Left Hand, Right Hand!

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

13

TO ME, my home always meant Renishaw; and the summer took me there, so that it meant the summer, too; summers that from this distance all merge into one. I remember, every year, directly I arrived, running through the cool, pillared hall to the low, painted door a little taller than myself, opposite, and standing on tiptoe, so that the smell of the garden should come at me over it through the open window; the overwhelming and, as it seemed, living scent of stocks and clove carnations and tobacco plant on a foundation of sun-warmed box hedges, the odor of any component of which to this day carries me back to infancy, though never now do I obtain the full force it drew from that precise combination.

I remember, too, the pleasure with which I always arrived at the house, and my sorrow at leaving it, for though we spent much time in Scarborough, and paid long visits to London and to grandparents, Renishaw was my home. I felt this with peculiar intensity, experiencing a curious attachment to the soil, a sympathy with the form of the country, with its trees and flowers, the frail blue spires of the bluebells in May, or the harebells and toadflax of August, which has never left me and has made me wonder at times whether my ancestors, in the buildingup of an estate through so many hundreds of years, and by the hunger and passion for this land which must have inspired them, —for it was an estate gradually accumulated, not obtained by huge grants or the purchase of church property, — had not bequeathed to me something still very real and active in my nature; this love seemed to me so much older than myself and so much part of me.

Here things endure. The old tides of rural existence survive beneath the indications of industry, new and old. Even though the furnaces blaze and belch, and the smoke sullies the very sky, men still measure the seasons by the facts of rural life. Summer comes with the ripening corn, autumn with mists and the picking of mushrooms in meadows and blackberries in hedges, winter with the falling snow, which lies long, often for two months, upon this high, cold country, but the advent of spring is heralded, not by the choirs of birds or the opening flowers, but by the passing of a black horse. Along the roads, along the lanes to the farms, a man will see a fine stallion pass, glossy and strong, led by an attendant, its mane plaited, its tail tied with blue and buff ribbons, —the colors of the Duke of Devonshire, — and will remark to his friend, “Why, spring must be here. There’s the Book’s stallion going by!”

The dialect of this potent and contrasting landscape is characteristic as its stone hedges and cliffs and crags, its great stone-built churches, Norman or gothic, with their stone spires, its stone-built farms, wind-swept on their little hills, and bearing such names as Spitewinter, Toadpool, Shady Hall, Hagg Hall and Clod Hall, Johnnygate and Highlightly. It. possesses words unknown elsewhere. There are names from France, but most of the language hails from the North, from Denmark and Norway.

In the local idiom, “I’ll pize thee one” is what the angry mother says to her child; if you are born left-handed, you are a “keggie-hander ”; if you must wait your turn, you “mus wairt thee kale”; and, if you hurry, a farmer calls out, “Are t’ thronged?” “ Gate ” is still the word for “road,” that very late invader, unheard-of until Elizabethan times, whereas “gate” survives from the uses of medieval agriculture, when the paths between the fields were known as “gates,” a meaning still to be detected in the common names of places in the district, Southgate , and Moorgate and Norgate, or in the angry tones of a wagoner who bids you to get your motor “out o’ t’ gate.”

Moreover, at the time of which I write, when the light first sculptured for me the outlines of ridge after ridge, misty and tree-tufted, stretching away toward the heights, distant and unattainable, the landscape and its inhabitants possessed even more character than they do today. Then, as now, in the distance beyond the park, the great plumes of smoke would wave triumphantly over the pyramids of slag, down which, every now and then, crawled writhing serpents of fire, as the cinders were discharged from the trucks.

After dark, this process at conjecturable intervals lit the whole night with a wild glory, so that, my father told me, standing on the lawn, he could read his watch by the light of Staveley flares three miles away, and in the woods this sudden illumination gave an added poignance to the sylvan glades that it revealed, causing the rabbits to be frozen for an instant into immobility, their eyes reflecting the glare and the terror within them, showing a shape, which might be that of an otter from the lake below, scudding through the long wet grass, and making the great owl hiccup uneasily in the trees where formerly he had hooted with assurance. As the golden surge diminished, so did the uneasy stirring of the minute but multitudinous life beneath the tall bracken.

All this is the same today — except that the immigrant small owl has made his way here and adds his clamor to the summer night; indeed, the flares are brighter. But in those times, during the hours of daylight, the very starkness of the little houses and the blackness of them from the smoke — at which there had been no attempt at amelioration — added their own quality of outrageous contrast, even, as it were, of color. In this chiaroscuro world, the gangs of miners returning from their work would tramp along the roads, wearing stuttering clogs, cord trousers, and scarlet tunics, the cast-off tunics of a happy army, then still dressed in musical-comedy uniforms, which the colliers bought regularly; a costume which set off the blackness of their faces and their scarlet lips. Where else could you see such color in the clothes of the working people at this period?

Even the roads were different, bordered with tall trees, now cut down by councils eager in their triple quest of tidiness, uniformity, and standardization; and the lanes of the countryside, and the drives through the park, were more vivid, I believe, than others anywhere — for their surface was laid with clinker, a vitreous substance, turquoise-blue, marine-blue, and sea-green, which, if it had been a natural product instead of having been cleaned out of the vast furnaces of the neighborhood, would rank, such is its beauty, as a semi-precious stone. (What exquisite mountains, temples, trees, and fantastic animals, in miniature, Chinese craftsmen would have carved from it!) Fragments of clinker can still be found best after a very rainy day when the downpour has lifted the surface, along the drives; but no new substance of the same kind can be obtained, for improved processes of industry now leave only an ugly gray stone behind them.

In the hot summer the house, standing above the world on its wide tableland, threw its battlemented and spired shallow, uncompromising and stark for all its fantasy, as far as the tall beech trees at the hills’ edge, while down below, in the north park, the golden mist still lay melting. On this side, the house makes no gesture to the graces, but is a stout-built, machicolated screen with but a few shallow breaks in the hundred yards of its façade. Here is no garden, only the grass and the old trees, of great girth; in spite of its austerity, it is rustic and pastoral, cows and horses come out of the Palladian stables into the park, and in their seasons buttercups and mushrooms grow among the green tufts of the turf.

But on the south side, the atmosphere changes dramatically; is no longer pastoral, but romantic. The house with its deep recesses, the fountains and pools and hedges set so fast among their surrounding woods that in the distance, from the south, the building appears to rise from a forest, the vistas to which lead every alley and every green court, are all part of the great romantic movement , and water provides the link which binds them together — water dripping from fountains and flashing from pools and culminating in the expanse of lake below, which swoons in a summer ecstasy of sun-born mist and still green leaves to the nostalgic rhythms of Mendelssohn, Weber, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky.

14

PEOPLE, except those very near me, were still strange and stiff from first sight as those figures, full of latent movement, seen in a pointillist picture — female figures in wide skirts and angular sleeves and straw hats, resembling those portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec or Beardsley, figures just learning to ride bicycles, men in round caps and cricket blazers and white trousers. Sometimes I would look up from the garden, hearing my name called, and see my father, talking to an architect or a landscape specialist upon the roof, far above. And I could never make out by what magic they achieved those heights. Then there were the rustics, bearded or bonneted. But, more easily, I remember occasions; those aquatic afternoons, for example.

How delicious were those long picnics on the lake, in the wide, flat-bottomed boat, blue-painted, that yet rots somewhere in the disused stables; those long, hot, calm, drowsy, sun-spangled afternoons of childhood spent on that mirror-flat, cool surface, the slow movement and the sound of the rowlocks as the nursery maid, Davis, listlessly plied the oar; the hours in which we drifted, yet never wasted our time, for if Edith and I leaned over the thick blue wall of the boat, we could watch the fish flickering in their checkered mail through trailing avenues of weeds. And sometimes my father would appear and carry me off for a swift darting journey in a canoe, while his spaniel flopped and splashed after us in the water or, after shaking himself in the sun on the bank, until his dangling ears flapped wildly and a smell of hot wool ascended from his steaming body, then tried, if we were near enough, to jump upon our prow, and, missing it, fell into his other element again.

Edith and Davis would be watching us from the boat, now moored by the island under the light shadow of a grove of young trees. At four-thirty a footman would come down with a hamper, and we would begin collecting dry wood to make a fire upon which to boil the kettle. The twigs crackled and burst, and the kettle began soon to hiss. Presently my mother and her friends would join us, and their grown-up laughter — laughter at things hidden and beyond our sight — would sound among the teacups.

But my mother, with her own children and with others’, but especially with her sons, was like a child herself, absorbed in their interests. Her friends, however, were thinking of themselves and how they looked; their air was patronizing in its unnecessary and false kindness (this stricture, of course, in no way applies to the several we loved). Soon my mother would light a cigarette to keep the midges away. (In those times, women who smoked usually did so to be daring, but she smoked for pleasure.) But time was passing, and soon we would climb the steep sun-baked hill to the house, entering the garden, sweeter than ever in these hours of dwindling light.

In the lamp room, under the heavy fumes of paraffin, the sightless Stephen Pare —with his vast and hollow eyes that now I understand resembled the gaping eyes of an antique mask of tragedy — was already lighting the wicks, which, by an unhappy irony, were to make clear for everyone else the exterior world, to him so dim, and indicate the shape and corners of chair and table, blurred to him and fading. Indeed he was the only person to gain no benefit from the process; he could not read at all, even, and he felt his way by instinct through the lofty, darkening rooms. But never, during the many years I knew him, did he make a mistake; he placed things down more softly than would any man who could see. Many of the rooms were now beginning to glow with a light forgotten today, for we belong to the last generation of children brought up by candlelight, and the smell of snuffed wax lay heavy on our nostrils as we went to sleep.

There was, however, though it was already time for bed, still a grateful hour or two before we must go to sleep, for I hated darkness here, was frightened in this large, rambling old house, haunted and haunting, and counted every moment until my mother came upstairs after dinner to bid me a second good-night, — a custom strictly forbidden by my father, —bringing with her the comfort of her warm and, to me, loving presence, and the scent of the gardenias and tuberoses she was wearing, and usually — which was also prohibited — a peach, strawberry water-ice, or some delicacy of that sort. She would bend above me, standing close to me, talking to me as to one of her own age, telling me how her cousins, who were staying with us, had behaved at dinner, of how Henry, still a footman, had suddenly laughed at something that was said, and of how difficult my father was being, with all his new ideas — probably he would alter them all again, tomorrow.

But though I was so frightened of the night, there was never a moment when I would not rather have been here than elsewhere. I loved the impalpable essence — what later one learns to call the “atmosphere” — of the house, a strange prevalence, laden with the dying memories of three centuries, pervading the mind like a scent faintly detected, the smell of wood-smoke, for example, that seems to color a whole room with its fragrance though a year has passed.

My mother, who looked so beautiful in her light-colored evening dresses, pale pink or yellow, would say good-night, and unless already I was in an almost trance-like condition of fatigue, I would struggle to prevent her going. With her, as she walked out of the door, she took the last remainder of all the light that the day had held. The lingering breath of strong scent she affected, and of the warmth of a physical presence that, as with other members of her family, was Italian in its radiance and, at first sight, apparent simplicity, only made the night still darker than it had been before she arrived. There was nothing now except darkness, out of which substance ghosts are spun and torn.

Through the door, however, left open on purpose, I could, if I removed the sheet from over my ears, hear the monotonous, grating tone of Davis’s voice in the day nursery. It was a dull sound, but I loved it, because it supported me on its safe wings; even the smell of cheese and beer which accompanied it, — for they were having their supper, — though at other moments it made me feel sick, now seemed pleasant to me, exhaling a human warmth and animal coarseness. A piece of garlic hung outside the window, says the folklore of Southeast Europe, secures a sleeper against vampires, and equally I can testify that the scent of bread and cheese can dispose of ghosts for children. I would listen to the voices, and then, the next thing I knew, it was morning and the blinds were being drawn up in our room level with the highest treetops.

15

IT Renishaw, then, the background was less complex than at Scarborough. The atmosphere of political excitement for one thing — and in those days it was marked — was lacking; there were no gifts of chocolates from enthusiastic supporters of my father and the Primrose League, uo circuses, and neither bands nor Negro minstrels. The climaxes were more artless and traditional; a donkey ride with Edith in the morning to where the toadflax grew on the banks of the now deserted canal (part of which had been constructed two centuries before at the expense of my ancestors, so as to help to improve trade), or to one of its pretty stone bridges, elegant in span as are those shown in paintings of Canaletto’s, or a drive in the pony cart, shining with paint and with brass and patent leather, drawn by the buxom piebald pony who pulled us along the roads for so many years and had enjoyed a romantic past, having been, it was alleged, the former star equine performer in a circus (indeed, at Scarborough, it was noticeable that certain tunes played by a barrel organ or a band would strike some chords of memory, for first he would stand still, then prance and try to take us in a fast and sweeping circle).

Usually we drove through the Eckington Woods, under the banks of dog’s-hair, — flowing Alpine grass like the hair of Nereids, and a speciality of the Derbyshire hills, and would hunt among it for wild rasps and strawberries, here where my great-great-grandfather had hunted the tiger. (These glades had no doubt often sheltered Robin Hood, — and indeed the tallest man could stand unseen in the bracken which flowed up and down the hills, — and, at the time of which I write, his bow still hung, as it had hung for three centuries, on the staircase at Barlborough, three miles away.) Sometimes, again, we would only walk, in the wood called the Settings, as far as the icehouse, a strange, forbidding cave, seemingly ancient as the beehive tombs of Mycenae, to peer down its shaft full of a century’s drifting of dead leaves, a place still set apart for winter even in the midst of summer.

Then we would spend the rest of the afternoon in the company of my mother, making butter under the guidance of Mrs. Hunt, who presided in the dairy. In the center of the floor was an Italian vase of marble from which water spouted, and to its octagonal sides were fitted slabs of Derbyshire marble, gray and showing sections of fossils, things such as the razor shells that I knew in the life of this age from the sands at Scarborough. It was deliciously cool even in the hottest hours of August, and I can still hear the wooden clatter of the “Scotch hands,” as they are called, see the liquid running out of the butter as the print is pressed onto it, and smell the sour odor of the buttermilk.

Sometimes, again, I would be taught to fish in the lake, the hook being baited with a maggot, chosen by an attendant, with the eye of a connoisseur, from a loathsome tin box that contained all writhing hell within its putrid compass, or I would watch my mother fishing for pike in Foxton Dam (Foxton, the Wood of the Little Folk, is near-by, through meadows full of dark-blue scabious a-flutter with small blue butterflies). After fishing in the Dam, there was always tea with old Mrs. Betts, wife of the keeper, who lived by the edge of the wood in a large stone cottage hidden behind a huge espalier apricot; and when we had eaten homemade scones and cakes and jams, she would, on being pressed, favor us with — in, if the truth is to be told, a rather cracked and hollow voice — part of the Hallelujah Chorus. She loved to display her gift, but it was a treat that always reduced my mother, partly, perhaps, because of our obvious enjoyment of it, to helpless though carefully hidden laughter.

And finally, towards the end of August, came the climax of the summer, a flower show, held in the park on the highest ground, where there is a flat stretch bearing the biggest and oldest trees. Here was every possible attraction. Besides the tents, — filled with a crowd that surged round mounds of fruit and vegetables, in an atmosphere laden with the heated scent of prize flowers and of prize onions mingled together, — besides purple potatoes in their Assyrian armor, besides giant cauliflowers like rustic faces, and mammoth dahlias, and huge gooseberries, overripe, sticky, and melting like cheap sweets, there was a military band playing Waldteufel waltzes, simple tunes pursued by fat, mustached bandsmen down serpentine instruments into an eternity, an infinity, in which nevertheless every vista was clearly defined and obvious. There were marionette shows and displays by midgets, while in the hot seclusion of small, red-lined tents rustic professors foretold the future from the lines of sweaty hands. I was held to be too young to consult them, though several times I ran in a determined manner towards the entrance.

16

ALAS! from this moment the progress of the year downhill was within sight; we were near the autumn, which, to my chagrin, always took us back to Scarborough, electric light, and to children’s parties, those fearful ordeals imposed upon the young by their elders. Before us stretched long autumn, and then winter, months, blustering winds, and wreck-strewn seas.

At this season the town reverted from a gay, holidaymakers’ paradise to a borough with a life and tradition of its own, and the tradesmen would stand gossiping in their doorways or come out to talk to us as we passed. The market was full of the smell of apples and the sunlight hung in tattered autumn streamers from rooftop and tree. This condition went on throughout the golden autumn till Martinmas (a local festival, but one which — for it fell on November 11 — I was to celebrate in the future with great fervor and more cause).

On the day in question the ox-eyed plowmen and the maidservants from the neighboring farms would walk round the market to be hired, a custom that has now everywhere died out; though, before the days of general advertising, it was common. (In Eckington we hired our plowmen on Guy Fawkes Day, known as Eckington Stattis, — a corruption of statutes, — when there was a small fair, gypsies and coconuts and roundabouts — but here no diversion was allowed except that, to countrymen, of walking round a town.) It was also a favorite day upon which plowmen chose to marry their round-faced rusticbrides, and many was the procession we watched climb up the hill to the old inn in Newborough, where the wedding breakfast would be held; flushed countenances, seemingly carved out of turnip or swede, stolid, listless, and good; large red hands crammed into cramping gloves for the occasion; white favors and white flowers.

The town, however, was in no way dependent on such arbitrary connection with the land as these customs would indicate; it derived its scaly, glittering harvest from the waves that could be seen rolling their long lines in exemplary formation. By the fruit of the sea it lived all the autumn, vying proudly with Aberdeen. The quays would be lined nearly every morning with ships, their brown sails furled, and often fleets would be seen under full sail, approaching. Nets, bursting with fish, and empty barrels stood upon the stone platform, and the air was strong with the smell of salt and rope and fish, and tar and woodsmoke. The fishwives roared to each other across their tables, slimy and running in the morning sunlight, and the paving itself was slippery from the catch, soon to be smoked and dried.

When the great storms of December began to break, and the rolling, gigantic waves bellowed and roared far out to sea and shook the whole town as they battered and pounded, and the houses seemed caught, themselves, in a net of finely spun spray from the breakers, snowy and mountainous or creamy with sand, I have seen the impassive faces and stoic endurance of these women, waiting for their husbands and fathers, and themselves so well able to value the dangers run, since not one woman in the fishers’ quarter but had lost some relative.

But, for all the terror it carried in its tremendous power, I loved the sea passionately then as now, this immense and tragic blind force which seemed somehow, as you stood near it, to change and renew the feeling in every cell of the body; I loved all its moods, but especially the storms and the fine, blown-out mornings that followed them, when the sands at the waters’ edge were tumbled, laden with inexplicable treasure, sea fruit and weed and strange shapes in wood and bone and in a substance black as jet and weighing as light.

When the days grew shorter and darker, though, they became for me more miserable. At the age of eighteen months I had a very serious illness, from which I was not expected at the time to recover. Though I contrived to hang on to life, it had left me a rather delicate and nervous child, and I suffered from attacks of that very terrifying

— but now fortunately extinct — disease, croup. Damp, and in my case especially sea fogs, mainly induced it, and being, albeit rather backward for my age, by no means stupid. I could detect, some fifteen to twelve hours beforehand, its approach, though still too young to be able to explain the nature of the symptoms and that I recognized them. Thus, since I could only indicate that I expected an onslaught, when it came, those in authority over me, instead of being grateful for the warning they had received, would denounce me for “bringing it on" ; a sin visited upon me, when the attack occurred, by extra-strong mustard baths that flayed the victim alive as though he were an early Christian martyr, and by doses of the indescribable ipecacuanha, that searing drug which even its name, with, implicit in its mournful but fascinating rhythm, all the lilting tangos of South America, can never redeem.

But Davis belonged to a generation which believed in old-fashioned remedies, as did our doctor, with his frock coat, top hat, and coral-pink stethoscope that seemed, when he used it, to be an exteriorization of the breathing apparatus within the body. Both the doctor and Davis immediately quelled any instinctive tendency on the part of an invalid to eat things — such as oranges, for example

— which would have cured the malady. The patient must be choked with fortifying delicacies, sago pudding and blancmange, and calf’s-foot jelly, made of melted hoofs and horseshoes, it seemed. Yet on the whole I must have obtained a good deal of my own way in the nursery, for I can still hear Davis’s favorite cry, where I was concerned: “Anything for peace, Master Osbert!”

The light all this time is growing stronger. Nevertheless from my infancy in Scarborough I can remember incidents more easily than people; incidents better forgotten. Thus I recall only too well how I stole an apple at the age of three from the market — not so much “stole" perhaps as “took,” for the laws concerning private property had not penetrated my consciousness, and all children are born communists. It was a lovely autumn morning; within, the cool and shadowy lanes of the great stone temple were lined with mounds of rosy apples, which scented the air, impregnated it with a sweetness almost like decay.

The whole world was my apple — rather than my oyster — and, in the tradition of my ancestress Eve, I was tempted, I managed, as the saying goes, to “get away with it,”though how my furtive munching escaped Davis’s attention, I cannot imagine; presumably she was talking about life and death — her favorite subjects — to one of her friends. The applewoman waited until we had left, and then stumped up the hill to see my father, acquaint him of his son and heir’s disgrace, and to demand five pounds as the price of her silence; otherwise, she hinted, he might find himself at the bottom of the poll at the next election.

During the long winter evenings there were fairy stories — of which my father strongly disapproved, holding that they developed the imagination in the wrong channels — to be followed by the usual childish terrors of cupboards and dark places. On the other hand, when tardy spring at last arrived, when the bands played and the barrel organs, I would dance to them with abandon. On other occasions I would dance to a very different tune, for I used to dance from temper, and one or two of my cousins used to make a point of annoying me on purpose, in order to he treated to this spectacle.

In a moment I will tell you of my cousins and of the life of which they were part; but I am only just beginning to see them, or to range beyond members of our own household. Indeed I can remember, with the utmost distinctness, an animal, almost before I can remember human beings. Bill Moat, the brother of our butler, Henry, was a fisherman, and used to bring over to see us from Whitby a tame seal. He had caught it during a whaling cruise, and it now lived in the back yard of his ancestral house at Whitby. It can be imagined with what mingled pride, pleasure, and interest my sister and I made the acquaintance of this new friend, who flopped about the sands after us in the most flattering way, used suddenly to come up and poke his nose at the back of his master’s knee so that he would nearly fall down, and would then bellow loudly for fish.

The reader may wonder how such a slippery customer was conveyed to us. Unlikely as it sounds, by train, and then by cab. Bill was a well-known character in Whitby, and was allowed to take his seal with him in a third-class carriage. He would have charge of its head, a porter would help him by pushing from below, and the sleek creature would ride beside him, giving a delicious breath of the ocean — and of fish — to the whole third-class compartment. Once arrived at Scarborough, they would take a cab, sent by my mother, the seal again sitting beside him, and looking round with interest at place and people. It seemed fitting, and in no way strange to us — or to any that knew either of them — that the brother of Henry, who belonged, like all his family, in his very essence to the sea, coming of a whole dynasty of sailors and fishermen, should possess such a pet.

17

WHEN I paid my first visit I was three years of age. Davis’s father was a cobbler in a small village near Newbury in Berkshire, and she was going home to spend a few days with her parents, who were both very old. Since I refused to be parted from her for an instant, she — though it must have spoiled her holiday — nevertheless, in accordance with the principle of appeasement which she had adopted where I was concerned (“Anything for peace, Master Osbert!”), arranged to take me with her. How clearly it comes back to me! Perhaps I remember it so well because that the visit took place at all constituted, I even then realized, a personal triumph: my mother was jealous, my father disapproved, my sister would like to have gone too, and the governess was frankly furious; by the sheer power of my plaguing I had obtained, almost for the first time, ray own way.

Certainly every detail of my stay lives in my memory: our arrival, very tired, at the cottage on an evening of timeless June, the long shadows of the trees on our way there, and how I woke up the next morning, very early, because of the excitement of the change, and how at that hour the light of the sun still lay flat as feathers along the ledges of the windows. Presently the rays slanted downwards, and there were signs of activity. Life seemed very intimate and enclosed here, after the larger houses to which I was accustomed; warm and compact and lacking in any sense of fear. There were no creaking boards, no inexplicable rustlings, no feeling of interruption if one ran into an empty room.

Every noise here made explicit its meaning. I heard now, as I lay there beside Davis, who was still fast asleep, the sounds that accompanied her father’s getting-up, the washings and splashings and crinkling tug of clothes being put on, then his going downstairs, moving about, lighting the fire and washing the dishes. Soon after, I heard the sizzling of bacon as he crisped it on a fork before the fire for my breakfast, — for, I do not know why, he, not his wife, did this part of the cooking, — and then there reached me the talking of rustic voices below.

After I had been dressed and had eaten the bacon, so crisp and delicious, I was allowed to sit in the workshop, full of the smell of leather, and watch the old cobbler hammering at his last and listen to him talking through the din to his friends.

But this brief pastoral episode was soon over. My next, my second, visit was of a different kind, accompanied by my entire family and paid to my grandfather and grandmother at Londesborough.

They were whole continents apart, these two houses; this was a different world, given over to those pomps and vanities which, in their own day so overwhelming, notwithstanding, leave no shadow behind them — unless they are fortunate enough to catch for a moment the attention of a Rowlandson or a Constantin Guys, and so remain fixed in the eye of time; a world of horses, carriages, and liveries, an immense machine, producing little, unless it were the love given it for its own sake, scarcely, even, rewarding with smooth working — still less with any pleasure — those to whom it ministered. Here there were major-domos, grooms of the chamber, powdered footmen, wearing velvet knee-breeches on the right occasions, grooms, gamekeepers, the cool and ordered processes of the dairy, and stables full of haughty and glossy gods, well tended. In their fragile glass cases were caged the steamy fragments of Africa and Asia, orchids and rare, strongsmelling flowers, while, in their seasons, ripe peaches and grapes and nectarines and melons flourished within their crystal orchards.

The park, I remember, contained groves of immense dead trees, as well as living; for my grandmother, though in other directions of by no means so soft a disposition, would not allow them to be cut down, because to see an old tree felled always made her cry. In consequence, these gnarled, gigantic skeletons, standing in groups, seemed to preserve, within the general leafy paradise, their own bony deserts of winter, and in their antique desolation contrasted with the well-drilled, even ranks of trees of the younger plantations which soared up the hillsides, and then swept down again as sharply. Every branch in them seemed to shelter a cock pheasant that, giving its Chinese cries, flew whirring like a rocket out from it as we passed.

A whole army of men looked after the domestic life of these birds until the time came for their slaughter. We used to stand below the plantations, with my grandfather and uncle, while eggs or young chicks were brought up to be shown to us. How tall they seemed, both trees and men; for my uncle — my mother’s only brother — was six foot six inches, and my grandfather was but an inch or two shorter.

In the afternoon we walked by the side of our grandmother’s Bath chair, accompanied by our mother and her tall sisters, in slow progress round the red-walled kitchen gardens, full of every sort of sweet-scented leaf, myrtle and geranium and verbena. And at teatime we fell back into the rhythm of the nursery. This life went on for some time, until I let my parents down by developing that mysterious “summer cold,” an ailment which so frequently afflicts children, and which, in the houses of relatives as opposed to one’s own home, always carried with it a suggestion of disgrace. No doubt in my case this congestion, as it would aptly be termed in France, had been caused by overindulgence in the most delicious chocolate cake in the world, a speciality of the house. The taste of it, as I write, I can still recall vividly as the varying flavors of the old-fashioned remedies made in the stillroom, such as black-currant tea, to which my consequent indisposition and confinement to bed rendered me for some days subject.

18

THE world of my relatives recurrently expanded, in the late or, less usually, in the early summer, when the members of my mother’s family would arrive in Scarborough for a sojourn, in large numbers and with quantities of children. Usually we would go to Renishaw before they returned to their homes; but even in the few weeks or days of our being there together, there would be all kinds of new amusements for us.

My grandfather Londesborough was devoted to children and had a fascinating manner with them. He liked to take Edith or me — or sometimes both of us, though there was scarcely room — for a drive in his buckboard, a then fast and dashing equipage (there were of course no motors in those days), balanced precariously on two enormous wheels and drawn by, one would have said, a permanently bolting horse. My grandfather chose this vehicle because it could be driven over the countryside, without following a road, and could actually cross ditches without its occupants’ incurring any mishap worse than a severe shaking.

As a rule we first went through Raincliffe Woods, to the beautiful and celebrated Forge Valley, where a groom would be waiting to take the reins. My grandfather would give him orders to meet us in some other valley, while we walked up one of the steep hills, thickly covered with trees, and down the other side. (Here, in their season, you could discover the beautiful burnet-colored wild columbine, tangles of the sweetest honeysuckle, and many rarer flowers.) The woods were large, however, and the meetingplaces difficult to find as in the Forest, of Arden, and if the arrangements he had made went wrong, as most frequently they did, my grandfather’s language — famous, like his son’s after him, for a wealth and warmth of imagery that, perhaps, suffering a metamorphosis, is to be traced, identically, in the poetry and writings of three of his grandchildren — for a moment echoed far and wide. Suddenly he would remember our presence, and hush his voice for the sake of the young, so that only very occasionally we caught a fragment of the real works of art at the end of these fascinating and unfamiliar vistas.

Sometimes, again, he would carry us off to the cliffs, to show us where the Grass of Parnassus flourished, a delicately veined, pale flower, uncommon in England, half sorrel, half snowdrop, swaying on a wire-thin stalk, to near-by dells, nigh bidden in their rocky clefts, where grew the yet rarer Herb Paris, a green flower with a green monk’s cowl and hanging head, or to Cayton Bay, where we would walk from the high cliffs down to the deserted shore, on which the waves, always the fiercest in the neighborhood, washed up quantities of shells, nacreous or rusty or rose-pink, shaped like the spires of Wren’s churches, or like ears, or like the very shells from which Venus arose on the Paphian shore.

In appearance he was, as I have said, very tall and rather dark, with a longish, pointed beard. In repose there was a certain air of Spanish dignity about him, and he possessed a combined distinction and ease of manner which enabled him to get on well with everyone. In his clothes, too, he displayed a very personal style. When he took us out driving, he always wore an ulster with, at the back, a hood which, after the fashion of a monk s cowl, he could put over his head if it rained. Many years previously he had lost an eye, as a result of a shooting party (though no one had yet dared to tell my grandmother the name of the friend responsible for the accident). Thus, in addition to the particular charm he undoubtedly exercised, his glass eye, with its fixed and lucent stare, proved a great source of attraction to his grandchildren and promoted him in their regard to the legendary and heroic status of a Nelson.

Londesborough Lodge, bis house in Scarborough, which had been bought and “ improved by Lord Albert, had no large rooms in it, but was an enchanting place for seaside villeggiatura — if such a phrase is not a contradiction in terms. The rooms, small but numerous, were set in their own world of strange trees. Cut flat at the top, these were grotesquely bent by the winter winds, so that they resembled a whole grove of Daphnes frozen in permanent flight from the cool waves below. The state, the organization of household and garden and stable, that prevailed, even in this comparatively small house, would seem remarkable today — would, even, have seemed remarkable yesterday.

When the family descended to the Spa, by way of the private bridge which crossed the main thoroughfare that led to the sands, red carpets, literal as well as metaphorical, had to be put down for them; almost a mile of red carpet. It was, indeed, an atmosphere of the hilltops—though not mentally, I am afraid; but it was pleasant, welcoming, luxurious, and the thought never occurred to any of those living in it that it might not be deserved. Moreover, the genuine good feeling which lay under what some people might have thought the sycophancy evinced in various directions had, in truth, been earned by the kindly qualities of the principals.

No, my grandfather’s houses — and in particular, perhaps. The Lodge — depended for their quality not upon beauty, but upon fun. He was still dissipating his fortune in a thousand different directions. It seemed as though the special money sense which had enabled earlier generations to build up their prodigious fortune had, in their descendants, become hypertrophied, so that they could exercise no restraint in spending it. And this extravagance, which all who come of our blood share, produced results which were sometimes as unexpected in their fantasy as, at others, they were tragic.

Of the lighter consequences, I recall, for example, a remark of one of my grandfather s younger sisters, who, when I grew up, often entertained me in her large and hospitable house. Tall and thin, and like all her sisters, with a beautifully cut profile and turn ot head, she looked astonishingly young for her age, and had kept her vivacity. She loved seeing people, and at luncheon there were always a great many guests. The food was good and plentiful, but one day, when I arrived early, she said to me, “ Dear boy, I fear you’ll find these luncheons rather monotonous, but they’re ordered by the trustees”; for the lavisliness of the household bills in the past obliged them now, in order to prevent expenditure in this direction, to supply her with salmon and chicken and garden produce from her country estate.

19

NOBODY, however, dared to interfere with my grandfather. Occasionally, I am told, he would suffer from hours of exaggerated depression over his money affairs and from exaggerated abnegation — hours in which he believed himself to be utterly ruined, and would refuse to spend a farthing; but they were quickly followed by a reversion to his normal lavish moods of spending money, and of his intense pleasure in doing so. A great deal had, of course, already gone. Yachts, races, coaches, carriages, sport of every kind, especially shooting, speculation, and the stage were the chief channels he had found for ridding himself of his earthly burden.

His houses, as I have said, teemed with servants, and his first act in 1861, on inheriting the fortune, had been to provide all his chief servants with checkbooks so that they could draw on his funds at the bank without worrying him for his authority; after a year or two, however, the remonstrances of his angry bankers induced him to cancel this comfortable and original arrangement. Stables and gardens were decorative hives of idleness. His carriages had long been famous for their smartness, the horses for their gloss, speed, and style.

All channels for waste, then, were welcome, but the most rewarding in sheer expense, and certainly his favorite, was the theater. In this connection, again, W. B. Maxwell describes the sort of company my grandfather enjoyed, and various of his activities: —

“It was in this year that I went to the first of two or three quite entertaining Henley parties. These were given by Lord Londesborough, the local potentate of the New Forest. Their scene was a houseboat, named The Ark, from which, however, we could issue if we wished and take a little tour in punts or canoes or skiffs on the crowded river. But the company it was that so greatly delighted me . . . theatrical stars of both sexes, with the very prettiest of the actresses, together with a selected band of our host’s innumerable friends, for the most part, like himself, of noble rank. . . . Lord Londesborough was a patron of the stage, and was reputed to have lost thirty thousand pounds in one production — Babil and Bijou, a musical spectacle. For some years he ran the Olympic Theatre, with Henry Neville, in legitimate drama. It was on The Ark that I consolidated my acquaintance with dear Mrs. John Wood, the comedy actress, and Lionel Brough, the comedian.”

W. B. Maxwell, it will be noted, mentions thirty thousand pounds as the sum my grandfather was currently supposed to have lost over a single theatrical venture, but I have always understood from others that it was a hundred thousand. And it can be well imagined how eager I had been, ever since I first heard of it, to find out more concerning this fascinating financial escapade of my grandfather’s. Nor, now that I have come to know more of it, do I consider it as by any means merely financial.

It was, in the true sense, an escapade; for, though by no means a clever man, he was no doubt more than usually susceptible to atmosphere and emotion, and his backing of Babil and Bijou constituted an attempt on his part to escape, to deliver himself from the settled, foggy, humdrum air of mid-Victorian London, and regain for the evening the less conventional, flaring ambience of a Paris that had only just died so violent a death in the siege and commune, a Paris that had only three or four years before been the pleasure center of the world, numbering not least among the joys it offered the always skillful and often inspired comic operas of Offenbach, with Hortense Schneider as their chief ornament. The very essence of that gilded, contaminated city, where life had been pleasant, free of every duty except dissipation, had been distilled by such entertainments as these that he hoped to introduce. The reader, therefore, will allow me again to step out of my childhood for a moment, so that I may take him to look for a few minutes at a forgotten episode in English theatrical history; an episode that, it is true, led to none of the ends anticipated for it, but, notwithstanding, attracted at the time enormous attention.

20

WHEN I first possessed the leisure wherein to make these inquiries — which was directly after the last war — the early seventies of the past century already seemed so distant that it appeared almost impossible to find out anything concerning Babil and Bijou. Certainly I never expected to be given an account of the entertainment by an eyewitness, far less by a member of the first-night audience.

It must have been one night in 1925 — for, alas, he died the following year — that A. B. Walkley, for many years the dramatic critic of the Times, came to dine with my brother and me. I had met him first at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Somerset Maugham in Wyndham Place, in the large, beige-painted, barrel-vaulted drawing room of which delightful eighteenth-century mansion their friends were privileged to meet all the most interesting figures connected with the worlds of art, literature, and the theater, both here and in America.

A remarkable character, he belonged to a traditional type which inevitably has something in it of the dandy’s attributes: the Englishman with a passion for French culture. Short, rather stout, with a little black imperial and very black and shiny hair, and with an eyeglass attached to a broad black ribbon, he could easily have been mistaken for a French literary man of the eighties or nineties. It would have been with pleasure, no doubt, that he would have welcomed such an instance of mistaken identity. And yet, the fact that he was an Englishman came through the French polish, to give him, in addition, just something of the air of a stage Frenchman. He sprinkled his conversation, always interesting and often witty, with French phrases and allusions, and he also modeled the style in which he wrote upon that of the French critics of his youth.

Though we knew that he had been connected with the theater for very many years, it seemed improbable that he had seen Babil and Bijou. Idly I asked him if he had ever heard anything about it, and the delight of my brother and myself can be imagined when he replied that he had been in the audience on the first night. Perhaps the French tinge of its name may have been responsible for his presence there, but he stated that he had enjoyed the performance. Further, he declared that, if it had been produced half a century later, its success would have been tremendous, so much was it in the taste of the revue-ridden times in which we were at that moment talking. The curtain, for example, he told us, had been made of drops of water (if it had been made of champagne it could scarcely have proved more costly) and, to persuade the audience of the stark reality of the scene before them, which represented the ocean bottom, live lobsters — not pantomime lobsters, but genuine, black crustaceans — had gamboled and waved friendly claws from among the rocks at the back of the stage.

As a theatrical convention, I thought, at the time he told me, that it had been a mistake to allow the lobsters to face the limelight in their own black shells — because these remain to the conditioned mind of the consumer peculiarly unconvincing. It was, in fact, a technical error, comparable to allowing the chorus of a musical comedy to come on without make-up. Perhaps I mistook what he said, or perhaps Walkley’s memory misled him in this instance, for he can only have been seventeen or eighteen years of age when he saw Babil and Bijou. Certainly the program, now in the possession of my brother, of this New Fantastic Musical Drama,”as it is described, makes no mention of real lobsters, though, in the third act , on the other hand, it specifies a chorus of “Oysters, Crabs. Cockles, Seals, Sea Lions, Sea Horses, Sea Anemones, Sharks, Alligators, Swordfish, Devilfish, Starfish and Lobsters.

Babil and Bijou was first produced at Covent Garden on the night of August 29, 1872, and ran for one hundred and sixty performances. The program tells us that Mr. Dion Boucicault was the lessee — and had written “The Drama,”as opposed to the “Lyrical Part by Planche and Lionel Brough, who also appeared on the boards, the stage manager. The feast provided for the theatergoing public must have been extensive as well as expensive, for it began at seven, and was not over, one paper states, until the audience, having pelted Mr. Boucicault, and the principal artists “with the last bouquet in Covent Garden, dispersed finally “on the stroke of midnight.”The piece possessed an enormous cast, which I will not detail here because the names of the chief performers will occur, as though casually, in a moment.

The scenes were varied, being extremely numerous and fantastic in their invention, and I may mention that a large ballet company also took part. Its chief star was the captivating Mademoiselle Henriette D’Or in the part of Iris, while Madame Espinosa danced the role of Maxaia, Chief of the Tartars, and her husband, Monsieur Espinosa, acted as Ballet Master throughout, and made his second appearance on the English stage, this time in the capacity of A Dancing Dervish.

To return to our lobsters, and allow them to act as compère and commere to the evening’s show, let us read what Clement Scott has to say in this connection, for he offers us his testimony concerning both them and their producer, Dion Boucicault. “I saw very little of him,”he writes, “after that strange and unaccountable disappearance to America on the night of the outrageously costly spectacle Babil and Bijou at Covent Garden, when, having been asked by that devoted and loyal patron of the drama — Lord Londesborough — to write a play or comedy, he of course did neither, but literally made ducks and flrakes of his friend’s money, and produced a quite unnecessary spectacle, with reckless extravagance.

“ He engaged Helen Barry for a stately Amazon, which, indeed, she was, and of the most remarkable beauty; introduced Henriette D’Or, one of the most graceful dancers of the old ballet school ever seen in this country; gave commissions to the veteran Planche to write verses for the music of Herve and Fred Clay; asked Riviere to compose songs and choruses, amongst which was the celebrated ‘Spring, Spring, beautiful Spring’ for boys’ voices, one of the unexpected successes of the play, gave us Mrs. Howard Paul, Mrs. Billington, Lal Brough, J. B. Howe, Turtle Jones — called so on account of the creature of calipash and calipee he represented; served up scarlet boiled lobsters at the bottom of the ocean, committed himself to innumerable anachronisms; and then made tracks for America. . . .”

It can. then, be deduced, that whether real lobsters, boiled or unboiled, appeared in this production, a number of genuine — and, if one may be permitted such a phrase, — hard-boiled sharks were connected wdth it. Yet in spite — or perhaps because — of this, the opening of Babil and Bijou seems to have been awaited with positive expectancy and impatience, and when, at last, the first performance took place, to have caused a prodigious stir. Indeed for many reasons it was a notable evening, full of attempts at novelty, great and small, though all alike in their failure, while these efforts were not confined to the stage, but were forced upon the audience as well. For example, a journal remarks; “It will be extremely interesting to watch the results of Mr. Boucicault’s daring innovation in allowing ladies to wear their bonnets wherever they are seated.”

Though Babil and Bijou did not, as I had formerly thought, run only for a single night, though it endured for one hundred and sixty performances and even enjoyed occasional revivals, notwithstanding, Clement Scott was able to brand it as “the most scandalous waste of money on record.”But whether the figure of thirty thousand pounds or one hundred thousand pounds, given variously as the cost, to the backer, is correct, the reader may wonder how so long a run could end in so grave a loss. No doubt the answer is that the theater did not shut its doors until the money put up had been exhausted. Even longer runs have ended in disaster to the “angels" of the piece. (Florodora, for example, enjoyed a run of four hundred and fifty-five performances.)

Most of the papers were in agreement concerning the strict propriety of the performance. The Daily Telegraph declared it to be “imexceptioliable,”and said that “from one end to the other, there is not a trace of indecency, fastness, vulgarity or bad taste.”

Others there were, however, who held contrary opinions. An echo of another sort, this time by way of a book, reaches us faintly from the distance. Augustus Hare, writing in February, 1877, four years after Babil and Bijou had been withdrawn, tells us that he had recently met Mr. Ivnowles, former editor of the Contemporary Re-view, at luncheon. Knowles, in describing how he had once taken Tennyson to see a ballet, and how “when the ballet girls trooped in, wearing ’une robe qui ne commence qu’ à peine, et qui finit tout de suite, Tennyson had rushed at once out of the box, in an agony over the degradation of the nineteenth century,” had added that “a general improvement in the stage had dated from a climax of impropriety in Babil and Bijou.” (Special half-price terms, I note from the program, were reserved on Saturdays for “children and schools”!)

21

THAT all-time low record in morality was, however, at the time of which I am writing, some twenty-five years in the past. They very name Babil and Bijou had died out of memory. Now, though still no form of enjoyment came amiss to him, he was growing old, and the cup of life was nearly empty. It is true, that we sometimes accompanied him and my grandmother to the theater called after them in Scarborough, but it was the Cricket Festival, which he had founded, that now claimed his chief interest here. Certainly, he had grown more domestic. He took increasing pleasure in the society of his daughters and of his numerous grandchildren, upon whom he liked to play the most ingenious and elaborate tricks.

Thus I recall that during one of the first church services I attended —a Children’s Service — a photograph of a peculiarly hideous and ill-disposed little girl, a year or two older than I, and whom, though I met her at every children’s party to which I went, I much detested, fell out of my prayer book, as I opened it, with a clatter that focused all eyes upon me. The whole incident produced an effect of childish pining which was most embarrassing, and my grandfather had, of course, arranged it, taking infinite pains to secure the photograph and secrete it in the best place, whence it was sure to drop out at the most stupefactive moment.

His daughters adored him, and my grandmother was in her own way, a protective way, devoted to him; while he —I think there can be no doubt about it — was terrified, even though fond, of her. Hitherto I have mentioned her little in the course of this account, but that is, as I hope to show, in no manner because she lacked character. The whole world trembled when she spoke, for her words, which she could inspire with an infinite and indefinable charm, partly from the sound of her voice, warm and luxurious, could also perform the most expert incisions upon conceit and self-importance grown dropsical.

Even my father, I think, was frightened of her, though he would never admit it. But each of them, being worthy of the other’s most ingenious schemes and best retorts, perhaps enjoyed rather the battle, and it may be as a result of this that, in the end, towards the final years of the old lady’s life, — she died in 1915, — a real and most unexpected friendship had come to exist between them.

It was not always thus, however, and I recall one occasion — two or three years after the time of which I write — when she came to stay at Renishaw. My father had recently bought in Italy some painted hangings of which he was very proud. These he caused to be spread on the ground, to an inaudible flourish of trumpets, for his mother-in-law to inspect. Standing back, with a self-congratulatory air and indulging in a gesture that implied his assured expectation of receiving a compliment from her upon his powers of bargaining, he remarked: —

“ I paid the owner forty pounds for these.”

“How pleased he must have been!" she answered, in tones that implied a tribute, sure enough, but rather to his charitable disposition than aesthetic discernment.

To her young grandchildren she was invariably charming. Well shepherded by — in the background — a circle of nurses with restraining hands and cautioning voices, we would raid the breakfast table at about ten-thirty every morning, to be rewarded or bought off with a peach or nectarine (and fruit seemed particularly delicious in those days). Our tall uncles and aunts would be sitting round the table, trying to eat a little—and breakfast then meant cutlets and cold grouse, as well as such things as fish and eggs — in order to fortify themselves against the fatigues of the hours before luncheon; but this, owing to the bullying and cajolery of their young relatives, who, now entirely out-of-hand, worried them after the manner of so many gypsies or the whining beggars of Spain and South Italy, was a difficult process.

The pack of children was numerous, composed of Raincliffes, Codringtons, Westmorlands, Ogles, and Sitwells. Behind us the nurses looked pale, showed in their features clear evidence of strain: for my grandmother with her compact, feminine adaptation of the Wellington profile, her features powdered very white, almost floury, and revealing through this nmke-up a small blue vein above the bridge of the nose, and one on each temple, with her deepset, tragic eyes of brown velvet peering from this mask, and with her velvet voice, so slow and emphatic, with her beautifully shaped, decisive hands — which carried on their fingers, besides the wedding ring, only one other, bearing an enormous square-cut emerald — was, most clearly, not a person to be trifled with.

That much, at least, was plainly to be read in everything about her. They all knew it, but none so well as Davis, formerly a nursery maid in the house. To her, down to the day of her dying, the mystic syllables “Her Ladyship” meant, and could mean, one person alone, a figure in black, with a white eagle’s face, and a white fringe above it, who appeared always as an apocalyptic figure in a storm, her quiet voice sounding through the thunder for which she was responsible.

But what else did we know of her? She expressed little of her feelings. Her remote and impersonal air seemed in contradiction to the strong temperament it. plainly covered. To me, it always seemed as though a whole age had passed since she was young, though, on the other hand, my grandfather’s youth appeared to have been obscured but yesterday. I admired her as an object, but to this day how little I know of the mainspring of her inner life, how little of her intimate history — though her face, with its tragic aspect, seemed to signify so much.

I know, for example, that when she was a girl, the Emperor Napoleon III had wanted to marry her; and that she loved opera with such passion that she had made my grandfather take her to Egypt, so that she might be present at the first performance of Aïda in the desert. (This opera had originally been commissioned by the extravagant Khedive for the state opening of the Suez Canal, but the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War held up the delivery of the costumes and scenery, which were being made in Paris.) Such details, circumstantial, but at this distance elusive, lead to no trail; they are negative, particularly for a woman with so impressive an individuality.

Most people, then, were frightened. But fortunately the atmosphere of the round table in the round, red, pillared dining room was calm and pleasant this morning. The sun poured in at the French windows, which revealed an expanse of flat, mown treetops that seemed to form a closely cropped aerial lawn slanting down to the sea, a racing ground for the winds of summer. Beyond, the waters of the North Sea presented the blue and imbecile smile which they hypocritically reserved for summer visitors, who left the town never suspecting the winter rages that occurred when their backs were turned.

In the room itself, my grandmother’s two Pomeranians had begun to yap, a sound which always appeared to induce and assure a continuance of good humor in her, and, from their cages hung just outside the open window, the parrots and cockatoos, feathered in pink and gray and in white and yellow, were talking and squawking to each other in fussy French. “Tais-toi, chérie! Comme tu es méchante! Laisse-moi tranquille!” they would cry, and then dissolve into ardent, amorous giggles, varied by snatches of Tosti’s most sentimental songs, rendered sometimes in high falsetto, sometimes as though by a warbling Italian tenor. The homely bullfinch and thrush joined in the uproar caused by these versatile and exotic fowl, and by the expert there could be detected, too, in this medley, the incessant chirrupings of small birds, — the name of whose species I never could remember, — very rapid in their movement, with red crests and streaked and striped wings. In the distance, on the town side, a barrel organ was grinding out its tunes, so mechanically debonair.

Today everything was all right, for she liked her grandchildren, especially the children of her adored only son (he spent the summer here, with his wife and sons and daughters, in a separate house in the grounds). Thus, however much her daughters and — above all—her sons-in-law may have been obliged at times to put up with from her, to us she was invariably the quintessence of sympathy. “Poor boy, poor boy,” “Little owls,” “Neat little things,” she would say, allowing herself to be amused by the children, even while she was thinking out new ways of dealing with our recalcitrant parents. Meanwhile her other favorites, my aunts Sibyl and Mildred, would be seated at a piano in the next room playing duets, a Strauss waltz or a selection from musical comedies of the time, Florodora or The Geisha.

My grandmother seemed pleased at these sounds, though the operas of Verdi were what she really enjoyed. All the famous executants, including Liszt, had performed at the house of her parents, the old Beaufort House, but she liked most of all to hear the great singers. Even while she was listening with this appearance of contentment, she also gave the impression of watching, waiting like an eagle to swoop.

Meanwhile my grandfather would be thinking out some way of amusing himself and us. The treats provided for us — that is to say for his grandchildren — were many and diverse. Chief of them (though, never, alas, for me) was the Cricket Week, when Scarborough broke out into its greatest display, and there was feasting in the hot tents of the rich at the ground’s edge. My grandfather, the founder and president, delighted to entertain—I was going to write “the hungry,” but though he loved, too, to do this on other occasions (for he was very kind and charitable, and in particular the trusted friend of the fishermen and their wives, who in those days at times found themselves in great distress), here it would be more correct to say that he fed those who possessed a regular and recurrent appetite.

The tents blazed with the ties of the cricketing clubs and the port-wine-colored faces of the aficionados, and between the rounds of cold salmon and cold chicken that were dispensed, we would have to sit solemnly and watch the progression — if such it can be called — of this, to me, always unattractive and lengthy game. But my grandfather loved it and, guided by intuition, had formed, from the first moment of my appearing, extravagant expectations of my future prowess at it. In me, out of all the family, he had divined the cricketer, and so had arranged with W. G. Grace to enter my name for the Marylebone Cricket Club on the very day of my birth.

Alas, already, at the age of four, I was disappointing him, and early afforded, indeed, some evidence of the devil within me by falling asleep during what was, for others, one of the most thrilling moments of a County Championship match, and hurtling off my chair with a crash like a falling meteor. I shall never forget the sense of shame when I woke up bruised and on the ground, and realized by the wooden repartee of bat and ball, and by the expressions of shock and displeasure on the faces of my elder relatives and attendants, the execrable taste of the manner in which I had failed them.

(To be continued)

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