A New Medley of Memories Part 8

In lighter vein Philip told us some odd Johannesburg stories. One was of a man who had arrived there some years before with absolutely no a.s.sets except a tin of condensed milk and a needle. He spread a report that smallpox was on its way through the country, gave out that he was a surgeon, and vaccinated the entire community with his needle and condensed milk, at 5_s._ a head! From this beginning he rose to be a wealthy capitalist, with the monopoly of selling liquor within the precincts of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Woodburn was admirably handy for the Edinburgh libraries, in which I put in several days' work (much belated during my illness) for the _Encyclopaedia_. September I spent happily at St. Andrews, where my friend and host George Angus, though now a good deal of an invalid, was as kind and pleasant as ever. We had talks on heraldry, a favourite subject with us both; and I remember his rubbing his hands with delight on reading (on the authority of Juliana Berners, prioress of Sopewell), that the four Evangelists were "gentlemen come by the right line of that worthy conqueror Judas Maccabaeus"; and also that the Four Latin Doctors, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory, were gentlemen of blood and coat-armour."[4] I copied from one of his early heraldic books the arms anciently a.s.signed to:--

_Adam_ (before the Fall)--a s.h.i.+eld gules, whereon a s.h.i.+eld argent borne on an escutcheon of pretence [arms of _Eve_, she being an heiress].

_Do._ (after the Fall)--paly tranche, divided every way, and tinctured of every colour.

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_Joseph_--chequy, sable and argent.

_David_--argent a harp or.

_Gideon_--sable, a fleece argent, a chief azure gutte d'eau.

_Samson_--gules, a lion couchant or, within an orle argent, seme of bees sable.

I saw something at St. Andrews of another old acquaintance, Jock Dalrymple, now Stair, who had some little time before succeeded his father (the kind old friend of my youth), and had grown grey, portly, and rather solemn since coming into his kingdom. He was Captain of the Royal and Ancient this year; and although he boasted of "hating politics," and would not trouble to vote in Parliament on the most vital Imperial question, would sit for hours in the chair at a club meeting, discussing the minutiae of golfing rules with a zest and patience that never failed. Men are curiously made!

I went, while at St. Andrews, to spend a weekend with the Fairlies at their neighbouring castle of Myres (set in the most enchanting old Scottish garden), and said ma.s.s in a billiard-room converted by my friend into a decorous chapel, just as had been done by Bishop Hedley in his episcopal villa near Cardiff. I noticed with interest the mace sculptured on one of the angular turrets. Thereby hung a tale--and a grievance; and my host told me how the presentation of a macers.h.i.+p in the Court of Session went with the owners.h.i.+p of Myres, i.e. of the castle, as he maintained. But though he had bought the castle, my Lord Bute had bought the estate (marching with his lands of Falkland); and _his_ contention was that the estate, not the castle, carried with it the macers.h.i.+p.[5] _Hinc illae lacrymae_.

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I left St. Andrews early on a bright autumn morning, my kind old friend, who had insisted on getting up to serve my ma.s.s, waving me good-bye under his hospitable porch--a last good-bye it proved to be, for I never saw him again.[6] Before going south I spent a few days at Aberdeen, having some business with our good bishop. I stayed with Malcolm Hay of Seaton (one of my very few Catholic relations) at his pretty old place on Donside. From the windows one looked across the river, and up a wooded brae, to the venerable towers of St. Machar's Cathedral. Malcolm motored me one day to Blairs College; I had not before seen the new buildings and church of our Scottish seminary, quite an imposing pile as viewed from the much-frequented Deeside road.

We found the Archbishop of St. Andrews (Mgr. Smith) at tea with the Rector and his professorial staff, who were all most kind and civil. I heard here of the elevation of the eminent advocate, Campbell of Skerrington, to the Scottish Bench--the first Catholic Lord of Session for generations, if not centuries.

I was due in Oxford before the opening of the autumn term, in view of my prospective "flitting" from our Benedictine Hall; but I first fulfilled a long {125} overdue engagement to pay a visit to some French friends (the Marquis de Franquetot and his wife) in Picardy. Their pretty chateau, embowered in big chestnut-trees, was some ten miles from Boulogne, and we drove thither on Sunday to high ma.s.s at St.

Nicholas-in-the-Market, as my host wanted me to hear the French Bishops' joint pastoral (the first they had been permitted to issue for a great number of years) on Christian education. M. de Franquetot said it had been prepared under the roof of my old friend Lady Sophia Palmer, Comtesse de Franqueville, who, with her excellent husband, had entertained the whole hierarchy for a week at their beautiful hotel in the Bois de Boulogne. The congregation at St. Nicholas was very large and devout, comprising, as I was pleased to observe,[7] many men of all ranks and ages; and the long pastoral, addressed "aux peres et meres de famille," and interspersed with admirable comments from the good cure, was listened to with close attention, and approval, which the "peres de famille" occasionally showed by thumping the floor with sticks or umbrellas, and muttering--not always _sotto voce_--"Tres bien dit,"--"ils ont bien raison," and so on. I was very glad to have been present. Boulogne seemed full of British trippers; and I was amused, as we drove along the sea-front, to see the number of unmistakably French eating-houses which labelled themselves by such enticing t.i.tles as the "Royal English Chop {126} House" and the "Margate Bar." Some, more accommodating still, announced in their windows that "Messrs. the Britannic tourists who arrive furnished with their own provisions may eat them here gratuitously." Could the _Entente_ go further? I had hardly seen the pleasant town since I had lived for a year in its environs with my family as a little boy; and the narrow bustling streets looked to me much as they used to under the Empire, when my father would point out to us the gallant Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique swaggering along--"the finest soldiers in the world, sir--fought beside us in the Crimea,"--six short years before the _debacle_ of 1870. We pa.s.sed through Pont-de-Brique, and asked for the Chateau Neuf, the big rambling house in an unkempt garden which had been our home; but no one could point it out to us.

My French visit was brought to an agreeable close by a trip across the Channel ("Why do you call it the _English_ Channel, you others?" my hostess asked me; "to us it is only La Manche!") in a beautiful schooner yacht belonging to a friend of the de Franquetots. We scudded along the English coast in bright suns.h.i.+ne, before a strong south-easterly breeze, finally landing at Southampton, whence I made my way to Kneller Court, which I found as friendly and hospitable as ever: Admiral Sir Percy and Lady Scott at luncheon with my kind sister-in-law, and subalterns and sub-lieutenants dropping in later for tennis and tea. My brother drove me up to Fort Nelson, and showed me his 60-pounders and the interior of the fort, one of the chain erected at enormous cost by Palmerston fifty years before, and now absolutely useless except as barracks. {127} Next day I escorted my pretty niece by dogcart, train and tram to Hilsea, to see the Gunners'

sports--gun-driving, tent-pegging, wrestling on horseback, and so forth. It was my fifty-fifth birthday, and my health was pledged at dinner, with musical honours, by the merry party of relatives and friends. On October 1 I reached Oxford, superintended the transport of my effects from Beaumont Street (where my successor, Dom Anselm Parker, was already installed as Master of our Hall) to St. Aldate's, and received a kind welcome there from my host and new "chief," Mgr.

Kennard. He was suffering from the peculiar const.i.tutional disturbance--I believe a form of suppressed gout (King Edward was in his last years a victim to it) which keeps people always on the move; and this chronic restlessness took him away so constantly from Oxford that a great deal of his pastoral work--the spiritual superintendence of fifty or sixty Catholic undergraduates, scattered all over the university, at once devolved to great extent on me. The experiment of sending Catholic boys to Oxford (and Cambridge) had by this time pa.s.sed out of the experimental stage, and had on the whole justified the antic.i.p.ations of those to whose initiative it had been due. There were, of course, a few failures and a few wastrels among our small contingent of undergraduates; but on the whole they were a good lot of young fellows, who did credit to the various Catholic schools where they had been trained. And their personal kindness to me was such that it was a real pleasure to find oneself in fairly intimate relations with them, and to be of any service to them that one could.

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The good Monsignore hardly ever returned from his many absences without bringing a friend or two with him; and his great recreation at this time was driving his guests about in a fine motor (a new toy) which he had lately bought from his nephew Fritz Ponsonby, the King's equerry.

Fritz and his charming wife stayed with us this autumn, as did also our host's brother, Colonel Hegan Kennard, who was considerably the older, but much the more vigorous and energetic of the two.[8] He attended service on Sunday at the Evangelical church close by, and came back indignant. "By George, sir, I never saw anything so slovenly and slipshod in my life; disgraceful, sir, positively disgraceful!" I took him to hear Mrs. Garrett-Fawcett speak at a woman-suffrage debate at the Union--a most plausible lady, but we voted against her by a large majority. I found the motor an agreeable means of visiting various places of interest in the neighbourhood--Dorchester Abbey, an epitome of architecture from Early Norman to Late Perpendicular, but the interior spoilt by the bad taste of the Ritualistic fittings; the grand old Augustinian minster of Burford; and Cuddesdon, a miniature cathedral, with its western porch and ma.s.sive central tower. It was over this porch that the ladies of Cuddesdon, in years gone by, wis.h.i.+ng to do honour on some feast-day to their beloved diocesan Samuel Wilberforce, and not less beloved Archdeacon Alfred Pott, displayed their joint initials wrought in evergreens. "S.O.A.P.," read {129} the Bishop as he paused before the western gable. "Surely an enemy hath done this," he sorrowfully muttered, and proceeded on his way.

An excursion or two from Oxford I remember this autumn: one to Downside, where it was always a happiness to go and spend a church-festival with my Benedictine brethren; another to Eton, where I gazed with dismay on the new school-hall with its unsightly dome, and wondered if this was really the best the Committee of Taste could achieve by way of South African War Memorial.[9] I met afterwards quite a contingent of Scotsmen (Arthur Hay, the Duke of Roxburghe's brother, etc.) at luncheon with the Irish Guards at Victoria Barracks, where I used to breakfast of a Sunday morning--a dissipation forbidden, I believe, to modern Etonians--with an uncle in the Scots Fusilier Guards, in my own school days. I went to London that evening to dine with, and read afterwards a paper on "Jerusalem of To-day" to, the Guild of SS. Gregory and Luke, my host being Sir John Knill, Sheriff of London, who was two years later to occupy the civic chair, as his excellent father had done before him. On another evening I attended our Westminster Dining-club, to hear Fr. R. H. Benson read us an essay on "The Value of Fiction"--interesting, as coming from a successful novelist, and of course brilliant; but I agreed with only about half of it.

Ninian Crichton Stuart had engaged me to go and {130} support him at the St. Andrew's Day banquet of the Caledonian Society of Cardiff, the suffrages of which city he was at that time wooing as Conservative candidate, much a.s.sisted by his clever and charming wife. I stayed with them at their pretty home near Llandaff, and we motored in to the patriotic banquet, which began at 6.30 and lasted nearly five hours! I proposed the princ.i.p.al toast, and had of course no difficulty in showing (as one of the newspaper reports remarked) that all the chief posts in the Empire--political, ecclesiastical, legal and administrative, were, with the most insignificant exceptions, held by Scotsmen. Bagpipes, of course, skirled and whisky flowed freely; and the national enthusiasm reached its height when the haggis was borne round the hall in procession, carried by the white-clad chef and preceded by the pipe-major, playing his best and loudest in honour of the "chief of pudding race." I left Llandaff next morning, Ringan, Lady Ninian's pretty baby, crowing good-bye to me from his mother's arms,[10] and spent an hour or two in Cardiff with Bishop Hedley, who expressed his hope that I would help Kennard at Oxford as long as I could, and would ultimately succeed him as chaplain. We visited together the new and splendid town-hall, the finest munic.i.p.al building I had ever seen. The Oxford term ended in the following week, {131} and I made my way north to Fort Augustus, where I found discussion in progress as whether we should or should not sell our house and estate of Ardachie, for which we had several good offers. I said yes; for the place, though not without its attractions, had been altogether more of a burden than a profit to us for a good many years.[11] Whilst at Fort Augustus, I addressed, by desire of the community, letters to the Abbot-Primate in Rome, as well as to our own bishop, urging, for many weighty reasons, the reincorporation of our abbey into the English Benedictine Congregation, from which it had been separated for just twenty-six years.

[1] Parodied in _Punch_ (I think by that inveterate punster the then editor, F. C. Burnand), under the t.i.tles of _Goeth Down as an Oyster_ and _Red in the Nose is She_. It is the Scottish hero of one of these romances, I forget which (I mean, of course, the original, not the parody), who shows his emotion at a critical moment by "cramming half a yard of yellow beard into his mouth!"

[2] The bag consisted of an a.s.sortment of miscellaneous fowl. Bute was at this period of his career something of the typical Briton whose idea of happiness, according to some French observer, is more or less summed up in the formula: "My friends, it is a fine day: let us go out and kill something!"

[3] In the preface to _Rod, Root, and Flower_. The pa.s.sage was quite new to me.

[4] From the _Boke of St. Albans_ (1486).

[5] An antique privilege of the kind would appeal irresistibly to Bute--_tenaci propositi viro_; he stuck to his guns, not only claiming the right of presentation, but actually exercising it at the next vacancy. I am not qualified to p.r.o.nounce on the vexed question; but my experience is that in such matters the big man usually gets his way, and the smaller has to go to the wall. What was settled after Bute's death I know not. Anyhow--the last Lord of Falkland lies among the lilies in a war cemetery in France; and the memorial chapel in his park, near by the House of Falkland, was designed by the present laird of Myres.

[6] George Angus, for nearly a quarter of a century resident priest at St. Andrews, died there on St. Patrick's Day (March 17), 1909.

[7] Less pleasing was it to notice the outside walls and very doors of the old church plastered all over with flaring _affiches_ of music-hall performances, pictures of ballet-dancers, etc. "Cette canaille de Republique!" murmured in my ear, as we drove off, my friend and host, whose sympathies were entirely with the _ancien regime_.

[8] More of a man, in short. "Dear old Charlie," he said to me, "was good at games when he was at Harrow, and a capital runner. All the same, he was always a bit of an old woman, and always will be!"

[9] I wrote, I fear, rather heatedly to good old Ainger (Secretary of the War Fund), on what seemed to me the painful incongruity of the building with its surroundings. "Many people, I believe," he replied with admirable restraint, "feel quite as you do on this matter; but no one has expressed himself quite so strongly!"

[10] Poor little Ringan! (his name was the ancient "pet" form of "Ninian," the saint of Galloway). On the election-day, a year or so afterwards, the burgesses of Cardiff smiled to see him driving through the streets in a motor from which flew a bannerette recommending them to "Vote for Daddy!" There was universal regret, a few days later, at the sad news that the little electioneerer had succ.u.mbed to a chill caught on the occasion of his first public appearance, when less than two years old. See _post._ page 176.

[11] The actual tenant, Colonel Campbell, whose wife was a Catholic, eventually bought the property.

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CHAPTER VIII

1908-1909

I spent the Christmas of 1908, as usual, very pleasantly at Beaufort.

For the first time for many years the family was absolutely _au complet_: the services of the season in the beautiful chapel were well attended; and I sympathized with the happiness of my kind hostess, as she knelt at the altar at midnight ma.s.s surrounded by all her children, without exception. There were grandchildren, too, of all ages, who amused themselves vastly in spite of appalling weather, rain, snow, frost, thaw, and gales, following one another in rapid and unwelcome succession. The children acted a pretty and touching miracle-play, the hand-painted programme whereof still adorns my sc.r.a.p-book; and there were seasonable revels of various kinds. At New Year somebody announced that 1909 was to be a great year of anniversaries, 1809 having been _annus mirabilis_. We remembered (with difficulty) eight celebrities born that year--Mendelssohn, E. Barrett Browning, Darwin, Tennyson, O. Wendell Holmes, Lord Houghton, W. E. Gladstone, and Abraham Lincoln, but could think of no others. This reminded some one else that I. Disraeli called thirty-seven the "fatal age of genius,"

four great men (among others) who died at that age having been Raphael, Mozart, {133} Byron and Burns. I wound up with a statement new, I think, to everybody, viz., that Sat.u.r.day was the fatal day of the week to the English Royal Family (Hanoverian Line). I have not followed the matter down to quite recent times; but it is undoubtedly singular that William III., Queen Anne, George I., II., III., and IV., the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent, the Prince Consort, and Princess Alice all died on a Sat.u.r.day.

I stayed at Loudoun Castle on my way south, finding there a big party of young men and maidens--Howards of Glossop, Hastings', Bellasis', Beauclercs, and Beth.e.l.ls, gathered for an Eglinton Hunt Ball (recalling the days of my youth). Nearly all were Catholics, so I had quite a congregation in the little chapel, redecorated (with the rest of the castle) since my previous visit. I was back in Oxford before the middle of January for the Lent term, to me always a more interesting period than the golden weeks of summer, when everybody's heads seemed to be full of nothing but amus.e.m.e.nt and sport. Our Sunday conferences were given this term by Father Kenelm Vaughan (the late Cardinal's missionary brother), who used to arrive for the week-ends with no luggage save a little well-worn Bible hanging from the girdle of his ca.s.sock and (possibly) a toothbrush in his pocket. If there ever was a man who lived entirely in "a better country, and that an heavenly," it was Kenelm. Like all the Vaughans, he was of striking appearance; and his personality, as well as his appealing eloquence, made a great impression on his young hearers, although his unconventional sayings and doings had an occasionally disconcerting effect on our good host and his guests, which used to remind me of {134} Jerome's "Man in the Third Floor Back." Wilfrid Ward was with us for a day or two, with a great flow of conversation, chiefly about himself. He read an interesting paper to our Newman Society on "The Writing of the Apologia"--antic.i.p.atory gleanings, of course (if the phrase is permissible), of his great forthcoming biography, and including several of the Cardinal's unpublished letters. There was a record meeting of the Society a little later, to hear W. H. Mallock on (or "down on") Socialism. Many dons of note were present, and there was a brisk debate, W. H. M. holding his own very well. At supper afterwards I ventured to remind him of two sentences of his (I forget from which of his writings) which had given me much pleasure:--

"The Catholic Church is the Columbus of modern society, who will guide us eventually to the new moral continent which other explorers are trying in vain to reach."

"An aristocracy is the best of all possible orders, in the worst of all possible worlds."

Our good Monsignore was nominally at home during these weeks, but in a restless and excitable state. He would exhaust himself by feverish energy at golf for a day or two, then rush off in his motor, "for change," with valet and chauffeur, and return more tired than he had gone away. He attended one evening a big golfing-dinner at the Master of University's: dined well (according to his own account), drank hock, old port, and Benedictine, came home and rolled about all night in indescribable agony. Most of his duties he delegated to me, including, sometimes, the task of "interviewing" bewildered Catholic parents, to whom Oxford university life was an absolute _terra incognita_, and who {135} were puzzled or anxious about their sons' doings. Poor Lady E---- B----! I remember still the dismay with which she came to tell me how her boy had made friends in college with an Egyptian Moslem ("an unbaptized heathen Turk," was her description of him), and was bent on taking "digs" (lodgings) with him in the following term. I felt sympathy with the Catholic mother in her instinctive dislike to this prospect; but I felt none with the indignation of another parent (a distinguished diplomatist) at the refusal of one of the most sought-after colleges to admit his son. The fact was, as I had, after due inquiry, to explain tactfully to the aggrieved parent, that the youth (a pupil of one of our smaller Catholic schools) gave himself, at the preliminary interview with the college authorities, such "confounded airs" (as one of the dons expressed it) that they would have nothing to say to him. Probably the poor lad's "airs" were only one of the many forms in which extreme shyness manifests itself; anyhow it is fair to add that this was an exceptional case, and that our Catholic freshmen, as a whole, made a favourable impression by their good manners and modesty of demeanour. One Head, who had no sympathy at all with the Catholic religion, told me that so pleased was he with the Catholic contingent in his college, that he would willingly admit as many more as I cared to recommend to him.

Of events of general interest this spring, I recall a fascinating lecture by Sven Hedin on his Tibetan travels. The eminent explorer had a b.u.mper audience and a great reception, and was given an honorary degree by Convocation next day. Kennard and I agreed in resenting his arrogant and b.u.mptious {136} manner; and the tone of some of his remarks might have prepared us for the outburst of anti-English fanaticism for which he made himself notorious a few years later.

There was a big gathering at the Schools one evening in celebration of the centenary of Darwin. The oratorical tributes and panegyrics were, as usual, so lengthy as to become wearisome; but an interesting feature was the presence of three of Darwin's sons, of whom one (Sir George) gave us some pleasant personal details and reminiscences of his distinguished father. His affectionate loyalty to a parent's memory one can sympathize with and understand; but I confess that, reading the "pulpit references" to the centenary that week, I was puzzled to comprehend how Christian ministers could "let themselves go" in indiscriminating panegyric of a man of whom I hope it is not uncharitable, as it is certainly not untrue, to say that he was, if any man ever was, a self-confessed unbeliever in revelation and in Christ.[1] The utterances on such an occasion of a distinguished occupant of the university pulpit a generation earlier[2] would certainly have been pitched in a different key; and so would those of my old friend Dr. Frederick George Lee, whose summary of the logical result of Darwin's teaching was--

The Incarnation is but a dream, the Supernatural a delusion. Our only duties are to feed and to breed. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.

I received into the Church this term an undergraduate of one of the smaller colleges, who was reading {137} for natural science honours and rowed in his college boat; but he had evidently had time for reading and reflection as well, and had thought the whole matter out so carefully that I had little left to do. In order to keep him back at the eleventh hour, his tutor (an Anglican divine of some repute) kept propounding to him historical difficulties such as "How was it that Henry of Navarre was allowed by the Pope to have two wives at once?"