25

Twenty-Five

_By Beverley Nichols_

Prelude

Patchwork

Self

25

Being A Young Man’S Candid Recollections Of His Elders And Betters

_By_ BEVERLEY NICHOLS

New York George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1926, By George H. Doran Company

25 —B— Printed In The United States Of America

Contents

Chapter One

In Which Some English Gentlemen Set Out On A Strange Journey 11

Chapter Two

Presidents--Lean And Fat 21

Chapter Three

Containing A Fruitless Search For American Vulgarity 31

Chapter Four

John Masefield, Robert Bridges, W. B. Yeats 36

Chapter Five

In Which Mr. G. K. Chesterton Reveals His Fears And His Hopes 50

Chapter Six

In Which Mrs. Asquith Behaves With Characteristic Energy 56

Chapter Seven

IN WHICH MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL LOSES HIS TEMPER, AND MR. HORATIO BOTTOMLEY WINS HIS DEBATE 62

Chapter Eight

Being An Impression Of Two Ladies Of Genius 73

Chapter Nine

In Which We Meet A Ghost 84

Chapter Ten

In Which I Journey To Greece 99

Chapter Eleven

Concerning The Confidences Of A Queen 112

Chapter Twelve

Strange Tales Of A Monarch And A Novelist 120

Chapter Thirteen

From The Regal To The Ridiculous 133

Chapter Fourteen

In Which Sir William Orpen And Mrs. Elinor Glyn Reveal Their Souls 146

Chapter Fifteen

Concerning Two Artists In A Different Sphere 156

Chapter Sixteen

Hanged By The Neck 165

Chapter Seventeen

Two Plain And One Coloured 174

Chapter Eighteen

A Lamb In Wolf’S Clothing 183

Chapter Nineteen

Two Big Men And One Medium 189

Chapter Twenty

A Memory--And Some Songs 201

Chapter Twenty-One

Hicks--Hicks--And Nothing But Hicks 210

Chapter Twenty-Two

Showing How A Genius Worshipped Devils In The Mountains 218

Chapter Twenty-Three

A Defence Of Dramatic Critics 224

Chapter Twenty-Four

In Which William Somerset Maugham Makes A Delicate Grimace 232

Chapter Twenty-Five

In Which Michael Arlen Disdains Pink Chestnuts 240

Chapter Twenty-Six

Containing The Hideous Truth About Noel Coward 248

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In Which I Allow Myself To Be Entirely Sentimental 255

_to_ GEORGE AND BLANCHE

Foreword

Twenty-five seems to me the latest age at which anybody should write an autobiography. It has an air of finality about it, as though one had clambered to the summit of a great hill, and were waving good-bye to some very distant country which can never be revisited.

A delicious age, you may agree, but an age too irresponsible for the production of autobiographies. Why, I ask you? The bones of a young man of twenty-five (according to the medical profession) are duly set, his teeth are ranged in their correct places, and many arid pastures have been made beautiful by the sowing of his wild oats. Why then, not write about some of the exciting people he has seen, while they still excite him?

That is the essence of the whole matter, to write of these things before it is too late. This is an age of boredom, and by the time one is thirty, I am terribly afraid that the first flush of enthusiasm may have worn off. It is quite possible that by then I shall no longer be thrilled by the sight of Arnold Bennett twisting his forelock at a first night, and that the vision of Elinor Glyn eating quantities of cold ham at the Bath Club (a sight which, to-day, never fails to amuse) will not move me in the least.

It is also possible that my indignations will have suffered a similar cooling, that I shall no longer feel faintly sick at the sight of the new Regent Street, and shall be able to view the idolization by the British people of Mr. George Robey, if not with approbation, at least with tolerance.

It is to be hoped that this will not be the case, but you must admit, from your own experience of young men who have grown up, that it is quite on the cards. They are faithless to their first hates, they have forgotten their first loves. They turn from the dreams of Oxford to the nightmares of the city, just because the dream is difficult, and the nightmare is so easy. In fact, they grow old.

That is why I have written this book. And from the decrepitude of thirty I shall write another on the same lines. It will be called ‘Making the Most of Twenty-Eight.’

B. N.

Chapter One

In which some English Gentlemen set out on a Strange Journey

Had one been a Prime Minister there would be every reason for talking of one’s first tooth and devoting a chapter or two to its effect upon the history of our times. There would then follow, in succeeding volumes, sketches of the youthful genius from every aspect, with appropriate legends at the top of each page, such as ‘Backward at School,’ ‘A Daring Frolic,’ ‘Visit to the Tomb of William Pitt.’

But since one has not been a Prime Minister, and since all first teeth greatly resemble one another, and since most small boys are very much alike (for if they aren’t, they are horrid)--since, in fact, there is no excuse for being dull, we must begin by making things happen. And I can think of no better moment for ringing up the curtain than when, at the age of nineteen, two months before the Armistice, I was given leave to go to America as Secretary to the British Universities Mission to the United States.

It sounds deadly, but it was really exceedingly amusing, for this mission, before it finished its tour (which was largely for propaganda purposes), was to come in touch with most of the leading men in America, from President Wilson downwards. Even in England, there were celebrities hanging round us, all telling us with various degrees of pomposity the sort of things which Americans expected Englishmen to do, and the best way not to do them.

Ian Hay was the first man who gave me any information about America that was worth having. I can see him now, standing against a window in the Ministry of Information, a tall, slim figure, in a rather shabby uniform, saying:

‘Whatever else you do, don’t refer to the Americans as “children.” It’s such a damned insult.’

I demanded further suggestions.

‘Dozens, if you want them. Don’t leave your boots outside the hotel door. Don’t get ruffled if a porter slaps you on the back and calls you “boy.” Don’t be surprised if they refer to their country as the peculiar property of the Almighty. For all you know they may be right. It’s a marvellous country. And the people! Lovable isn’t the word for them. They’ll kill you with kindness.’

All this I had heard before, but from Ian Hay it sounded different. It is not surprising that he was a success in the States. He is very like his own heroes, who, even when they are talking fourteen to the dozen, give one the impression of being strong and silent. Add to this quality a charming smile, the faintest possible flavour of a Scottish accent, and an air of modesty which is not usually associated with the Creators of best-sellers, and you will have the main ingredients of one of our most typical authors.

If Ian Hay had accompanied us on our Mission he would have had material for a comic masterpiece of English literature. There was the representative of Oxford, who was to lose his boots in every American hotel we were to frequent. There was dear old Sir Henry Jones, whose Scottish-Welsh accents, combined with a heavy beard, an almost complete lack of teeth, and a heavenly smile, were so to intrigue American audiences; Professor J--, the brilliant Irish scientist, who was our official pessimist, and foretold shipwreck, train-wreck, and motor-wreck with unfailing hope; Sir Henry Miers, from Manchester, cool, calm, and capable, who found the Oxford representative’s boots for him and helped to interpret some of Sir Henry Jones’s more obscure utterances; and last, but certainly not least, Sir Arthur Shipley, the urbane Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, who never lost his boots, who spoke perfect English, who had always exactly the right word to say to exactly the right person, and without whom we should all probably have been arrested within twenty-four hours of our arrival as a band of undesirable mountebanks.

I wonder if all the English missions which tour the United States, which march in dignified processions through the streets, which blink up at the skyscrapers, which sneeze over the grape-juice and stagger back from the serried headlines of the newspapers ... I wonder if they are all made up from such human and fallible men as was ours.

Take the case of Sir Henry Jones, one of the sweetest characters and the most generous men I have ever met. He had, in his head, a tooth. One tooth, and no more. The first memory I have of him was in the early morning, when we were ploughing our way through a choppy sea, with the coast of Scotland misty to the starboard. He put his head through my porthole, and complained bitterly that there was no fresh water in his cabin. ‘What did he want fresh water for?’ I asked, looking sleepily at his flowing beard. He waved his toothbrush through the window, and I gave him my carafe. I wish we were all such optimists. And I hope this story is not too impertinent. A very faint hope, I fear.

Again, Professor J--. It is with no lack of respect that I refer to the more humorous side of his character. Any scientist, from San Francisco to Petrograd, will tell you what the world of astronomy owes to his researches into the theory of the Martian canals. Anybody but a fool would pay homage to his intellect. None the less, for sheer pessimism I have never met his like.

‘I took a bath this morning,’ he said to us, one day at breakfast, ‘and I did it at the peril of my life.’

We wondered what made him think that a bath was so particularly perilous. He explained. In taking his bath it had been necessary for him to take off his patent waistcoat. It had also been necessary for him to take off his clothes. In view of the fact that we were at the moment, in a part of the ocean which was regarded with particular affection by German submarines, both actions had been highly inadvisable. The patent waistcoat for obvious reasons. The dangers of the state of nature, however, he described at greater length. ‘If a body enters the water,’ he said, ‘death takes place by chill just as often as by actual drowning. I have made researches into the matter and I find that a body covered with clothes does not chill so fast as a body with nothing on. Hence the danger of baths in a situation such as this. Supposing a torpedo had hit us while I was in my bath!’

While we were on the water, a torpedo did actually hit a liner off the Coast of Ireland, though it was not our own vessel. As soon as the news came through, J-- was convinced that one of his own relatives, an aged aunt, must have been on board. The fact that she had been bedridden for eight years, the fact that there was no conceivable reason why she should have got up at all, far less have ventured across the Atlantic, weighed with him not at all. He was born like that, and I think he even took a certain grim pleasure in it, realizing the futility of human existence.

When I add that there were in our Mission two ladies, Miss Spurgeon and Miss Sedgwick, the introductory passage to this book is complete.

* * * * *

Have you ever noticed--you who have crossed the Atlantic--the extraordinary effect that the Statue of Liberty has upon those who pass for the first time beneath its shadow? It brings out all sorts of hidden traits in even the most secretive of the passengers. Men who have spent the entire voyage in the bar, whom nobody would accuse of sentimentality, rush out and stand strictly to attention, chin well out, eyes fixed on that impressive brazen lady, much as a dog would fix its eyes on its mistress. Young and flapping ladies, who have lain on the decks in attitudes which they apparently consider seductive, stand with open mouths and unpowdered noses, trying to remember the date of the American Declaration of Independence. Fathers bring out their children and regard the statue with an air of proprietorship as though they themselves had been largely responsible for its erection. And as for the poets....

We had on board one rather celebrated young poet who I am sure will never forget the Statue of Liberty--whether or no the statue will ever forget him is another question. His name was Robert Nichols, and he was being sent out by the English Government as the most accomplished of all our war poets. He had created rather a sensation at home by his volume, _Ardours and Endurances_, which contained, in the opinion of the critics, much the best war poetry which had been produced. During the voyage over I fear he had not been much in the mood for writing poetry, unless it were of the style of Rupert Brooke’s dreadful ‘Channel Crossing,’ for he had been groaning with sea-sickness in his cabin. But the statue cured him of all that. As soon as he heard that we were about to pass under it, he emerged pale but determined and came up to me, where I was standing by the railings.

‘I’m going to salute the statue,’ he said.

‘Well, hadn’t you better get your hat?’ I asked. ‘You can’t salute without a hat on.’

‘I don’t care a damn about the hat,’ replied Robert, and without any more ado, swung his hand behind his ear, where it remained quivering like any guardsman’s. Further conversation under these circumstances would, I realized, be sacrilege not only on the spirit of liberty but on the spirit of poetry as well, and so I held my peace. But it was a pity that Robert had somewhat miscalculated the distance we still had to run, for after a few minutes he was forced, from sheer cramp, to lower his arm again. It would have been better if he had got his hat.

I fear that Robert Nichols did not greatly enjoy himself in the States. He could not get that ‘platform’ which had been anticipated for him, and he always looked a little afraid, when one saw him on Fifth Avenue, as though a skyscraper would fall on him before he had finished his last sonnet. He might indeed have been reading a Keats poem:

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charact’ry Hold like full garners the full-ripen’d grain ...

All of this, however, is not getting us to America, to Presidents and millionaires, and all those other engaging things.

Landing in America in this autumn of 1918, for an Englishman at least, was exactly like a page out of an H. G. Wells novel. The aeroplanes circling round us, the little pilot boat coming with newspapers that told us the end of the war was in sight, the sudden glimpse of a new radiant continent, with houses sparkling with a million lights--it was the lights that we found most surprising. After stumbling about in darkened streets at home, after being given hell by the police if we so much as allowed a chink of light to escape through the window (for fear of air raids, of course), it seemed almost indecent to see this blaze of light coming from every window. In absolute exultation, as soon as I reached my room (we were staying at the Columbia University Club), I turned on all the lights, drew the curtain, and threw open the window, thinking--‘there, look at that, and be damned to you,’ the remark being addressed to imaginary zeppelins, thousands of miles away.

And then--the banquet that night! There was butter. Lots of it, making the pale wisps of grease on which we had lately fed seem like some loathsome memory of a nightmare. There was sugar, not done up in little bags, and shrunk to the size of a pea, but fat, glistening sugar, shining and sparkling like any diamond. There was meat, not brought to one in exchange for a coupon, but perched on the plate, proud and abundant. Sir Henry Jones’s one tooth was working overtime that night.

At this dinner I met my First Great American--Nicholas Murray Butler--President of the Columbia University.

For the benefit of English readers I should here point out that the Presidents of great American Universities occupy far more prominent positions in the life of the nation than the Vice-Chancellors of Oxford or Cambridge. These latter gentlemen are hardly known to the public at all. The only Vice-Chancellor of Oxford of whom the newspaper-reading public has ever heard is Ex-Vice-Chancellor Farnell, who set the whole University on edge by medieval restrictions, and who has now retired to the obscurity from which his faintly ridiculous personality should never have been dragged. Apart from this regrettable exception, English Vice-Chancellors have usually figured only in small paragraphs at the bottom of the sober columns of _The Times_, when they are reported as having given degrees to various earnest youths and maidens.

In America it is very different. Here, when the President of a great college delivers himself of an utterance, great treble headings announce the fact in all the principal newspapers. He is given almost as much publicity as a successful horse. His judgments are made the subject of leading articles, his portrait is almost as well known as that of the baser type of politician in England. I do not know whether this is because knowledge is more venerated in the United States than in England. It just happens to be the case.

Well, Nicholas Murray Butler was a super-President, and, next to President Wilson and Charlie Chaplin, he was the most ‘talked-of’ man in the States. As I said before, he was the First Great American I met, and it is with a feeling of regret that I have to admit that I was not in the least impressed. He struck me as the epitome of the commonplace. Charming, yes--a dear, kind smile, a loud and penetrating voice, but--my God! what a mind! It was stocked with every platitude that has bored us since Adam first yawned into the disillusioned face of Eve.

He made a speech. Such a speech. It was filled with tremendous pauses, in which the hand would be raised, and the finger held aloft, and then, like the booming of a gun, the platitude. For example. Silence. A row of expectant faces, and eager eyes. A row of set mouths (except of those who were munching salted almonds). And then ... ‘I say to you, and I say it as my considered opinion, that War is a terrible thing. It is a cruel thing, ladies and gentlemen, a brutal thing. But ...’ again the silence, and the munching mouths are stilled ... ‘wars happen. They occur. They break out. They are declared. They exist. They ...’

Oh dear, I thought. If all American speeches are like this, I am in for a bad time. Of course, we were very soon to discover that they weren’t, and that American oratory is among the finest in the world. But Nicholas Murray Butler was a bad beginning. It is a matter of absolute mystery to me how people listen to such things, or how they read his books. For example, I picked up, the other day, a book by him called _Is America Worth Saving?_ It was incredible. It contained page after page of the dullest moralization, page after page devoted to the proving that black is generally black, and that white, more often than not, is white. And yet, when you get him by himself, Butler is better. When we went to see him at Columbia University he kept Sir Arthur Shipley and myself giggling faintly for twenty minutes over his description of some of the difficulties of the educational career. I remember in particular one reply he made which was typical of a certain broad, dry humour. Sir Arthur had asked him, with reference to a little party of English boys who had gone out west, if they were still at San Francisco.

‘Not always so very still,’ replied Butler with a smile.

I had a long talk with Nicholas Murray Butler, but I gained no enlightenment from it. He told me that the young had a great advantage over the old because the young had longer to live, but after all the old had an advantage over the young because they had lived longer. Or some equally penetrating generalization. After talking to him for ten minutes, in an atmosphere of linked Star Spangled Banners and Union Jacks, I came to the conclusion that he probably had so original and destructive a mind that he was forced to send out this smoke-barrage of commonplace in order not to be arrested as a revolutionary.

Chapter Two

Presidents--Lean and Fat

If you wish to sip the very essence of democracy, you must pay a visit to the White House and talk with the President of the United States. The more urgent your business, the more stirring the occasion, the more completely unpretentious will be your reception.

We arrived in Washington in late October, already somewhat battered by an existence in which every meal was a banquet, and on the day after our arrival found ourselves drawing up at the gates of the White House, duly attired, cleaned and brushed, in order to make the most favourable impression on President Wilson.

The simplicity of the first home of America is, in some ways, more alarming than the pomp of an ordinary Court. There were no beautiful footmen, no drifting diplomats to waft us higher and higher until we were at length admitted into the presence. Indeed, it was more like going to see a dentist than a President.

We were shown into a pleasant white room, with the usual dentist’s array of newspapers and periodicals, slightly soiled by many democratic thumbs. At this point it might be mentioned that the pet mascot of the Mission also entered the White House with us, concealed in an overcoat. This was Cuthbert, a stuffed rabbit, which had been presented by a frivolous friend to the Mission on our departure from England. Cuthbert had been a sure help in trouble and had grown more than human. When the sea was rough, he would be propped up on the edge, looking over, in case he might be overcome. When it was calm he would be allowed to bask in the sunshine. And when we were passing under the Statue of Liberty he was stood to attention until the statue was passed. He couldn’t salute, because toy rabbits aren’t made that way.

Cuthbert was adored by every member of the Mission, except the representative of Oxford, who thought that such things were naughty. He was taken to the tops of skyscrapers to survey New York by night. He was taken on the Hudson to survey New York by day. And I was damned if I was going to allow Cuthbert to depart from America without entering the White House. And so, he was carefully stuffed into the capacious pocket of Sir Arthur’s overcoat (unknown, one must in fairness admit, to Sir Arthur). He was not taken, however, to see the President. There are limits.

Mr. Lawson, the Secretary for the Interior, was with us when we entered, but the real thrill of the morning was to come when a manservant poked his head through the door and said, ‘Are you men waiting to see the President?’ We all bridled slightly at this historic question. ‘How divinely American!’ we thought. Were we ‘men’ waiting to see the President? Men. _Men_, if you please. The world’s greatest authority on bugs. A man. The world’s greatest authority on the canals of Mars. A man. The world’s greatest authority on Greek something or other. A man. Men--all men. Except, of course, the women. We said, yes, we were waiting to see him.

‘Then you’d best come along with me,’ said the manservant.

We came along with him. We came along through a passage, from which outside you could see the short drive, the white buildings of Washington, the bustling life of the city passing by, and we stepped through some folding doors, on to a great space of highly polished floor, in the centre of which, like a waxwork, was standing the world’s most important figure--President Wilson.

The first thing that struck me was that he looked very clean. Immaculate. Not that I had expected to find him dirty. But there was something about the stiff white cuffs, the gleaming collar, the sparkling pince-nez, the beautifully pressed trousers, that suggested he had dressed in a disinfected room with the assistance of a highly efficient valet, who had put on his clothes with pincers. Again the dentist feeling. He _was_ like a dentist. Or a distinguished surgeon.

In silence we were introduced, and slid over the polished floor until we were grouped round him in a sort of semicircle. I had a ridiculous feeling that we were all going to sing ‘Here we come gathering nuts-in-May.’ Everything was suddenly so dignified. No question now of being mere ‘men.’ We were all diplomats, in the centre of the universe.

And then Wilson began to speak, quietly and calmly, weighing his words, telling us exactly what was passing in his mind. I remember being struck by two things--foolish, no doubt. The first was a feeling of strangeness that he should speak with an American accent. One had imagined him as belonging to the world, forgetting that after all, he only belonged to America. The second was that he was just an ordinary man, in a hideously difficult position, applying the ordinary standards of decent conduct to the world situation.

He talked about affairs in France, compared them with that of last year, and drew conclusions. And then he said something extraordinarily interesting:

‘My principal difficulty,’ he remarked, ‘is that we are dealing with people whom we can’t trust. I wonder if you can understand how baffling that is, when one is honestly trying to find a way out? If Germany were like any other country, if we could count on certain promises, certain assurances being fulfilled, then we should know where we are. But we can’t count (he almost shouted the last words) on that. I write a note. I receive an answer. I write another note. I receive another answer. I _go on writing notes_. And I am left in exactly the same situation as before, because I have learnt, from bitter experience, that the promises contained in that answer will be broken as soon as the first convenient opportunity presents itself.’

All the time he spoke he stood looking straight in front of him, with his hands behind his back. He looked terribly tired. I gathered afterwards that he had scarcely time to sleep, that often he would be up all night trying to unravel the hopeless tangle of lies and evasions which was almost daily served up for him.

He continued in this strain for some time, until there suddenly came into his voice a note of passion, ‘America is not going to leave the Hohenzollerns in power. It would mean leaving a running sore in the heart of Europe.’ He made a little grimace of disgust.

I won’t attempt to give any long précis of his remarks. Generalizations are never interesting, and even if they were, you can discover all of them in the newspapers of the period. Sir Arthur had a talk with him on the way out about his life at Princeton, and with his usual genius, managed to smooth the wrinkles out of his face and to make him laugh. The last words I heard him say were in reference to the Princeton professors. ‘They kicked me upstairs,’ he said. A very long way upstairs, most people would think.

That was one of the most interesting mornings of my life. I only wish that Cuthbert could have been concealed behind the curtain.

* * * * *

Where Wilson impressed one with a feeling of respect (if not reverence), Taft filled one with a bouncing spirit of good will--a sort of ‘Pippa Passes’ spirit--that as long as Taft was in being, all must be right with the United States.

I met him at a dinner given about this time in Washington, and was at once captivated by him, because he seemed to make a point of being particularly charming to the people who didn’t matter. There was a tremendous reception after dinner, and half the time Taft was standing, a round Colossus, talking to persons of no importance, and ignoring the crowd of millionaires and diplomats who clustered round him.

Somehow or other, I found myself talking to him. He said:

‘Well, young man, and aren’t you getting rather sick of trotting round with a lot of old professors?’

I indignantly disclaimed any such suggestion (which happened to be quite untrue).

However, Taft only winked, and said Englishmen were always so tactful, weren’t they, winked again, heaved his shoulders, and shook. Then, apropos of nothing he said:

‘I heard a wonderful story yesterday about a Scotchman.’

One has always just heard wonderful stories about Scotchmen, but not always from Ex-Presidents of the United States, so I listened politely.

‘A Scotchman,’ said Taft, speaking in a loud whisper, and keeping one eye on the crowd of millionaires behind him, ‘went out one cold day on the links, did the whole eighteen holes, tramped back, and at the end of it all gave his caddy threepence.’

Here he heaved again. I wondered if that was the end of the story, when Taft continued:

‘The caddy looked at the man and said, “D’ye ken I can tell yer fortune by these three pennies?”’

(Heavens! I thought. He can speak Scotch. No wonder they made him President of the United States.)

‘The man shook his head,’ said Taft, ‘and the caddy looked at the first penny.

‘“The fir-r-rst penny,” he said, “tells me that you’re a Scotsman. Eh?”

‘“Yes.”

‘“The second tells me that you’re a bachelor.”

‘“Yes.”

‘“And the thir-rd penny tells me that yer father-r was a bachelor too.”’

And with that Taft turned on his heel, roaring with laughter, leaving at least one young Englishman a staunch Anglo-American for the rest of his life.

* * * * *

It was also in Washington that I first met Elihu Root. Everybody, ever since my arrival had said, ‘Ah! but you must meet Elihu Root,’ rather in the same sort of way as Sydney people say, ‘Ah! but you must see our harbour,’ or Cambridge people, ‘Ah! but you must see our Backs.’ He seemed to have a quite unique reputation--the reputation of being a thoroughly honest politician. I used to ask, ‘Why in that case is he not made President?’ And the reply invariably was, ‘He is too good, too honest, too impeccable.’ All of which seemed very strange.

However, when one met him, the mystery was explained. Elihu Root struck me as ‘a very parfit gentle knight.’ His conversation was like a man thinking aloud. He shut his eyes and frowned and then spoke, and you knew that the man was telling you what he really thought. It was at one of the inevitable banquets that he first appeared, and after it was over I boldly went up to him and asked him some sort of question about Anglo-American friendship.

‘That rests with you, young man,’ he said, and shut his eyes. ‘Youth to youth, young heart to young heart’--and he sighed a little sentimentally.

I asked him the usual stock question which one asks on these occasions--if there was no means of dissipating some of the ridiculous clouds of mistrust and delusion which still hung over the Atlantic, blotting out the true features of each nation from one another; if there was no means of bringing the Press, at least, to realize the importance of the Anglo-American ideal.

‘Ah--the Press. Did you ever study the question of sovereignty at college?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever tried to put your finger on a certain monarch, a certain body of men, a certain institute and say, “Here is sovereignty--here is the ultimate authority”? And have you, when you have decided that sovereignty lies here, or there, suddenly realized that the true power still eludes you? Have you realized that those men are elected by the people and that in consequence sovereignty lies in the people? And have you, going even further, realized that the force that makes the people vote, i.e., the force that moulds the people’s wills, is really the true sovereign? Think about it. And then you will realize the true importance of the remark you made to me just now.’

All this was delivered with eyes shut and with head tilted back. A very straight and honest man, Mr. Root, typical of all that is best in American life.

* * * * *

From Washington we travelled to Boston, staying with President Lowell of Harvard. Harvard made us all feel a little depressed. It was so very rich, so very efficient, so very prosperous, so entirely different from the bankrupt universities of England. I looked with green eyes on undergraduates’ rooms fitted with telephones and bathrooms, and served with a central heating apparatus that made the frozen apartments of Balliol seem a little torturous.

And then, after Boston, Chicago. Our arrival in Chicago was sensational. Mr. Hearst, the newspaper proprietor, had declared the war to be over, although it was still raging gaily, and had another forty-eight hours to run. As a result of Mr. Hearst’s enterprise, all the country people within a hundred miles of Chicago had come to ‘celebrate,’ and they travelled with us, dressed in their best, and taking liberal swigs of whisky. When we actually arrived, we found a mad city. Paper littered the streets, bells clanged everywhere. And when we came to the club (decency forbids me to mention which one it was) every waiter in the place was drunk, and we had to tread our way upstairs over recumbent figures, while our bags remained in the hall.

‘Terrible,’ said the representative of Oxford. ‘I am beginning to understand why the Americans have so urgent a need for Prohibition.’

I am afraid I did not agree with him. It all seemed to me very jolly. For one thing, all the telephone books in the club had been taken to the roof where they had, throughout the day, been slowly torn into little pieces by intoxicated fingers, in order that the streets might have a festive and confetti-like appearance. As a result, though we could be rung up, we could not ring up, and that, for the secretary of an educational mission was, I assure you, a blessing not at all in disguise.

* * * * *

However, that was one of the only two occasions when I ever saw anybody intoxicated in America. The other was some weeks later when we were down in Texas. We had been travelling all night, and we emerged, one cold morning before breakfast, at the town of--(I had better leave it blank), to visit the local university. Half the professional staff were lined up on the platform to meet us, and they certainly had the warmest ideas of hospitality, for from the overcoat pockets of at least half a dozen of the more venerable members of the staff protruded the neck of a bottle of rye whisky. Now rye whisky is, at all times, a potent drink, but taken before breakfast, on a cold morning, it is not only potent, it is deadly. Nor was this all. For when we had driven to the university, we were greeted by a festive board at which the chief item of diet appeared to be egg-nog, well flavoured with rum. However, we all enjoyed ourselves very much, though I fear that this part of the tour cannot have been very fruitful from the educational point of view, however much it may have strengthened the Anglo-American ties of friendship.

Chapter Three

Containing a Fruitless Search for American Vulgarity

I noticed more and more in America that vulgarity (which one finds, of course, all over the world, even in the South Sea Islands), seemed to be in inverse ratio to wealth. The people who were really tiresome, who talked about their automobiles and their incomes, and their emeralds, and their trips to Europe, were nearly always the people with comparatively small incomes. They might be rich, but they weren’t ‘rolling,’ like the Goulds or the Vanderbilts.

For example, a perfectly appalling little woman to whose box at the opera I was once unwillingly lured, suddenly, during an _entr’acte_, produced from her stocking a cheque for a hundred thousand dollars, and waved it in my face, saying, ‘Say, what d’you think of that for a birthday present?’ A most unsavoury proceeding, and as I afterwards discovered, a complete fake. The woman’s husband had not a hundred thousand dollars in the world, and went bankrupt only a few weeks later.

How entirely different are the super-millionaires! They have enough money to roof their houses in gold and diamonds, but they behave with the simplicity of an English parson. It seems foolish to have to say it, and one’s only excuse is that there is still in England a ridiculous prejudice against rich Americans.

It would be a good thing if people who have such a prejudice could meet a man like, for example, Jack Pierpont Morgan. No nicer creature ever trod the earth, in spite of his mansions in New York, Grosvenor Square, Scotland, Cannes, and a few other places. He was one of the last people I saw in New York, and one of the best.

One cannot think of Jack Morgan, of course, without thinking of his library, although it is somewhat depressing for an Englishman to think of it, since so vast a multitude of English treasures have found their way there. When he showed me over it I was absolutely staggered by the collection of our manuscripts which he has amassed. There is hardly a novelist or poet of any repute whose faded pages are not treasured in this house. And not only their manuscripts, but their portraits, their personal belongings, in fact anything of interest that is even vaguely connected with them.

I was browsing round among these treasures when I suddenly saw, under a glass case, a thrilling object. It was a little lock of hair, bound together with a piece of ribbon, and underneath was a label which read: ‘A lock of the hair of Keats. Given to Shelley by Keats’ friend--’ And then there was a description of the time and place at which the lock had been given.

This object so excited me that I could not drag myself away from it.

Jack Morgan came up.

‘What are you looking at?’ he said. ‘Keats’ hair? Like to hold it for a minute?’

He produced a key from his pocket, undid the case and put the precious thing into my hand. I felt an almost schoolboy emotion at the thought that this hair had grown from the head in which the Ode to a Grecian Urn had been conceived.

Suddenly Morgan said, ‘Give it to me for a moment.’ Reluctantly I handed it over. And then, marvel of marvels, he extracted a single hair from the lock--(a long, curly one) put it on a piece of paper, dropped a spot of sealing wax on one end of it and then wrote, as a sort of testimony:

‘Keats’ hair. From a lock in my possession. J. P. Morgan.’

This hair he gave to me, and, as all writers of autobiographies so constantly assert, ‘it is one of my most treasured possessions.’ After he had done that, he took off the key from its ring, handed it to his secretary and said:

‘That’s the last hair from that lock that I give away. If we take any more we shan’t have a lock, we’ll have a bald patch. Don’t you let me have that key--not if a dozen young Englishmen come along and beg for it on their bended knees.’

Morgan is like a father among his children when he moves among these marvels. He pretends to know nothing very much about them, but he knows a great deal. He knew, for example, what I had never quite understood--the exact sequence in which Poe had written ‘The Bells.’ Poe’s manuscripts seemed to convey a special charm for him, as indeed they might, since Poe was incomparably the greatest creative genius that America has produced. His manuscripts were the very reverse of what one would have expected. There were no wild scrawls, no blotches, no hasty writing. On the contrary, they were all beautifully transcribed on clean paper, in a hand that would have won a prize in the copybook of a schoolboy.

I fell quite in love with American newspapers--bad taste, I suppose--but quite comprehensible if you have strength enough to survive the first shock of them. Everybody has written everything that there is to be written about American journalism, and I won’t add to it. But one episode does deserve to be recorded as a classic example of New World enterprise.

The two ladies of our Mission, after a few weeks of racket and bustle and sleeping-cars, arrived at Detroit in such a state of exhaustion that they retired straight to their rooms, refusing to see anybody, whether they were professors, or journalists, or presidents, no matter, in fact, how distinguished they might be. There arrived on the scene a young man with a speckled face who demanded an immediate interview with these ladies.

‘Impossible,’ I said.

‘I’ve got to get it.’

‘Can’t help that.’

‘I _shall_ get it.’

‘You won’t.’

Pause. The speckled gentleman spat on the floor, sniffed, and then said, ‘Well, we shall see.’

What he meant I did not even guess. But the next day there appeared an immense interview, together with pictures of the two ladies in question, under a head-line that informed all and sundry that ‘Dishpans Lose Their Lure For Female Sex in England Say Prominent British Women Educators.’

To an American reader, this must sound quite dull. Its only value, as a story, is that, to an Englishman, it sounds almost impossible. The ladies, rising refreshed, and eating a hearty breakfast, looked up from over their grape-fruit to see this astounding account of the interview which they had never given, and choked with fury.

‘How dare they?’ said one.

‘How monstrous!’ said the other. ‘Barbarism, savagery!’ they cried.

‘Not at all.’ It was imperative to soothe the ladies a little. ‘Don’t you see that it’s really extraordinarily funny? A speckled young man demands an interview and doesn’t get one. He therefore invents it. You ought to feel flattered that your views are so much sought after.’

They did not feel flattered, however.

‘Besides,’ I added, ‘it is probably perfectly true that Dishpans have Lost their Lure. Haven’t they?’

‘Dishpans have no more to do with the case than the flowers that bloom in the spring,’ said the ladies.

* * * * *

And there, I am going to leave America. I am well aware that these few pages represent only a very small and quite superficial fragment of a great many exciting happenings. The truth, however, is that I was too young to pick out what Americans call the ‘high spots.’ The rest of this book will, I trust, be different.

Chapter Four

John Masefield, Robert Bridges, W. B. Yeats

In January, 1919, I went to Oxford. That seems about the shortest way of relating a fact that is of singularly little interest to anybody but myself. What _is_ of interest is that Oxford, at that time, was a regular nest of famous singing birds gathered together in the aftermath of the War, choosing Oxford as a sheltered resting-place, as though their wings were a little weary and their feathers rather draggled.

W. B. Yeats had come to rest from the storms of Ireland in a quiet, green-shuttered house in Broad Street; John Masefield was writing his marvellous sonnets in a cottage on Boar’s Hill; Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, was near by, occasionally producing a few lines of verse which had more satire in them than poetry, to say nothing of such young men as Aldous Huxley, Robert Nichols, and Robert Graves. I must also pay tribute to Leslie Hore-Belisha, who is now perhaps the most brilliant of our younger M.P’s. He did not write poetry, but his quite unmatched eloquence at the Union will always linger as one of my keenest intellectual (I almost said emotional) pleasures.

Of all these men, by far the greatest, to me, at least, was John Masefield. He was the strangest blend of passion, and ethereality. He was, moreover, the most generous of men. As soon as I went to Oxford I decided, in company with a little band of equally impertinent young men, that what Oxford needed was a new literary magazine which should reflect the new spirit of the university after the War. Delicious innocence! One really was under the impression that one was doing something, not only terribly important, but quite new.

After endless cigarettes and a quantity of mulled claret we decided on two things--the title and the price. It was to be called _The Oxford Outlook_, and people were to pay half a crown for it. It is still called _The Oxford Outlook_ to this day, which must be something of a record for ’varsity papers. The price, however, is only a shilling.

Now came the question of contributors. Although we were properly idealistic we were also shrewd enough to realize that unless we got some big names, apart from those of the undergraduates, our publication would stand little chance of creating any very great stir in the world outside, which was what we secretly desired. Somebody therefore suggested Masefield. And that night I sat down and wrote to Masefield, telling him what we were doing, and asking him if he could possibly send us a few lines for our first number.

By the next post came a most charming letter from Masefield, wishing us all good luck, and enclosing two of the best sonnets he has ever written--poems which any editor of any country in the world would have been proud to publish. Here is the first of them, which has since been included in the collected edition of his works:

On Growing Old

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying, My dog and I are old, too old for roving; Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.

I take the book and gather to the fire, Turning old yellow leaves. Minute by minute The clock ticks to my heart; a withered wire Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.

I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander Your mountains, nor your downlands, nor your valleys Ever again, nor share the battle yonder Where your young knight the broken squadron rallies, Only stay quiet, while my mind remembers The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.

And that he sent to somebody whose name he had never even heard, knowing full well that we could not afford to pay for them.

A few weeks later I met Masefield himself. He had promised to read some of his poetry to a little literary society which we had gathered together, and we all assembled in my rooms to await his arrival. It was a bitterly cold night, with driving snow, and he lived some eight miles out of Oxford, in a region where there were neither taxis nor buses, so that he would have been perfectly justified in ’phoning us to say that he could not come. However, he turned up only a few minutes late, having bicycled all the way, in order not to disappoint us.

One never forgets Masefield’s face. It is not the face of a young man, for it is lined and grave. And yet it is not the face of an old man, for youth is still in the bright eyes. Its dominant quality is humility. There were moments when he seemed almost to abase himself before his fellow-creatures. And this humility was echoed in everything he did or said, in the quiet, timid tone of his voice, in the way in which he always shrank from asserting himself.

This quality of his can best be illustrated by his behaviour that night. When the time came for him to read his poems, he would not stand up in any position of pre-eminence but sheltered himself behind the sofa, in the shade of an old lamp, and from there he delivered passages from ‘The Everlasting Mercy,’ ‘Dauber,’ ‘The Tragedy of Nan,’ and ‘Pompey the Great.’ He talked, too, melodiously, and with the ghost of a question-mark after each of his sentences as though he were saying ‘Is this right? Who am I to lay down the law?’ And when it was all over, and we began to discuss what he had said, all talking at the top of our voices, very superficially, no doubt, but certainly with a great deal of enthusiasm, it was with a sudden shock that I realized that Masefield had retired into his shell, and was sitting on the floor, almost in the dark, reading a volume of poems by a young and quite unknown writer.

I saw a good deal of him after that. He lived in a little red house looking over the hills and valleys about eight miles out, and on fine days one could see from his window the grey spires and panes of Oxford glittering in the distance.

‘Oxford is always different,’ he said to me once. ‘Always I see her in a new mood of beauty from these hills.’ We were looking down on the city from the distance and I too knew how he felt. Oxford from the hills is a dream eternally renewed. Under the rain, when only a few spires and towers rise above the driving sheets of grey, on an April morning, when the whole city is sparkling and dappled with yellow shadows, by moonlight when it is a fantastic vision of the Arabian Nights.

Like many other literary geniuses, Masefield is clever with his hands. He will, with equal complacency, make a model of a ship or mend a garden gate. But since he was himself a sailor--since he has himself known the sea in every mood of loveliness or of terror, it is only natural that, when he does model, he should turn, by instinct, to ships. He showed me, at his house, a most exquisite model in wood of an old sailing vessel of the eighteenth century. There was nothing of the dilettante about that work. Every spar, every rope, every mast, every tiny detail was there, modelled to scale. It would have satisfied the most ardent technician, and yet it had a grace and a poetry that only Masefield could have given it.

‘You must keep this in a glass case,’ I said to him. ‘It’s far too precious, too dainty, to knock about like the other things.’

He shook his head. ‘She’s not going to stay here,’ he said. ‘I made her for a friend who has been very kind to me.’

That was like Masefield, I thought, to spend weeks and weeks of labour to please ‘a friend who had been kind to him.’

* * * * *

Anybody more different from Masefield than the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, it would be difficult to imagine. One was always longing to put him on a pedestal, to thrust a sceptre into his hand, and a crown on his head, and then to wait for the lightning. A most leonine and noble gentleman. Even when he wandered round the streets of Oxford clad in shabby knickerbockers, with a large, dirty satchel full of books on his bent back, it was impossible to forget either his great height or the immense head, modelled after Meredith, with a snowy beard and silvery locks, flowing with just that touch of abandon which made one wonder if, after all, Nature had not been a little improved upon.

Just as Masefield’s favourite word was Beauty, so, according to popular tradition, Bridges’ favourite word was Damn. We all know his celebrated retort to Horatio Bottomley, who had suggested in the House of Commons that in view of the exceedingly limited output of the Poet Laureate, it might be advisable to grant him, instead of his salary, the ancient Poet Laureate’s privilege of an annual cask of wine, in order that his tongue might be a little loosened. Bridges, in reply to all these criticisms, merely wrote and said, ‘I don’t care a damn.’ It was typical of him, but most of us thought that the criticism was justified, for, at the time, there _was_ a war on, he _was_ Poet Laureate, and he _wasn’t_ writing a word.

The only time I ever heard Bridges deliver himself of this word was at a tea-party at his house on Boar’s Hill. He damned the Press, he damned the university, he damned, also, more than one of the modern poets whom we were so ill-advised as to mention. When I mentioned Masefield he was most generous to him, which made me realize how little truth there was in the story which some wit had sent round the university at the time, concerning Bridges’ criticism of Masefield. However, though fictitious, it is amusing enough to recall.

‘“Masefield’s Sonnets”?’ he is alleged to have said. ‘Ah! yes. Very nice. Pure Shakespeare. Masefield’s “Reynard the Fox”? Very nice too. Pure Chaucer. Masefield’s “Everlasting Mercy”? Mm. Yes. Pure Masefield.’

The other literary celebrity who at this time had chosen Oxford for a home was the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats. Yeats always seemed to me to move in a mist.

He was like ‘men as trees walking.’ He certainly did not do it on purpose, as Bridges may have done. He would wander along the street with his head in the air and his hands behind his back, always wearing an overcoat, even in the warmest weather, with a long loose bow, and a mouth perpetually open. To walk behind him was in itself an adventure, for when he crossed the street he never took the faintest notice of any traffic that might be bearing down upon him, but dawdled over oblivious of the stream of cars, bicycles, horses and motor-lorries that were rushing past.

A lovable man, Yeats, but, I should imagine, that some people would have found him a trying fellow to live with. When I left my college rooms I went to a divine old house with a rickety staircase, and low ceilings, which looked out on to one of the fairest views in Oxford, the Sheldonian library. To this house after a little time, drifted Yeats, complete with his wife and his baby. It was a time when the servant problem was at its height, and occasionally, if the house was more than usually under-staffed, all the undergraduates and other occupants of rooms, including Yeats himself, used to gather to eat a communal luncheon.

On the first of these luncheons, Yeats arrived very late, and after absently toying for a few moments with a little cold asparagus, turned to me and said:

‘Were you at the Union last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what did you think of it?’

It was difficult to say what one thought of it. The debate had centred round the ever-green subject of Ireland. There had been a great deal of bad temper, and not very many arguments. Before I could reply Yeats said:

‘I thought it was terrible. The appalling ignorance of English Youth about anything remotely connected with Ireland. I was astonished. Why, they don’t know the first thing about us.’

He darted a limp stick of asparagus into the open mouth, looked away for a moment and then said:

‘Why can’t they understand that the Irish people are Irish, and not English? Why can’t they realize that over there they’ve got a race of peasants who believe in fairies, and such-like, and are quite right to do so? Why, I’ve seen myself the saucers of milk which the Irish peasants have put outside their doors for the pixies to drink.’

He talked absently for a little longer, and then said, in a dreamy voice:

‘_If the English could only learn to believe in fairies, there wouldn’t ever have been any Irish problem._’

However, Yeats was not made entirely from dreams. He had a good business streak in him as well. He knew to a ‘T’ the best market for his poems, although like all poets he also knew from bitter experience that verse as a means of livelihood was impossible.

‘America pays best for poetry,’ he said to me once; ‘but even America pays badly. They will give you twice as much for a poem in America as in England. But for an article they will give you three times as much. I wonder why?’

* * * * *

Among the most entertaining people in Oxford at this time (and, I may add, among the most entertaining people in Europe), were the brothers Sitwell. I suppose the Sitwell trio--Osbert, Sacheverell, and sister Edith, have been talked about as much as any literary family in England. Apart from their merits, they have had a great advantage over most writers to whom publicity is not distasteful--they possess a label. A label is tremendously important if you want to impress yourself on the British public. It seems that there are a certain number of niches in the contemporary temple of Fame, and that unless you fit into one of these niches you will never be recognized. There is a niche labelled ‘Paradox Mongers,’ another niche labelled ‘Psychic Storytellers’ and a whole series of geographical niches labelled ‘Dartmoor Scribes,’ ‘Irish Prophets,’ ‘Sussex Poets,’ ‘East End Recorders,’ ‘Yorkshire Romancers,’ etc. If by any chance, a describer of Sussex gorse strayed into the Dartmoor heather, he or she would be disowned. If Mr. Michael Arlen were to get into the wrong omnibus and be observed alighting guiltily at Selfridges, his reputation would be tarnished beyond hope. And if a man who had gained a reputation as a writer of ghost-stories began to make paradoxes, the result, as they say in the Bible, would be confusion.

The particular niche which the Sitwells occupy is that of ‘Chelsea de Luxe.’ It is a very definite and not unprofitable niche. At the time of which I am writing nobody was inclined to take them seriously. In fact, we used to think that if the Sitwells’ papa had been anything else but a baronet with fierce ginger hair, if they themselves had dropped their h’s instead of dropping their rhymes, their united efforts would not have created much of a stir, and that _Wheels_ (the only true schoolboys’ magazine published outside a school) would have been passed over in comparative silence. Since then, however, Osbert has written some of the finest short stories in the English (or the French) language, and Sacheverell has produced a work of real genius in _Southern Baroque Art_.

Sacheverell was ‘up’ at Oxford at the same time as myself, and introduced a very pleasant flavor of Bohemianism--(there really is no other word)--into those dingy quarters. He hung his rooms with drawings by Picasso and Matisse, which were the subject of lewd comment among the more athletic members of the college. There was one drawing by--I believe, Picasso--called Salome, which represented a skinny and exceedingly revolting old lady prancing in a loathsome attitude before certain generously-paunched old men who looked like the sort of people you meet at a Turkish Bath when your luck is out. One day a certain charming don--(an ardent Roman Catholic)--strolled into Sacheverell’s rooms, saw the picture, paled slightly and then asked him what it was all about.

Sacheverell said something about ‘line.’

And then the don let go. ‘Line,’ he said, was the excuse for every rotten piece of work produced by modern artists. If a leg was out of drawing, or a face obviously impossible, if the whole design was grotesque and ridiculous, the excuse was always ‘line.’ And he stamped out of the room leaving untouched the very excellent lunch which Sacheverell had prepared for him.

But Sacheverell stood his ground in all his conflicts with the authorities. At the end of every term a terrible ordeal takes place known as ‘collections,’ or more colloquially, ‘collecers,’ which consists of an examination on the work done during term. When Sacheverell came up for his viva voce, he was greeted with black faces and remarks of that strange and curdled quality which, in academicians, passes for sarcasm. ‘As it is obviously superfluous to comment on your knowledge--which is non-existent--we are only left with your style, Mr. Sitwell,’ said one of the examiners. ‘You appear to write very much in the manner of Ouida.’

‘That,’ remarked Sacheverell calmly, ‘is my aim.’

I am not surprised that Sacheverell describes himself in _Who’s Who_ as ‘Educated Eton College, Balliol College, Oxford. Mainly self-educated.’

Osbert, Sacheverell’s brother, is the wittiest of God’s creatures--(forgive me, Osbert, for that expression)--whom I have ever met. He has infused even more wit than Sacheverell into _Who’s Who_--that badly constructed work of fiction. As far as I know, the editor of _Who’s Who_ is not aware of the pranks which Osbert has played in the 1925 edition. May I enlighten him?

Take first that wonderful phrase ‘Fought in Flanders and farmed with father.’ One day I am going to write a beautiful fugue in F to accompany that phrase, but at the moment it is only necessary to call attention to the source from which it sprang. For that, you must cast your eye to the preceding paragraph, which is devoted to Osbert’s papa. There you will read: ‘Being unfit for service, farmed over 2,000 acres, producing great quantities of wheat and potatoes.’

Take again ‘Founded Rememba Bomba League in 1924.’ It sounds so exactly like the sort of thing which most of those who appear in _Who’s Who_ would do. There is no such organization as the ‘Rem....’ No, I won’t be quite as obvious as that. But I might explain that the telegraphic address ‘Pauperloo,’ which appears at the bottom of the paragraph, being interpreted, means ‘Pauper Lunatic Asylum.’

‘Deeply interested in any manifestation of sport.’ One has a feeling that Osbert’s page has got muddled with that of Lord Lonsdale, or Dame (Clara) Butt. Until finally, one is informed that his recreations are: ‘Regretting the Bourbons, repartee, and Tu Quoque.’

Repartee, most certainly. I have laughed as much with Osbert as with anybody in the world. I shall never forget his reply to a certain publisher, who had been endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to shield the body of W. J. Turner from the darts of scorn which Osbert was aiming at it. ‘Personally,’ said the publisher (and when people begin with that word one always knows they have nothing to say), ‘personally, I find W. J. Turner rather a lovable person.’

Osbert put his head on one side and smiled. ‘I know what it is,’ he said, with an air of discovery, ‘you used to keep tadpoles.’

He once told me, with that perfect modesty which his enemies find so disarming, that he gave his superior authorities more trouble during the War than any other officer they had ever known. I suppose it _must_ have been a little trying to the colonel who came up to him and asked if he were fond of horses to be told ‘No. But I adore giraffes.’ And it must have been positively exasperating to the outraged military police to find him, an officer in the Grenadiers, carrying on an intimate conversation with a very private soldier in a very public place. Even worse, when at the subsequent cross-examination, the private soldier turned out to be Epstein (whose taste in birds differs so strangely from that of the British public).

He began a naughty movement during the War to urge that all those who had served in France and had no desire to serve again should first be voluntarily denationalized and then compulsorily deported. It never came to anything. But in spite of its failure, he survived, and still walks from time to time down the grey pavements of Piccadilly, negligently tripping up an occasional poetaster or Royal Academician who has the temerity to cross his path.

One more story. It is set on the said grey pavements, and Osbert was walking over them with another man who was staying with him. There came into sight a mutual acquaintance, whom we will call Lady C. Now Lady C. knew perfectly well that Osbert’s friend was staying with him, but she calmly ignored Osbert and said to the friend, ‘Do come and dine with me on Friday.’ The invitation was accepted. They passed on.

The day of the dinner arrived, and with it, a postcard from Lady C. on Osbert’s breakfast table saying, ‘I should be so glad if you would come and dine to-night as well as Mr. --’

This was too much. Osbert went grimly to the telephone.

‘Hullo? Is that Lady C.? I’m sorry, but I shan’t be able to dine to-night. But listen.... Will you lunch with me last Thursday?’

Yes--England needs its Sitwells.

Chapter Five

In which Mr. G. K. Chesterton reveals his Fears and his Hopes

Among the questions which will present themselves to the future literary historian, none will be more difficult to answer than ‘Was Mr. G. K. Chesterton afraid of his wife?’ There are several passages in his books which indicate that the answer will be in the affirmative, and among them one might quote that charming essay from _Tremendous Trifles_ which is called ‘On Lying in Bed.’ He confesses to an overwhelming desire, while lying in bed, to paint the ceiling with a long brush. ‘But even,’ he adds, ‘my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged--_never mind by whom_; by a person debarred from all political rights.’

The first time I ever asked myself this question was in Cornmarket Street at Oxford, on a windy night in May. G. K. Chesterton was alighting, with a certain amount of difficulty, from a taxi-cab, and as soon as he had safely emerged, he stood in the gutter, his mackintosh flapping loudly in the wind, while he assisted a charming and diminutive figure in a cloak. The diminutive figure was his wife. But even in these strange circumstances, with the wind tying her cloak into knots, and the rain-spots slashing against her veil like cold bullets, she seemed completely mistress of the situation of the moment, which was ‘When should the car come back to fetch them?’

Chesterton turned to me--(for he had come to debate with us at the Union)--‘When _shall_ we want it, do you think?’ he said, a little pathetically.

Before I could reply the diminutive figure said, in a sweet, firm voice:

‘When will the thing be over?’ (a great deal of feminine contempt in that sentence).

‘At eleven. But there’s a sort of reception afterwards.’

She immediately turned to the driver. ‘Be here at eleven.’

‘But ...’ began Chesterton.

‘And,’ said Mrs. Chesterton, ‘is this the way in? It’s raining, and my husband has a cold.’

So we meekly followed her to the debating hall.

One has so often been told that Chesterton is an enormous, elephantine creature, that the actual sight of him is really a little disappointing. He _is_ a big man, of course, but not as big as all that. If it were not for his cloak, and his longish hair, and the bow which he sometimes wears, one would not say that he was an exceptional figure in any way. It seemed to me that he took a secret joy in making himself as large as possible, like some little boy who stuffs his overcoat with cushions. G.K.C. has such a passionate love of the grotesque that if it were suddenly ordained that he should be four times his present size he would give a whoop of joy.

Yes. The more one thinks of it--the more it seems that he _did_ purposely accentuate his largeness. His mackintosh was the mackintosh of a man several sizes larger than he. The wide-brimmed Homburg hat seemed specially designed to exaggerate his face. Even his glasses could, without difficulty, have been cut in half. And I noticed that he took a sort of impish delight, as soon as he was introduced to the committee, of placing himself next to the Junior Librarian, a very diminutive young man, whom he addressed as from a pinnacle, holding himself well erect, swelling his shoulders, and even puffing his cheeks, to improve upon the already imposing body with which nature had provided him.

We all trooped into the debating hall, which was absolutely packed, for Chesterton’s paradoxes are always a draw with youth. The subject for debate was ‘That this house considers that the granting of any further facilities for divorce will be against the true interests of the nation,’ or words to that effect. I was speaking against this motion (being one of those who have never seen how the interests of the nation are served by perpetuating the union between a sane husband and a lunatic wife, or a law-abiding wife and a murderer husband), and as soon as my speech was over I went to the ‘Ayes’ side of the house where Chesterton was sitting and sat beside him.

‘You shouldn’t have referred to me as eloquent,’ he said. ‘Wait till you hear me speak. I’m not a bit eloquent. I can’t speak off the bat. I must always have notes.’

I looked down and saw that he had a sheet of paper in his hand, on which he had been scribbling in pencil. But the ‘notes’ were not words, they were little pictures. A grotesque dragon had been hastily drawn in one corner, and a tiny sketch of a very fat man in another. There were also several comic faces, among which I recognized that of the secretary, who was sitting with his profile to us. It was typical of him to call these sketches his ‘notes,’ and it was even more typical when he got up to make a very brilliant speech, that he left his notes behind him.

I forget what he said except that it struck one as irrelevant. To hear Chesterton speak is in itself an explanation of his writing. He pours out his words, suddenly says something which pleases him by its touch of fantasy, pauses, and then with a face that grows more and more smiling and eyes that grow more and more bright, proceeds to develop the idea, to chase it, to leap ponderously after it, so hurl paradoxes in its wake, to circumvent it with every ingenious conceit. For example, he said, almost in an aside, that doubtless divorce would soon be part of the regular curriculum at Oxford, and when he had said it, was so entranced by the prospect opening up before him, that he almost lost his head, and ended by drawing for us a picture of the future in which M.A. instead of meaning Master of Arts should mean ‘married again’ and should be accompanied by the B.A., three months later, which would mean ‘bachelor again.’

Perhaps his most vivid conversation came after the debate was all over. When we were standing in the hall, waiting for the car, he delivered himself of a second speech which so interested me that afterwards I went straight home to write it down.

‘Somebody said in the debate,’ he remarked, ‘that I am the slave of symbols, that I believed in magic, that in a ceremony or an institution or a faith I merely examined what was on the surface and took it all quite literally, like a peasant in the Middle Ages.

‘But it isn’t I who am the slave of symbols. It is you. I venerate the idea which lies behind the symbol, you only venerate the empty shell. Take this case of monarchy. Somebody remarked to-night that we had taken away half the duties and prerogatives of the King, and that the monarchy still remained. They went on to say that we could take away half the duties and prerogatives of marriage, and that marriage would still remain. Perhaps it will, but what will be the use of it?

‘Because I bow down to the sceptre, and because I take the words “honour and obey” quite literally, you say that I am the slave of the symbol. But I bow down to the sceptre because I believe in the power that lies behind it. I keep to the smallest details of the marriage service because I believe in marriage. If you believe neither in the sceptre nor in the service, and yet bow down to them, then you are the slave of the symbol.’

He looked away. Somebody presented him with his mackintosh. He struggled into it, got it half on, and then, with one arm still waving in the air he exclaimed:

‘A time will come--very soon--when you will find that you want this ideal of marriage. You will want it as something hard and solid to cling to in a fast dissolving society. You will want it even more than you seem to want divorce to-day. Divorce ...’ and here, with a sort of groan, he thrust his second arm through his mackintosh--‘the superstition of divorce.’

The small figure of Mrs. Chesterton appeared in the doorway. She, as usual, was quite unperturbed. The fiery words, the tangled eloquence of the evening seemed to have passed over her unnoticed.

‘The car is here,’ she said, ‘and we are already five minutes late.’

G.K.C. shook hands hurriedly, and vanished through the door. The last I saw of him was the flap of his mackintosh in the wind.

Chapter Six

In which Mrs. Asquith behaves with characteristic Energy

Oxford at this time was a ferment of political activity. It was full of young ex-soldiers, who considered, with pardonable presumption, that having endured Hell for five years, they were justified in suggesting the lines along which the New England (the Lloyd-Georgian England) was to be remodelled. And so we formed ourselves into clubs, concocted newspapers, wore ties varying from the noblest shade of blue to the bloodiest tint of red, and extracted a great deal of pleasure out of it.

On the outskirts of Oxford lived Mr. and Mrs. Asquith, watching with interested eyes this ferment of budding talent. I do not know if Mr. Asquith ever actually said ‘Catch ’em young,’ but, to use his own type of phraseology, he was not unaware of the advantages which might conceivably be expected from a judicious sowing of the Liberal Seed among mentalities still unprejudiced and alert. It was only to be expected therefore that when I, in company with two staunch friends of the same College, formed the Oxford University Liberal Club, he should accept the position of President with alacrity.

As soon as the club was formed, we arranged a monster meeting in the Oxford Town Hall, and decided that it would be rather fun to have a thoroughly pompous dinner beforehand. We therefore invited various celebrities, who all, to our astonishment, accepted; and when the plans were well in hand, I departed to tell the Master’s wife of our intentions.

Now, it has been suggested to me that the Master’s wife did not absolutely ‘appreciate’ Mrs. Asquith. At any rate, although it was understood that Mrs. Asquith was to dine at Balliol, there was trouble. So much trouble, in fact, that it seemed as though the dinner could not take place at all.

This was a dreadful situation. We had already asked Mrs. Asquith to dine. She had already accepted. It was quite impossible to put her off. What was the matter?

It was afterwards suggested to me, by an ingenious scholar of Balliol, that the college authorities feared that Mrs. Asquith would have a disruptive influence on callow youth. A foolish reason, of course. If we wanted, we could have asked Mrs. Asquith to dine with us in our rooms on every day of the week, Sundays included. She would not have accepted, but that is another story.

However, I never did discover the real reason, and, as a matter of fact, there was no need to do so, for the Master’s wife, in the interests of Liberalism, very kindly asked Mrs. Asquith to dinner herself. And so, that was how we dined,--the men in one building, the women in another, as closely segregated as though we had been members of some strict religious order which forbade the intermingling of the sexes.

Asquith was in great form at dinner. I had never seen him before, and if first impressions are of any value, be it recorded that he struck me as having a head far too large for his body. His face was of a pleasant, rosy hue, rather like that of a genial baby, his body was short and rather inclined to stoutness. Two things only about him suggested the sheather of swords--his hair and his voice. The former was long and white and so silky that one longed to stroke it. His voice was deep and rich with a quality that also suggested silk.

The first thing he said to me after we had been introduced was:

‘Did you get my box?’

This cryptic remark needs a little explanation. As soon as Asquith had consented to speak for us he sent word by his secretary saying that it was most important that we should prepare for him a box, some ten inches high and twelve inches broad. This object must be covered in green baize, and placed on the table at which he was going to speak. It was destined, as we afterwards learnt, to carry his notes.

Such a request was, at first, a little surprising. One had always thought of Asquith as a man with an endless flow of language, who did not have to rely upon written memoranda in his speeches. However, the more one learns about apparently impromptu oratory the more does it appear in its true light, as carefully prepared. Winston Churchill has told us that the speech that gained him his greatest reputation as an impromptu was written out six times with his own hand. Bright used to have an entire synopsis hidden between the palm and fingers of his left hand, and I am sure the more ‘mountainous’ districts in Lloyd George’s perorations are carefully hacked and hewn beforehand. So at least Asquith was in good company.

During dinner I asked him if it was true that he had once laughingly summarized the most valuable attribute of Balliol men as a ‘tranquil consciousness of superiority.’

‘A tranquil consciousness of _effortless_ superiority,’ he corrected. ‘Don’t forget the “effortless.” That’s the whole point of it. But,’ he added, ‘I don’t want to corrupt the youth of Balliol by such agreeable theories as that.’

He had an extraordinary thirst for knowledge about post-war Oxford--a thirst that was almost pathetic, so clearly did it indicate a love of the very stuff, one might almost say, the very smell, of scholasticism. Was there much unrest among the undergraduates? Did they find it hard to settle down after the War? How many people were abandoning the classics? And what was their chief reason for doing so? Was it lack of time or lack of thought, or mere laziness? One could not help thinking what an admirable Master of Balliol Asquith would have made if he had ever chosen to abandon politics for university life--(his natural element).

Dinner passed quickly under this fusillade of questions, and I was longing to see how Mrs. Asquith had fared in her comparatively solitary dinner. It cannot have been a very inspiriting one, for when we all trooped over to the lodge, and joined them in the big room upstairs, the atmosphere was gloomy, not to say strained. Mrs. Asquith was sitting on a table, swinging her legs, which were encased in grey Russian top-boots, and she greeted our arrival with a whoop of delight, and started to talk very quickly, as though she had been pent up for years. How wonderful of the undergraduates to give her a bouquet of red roses! Had they guessed that she was going to wear a red hat? And did they mind her not dressing? No? How charming of one to say that she looked nice in anything, etc., etc.

The Master’s wife, on the other hand, said nothing at all, but remained by the fireplace in what appeared to be deep melancholy. I went up to her and said, ‘We really ought to be going along to the Town Hall now. The meeting starts in five minutes.’

At this she brightened considerably, and said:

‘Is Mrs. Asquith going?’

I explained that it was snowing outside, and that the other guests had to be disposed of first. Mr. and Mrs. Asquith would bring up the rear, as they were the most important people.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said, ‘Mrs. Asquith’s the climax, is she?’

I was very thankful when we were all safely landed at the Town Hall, and the meeting had begun.

I needn’t say anything about the meeting itself, except that everybody made admirable speeches, which called forth a great deal of applause, and set the fires of Liberalism blazing fervently. A few extra lines may, however, be inserted to make this sketch of Mrs. Asquith a little less shadowy.

I am perfectly certain that this lady has been very much maligned by the British public. A section of that public regards her as vulgar because she is enthusiastic, prejudiced because she is loyal, conceited because she is frank, and generally a very tiresome creature. They have not the wit to realize that she is, in reality, a woman almost unbearably sensitive, who is aggressive only in self-defence, and that she is so emotional that she does things in public which some people regard as outrageous only because they do not understand her.

I shall never forget, for example, seeing her at the end of the meeting, put her hand on her husband’s shoulder while they were playing God Save the King, and, as soon as the King was saved, throwing the flowers from her bouquet into the stolid faces of the crowd below. How I sympathized with her at that moment. I should have liked to jump to the roof with elation. The only difference was that Mrs. Asquith had the courage to do what she wanted, and I hadn’t.

Chapter Seven

In which Mr. Winston Churchill loses his Temper, and Mr. Horatio Bottomley wins his Debate

You may, or you may not, have heard of the Oxford Union Society. It has a habit of producing future Prime Ministers. Among its past presidents it numbers such illustrious names as Gladstone, Salisbury, Asquith, Birkenhead, etc., etc., to say nothing of such minor fry as occasional Archbishops, diplomats and ambassadors.

Among its past presidents it also numbers myself. A matter again of no importance, except for the people with whom it brought me into touch.

Now, every president of the Oxford Union Society can invite, during his term of office, not more than two distinguished statesmen to address the Society. As soon as I had been elected I looked round for two men who might bring a little live blood into our somewhat academic discussions, and there seemed no better couple, for this purpose, than Winston Churchill, the Secretary for War, and Horatio Bottomley, M.P., who is at present languishing in gaol. Both expressed themselves as delighted to accept, and dates were fixed for their respective appearances.

A terrible problem faced me as Winston’s arrival drew near. I had to give a dinner, not only to him, but to his guests (four of them), and about a dozen others. When one dines in this fashion, one has to dine well, with Moët 1914 and all the usual things which go to make good oratory. Being quite devoid of funds, and having long before exhausted my allowance in riotous living, there seemed no alternative but to make a descent on an already overburdened parent. Then suddenly, a charming friend, who is now brightening a not very brilliant House of Commons, suggested that we should all dine with him ... a suggestion which was carried _nem. con._

Winston was the first great English statesman who ever dined with me (probably the last also). Remembering that it was he who had, on his own responsibility, given orders to the British Fleet at the outset of the War which were probably instrumental in saving the Empire, I sat gazing at him in a sort of awe. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is the face that launched a thousand ships.’ And yet there was something a little incongruous about Winston Churchill in this tiny room. He was so vigorous, he breathed so hard, and spoke so quickly that one feared he might at any moment seize all his knives and forks and glasses and arrange them in the form of a field of battle to illustrate his martial theories.

This he actually did. I happened to mention that, in order to help our memory of the campaigns of Napoleon, I and several others who were working together, had composed a series of rhymes round the tributaries of the Po, which we found of the greatest value.

That set Winston off. He seized a knife, a fork, and a salt cellar and made with them a little plan round which he marched the imaginary armies of Napoleon. I have never heard anybody talk of war with such gusto. With each martial adjective, a light seemed to be turned on inside his head, his eyes gleamed, his lips parted, and he talked so vividly that the slight impediment in his speech, which he has always so pluckily fought, was forgotten. And when he had finished he gave me an exhaustive list of military treatises on Napoleon, which, needless to say, I did not attempt to read.

Winston was a wonderful talker that night--not only of war, but of other arts, notably of literature and painting. He asked how long it had taken me to write my novel _Prelude_.

‘I haven’t the least idea,’ I said, ‘because it was done in bits and patches over a period of about five months.’

‘Didn’t you work at it regularly?’

‘No. I don’t see how you can do work in that manner if it is to have any sort of claim to be emotional.’

‘Nonsense.’

I sat up, and Winston began to put forward some very interesting theories on the writing of books.

‘You should go to your room every day at nine o’clock,’ he said, ‘and say to yourself, “I am going to sit here for four hours and write.”’

‘But suppose you _can’t_ write? Suppose you’ve got a headache, or indigestion....’

‘You’ve got to get over that. If you sit waiting for inspiration, you will sit there till you are an old man. Writing is a job like any other job, like marching an army for instance. If you sit down and wait till the weather is fine, you won’t get very far with your troops. It’s the same with writing. Discipline yourself. Kick yourself. Irritate yourself. But write. It’s the only way.’

Advancing years have taught me that there is a good deal more than half of the truth in what Winston said. The ideal combination would seem to be a little of both spirits--the spirit that enabled Mozart to sit down, like an accountant, and write his divine melodies at his desk, and the spirit that urged Beethoven out into the woods and forests when the storm was at its height.

To return to Winston. He made a very good speech--(it was about Russia)--quite as good as those of the undergraduates who were opposing him--won his motion, and then trotted off to bed, with the cheers of a thousand young throats ringing in his ears.

The next day I called on him after breakfast and suggested that it might amuse him to walk round some of the colleges. ‘All right,’ he said, and we set out forthwith, while I tried to recall the names of the various buildings which one passed every day, but never recognized.

However, Winston strode along gloomily, smoking a cigar, tapping his stick on the pavement, and taking not the faintest notice of my chatter, which showed his good sense. Still, I wanted to know the reason for his ill-humour, and was about to ask him if he had got out of bed on the wrong side, when he said:

‘There was a shorthand reporter there last night, of course?’

I shook my head. ‘No. We don’t run to that.’

He glared at me in astonishment. ‘But there was a man from the _Morning Post_?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he only takes extracts. Did you want a report?’

‘I should damned well think I did,’ replied the Secretary for War. ‘I said a lot of very--er--delicate things last night and it’s most important for me to know what I _did_ say.’

I remembered, with exquisite clarity, his remarks about footpads, assassins and other gentlemen with whom His Majesty’s Government, of which he was a prominent member, were at that period negotiating. And I also appreciated the fact that he was honest enough to stand up for his personal convictions at the risk of being severely censured by his colleagues. However, there seemed nothing to be done.

‘Perhaps,’ I remarked, with singularly misplaced brightness, ‘it may be a good thing in view of the delicacy of the discussion, that there _was_ a certain vagueness about what you actually said?’

For reply, he merely clasped his hands behind his back, made a clucking noise with his teeth and said:

‘Is that Lincoln or Exeter?’

That night, in the House of Commons, several indignant gentlemen rose to their feet to draw the attention of the House to the indiscretions of the Secretary for War at Oxford. Many uncomplimentary things were said before the matter was allowed to drop. For one night, at least, I experienced something of the thrill of government.

* * * * *

It is a long step from Winston Churchill to Horatio Bottomley, but not quite as long as might at first be imagined. Both men have a good deal in common--(this is meant as a tribute to Horatio rather than a reflection on Winston)--and if Horatio had been to Harrow instead of to a little school in the East End of London, it is not impossible that he would have risen to Cabinet rank, have stirred the nation with patriotic speeches, and have gone down to history as one of the great men of our times.

At any rate, he seemed to me a fascinating figure, and one who should enliven any debate in which he spoke.

I therefore wrote to him, suggesting that he might care to visit us. By return of post I received a reply, typed on the sort of notepaper that is described by stationers as ‘superfine,’ and couched in the third person. It stated that ‘Mr. Bottomley considered himself honoured by the invitation, which he had great pleasure in accepting. Mr. Bottomley would also like to know the subject of the debate. If he had any say in the matter he would prefer to speak in favour of the Independent Political Party. Failing that, he would like to attack the League of Nations, which he considered a useless and a pernicious institution.’ The Independent Party won the day.

On the night of Bottomley’s arrival, I was suddenly sent into a panic by the news that a gang of undergraduates, who considered that the dignity of the Union was being outraged by including Bottomley among its ‘distinguished visitors,’ had arranged to kidnap him. The plan was to meet him at the station before anybody else could get near, to hurry him into a motor-car, and to drive straight up to Boar’s Hill, where he would be given a good dinner, and allowed to depart in peace after the debate was over. I immediately went down to the station, seized several burly porters and informed them of the situation. Whether or no these measures had the effect of nipping the plot in the bud, history will never know. He arrived safely.

A grotesque figure, one would have said at first sight. Short and uncommonly broad, he looked almost gigantic in his thick fur coat. Lack-lustre eyes, heavily pouched, glared from a square and sallow face. He seemed to have a certain resentment against the world at large. It was not till he began to talk that the colour mottled his cheeks and the heavy hues on his face were lightened.

Was there any excitement at his coming? Yes? He smiled like a child. A lot of big men came down to speak, didn’t they? Asquith, Winston, Lloyd George? Yes? ‘And now, Horatio.’ He rubbed his coarse hands and chuckled.

At the entrance to the hotel he stood sunning himself in such publicity as was afforded by the gaping hall porter and his underlings. He stumped across to the office, his fur coat swinging open, drew from his pocket a heavy gold pen, and signed his name with a flourish. The signature was illegible, but the gesture was Napoleonic.

He dined with me that night, and kept the small gathering of undergraduates I had invited in a constant splutter of unholy laughter. ‘Do I pay my income tax?’ he said. ‘Not I.’ And he told us, with a dazzling display of figures, exactly how he managed to avoid that obligation. To my dying day I shall regret that I forget his method. He discussed religion, with his tongue well out in his cheek. He drew for us a little portrait gallery of contemporary politicians, as crude but as vivid as the work of an inspired pavement artist. Birkenhead seemed to be the sole politician for whom he entertained any genuine regard.

‘When Birkenhead was seriously ill a few months ago,’ he said, ‘I was the only man he allowed into his room. I would go and sit with him for hours, sometimes talking, sometimes just silent. Funny, isn’t it?’

We adjourned to the debating hall, were greeted with uproarious applause, took our places. As the debate proceeded, I looked from time to time at Bottomley. He seemed, suddenly, to have grown nervous. His face was flushed and hot, and from time to time he mopped his forehead with a large silk handkerchief. The light and airy chatter, the brilliant irrelevancies, of the Oxford Union seemed to be filling him with a certain mistrust. He had never known an audience like this. Every phrase, every gesture, he watched with narrowed eyes, leaning forward intently. And then he rose to speak. He took the wind out of our sails from the very beginning.

I had been afraid that before this, ‘the most critical audience in the world,’ he would try to assume an air of culture that was foreign to him, that he would endeavour to put on airs. He did exactly the reverse. After his opening sentence there was a moment when everything hung in the balance. He made some rather inapt historical reference, paused, and was for a moment at a loss. And then, quite calmly and deliberately, he looked round and said:

‘Gentlemen: I have not had your advantages. What poor education I have received has been gained in the University of Life.’

Dead silence. I sat back, marvelling at the consummate stagecraft of the man. After that brief remark, any men who laughed at his pronunciation or his mannerism would be cads, and they knew it. And he knew that they knew it.

From that moment, he sailed on triumphantly. His eloquence was uncanny. For sheer force of oratory I have never heard anyone like him. Compared with him, Asquith was a dry stick. (I am talking of the manner, not of the matter.) And his aptness of retort was modelled on the best Union styles. For instance, he happened to use, during one of his passages, the phrase ‘the right to work.’ A Welsh miner who was in the gallery, and who was, as usual, on strike, cried out ironically, ‘’ear, ’ear.’

Bottomley did not look at him. He merely added, in exactly the same voice as he had used before, ‘a right which I am sure we will gladly grant to the honourable member.’ Delicious.

Nor was his repartee merely flippant. One of the preceding speakers had made a great hit by referring to him, somewhat contemptuously, as ‘a voice crying in the wilderness.’ Bottomley took up the gage and hurled it with unerring skill back into the face of his opponent. ‘All my life,’ he cried, ‘I have been a voice crying in the wilderness. All my life I have battled alone, fought alone, struggled for causes that other men have deserted as hopeless. A voice crying in the wilderness! Yes, gentlemen, and I am proud of it!’ Thunders of applause.

He won his motion by several hundred votes, and when he left the hall, they cheered him to the echo.

But he did not seem particularly elated by his success. When he returned to a party I gave for him at my room afterwards, the voting had totalled about 1,100--a few less than a record attendance. ‘I’d hoped I should draw the biggest house you ever had,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Are you sure there was no mistake in the counting?’

I assured him that the tellers were thoroughly trustworthy.

He nodded. ‘Well, it can’t be helped. Still--it’s a pity.’

Further regrets were stopped by the discovery that nobody could open any of the champagne. ‘Give me a bottle,’ said Bottomley. ‘I’ll show you a trick.’

He seized a bottle in his podgy hand, went to the door, half opened it, shut it again, gave the bottle a pull, and lo!--the cork was removed. As he drank our healths he looked across and said ‘Damned fine champagne.’

He was either a liar or a very bad judge of champagne, for it was the worst wine I have ever tasted.

* * * * *

We had arranged to breakfast together the next morning, and at nine o’clock I arrived at the hotel. It was a drizzling, dreary sort of morning, with a cold wind, and an indeterminate mist over the roofs. Bottomley came downstairs looking very tired. The lustre had faded from the heavy eyes, the bulky frame had lost all elasticity.

‘And what would you like for breakfast?’ I asked him.

He protruded the tip of his tongue, paused, and then gave me a wink. All Whitechapel was in that wink.

‘A couple of kippers,’ he said, ‘and a nice brandy and soda.’

I gave the order, as gravely as possible, to the waiter, and watched him gulp his brandy, leaving the kippers untouched. He cheered up after that, and by the time his cab had arrived he was quite gay. ‘I’ve enjoyed myself,’ he said to me when I bade him good-bye. ‘Enjoyed myself like hell.’

It will need a clever man to write _finis_ to an analysis of the character of Horatio Bottomley--part genius, part scoundrel, and yet, wholly human.

Chapter Eight

Being an Impression of Two Ladies of Genius

So far the feminine element has not obtruded greatly into these pages, not for lack of females, but for lack of distinguished ones. It is a matter of little significance to the reader that in May I met a charming girl called Jean, and in June lost my heart to a languorous beauty named Helen. But at about this time (the summer of 1920) I did meet and get to know two very remarkable women.

The first was Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She was staying at a house whither I journeyed in late July to escape the heat of a London summer. My first sight of her was as I emerged from the car; very dirty and dishevelled after a long journey, in which somebody had spilt a bottle of champagne all over my trousers. I entered the hall, and observed a strange, dark woman in orange looking at me, wondered who she was, wondered still more when she advanced and said in a deep booming voice:

‘Oh, young man. Run upstairs quickly before you go in to see them. The room is full of earls and cocktails.’

This remarkable announcement (which was true in so far as there was an earl somewhere in the distance, and the clinking of ice in glasses) was followed by a mutual introduction.

A fiery, billowing, passionate, discontented creature of genius--that is my impression of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She absolutely dominated the party during my whole visit. I fell passionately in love with her, with the shy, ridiculous love of twenty-one for--?

Try to see her as I see her now. The tall, cool dining-room, the Romney smiling from the wall, the long dining-table, and, near the end, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, hunched up, scowling, smoking a cigar, and as she puffed the smoke into the face of the lady opposite (whom she detested) telling the following story:

‘Do you know’ (oh! the mellow boom of that magical voice!) ‘the story of the old hen that was crossing the road and that was run over by a Rolls-Royce? There was a flutter of feathers, a shrill cackle and then--’ (turning to her neighbour) ‘what do you think the hen said as she died? _My God, what a rooster!_’

I don’t think anybody was ever quite so rude to people as Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She would stand in front of the glass, tugging fitfully at her dress, and then, with her head on one side, she would say, in dreamy but resounding tones:

‘Isn’t it awful? I try to look like a lady and all I look like is Miss --.’ The fact that Miss -- was standing just behind her, made no difference at all.

At this house there was a swimming bath--rather on the Roman model, with pillars of pale blue marble mosaic, and little nooks and corners where one could drink cocktails before summoning up the energy to dive in. It was a very hot summer and the bath was in great demand, especially after tennis. On one of these occasions we all assembled, in dressing-gowns of varying gorgeousness, and plunged into the water. Enter Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She herself was in a tea-gown, having no intention of bathing. Lying on a couch, she surveyed the splashing throng. Suddenly, as a pretty girl in a _décolletée_ bathing dress scrambled up on the diving board the great voice rang out:

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t appear like that before the man you loved!’

I don’t know what happened. I only know that the two never spoke to one another again.

And yet, when one got her by herself, she was the most fascinating of creatures. She was, at the time, moving into a little house near by, and whenever the opportunity occurred, we would go over to assist her in her task. It is probable that the ‘assistance’ considerably delayed her entry into possession, for though we had all of us very decided ideas upon house decoration, we had not the remotest idea of how to carry them out. I remember standing in a small and dishevelled room for nearly an hour, while we all argued exactly where a set of the works of Bernard Shaw (which the author had given her) should be placed. Finally, with a gesture that would have done credit to an empress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell swept the whole lot on to the floor, drew from her pocket the manuscript of a one-act melodrama by Clemence Dane, and tramped round the room reciting it, her golden voice echoing over the empty house. She must have quite demoralized the young man who was putting in a new bath, and she certainly created havoc among the various vases and oddments with which the floor was strewn.

After that, we decided that we would leave the house to itself for an hour or two, and go into the village to buy garden implements. I wish you could have seen Mrs. Patrick Campbell stalking into that provincial ironmonger’s shop. She stood in the entrance, drawing her furs around her, swept out her hand and pointed to some extraordinary instrument covered with knobs and spikes (probably designed for the uprooting of turnips).

‘What,’ she boomed, ‘is that?’

The man, like a startled rabbit, tried to give her some indication of its use.

‘Give it to me,’ she cried.

The next thing was a rake. She asked for a r-r-rake, rolling her r’s and her eyes as though she were asking for some esoteric poison. When she held the rake at arm’s length she reminded one irresistibly of a Britannia of the decadence. Choppers, trowels, insecticide, squirting things--enough to staff a place four times the size of her own--were all ordered and bundled into the car, so that when eventually we set out for home we must have looked like a party of _sans-culottes_ departing to arm their local legion.

The actual use of these instruments was never fully discovered. The rake was of course a simple matter, and was employed with great aplomb in removing the remaining gravel from the centre of the drive to the sides, where it served as a very effectual choker of the drains. The clippers also wrought confusion with the grass borders, and became caked with earth and grit. But the spiked thing remained a complete mystery.

I never understood how Mrs. Patrick Campbell wrote her autobiography. When I saw her it was apparently due at the publishers towards the end of the next month, although not a word of it had been written. She would suddenly get up in the middle of a conversation, and rush away to her room saying, ‘Now, I am going to write.’ But half an hour later she would invariably be back again, booming at us from the sofa.

This habit of leaving things to the last moment undoubtedly explains, to a large extent, the fact that her later career has not been marked with the same triumph as she enjoyed during her earlier years, in spite of the fact that she is still the superb genius, shining with a dark radiance that hardly any of her younger rivals possesses.

Does she allow that genius to run to waste? I wonder. She does not appear to have the capacity for taking pains. Philip Moeller, the author of _George Sand_, told me that she was anything but word-perfect in the title-rôle. ‘At the final dress rehearsal,’ he said, ‘she was sweeping about the stage with the text in her hand, reading it, word by word. She carried it off somehow, by gagging--magnificent gagging, if you like--but still, you can’t expect to play a part on those lines.’

A pity, a decided pity. For so fine and sensitive an artist must have suffered tortures when she first saw inferior artists taking her place. And when she had to appear at the music-halls it must have been like putting a queen in a pillory. I once heard a marvellous story of her in this connection.

It is alleged to have occurred at some London music-hall where--sadly to relate--she had to share the honours with some performing sea-lions. Think of it! Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had swept London off its feet in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, having to appear in the unworthy company of beasts of that nature, which probably eat their young and sleep all the winter. These animals were apparently incapable of appreciating true art, for during the whole of her act (which preceded their own), they made the most appalling noises off stage, booming and bellowing for food. They were, of course, kept hungry in order that they might go through their tricks with proper alacrity.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell, according to the story, put up with the sea-lions for two performances, but after that, she had had enough. On the following evening she therefore paid an early visit to the theatre, a strange bundle under her arm. In this bundle was a packet of succulent fish with which she proceeded to feed the sea-lions one by one, addressing them, as she did so, in terms of great affection. After a couple of fish the bellowing ceased, and gave way to contented licking of lips....

Mrs. Patrick Campbell went through her act in a deathly silence that night. But when the sea-lions came on, the general impression of the audience was that it was a very poor show.

* * * * *

I cannot better introduce the other lady who at this time so impressed me than by quoting a very penetrating sentence that was written about one of her books by Mr. Middleton Murray. It referred to _Vera_ (by the authoress of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_), and he called it ‘A Wuthering Heights written by a Jane Austen.’

For Lady Russell--if one may be so unkind as to strip from her the mask of anonymity which she is always so careful to preserve--is just like that. It is as though she dwelt in an early Victorian drawing-room, listening to some passionate dialogue of life that was being carried on outside the window. The voices rise and fall, the rain splashes against the bright panes, the wind moans and whistles round the stoutly built walls. Then, there is a lull, and in the silence may be heard the scratching of her little quill pen, transcribing the violent things she has heard in a tiny, spidery handwriting, catching the thunder in a polished phrase. And when she has finished writing, there, on the paper, is a story as full of tension, fierce and frightening as any that dwells in the broken, passionate sentences of Emily Brontë.

When one meets her, inevitably she suggests Dresden China, with her tiny voice, tiny hands, tiny face, tiny manners. And then suddenly, with a shock, you realize that the Dresden China is hollow, and is filled with gunpowder. Not that Lady Russell will tell you. You simply sense it, and stand back a little, wondering.

After I had returned to London, I was trying to endure one of those dull Septembers which seem to concentrate in themselves all the heat and stuffiness of a summer that has outstayed its welcome, when somebody rang up and said, ‘Come to lunch. I want you to meet a very charming lady.’

I went to lunch, and there were certainly several very charming ladies, but one knew them all before. Until, twenty minutes late, the door opened, and a little figure with blue eyes floated across the floor saying, ‘Du forgive me, will yiu? I feel I must be late.’ And then everything was changed.

There really ought to be some sort of musical notation for giving the exact timbre of people’s voices. Lady Russell’s is a delicious voice, like a dove that has become slightly demoralized by perching too long on a French hat. Her ‘U’ sounds are startlingly French, and yiu, pronounced _à la française_, is the only way you can write it. She does not really talk, she croons aloud. And here again, one comes up against the Austen-Brontë combination. No other woman could possibly deliver herself of such remarks in so utterly dulcet a tone.

It was at the time when her (?) book _In the Mountains_ was being so well reviewed, and there was just enough doubt as to whether she really had written it to lend piquancy to the discussion.

‘In the Mountains?’ she said. ‘It sounds like a Bliu Guide.’

‘You wrote it--you _know_ you wrote it.’

‘_Yiu_ may know I wrote it. I haven’t even read it.’ But if _yiu_ like it, it must be improper. So I shan’t read it.’

She swore till the very last that she did not write it.

‘I couldn’t have written it, could I, because I only published a book last year, and I write terribly slowly. Scratch out all the time. I want to write a play.’

‘Why don’t you?’

She sighed. ‘It’s so difficult to know what’s going to happen to a play. Yiu always know with a novel that it will be published, but with a play yiu never know, du yiu? I once had a play produced and I was so thrilled that I used to go every night and sit all by myself in the pit, thinking “What a clever girl am I.” But I think the little man at the door began to think I must be in love with him and so I stopped. And so did the play.’

Suddenly--(this was after lunch)--‘Let’s write a play _now_.’

‘What sort of a play?’

‘A play with heaps and heaps of tiny scenes, all lasting only about five minutes. With Bach fugues in between. Beautifully lit. Tiny tragedies. Tiny comedies. Like the things that happen in one’s life. Some of the plays might be silent. And then--oh, _du_ lets’--and then after each funny little emotion, one would always have the fugue to recall one back to life.’

It sounds a fascinating idea, and I wish she would do it. Perhaps she will. So that if ever a unique entertainment by an anonymous writer is produced in London, of the type sketched above, you will know who is responsible for it.

Lady Russell has her own way of administering criticism to bad writers--the sort of way which makes one swear never to do it again. In one of my novels, which she had read, there comes a passage of a very lurid and foolish nature, where a villainous vicar strikes an adventuress across the face. One develops fairly quickly, and I knew, almost as soon as the book was published, that this passage was rotten stuff. I met Lady Russell shortly after she read it and she said, ‘I _du_ like your book. And I _loved_ the bad old man who hit the girl on the mouth.’ Silence. Utter silence. And then a laugh. I went straight home and threw that silly novel into the fire.

But that is not nearly so damning as she can be. I shall never forget my thrill of delight when I heard of her quite classic rebuke to one of the world’s most tiresome women. The scene had better remain veiled in mystery, but one can say that she had several amusing people staying with her. There suddenly arrived in the neighbourhood Lady --, who, as everybody who knows her will tell you, will go miles in any weather to be near a celebrity. She was full of her latest discovery, a very decorative young soldier, who had won far more than his share of medals in the war. Lady -- talked about him till everybody felt inclined to scream: how she had lunched with him in Paris, how he had done this, that and the other. ‘And do you know,’ she added, in a vibrating voice, ‘he was wounded in sixteen places!’

Lady Russell looked at her with a plaintive smile. ‘I didn’t know men _had_ so many places,’ she said.

It would be interesting to know what she really thought of life, or failing that, what she really thought of her own work, but very few people have ever managed to get behind the mask of anonymity, and they all come back with different stories of what they have seen. One thing I do know, and that is that _Vera_ _had_ to be written. The terrible brute of a man, the feeling of suspense which hangs over the pages like a menace--they were as inevitable as a human birth.

‘Did you like writing that book?’ I asked her once.

‘I hated it,’ she said, in a whisper. And then, looking down at the floor, ‘Isn’t he a brute? An absolute brute? Have you ever known anybody so horrible?’ She shuddered as though she were talking of a very real person.

Whatever one may say of her, the fact remains that she occupies a place in modern literature that is unique, because to the public she is only a pen, and not a person. When they think of anybody like Sheila Kaye-Smith, they call to mind bobbed hair, black eyebrows, and a cottage on the Sussex downs. When they think (as they apparently sometimes do) of Hall Caine, they call up visions of a beard, private suites at the Savoy, and countless mysterious legends of his doings in the Isle of Man. When they hear of Stephen McKenna it is always with the knowledge that he has either just been to or returned from the West Indies and is either going or has gone to some party or other in London. But they never think at all of Lady Russell, because they simply do not know she exists. They are caught up in the fascination of her work, they wonder for a moment what manner of man or woman produced it. And all they have to guide them is a blank title-page.

Chapter Nine

In which We Meet a Ghost

At this point in the narrative it seems fitting to introduce a spiritual element which, up to the moment, has not been very noticeable.

You may have seen, two Christmases ago, a sensational article in the _Weekly Dispatch_, by one Lord St. Audries, telling of a ghostly midnight adventure which he had experienced with two friends in a Devonshire house. The article made something of a sensation at the time. The _Daily Mail_ devoted a leading article to the subject, and many American papers quoted it in full. The full story of that adventure, however, has never been told. And since the two other conspirators mentioned in the article were my brother and myself, it seems that the time has now come when the true story of that very remarkable evening may be told in full.

It was the first week in June when Peter--as it is shorter to call him--came down, and it was in the third week in June that the thing happened. In case you might imagine that the atmosphere of my home was favourable to ghosts, it is necessary to state that we had lived, during those two intervening weeks, the most distressingly healthy of lives. Most of my morning had been spent in wrestling with the foreign policy of Queen Elizabeth or the political theories of Mr. Aristotle, a task that was not made any the more pleasant by the thud, thud of tennis balls which came from the lawns below. But in the afternoon we would always set out together, sometimes to motor up to Dartmoor and picnic in heather, but more often down to the sea, where we bathed, and spent the long hot afternoons lazing about on the beach.

One Sunday--the last Sunday of Peter’s visit--we all went to evensong. It was a glorious evening when, at about seven o’clock, we came out of church, and we decided to walk home, taking the short cut by the road over the hill. This road, I may say, runs straight from the church, past various houses, until it reaches the gates which guard the approach to our own home.

A full moon hung over the hills--a little pale in the fresh light of dusk--and after we had been walking a few minutes, Peter stopped, looked over a wall and said:

‘What a fearful house.’

We looked with him. It was a house which I will call Weir. It had been untenanted for nearly thirty years and was falling to rack and ruin. The roof had long ago disappeared, the paint was peeling from the faded green shutters, and as we looked a bat flew out of one of the second-story windows, showing that the glass had also vanished.

‘Why has it been allowed to get like that?’ asked Peter.

‘Haunted,’ said my brother. ‘At least, that’s the legend.’ And then he told him how nobody could ever live in it, how strange sounds, screams and the pattering of hurried feet were heard by passers-by, how it was narrated that in years gone by there had been a terrible murder there, in fact, all the usual things which are told in Christmas numbers of popular magazines.

Peter interrupted him.

‘I’m for going in,’ he said.

‘What on earth for? You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’

‘No. Nor disbelieve in them. But, it would be rather fun.’

And that was how it began, and how we found ourselves, three hours later, walking back over the road by which we had come.

The road was quite deserted, for the town went to bed at early hours, and as we swung along, wearing our flannels, for it was a hot night, I took a certain interest in the state of mind of my two companions. My brother was, frankly, a little on edge. He had a candle in one pocket, and a crucifix in the other, to meet the respective powers of darkness with which we might be confronted. Peter was just--how shall I say?--alert. He had had experiences which might be described as psychical in the past, and he was more or less prepared for anything that might happen. And I was just enjoying the whole thing, quite confident that we should see nothing at all, but none the less amused by the possibility that, perhaps, if we were lucky....

We clambered over the wall, for the gate was locked, walked down some steps, through some bushes, and round to the front of the house. It stood about thirty yards back from the road, and the main grounds stretched out in front. As it was built on sloping ground, the tangled grass and shrubberies in front were on a level with the basement, through which we had to enter. The first floor was on a level with the road behind us.

It was an absolutely still night, so still that the poplar trees behind us were etched against the moon in a motionless trelliswork of silver leaves.

‘Come on,’ said Peter. We decided to enter the house through one of the windows in front of us. The glass was broken, and there was no difficulty in raising the sash. We opened the window and as soon as we had done so, it fell down again with a bang. The sash had long ago rotted.

‘Give me your stick,’ said my brother. ‘I’ll prop this thing up. We might have to come out in a hurry, and we don’t want to crash into a lot of broken glass.’

I gave him the stick, and he wedged the window firmly into position. It is lucky that he did so.

We clambered in one by one, groping our way in the semi-darkness. As soon as the candle was lit, a room of indescribable melancholy flickered into view. The plaster had fallen in great lumps from the ceiling, so that we walked with a crunching noise that echoed all over the house. Wooden boxes and planks strewed the floor. The wall-paper had almost all peeled from the walls, though some of it still clung in strips, like pieces of decaying skin.

‘Where?’ said Peter.

‘Upstairs, I think--don’t you?’

‘Right.’

We spoke in whispers, as though afraid of disturbing something that might be lying asleep above, and one by one made our way up a narrow twisting staircase that led into the main hall.

In this hall we paused, undetermined where to go next. Right before us was the front door, and on the left, the two principal rooms of the house. Both of their doors were open, and through them one caught sight of a floor on to which the moonlight poured abundantly. To the right was a corridor leading to some rooms that were shrouded in darkness. Just by us was the continuation of the staircase, which in the old days had led up to the rooms above, but which now led (after turning a corner beyond which we could not see) straight up to the sky.

We began to make a tour of the house, and chose, firstly, one of the big rooms on the left. There was hardly any need for a candle here, since the moonlight was so brilliant, but we took it for the sake of dark corners. We found absolutely nothing. Only a big, silent room, looking out on to the garden, with a single cupboard, which was empty. A most prosaic room it must have been in daylight, and even now, there was nothing particularly alarming about it.

‘So far, so good,’ said my brother.

‘Let’s try the other room now,’ I said.

I went outside, and stood in the hall, waiting for them to follow. I was not feeling ‘creepy,’ although I should not in the least mind admitting it. As a matter of fact, I was rather disappointed that nothing had happened. I stood there waiting, looking into the darkness of the corridor on the right.

And then suddenly, the first alarm. It was not in the least the most important thing that happened that night, but since it happened to me, I take a particular interest in it.

As I stood there, I was thinking in the odd, inconsequent way in which one does think, of an essay which I had been writing that morning, when suddenly I thought--‘I am thinking very slowly. My brain does not seem to be working properly.’ And then, with a thrill of dismay I realized that exactly the same physical process was taking place in my head as takes place on those dreary occasions when I have been forced to have an anæsthetic. The left side of the brain starts to be covered with a black film (almost like the shutter of a camera), which gradually closes over, from left to right. While this is going on I can think perfectly clearly with the right side. Thought and consciousness do not cease until the film has closed completely over. Then, everything is blackness.

This was now happening to me, but with two differences. The film was spreading over my brain far more quickly, and the agent which was responsible for it was not anæsthetic but a force which I can only describe as a form of suction, coming very distinctly from a room down the corridor on the right.

‘Hullo! What’s up?’

I saw them standing before me. With every effort of concentration, I managed to say, in an absurdly stilted voice: ‘The candle. Quick, the candle. Outside.’ I found the candle placed in my hand. My feet carried me downstairs, I half fell to the window, and then--the film closed over.

A minute later I found myself sitting up on the grass, feeling absolutely normal again, though strangely tired. What had happened? It was exceedingly difficult to say. Nothing--and yet, everything. All I knew was, that here in the garden I was safe. But inside....

‘I wish to goodness you wouldn’t go in again,’ I said.

However, they were now more determined than ever to make a thorough investigation, and after waiting to see that I was all right, they clambered once more through the window.

Not one corner, not one crevice of that house did they leave unexamined. It was a very simple house to explore, because apart from the fact that the only possible entrance was by this particular window, the rooms themselves were square and stoutly built, and there were but few cupboards, and absolutely no mysterious closets or any other contrivances which might be thought to harbour ‘ghosts,’ or even, failing a ghost, a harmless tramp.

They spent about twenty-five minutes over their examination, and came out reporting that they had been everywhere--including the little room from which I had felt the ‘influence,’ and had found absolutely nothing.

‘And now,’ said Peter, ‘I’m going in _alone_.’

‘Alone? Good Lord, man, haven’t you had enough of this business?’

He shook his head. ‘No. I believe Paul’s an “anti-influence.” Sort of lightning conductor. He keeps them off. Perhaps it’s the crucifix,’ he laughed. ‘Anyway, you remember that nothing happened to you until you went out in the hall away from him. And nothing happened to me, perhaps because we were together all the time.’

We tried to persuade him not to go. But he insisted, and we let him go in on the condition that he should take the candle, and that we should whistle to him every few minutes, while he would whistle back, to show that he was still there.

Once more, for the third time, he went into that house, while we sat down on the grass and listened to the sound of his footsteps as he clambered up the stairs. We heard him walk across the hall and sit down, as I judged, on the bottom of the steps, waiting. Then there came a faint whistle, and we whistled back.

Silence. We whistled again, and the answering echo sounded clearly. Another whistle, another answer. And so the minutes passed away.

Then--terror!

It was about twenty minutes after Peter had climbed through the window, and nothing had happened. The last whistle we had heard, which was about two minutes before, had been particularly shrill and cheerful. It seemed quite evident that we had drawn a blank, and I turned to my brother to suggest that we should call Peter out, and go home.

But, over our heads there came something which was not a sound, for there was no sound; not a wind, for the trees were still; nothing visible, for we saw nothing. A second later, a cry from the house, in Peter’s voice, the like of which I hope I shall never hear again. It was a long-drawn ah-h-h! The sort of cry that a man would give who had been stabbed in the back.

We sprang to our feet, and rushed to the window. As we did so, a single cloud which had long been drifting slowly to the moon, started to obscure the light. Clambering through, we found ourselves in utter darkness. The planks and boxes which, by candlelight had been so easy to surmount, appeared gigantic. To add to the distraction there came from upstairs the wildest thuds and crashes, as though several men were struggling together.

‘For God’s sake, matches.’

‘Haven’t got any.’

‘We must get some.’

We scrambled to the patch of light made by the window, rushed through the bushes, the noise of the struggle inside increasing all the time, vaulted the wall into the garden of the house next door, whose occupants were fortunately well known to us, pushed wide the front door which was fortunately open, seized a lantern which, by a miracle lay just inside the hall, tore back again, over the wall. As we vaulted the wall we heard a noise which was like a whole platoon of men stumbling down the stairs.

And then, ‘Oh, my God! ’ in Peter’s voice.

We met him as he emerged, staggering round the corner, his face dead white, his hair, his hands and his clothes covered with plaster and dirt. We took him into the next house, dosed him with brandy, and listened to the following story:

‘When I got into the house,’ said Peter, taking a plentiful gulp of brandy, ‘I couldn’t at first decide where to take up a position. I eventually chose the bottom of the staircase, for two reasons. It was central--that is to say, it commanded a view of nearly every door on the ground floor, and it also allowed me to face the corridor on to which opened the little room from which you’ (turning to me) ‘felt the influence coming.

‘I wasn’t particularly hopeful of seeing anything. However, something seemed to tell me that if there _were_ to be any manifestations, that is to say, quite crudely, if there was a ghost, the centre of its activity would be in that little room. My attention seemed constantly switched in that direction, and after a few minutes I sat quite still, my eyes fixed on the door of the little room, which I could just make out as a patch of greyish light in the darkness of the corridor.

‘The minutes sped by, bringing nothing with them. I heard your whistles outside. I whistled back. And though the echo of my whistle sounded a little uncanny in the lonely house, I still didn’t feel in the least “ghostly.” I felt extraordinarily matter of fact. I remember even wondering if the wood on which I was sitting was damp.

‘I suppose that about twenty minutes must have gone by like this, and I was seriously thinking of giving it up as a bad job. Your last whistle had just sounded, and, growing impatient, I began to rise to my feet, intending to have a final look at the little room, and then to go home.

‘Then, the thing happened. Out of that room, down the darkness of the corridor, something rushed. I don’t know what it was, except that it was black, and seemed to be shaped like a man. But two things I did notice. The first that I could see no face--only blackness. The second was that it made no noise. It rushed towards me over that bare floor without a sound.

‘I must have taken in those two facts subconsciously, for I had only two or three seconds in which to think. After that I was knocked flat on my back by some overwhelming force. I had a sickening, overwhelming sensation of evil, as though I were struggling with something beastly, out of hell.

‘After that I remember struggling--it seemed to me for my life--staggering with an incredible effort to my feet--and fighting my way downstairs. If one’s sensations in moments of half-consciousness are of any value, then I must have been fighting not with one thing, but with two or three. How I managed to get down the stairs, God knows. There was nothing but darkness and a hundred filthy influences sapping my strength. The next thing I remember is meeting you outside.’

Before I go on to the sequel to this story, just let me remind you of two things. Peter was, once again, a perfectly normal and healthy creature, going through the war like any other young man, fond of country life, the reverse of neurotic. Secondly, whatever it was that knocked him down, it was not a human being. That room from which the ‘thing’ emerged was empty. It had no cupboards, no secret doors. There was no possible way of entering it.

The sequel is as follows. We were naturally very anxious, after this exceedingly unpleasant experience, to find out a little more about Weir, and its antecedents, and with this object we paid a visit to a certain very charming lady who lived close by and who had an international reputation in things psychic. She knew all about it. She heard our story quite calmly, and without the least surprise.

‘But do you mean to say,’ she said, when we had finished, ‘that you didn’t _know_?’

‘Didn’t know what?’ I asked impatiently.

And then it transpired that some forty years ago, Weir had been the scene of a particularly brutal double murder, in which a semi-insane doctor had done to death first his wife, and then a maid-servant. The actual scene of the murder was in the bathroom. _And the bathroom was the little room at the end of the corridor from which I had felt the influence coming and from which the thing had rushed at Peter._

I could tell you a lot more about Weir if I had time--how when it was renovated, and re-inhabited a short time ago, no door in the place would keep shut, and how even the stodgiest tenants were forced to admit that something very devilish was on foot. How no dog can be got past the house after a certain hour. How--but one might go on like that for ever, and so I shall leave the facts as they stand.

* * * * *

Before leaving this question of ghosts, however, I cannot refrain from telling another story of the same kind, which also had Peter as its main victim. You may disbelieve it or not as you choose, but at least, even if you decide to treat it as pure fiction, it makes very good reading. And it is, as a matter of fact, the unadulterated truth.

The scene was laid about six years ago at St. Audries, a rambling, pleasant old place in Somersetshire. Peter had come home from London the night before, and apart from his sister, there was nobody there except the servants. On the second night, he was rather tired, and so at about ten o’clock he went to his room, which lay at the end of a long wing, a good distance away from the main body of the house. By half-past ten he was sound asleep.

Some hours later, in the middle of the night, he suddenly found himself awake, with that strange feeling that one has been disturbed by some noise outside. He rubbed his eyes, and sat up. Yes--distinctly there was a noise in the corridor. Wondering who on earth it could be at this time of night, he called out. There was no answer. Called again. Still no answer. Mystified, he rose from bed, put on a dressing-gown, and opened the door.

Outside, there was an old woman with a candle, standing a few yards away from him, regarding him with calm, wide eyes. He had never seen her before, and he spoke to her. She did not reply.

He then took a step towards her, and as he did so, she suddenly turned and began to walk away. Exceedingly curious, he began to follow, but she broke into a run. He too started running, and he chased her down corridors, along passages, up little staircases, faster and faster.

Suddenly at the other end of the house, when he was only a few yards behind, she turned into a corridor that led to a room from which there was no escape. There was the sound of a door slamming, and a second later he flung it open. Bright moonlight flooded the room. It was empty, silent, deserted.

Peter stood there, wondering. The only exit from the room was by the door through which she had just entered. Unless of course one jumped out of the window, from which there was a sheer drop of forty feet on to a hard lawn. But the window was locked and barred. Nobody had opened it for years.

Shrugging his shoulders, he walked back to his room, a little disturbed, and greatly puzzled. Before he turned out the light to go to sleep again he glanced at his watch. It was two minutes to one.

The next morning, the whole adventure seemed so fantastic that he decided to say nothing about it. He therefore went down to breakfast, talked quite normally and cheerfully, and kept his peace.

As he rose to go out, his sister suddenly said to him:

‘Oh, Peter. The clock on the mantelpiece has stopped, and it’s a terrible nuisance to wind. What is the right time?’

Peter looked at the clock. It registered two minutes to one. He took out his own watch. That also marked two minutes to one.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll go outside and tell you.’

But in the hall the same thing had happened. The grandfather clock, which was usually kept fast, had also ceased ticking--at two minutes to one. The clocks in all the other rooms had stopped--at two minutes to one. Even a clock over the staircase, which could only be reached by a ladder, and of which he alone held the key, had stopped at two minutes to one.

That is all. There is no explanation, no ‘sequel’ of any kind. It just happened. It has never happened again.

Since these events I have looked the other way whenever I have seen any spiritualists coming down the street.

Chapter Ten

In which I Journey to Greece

It was not easy, in the unrest and turmoil of the year 1921, for any young man to settle down to a definite occupation. There was a great outpouring from Oxford in that year, mainly consisting of those who had been to the war, had returned to the University to finish their studies, and had taken the shortened course. Men of that type, prematurely matured, seemed indeed to many of us, quite middle-aged, though most of them were not twenty-eight. And naturally having already lived many lives and died many deaths, the prospect of beginning all over again and being treated like children was not altogether pleasing.

Everybody who has done much public speaking at the University is always told that he ought to go to the Bar. It seems destined for him, as something almost inevitable--why, I could never quite understand, because mere eloquence is not nearly so great an asset at the Bar as the capacity to spurn delights, to live laborious days, and to make up your mind that for several years at least you must be content to be a very dull dog indeed.

I, too, was caught in this spirit of unrest. I went to London in search of a job, had no idea how to set about it, wrote odd articles, spent all my money, and returned home. Something had to be done, so I sat down and occupied the next four months in writing _Patchwork_, a novel of the new Oxford. It was published in the autumn, had a certain _succès d’estime_, and brought me in about enough money to pay my tailor’s bill.

And then one day, there came a letter which set my heart beating quickly and filled me with a sense of adventure which made life seem more than worth living again. It was from my publishers, and it told me the following story:

A new revolution, it seemed, was on the point of breaking out in Greece. That unfortunate country was in the direst distress, being ruled by a monarch (the late King Constantine) who was not recognized by the Allies, who had already been exiled once, and who, unless drastic measures were taken, would be exiled again. The national exchequer was empty, the national spirit almost broken, and the national manhood practically exhausted by the war against Turkey, which had already lasted, on and off, for seven years.

The only way in which Greece could be saved was by the recognition of King Constantine by the Allies. Such an event was, at the moment, out of the question, since ‘Tino’ was regarded in France and England and America as an Arch-Traitor, a sort of miniature Kaiser, who by his treachery and his double dealing had imperilled our cause throughout the whole of the Near East.

But that legend of Tino, it was now alleged, was false. It had been carefully built up, during the war, by interested agents, on a fabric of complete falsehoods. The astounding nature of these falsehoods was contained in a collection of documents which was being carefully guarded. In those documents was material for a book which would cause a sensation throughout Europe as soon as it was published.

Would I go to Athens and write that book? I should be given immediate access to the documents, I should be under the special protection of the Greek Government, I should have, as a matter of course, the entrée to every circle of Greek Society which I might desire to investigate, from the Court downwards. And all my expenses would be paid.

Would I go to Athens? Would I go to heaven? Just imagine if _you_ had just come down from Oxford, were still at heart an undergraduate, and were suddenly given the opportunity of embarking on an adventure which gave every promise of situations as fantastic as ever occurred to the peppery imagination of William le Queux! For, naturally, one guessed that, in an undertaking of this sort, there would be a certain element of danger. The Balkan countries have never been exactly a health resort for political adventurers, and what should I be but a political adventurer, delving into secrets of which, at the moment, I knew nothing, in a distant and romantic capital which was alive with intrigue?

Would I go to Athens? Without a moment’s delay I sat down and wrote a telegram, saying that if necessary I would start to-morrow.

* * * * *

Let us get straight on to Greece, for it is easier to do that in a book than in the so-called _train-de-luxe_ which totters across Europe, falling over bridges, blundering through ravines, and waiting for a whole day at deadly looking hamlets in strange countries. It is all right until you reach Fiume. Till then you have a comfortable dining-car with regular meals, and a sleeping compartment in which it is possible to sleep and not to freeze. But after that, God help you. They take off the dining-car, and you have to depend for sustenance on what you have got with you. And if you have got nothing, it means that you have to clamber out of bed in the middle of the night and go into some filthy little railway café, to bargain for black olives and dusty chocolate and sour bread. At least, that was how things were in the winter of 1921.

A word about Belgrade, the capital of Yugo-Slavia, because it is, of all the cities I have ever seen, the most sinister and the most melancholy. It would appeal to Poe. We arrived at about dawn, and I woke up to look out on a dreary, broken-down station, snow-bound, and to hear the monotonous echo of some soldiers singing round a little fire which they had built on the platform to keep them warm. I dressed and went outside with some Greeks, who spoke bad French. We were all terribly hungry and were determined to eat some breakfast or die in the attempt.

What a sight when we stepped outside the station. You must imagine a background of leaden skies, and long, almost empty streets along which an occasional bullock cart silently plodded. In the foreground, however, all was colour and noise and animation, for it was market day, and the peasants from the outlying districts had all come in to sell their cattle. Never can there have been such a picturesque crew of rascals--rather like a chorus in the Chauve-Souris. The men with black beards, and stockings brightly worked in blue and crimson wools, the women with green aprons and yellow jackets, and odd-looking belts that seemed to be made of dyed leather. And they were all stamping about in the snow, shouting out in that dark, stinging language which sounds like Russian spoken by a devil. At least three fights were in progress, and the way they treated their animals made me feel that, unless I went straight into Belgrade, there would be a fourth.

We pushed our way through this unsavoury collection, and walked down the silent, desolate street in a sort of dream. There were no motors (I did not see a single motor in the whole of Belgrade) and very few horse-carriages. Almost every man we met was a soldier. And such soldiers! Dreary, pale, half-starved-looking creatures, slouching along like tramps, with uniforms that hung about them in rags and boots that had long been unfit for any human beings. Then, suddenly, we saw three officers, swaggering down towards us. A greater contrast it would be impossible to imagine. They were not only smart, they were superb. They glittered and shone and sparkled, they strutted, and puffed, and posed. They were the complete musical-comedy officer of the Balkans, their uniforms a dream of delight. And as they passed, a group of ragged soldiers sprang to attention, and remained stiff as corpses for fully a minute after the said officers had gone by. Discipline, what crimes are committed in thy name!

And then the breakfast! It was quite as depressing as a Dostoievsky novel. We had it at the best hotel in the place, and it consisted of bitter coffee, white butter made with goats’ milk, and bread so sour that it was almost impossible to eat. There were no eggs, no meat, no sugar. One was back in war-time England again, _with_ a difference.

Only one word more about Belgrade, and that must be to record the impression of amazement I had that this terrible hole of a place was the capital of one of the largest countries in Europe, of the country which, according to the economists, is going to be one of the most prosperous in the whole world. Make no doubt about it, Yugo-Slavia is a coming country. But if you could see its capital, the town which, by the august dispensation of the Peace-Makers, has been set in authority over many fair and cultured cities of the Austria that was, you would say it was a back slum of London, set on a hill, subjected to an earthquake, and then cursed by the Creator.

They don’t build houses to last in Belgrade, because they know that in ten years or so there will be another war, and the whole thing will be blown to pieces again. That is the sort of spirit one met the whole time. Nothing permanent. No trust. No faith. No hope. I looked into a photographer’s shop and saw a photograph of the Parliament in session. So pompous, so threadbare, so utterly, damnably sad.

All this may have been the effect of a bad breakfast and a cold morning. But I think that you will admit that it is borne out by the facts.

Let us hurry to Greece. The next scene in the journey was when, at dawn, the train, with a last despairing effort, arrived at the frontier town of Ghev-Gelli, and stopped, panting. And this was Greece! This land of crystal sunlight, with the brown mountains against skies of burning blue. Greece! I felt like Linnæus, who went down on his knees at the first sight of English gorse; or like Cortez, when his eagle eye first gazed upon the Pacific, through the medium of Keats’ Sonnet. Or like a great many other popular people who may all be found in _The Children’s Encyclopædia_.

I dressed quickly, and went into a little restaurant that lay just behind the station. A brown-eyed maiden bustled forward and showed me to one of the four small tables. There was a spotless cloth on the table, and a big earthen bowl of violets. And for breakfast there was a huge glass of fresh milk, a chunk of coarse bread, and the sweetest honey that even Greek bees can ever have distilled. One felt that on such a diet, and under such sunshine, anybody could write masterpieces.

I had just swallowed my last spoonful of honey, and lit a cigarette, when there was a sound of tramping feet outside, a shouted word of command, a moment’s silence, and then a babble of conversation. Soldiers! Greek soldiers! These must be inspected at once. I went to the door and saw, lined up, a small platoon of soldiers, clad in khaki, standing at ease. They were burnt almost black with the sunlight, were of rather under average height and were talking in a fierce and indigestible language. But what most attracted the eye was the superb young officer who was engaged in conversation with the conductor of the wagon-lit. He was the first (and almost the last) Greek I ever saw who gave one the impression of a statue come to life. And how smart he was! How his sword glistened in the sunlight, how his leather shone and his buttons sparkled!

Suddenly he turned, pointed in my direction, and started walking towards me. I hurriedly adjusted my tie, and wished that I had shaved. It didn’t seem to make much difference, but it made one feel somehow undressed. However, there was little time for regret. The officer was already by my side.

‘Monsieur Nichols?’

‘Oui.’

He saluted, turned, and shouted to the soldiers. They ceased talking. Shouting again. They sprang to attention. Shouted again. They sloped arms.

This was terrifying. I also endeavoured to put a few inches on my height, and frowned severely, which is reputed to have an effect of making one look older.

‘I come from the Military Commander of Macedonia,’ he informed me. ‘You are to be under his special protection.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, in as deep and resonant a voice as possible. ‘It is very gracious of him.’

‘I have also,’ he remarked, ‘to present you these documents.’ He handed me some papers decorated with heavy seals. I took them, glanced at them, and placed them inside my pocket.

‘You will have no difficulty,’ added this excellent young man, ‘in such things as customs. Athens has been informed of your arrival. Everything will be done to ensure your comfort.’

‘I am more than honoured,’ I said. I felt an awful fraud, and was thankful that the Military Commander himself was not present. If only one could have grown a beard, or have developed pouches under the eyes, or a cynical smile or _something_ which would have concealed the fact that one was really only an undergraduate, and not the distinguished author that they were expecting. How marvellously Hall Caine would have suited an occasion like this. He would probably have emerged in a black coat, looking like a minor prophet, and have made some profound remark on the liberty of Greece. All I could do was to ask the young man to stand his soldiers at ease, which seemed an excellent suggestion and was promptly carried out.

We talked for a little longer, and then, in order to end a situation which was rapidly becoming unbearable, I informed him that I had business in the train which must be attended to. He sprang to attention, we shook hands, the soldiers clicked, sloped arms, right turned and stamped rhythmically out of the station. The last thing I saw was the glint of their rifles in the sun.

After waiting nearly the whole day at Ghev-Gelli, the train puffed out into the open country towards Athens at about five o’clock. I looked out on to the mountains and flower-filled valleys, dreaming in the late afternoon sunlight. The adventure had really begun.

* * * * *

And now, Athens.

We arrived at about seven o’clock in the evening, and all the things which my admirable and decorative soldier had foretold, came to pass. Various imposing people met me, my luggage slipped through the customs unopened, and I found myself outside the station while the other wretched people were still wrestling with officials.

Now, I am all for dramatizing the various episodes in one’s life in order to get the utmost emotion from them. This seemed to be an episode well worthy of such treatment. And so, for this night, I planned to drive through the streets to my hotel in an open cab, have a jolly good dinner, and then go up to the Acropolis by moonlight alone.

I achieved all these delectable things. By various subterfuges I managed to get rid of the people round about, and found myself in the desired open cab driving slowly towards the main streets.

The streets of Athens at night! Take, as a model, Paris, and set it in surroundings of incredible beauty, hills that soar proudly above, a sea that stretches below, lit with the lights of a thousand ships. Fill it with dark, swarthy people, with eyes like stars, who do not so much walk as sway. Plant along its streets rows of pepper trees, whose feathery branches dance beneath the lamp-light. Sprinkle among the crowd young giants in the most picturesque uniform of Europe--a white kilt that makes them look, in the distance, like ballet girls. Build your houses of white marble, scatter their gardens with flowers, breathe over it all a spirit of gaiety and love, light it with a moon so clear and clean that it might be carved from the marble of the Acropolis--and then, perhaps, you will have a faint idea of Athens. Unless, from sheer incapacity, I have inadvertently been describing a Lyceum pantomime.

And then, most important of all, one could dine like a king in this paradise, and still ca