Left Hand, Right Hand!

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

SITWELLS have lived at Renishaw in Derbyshire since 1625. Hot-tempered and reckless, scholarly and adventuresome, this family is in miniature a portrait gallery of England. The present owner, Sir Osbert Sitwell, served in the Grenadier Guards from 1914 to 1918. During the Long Armistice he led the attack against the English Philistines, and now in his early fifties, he combines the duties of a country squire with the pleasures of a biographer.

In his Autobiography, Sir Osbert traces some of the multitudinous influences, both of heredity and association, that have affected him and his family. The result is a frank and fascinating study of a family that has produced three notable authors in the present generation the poets Edith and Sacheverell, and Sir Osbert himself, the master of prose.

7

Now I turn to my mother’s side of the family, and first to her father’s grandfather and grandmother, Lord and Lady Conyngham. The Conynghams derived from an Anglo-Norman family, long settled in Ireland. The 3rd Lord Conyngham was created a marquis in 1816, and he served as Constable of Windsor Castle and Lord Steward of the Household for nine years. These posts and dignities he owed, it is presumed, to the influence of his wife with the Prince Regent, later George IV.

For the whole florid decade of King George’s reign, the three most caricatured and ridiculed persons in England were the Monarch himself, his friend Lady Conyngham, and the Duke of Wellington; the lengths to which the cartoonists and pamphleteers pushed their libels, even though one of the trio was the King, and another the hero of England and, more than that., of the whole of Europe, was startling indeed. And toward the end of King George’s life, the coarse and brutal attacks upon his physical infirmity — he suffered from dropsy — are, even in this ruthless age in which we now find ourselves, almost unbelievable; though they are paralleled by the description Fielding, a sufferer from the same disease, gives in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, of the crowds at the docks in London laughing at his swollen form as he was carried on board ship.

Sometimes, then, looking at these caricatures, you will find yourself wondering whether, if t he Duke of Wellington were so plainly and vindictively misrepresented, the same may not be true, in at any rate a lesser degree, of the two other victims. The verdict which, in conversation with Raikes, the Duke of Wellington passed on George IV, many years after his death, is well known: “He was, indeed, the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy, and good feeling — in short, a medley of the most opposite qualities with a great preponderance of good that I ever saw in any character in my life.” His judgment on Lady Conyngham is less familiar; he remarked that during the King s reign, no great decision in English policy or matters of State had been taken without her counsel and consent.

It is singular that when so much labor has been spent in rehabilitating people of far less historical and personal interest , this woman, so powerful in her own day, should have found no writer to undertake her defense. No champion comes forward to refute with incontrovertible evidence the vague but general accusation of greed, stupidity, and want of feeling leveled at her by her contemporaries. My own purpose, however, in trying to summon her for a moment from oblivion, is in no way to whitewash her, but merely to recall to memory a few points in her favor to set against those to which, if the public at all remembers her, it yet clings in her despite, and to examine the curious circumstances wherefrom she sprung. Apart from this, she is too far away now for me to feel much of the piety of a descendant rushing to the rescue of an ancestress.

The beginning of Lady Conyngham’s real ascendancy over the King coincided with the beginning of his reign — and it may be noted that he had succeeded to the throne on the twenty-ninth of January, 1820, at the age of fifty-seven, and that Lady Conyngham herself was already over fifty — and only ended, after ten years, with his death. During this entire decade the public attention was fixed upon her every action and word. And if, as I have said, the Duke of Wellington, most unbiased of observers, did not join in the chorus of her dispraise, the rest of her contemporaries were not so lenient.

Princess Lieven, that rattling bag of bones animated by so lively an ill-will, and a person as much feared by the stupid and uncritical as Lady Oxford in our day — but with more reason, since Lady Oxford’s kindness in act as opposed to word never fails — opens the attack. On April 26, 1820, she ends a letter to Metternich: ". . . can one imagine anything more absurd than an amorous and inconstant sexagenarian who, at the beginning of his reign, gives up all his time to a love affair? It is pitiable.”

Then, on May 24 of the same year, Charles Greville proceeds to the assault with a triple-barreled firing of anecdotes of an uncomplimentary nature. The first is that delightful story of Lady Hertford, the discarded and supplanted favorite of the new King. “Somebody asked Lady Hertford ’if she had been aware of the King’s admiration for Lady Conyngham’ and ‘whether he had ever talked to her about Lady C.’ She replied that ’intimately as she had known the King, and openly as he had always talked to her upon every subject, he had never ventured to speak to her upon that of his mistresses’!” Then he tells us that when the King was riding in the Park with Lady Conyngham, Lord Beauchamp, Lady Hertford s grandson, exclaimed, “By God, our grandmother must learn to ride, or it is all over with us.’ And finally he repeats that when members of White’s were discussing Lady Conyngham’s looks, someone said she had “a leg like a post,”and Copley added, “A poste royale.”

In June of the following year, he notes; “The King dined at Devonshire House. . . . Lady C. had on her head a sapphire which belonged to the Stuarts, and was given by the Cardinal of York to the King. He gave it to the Princess Charlotte, and when she died he desired to have it back, Leopold being informed it was a crown jewel. This crown jewel sparkled in the headdress of the Marchioness at the ball.” And, at the end of 1821,

Princess Lieven obliges Metternich with a characteristic vignette of the favorite. “Not an idea in her head; not a word to say for herself; nothing but a hand to accept pearls and diamonds with, and an enormous balcony to wear them on.” After a visit to Windsor in June, 1822, she treats us to a remarkable conversation piece, etched with the purest and most corrosive acid: “. . , here is one of the scenes between the trio — King, Favorite and Myself: —

“The King, pointing to Lady Conyngham. ‘Ah, heavens, if she were what I am!' I was at a loss to understand what this meant. Ought Lady Conyngham to be a man? The King stopped, sighed, and then went on; ‘If she wete a widow, as I am a widower, she would not be one for long.’

“Lady Conyngham: ‘Ah, my dear King, how good you are.’ . . . The King: ‘Yes, I have taken an oath’; then turning to me, he added in a low voice, ‘Patience; everything in good time.’

“I could not help thinking of the mysterious nocturnal visits of the man midwife [Princess Lieven’s name for Sir William Knighton], and a whole chemist’s shop flashed through my mind. I am not sure I did not shiver as if I were cold.”

All through the reign, the volume of ridicule and denunciation continues until it culminates in two passages fiom Greville. On May 14, 1829, he writes in his diary: ". . . the influence of Knighton and that of Lady Conyngham continue as great as ever; nothing can be done but by their permission, and they understand one another and play into each other’s hands. Knighton opposes every kind of expense, except that which is lavished on her. The wealth she has accumulated by savings and presents must be enormous. The King continues to heap all kinds of presents upon her, and she lives at his expense; they do not possess a servant; even Lord C.’s Valet de Chambre is not properly their servant. They all have situations in the King’s Household from which they receive their pay, while they continue in the service of the Conynghams. They dine every day while in London at St. James’s, and when they give a dinner it is cooked at St. James’s and brought up to Hamilton Place in Hackney Coaches and in machines made expressly for the purpose; there is merely a fire lit in their kitchen for such things as must be heated on the spot.”

After the King’s death, again, Greville had an enjoyable gossip with one of the Valets de Chambre or Pages of the Backstairs, as they were know n, and makes the following entry of what he had learned in that direction.

“It was true that last year, when she [Lady Conyngham] was so ill, she was very anxious to leave the Castle, and that it was Sir William Knighton who with great difficulty induced her to stay there. At that time She was in wretched spirits and did nothing but pray from morning to night. However, her conscience does not ever seem to have interfered with her ruling passion, avarice, and She went on accumulating. During the last illness wagons were loaded every night and sent away from the Castle, but what their contents were was not known, at least he did not say. All Windsor knew this.”

In the copy of the Greville Memoirs in the library of Windsor Castle there are a few marginal comments, some thought to be by Queen Victoria, others by Lord Sydney, who had been page to George IV. One such note, probably by Lord Sydney, relates to the statement I have just quoted and runs: “Believed not to be true.” This is almost the only favorable contemporary reference to her — and it is a later aside.

8

FEELING against the favorite was so strong that, in their violence, the writers contradict themselves. Thus some refuse to believe she was ever the King’s mistress, and at the same time assign her children to him, while others maintain that she was his mistress and that the children are Lord Conyngham’s. Greville, in referring to the King and Lord Francis Conyngham, alleges: “Now Bloomfield sits among the guests at dinner at the Pavilion; the honours are done by the Father on one side and the Son on the other.” And Creevey, in a letter to his stepdaughter headed from Croxteth, December 23, 1822, writes: . . . Brougham says many of the best informed people in London, such as Dog Dent and others, are perfectly convinced of the truth of the report that dear Prinney is really to marry Ly. Elizabeth Conyngham; on which event the Earl here humorously observes that the least the King can do for the Queen’s family is to make Denison ‘Great Infant of England.’ ” To this statement a footnote is appended, which informs the reader that the Infant in question was “Lord Albert Denison Conyngham, third son of Elizabeth Denison, Marchioness of Conyngham. He was born in 1805, and was supposed to be the son of the Prince of Wales (George IV).”

In the middle of all the accusations that fly through the overheated air of that short reign, we remember suddenly that Lady Hertford was a deeply wounded and resentful woman whose vindictiveness age could not stale, and that Charles Greville was always jealous of success of every kind, and on every occasion manifested a total lack of feeling, fed by the prying mind of a born sycophant and lackey. Surreptitiously his fingers turn the pages of his master s letters; he says nothing at the time, takes his orders, and then returns home and jots down in his diary what he has read, and his disgust at it. Certainly we are the richer for the scavenging of this golden dustman, for his little talks with the Pages of the Backstairs; but we need not think him a nice character or believe all that he says. We recollect, too, that Princess Lieven, with her moral strictures and her very witty descriptions, was, at the very moment of writing them, the scraggy, undecorative mistress of Prince Metternich.

The pictures they give us of Lady Conyngham are too vehement, too emphatic, for all their vividness. Resentment at the influence of the favorite enters into each mention of her, and, though certain features in the delineations of her tally, in the main they are contradictory. A famous beauty, - - though admittedly past her prime, — they show her to us as a fat, middle-aged woman totally lacking in charm. At one moment we are told that she was stupid, ugly, and grasping; at the next we are asked to believe — which is true — that she was able to capture and, until his death, retain the affection of the most capricious, cultivated, elegant, and original, if eccentric, prince that England had seen for two centuries. We are told that she was avaricious in the extreme, but we are not informed that she was herself a rich woman, the daughter of an immensely rich man, and the sister of a multimillionaire.

Similarly the gossips maintain that she was the mistress of the King, and that certainly one, and probably two, of her children were his; and then we find out that, unless during the period that Lady Conyngham was living chiefly in Ireland, some previous connection had existed between them, — and of this, though a few curious hints exist, there is no evidence, — Lord Francis was born some seventeen years, and Lord Albert fourteen, before their mother’s acknowledged ascendancy began. Also Lord Conyngham’s marquisate is said to have been due to her influence with the Regent, but he was created a marquis four years before the friendship is supposed to have started!

But everything she does is wrong; the diarists and letter-writers attack her for her influence in politics, and at the same time accuse her of taking no interest in public affairs; she is pilloried for inducing the King to abandon the Whigs and support the Tories, and then, when she becomes the powerful advocate in royal circles of Catholic emancipation, the fury of the same Whig diarists knows no bounds!

As to whether she was, or ever had been, in fact, the King’s mistress, it is impossible now for us to judge. Nobody even tells us definitely when they met. But, quite apart from such speculations, it is plain, I think, that in his mature years the King, that extraordinary man, so unanchored to reality for all his talents and kindnesses and social graces, valued her friendship especially for the atmosphere which she provided in his home. He admired, no doubt, the particular type of beauty which she possessed — since, with her massive frame, fair hair, and fine complexion, she a little resembled Mrs. Fitzherbert, his wife and the woman who, in spite of his frequent anger — and with how little reason! —against her, remained his ideal.

But, above all, he enjoyed her company, and that of her sons and daughters, because he loved family life — so long as it was not that of his own family — and he loved young people — so long as they were not his own young people. This, of course, is the meaning of the scene witnessed by Princess Lieven, who told Lady Harrowby, who, in her turn, made it grist for Greville’s mill; a scene which, since he misunderstood it, so deeply shocked, and therefore enchanted, him. Lady Conyngham had given the order for the hundreds of wax candles in the chandeliers of the Saloon of the Pavilion to be lit. “When the King came in, she said to him, ’Sir, I told them to light the candles, as Lady Bath is coming this evening.’ The King seized her arm and said with the greatest tenderness, ‘Thank you, thank you, My Dear; you always do what is right; you cannot please me so much as by doing everything you please, everything to show you are Mistress here.’ ”

Another cause of her power over him, and its long duration, is to be found in the King’s laziness. As he grew older a kind of torpor enveloped him, until, at the end of his reign, he was called at six or seven in the morning, breakfasted in bed, transacted what business his Ministers could induce him to transact, still in bed, read every newspaper all through, got up in time for dinner at six, and retired to bed again between ten and eleven. In the night he would often ring his bell forty times, and, though a watch hung by his side, he would not make the effort of turning his head to look at it, but would ring for a Page to tell him the time; similarly, he would not even stretch out his hand for a glass of water. This was at Windsor, when he was in failing health; but even at the Pavilion, in the early twenties of the century, though he liked feminine society, he did not wish to be bothered and fussed. Lady Conyngham never offered her advice unless the King sought it — and her triumph was that, in consequence, he always did seek it.

Otherwise, she did not interfere, except to make life more pleasant for him. She left him in peace, in his stifling rooms, of which others — but not she complained that they were like a furnace, to concentrate upon the Things That Mattered; to consult with his cook upon the acquisition of an old master or the invent ion of a new dish, to design a piece of jewelry — composed, no doubt, of a Crown jewel or two — for Lady Conyngham, a new wig or waistcoat for himself, a new sling jacket for the Hanoverian Hussars. There were tailors to be seen, and the makers of chandeliers and curtains. He had thought out a new carved dragon, with golden and silver scales, for the Music Room, and a new draping for the curtains. He must order a new kind of shoe that, though elegant, gave room for gout. He must see the architects about new ideas for the Royal Pavilion itself, for the Cottages and the Fishing Temple on Virginia Water.

He might, too, if he had time for it after he had read the papers, think of a new battle in which he had taken part—he was tired of Salamanca and Waterloo, and that fisticuff battle with the butcher that he had been relating lately — to tell to that old stick-in-the-mud, Wellington. (He, the King, might be only a constitutional monarch, but he still retained some prerogatives: the King’s truth was different from other men’s truth, and even Wellington, the most truthful man alive, could not question it.) So there was plenty to do, really important things; and if the Ministers wanted to see him, well, they could wait. Let them wait! He had already saved Europe once, with his plan for the league of Continental Powers which culminated in 1814; it had been his idea. And no acknowledgment for it, no gratitude had he received ! So now they could kick their heels in the anteroom. Sometimes he kept them there for four or five hours.

Caroline was dead, the old King was dead, so he could do what he liked. He most emphatically did not wish for the influence, which he knew he must have in his entourage, to be wielded by someone who would attempt to interfere with his genuine passion for the arts and for music; who would try to frustrate his continual and immense plans for rebuilding palaces and cities, or would want to help him by urging economies and by endeavoring to curb his extravagances — after all he was King now, and the money was his, and bore on it his likeness (not a very good one, by the way, he reflected).

And, in other directions, the woman presiding over his house must be one who would never protest at his suddenly, without a word, summoning the choir from St. George’s Chapel to sing to him after dinner in the Dome; who would not deprecate his action if, when his private orchestra was playing a favorite piece, he decided to join in its rendering with a dinner gong; or tell him that it was unwise to mimic his Ministers or a foreign Monarch in front of a large gathering (and his new imitations, he was aware, were better than ever!); or declare that it was undignified of him to receive that young Italian composer, Rossini, whose work he so much admired, but whom many of his friends regarded as rude, conceited, and flashy, not a fitting guest for their King. Lady Conyngham filled this role; if she liked jewels, and spending money on them, so did he. He would design them for her. And it was a pleasure, too, to have Francis and Albert and Lady Elizabeth about him.

In these ways that we have mentioned, and in the company he liked, the King was able, if only for a time, to banish the specter of boredom which he so much dreaded. Ever since he could remember, he had sought, by means of diversions and pleasures, often deliberately unworthy, and with the aid of his charming manners and lively company, to avoid the form, the ceremony, the constraint, that his presence had, all along, inevitably imposed, and now, since he had succeeded to the throne, more than ever entailed. Looking back, it seemed as though his whole life had been spent in this vain attempt to escape from his own gilded and unwieldy shadow — the splendid, pompous shadow that passed like a wind over every room he entered, as the men bowed their heads and the women swept down in a curtsy. Only in this circle, and with these individuals, could he relax.

Lady Conyngham, for her part, loved power, no doubt, and in her composition had some of a pirate’s qualities. Perhaps the jewels and the compliments reminded her, too, how far she had traveled, for she, also, may have been trying to escape a shadow, though a shadow of different sort, of early poverty and disregard. Certainly she was not merely the middle-aged woman of coarse appearance with whom the caricaturists of the period make us familiar. The portrait of her by Sir Thomas Lawrence, in the possession of the Countess of Londesborough, shows her as a very beautiful and dignified woman. And it is to be observed, in respect of this, how many of her descendants, Conyngham as well as Denison, have been noted for their beauty. As her granddaughter and my great-aunt. Lady Treowen, when an old lady, remarked to me of herself and her several sisters, “We gals were a damned good-looking lot!”

But the most curious and unexpected tribute to Lady Conyngham that reaches over the years is that Greville, writing a quarter of a century later, admits that Queen Victoria entertained a regard for her, and was grateful to the favorite for her treatment of the Duchess of Kent and herself in the time of her domination.

There seems at this distance to be no means of deciding whether Lady Conyngham enriched herself at the expense of the Crown or not. If many Crown jewels had passed into her hands, Queen Victoria, I imagine, would not have pronounced so favorable a judgment upon her. Doubtless she received presents of jewels, but, where money was concerned, the Conynghams were at that time a very rich family, the income of Lord Conyngham’s inherited estates being estimated at £70,000 a year, while, though it is true that Lady Conyngham at her death left some £200,000, it must be remembered that this was probably her portion, for her father died a very rich man, and her brother became even wealthier, bequeathing to his younger nephew, Lord Albert, in 1849, a fortune of over £2,300,000 — then an even greater sum than it would be today.

9

As I have said, there were those who alleged that Lord Albert — pronounced “Orbert,” by the way — who inherited this great fortune in 1849 and assumed, under his uncle’s will, the name of Denison, was the son of George IV. Certainly in appearance he in no way resembled that monarch, for he was tall and thin and dark, being described by a contemporary as “like a comb, all teeth and backbone.” But he was, as his picture by Grant that hangs at Blankney shows us, an extremely imposing and romantic figure, with his great height, — he was six feet four or five inches, — his dark, curling hair and sidewhiskers, his features of a rather Latin regularity, and his eyes of a Spanish pride and melancholy. He had also the reputation of being a wit, and things he said I have heard repeated in my own lifetime. Age, however, seemed to have dulled them.

For a time Lord Albert was a cornet in “The Blues,” then he served in the Diplomatic Service and translated a fashionable novel by Carl Spindler, a German author who wrote dozens of romantic stories. This book, The Natural Son . . . a German tale descriptive of the age of the Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) by Lord A. C. in 3 volumes, appeared in 1835. Later he entered the House of Commons, sitting as Whig member for Canterbury. But the real business of his life was the collecting of beautiful and rare objects, and in this connoisseurship resides the single resemblance that can be found to his reputed father. In addition to his London house, he purchased Londesborough Lodge at Scarborough, — a house which played so great a part in our own young lives, — Londesborough itself, and in 1850 the magnificent classical house of Grimston in Yorkshire.

Lord Albert was responsible for the publication of two sumptuous illustrated catalogues of the pieces of art and antiquity in his possession, and was an author as well as a translator — though of only one book. In 1849 he caused to be printed a small volume of travel sketches for private circulation. In 1848 he had been very ill, and towards the end of that great revolutionary year he set out to find a warmer climate, accompanied, as he tells us, by “a wife, a plump and rather pretty English maid, and an English valet . . . an exception to the latter part of the rule ‘that a servant may be a good servant for the first five years, a good master for the second five years, but is a hard master for the third five years of his service.’ ”

The book that my great-grandfather wrote as a result of the voyage that he thus undertook opens a window upon the eastern end of the Mediterranean as it existed in those days, and his accounts of it — and of Malta, Sicily, and Italy — are authentic and lively, albeit his mind appears to have been somewhat formal despite its Whiggish mold. At the same time, a certain unintentional air of originality had been imparted to the chapters concerned with Greece, by the insistence of the printers on rendering “Armenian ” as “American”; thus, “I met a group of American peasants, and asked to buy a terracotta they had recently excavated” is a common adventure.

Lord Albert married again in 1847, six years after the death of his first wife in 1841, and had a large family by his second wife. I have been told that he was very highly strung, and that, as he became older, all servants and gardeners had to be banished from his sight, or he would be menaced with a nervous breakdown! Though his various large houses required great staffs to work them, he liked to assume that the rooms, the carpets and furniture, the pictures and lamps, the flower-beds, terraces, and clipped hedges of ilex, all looked after themselves, miraculously swept and tidied or renewed. It can have been no easy matter to quell the sounds of dusting, the rustling of dresses in the corridors, and to make sure that no clumsy garden boy blundered across his path when be walked in the grounds of Grimston or Londesborough,

Lord Albert died in January, 1860, and to his rent-roll of £100,000 a year, and, it was said, two million in stocks and shares, my grandfather then succeeded at the age of twenty-six, and set himself to its dispersal, itself the work of a lifetime, with zest and abandon. Meanwhile let us note in passing that his grandmother, Lady Conyngham, was still living. Thus I have been able to talk to — and discuss her with — many people who remembered her well.

Long gone, now, were the days of piracy and power, and she had become a very strict, religious, and dignified old lady of whom it was impossible to think evil. The Crown jewels she had worn had — many of them — been long returned; it was whole decades since she had ruled Windsor and the Royal Pavilion, forty years since Princess Lieven played the piano to King George and wrote afterwards, ". . . he was overcome, and for five minutes could not speak. At the end of that time a flood of tears relieved his feelings. I have never seen a man more in love,” nearly forty years since the Russian Princess had stayed at the Cottage in Windsor Great Park, and had described how, after dinner, she had looked up to find “the King gazing at Lady Conyngham with an expression in which somnolence battled against love; Lady Conyngham was gazing at a beautiful emerald on her arm; her daughter was toying with a ruby hanging round her neck.”

How far away they must have seemed now, those days when she and her friends dined on warm summer evenings in the Fishing Temple on Virginia Water, with a garden full of flowers, shut out from everything, while opposite on the smooth, light waters was moored a barge on which the King’s band used to play. She found it a strange age now, this entirely different epoch into which her life had been projected by her iron constitution; the demure little hats, the little parasols, the huge crinolines, how different from the orchidaceous fashions of the Regency or of her King’s reign! The royal idyl that had endured for two decades was nearly over (Lady Conyngham died at the age of ninety-one, two months before the Prince Consort, who was half a century younger than she).

The occupant of the throne was now more respectable than any of her subjects, and had increased immeasurably its influence, though art and humor had become continually further removed from it. Only the old Guelph passion for music — from which Lady Conyngham, who had not cared for opera or concert, had so often suffered — survived. How different England was, scarcely recognizable! And the old lady may sometimes have sighed to herself and thought that, if she had been younger, she would have migrated to Paris, where persisted at the court the sort of life to which she had been accustomed. She would have been more at home across the water in the gilded and parvenu empire that had yet inherited the ways of the old European monarchies. But she was too old for such fripperies; religion was her chief joy, and she attended church every Sunday, a large and beautiful old lady in a vast black crinoline, walking with the aid of a small gold-headed cane that the King had given her; looking “very different,”her granddaughter, Budy Treowen, told me, “from all those regrettably coarse and scandalous caricatures in the press.”

My grandfather, who will figure later in the pages devoted to my childhood, married his cousin. Lady Edith Somerset, youngest daughter of the 7 th Duke of Beaufort, a magnate who owned, in addition to estates in England, nearly three whole counties in Wales. These Welsh possessions descended to the Duke from the ancestress who, in 1477, had married the 1st Lord Worcester. The mother of the 7th Duke was the sister of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Granville — in whose eyes Lady Bessborough tells us she “dreamed her life away" — and he perhaps took after him, for my grandfather had great charm, and all his life, from the time when, as Lord Worcester, then a very young man, Harriet Wilson attached herself to him with ardor — only equaled in vehemence by the spite she evinced subsequently against him — he seems always to have been greatly loved. He married, first, Georgina, daughter of the Honorable Henry Fitzroy and Lady Anne Fitzroy, — afterwards Lady Anne Culling Smith, — the only sister of the Duke of Wellington. She died, after a few years, leaving two daughters.

A little over a year later, Lord Worcester married again — his former wife’s half-sister, Emily, the daughter of Mr. Charles Culling Smith and Lady Anne. This match gave rise to endless gossip, for it was said to be within the prohibited degrees of affinity, “voidable though not void.” Some echo of the excitement can still reach us. Princess Lieven wrote to Metternich on July 2, 1822: “Society is all affairs of gallantry — there is a positive epidemic of them — and yesterday a clandestine marriage took place under the most extraordinary circumstances. What strange beings these English women are. Think of it, a little miss running away at nine in the morning from her parents’ house, arriving at the church door, seizing two passers-by in the street and forcing them to be witnesses of the ceremony. The young man for his part had hired a parson and caught a passer-by too. They were married and left at once, meaning to cross to France. When they got to Rochester, they realised they had not a halfpenny; and there they are stuck, living presumably on love, for they have nothing else. The girl is own niece to the Duke of Wellington, and the young man is the Marquis of Worcester, future Duke of Beaufort.”

The Marriage Act of 1835, by specifically forbidding all such marriages in the future, legalized those that had taken place in the past. Lady Worcester, later Duchess of Beaufort, was the mother of the 8th Duke and of several daughters. She lived to be an exceedingly old woman, and my mother used to describe her, a formidable figure still, but rather vague mentally, taking her pet parrot out for a drive in the New Forest. She always wished to go for a new drive, but the coachman invariably took her the same way; she was too old to be aware of the deception. The parrot, too, had long been dead and stuffed so as to give an illusion of life and to prevent the storm that, even then, would have rained down on the heads of her retainers had she discovered that they had allowed this lovely creature to die. She was also too old, fortunately, to tell the difference between animate and inanimate.

Of the Wellesleys, her mother’s family, no account is necessary. The Duke of Wellington and his four brothers are now legendary and fabulous. But perhaps it is permissible to stress the love of building that ran in their blood — as evinced particularly by Lord Mornington and by his son the Iron Duke — and, still more strongly, the love of music.

Lord Mornington had learned to play the violin when he was nine years old, and soon after was taking his part in difficult sonatas; at fourteen he could play both harpsichord and organ and, before long, could improvise fugues. He composed the glees “Here in cool grot" and “Come, fairest Nymph.” The great soldier himself played the violin as a boy, and was so passionately attached to it that, the night before he joined the army, realizing that he now must abandon the instrument, he broke it in half. This same love of music I have in my own lifetime watched developing among many of those descended from Lord Mornington.

But the quality which, for the majority of these families I have mentioned, counted more than any other was the love of Sport. So famous have the Dukes of Beaufort been in the field of sport for three centuries that I will not dwell oil their passion for it, or their prowess in its exercise, but will turn to other facts concerning them.

This family has two early associations with great poetry. One is to be found in Spenser’s “Prothalamion,” with its enchanting refrain of

Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song;

this is described as “A Spousall Verse, in honour of the double mariage of the two honourable and vertuous ladies, the Ladie Elizabeth, and the Ladie Katherine Somerset, daughters to the Right Honourable the Earle of Worcester,” and in it the two sisters are called

The other link resides in the fact that Katherine Swynford, our ancestress, was the sister of Philippa, Chaucer’s wife.

There, reader, you have, in any case, the converging roads down which three travelers came, to meet, and thence start on a new journey. And as I am, perhaps, the most earthbound, it is fitting that I should describe its beginning.

I do not know that it is easy to deduce much from these diverse prenatal tracks lying behind us. Out of the sixteen great-great-grandparents, there seem to me to be three strains of original talent, Wellesley, Heber. and Sitwell; one of music, Wellesley, two of religion, Tait and Heber, two of marked practical capacity, Wellesley and Hely-Hutchinson, and many of the spendthrift, a trait which most certainly I inherited and which, though by now repressed of necessity, still troubles me. In every, or nearly every, direction there is, too, — especially during the last century, — a frenetic at tent ion to sport. Above all, and from every source, my ancestors have for generations been used to getting their own way.

Further, common to all four of my great-grandfathers is one other thing I have not mentioned, but have most specifically inherited: gout. Of this illness, mysterious in origin and manifestation, the late Dr. Havelock Ellis wrote that it “occurs so often, in such extreme forms, and in men of such pre-eminent intellectual ability, that it is impossible not to regard it as having a real association with such ability,” and again that it would be impossible to “match the group of gouty men of genius, for varied and pre-eminent intellectual ability by any combination of non-gouty individuals on our list. . .”He adds that they have frequently been eccentric and irascible, and in the eighteenth century were termed “choleric" by their contemporaries.

Another earlier writer and most famous physician states that gout kills “more rich men than poor, more wise than simple.” But Havelock Ellis supplies a reason for the connecting of this pathological condition with mental activity. The poison which causes it, he declares, acts as a stimulant to nerves and brain, while in addition the periodic fluctuations of it from the blood to the joints and back again afford the victim the benefit of two different points of view, almost, as it were, of two different brains; one, when the poison is in the joints, melancholy and overclouded; the other, when it is in the blood, unusually clear and vigorous.

So, as I lie in my bed, from time to time, comfortable, as Horace Walpole writes of himself, during an attack of gout, “as St. Lawrence on his gridiron,”I try to soothe my pains with the personal implications of this theory. Certainly gout stimulates the brain, influencing it at the time of an acute attack, almost as though a drug were at work (during one such short period of torment, I was able to make drafts for seven short stories). Groaning, afraid to move an inch upon my rack, I say to myself angrily that the decay of great men, the disappearance of consummate generals and statesmen, is in reality only due to a decline in the numbers of gouty subjects.

Bound together by the tie of an agony that brings its own reward, this small but privileged community of victims to which I have the honor to belong knows no boundary of faith or creed; Kubla Khan and Talleyrand, William Pitt and the Bacons, father and son, Wesley and Darwin, Gibbon and Fielding, Milton and Newton, and many another name as famous, go to compose the roll of honor of this martyred but happy band; and of Ben Jonson, Drummond of Hawthornden tells us that the great poet “ heth consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he heth seen Tartars, Romans and Carthaginians, feight in his imagination.”

10

I HAD come into the world in London, rather unexpectedly and with nothing prepared for my recept ion, on a very cold December afternoon, and the place of my birth was 3 Arlington Street, opposite to where the Ritz Hotel now stands; described contemporarily, I find, as a “nice house with electric light,” which my father had taken for a year or two in order to attend his parliamentary duties. My arrival, I think, cannot have impressed my parents so much as I should have liked, for they forgot to register my birth until six years later, in 1898, after my brother had been born.

Perhaps London, a year or two subsequently, is the first place I remember. Exploring dim recesses of memory, I seem to have a recollection of being wheeled down Piccadilly, of the trees of the Green Park and the old wooden gates of Devonshire House opposite, and of my mind’s being occupied with the polysyllabic music of the word “Piccadilly . . . Pic . . ca . . di . . lly,”which seemed to me then, as it does today, a very strange and beautiful name. But London did not then occupy an important place in my existence; the two backgrounds of my childhood were Renishaw and Scarborough. In any ease, though, being a slow rather than a quick child, it is places more than people, and words more than thoughts, that remain to me from my earliest days. The first words I learned were “Rags and Bones.”

At Scarborough the night nursery was at the top and back of the high old stone-pillared house we then occupied, and looked out above a narrow alley. When the rushing and bellowing winds of the winter ceased for a moment to roar down this passage made for them, tearing the words from the throats of the speakers right away into the void, and only the background of tumultuous seas remained, you could hear very distinctly what was said below. In the winter dawn, before it was fully light, these houses resounded with the loud cry, “Rags and Bones! Rags and Bones!”

And so it came about that these words were the first I learned, and who knows that such countersigns to mortality, pronounced at an impressionable age, may not have influenced my mind, making me seek behind the flattering disguise for the mortal and immortal core. It served, perhaps, as a warning not to take too seriously the comfortable life of the senses developing round me, and emphasized the same lesson to be learned in my favorite nursery rhyme: —

“Rags and Bones!” the old man used sometimes to shout, sometimes to insinuate slyly, in a voice that was between a song and a whine, into the frozen air, beneath where the fleeces of the sky were now showing their flayed and bloody edges, “Rags and Bones!” And so, since I associated him with the first words I had taught myself to utter, I took an interest in him and can still see very clearly his figure as he was a few years later, his bearded face crowned by a battered top-hat, — the survivor, it seemed, of innumerable orgies, just as it had been the witness, too, of countless interments, — vacant and smiling eyes full of an ineffable crankiness and guile, his whole impression and his jerky movements, as he pushed his barrow along, giving a little the flustered yet inanimate air of a scarecrow subjected for many seasons to the force of an intolerable wind.

Of such human beings, feckless, unable to extricate their weighted limbs from this terminus in which they found themselves, Scarborough in those days offered an inexhaustible supply the Negro, locally known as “Snowball,” who limped with a pitiful exoticism through the winter streets, trying to sell flowers, bunches of violets and button-holes, a figure from a warm Italian picture strayed into these prim, northern streets, with their frozen gutters and their roofs saw-edged with icicles; the bearded and witless tramp, known as Lousy Peter, ever tormented by various gangs of small boys, who would hit him when he fell asleep, warm in his rags, in the deserted squares at the hour which for everybody else was the dinner hour, or throw buckets of water over him — and then run away; or experiment upon him daily with a new booby-trap of their own skillful invention; the Cat Man who mewed to himself on the sands; the cretinous cherubs, children of the rich, but no less fantastic than the beggarcontingent; and more ordinary, but yet alien, players of the hurdygurdy, now extinct, with theirpleading, broken English, and their coated and capped attendant monkeys, decked out in the remnants of a brighter age. And there were the more subtle and rare specimens of whom I will write in their proper place, though the observation of them, albeit it belongs to a later day, when I could more fully remark and comprehend, was nevertheless the fruit of this cry that I learned so early, “Rags and Bones! Rags and Bones! ”

My father considered sons, especially elder sons when they were small, as a valuable extension of his personality, and my mother preferred small sons to small daughters, and the newest arrival to the earliest, and so my birth caused my sister Edith to be relegated to a second place in the nursery, a position which her very nature forbade her to occupy anywhere, even at that tender age. It never altered, I believe, her feeling for me, but all the same it must have constituted, like an inoculation, a first experience of the cruelty and fickleness of men and women. In consequence, it was only a few months after my birth that this little creature tried to run away from home, making an escape from our house in Scarborough so far as the outskirts of the town. Only the fact of her being as yet unable to lace her own boots, and of their being, as a result, so loose that further walking became impossible, was responsible for her capture and enforced return after an outing of three or four hours.

As for my parents, they were furious, for where she was concerned, a sense of humor, usually so noticeable a trait in both their natures, entirely deserted them. They had produced, instead of what they had expected, — a “charming” toy reproduction of themselves in fifty-fifty proportion, — a changeling, a small being with an intensely individual character and appearance, quite unlike those nearest her, with an aquiline nose instead of the straight one for which my father had been prepared, and (it became clear in time) with no love of sport, as my mother had hoped — worse, a small creature with an alien and immortal soul, difficult to bend or mold to the comfortable, late Victorian conventions of her class. No, their sense of humor, and even of pity, completely vanished when in contact with her.

I doubt whether any child was ever more mismanaged by her parents. They failed entirely to comprehend the sort of being who was in process of flowering before their eyes; they mistook nervous sensibility for awkwardness, imagination for falsehood, and a capacity for throwing the cloak of drama over everyday events — often the sign of an artist — for “being affected.” As she grew older, instead of allowing her to find her own range, in the same manner that she bad taught herself to read, they tried to force her to comply to their own measurements. Her seriousness, and an attitude of criticism which gradually developed in her concerning current class beliefs (such as that the poor deserved to be poor, and the rich, rich, or that sport was of more value to life than art) terrified my mother, albeit she enjoyed, and always more with the passing years, the immense sense of fun that my aunt Florence noticed in the child early,’and which continually developed.

My father, on the other hand, insisted on her admiring the things which he, with a taste he held to be infallible, himself admired. If she wanted to play the piano, no. it must be the cello instead, for he, profoundly unmusical though he was, had in his own mind decided that the cello was the finest of all instruments. Then, where poetry was concerned, Swinburne must be bad for her to read, for he had not read him, and therefore could not like him she ought to be content with Tennyson for beauty. Austin Dobson for charm, and Kipling for strength. Besides, Swinburne was not the sort of poet to read; my mother agreed. “Morbid,” she pronounced, with some lack of conviction, for she never read a line of poetry of any sort — or rather, “Morb’,”for she clipped her words. But I am going too far ahead.

11

THE traditional upbringing of children, in a family such as mine, implied, before the present nursery days of vitamins and orange juice and the use of Christian name between the employed and the children of the employer, a frank acceptance of the situation. Parents were aware that the child would be a nuisance, and a whole hedge of servants, in addition to the complex guardianship of nursery and schoolroom, was necessary, not so much to aid the infant as to screen him off from his father and mother, except on such occasions as he could be used by them as adjunct, toy, or decoration. Thus, in a subtle way, children and servants often found themselves in league against grownups and employers. The female child sought shelter with nurse and housekeeper and cook, the male in the pantry.

Certainly I learned more, far more, from talking to Henry and Pare in the pantry, from their instinctive wisdom and humor, than from more academic sources. They prevented the atmosphere from becoming too rarefied or refined. Their expressions nourished the writers hidden within the children, just as the food which Davis favored on special occasions, when my father was, for Some reason or other, not likely to interfere, nourished our bodies. For though she held boiled mutton and rice pudding to be the correct everyday food, and though she thought bananas “common,”she often added winkles, bought as a treat on the sly (because of my father’s fear of ptomaine), to our diet for tea, or shrimps, measured out in an enamel mug at the fish-shop or dragged, sandy and recalcitrant, from the pools along the shore, by ourselves. It would be vulgar for ladies and gentlemen to indulge such tastes, but children were children.

As for Henry, in after years, he himself recognized the part he had played in the development of Sacheverell and me, for in a letter I received from him, in retirement at Scarborough in 1938, he says: “ There is often a bit in the newspapers about you and the members of my club rush up to me and show me. I see in Monday’s Scarborough News a bit in about your hobbies, saying your education was not got at school or college, but during your holidays. Well, Sir, I make bold to claim some of that, because wether you were at Scarboro’, Renishaw or abroad, if you or Master Sachie wanted to know anything about things on the earth, the sea under the earth or in the air above you generally came to me, even when you had a tutor, and often the tutors came too.”

In the days when I first remember the pantry, it contained as its permanent figures Jones, Henry, and Pare. Jones was in charge, a lean individual, who had been my father’s scout at Oxford, and possessed an extraordinary physique, thin and long-chinned: it was, really, a memorable chin, all the more so because, contrary to the usual reading of such a feature, it spelled indecision and a lack of organizing power. Under him served Henry, who later became butler, and Pare, while a fewfriends or former retainers like James Broadbent, my grandmother’s fat and jovial coachman, then retired — or, rather, discharged — would look in, especially late at night.

But Henry Moat, even before he superseded Jones, was always the chief personality there. How often he used to imitate for me some guest, to whom I had taken a childish dislike, or talk to me about “Sir George’s latest idea,”or tell stories about the sea, or sing in his handsome bass bellow, which resembled the singing of a whale — could a cetacean be induced to sing — that won him, I found out later, so many female admirers; his atmosphere was always of the sea, for he came of a long line of sailors, fishermen, and whalers. His humor was in no way esoteric, but belonged to the genius of the race. Stephen Pare was his foil, intensely appreciative of Henry’s jokes and general character, but sad himself — and not without reason, for his wife, whom I only remember dimly — though she was often mentioned in my hearing with a lowering of the voice — and to whom he was devotedly attached, had gone mad, and he was losing his sight through having been struck by lightning. Thus he introduced a contrary and Biblical element of Job-like patience into the happy and robust eighteenth-century atmosphere of the pantry.

Henry first came to us as footman in 1893, as his signature, cut with a diamond on a windowpane of the pantry at Renishaw, still testifies, and remained with us, on and off, for forty-two or forty-three years. His absences were caused by his giving notice to my father, usually because of the introduction of some new idea of which he disapproved. And, as Henry used to complain to me, you “never knew what Sir George would do next.”He lacked continuity, it seemed, in the smaller items of behavior, though, regarded in another light, each fresh contradiction seemed hallmarked with his personality. “There’s only one certain thing, and that is, you can’t do right.”

Thus, at the age of one and a half to two years, I had unknowingly provoked a crisis, for while if Henry broke anything, or allowed it to be broken, he was always severely taken to task for it, yet on this occasion, when he had grabbed a valuable wineglass from me, just as I had smashed one, and was evidently going to smash another, my father’s aesthetic theories were disturbed, and he reproved him sternly, in the words, “Don’t do that, Henry! Leave him alone, or you will spoil the boy’s sense of touch.”

And there were his innumerable other theories, or “ Sir George’s fads,” as Henry called them. New ideas, or, indeed, ideas of any sort, were a great trouble, for servants, even the most unusual, always like their master to be conventional. In spite of his antiquarian attitude towards life, my father, for example, was fond of reading the latest scientific treatises and of trying to keep up with modern inventions. (He considered he had made some discovering himself on occasion.) “Henry,” he called one day to the great man, “I’ve a new idea! Knife handles should always be made of condensed milk!” (I must explain that a substance, derived from milk, a sort of paste in various colors, had lately made its appearance.) Henry looked particularly disgusted at the idea and very worried at its application. Then, with emphasis, and with an unusual air of correctitude, he countered, “Yes, Sir George. But what if the cat gets at them?”

At other times he left because it was a tactical move in the lifelong strategic game which he and my father played together; or, again, he disappeared in a trail of mystery and disapprobation, because his enjoyment of sensual pleasures had been too pronounced.

Sometimes Henry would ask to come back, sometimes my father would invite him to return; but one thing was certain: whatever the cause of the break had been, however permanent it might have appeared for the moment, or for the month, back he always came in the end. He and my father, though mutually critical and at the same time appreciative, never failed to gravitate towards each other again, as if influenced by the working of some natural law. My father always referred to Henry as “the Great Man,”and Henry for his part, mixed with feelings of the utmost disrespect, cherished towards him, as well, sentiments approaching veneration. Henry realized my father’s quality, both mental and physical, and that he was an uncommon, if difficult, character. This singular mixture of regard and ridicule is best illustrated by the following very typical letter which I received from Henry many years later, describing experiences abroad.

Hotel Bristol, Berlin
Sept. 23, 1929
DEAR CAPTAIN OSBERT, We have been travelling a good deal in Germany since the 12th of August and very interesting it is Sir George taking me and sometimes Miss Fowler [my mother’s maid] with him to see the Castles, Palaces, and Museums. We have become well-known in Germany Ginger visiting the above places over and over again and giving the attendants a hell of a time so that when we enter a door and they see him they scatter like scalded cats some through doors, some through windows and others up the chimneys one fat old woman wanted to take his umbrella from him and then commenced a vigorous tug of war result the fragments of the umbrella has been sent to the Castle to be put away in the armoury. At present he is looking remarkably well and looking well after himself — and after us too. He has docked us all of soup, meat and sweets for our dinner, for fear that we get fat — her Ladyship too — and of course pays half-price for us where he has to eat double portions to get built up again, himself. But joking apart Sir George is very good to me and took Miss Fowler and me to Potsdam. Very interesting. The palaces and gardens are truly beautiful. In the ex-Kaiser’s private palace in Berlin we saw the table on which he ordered the mobilisation of his Army and Navy “I.VIII.XIV. at 5 o’clock” the table is made from the oak taken from Nelson’s ship the Victory and for the writing paper, envelopes etc to stand in there is a model of the Victory the stem and the stern and small enamel flags showing the famous signal “England expects that every man this day will do his duty.” There was also a beautiful atlas globe of World in the Kaiser’s study and I showed Sir Geo where you was in Spain.
We went the other day (friday) to the Hohenzollern Museum (Sir Geo and I) of course I marched behind him and really I think and others say so too that if possible Sir George looks more distinguished than ever and the attendants eyed him intensely the head one especially and we had all of them bowing and scraping. The head guide ordered a special! cataloge to be brought and given to Sir George and then he came and asked me his (Sir Geo’s) name I felt very proud of him.
Now dear Master Osbert, take great care of yourself. We leave her this Wednesday for Munich stay there at the Continental Hotel until the 3rd October then H.L. departs direct for Florence and G.R.S. and self for Verona. I remain your obedient servant,
HENRY MOAT.
Henry claimed that he was descended from Italian jetcutters, called Moatti, who had settled in Whitby in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and certainly his family hail lived for well over two hundred and fifty years in the house, which later he inherited, in the fishermen’s quarter of Whitby; a delightful old house, built into the rock, its front concealed in a passage as narrow as a medieval street. Whether or not of Italian ancestry, nobody could have looked a more complete Yorkshireman than Henry. He stood well over six feet, and, with his high color, gave an impression of great physical strength; in character he was robust, original, vigorous, and audacious.
When Henry had grown old, Walter Cooper, my chauffeur, who thoroughly understood his character, asked him what he most regretted, and Henry replied, “If I had my life over again, I’d go in for scholarship and deep-thinking.”He had, as his letters show, a natural gift for a turn of phrase, and, when he retired, I repeatedly offered him sums of money if he would write his life, which had been of a most entertaining order, just as his ideas had always been his own. But he was then too tired and ill, I think, to undertake it.
A letter of Henry’s — also a literal transcription — written to my mother in 1918 or 1919, during one of his absences from the family, gives a good picture both of himself and of the pantry as I first remember it: —

To The Lady Ida Sitwell
MY LADY, Big thanks for the beautiful letter you sent me, it was like a ray of sunshine. I was very sorry just to miss Captain Osbert last Saturday, if I could just have seen him before I left I would cheerfully have cancelled my visit to Stokesley and Stockton. . . all being well I will come over to Searboro’ tomorrow (friday) when I hope to find your ladyship in the best of health and spirits although it takes a mighty effor t these times but it is worth it to try. My lady if I had gone to Scarboro’ last Saturday it would have been the 26th anniversary of me entering your service (Oct. 26th 1893). You were a fine young lady then full of high spirits and fun I would not have missed the career for the earth. The first night I arrived at Belvoir House Sir Geo was expecting a Committee meeting of 18 and so we only had 3 chairs in the dining room. The electricians had not got wired up, Lords, the caterers, had forgot to send, poor old Jones could not get his razor to sail round his chinn (I thought I had better put 2 n’s to chin, my Lady) and poor old James Broad bent [my grandmother Sitwell’s former coachman] sitting sighing on a chair very tired repeating “I wantsh go ’ome.” I know you will pardon me for the above my Lady I never feel lonely when I just think of my past life the cinema is not in it. Wishing you well my Lady, I remain, Your obedient servant, HENRY MOAT.

Yet though, as I say, all these persons played so large a part in my childish life, and though I saw more of them than of my parents, yet the atmosphere for all of us was distilled by my father and mother: by my mother’s unusual beauty and strange temperament, her kindness, indulgence, and furious, sudden rages; by my father’s cleverness and determination, and his view of life — a plotting of detail, of each move in the countless games in which he was engaged, which seems to me more Chinese than European. The atmosphere they provided was unmistakable.

12

I WAS in the happy position as a small child of being my mother’s favorite. I played on her bed, and upset everything with impunity. I adored her. Yet there were two things about her which I could not understand. The first time she lost her temper with me (I forget about what, but now I deeply sympathize with her), the whole world temporarily assumed a more tragic tone. I had been so sure of our relationship, now growing out of darkness into light, in which neither could do wrong for the other. I would not have believed that such a thing as this could happen, that so radiant and lovely and considerate a creature, always gay and gentle, could contain so dark a shadow within her. Moreover, though we were on such equal terms— for she treated every child as a friend and contemporary, never let him see that she was laughing at something he had said (and tins no doubt was the secret of the easy influence over children, the affectionate intimacy with them, which all her life she was able to establish) — I had not until that moment suspected its existence. But the dreadful day at last ended, and by morning, time had restored the old relationship.

I used to wander in and out of my mother’s room as I liked. I upset everything, as I have said — that was my privilege. I used to lie for hours in the morning on her bed, which was a drift of every newspaper published, of letters, and of cards, for she had been playing patience. I knew so well every familiar object: the flat, folding, leather card-tray upon which she had arranged her game, the clock like a huge watch in a green morocco case, the vases of flowers, the bottles of scent, the handkerchief laid on top of one of them ready for the day, the pincushions, with every size of hatpin in them, always with black shiny tops, pins that had continually to be rescued from me by my mother’s prim and patient maid, who would edge into the room, holding a newly arrived or newly brushed dress at arm’s length, as though it were a corpse, instead of an object of pride to her. But she would always have to drop it, and remove the pins from me before irretrievable harm was done.

I recognized the use of all the detail on the table, the diamond and ruby horseshoe brooch, the gothic pendant that had been made for Lord Albert to give his wife, with its fantastic shape and its black pearls, the silver hairbrushes, the innumerable photographs, the bottles and jars; but I did not understand one thing, a loop of thick rope, a foot or two long, twisted in a knot round the head of the bed. Eventually, after many implorlngs, I was told what it was. “It’s a bit of a hangman’s rope, darling. Nothing’s so lucky! It cost eight pounds — they’re very difficult to get now. Old Sir William got it for me.” And, suddenly, I was back again in a world instinctively comprehended of Hogarth and Gay.

Now a barrel-organ struck up a tune called “Queen of My Heart,” and the sunshine was pouring in at the three wide windows, which showed an expanse of light-blue sea, of a sparkling gayety that was imbecile. A German band, also, was playing at the corner of the Crescent, and a voice somewhere was singing “Linger Longer, Lucy, Linger Longer, Lou!” The gardenias my mother had taken off the previous night were lying on the dressing table and were scenting the room, and competing with the fragrance of tuberoses and sweet geraniums that stood in a vase. It was nearly noon, and she must begin to get up, for she was going to play a game of croquet before luncheon, and at the same time to rehearse with her partner and opponents a conversation — for a man, who had the reputation of being “most amusin’,” was going to show her and three friends how to make a phonograph record, and they were to pretend to have a quarrel over a croquet match.

The record itself was to be made after luncheon, but already the vibrant tin trumpet and the virgin cylinder that looked as though fashioned of cheap brown chocolate, soft and smelling of oil, stood ready to catch the impress of their voices, and fix their tones, it seemed, their inflection and laughter, in the throat of Time. No need now to depend upon a signature, glittering like rain, incised upon a sheet of brittle glass with a diamond ring for a particular kind of immortality: this was a much more secure method. And the phonograph was a new invention — not that my mother took any interest in scientific progress for its own sake, but it was a novelty, and it was fun. She left the theoretical side to my father.

Shut up in his study that smelled of strong Egyptian cigarettes, of which he smoked from twenty to thirty a day, my father was meanwhile, though quite unaware that an expensive phonograph had been imported into his house, reading a paper that had just appeared in a scientific journal upon the more recent discoveries of Edison, with especial reference to a machine — apparently called a phonograph—which recorded voices. (It was an interesting idea, but what a pity, he reflected, that he did not know Edison —he might have offered some valuable suggestions to the inventor, if only he had been consulted!) Then, he must run through a thing in the Athenaeum on “Modern Modifications of the Theory of Evolutional Survival.”

But, alas! he could not spend so much time upon it as he would have liked, would have to leave making notes on the subject until another day, for he had also to think out a scheme for the discomfiture of “the other side,” and he must work, too, at the pedigree of the Sacheverells, the origin of part-singing (a subject in which, except that it had an origin, he was not really much interested), make notes for a speech that he was to deliver to a large audience the following evening, ending with the quotation of a couple of lines from Byron, and consider the decorative motives employed in the leaden jewelry of the Middle Ages.

The household bills were again too high — such a mistake to entertain all these friends; people never did it in the thirteenth century, but were content to live modestly and quietly within the castle except on some great occasion! He must send for the cook about them, and also explain to her about the making of that sauce — she did not do it right. Henry polished boots the wrong way, and he must show him how to set about it. He must enter in his architectural notebook what he had found out about the origin in the East of Romanesque architecture. He must write to Turnbull, to say that the yew hedges were not being properly planted, and that he wanted all the levels taken again in the Eckington Woods for the new twelve-mile drive. He must send a letter to that new shoe place, pointing out that he refused to pay more than 18s. 6d. for a pair of shoes, and send a check to an architect, whose name he had temporarily forgotten, for £346:6:11.

He must revise, since seeing that last exhibition, his notes on “Greek Sculpture of the Golden Age.”The editor of the Scarborough Post ought to bring the leading article to him every day, so that he could approve it: he must think out a letter to him at once. (Sometimes he felt he would never get all these things done!) He must also enter his endorsement about the tints of spring foliage. “I have been trying to formulate my ideas as to the Spring Tints in planting. The ‘old gold which some oaks assume in May seems to me the finest colour in that month, especially when against a background of Scotch Fir. The contrast between apple trees in bloom and yews is fine, though too strong for most positions, but I have on several occasions been pleasantly surprised by it in the right place.” He must drop Sir Henry W hite a line to tell him his law was incorrect where the sale of copyhold coal was concerned, and write to Ernest, the gardener, about the proper way to plant roses (they understood these things much better in medieval times).

In a notebook entitled “The Wisdom of Life” he wrote down an aphorism, or a caution, “Never open a letter from a correspondent known to be troublesome, until after luncheon.” Now he corrected the date of “Hugh Fitz Osborne, called Blundus” from 1084 to 1086, and entered in their right place some discoveries he had made about the art of heraldry. In the pages devoted to gardens, he added that the Byzantines used to gild the trunks of cypress trees up to the height of a man, before proceeding to read over to himself a small account he had written of “Domestic Manners in Sheffield in the year 1250.”

Then he shut his notebooks and went to his solitary luncheon, with Henry in heavy and dignified attendance. He always had luncheon by himself except on special occasions. People distracted him, and their company prevented “the gastric juices from following their normal course.” An hour later, my mother and her friends would have an enjoyable meal, full of laughter and fun, and I would be in attendance under the table. Several of the guests were staying in the house; others came from the town or the country houses round. (There were sixteen to luncheon, but my father did not know that, and I was not to tell him. He made such a fuss about the household bills. “But whatever one may say about him, there’s no one else like him,” she would add.) Some friend would admire a bracelet, and she would say “Take it, darling" and give it to her. She would also give away, in the same manner, several dresses after luncheon. Ada, or Ethel, or Amelia, or one of my mother’s other devoted friends would try to prevent her from this folly. But it was no use; if anyone liked anything she had, she must give it to her.

Now, if they were all to go down to the Spa at four, those records must he made on the phonograph, at once. So those who were to take part, and their coach, drank down their coffee and went into the next room. I was allowed to accompany them on condition that I kept quiet. The needle ground out the sound of its progression, and there was scarcely a hitch in the making of the records. Only, perhaps, here and there, a voice waited a fraction too long before coming in.

And somewhere, in this house, the records still exist; some are smashed, and even those that are whole cannot be played, for my father’s favorite Law of Evolutional Survival has relegated the instruments for which they were made to that same limbo to which dinosaur, dodo, and our own anthropoid ancestor have at the end of their respective periods been consigned. Nothing remains of that golden hour, which was to be handed on so surely to posterity, except the oily, rather unpleasant scent of the records, that yet takes me — but alas! me alone — back to that gay interval between luncheon and going down to the Spa, as clearly and as surely as would the sound of the voices themselves.

It was time to go on to the Spa.

In the evening my mother and father would both come to say good night to me: it was the high moment of the day, a reception. My father would tell me a story, but his attitude was very different from that of my mother it was thought-out. He was considering my good, not my pleasure. It would be something about the Crusades, though he was in no way stiff with children, but they existed to be improved, and in the meantime to amuse and interest him with their curious point of view. My mother stayed on with me while I fell asleep, which even then, when I was a very small child, I found difficult because of a fear of not sleeping. She kissed me, and I remembered nothing more until morning came and I heard the cry “Rags and Bones! Rags and Bones!”

(To be continued)

With each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

RUMFORD PRESS

CONCORD N. H.

U. S. A.