in the summer holidays of 1883 mr. warre came to stay with us. john, cecil, and everard were at his house at eton. cecil was to read with him during the holidays. cecil was far the cleverest one of the family and a classical scholar.
mr. warre was pleased to find i was interested in the stories of the greek heroes, but pained because i only knew their names in french, speaking of thesée, medée, and egée. the truth being that i did not know how to pronounce their names in english, as i had learnt all about them from chérie. chérie said that mr. warre had “une tête bien equilibrée.” we performed les enfants d’édouard before him.
the following christmas, mr. warre sent hugo a magnificent book illustrating the song “apples no more,” with water-colour drawings done by his daughter; and he sent me church’s stories from homer, with this latin inscription at the beginning of it:
mauricio baring
jam ab ineunte aetate
veterum fautori
antiquitatis studioso
maeonii carminis argumenta
anglice enucleata
strenia propitia
mittit
edmundus warre
kal. jan.
mdccclxxxiii.
nobody in the house knew what the latin word strenia meant, not even walter durnford, who was then an eton master and destined to be the house tutor of hugo and myself later. but chérie at once said it meant the feast of the new[47] year. the scholars were puzzled and could not conceive how she had known this. the french word étrennes had given her the clue.
the whole of my childhood was a succession of crazes for one thing after another: the first one, before i was three, was a craze for swans, then came trains, then chess, then carpentry, then organs and organ-building. my mother played chess, and directly i learnt the game i used to make all the visitors play with me. my mother used to say that she had once bet my aunt effie she would beat her twenty-one games running, giving her a pawn every time. she won twenty games and was winning the twenty-first, late one night after dinner, when my father said they had played long enough, and must go to bed, which of course they refused to do. he then upset the board, and my mother said she had never been so angry in her life; she had bent back his little finger and had, she hoped, really hurt him.
i can remember playing chess and beating admiral glyn, who came over from plymouth. his ship was the agincourt, a large four-funnelled ironclad. one day we had luncheon on board, and my father was chaffed for an unforgettable solecism, namely, for having smoked on the quarter-deck.
another craze was history. chérie gave the girls a most interesting historical task, which was called doing le siècle de péricles and le siècle de louis xiv., or whose-ever the century might be.
you wrote on one side of a copy-book the chief events and dates of the century in question, and on the other side short biographies of the famous men who adorned it, with comments on their deeds or works. i implored to be allowed to do this, and in a large sprawling handwriting i struggled with le siècle de péricles, making up for my want of penmanship by the passionate admiration i felt for the great men of the past. my history of the world was the opposite to that of mr. h. g. wells!
somebody gave me an american history of the world, a large flat book which told the histories of all the countries of the world in the form of a pictured chart, the countries being represented by long, narrow belts or strips, so that you could follow the destinies of the various empires running parallel to each other and see the smaller countries being absorbed by the greater. the whole book was printed on a long, large, glazed linen sheet, which you could pull out all at one time[48] if you had a room long enough and an unencumbered door. you could also turn over the doubly folded leaves. that was the more convenient way, although you did not get the full effect. this book was a mine of interest. it had pictures of every kind of side-issue and by-event, such as the seven wonders of the world, the coliseum, pictures of crusaders, and portraits of famous men.
about the same time a friend of cecil’s, claud lambton, gave me an historical atlas which was also a great treat. lessons continued with chérie, and i used to learn passages of racine (“le récit de theramène”) and of boileau (“la mollesse,” from the lutrin) by heart, and “les imprécations de camille.” i also read a good deal by myself, but mostly fairy-tales, although there were one or two grown-up books i read and liked. the book i remember liking best of all was a novel called too strange not to be true, by lady georgiana fullerton, which my mother read out to my cousin, bessie bulteel. i thought this a wonderful book; i painted illustrations for it, making a picture of every character.
there was another book which i read to myself and liked, if anything, still better. i found it in everard’s bedroom. it was a yellow-backed novel, and it had on the cover the picture of a dwarf letting off a pistol. it was called the siege of castle something and it was by—that is the question, who was it by? i would give anything to know. the name of the author seemed to me at the time quite familiar, that is to say, a name one had heard people talk about, like trollope or whyte-melville. the story was that of an impecunious family who led a gay life in london at a suburban house called the robber’s cave, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. they were always in debt, and finally, to escape bailiffs, they shut themselves up in a castle on the seacoast, where they were safe unless a bailiff should succeed in entering the house, and present the writ to one of the debtors in person. the bailiffs tried every expedient to force a way into the castle, one of them dressing up as an old dowager who was a friend of the family, and driving up to the castle in a custard-coloured carriage. but the inmates of the house were wily, and they had a mechanical device by which coloured billiard balls appeared on the frieze of the drawing-room and warned them when a bailiff was in the offing.
one day when they had a visitor to tea, a billiard ball[49] suddenly made a clicking noise round the frieze. “what is that for?” asked the interested guest. “that,” said the host, with great presence of mind, “is a signal that a ship is in sight.” as tea went on, a perfect plethora of billiard balls of different colours appeared in the frieze. “there must be a great many ships in sight to-day,” said the guest. “a great many,” answered the host.
whether a bailiff ever got into the house i don’t know. the picture on the cover seems to indicate that he did. the book was in everard’s cupboard for years, and then, “suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.” i never have been able to find it again, although i have never stopped looking for it. once i thought i had run it to earth. i once met at the vice-provost’s house at eton a man who was an expert lion-hunter and who seemed to have read every english novel that had ever been published. i described him the book. he had read it. he remembered the picture on the cover and the story, but, alas! he could recall neither its name nor that of the author.
in french les malheurs de sophie, les mémoires d’un ?ne, sans famille, were the first early favourites, and then the numerous illustrated works of jules verne.
walter scott’s novels used to be held before us like an alluring bait. “when you are nine years old you shall read the talisman.” even the order in which scott was to be read was discussed. the talisman first, and then ivanhoe, and then quentin durward, woodstock and kenilworth, rob roy and guy mannering.
the reading of the waverley novels was a divine, far-off event, to which all one’s life seemed to be slowly moving, and as soon as i was nine my mother read out the talisman to me. the girls had read all walter scott except, of course, the heart of midlothian, which was not, as they said, for the j.p. (jeune personne) and (but why not, i don’t know) peveril of the peak. they also read miss yonge’s domestic epics. there i never followed them, except for reading the little duke, the lances of lynwood, and the historical romance of the chaplet of pearls, which seemed to me thrilling.
i believe children absorb more kultur from the stray grown-up conversation they hear than they learn from books. at luncheon one heard the grown-up people discussing books and chérie talking of new french novels. not a word of all this[50] escaped my notice. i remember the excitement when john inglesant was published and marion crawford’s mr. isaacs and, just before i went to school, treasure island.
but besides the books of the day, one absorbed a mass of tradition. my father had an inexhaustible memory, and he would quote to himself when he was in the train, and at any moment of stress and emotion a muttered quotation would rise to his lips, often of the most incongruous kind. sometimes it was a snatch of a hymn of heber’s, sometimes a lyric of byron’s, sometimes an epitaph of pope’s, some lines of dryden or churchill, or a bit of shakespeare.
one little poem he was fond of quoting was:
“mrs. gill is very ill
and nothing can improve her,
unless she sees the tuileries
and waddles round the louvre.”
i believe it is by hook.[2] i remember one twilight at the end of a long train journey, when papa, muffled in a large ulster, kept on saying:
“false, fleeting, perjured clarence,
that stabbed me in the field by tewkesbury,”
and then byron’s “i saw thee weep,” and when it came to
“it could not match the living rays that filled that glance of thine,”
there were tears in his eyes. then after a pause he broke into cowper’s hymn, “hark my soul,” and i heard him whispering:
“can a woman’s tender care
cease towards the child she bare?
yes, she may forgetful be,
yet will i remember thee.”
but besides quotations from the poets he knew innumerable tags, epitaphs, epigrams, which used to come out on occasions: sidney smith’s receipt for a salad; miss fanshawe’s riddle, “’twas whispered in heaven, ’twas muttered in hell”; and many other poems of this nature.
my father spoke french and german and spanish. he knew many of schiller’s poems by heart. soon after he was married, he bet my mother a hundred pounds that she would not learn schiller’s poem “die glocke” by heart. my mother[51] did not know german. the feat was accomplished, but the question was how was he to be got to hear her repeat the poem, for, whenever she began he merely groaned and said, “don’t, don’t.” one day they were in paris and had to drive somewhere, a long drive into the suburbs which was to take an hour or more, and my mother began, “fest gemauert in der erde,” and nothing would stop her till she came to the end. she won her hundred pounds. and when my father’s silver wedding came about, in 1886, he was given a silver bell with some lines of the “glocke” inscribed on it.
mrs. christie was decidedly of the opinion that we ought to learn german, and so were my father and mother, but german so soon after the franco-prussian war was a sore subject in the house owing to chérie, who cried when the idea of learning german was broached, and i remember one day hearing my mother tell mrs. christie that she simply couldn’t do it. so much did i sympathise with chérie that i tore out a picture of bismarck from a handsome illustrated volume dealing with the franco-prussian war—an act of sympathy that chérie never forgot. so my father and mother sadly resigned themselves, and it was settled we were not to learn german. i heard a great deal about german poetry all the same, and one of the outstanding points in the treasury of traditions that i amassed from listening to what my father and mother said was that goethe was a great poet. i knew the story of faust from a large illustrated edition of that work which used to lie about at coombe.
but perhaps the most clearly defined of all the traditions that we absorbed were those relating to the actors and the singers of the past, especially to the singers. my father was no great idolater of the past in the matter of acting, and he told me once that he imagined macready and the actors of his time to have been ranters.
it was french acting he preferred—the art of got, delaunay, and coquelin—although fechter was spoken of with enthusiasm, and many of the english comedians, the wigans, mrs. keeley, sam sothern, buckstone. the bancrofts and hare and mrs. kendal he admired enormously, and toole made him shake with laughter.
at a play he either groaned if he disliked the acting or shook with laughter if amused, or cried if he was moved. irving[52] made him groan as romeo or benedick, but he admired him in melodrama and character parts, and as shylock, while ellen terry melted him, and when he saw her play macbeth, he kept on murmuring, “the dear little child.” but it was the musical traditions which were the more important—the old days of italian opera, the last days of the bel canto—mario and grisi and, before them, ronconi and rubini and tamburini.
my mother was never tired of telling of grisi flinging herself across the door in the lucrezia borgia, dressed in a parure of turquoises, and mario singing with her the duet in the huguenots. mario, they used to say, was a real tenor, and had the right méthode. none of the singers who came afterwards was allowed to be a real tenor. jean de reszke was emphatically not a real tenor. none of the german school had any méthode. i suppose caruso would have been thought a real tenor, but i doubt if his méthode would have passed muster. there was one singer who had no voice at all, but who was immensely admired and venerated because of his méthode. i think his name was signor brizzi. he was a singing-master, and i remember saying that i preferred a singer who had just a little voice.
my father loathed modern german opera. mozart, donizetti, rossini, and verdi enchanted him, and my mother, steeped in classical music as she was, preferred italian operas to all others. patti was given full marks both for voice and méthode, and trebelli, albani, and nilsson were greatly admired. but wagner was thought noisy, and faust and carmen alone of more modern operas really tolerated.
sometimes my mother would teach me the accompaniments of the airs in donizetti’s lucrezia borgia, while she played on the concertina, and she used always to say: “do try and get the bass right.” the principle was, and i believe it to be a sound one, that if the bass is right, the treble will take care of itself. what she and my aunt m’aimée called playing with a foolish bass was as bad as driving a pony with a loose rein, which was for them another unpardonable sin.
on the french stage, tradition went back as far as rachel, although my mother never saw her, and i don’t think my father did; but desclée was said to be an incomparable artist, of the high-strung, nervous, delicate type. the accounts of her remind one of elenora duse, whose acting delighted my[53] father when he saw her. “est-elle jolie?” someone said of desclée. “non, elle est pire.”
another name which meant something definite to me was that of fargeuil, who i imagine was an intensely emotional actress with a wonderful charm of expression and utterance. my father was never surprised at people preferring the new to the old. he seemed to expect it, and when i once told him later that i preferred stevenson to scott, a judgment i have since revised and reversed, he was not in the least surprised, and said: “of course, it must be so; it is more modern.” but he was glad to find i enjoyed dickens, laughed at pickwick, and thought vanity fair an interesting book, when i read these books later at school.
we were taken to see some good acting before i went to school. we saw the last performances of school and ours at the haymarket with the bancrofts. my mother always spoke of mrs. bancroft as marie wilton: we saw hare in the colonel and the quiet rubber; mrs. kendal in the ironmaster, and sarah bernhardt in hernani. she had left the théatre fran?ais then, and was acting with her husband, m. damala. this, of course, was the greatest excitement of all, as i knew many passages of the play, and the whole of the last act by heart. i can remember now sarah’s exquisite modulation of voice when she said:
“tout s’est éteint, flambeaux et musique de fête,
rien que la nuit et nous, félicité parfaite.”
the greatest theatrical treat of all was to go to the st. james’s theatre, because mr. hare was a great friend of the family and used to come and stay at membland, so that when we went to his theatre we used to go behind the scenes. i saw several of his plays: pinero’s hobby horse, lady clancarty, and the first night of as you like it. this was on saturday, 24th january 1885.
one night we were given the queen’s box at covent garden by aunt m’aimée, and we went to the opera. it was a?da.
we also saw pasca in la joie fait peur, so that the tradition that my sisters could hand on to their children was linked with a distant past.
when mary anderson first came to london we went to see her in the lady of lyons, and never shall i forget her first[54] entrance on the stage. this was rendered the more impressive by an old lady with white hair making an entrance just before mary anderson, and cecil, who was with us, pretending to think she was mary anderson, and saying with polite resignation that she was a little less young than he had expected. when mary anderson did appear, her beauty took our breath away; she was dressed in an empire gown with her hair done in a pinnacle, and she looked like a picture of the empress josephine: radiant with youth, and the kind of beauty that is beyond and above discussion; eyes like stars, classic arms, a nobly modelled face, and matchless grace of carriage. next year we all went in a box to see her in pygmalion and galatea, a play that i was never tired of reproducing afterwards on my toy theatre.
as i grew older, i remember going to one or two grown-up parties in london. one was at grosvenor house, a garden party, with, i think, a bazaar going on. there was a red-coated band playing in the garden, and my cousin, betty ponsonby, who was there, asked me to go and ask the band to play a valse called “jeunesse dorée.” i did so, spoke to the bandmaster, and walked to the other end of the lawn. to my surprise i saw the whole band following me right across the lawn, and taking up a new position at the place i had gone to. whether they thought i had meant they could not be heard where they were, i don’t know, but i was considerably embarrassed; so, i think, was my cousin, betty.
another party i remember was at stafford house. my mother was playing the violin in an amateur ladies’ string-band, conducted by lady folkestone. my cousin, bessie bulteel, had to accompany madame neruda in a violin solo and pianoforte duet. the princess of wales and the three little princesses were sitting in the front row on red velvet chairs. the princess of wales in her orders and jewels seemed to me, and i am sure to all the grown-up people as well, like the queen of a fairy-tale who had strayed by chance into the world of mortals; she was different and more graceful than anyone else there.
there is one kind of beauty which sends grown-up people into raptures, but which children are quite blind to; but there is another and rarer order of beauty which, while it amazes the grown-up and makes the old cry, binds children with a spell. it is an order of beauty in which the grace of every movement, the radiance of the smile, and the sure promise of lasting youth[55] in the cut of the face make you forget all other attributes, however perfect.
of such a kind was the grace and beauty of the princess of wales. she was as lovely then as queen alexandra.
i was taken by my father in my black velvet suit. i was sitting on a chair somewhere at the end of a row, and couldn’t see very well. one of the little princesses smiled at me and beckoned to me, so i boldly walked up and sat next to them, and the princess of wales then took me on her knee, greatly to the surprise of my mother when she walked on to the platform with the band. the audience was splendid and crowded with jewelled beauties, and i remember one of the grown-ups asking another: “which do you admire most, lady clarendon or lady dudley?”
another party i remember was an afternoon party at sir frederic leighton’s house, with music. every year he gave this party, and every year the same people were invited. the music was performed by the greatest artists: joachim, madame neruda, piatti the violoncellist, and the best pianists of the day, in a large moorish room full of flowers. it was the most intimate of concerts. the audience, which was quite small, used to sit in groups round the pianoforte, and only in the more leisurely london of the ’eighties could you have had such an exquisite performance and so naturally cultivated, so unaffectedly musical an audience. the leighton party looked like a du maurier illustration.
when we were in london my father would sometimes come back on saturday afternoons with a present for one of us, not a toy, but something much more rare and fascinating—a snuff-box that opened with a trick, or a bit of china. these were kept for us by chérie in a cupboard till we should be older. one day he took out of a vitrine a tiny doll’s cup of dark blue sèvres which belonged to a large service and gave it me, and i have got it now. but the present i enjoyed more than any i have ever received in my life, except, perhaps, the fifty-shilling train, was one day when we were walking down a path at membland, he said: “this is your path; i give it to you and the gate at the end.” it was the inclusion of the little iron gate at the end which made that present poignantly perfect.
there was no end to my father’s generosity. his gifts were on a large scale and reached far and wide. he used to collect[56] breguet watches; but he did not keep them; he gave them away to people who he thought would like one. he had a contempt for half measures, and liked people to do the big thing on a large scale. “so-and-so,” he used to say, “has behaved well.” that meant had been big and free-handed, and above small and mean considerations. he liked the best: the old masters, a turner landscape, a velasquez, a watteau; good furniture, good china, good verse, and good acting; shakespeare, which he knew by heart, so if you went with him to a play such as hamlet, he could have prompted the players; schiller, juvenal, pope, and dryden and byron; the acting of the comédie fran?aise, and ellen terry’s diction and pathos. tennyson was spoilt for him by the mere existence of the “may queen”; but when he saw a good modern thing, he admired it. he said that mrs. patrick campbell in her performance of mrs. ebbsmith, which we went to the first night of, was a real erscheinung, and when all the pictures of watts were exhibited together at burlington house he thought that massed performance was that of a great man. he was no admirer of burne-jones, but the four pictures of the “briar rose” struck him as great pictures.
he was quite uninsular, and understood the minds and the ways of foreigners. he talked foreign languages not only easily, but naturally, without effort or affectation, and native turns of expression delighted him, such as a german saying, “lieber herr oberkellner,” or, as i remember, a frenchman saying after a performance of a melodrama at a casino where the climax was rather tamely executed, “ce coup de pistolet était un peu mince.” and once i won his unqualified praise by putting at the end of a letter, which i had written to my italian master at florence, and which i had had to send via the city in order to have a money order enclosed with it, “abbi la gentilezza di mandarmi un biglettino.” this use of a diminutive went straight to my father’s heart. nothing amused him more than instances of john bullishness; for instance, a young man who once said to him at contrexéville: “i hate abroad.”
he conformed naturally to the customs of other countries, and as he had travelled all over the world, he was familiar with the mind and habit of every part of europe. he was completely unselfconscious, and was known once when there was a ball going on in his own house at charles street to have[57] disappeared into his dressing-room, undressed, and walked in his dressing-gown through the dining-room, where people were having supper, with a bedroom candle in his hand to the back staircase to go up to his bedroom. his warmth of heart was like a large generous fire, and the people who warmed their hands at it were without number.
with all his comprehension of foreigners and their ways, he was intensely english; and he was at home in every phase of english life, and nowhere more so than pottering about farms and fields on his grey cob, saying: “the whole of that fence must come down—every bit of it,” or playing whist and saying about his partner, one of my aunts: “good god, what a fool the woman is!”
whist reminds me of a painful episode. i have already said that i learnt to play long whist in the housekeeper’s room. i was proud of my knowledge, and asked to play one night after dinner at membland with the grown-ups. they played short whist. i got on all right at first, and then out of anxiety i revoked. presently my father and mother looked at each other, and a mute dialogue took place between them, which said clearly: “has he revoked?” “yes, he has.” they said nothing about it, and when the rubber was over my father said: “the dear little boy played very nicely.” but i minded their not knowing that i knew that they knew, almost as much as having revoked. it was a bitter mortification—a real humiliation. later on when i was bigger and at school, the girls and i used to play every night with my father, and our bad play, which never improved, made him so impatient that we invented a code of signals saying, “bêchez” when we wanted spades to lead, and other words for the other suits.
a person whom we were always delighted to see come into the house was our uncle johnny. when we were at school he always tipped us. if we were in london he always suggested going to a play and taking all the stalls.
when we went out hunting with the dartmoor foxhounds he always knew exactly what the fox was going to do, and where it was going. and he never bothered one at the meet. i always thought the meet spoilt the fun of hunting. every person one knew used to come up, say that either one’s girths were too tight or one’s stirrups too long or too short, and set about making some alteration. i was always a bad horseman,[58] although far better as a child than as a grown-up person. and i knew for certain that if there was an open gate with a crowd going through it, my pony would certainly make a dart through that crowd, the gate would be slammed and i should not be able to prevent this happening, and there would be a chorus of curses. but under the guidance of uncle johnny everything always went well.
whenever he came to membland, the first thing he would do would be to sit down and write a letter. he must have had a vast correspondence. then he would tell stories in devonshire dialect which were inimitable.
there are some people who, directly they come into the room, not by anything they say or do, not by any display of high spirits or effort to amuse, make everything brighter and more lively and more gay, especially for children, and uncle johnny was one of those. as the bulteel family lived close to us, we saw them very often. they all excelled at games and at every kind of outdoor sport. the girls were fearless riders and drivers and excellent cricketers. cricket matches at membland were frequent in the summer. many people used to drive from plymouth to play lawn-tennis at pamflete, the bulteels’ house.
we saw most of bessie bulteel, who was the eldest girl. she was a brilliant pianist, with a fairylike touch and electric execution, and her advent was the greatest treat of my childhood. she told thrilling ghost stories, which were a fearful joy, but which made it impossible for me to pass a certain piece of italian furniture on the landing which had a painted triton on it. it looks a very harmless piece of furniture now. i saw it not long ago in my brother cecil’s house. it is a gilt writing-table painted with varnished figures, nymphs and fauns, in the italian manner. the triton sprawls on one side of it recumbent beside a cool source. nothing could be more peaceful or idyllic, but i remember the time when i used to rush past it on the passage in blind terror.
a picturesque figure, as of another age, was my great-aunt, lady georgiana grey, who came to membland once in my childhood. she was old enough to have played the harp to byron. she lived at hampton court and played whist every night of her life, and sometimes went up to london to the play when she was between eighty and ninety. she was not deaf, her sight was undimmed, and she had a great contempt for people[59] who were afraid of draughts. she had a fine aptitude for flat contradiction, and she was a verbal conservative, that is to say, she had a horror of modern locutions and abbreviations, piano for pianoforte, balc?ny for balconi, cucumber for cowcumber, montagu for mountagu, soot for sut, yellow for yallow.
she wore on her little finger an antique onyx ring with a pig engraved on it, and i asked her to give it me. she said: “you shall have it when you are older.” an hour later i went up to her room and said: “i am older now. can i have the ring?” she gave it me. nobody ever sat at a table so bolt upright as she did, and she lived to be ninety-nine. she came back once to membland after my sisters were married.
perhaps the greatest excitement of all our membland life was when the whole of the harbord family, our cousins, used to arrive for christmas. our excitement knew no bounds when we knew they were coming, and chérie used to get so tired of hearing the harbords quoted that i remember her one day in the schoolroom in london opening the window, taking the lamp to it and saying: “j’ouvre cette fenêtre pour éclairer la famille harbord.”
on rainy days at membland there were two rare treats: one was to play hide-and-seek all over the house; the other was to make toffee and perhaps a gingerbread cake in the still-room. the toffee was the ultra-sticky treacle kind, and the cake when finished and baked always had a wet hole in the middle of it. hugo and i used to spend a great deal of time in mr. ellis’ carpenter’s shop. we had tool-boxes of our own, and we sometimes made christmas presents for our father and mother; but our carpentry was a little too imaginative and rather faulty in execution.
not far from membland and about a mile from pamflete there was a small grey queen anne house called “mothecombe.” it nestled on the coast among orchards and quite close to the sandy beach of mothecombe bay, the only sandy beach on our part of the south devon coast. this house belonged to the mildmays, and we often met the mildmay family when we went over there for picnics.
aunt georgie mildmay was not only an expert photographer, but she was one of the first of those rare people who have had a real talent for photography and achieved beautiful and artistic results with it, both in portraits and landscapes.
[60]
whenever hugo and i used to go and see her in london at 46 berkeley square, where she lived, she always gave us a pound, and never a holiday passed without our visiting aunt georgie.
mothecombe was often let or lent to friends in summer. one summer lady de grey took it, and she came over to luncheon at membland, a vision of dazzling beauty, so that, as someone said, you saw green after looking at her. it was like looking at the sun. the house was often taken by a great friend of our family, colonel ellis, who used to spend the summer there with his family, and he frequently stayed at membland with us. i used to look forward to going down to dinner when he was there, and listening to his conversation. he was the most perfect of talkers, because he knew what to say to people of all ages, besides having an unending flow of amusing things to tell, for he made everything he told amusing, and he would sometimes take the menu and draw me a picture illustrating the games and topics that interested us at the moment. we had a game at one time which was to give someone three people they liked equally, and to say those three people were on the top of a tower; one you could lead down gently by the hand, one you must kick down, and the third must be left to be picked by the crows.
we played this one evening, and the next day colonel ellis appeared with a charming pen-and-ink drawing of a louis-quinze marquis leading a poudré lady gently by the hand. if he gave one a present it would be something quite unique—unlike what anyone else could think of; once it was, for me, a silver mug with a twisted handle and my name engraved on it in italics, “maurice baring’s mug, 1885.” his second son, gerald, was a little bit older than i was, and we were great friends. gerald had a delightfully grown-up and blasé manner as a child, and one day, with the perfect manner of a man of the world, he said to me, talking of queen victoria, “the fact is, the woman’s raving mad.”
we used to call colonel ellis “the gay colonel” to carefully distinguish him from colonel edgcumbe, whom we considered a more serious colonel. the mount edgcumbes were neighbours, and lived just over the cornish border at mount edgcumbe. colonel edgcumbe was lord mount edgcumbe’s brother, and often stayed with us. he used to[61] be mercilessly teased, especially by the girls of the bulteel family. one year he was shooting with us and the bulteels got hold of his cartridges and took out the shot, leaving a few good cartridges.
he was put at the hot corner. rocketing pheasants in avalanches soared over his head, and he, of course, missed them nearly all, shooting but one or two. he explained for the rest of the day that it was a curious thing, and that something must be wrong, either with his eyes or with the climate. some new way of tormenting was always found, and, although he was not the kind of man who naturally enjoys a practical joke, he bore it angelically.
his sister, lady ernestine, was rather touchy in the matter of devonshire clotted cream. as mount edgcumbe was just over the border in cornwall, and as clotted cream was made in cornwall as well as in devonshire, she resented its being called devonshire cream and used to call it cornish cream; but when she stayed with us, not wishing to concede the point and yet unwilling to hurt our feelings, she used to call it west-country cream.
another delightful guest was miss pinkie browne, who was irish, gay, argumentative, and contradictious, with smiling eyes, her hair in a net, and an infectious laugh. as a girl she had broken innumerable hearts, but had always refused to marry, as she never could make up her mind. she was extremely musical, and used to sing english and french songs, accompanying herself, with an intoxicating lilt and a languishing expression. as dr. smyth says about tosti’s singing, it was small art, but it was real art. and her voice must have had a rare quality, as she was about fifty when i heard her. such singing is far more enjoyable than that of professional singers, and makes one think of tosti’s saying: “le chant est un truc.” she would make a commonplace song poignantly moving. she used to sing a song called “the conscript’s farewell”:
“you are going far away, far away, from poor jeanette,
there’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget;”
of which the refrain was:
“oh, if i were queen of france,
or still better pope of rome,
i would have no fighting men abroad,
no weeping maids at home.”
[62]
membland was always full of visitors. there were visitors at easter, visitors at whitsuntide, in the autumn for the shooting, and a houseful at christmas: an uncle, general baring, who used to shoot with one arm because he had lost the other in the crimea; my father’s cousin, lord ashburton, who was particular about his food, and who used to say: “that’s a very good dish, but it’s not veau à la bourgeoise”; godfrey webb, who always wrote a little poem in the visitors’ book when he went away; lord granville, who knew french so alarmingly well, and used to ask one the french for words like a big stone upright on the edge of a road and a ship tacking, till one longed to say, like the red queen in alice in wonderland: “what’s the french for fiddle de dee?”; lord and lady lansdowne, mr. and mrs. percy wyndham—mr. wyndham used to take me out riding; he was deliciously inquisitive, so that if one was laughing at one side of the table he would come to one quietly afterwards and ask what the joke had been about; harry cust, radiant with youth and spirits and early success; lady de clifford and her two daughters (katie and maud russell), she carrying an enormous silk bag with her work in it—she was a kind critic of our french plays; lady airlie, and her sister, miss maude stanley, who started being a vegetarian in the house, and told me that henry viii. was a much misunderstood monarch; madame neruda, and once, long before she married him, sir charles hallé. sir charles hallé used to sit down at the pianoforte after dinner, and nothing could dislodge him. variation followed variation, and repeat followed repeat of the stiffest and driest classical sonatas. and one night when this had been going on past midnight, my father, desperate with impatience and sleep, put out the electric light. i am not making an anachronism in talking of electric light, as it had just been put in the house, and was thought to be a most daring innovation.
we had a telegraph office in the house, which was worked by mrs. tudgay. it was a fascinating instrument, rather like a typewriter with two dials and little steel keys round one of them, and the alphabet was the real alphabet and not the morse code. it was convenient having this in the house, but one of the results was that so many jokes were made with it, and so many bogus telegrams arrived, that nobody knew whether a telegram was a real one or not.
[63]
mr. walter durnford, then an eton house master, and afterwards provost of king’s, in a poem he wrote in the visitors’ book, speaks of membland as a place where everything reminded you of the presence of fairy folk, “where telegrams come by the dozen, concocted behind the door.”
certainly people enjoyed themselves at membland, and the christmas parties were one long riot of dance, song, and laughter. welcome ever smiled at membland, and farewell went out sighing.
as i got nearer and nearer to the age of ten, when it was settled that i should go to school, life seemed to become more and more wonderful every day. both at membland and in charles street the days went by in a crescendo of happiness. walks with chérie in london were a daily joy, especially when we went to covent garden and bought chestnuts to roast for tea. the greatest tea treat was to get chérie, who was an inspired cook, to make something she called la petite sauce. you boiled eggs hard in the kettle; and then, in a little china frying-pan over a spirit lamp, the sauce was made, of butter, cream, vinegar, pepper, and the eggs were cut up and floated in the delicious hot mixture. a place of great treats where we sometimes went on saturday afternoons was the aquarium, where acrobats did wonderful things, and you had your bumps told and your portrait cut out in black-and-white silhouette. the phrenologist was not happy in his predictions of my future, as he said i had a professional and mathematical head, and would make a good civil engineer in after-life.
going to the play was the greatest treat of all, and if i heard there was any question of their going to the play downstairs, and mr. deacon, my father’s servant, always used to tell me when tickets were being ordered, i used to go on my knees in the night nursery and pray that i might be taken too. sometimes the answer was direct.
one night my mother and lord mount edgcumbe were going to a pantomime together by themselves. mr. deacon told me, and asked me if i was going too, but nothing had been said about it. i prayed hard, and i went down to my mother’s bedroom as she was dressing for dinner. no word of the pantomime was mentioned on either side. she then, while her hair was being done by d., asked for a piece of paper and scribbled a note and told me to take it down to my father.
[64]
i did so, and my father said: “would you like to go to the pantomime, too?” the answer was in the affirmative.
what a fever one would be in to start in time and to be there at the beginning on nights when we went to the play! how terribly anxious not to miss one moment! how wonderful the moment was before the curtain went up! the delicious suspense, the orchestra playing, and then the curtain rising on a scene that sometimes took one’s breath away, and how calm the grown-up people were. they would not look at the red light in the background, the pink sky which looked like a real pink sky, or perhaps some moving water. people say sometimes it is bad for children to go to the theatre, but do they ever enjoy anything in after life as much? is there any such magic as the curtain going up on the demon’s cave in the pantomime, or the sight in the transformation scene of two silvery fairies rising from the ground on a gigantic wedding cake, and the clown suddenly breaking on the scene, shouting, “here we are again!” through a shower of gold rain and a cloud of different-coloured bengal lights? is there any such pleasure as in suddenly seeing and recognising things in the flesh one had been familiar with for long from books and stories, such as cinderella’s coach, the roc’s egg in sinbad the sailor, or aladdin’s cave, or the historical processions of the kings of england, some of whom you clapped and some of whom you hissed? oh! the charm of changing scenery! a ship moving or still better sinking, a sunset growing red, a forest growing dark; and then the fun! the indescribable fun, of seeing cinderella’s sisters being knocked about in the kitchen, or the babes in the wood being put to bed, and kicking all their bedclothes off directly they had settled down; or best of all, the clown striking the pantaloon with the red-hot poker and the harlequin getting the better of the policeman! harry paine was the clown in those days, and he used, in a hoarse voice, to say to the pantaloon: “i say, joey.” “yes, master,” answered the pantaloon in a feeble falsetto.
childhood bereft of such treats i cannot help thinking must be a sad affair; and it generally happens that if children are not allowed to go to the play, so that they shall enjoy it more when they are grown-up, they end by never being able to enjoy it at all.
one great event of the summer was the eton and harrow[65] match, when cecil and everard used to come up from eton with little pieces of light blue silk in their black coats. john had gone to cambridge, and i hardly remember him as an eton boy. we used to go on a coach belonging to some friends, and one year one of the parkers bowled three of the harrow boys running.
as chérie had been with lord macclesfield in the parker family before she came to us, and as this boy, alex parker, had either been or nearly been one of her pupils, she had a kind of reflected glory from the event.
eton was always surrounded with a glamour of romance. john had rowed stroke in the eton eight, and when cecil rose to the dignity of being captain of the oppidans we were proud indeed. one summer we all went down to eton for the 4th of june.
we went to speeches and had tea in cecil’s room, and strawberry messes, and walked about in the playing-fields and saw the procession of boats and the fireworks.
from that day i was filled with a longing to go to eton, and resented bitterly having to go to a private school first.
another exciting event i remember was a visit to windsor, to the norman tower in windsor castle, where my uncle, henry ponsonby, and my aunt m’aimée lived. this happened one year in the autumn. we stayed a sunday there. the house was, for a child, fraught with romance and interest. first of all there were the prisons. my aunt had discovered and laid bare the stone walls of two octagonal rooms in the tower which had been prisons in the olden times for state prisoners, and she had left the walls bare. there were on them inscriptions carved by the prisoners. she had made these two rooms her sitting-rooms, and they were full of books, and there was a carpenter’s bench in one of these rooms, with a glass of water on it ready for painting.
windsor was itself exciting enough, but i think what struck me most then was the toy cupboard of the boys, fritz, johnny, and arthur. all their toys were arranged in tiers in a little windowless room, a tier belonging to each separate boy, and in the middle of each beautiful and symmetrical arrangement there were toys representing a little room with a table and lamp on it. as if all this was not exciting enough, my cousin betty told me the story of the corsican brothers.
before i went to school my father had to go to contrexéville[66] to take the waters. my father and mother took me with them. i faintly regretted not playing a solo at mademoiselle ida’s pupils’ concert, which was to have been part of the programme, but otherwise the pleasure and excitement at going were unmitigated. we started for paris in july. bessie bulteel came with us, and we stopped a night in paris, at the h?tel bristol. my father took me for a walk in the rue de la paix, and the next day we went to contrexéville. i never enjoyed anything more in my life than those three weeks at contrexéville. there were shops in the hotel gardens called les galeries, where a charming old lady, called madame paillard, with her daughter, thérèse, sold the delicious sweets of nancy, and spoilt me beyond words. the grown-up people played at petits chevaux in the evening, and as i was not allowed to join in that game, the lady of the petits chevaux, mademoiselle rose, had a kind of rehearsal of the game in the afternoon at half-price, in which only i and the actresses of the casino, whom i made great friends with, took part. my special friend was mademoiselle tusini of the eldorado paris music hall. she was a songstress.
one day she asked me to beg madame aurèle, the directrice of the theatre, to let her sing a song at the casino which she had not been allowed to sing, and which was called “les allumettes du général.” mademoiselle tusini said it was her greatest success, and that when she had sung it at nancy, nobody knew where to look. i pleaded her cause; but madame aurèle said, “un jour quand il n’y aura que des messieurs,” so i am afraid the song can hardly have been quite nice. when we went away, mademoiselle tusini gave me a large photograph of herself in the r?le of a commère, carrying a wand. chérie was slightly astonished when she saw it, and when i described the great beauty and the wonderful goodness of mademoiselle tusini, she was not as enthusiastically sympathetic as i could have wished.
there were a great many french children at contrexéville, and i was allowed to join in their games. there was a charming old curé who i made friends with in the village, and his church was the first catholic church i ever entered.
my mother and father used to go to the casino play every night. i was allowed to go once or twice, as mademoiselle tusini had threatened to strike if i left contrexéville without seeing her act, so i was taken to monsieur choufleury restera chez lui, a harmless farce, which is, i believe, often acted by amateurs.
[67]
we stayed there three weeks, and i left in sorrow and tears. we went on for a nachkur to a place in the vosges called géradmer, which is near a lake. one day we drove to a place called the schlucht, and saw the stone marking the frontier into alsace, which was, of course, germany. it was suggested that we should cross over, but i, mindful of chérie, refused to set foot on the stolen and violated territory.
on the way back we stayed a day and night in paris, and bought presents for all those at home. in the evening we went to the théatre fran?ais and saw no less an actor than delaunay in musset’s play, on ne badine pas avec l’amour. delaunay had a voice like silver, and his diction on the stage was incomparable. i remember count benckendorff once saying about him that whereas one often bewailed the failure of an actor to look the part of a grand seigneur, when one saw delaunay one wished anyone off the stage could be half as distinguished as he was on the stage.
my father took me to the louvre and showed me the mona lisa and watteau’s large picture of a pierrot: “gilles” and the galérie d’apollon, and late in the afternoon we drove to the bois de boulogne.
chérie had always told us of the magasin du louvre, where as children went out they were given, as george, in the poem, when he had been as good as gold, an immense balloon. this balloon had always been one of my dreams, and we went there, and the reality was fully up to all expectations.
we bought some nonnettes in the rue st. honoré and a great many toys at the paradis des enfants.
the next time i went to contrexéville i was at school. i wore an eton jacket and a top hat in paris; this created a sensation. a man said to me in the rue de rivoli, “monsieur a son gibus.” i also remember receiving a wonderful welcome in the galeries.
with the end of the first visit to contrexéville i will end this chapter, for it was the end of a chapter of life, the happiest and most wonderful chapter of all. new gates were opened; but the gate on the fairyland of childhood was shut, and for ever afterwards one could only look through the bars, but never more be a free and lawful citizen of that enchanted country, where life was like a fairy-tale that seemed almost too good to be true, and yet so endlessly long and so infinitely happy that it seemed as if it must last for ever.
