I suspect he was an unhappy man, and he was certainly a very lonely one, and his loneliness no doubt was accentuated to him by his shy reticence. He kept himself largely apart from other masters; to the best of my knowledge I never saw him speak to a woman, and all the time he was stewing in the affection which he was incapable of expressing. But he had, out and away, by far the most forcible and attractive personality of any tutor I came across either at school or the University; he was one of those reserved demi-gods whom a boy obeys, reverences, and loves for no ostensible reason.
CHAPTER VIII
LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON
WHILE I was still in my second year at Marlborough a thoroughly exciting and delightful thing happened at home, for my father was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, and up trooped his pleased and approving family to take possession of Lambeth Palace and Addington Park with, so far as I was concerned, a feeling that he had done great credit to us. Delightful as Truro had been, we all welcomed the idea of these expanded grandeurs, and felt colossally capable of taking advantage of them to the utmost. How great a man my father had become was most pointedly brought home to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marlborough soon after his appointment for my confirmation, I could, then and there, measure the altitude of his pinnacle by the fact that there appeared on the school notice-board next day an inscription to the effect that His Grace had asked that a whole holiday should be given to the school in honour of his visit. He had just asked for it, so it appeared, and in honour of his visit, it was granted. “Can’t you be confirmed again?” was the gratifying comment of friends. “I say, do be confirmed again.”
To me, personally, all the splendour and dignity of his office signified nothing: what concerned a boy in the orgy of his holidays, was the new sumptuousness of his surroundings.
Stupendous though my father had become, we knew but little of his work and of its national significance, and it was my mother who to us, far more than he, was exalted into the zenith. Often since has she told me how shy and inadequate she felt on entering London, as she now did for the first time, in such a position, but never can I conceive of her otherwise than as filling it with the supremest enjoyment, which, after all, is the first of a hostess’s qualities. Her wisdom, her conversational brilliance, above all her intense love of people, just as such, nobly filled and fitted the new sphere. The management of the great house, with the added concern of the second house at Addington, appeared in her a natural and effortless instinct: she took the reins and cracked her whip, and the whole equipage bowled swift and smooth along the road. The stables were under her control as well; she arranged all the comings and goings of my father: out rolled his landau with its tall black high-stepping horses and gilded harness to take him to the House of Lords, and scarce had the great gates below Morton’s tower clanged open for him, than Maggie and I set out on our horses for a ride round the Row, very stiff in top-hats, and riding habit and strapped trousers, and then round came my mother’s victoria, and woe be to the carriage-cleaner if the japanned panels failed to reflect with the unwavering quality of glass. She would be going to pay a couple of calls and visit a dentist, and while she was there, the victoria would take Hugh and Nellie to the Zoo, and drop them with strict injunctions that in an hour precisely they were to pick her up at a fatal door in Old Burlington Street, and so proceed homewards to tea. Meanwhile the carriage that deposited my father at the House could take Arthur to some other rendezvous, and once at any rate, the hansom containing the Archbishop was prevented from entering the Lambeth Gate, because the Archbishop’s carriage (containing Hugh and me) must be admitted first. Never were children so indulged in the matter of equine locomotion, for the riding horses clattered in and out, and Hugh returning from a straw-hatted visit to the Zoo must in three minutes hurl himself into the top-hatted and black-coated garb which in those days was current in the Row, in order to ride with my father on his return from the House. One of the five of us, at any rate, was kept on tap for a rather stately ride with him whenever during the busy day he found an hour to spare, and it was a pompous pleasure to see the traffic stopped at Hyde Park Corner, so that we might ride past saluting policemen through the arch. Physically I suppose we enjoyed our fraternal scampers more, but it could not help being great fun for a boy of fifteen to steer a rather fretful horse that went sideways across the street and behaved itself unseemly, while tall buses waited for his esteemed progress. After all, if you happened to be riding with your father, for whose passage in those days all traffic was stayed, you might as well enjoy it....
All such arrangements, all such “fittings in” were a pure delight to my mother. She revelled in her dexterity, and revelled no less in the multitude of her engagements. She loved, after a busy day, to dine at some political house, and hear the talk of the hour, and follow that up with some party at the Foreign Office, for though she cared very little if at all about political questions themselves, she delighted in the froth and bustle and movement. She was great friends with Mr. Gladstone, though she cared not one atom about the Home Rule question, and he in turn had the greatest appreciation of her wit, her humour which would strike a spark out of the most humdrum of happenings: and I believe it is authentically told that when once at Hawarden there was discussion as to the identity of the cleverest woman in England, and someone suggested my mother as the fittest candidate for the post, he said in that impressive voice, reinforced with the pointed forefinger, “No, you’re wrong: she’s the cleverest woman in Europe.” Quite unfatigued, she would be up and dressed in her very oldest clothes before seven next morning, and walk for a full hour before breakfast, since the rest of the day held for her no leisure for exercise. Never was there anyone so acutely observant as she, and at breakfast there would be some grotesque or comic side-show of the streets for narration. Parks and open places were of no use to her at all in those rambles; Lambeth Walk, or the humours of Covent Garden Market were her diversion, and refreshed by these humours she tackled her new and delightful day. Never by any chance did she go out to lunch, but never by any chance did we lunch en famille; guests were invariably there. Even more to her mind were her dinner-parties, in the selection and arrangement of which she took an infinity of rapturous trouble, and the bigger they were the more I think she enjoyed them. There was, of course, a great deal of clerical entertainment, but half a dozen times in the season she gave more secular dinner-parties of about thirty guests, when literature and science, and art and politics, and the great world magnificently assembled. And when the last guest had gone, a piece of invariable ritual was that she with any of us children who were at home, executed a wild war-dance all over the drawing-room in a sort of general jubilation. I remember Lord Halsbury coming back unexpectedly to tell my mother some story which he had forgotten to mention, and finding us all at it.
But however full was the day, my mother seemed possessed of complete and unlimited leisure for talk with any of us who wanted her. I can remember no occasion on which she was too busy for a talk. Her letters could wait; anything could wait, and she would slew round from her writing-table, saying, “Hurrah! Oh, this is nice!” She would listen alert and eager to some infinitesimal problem, some critical observation, and say, “Now tell me exactly why you think that. I don’t agree at all. Let’s have it out.” It seemed that nothing in the world interested her nearly as much as the point in question, and verily I believe that it was so. She projected her whole self on to it: she desired nothing so much, just then, as to put herself completely in your place, and realize, before she formed an opinion of her own, precisely what your opinion was. Then invariably the magic of her sympathy seized on any point with which she agreed, “Quite so: I see that, yes I feel that,” she would say. “But how about this? Let me see if I can put it to you.”
It was no wonder that the closeness of her special, particular relation to each of us was ever growing. The primary desire of her heart was to give love: when it was given her (and who ever had it in larger abundance?) she welcomed and revelled in it, but her business above all was to give. And her love was no soft indulgent thing: there was even an austerity in its intenseness, and it burned with that lambent quality, which was so characteristic of her. Never was anyone so like a flame as she: her light illuminated you, her ardour warmed and stimulated. Withal, there was never anyone who less resembled a saint, for she was much too human to be anything of the kind; she had no atom of asceticism in her, and without being at all artistic she adored beauty.
Spiritual beauty came first, for she loved God more than she loved any of His works, but how close to her heart was intellectual beauty, things subtly and finely observed, things humorously and delicately touched! How, too, she hated spiritual ugliness, as expressed by priggishness with regard to the Kingdom of Heaven, and mental ugliness as expressed by conceit or narrowness, and hardly less did she dislike physical ugliness. Her tones would rise from a calmness which she found quite impossible to maintain, into a crescendo of violent emphasis and capital letters as she said something to the following effect:
“Yes, I know: I’m sure he’s a very good man, and that’s so trying, because he is such a prig, and always does his duty, and, my dear, that awful mouth, and the Beautiful sentiments that come out of it. Besides he’s so Very, Very Plain!”