation, in accordance with my father’s suggestion, Monty James took two other undergraduates and myself for a bookless tour through Normandy and Brittany. It was nominally a walking-tour, but we went by train, visiting Rouen, Caen, Bayeux, and Lisieux, and finishing up with Amiens and Beauvais. We played quantities of picquet, and the Nixon saga was enriched by a Pindaric Ode in praise of Pnyxon winner in the tricycle race against two Divinity professors....
The last paper in the Tripos, after translations into English from Latin and Greek verse and prose, and translation into Latin and Greek from English, was in classical history, of which I knew nothing whatever, and so I sat up three-quarters of the night and read through the whole of two short history primers. In the few hours that intervened between that degrading process and the history paper, it was impossible to forget crucial dates or events of any magnitude, and by dragging in all collateral information, and dishing it up with a certain culinary skill acquired by years of Saturday Magazine, I produced a voluminous vamp of information. And then after some days of waiting came the lists, and the year of Babooism had won its appropriate reward, for, sure enough, I had taken a first. As for the history, I had produced a paper that caused me to be congratulated by the examiner (Dr. Verrall) on my “grasp”—acquired the night before—and was advised by him to take up history for a second Tripos. That, knowing better than he what the tenacity of my grasp really was, I thought better to decline.
Having taken a first (such a first!) my father was more than pleased that, pending the choice of a profession, which I had already secretly registered, I should stop up another year and attempt to perform a similar feat in some other branch of knowledge. Should that also be accomplished, I should be of a status that could see a Fellowship at King’s within possible horizons, and he wanted no finer threshold of life for any of his sons than a Fellowship of his college. Here then his scholastic sympathies were completely engaged, but infinitely more potent than they was his desire that we should all of us enter the priesthood of the Church to which, with a unique passion, all his life was dedicated. Arthur at this time, had already been an Eton master for over five years, and had not taken orders, and it was not likely now that he would. I was the next, and when my father more than gladly let me stop up at Cambridge with a view to a second Tripos, for another year, he coupled with his permission the desire that I should attend some Divinity lectures. Never shall I admire tact or delicacy more than his upon this subject. For years while at school he had put before me, never insistently but always potently, his hope that I should be a clergyman, so that now I was quite familiar with it. But at the very moment when a strongly expressed desire on his part might have determined me, he forbore to express such desire at all: if I was to be a clergyman I must have the personal, the individual sense of vocation, and not take orders because he wished it. Already I knew that he wished it, but he would not stir a finger, now that I had come to an age when definite choice opened before me, to influence my decision. He wished me to attend Divinity lectures in order to learn something before I either chose or rejected, but beyond that he never said a word in argument or persuasion, nor even asked me if I had attended these lectures. At the very moment, in fact, when his wish, had he expressed it, that I should take a theological Tripos with a view to ordination, would have had effective weight, seeing that he was allowing me to spend a fourth year at Cambridge, he, with a supreme and perfect delicacy, forbore to put a pennyweight of his own desires into the scale, and welcomed the choice I made of taking up archæology for a second Tripos. He merely wished me to attend a few divinity lectures, and left it at that. Hugh, meantime, triumphantly carrying the banner of early failure which I had so long held against all comers, had unsuccessfully competed, after a year of cramming, in the Indian Civil Service examination, which had been his first choice of a profession. Having failed in that, he was to come up to Trinity in October, unblushing and unhonoured. I passed the banner to him with all good wishes.
There were some weeks of long vacation after the archæological decision was made which I now know to have been loaded with fate so far as my own subsequent life was concerned, though at the time those scribblings I then indulged in seemed to be quite as void of significance as any particular number of the Saturday Magazine had been. For one morning, at Cambridge, where I had returned for a few weeks before we went out to Switzerland in August, I desisted from the perusal of Miss Harrison’s Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, and wrote on the top of a piece of blue foolscap a word that has stuck to me all my life. For a long time there had been wandering about in my head the idea of some fascinating sort of modern girl, who tackled life with uncommon relish and success, and was adored by the world in general, and had all the embellishments that a human being can desire except a heart. Years ago some adumbration of her had occurred in the story that Maggie and I wrote together; that I suppose was the yeast that was now beginning to stir and bubble in my head. She must ride, she must dance, she must have all the nameless attraction that attaches to those who are as prismatic and as hard as crystal, and above all she must talk. It was no use just informing the reader that here was a marvellously fascinating personality, as Maggie and I had done before, or that to see her was to worship her, or that after a due meed of worship she would reveal herself as no more than husk and colouring matter. Explanations and assurances of that sort were now altogether to be dispensed with. Scarcely even was the current of her thought, scarcely even were the main lines of her personality to be drawn: she was to reveal herself by what she said, and thus, whatever she did, would need no comment. There is the plain presentment of the idea that occupied my youthful mind when I wrote Dodo at the top of a piece of blue foolscap, and put the numeral “one” on the top right-hand corner; and where this crude story of mine still puts in a plea for originality, is in the region of its conscious plan. Bad or good (it was undoubtedly bad) it introduced a certain novelty into novel-writing which had “quite a little vogue” for a time. The main character, that is to say, was made, in her infinitesimal manner, to draw herself. In staged and acted drama even, that principle—bad or good—is never consistently maintained, because other people habitually discuss the hero and heroine, and the audience’s conception of them is based on comment as well as on self-spoken revelation. Also in drama there is bound to be some sort of plot, in which action reveals the actor. But in this story which I scribbled at for a few weeks, there was no sort of plot: there was merely a clash of minor personalities breaking themselves to bits against the central gabbling figure. Hideously crude, blatantly inefficient as the execution was, there was just that one new and feasible idea in the manner of it. What I aimed at was a type that revealed itself in an individual by oceans of nonsensical speech.
I wrote with the breathless speed of creation (however minute such creation was), almost entirely, but not quite, for my own private amusement. It was not quite for that internal satisfaction alone, because as I scampered and scamped, I began to contemplate a book arising out of these scribblings, a marketable book, that is to say, between covers and for sale. Eventually, for the information of any who happen to remember the total result, I got as far as the lamentable death of Dodo’s first husband, and that, as far as I knew then, was the end of the story. Dodo would be thus left a far from disconsolate widow dangling in the air like a blind-string in front of an open window. On the last page of the book, she would remain precisely as she had been on the first; she had not developed, she had not gone upwards or downwards in any moral course; she was a moment, a detail, a flashlight photograph flared on to a plate without the smallest presentment of anything, except what she happened to be at that moment. All this I did not then realize.... There it was anyhow, and having finished it, I bundled the whole affair into a drawer, and with that off my mind, concentrated again over the Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens.
Then followed a few weeks at the Rieder Furca Hotel, above the Aletsch Glacier, opposite the Bel Alp. At that time it was a wooden structure of so light and airy a build that without raising your voice you could talk through the wall to the person next door. Maggie that year was obliged to go to Aix for a course of treatment and my mother went with her, but, even as it was, we nearly filled the little hotel. The weather was bad, an ascent of the Jungfrau which I made in very thick soft snow, after sleeping for two nights at the Concordia hut being the only big (and that an abominable) climb, and there was a great deal of “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” My father had a larger supply of books than usual, for he was busy with his judgment in the Lincoln trial, to be delivered in the autumn. For a couple of years the case had been a perpetual anxiety to him. It was doubtful at first whether he, as Archbishop, possessed the jurisdiction to try it, and while personally (to put the matter in a nutshell) he was very unwilling to do so, he did not want the jurisdiction of the See, if it possessed it, to lapse. The case was one of illegal ritual: and the Church Association party, at whose instigation it was started, had obtained their evidence in a manner peculiarly sordid, for they had sent emissaries to spy on Bishop King’s manner of celebrating the Holy Communion. As their object was to obtain evidence on that point, it is difficult to see how else they could have obtained it, but the notion of evidence thus obtained was revolting to my father. On the other hand there was Bishop King, a man of the highest character, of saintly life, an old and beloved friend of my father’s, who was thus accused of illegality in matters which to the ordinary lay and even clerical mind were of infinitesimal importance. But the indictment was that he had offended against Ecclesiastical Law, which my father as head of the Church was bound to uphold, so that when, after innumerable arguments and discussion, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council found that he had the jurisdiction, he decided to assume it. That being so, he could dismiss the case as being a frivolous indictment, but this course undoubtedly would have caused a split in the English Church, and accordingly he decided to try it. It was heard in February, 1890, and he reserved judgment. It was this pronouncement that occupied him so closely all that summer, and he finished it in September.
At the beginning of October, Hugh went up to Cambridge, for the assembling of freshmen, and I had still some ten days which I spent at Addington. Arthur was already back at Eton, my father and mother and Maggie soon went off on some visit, and thus it happened that Nellie and I for a few days were alone there. We had breakfast very late, with a sense of complete uncontrol, we rode and we played lawn-tennis and talked in the desultory argumentative manner that we both thoroughly enjoyed. In particular we played at “old games,” and Beth used to join us. That year the big cedar in the garden was covered with little immature cones, full of a yellow powder like sulphur, and we collected this in glass-topped pill-boxes, part of the ancient apparatus of the moth-collections, shaking the sulphur-laden cones into them, and filling each full to the brim. There was no design as to what we were to do with these: there was just some reversion in our minds to childish “treasures,” like the spa and the dead hornet in the aquarium. It was enough to fill these little pill-boxes with the cedar-pollen, and screw the lids on, and know that half a dozen boxes were charged to the brim. We were quite aimless, we saw nobody but Beth, and were wonderfully content. I did a little reading in Overbeck’s Schriftquellen, and Nellie translated the German part of it to me, to save time. There was nothing more to remember of those days except that delicious sense of leisure and love and liberty: we did nothing except what we wanted to do, and what we seemed to want was to be ridiculous children again. Eventually, after some four or five days, came the afternoon when I had to go back to Cambridge; my father and mother were coming back to Addington that day or the next. Nellie and I parted, greatly regretting that these silly days were done, and made plans for Christmas.
A week or so afterwards, I got a letter from my mother, saying that Nellie had a diphtheritic sore throat. Anxious news came after that for a few days, but on a certain Sunday I had tidings that she was going on well. Early on Monday morning I got a telegram telling me to come home at once, for she was very much worse. I went round to Trinity to see Hugh, and found he had received a similar telegram. There was a train to London half an hour later, and as I was packing a bag the post came in with reassuring news. But that had been written the day before: the telegram was of later date.
She had died that morning, facing death with the fearless welcome that she had always given to any new experience. During her illness she had not been able to speak at all, but had written little sentences on scraps of paper; after the nature of it was declared she had been completely isolated, but her nurse disinfected these notes and sent them to the others. The first was a joyful little line to my mother, saying that as she had to be in bed, she was going to have a good spell of writing at a story she was engaged on. At the end, the last note but one had been for her nurse; in this she had thanked her and asked, “Is there anything I can do?” Her nurse answered her when she read it, “Let patience do her perfect work.”... So that was off Nellie’s mind. And then last of all she wrote to my mother who was by her bed and she traced out, “I wonder what it will be like. Give them all my love.” Then my mother began saying to her, “Jesu, Lover of my soul,” and while she was saying it, Nellie died.
That afternoon, we, the rest of us, went out on that still sunny October day and strolled through the woods together, splitting up into twos and threes and rejoining again. My mother seemed to have her hand in Nellie’s all the time, telling us, who had come too late, tranquilly and serenely, how the days had gone, and how patient she had been and how cheerful. We recalled all sorts of things about her, with smiles and with laughter, and there was no sense of loss, for my mother brought her amongst us, and never let go of her. Then, back in the house again, there were other arrangements to be made: it was settled that Arthur, Hugh and I should go back to Eton and Cambridge as soon as we could, but after the funeral we must spend a week of quarantine somewhere. How Nellie had got diphtheria was obscure, and it was better that we should not sleep in the house, or run a possible risk of infection. I wanted to see her, but my mother said that what I wanted to see was not Nellie at all, and that I must think of her as I had known her. And as I knew her, so she has always remained for me, collecting the cedar-sulphur, or laughing with open mouth, or grave and eager with sympathy. The glass-lidded pill-boxes were on a ledge of a bookcase, where we had left them a week or two before. My mother had seen them, and thought that there was probably some mystic significance about them, so I told her how Nellie and I had gathered them, and she said, “What treasures: bless her!” Golden October weather it was, with frosts at night and windless days, and the chestnut leaves came peeling off the trees and falling in a heap of tawny yellow below them, each leaf twirling in the air as it fell.
She was buried in Addington churchyard and next her now lies Maggie, and on her other side my mother.
My father, all the time of Nellie’s illness, had been hard at work on the final revision of his Lincoln judgment: now the delivery of that was postponed for a little, but not for long. Everyone had to get back normally and naturally to the work and the play and the joy and sorrow of life again, but at the Christmas holidays it was seen how huge a gap had come in the circle which since Martin’s death, twelve years before, had grown up together, critical and devoted and wildly alive. No one, when all were so intent on the businesses in hand, had estimated when a play, for instance, must be written and rehearsed and managed, how largely it was Nellie’s enthusiastic energy that carried things through. So there was no play that Christmas, and the year after four of us, my father and mother and Maggie and I, were in Algiers, another year they were in Florence, and another Maggie and I were in Egypt, and so that particular blaze of young activity of which Christmas holidays had been the type and flower came to an end. Besides we were all getting older, and there was no Nellie; with her death some unrecapturable magic was lost.
Of the many intimate friendships of my mother’s life none was closer than that which had ripened during these years at Lambeth with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the late Archbishop. She had constantly been with us in town and at Addington, and now, after Nellie’s death, she made her permanent home with us. Then, when the Lambeth days were over she continued, until my mother’s death, twenty-two years later, to devote her life to her.
CHAPTER XII
AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXCURSION
AT Cambridge the study of archæology had forcibly taken possession of me by right of love, and at last I was working at that which it was my business to be occupied in, with devotion to my subject. Roman art, so I speedily discovered, was an utterly hideous and debased affair in itself, and the only things of beauty that emerged from Rome were copies of Greek originals, and even then these copies were probably made by Greek workmen. In Roman buildings also all that was worth looking at was stolen from the Greeks, and often marred in the stealing, and the thick mortar between their roughly hewn stones, the facing of them with a dishonest veneer of marble, their abominable tessellated pavements, the odious wall decorations of Pompeii revolted this ardent Hellenist. Now, too, for the first time since I came up to Cambridge, I came under an inspired and inspiring teacher; indeed, there were two such, for it was impossible not to burn when Dr. Waldstein in the Museum of Casts flung himself into Hellenic attitudes, and communicated his volcanic enthusiasm. But more inspiring yet was Professor Middleton: he gave me no formal lectures, but encouraged me to bring my books to his room, and spend the morning there. He used to walk about in a thick dressing-gown and a skull-cap, looking like some Oriental magician, and now he would pull an intaglio ring off his finger and make me perceive the serene and matchless sobriety of an early gem as compared with the more florid design, still matchless in workmanship, of a later century, or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waistcoat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative letters and tell him where they came from. He had dozens of notebooks filled with sketches of Greek mouldings and cornices: there were sections of the columns of the Parthenon that showed how the drums had been ground round each on the other, till, without any mess of mortar, they adhered so closely that the joint was scarcely visible. There were cedar-wood blocks in the centres of them with bronze pins round which they revolved; the honesty and precision of the workmanship could never be discovered till the column was in ruins. But there was the very spirit and ardency of Greece; and as for the great frieze of horsemen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon it was so placed that only a mere glimpse of it could be had by those who walked in the colonnade. Yet in honour of the goddess and in obedience to the imperious craving for perfection, it, though scarcely to be seen, must be of a fineness and finish unequalled in all the forums of Rome. Then Middleton would take a fragment of Greek pottery from a drawer, or a white lekythus from Eretria, and show me the mark of the potter’s wheel, and how the white ground was laid on after the baking, and how the artist with brush delicate and unerring had drawn the raised arm of the ephebus who laid his garland on the tomb. There were photographs also from the Street of Tombs; in one there was standing a young girl with braided hair. She it was who was dead, and the mother stood in front of her lifting the small face upwards with a hand under her chin, bending to kiss her for the last time, and such of the inscription as remained ran ΧΑΙΡΕΠΕΝΘ.... The rest of the letters was gone, but that was sufficient, and told how her mother gave the final greeting of Godspeed and of farewell to Penthesilea, for in that beautiful tongue “Hail”! and “Good-bye” are the same word and affectionately wish prosperity, whether for one who returns to the home, or goes from the home on the longest journey of all. And Professor Middleton made me realize the serenity of those good wishes for Penthesilea: there was a wistfulness on the part of those who remained, and a wonder and a great hope, and God knows how that struck home to me.... Or a young man sat languid on a rock, and his hunting spear was propped behind him, and beside him just one companion, weary with watching, had fallen asleep. There was no mother there to send him on his way; his friend and his hunting-spear were his comrades on earth, and these he must leave behind him, when to-day he fared out on his new adventure, further afield than ever his huntings had taken him.... And thus to me, the supreme race of all who have inhabited this earth became real. They heard the voice of creation as none other has heard it, and saw as none other has seen. They realized in dawn and in nightfall the attainment towards which all others have fruitlessly striven, showing in marble the humanity of the divine, and the divinity of man; they had birthdays for their gods, and for their dead, who died not, they had the imperishable love that knows not fear.
Professor Middleton never alluded in any way to this archæological tripos which I was to challenge after one year’s work. All the morning, three times a week or more, I used to sit there with my books that I never read, because he, in his dressing-gown, produced, one after the other, little bits of things which would make me love the Greeks for no other reason than for the artistic joy of their works and days. He knew of course that there was a tripos impending, and this in his view was the best way of preparing for it; while for drier stuff he gave me his notebooks on Vitruvius, which would, with his little exquisite sections and elevations, explain all that I need know about the bones and alphabet of architecture. His whole procedure, as I saw then, and his whole object was to make me want to know, down to their sandals and their salad-bowls and brooches, all that was to be learned of the brains of a god-like race. Once, so I remember, a bitter blizzard white with snow beat against the windows, and from some roof near a slate flew off and crashed in the small court at King’s where the mulberry tree grew. “That was Oreithyia,” he said, sucking on his pipe. “Boreas loved her, and blew her away. Rude Boreas, you know. You should read up the myths. Most of Greek sculpture illustrates myths.”
Since the days when I was fifteen, since Beesly and the Trojan Queen’s Revenge, there had been no such inspirer. But Beesly dealt only with language, while under Middleton the dry bones which had come together, not only stood up “an exceeding great army,” but went about their work, and returned to their homes of an evening, and lived and loved. Beesly had brought me to the portals of the house of the people who made Art, and knocked on the door for me. But Middleton pushed it open, and the gold standard of the Greeks that, theoretically, seven years ago I knew to be the only coinage, was now weighed and was found sufficient, and all else whatever baser stuff might load the opposing balance was found wanting.
It was at some time during that year that J. K. Stephen, the founder of the T.A.F., returned to King’s, and instantly for me all the lesser lights of general influence were eclipsed. In presence and personality alike he was one of those who without effort or aim impose themselves on their circle. Had he never said a word, the very fact of his being in the room must have produced more effect that any conversation that might go on round him. He was splendidly handsome, big of head, impressive and regular of feature, and enormously massive in build; slow moving and shambling when he walked, but somehow monumental. He had an immense fund of humour, grim and rather savage at times, at others of such froth and frolic as appeared in the two volumes of verse which he published during the next year, Lapsus Calami, and Quo Musa tendis. But this bubbling lightness was markedly uncharacteristic of his normal self. That it was there, those two volumes proved, but that particular spring, that light-hearted Puck-like quality, he certainly reserved for his verse, which to those who knew him was in no way the flower of his mind. In the dedication to Lapsus Calami, he expresses the desire that the reader should recognize his debt to “C.S.C.” (Calverley of Fly Leaves), he hopes that some one will think that “of C.S.C. this gentle art he learned,” and undoubtedly the reader did think so, for it was certainly C.S.C. whose method inspired some of these poems. But it is just these poems in which he was obviously indebted to Calverley, that are least worthy and characteristic of him. Jim Stephen made, at his worst, amusing neat little rhymes not nearly so good as Calverley’s, but, at his best, he made poems, such as “The Old School List,” of which Calverley was quite incapable. Both also were brilliant parodists, but here J.K.S. had a far subtler art than the man with whom he hoped his readers would compare him. Calverley’s famous parody of Robert Browning, “The Cock and the Bull,” does not touch in point of rapier-work J.K.S.’s poem “Sincere Flattery to R.B.” The one does no more than seize on ridiculous phrases in Browning, and go a shade further in absurdity: the other (“Birthdays”) parodies the very essence of the more obscure lyrics: you cannot read it, however often you have done so, without the hope that you may this time or the next find out what it means. He was the inventor, too, of a peculiarly pleasing artifice with regard to parody, for he put into Wordsworth’s mouth, for instance, in pure Wordsworthian phrase, the exact opposite of Wordsworth’s teaching, and produced a lament over the want of locomotive power in the Lake district. The effect is inimitable: the poet longs to see in those happy days when Helvellyn’s base is tunnelled, and its peak grimy
Which leads to Euston Square,
and in lines that almost must have been written by Wordsworth exclaims:
“Change here for Ennerdale!”
And I must be forgiven, since so few know the poem, for quoting the postscript to his parody of Browning, sufficient surely to make the poet, for whom Jim Stephen had an immense reverence, turn in his grave in order to laugh more easily. As follows:
P.S.
Where my works, cum notis variorum
Are talked about: well, I require the same bridge
As Euclid took toll at as Asinorum.
I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall
I’ve composed the above, and a stiff one it is,
A bridge to stop asses at, once for all.
If the art of parody can go further, I do not know who has conducted it there. The kindly ghost of Robert Browning might perhaps shrug his shoulders at “The Cock and the Bull,” and say, “Very amusing”: but reading Jim Stephen’s R.B. he must surely have winced and frowned first, and thereafter broken into a roar of his most genial laughter.
Often (when not indebted to C.S.C.) Jim Stephen’s most apt and biting parodies would be written or spouted extempore: I remember for instance someone reading a rather lamentable verse from F. W. Myers in which he delicately alludes to the godly procreation of children in the following lines:
Lo! when a woman desperate and true,
Make the irrevocable sweet surrender,
Show to each other what the Lord can do.
upon which Jim Stephen without a moment’s pause exclaimed:
This could not be included in Lapsus Calami, nor unfortunately would he include one of his most ingenious extravagances, and I cannot find that it has ever been published. The subject matter was that a burglar “desperate and true” awoke in the night and found an angel standing in his room, who asked him whether, being what he was, he would sooner go to heaven or hell, the choice being entirely his. His admirably logical conclusion was as follows:
But custom that anguish would soften;
But those who are bored by praising the Lord,
Would be more so by praising him often.
He chooses accordingly.
All that year Jim remained in residence at Cambridge; during one vacation he stayed with us at Addington, during another I went over to his Irish home, where, one evening after an argument about Kipling, he took up his bedroom candle saying, “Well, I wish he would stop kipling. Good night.” In ten minutes he came back, “I’ve written a poem about it,” he said, and proceeded to read the two immortal stanzas which end,
And the Haggards ride no more.
Close friends though we were, I was always conscious of a side of him that was formidable, of the possibility of a sudden blaze of anger flaring up though quickly extinguished again: there was, too, always present the knowledge of that “dark tremendous sea of cloud” in the skirts of which he had been before, and into the heart of which it was inscrutably decreed that he must go. There came a dark December morning; that time the breakdown was final, and he lived not many weeks.
Once again I made a triumphant tripos in the matter of archæology, was given an open scholarship at King’s, and immediately afterwards applied for one of those grants that seemed to hang like ripe plums on the delightful tree of knowledge. Hitherto those branches had waved high above my head, but now they graciously swept downwards and I plucked at the first plum I saw, and applied for a small grant to excavate in the town-walls at Chester. There was reason to suppose that quantities of the Roman tombstones of the legionaries that had been stationed there, had been utilized in the building of the town-wall, and though there were only Roman remains to be discovered (would that they had been Greek!) the search for them would be a very pleasant pursuit for the autumn, and might yield material for a fellowship-dissertation. To my intense surprise some grant—from the Würtz Fund, I think—was given me, for the purpose of discovering, if possible, new facts about the distribution of Roman legions in Britain.
The family went out to Pontresina that August, and I with them for a week or two before the work at Chester began. There I had a most horrible experience with Hugh on the Piz Palu, one of the peaks of the Bernina. Our plan was to make a “col” of it, that is to ascend it on one side, pass over the top, and descend on another. We tramped and perspired up southern slopes in deep snow on the ascent, struck an arête which led to the top, made the summit, and began to descend by another route. The way lay over a long ridge swept by the most biting north wind, from which on the ascent the mountain had screened us, and never have I encountered so wicked a blast. The loose snow whirled up from the rocks was driven against us as if it was torrents of icy rain, piercing and penetrating. Once as we halted, I noticed that Hugh shut his eyes, and seemed sleepy, but he said that he was all right and on we went. He was on the rope just in front of me behind the leading guide, and suddenly, without stumbling, he fell down in a heap. He was just conscious when we picked him up and said, “I’m only rather sleepy; let me go to sleep ...” and then collapsed again.
He was alive and little more. Raw brandy, of which we had about half a pint, stimulated him for a moment, and soon, after another and another dose, our brandy was gone. There was no question of the inadvisability of giving him spirits, in order to warm him, which is one of the most fatal errors when a climber is suffering from mere cold: there was just the hope of keeping him alive by any stimulant. It was not possible to go back over the summit, and so to get into more sheltered conditions again; the best chance, and that a poor one, was to convey him down somehow along the rest of this bitter ridge, till we could find shelter from the wind. Very soon he became completely unconscious, he could move no more at all, and the guide and the porter whom we had with us simply carried him along the rest of the ridge. The rope was altogether a hindrance, so we took it off, and proceeded in two separate parties. The guides carried Hugh between them, and I followed.
I had no idea after we had made this arrangement if Hugh was alive or not; often I had to wait till they got round some awkward corner, and then make my way after them. Places that would have been easily traversed by a roped party, took on a totally different aspect, when two men unroped were carrying another, and when the fourth of the party had to traverse them alone. What chiefly occupied my benumbed mind was the sort of telegram that would be sent to my father when we got down to the foot of the glacier below, where there was communication with Pontresina. Should I be sending a telegram that Hugh was dead, or should I have slipped, and thus be incapable of sending a telegram at all, or would nobody come back?... For some hour or so this procession went on its way: after I had waited for the trio to get round some rock or obstruction on the ridge, I followed, and caught sight of them again a dozen yards further down. Whether they were carrying a corpse or not I had no idea.
Gradually we came to the end of this ridge. I had waited for them to scramble over a difficult passage, and then they disappeared round a corner. One of the guides had loosened a rock, and when I tried to step on it, it gave way altogether and rattled down the almost precipitous slope to the side. I had recovered on to my original standing-ground, but with that rock gone, and being alone and unroped, it took me some couple of minutes, I suppose, to find a reliable foothold. When that was done, a couple of steps more brought me, as it had brought them, completely out of the wind, and on to a broiling southern slope. Fifty feet below me there came another corner, which they had already passed, and I could see nothing further. I went round that corner, and found the two guides roaring with laughter and Hugh quite drunk. He was making some sort of ineffectual attempt to sit on the point of his ice-axe. He was not dead at all: he was only drunk. The moment, apparently, that they had got out of that icy blast, his heart-action must have reasserted itself, and there was a half-pint of raw brandy poured into an empty stomach to render accounts. With thick and stumbling speech, he staggered along, assuring us that he had only been rather sleepy.... And so he had, and I emptied the fine snow that had been driven in about my knees through my knickerbockers, and had no need to send any telegrams.
Except for that adventure, which I would gladly have done without, Pontresina was an uneventful place, rather picnicky and wearisome. There was a friend of my sister Maggie there under the sentence of the white death: there was an elderly bishop who attached himself somewhat to our party: there was Miss Margot Tennant whom then I met for the first time; and after a rather dull fortnight, I turned back to England to embrace the career, at Chester, of a serious archæologist.
Now there was no particular reason why the Corporatn of Chester should allow a young gentleman from Cambridge University to pull the city walls about, in the hope of extracting therefrom Roman tombstones, even though he was quite willing that these monuments, if discovered, should be presented to the local museum. So with a view to securing a warmer welcome, I had got my father to write to the Duke of Westminster at Eaton, and this was a gloriously successful move. I went over to see him, explained the plan, and got his support. He in turn wrote to the Mayor urging the claims of archæology on an enlightened town, and gave me £50 to augment the grant from the Würtz fund. The technical part of the work, the underpinning of the wall, the subsequent building of it up again in case we extracted Roman tombstones from it was entrusted to the city surveyor: local subscriptions came in, and tombstones of considerable importance came out, for we found that a legion, “Legio Decima Valeria Victrix” (The victorious Valerian), whose presence in England was hitherto unknown, had been stationed at Chester. Professor Mommsen, the historian, must be informed about that, and the copies of these tombstones must be sent him, and these produced a letter of congratulation and acknowledgment from the great man. I skipped with joy over that, for was not this an apotheosis for the family dunce, that Professor Mommsen should applaud his work? And again I skipped when one of the famous post-cards came from Hawarden, asking me to come over and tell Mr. Gladstone about these finds. The sense of diplomacy spiced that adventure, for profoundly ignorant though I was about politics, I had just the prudence to be aware that Eaton and Hawarden must not be put, so to speak, into one pocket, since Mr. Gladstone with his policies of Home Rule for Ireland and the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church had digged a gulf of liquid fire between himself and the Duke. There must be nothing said that could tend to stoke that, and strict was the guard that I set on my lips.
All are agreed on the sense of the terrific latent energy with which that quiet country-house was stored: there was high tension in its tranquillity. You felt that if you touched anything a great electric spark might flare with a cracking explosion towards your extended finger.... I got there during the morning and was at once taken to see Mr. Gladstone. He was in his study, sitting at his “political” table: that other table was the table where he worked at Homer, so he presently explained to me, suggesting though not actually stating the image which flew into my mind, of his boiling over, so to speak, at the political table, that furnace of fierce contention and white-hot enthusiasm, and of his putting himself to cool off from controversy by the Ionian Sea. He instantly plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain as if nothing else really mattered or ever had mattered to him, and pored over the copies of a few inscriptions I had brought him. But he wanted more lively evidence than a mere copy.
“I should like to see the squeezes of these,” he said. “Do you know the only proper way to make squeezes? You take your sheet of blotting-paper, and after you have washed the stone, you lay it on, pressing the paper into the letters of the inscription. Then sprinkle it with water, but by no means wet your paper before you have laid it on the stone, because it is apt to tear if you do that. Then take a clothes brush—not too stiff a one—and tap the surface over and over again with the bristles. By degrees you will get the paper to mould itself into all the letters of the inscription, and where there are letters apparently quite perished, it will often show you some faint stroke from which you can conjecture what the missing letter has been, though it is invisible to the eye. And let your blotting paper get dry before you remove it. Otherwise again you may tear it. Yes, we are coming to lunch: we know,” he said to Mrs. Gladstone, who came in for the second time to say it was ready.
I do not of course pretend to reproduce the precise wording of this little dissertation on blotting-paper-squeezes, but there or thereabouts was the substance of it,