Left Hand, Right Hand!

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

22

MY FATHER was watching, waiting for me to betray those symptoms of extravagance, weakness, and self-indulgence which from our family history he so confidently — and not without considerable justification — expected. He blamed me for resembling members of my mother’s family, while, rather unreasonably, he entered a judgment on a contrary plea against my sister, because he thought she resembled members of his own mother’s family. He had always hoped that a daughter of his would have a straight, Grecian nose, and here she was at the age of eight or nine, already provided with an aquiline! Most provoking and inconsiderate.

As a child I was slow as my sister was quick of apprehension. And in each of us this was wrong. She should have been slow, being a girl — dedicated, as girls of her class then were, first to a life of Infanta-like seclusion and then to marriage. On the other hand my childish difficulty in pronouncing certain consonants was regarded as downright original sin.

The development of my character for which my father was looking was not the only trouble that existed between us. There was, for example, my misunderstanding of the nature of humor. This discordant theme continually recurred to perturb him and — to go forward in time again — I remember very well, when in London, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, being taken out for a walk by my father so that he could speak to me upon, as he said, “a serious subject.”I had the usual sinking feeling which the thought of such a process entails, but eventually we sat down on a bench in St. James’s Park and he told me what the trouble was. He was very much afraid, he said, that there must be something wrong with my sense of humor. He had often noticed that I laughed at things in which he could see no joke, while at other times, when he said something extremely amusing, I apparently saw nothing funny in it.

Well, the same rankling trouble was at work even in this early period. We were in the middle of one of the great practical-joke epochs (it must have been about ‘97, when I was four years old). One morning I went with my father into the dining room before luncheon. He was expecting as a guest at this forthcoming meal a supporter of his in politics, an alderman, mighty in stature, a very heavy man, and he now placed ready for him at the table a Chippendale chair, the seat of which collapsed when you sat down on it. As a matter of fact, over this particular incident my sense of humor at that time coincided entirely with my father’s. I remember thinking it an extraordinarily funny joke.

And so, after he had left the room, I changed this chair — with tremendous labor, for I was very small at this time — with his own, and then hid under the table to watch the effect. My father sat down, rather slowly, waiting for the alderman’s collapse, and then fell through his own chair with an expression of intense amazement and consternation, while my merry laughter rang out from under the table. He was not in the least amused, but got up, very red in the face, remarking at the same time, “I might have most seriously injured my back.” My laughter soon changed to tears and it was some time before I was forgiven. All the same, I had meant no harm.

On the other hand, my father was always helpful and sympathetic about such things as nervous symptoms or health generally — though, with illnesses that might prove contagious, he would go to any length to avoid possible infection. (Thus, for example, when subsequently at the age of eleven I was very seriously ill, in bed for four months, and the doctors did not quite know what was the matter with me, he never once came near me, never even to the door.) He would be extremely kind to me, however, about my fear of the dark, a fear which I suppose all children have, but which I suffered in an exaggerated form. For this I dare say many things are responsible, including heredity and a sensitiveness to atmosphere.

I forget at what precise age I was first made to sleep by myself, but it was a moment I dreaded, and my father was most sympathetic. However, when that awful first night of estrangement did arrive, an incident occurred which I believe, though slight in itself, to have been responsible to some extent for part of my attitude towards life: that if you are afraid of a particular thing, that thing takes advantage of your fear to establish itself as the reality.

It was with great difficulty, and only after a relay of persons had looked in from the lighted passage, that I contrived on this first night to fall asleep at all. But no sooner had I just lost consciousness, and the fears of dark had been after that fashion temporarily banished, than there came a tremendous gust of wind which blew the French window open, though it was summer, and upset various objects in the room. This finally disorganized my nervous system for the night. I doubt if it had happened ever before — and it had happened, I realized, because I was frightened.

The dawn of neurasthenia, though it is a hereditary complaint, varies with each individual. It is born anew with him; yet it is so personal to him that it is difficult for even the most sympathetic to comprehend its symptoms. No apology for neurasthenics is needed after that fine passage in which Proust describes what this army has achieved. Without them, achievement in the arts would be limited in the extreme. Every time that you open a book, remember that countless bad nights, composed of torturing and unnecessary fears and worries, have gone to its making, as well as the fire, energy, and the zest of its writing; all sorts of nights in the past, as well as while the book was being written.

And I recall here the first occasion of this kind for me. When I was three or four, my mother always came to say good night to me at seven o’clock, and I well remember one night when she was a quarter of an hour late, how I thought to myself, “Now I shall never get to sleep tonight: it is past the time,” and how she noticed that I wanted to get rid of her and, being hurt, told my father, who spoke to me severely. It was all too complicated and unworthy, too difficult for a child of that age to explain.

In such ways, even Davis, our nurse, could not help. Her character was too simple. Besides, she and my father disliked each other very thoroughly. She thought him “too clever for a gentleman,” opinionated, abrupt, and irritable; he thought her stupid and old-fashioned. Further. she had been in the service of my mother’s family, and this seemed in itself reprehensible to him. Over one matter only, then, did employer and employee agree: over the food that a child should eat. It must be nourishing and, “to do the child good,” be disliked by him.

All the things for which children now clamor, — and are often indeed obliged against their will to eat, — oranges and sweets and fruit juices, were beyond the pale. Boiled mutton (fortunately without capers) and a stodgy eternity of rice pudding, stretching spotless beyond the horizon, or, like theChurchof England Heaven, a pale eternity of jelly, constituted our recognized diet, based on scientific knowledge. Glucose especially — now recognized as “a prime body-building food” — was the bogey of those days. “You must not eat a sweet. There may be glucose in it!” was the warning continually issued to all children of the time. Fortunately my mother paid no attention to these rules, and my native cunning taught me to keep on good terms with the cook. (Indeed, while we had a French chef, I even managed to learn a few words of French.) Whenever I happened to pass through the kitchen — which was frequently — I would nonchalantly seize a handful of candied cherries or sultanas, and eat them.

23

BIRTH and death entered my life about this time and together, and with them came the sense of mortality. Mortality, a specter, peered at me first, through a conversation that I heard murmured between my nurse Davis and a female assistant in a toy shop, who was dressed, after the manner of her calling in late-Victorian days, in very voluminous, tight-waisted black clothes that smothered her body from foot to chin, while a fringe draped her naked forehead. For a long time they discussed something in undertones, and then, out of the words, I pieced together the fact, of a dreadful operation on some unmentionable part of the unmentionable human body.

An atmosphere of intolerable and muffling sadness envelops this incident for me in the memory; for it was only then that I realized that we were all condemned to death in a world of swathed dejection and faint voices. Not here were the dying tones of youth and beauty. Though brightness fell from the air, sure enough, it was not because

but because Helen had lived on from her flaming and legendary world into this humdrum life of prison routine, with execution for each of us at the end of it; Helen of Troy, faded or grown insignificant or swollen and overemphatic, muffled in sadness and suffocating black clothes. And soon after this initiation, my aunt Lilian died. I did not know her very well, but I had been a page at her wedding the year before and could remember that ceremony and the excitement of it. And now the bitter weeping of my mother made me comprehend the existence of a world of sorrow beyond the world I knew.

Then birth came, a miraculous baby from the void — but for some reason this seemed to me no more strange than the truths of revealed religion as I was learning them. If one had to believe one, why not believe the other? At the age of nearly five I became an elder son; for a great event in the family occurred with the birth of my brother Sacheverell, from his earliest years my chief friend and companion. I suppose that when he was a very small child I understood him better than did anyone else, I instinctively comprehended what he wanted to say, before others could; and on this foundation our friendship was soundly based.

He was a particularly fascinating and genial child, as well as exceptionally good-looking, and — to anticipate — when he was three or four years of age, his love of life and of people was so intense that if Davis and I were not looking, he would often run up to strangers and say to them, “My Mummy and Daddy would he delighted if you would lunch with them tomorrow.” The stranger would easily find out, if he was not already aware of, our identity, and the most amazing raggle-taggle gypsy crew would thus occasionally assemble to be entertained in response to his invitations. It made things difficult for my poor father, who was either candidate or member at the time, and on whose part it would therefore have been most impolitic to turn constituents away. This love of life, shown in his earliest days, this curiosity, was undoubtedly the root of my brother’s subsequent search for knowledge, and perpetual eagerness to know the ways of humanity in every part of the world.

It can be imagined that some of the guests, thus hospitably gathered from highway and byway, were surprising in the extreme to my parents; and among them they included one or two of the untouchable class, known to us as “People At Whom You Must Not Look.” These were the eccentrics in behavior and morals, blown hither on some wind of curiosity and misfortune, and here stranded, listless, unaffected by life outside the town.

Even the ordinary people — the men in their bowlers, boaters, close-fitting caps and with their carefully trained or trailing mustaches, the women with their narrowwaisted bodies, like continents, their huge hats feathered and contaminated with milliners’ flowers, decaying in purple and deep pink — walking, riding horses, riding bicycles, driving in varnished shells of wood, were strange enough, looked back upon; but how do justice to these other capering figures at the world’s edge, on the faces of whom the light plays with the same trembling power of emphasis as a mirror flashed in the sun upon the features of an unsuspecting person by some small child?

There was, for example, Count de Burgh. A tradesman, retired and prosperous, who had bought a papal title, he always wore, over tightly laced stays, a frock coat, and to the rim of his top hat he had attached a row of curls, so that as he walked down the middle of the road — he generally seemed to be advancing from a broad cul-de-sac into the main street — and doffed his hat to his acquaintances, in a gesture reminiscent of the court of old France, his hair swept off with it. He seemed ever to be acknowledging the homage of the crowd, gravitating with certainty to the middle of every picture.

Again, there was an old man, with a divided beard, — like that of Mr. Dunlop in the advertisement, or King Leopold II of the Belgians. — who always wore a gray bowler and a gray frock coat and who had an unhappy and too meaning way of staring at Edith’s governess. It was alleged that on one occasion he had even followed her. Then there were a lady who dressed, in the daytime, in a ball gown of blue chiffon sprinkled with silver stars, a man who thought he was a cat and mewed, and a whole host of glandular children of one sort or another.

The same light that shows me these faces, wry and contorted, also illuminates for me the countenances of those I loved dearly, such as Miss Lloyd, who, until her death in 1923 or 1924, remained a great friend of mine. Her background was a little mysterious and we knew little of it except that she was related to Sir Charles Wyndham, the actor, who used to come to see her, and that she was partly of French extraction — but her gifts were plain to us all. She was, for an old lady, exquisitely pretty, with small, beautifully chiseled features and a round mass of long white curls spread all over her head, on which, when she went out shopping, — after the manner of a Frenchwoman, with a basket on her arm, — she put a sort of black poke-bonnet. Her fingers were the nimblest in the world; she painted flowers, did feather-work and embroidery, designed and baked china, embroidered and painted in a thousand different ways and as well and delicately as she cooked. I have never eaten chicken or cutlets that were so delicate and fragrant as hers, or bread that, was as delicious as the many different kinds she made.

Though fond of all three of us, she constituted herself from the first especially my champion. She used on many occasions, when I was a small boy, to give me presents, things she made, and I remember my grandmother Sitwell warned me against selfishness in this respect, and that, in consequence, an ethical difficulty assailed me thus early, for I, too, used to give Miss Lloyd small presents, bought with my pocket money, in return, as often as I could, and soon discovered that I preferred the pleasure of giving to that of receiving. Was it not, therefore, still more selfish on my part to give? And I remember my father, unintentionally, did not help me in the matter, for I heard him remarking, apropos of some member of the family, that it was “easy to be generous with other people’s money"; an aphorism which caused me much reflection.

24

NEVERTHELESS, I liked to receive as well as to give, and that brings me to my great-aunt, Lady Hanmer — Aunt Puss, my grandmother’s sister; the most worldly member of an unworldly sept. I frequently used to go to see her with Miss Lloyd as my herald — for Miss Lloyd helped her in a thousand useful ways. Richly appareled in layers of lace, satin, and velvet, Aunt Puss lived near the railway station, in an incongruous house, very ugly outside but full of lovely French furniture and rare china and silks. She sat in an armchair, with a lace cap poised on the top of her head and with one eyebrow lacquered — for her hair was rather colorless — in its normal position and the other flicked artistically into the middle of her forehead, with the consequence that it looked as if it had been put there — so exquisitely had it been placed, as it were, upon the paper — by the hand of some great Chinese artist; and again, to paraphrase Pater, it seemed as if she had become what men in the course of a thousand years had grown to desire, for she was the prototype of the models whom Matisse and other French artists were, unknown both to herself and to me, at the time painting in Paris.

Originally she had come to live near my grandmother, Lady Sitwell, and now that my grandmother had moved from Scarborough, and only came to her new house outside the town for a month or two in the year, she, too, was stranded on this desolate shore; but she did not dislike it, for webs of amusing scandal glistened for her in the perpetual sunshine of her room, being woven especially for her by the amateurs of the town. And among these enticing threads she spent much time. To me and to my brother she was invariably kind and I was very fond of her, though she kept us at the full distance of the seventy years that separated our ages.

I went to see her every week when I was in Scarborough, and later took my brother with me, and four times a year she would give us a tip. The suspense for some weeks before each of these occasions was considerable, the atmosphere carefully worked up. The procedure was always the same. The old lady would ring the bell. Alfred, her harlequin butler, would alight on the drawing-room rug — an Aubusson — for her commands, and then conduct us away into another room. After a few minutes she would ring once more. This time, it would be to summon us. Alfred would leave the room, and she would bestow upon each of us a golden sovereign wrapped in a neat piece of tissue paper. We would then, as it were, kiss hands on relinquishing office, and be ushered out by Alfred, who would be waiting discreetly behind the door with a slight smile of congratulation, but not enough to give offense. He would make no allusion in words to our good fortune.

At her death in 1908 or 1909, she left her property to my father, with appointment to Sacheverell and me, and in her drawing room, inside a cabinet wdth ormolu mounts, and with a Dutch flower-piece for front (it faces me now as I write), — a cabinet made for her father in Paris, when he was with the English troops in their occupation of that city in 1814, — were found fifteen hundred golden sovereigns, done up in tissue paper in ones and twos and threes, ready to be presented to us in the course, as it were, of the next hundred and eighty-seven years: for we received them, as I have said, only four times a year, and my sister because of her sex was never given a sou. This rather differentiated her view of Lady Hanmer from that held by my brother and me; since, for us, she had been at an early period, and continued to be, the great-aunt upon whom our liveliest interest was focused.

I will not here, however, unleash on you the whole ancient pack of my great-aunts. Each of my grandparents possessed numerous sisters and, drawn up foursquare, they would constitute a formidable though varied regiment of old women. Other single units of them shall make their appearance at the proper time, but to three of them I must introduce you now, as the light first touches their faces for me; two because otherwise they will slip away into the darkness again before I can show them to you, and the third because she survived to become a beloved part of our grow n-up life — though at the time of which I write none of them seemed so much to belong to every week, or at any rate to every quarter, as Aunt Puss, with her ceremonial maundv presentations.

These other aunts, then, were three of the sisters of my grandfather, Sir Reresby Sitwell. First came Aunt Mary, Lady Osborn; a very old lady with eyes that were still lucent and dark-blue as the harebells of our native slopes, she was already tottering down the steep return to childhood. Thin, pale, transparent, with white hair and a trembling lip, one could almost watch her growing smaller, as she slipped down it. For my benefit, and as though it were her duty to hand on some sacred flame, she would temporarily pull herself together, to question me, to see that I could tell my shibboleths correctly, and that my manners, deportment, and knowledge of the world were equal to my age — of four or five years — and station.

Next there follows her sister, Aunt Georgie, Mrs. Campbell Swinton, my father’s favorite relative, — though since he was always so undemonstrative, I doubt, if she ever realized it, — a delightful and distinguished old lady, more authoritative than her sister. I think it was her love of the family, and of Renishaw, of which she had made innumerable sketches, that, had particularly endeared her to him. And I, too, liked to listen to her stories of life in the house long ago, and her reminiscences of her sister Lucy’s red deer there, which used to follow her like a dog, or of the escape of a wild mountain cat brought thither from Balmoral.

Last, there comes Blanche Sitwell, — even the run of her names as you speak them, Blanche Susan Rose, is typical and enchanting, — twenty years younger than the rest of her brothers and sisters, and the only one of them to remain unmarried. She belonged to the rarest of the many diverse types to be found in a family such as mine, by the very variety of its members so essentially English; and can be classified as a Hunting Radical, Others of her relations, it is true, had been fine horsewomen, but they, together with the males of the family, were all Tories, whereas she was an ardent Radical of the most advanced outlook.

This generous attitude was, I believe, due to an adventure that befell her as a child, no less than to the warmth and kindliness of her nature. At the age of five, while in Italy with her parents in 1848, she had witnessed in a street in Milan a fight between the followers of Garibaldi and the Austrian governmental troops. The redshirts were temporarily the victors, and one of them, seeing that she was an English child, and knowing that English sympathy lay with the rebels, stopped pursuing the foe, to tear off his red cockade, and pin it upon her dress. This youthful initiation she had never forgotten.

The contradictions in her character helped to make up the sum of her great attraction. Her beautiful manners and exceptional charm were opposed to her views and to her expression of them. In art and politics — though art did not so much appeal to her — her mind ranged freely, whereas she was conventional in manners, in her code and religious outlook. She expected good manners in all members of her family. A strong feminist, she was horrified at any lack of a chivalrous attitude in a man, and, while herself a pacifist who would rail against the causes of the war, if a war was in progress she expected all her male relatives to be serving in the forces. She was able to enter equally into the beliefs held by generals and poets, archbishops and anarchists. Among them all, among people of every age and every creed, — or lack of it, — she found friends.

In later years, from Lambeth, where she would stay with Archbishop Davidson and his wife, who was her first cousin, she would champion the undeserving, and even introduced on one occasion a well-known anarchist within the Palace precincts. She was very fond of the Davidsons and they of her; but this did not prevent her saying what she felt. Once we heard her, from her house in Egerton Gardens, telephoning to Lambeth. The chaplain tried to guard the Archbishop from her, but she insisted on speaking to him, on the subject of a condemned man, who was to be hanged, but with whom she sympathized. “Are you going to do anything about it?” she inquired. “It’s your job!” The Archbishop must have said “No ; for she ended abruptly with “Go to hell, Randall, and rang off.

From our earliest years, -we three children were fortunate in that this unusual, courageous, and fascinating woman — who in later years reminded me so much of Aunt Alethea in Butler’s Way of All Flesh — took an interest in us — a great interest, but not too much, for she was never fussy. We knew instinctively that she, too, was in league against authority, and saw through the shams. (She told me later that as a girl she had driven past the Guards Club in a hansom cab, and that her mother, when she heard of it, said that neither she nor her daughter would ever be able to lift up her head again. It meant RUIN.)

With my mother she was always on terms of cordial friendship, but she did not get on so well with her own nephew, my father; for he, though himself no less original in character, resented in her the opposing manifestations of this same quality. As to her view of him, although a feminist and religious, she attributed what she considered his shortcomings, his formality and isolation, to having been “brought up by a pack of religious old women, and never carin’ for huntin’.” About myself — though we were extremely fond of each other — her chief complaints were that I, too, did not hunt or persist in taking a cold bath every morning. I remember in this connection that when, many years later, I told my father that my aunt Blanche attributed her good health at the age of eightyseven to having had a cold bath every single morning of her life, he remarked morosely, “Not at all! It merely shows how strong she is: it would have killed me long ago!”

As we grew up, she grew continually more interested in us, always giving me in particular her support and advice, until, in the end, although some sixty years my senior, she had become one of my most intimate friends. And while I write these words, I can still see her slight, active figure, is she used to run downstairs to greet me, her kind blue eyes, gray hair, and sweet — for that adjective, sullied though it is by wrong use, remains the only word to describe it — smile, and I can still hear her charming voice and laughter. Though her counsel was so valuable to others, about herself she was supremely careless, never worrying, hardly bothering even, about her clothes or what she looked like. She was, indeed, vague to a degree about her appearance, and far from vain; though as a girl she must have been pretty. About others, however, and their worries, she fretted herself perpetually and minutely.

25

I SEE two other figures, not such constant landmarks through our childhood, but going back to very early days and then disappearing. These figures, contrasting so violently one with the other, are nevertheless bound together; . they belong precisely to the same epoch, and their antithesis is so strong as almost to present a likeness. One of them was Sir Henry Pennell, a magnificent old soldier, brave and handsome in his old age, gay, even when he suffered, and altogether charming, who had earned great distinction in the Crimean War; the other was “Old Charles,” a deserter from the same conflict. These two old men, so different in their styles and virtues, though contemporary, constituted to Edith and me an insoluble puzzle; because, while my grandmother Sitwell and my mother, whose points of view were often divergent from one another, both encouraged our loving veneration for Sir Henry, Davis never failed to solicit and to claim our sympathy and respect for Old Charles. Secretly my sympathies were — and still are — with Old Charles. “Think of him daring to desert!” Davis used to say with the light of wonder and simple love in her eyes.

Certainly, these two contrary currents of opinion worried us; yet, looking back, I think I understand them and that between them can be discerned a very ancient rift, a difference of mind due to status. In Davis’s attitude can be distinguished that common-sense view of war which prevailed in England among the working classes from the time of the Norman invasion until the end of the nineteenth century (an outlook similar to that of the Chinese, which saw in soldiering a low and disgraceful profession), the same which in medieval times had made the villeins shake their sides with laughter as they saw their ridiculous masters strutting off to the wars; while in the opposing attitude of my grandmother and mother could perhaps be seen the survival of that same fire that had caused the nobles to kill each other off for no reason, except an exaggerated sense of honor and loyalty, during such struggles as the Wars of the Roses.

Sir Henry I see always sitting, muffled up, in a garden under the faint sunshine of the first spring days, the sea showing distant misty and fitful glints of blue. His heavy, rugged limbs seemed to be sinking with fatigue into the earth, cruelly sprinkled with the shrill, unheeding cups of the crocuses, insistent for attention: he was too old for the spring to do anything for him but tire him further. When he saw us, though, he would rouse himself, and throw round him the old fiery garment of his courage and gayety, and tell us stories.

Old Charles was not nearly so attractive a character as Sir Henry. He appeared to be connected by analogy, as well as by profession, with milk. He delivered it, and everything about him was milky. Always faintly splashed with milk, in addition, his hair and beard were milky, and his face had the milky complexion of a baby’s. If you pricked one of his veins, this opalescent liquid would most surely have run out of it. He was very badly paid for his work, it appeared, and, being a veteran deserter, as it were, could obtain no Poor Law Relief, because — or so Davis led us to believe — if he demanded it and gave his name (which incidentally he could not write, being only able to make a mark), the authorities would instantly recognize him and claim him for the Army. (I can hardly believe this now, unless a post in the War Office had been reserved for him; even then he must have been rising ninety.)

Davis, and my sister’s governess of hierarchic name, Miss King-Church, both agreed that children ought to try to be charitable; so we were encouraged to put away for the old man sixpence a week out of the shilling each allowed us. And here I must confess that my earliest charity was inspired by greed. Miss King-Church delivered a lecture to us which, rightly or wrongly, I understood to mean that each gesture of charity brought in a substantial and immediate return in cash from Heaven. Accordingly, I rushed with my pennies to Old Charles’s help, and was therefore, albeit gratified, in no way surprised when, by chance, a day or two later, my grandmother Sitwell presented me with five shillings. As a result, I pegged away month after month, and was dreadfully disappointed to earn no further dividend from the higher powers.

These figures, old, so very old, fade into the mist, sink into the ground, though the light still grows.

At Renishaw I see many more people; of whom a few — a very few — still remain. Maynard Hollingworth, for example, the present agent at Renishaw, who first emerges in my memory when I was aged seven and he came to the house to try to teach me how to take a large clock to pieces and put it together again (for my father, I do not know under what inspiration, at the time believed this to be an essential part of a child’s training). Alas, my native lack of sympathy with the machine in all its forms triumphed over his every effort to instruct me. I was much more interested in talking to him about other matters, and in finding out what, a delightful being, decisive, ingenious, and unusually versed in the lore of animals, flowers, and trees, and yet with a rare comprehension of character in human beings, was screened by his reserved manner and great height. Perhaps it is only because he seemed so tall to me then that I still see him after this fashion, for I am only an inch shorter myself — but I have never seen anyone who looked taller for his height.

These horological visits laid, at any rate, the foundations of a friendship by which I have been infinitely the gainer, for the little that I know of the country, of woods and flowers and trees and butterflies and birds and fish,— apart from the elementary lessons of Davis, — was taught me by this best and most genial of teachers with his innate sympathy for all wild things; a man whose interests would make him the most perfect country squire and naturalist combined.

It was he, for example, who would give me rural tidings: that he had seen a Camberwell Beauty the previous morning down by the old Sawmill at the edge of the lake, the first seen in the neighborhood for a century, and how the local entomologist, a rather proud, airy, and eccentric character, had chanced to come over the same afternoon to roam in the park for a few hours with his nets and bottles and cases and snaring tackle in general. Maynard Hollingworth said nothing about his morning’s adventure to this trafficker in wings, but when the latter called, about five o’clock, to bid a somewhat blase good-bye, adding that there was no point in his staying further as there was little of interest to see at present, asked: —

“What would you say if I told you that I had seen a Camberwell Beauty this morning?”

Catching wildly at his nets, the snarer rushed from the room crying, “Where? Where? Where?”

It was Maynard Hollingworth, too, who told me of the pair of kingfishers of pure white plumage that nested beyond the lake on the dark, miasmic waters of the Rother; and he can give one countless bits of information unknown to others: that on a particular hazel bush grow oval nuts instead of round, that his father had told him this forty years before, and how, remembering it, when the bush began to sprout again after regular attempts to extirpate it by the farmer, he took a cutting for his own garden, and there, sure enough, it bore oval fruit; or that wild violets must grow in one secluded ravine in the woods, because, though he had looked for the plants and never yet found them, notwithstanding, every summer he has seen fritillary butterflies there, the larvae of which — true gourmets in the fashion of the Romans eating nightingales’ tongues — feed only on the leaves of violets.

Sometimes I fear that my lack of feeling for rural pursuits, hunting, and fishing, and my constitutional ignorance of farming, must pain him; indeed his interests would have made of him a much better country squire than am I; but, on the other hand, as the years developed, we became the two greatest authorities on an abstruse subject, and one of moment to both of us: the character and behavior of my father, a subject of endless interest.

There are too many characters for me to tell you of in detail, and some will introduce themselves later, but it is plain that Mark Kirkby must enter here; an enchanting rural figure, a great friend of mine, and one who seemed to sum up in his short, sturdy person, his boots, gaiters, and stout clothes of Bedford cord, and in his red, very red face, peppered all over with blue shot lying protuberant just under the skin, the essence of the countryside. Haughty in manner with those — and their name was legion — whom he suspected to be poachers, and for whom he delighted to lay the most elaborate traps of dummy pheasants, made of straw and fastened to branches, so that in the moonlight they looked most realistic, he was known widely, from the situation of his cottage, as the Duke of Plumbley (Dook o’ Ploomly), and his rule in the woods, of which he knew every inch, was vigorous and absolute.

Accompanied by Clumber spaniels, night bitches of the local breed, he would roam hills and valleys at full moon throughout the hours of darkness, and thereby gained an infinite experience of their poetry, of which, in an unexpressive rustic manner, he seemed to be aware. Always the center of incidents, on one occasion, I remember he caught a poacher who refused to answer him; the more Mark shouted at him, the more dazed and silent and sulky the man seemed to become — and it was not until an hour or so had passed that he realized that he had caught the rarest of all his poachers, a deaf-mute.

The light of hills and sea shows in these faces; and my first Dionysian or rhapsodic experience was, too, connected with light; light which has always meant so much to me, its quality even affecting my writing. I was about five years old, and had been involved in what seemed at the time irretrievable misfortune. It was a Saturday afternoon in June, the first exquisite day of summer that year, and I was doing some of my first lessons; but so much did I long to be in the golden air outside that it became an obsession. From my high child’s chair I could obtain a view of sea and sky and, lured by their temporary but seemingly ineffaceable gayety, I resolved to make a dash for freedom.

Accordingly, I hurled my copy of Reading Without Tears down upon the floor and ran out of the room, a screaming Swiss governess in pursuit after me. But I had obtained a good start and hid under the billiard table in a room in the farthest part of the house. Extricated with some difficulty, I was carried upstairs by my father, who had been summoned by the governess, and in the course of the journey I kicked him very hard in the belly. Naturally he could not let that pass, and fearful scenes ensued. I felt disgraced and humiliated forever.

My mother had been out at the time but, when she returned, may have divined the original source of the trouble, because she took the same exaggerated delight in fine days as I did, and felt the same depression over those that were black and foggy. At any rate, she rescued me, restored my self-respect, told Davis to give me tea, and, though it was by now rather late for my usual promenade, for it was about six, sent me out alone with Davis.

We went a little farther than usual, to the gardens on the north side; flat, level lawns, broken off above the sea (the gardens there had slid into the water about ten years before), which were usually lacking in charm. On the edge of sea and sky great, white, furry clouds, goldentinged, wrestled and tumbled like polar bears clumsily in the summer wind. Tonight, skillfully eluding Davis, I ran to the edge of the precipitous cliff and stood there looking straight in the face of the evening sun.

The light bathed the whole world in its amber and golden rays, seeming to link up every object and every living thing, catching them in its warm, diaphanous net, so that I felt myself at one with my surroundings, part of this same boundless immensity of sea and sky and, even, of the detailed precision of the landscape, part of the general creation, divided from it by no barriers made by man or devil. Below me and above me stretched the enormous merging of blue air and blue water with golden air and golden water, fathomless, and yet more and more fervently glowing every moment, the light revealing new vistas and avenues up into space or out towards the horizon, as though the illimitable future itself opened for me; and, as I watched, I lost myself.

All this must have endured only an instant, for presently — but time had ceased to exist — I heard Davis calling. The eye of the sun was lower now. The clouds began to take on a deeper and more rosy hue, and it was time for me to return home; but this strange peace, of which poetry is born, had for the first time descended on me, and henceforth a new light quivered above the world and over the people in it.

Like Cellini before me, I had seen the salamander; I had seen it, not in a fire within a house, but in the flames that lit the eye of the sun.

26

MY FIRST contact with the worlds of art and literature occurred a year or two after this early experience of Dionysian or creative emotion. My father, gifted though he was, spent his life apart, alone. Indelibly stained with gothic darkness and its accompanying colors, pure and soft in tone, his mind inhabited the ivory tower of the thirteenth century, complete with every convenience of the time, — crossbows, battlements, oubliettes, and thumbscrews, — that growing unhappiness had obliged him to construct for his protection against the exterior and contemporary world.

Occasionally, he would lower the drawbridge and make a sortie; but these affrays became rarer and rarer. The ivory tower, within its magic circle and protected by the stout stone fortifications of a Harrison Ainsworth castle, grew more and more fantastic, and, with each passing year, he spent a longer time in it, until, gradually, he was able to fake for himself even the views obtainable from the loopholes of his fastness, and refuse to contemplate reality at all.

Even in these days of which I write, when he was a comparatively young man, he inclined to shun the company of living human beings, for they disturbed his ideas, forced him to adjust them with so much violence that slabs of ivory would fall from the tower, exposing its furniture to the light of the outside world. And this he disliked, becoming shy and paralyzed under its vibrations. Only where business was concerned did he see, or wish to see, things as they were, with a sharply outlined reality, though in this, also, some slight medieval bias attached to his acumen, and manifested itself in his methods.

But, though he felt no sense of anachronism in sitting in his thirteenth-century retreat reading the latest scientific theories by electric light, at all other times he liked to be surrounded with archers, bowmen, and servitors. (Henry, however, subtle and robust and fitting perfectly into the pattern of his time, was determined to be no henchman, but a servant, and continually drew up the blinds, as it were, with a bang. His passion, too, for mechanical devices, trouser presses, instruments for coring apples, special appliances, ingenious but complicated, for cleaning various objects — all these, besides being in part the passion of a sailor for all things neat and cleverly contrived, were in addition bought in order continually to bring my father up of a sudden against the epoch in which they were both living.) For the rest, if my father must meet the living, to him as insubstantial as were the dead to others, he preferred them to be in a trance-like condition of subservience and astonishment. And even my mother’s friends treated him in a rather frightened way, for to them he bore that intimidating label, clever; a word pronounced as though in invisible inverted commas.

Thus, in spite of his respect for artists and men of learning, — a quality he most certainly possessed, — he was acquainted with very few, and although he intended to see a great deal of them in some ideal and nebulous future, and, indeed, boasted of getting on well with them in a visionary present, in fact he seldom met them, and always remained apart, though not without an effort to impose his will upon the two or three antiquarian soul-mates who from time to time crossed his path.

Before proceeding further, however, I must illustrate his genuine reverence for these beings, together with his attitude of aloofness, even from those to whom his temperament most nearly related him, by two anecdotes picked at random out of time. When I was eleven years old, my health compelled my parents to take a villa at San Remo for the winter, and during that period Mr. Horace Round, the great authority on heraldry and genealogy, came for a few days’ visit. In appearance he was hirsute and solid, in the manner of the late nineteenth-century Englishman. Just before he left, he suddenly asked, “Are the young people interested in genealogies too?” And then, before there was time to answer him, he slid with abandon down the whole length of the banisters. This unexpected behavior on the part of one who was normally dignified, and by no means young, made us children laugh, and my father subsequently reproved us, saying, “Don’t laugh! These Great Men have their Little Idiosyncrasies.”

The other incident took place some time in the insouciant twenties of this century. Our dear friend Arthur Waley was staying with us at Renishaw, and my father very much admired his translations of Chinese poetry. My father’s manners were later in period than himself — about the time of Charles II, but with a touch, too, of the Meredithian baronet, Sir Willoughby Patterne or Sir Austin Feverel, clinging to them; or again they might belong to the eighteenth century, as seen through the pale amber spectacles of one of his favorite artists, once so famous and now so greatly neglected, Orchardson. But, formal, exquisite, and elaborate though they were, they could scarcely be more beautiful than Arthur Waley’s.

Upon a Sunday morning, then, my father was walking round the lake which he had caused to be created, regretting that he had not moved the old river-bed farther back, and thinking out possible fantasies in stone, torrents to fall through the hanging woods above, pavilions upon islands, and decorative effects generally (a few years before, he had determined to have all the white cows in the park stenciled with a blue Chinese pattern, but the animals were so obdurate and perverse as in the end to oblige him to abandon the scheme). The lake is shaped like an hourglass or a figure-of-eight, and a bridge spans its waist. On this bridge my father met Arthur Waley advancing towards him. Each took his hat off ceremoniously and said to the other, “How much I wish we were going in the same direction!” and passed on. Half an hour later they met again at the same place, having pursued their contrary courses as though they were planets whose goings and comings are immutably fixed by the sun, and repeated the salutation.

This aloofness, which hedged my father ever since I can remember him, possessed its own beauty and interest. Yet how remote he was! For example, in those days of house-to-house canvassing, he had personally visited each dwelling in the borough of Scarborough several times, but he seldom remembered single constituents when he met them. (He has frequently in later years passed me by in the street, looking at me without recognition.) My mother’s friends he saw very seldom, even when they were his guests. He liked to have his luncheon alone, an hour earlier than the rest of the family, and he always had tea by himself in his study. Often at Scarborough, when I was a small boy returning from a winter’s afternoon walk with Davis, just as we entered the hall, he would open the door of his room, which was on the ground floor, and call me in to talk to him. (He loved children until they were old enough to reason, express their views, and show a will of their own; he loved their originality and the amusing, naive things they said.) He would talk — always interestingly.

But, looking back, I realize how little he told me of himself. My mother would, when I was with her, tell me of incidents from her childhood, and of her brother, her sisters, her mother, her adored father who could do no wrong in her eyes. She enabled me to enter into her childish life as she had lived it. But my father, I suppose because it had not been happy, never mentioned his childhood. His range was wide, and intentionally instructive. It touched inevitably, at some point or other, on history, geography, or art, with, occasionally, the wonder of an elementary conjuring trick, with pennies disappearing from between the fingers, for amusement and to hold wandering attention. Even this, I have sometimes thought in later years, was really designed in order to prove that magic could not exist, and that everything that occurred possessed a material explanation. He would tell me not to be frightened of the dark (he was very sympathetic about it): there were no bogeys in dark corners, no ogres or ghosts; they were only stupid and ignorant nurses’ tales. Why, he had himself exposed that sort of thing once and for all, years ago. Then he would veer to medieval times, tell me a story about a knight or a minstrel, or lift me up to look at a painting.

It was by George Morland, a pict ure of the Westminster Election, and represented Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire kissing the butcher, or about to kiss him, in an attempt to win his vote for Charles James Fox. On each side of the butcher’s shop are the usual Morland sheep. The foreshortened face of a farmer’s boy, the usual thatch and trees, and the rather horrifying concomitant detail, the meat hanging up in the open shop, the dingy, mangy collie running out of it with a sheep’s head in his mouth, are all painted with an extreme realism, so that my father had chosen it out of the other pictures very skillfully for his purpose. Its story was easy to explain, and it was precisely the painting to arouse a child’s interest and hold his attention at an age when the greatest work of Titian or Raphael or Michelangelo would to him signify nothing. Thus it would ensure an early inclination towards noticing pictures, and looking at them.

From the time, therefore, when I was four or five, I remember the Westminster Election much more vividly than the lovely Copley group of the Sitwell Children or the Fruit Barrow by Henry Walton; notwithstanding, it may be that the intense pleasure I have derived from seeing works of art all over the world, and the influence they have exercised upon my mind, are due, at any rate to some degree, to this ruse of my father’s; for he was very anxious that, when I grew up, I should care for pictures — though, of course, only for the pictures he himself admired. At any rate it became a regular turn, a treat, and I was constantly worrying him to “show me the butcher’s shop.”

27

MY FIRST impression of a great artist — I do not mean a great painter — dates from the age of five, when Edith and I went to spend Christmas in London with my Londesborough grandparents, and without my father or mother. Looking back to that time, it seems to have been a season of primrose-yellow fogs and of snow, of brilliantly lit shopwindows, full of toys and flowers and sweets, and from the distant darkness of the nights that followed I recall — so that our nursery must have looked out on the square — the occasional clip-clop-clop of the horses, their hoofs muffled by the snow.

Very clearly, too, I see the carriages. (Who that has known it can ever forget the peculiar smell, mingled of oats and beer and leather, which haunted every four-wheeler, and accorded so well with its speed, and the face and voice of the driver?) In my ears still vibrates the tinny whistling that went on desultorily through the night — another London sound that has vanished; a whistling all the more shrill and forlorn because the world of the nineties was so quiet. As it died upon the thick night air, it left behind it, you would have said, a trail of sadness, of disillusionment; while the very hopefulness of its original start, until the break came in its voice, was as though someone were seeking a needle in the haystack of the enormous night. That sound, so typical of the city to which it belonged, was killed by the coming of the telephone — though it continued until forbidden at some period during the war of 1914-1918. And, accompanying it, I see the face of the crossing-sweeper under the gas lamp as he limps to open the door.

His was a trade which had belonged to nineteenthcentury art and literature, had inspired Dickens and Gavarni and many more. He belonged as much to this, the metropolis of mud, as modes to Paris, sand to Timbuctoo, or coal to Newcastle. His apotheosis, no doubt, had been during the 1840’s, before London had been paved, when, for example, even Oxford Street more resembled a derelict canal on the outskirts of Venice than one of the chief thoroughfares in the richest modern city. Then, as soon as for a moment the mud was swept back, the immense tide rolled in again.

The crossing-sweeper, in those days, was all-important; but even then it was constantly remarked that no one had ever seen him with a new broom — only such a stump as I remember my crossing-sweeper carried. But this was no sign of poverty, for fortunes had been not seldom amassed in the trade. The same persons, men or women, would occupy the same pitch year after year. They inherited it from their predecessors and bequeathed it to their heirs. The work, or rather the hours of work, varied with the locality. On the whole the crossing-sweeper rose late, for experience had taught him that the entire race of early risers was unworthy to be served, apt to be costive, poor, and in a hurry. It was necessary for him, of course, to be astir earlier in the city than in the districts devoted to fashionable life. Moreover, in the squares, contact was usually established between each family and the sweeper, who thus obtained benefits, scraps from one house, and a regularly paid salary, however small, at another.

In the prime of this career, one or two well-known characters were ambitious, and went in for ornamental sweeping. In the forties there was one man who, near the present Marble Arch entrance to Hyde Park, sculptured out of the dirt all sorts of designs, hearts and diamonds and icicles and stars, and another, by St. Giles’s Church, who hedged his right-of-way with holly twigs, and after dark decorated it with lighted candle-ends and small tallow lamps until it glittered like a Neapolitan presepio at Christmas. When the crossing-sweeper, however, had finished his day’s work he “shut up shop”; that is, swept the dirt, upon which he had during his hours of duty imposed some kind of order, back over the road again.

The crossing-sweeper I remember used to have a chat with my grandfather every day, and be given a shilling: he knew everybody’s business, but the great days were already gone, abolished, as a writer in the forties had foretold, “by wood, asphalt and granite, gutta-percha and India-rubber.” Nevertheless he was still an essential part of the life of London. Yet he disappeared as swiftly and quietly as a ripple in the mud. It was only yesterday that I used the expression “crossing-sweeper” and, seeing a look of incomprehension on the face of the girl to whom I was talking, realized that both word and trade were now obsolete and void of meaning.

Even to a child, the London of my young days presented its peculiar qualities of fascination and excitement. The very squalor of its climate, the cold and darkness and fog, the greasy tracks in the roads, the streets patterned by feet, made the luxurious life, the entertainments, the dresses, the carriages, the lighted windows of the shops like baskets of flowers or sweets, or even like rockets offering their flowers and stars to you, all the more alluring, as if you found a great picture in some dusty auction room or saw a diamond shine suddenly from a lump of mud. And above all, there was the size of London, vast and intricate, and seeming in those days of horse-drawn traffic, when to go from Mayfair to Regent s Park took half an hour, of a shape and layout impossible for the mind to grasp. In this city dwelt whole nations of the rich and poor, whole tribes of atrocious drunkards and cripples, gnarled like trees, as well as a thousand times as many dancing girls as ever postured on the terraces of palaces for Cambodian kings; in it were Chinese towns and Indian settlements, and Jews congregated round their synagogues.

Yet London was the heart of England, beating to the tune, unmistakable in vigor and rhythm, of its blood. An understanding of the world-wide roots of this great city, passing deep under the surrounding water to the rich soil of the five continents, was enforced by a visit to the Zoological Gardens, whither beasts had been brought from every direction across the seas. My grandmother’s love of birds, and especially of parrots and cockatoos, inspired her to take us to the parrot-house. I have never forgotten first entering it from the darkness of that afternoon, how triumphantly and gayly the feathers flared in the cages, and how the shrieks and squawks and chatter were so intense as almost to offer another element, like water or fire, in which you could drown or scorch yourself.

The culmination of our visit, however, was the opening of the Drury Lane Pantomime on Boxing Day, to which our grandparents were escorting us in state. All through the afternoon which preceded the performance, Edith and I were made to rest in bed, in a darkened room; that kind of resting which during childhood makes those subjected to it so much more tired than would the perpetual running about which both their limbs and spirits crave. We were mad, drunk, drugged with excitement. Drury Lane on Boxing Day had been a subject of conversation between our nurse and her friends ever since we could remember. It had seemed an ideal, visionary and beyond attainment. Yet now it could almost be touched, its air breathed in, and we threw our pillows wildly into the air, and even shouted, in our enthusiasm.

Still time advanced. Outside the drawn blinds, the yellow murk was deepening into a thick and nearly palpable darkness and the whistles that sometimes pierced the silence sounded lonely and choking. (Perhaps the fog would be so bad that we should be unable to leave the house? But we knew, we felt, that this could not happen.) At last, the climax arrived; we climbed into the carriage, and after half an hour arrived at the immense portico, got out, were conducted to the stage-box, sat down on our chairs, our chins just resting on the dusty red plush of the curving ledge that hemmed us in. The curtain went up. Already our grandparents were watching us, with the strained and anxious attention which elderly people reserve for children, to see if they are enjoying themselves.

Alas, right at the beginning, just as the devil had appeared in a red enveloping cloud through a trap-door, the accumulated feelings, the long-drawn-out sense of expectation, and, above all, the total exhaustion resulting from so protracted a period of resting, overwhelmed me and my nose began to bleed. Hastily I was taken out, to the little room at the back of the box, and told to lie down, flat, upon the gilt sofa. As I lay there, I heard Davis remarking that it might be a good thing in the long run, because it was said that, a week or two before, the Prince of Wales had only just been saved from apoplexy one night after dinner by his nose beginning to bleed. Whether I, too, was saved from this fate by the involuntary following of so illustrious an example, I do not know; but I know this: that all the first part of this performance, to which I had so eagerly looked forward, was spent by me, lying there, with a rusty key down my back, a piece of melting ice upon my forehead, and, in addition, the whole time undergoing threats of being subjected to other ill-judged and empiric remedies.

Fortunately, I recovered early enough to see Dan Leno as the Beautiful Duchess, wearing a hooped dress and a large picture hat with a feather flowing from the brim, fall through the harp he was playing. I can still remember vividly that supreme representation of artistic abandon, and also, before it, his virtuoso plucking at the instrument, the strings of which were made of elastic. I even recall a fragment of Dan Leno’s dialogue with Herbert Campbell. I believe it took place in the same pantomime, though I saw him subsequently more than once. At any rate on this occasion his appearance contrasted violently with that of his former role. Gone were the Gainsborough costume, the wig, and the plumes. Instead of them, he wore a tattered white silk dressing gown; and a little tail of hair, screwed up at the back of his head, together with a curl-paper or two, completed a masterpiece of slatternly ensemble. His face looked un-made-up and wrinkled. He was, temporarily, a pantomime Queen interviewing her cook in the morning. Herbert Campbell, Leno’s large and wonderful foil, acted the part of the cook. The Queen was finding fault with the household accounts.

“Cook,” she was saying, “the bills for the Palace are far too high. Look at them! Onions, onions, onions, always onions. I don’t understand. Did we give a garden party?”

“No, Your Majesty, you forget. Onions repeat.”

Such jokes may not sound funny, — though this still seems funny to me, — but Dan Leno’s personality in effect raised everything he did or said onto a plane of its own, for he possessed a sense of comedy that transcended comedy and became tragic, just as his face, one of the most sad and individual masks that any actor ever presented to the public, went beyond laughter and placed him on a level with the most famous clowns who have ever lived.

(To be concluded)

With each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

RUMFORD PRESS CONCORD.

N. H.

U. S. A.