That afternoon, we, the rest of us, went out on that still sunny October day and strolled through the woods together, splitting up into twos and threes and rejoining again. My mother seemed to have her hand in Nellie’s all the time, telling us, who had come too late, tranquilly and serenely, how the days had gone, and how patient she had been and how cheerful. We recalled all sorts of things about her, with smiles and with laughter, and there was no sense of loss, for my mother brought her amongst us, and never let go of her. Then, back in the house again, there were other arrangements to be made: it was settled that Arthur, Hugh and I should go back to Eton and Cambridge as soon as we could, but after the funeral we must spend a week of quarantine somewhere. How Nellie had got diphtheria was obscure, and it was better that we should not sleep in the house, or run a possible risk of infection. I wanted to see her, but my mother said that what I wanted to see was not Nellie at all, and that I must think of her as I had known her. And as I knew her, so she has always remained for me, collecting the cedar-sulphur, or laughing with open mouth, or grave and eager with sympathy. The glass-lidded pill-boxes were on a ledge of a bookcase, where we had left them a week or two before. My mother had seen them, and thought that there was probably some mystic significance about them, so I told her how Nellie and I had gathered them, and she said, “What treasures: bless her!” Golden October weather it was, with frosts at night and windless days, and the chestnut leaves came peeling off the trees and falling in a heap of tawny yellow below them, each leaf twirling in the air as it fell.
She was buried in Addington churchyard and next her now lies Maggie, and on her other side my mother.
My father, all the time of Nellie’s illness, had been hard at work on the final revision of his Lincoln judgment: now the delivery of that was postponed for a little, but not for long. Everyone had to get back normally and naturally to the work and the play and the joy and sorrow of life again, but at the Christmas holidays it was seen how huge a gap had come in the circle which since Martin’s death, twelve years before, had grown up together, critical and devoted and wildly alive. No one, when all were so intent on the businesses in hand, had estimated when a play, for instance, must be written and rehearsed and managed, how largely it was Nellie’s enthusiastic energy that carried things through. So there was no play that Christmas, and the year after four of us, my father and mother and Maggie and I, were in Algiers, another year they were in Florence, and another Maggie and I were in Egypt, and so that particular blaze of young activity of which Christmas holidays had been the type and flower came to an end. Besides we were all getting older, and there was no Nellie; with her death some unrecapturable magic was lost.
Of the many intimate friendships of my mother’s life none was closer than that which had ripened during these years at Lambeth with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the late Archbishop. She had constantly been with us in town and at Addington, and now, after Nellie’s death, she made her permanent home with us. Then, when the Lambeth days were over she continued, until my mother’s death, twenty-two years later, to devote her life to her.
CHAPTER XII
AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXCURSION
AT Cambridge the study of archæology had forcibly taken possession of me by right of love, and at last I was working at that which it was my business to be occupied in, with devotion to my subject. Roman art, so I speedily discovered, was an utterly hideous and debased affair in itself, and the only things of beauty that emerged from Rome were copies of Greek originals, and even then these copies were probably made by Greek workmen. In Roman buildings also all that was worth looking at was stolen from the Greeks, and often marred in the stealing, and the thick mortar between their roughly hewn stones, the facing of them with a dishonest veneer of marble, their abominable tessellated pavements, the odious wall decorations of Pompeii revolted this ardent Hellenist. Now, too, for the first time since I came up to Cambridge, I came under an inspired and inspiring teacher; indeed, there were two such, for it was impossible not to burn when Dr. Waldstein in the Museum of Casts flung himself into Hellenic attitudes, and communicated his volcanic enthusiasm. But more inspiring yet was Professor Middleton: he gave me no formal lectures, but encouraged me to bring my books to his room, and spend the morning there. He used to walk about in a thick dressing-gown and a skull-cap, looking like some Oriental magician, and now he would pull an intaglio ring off his finger and make me perceive the serene and matchless sobriety of an early gem as compared with the more florid design, still matchless in workmanship, of a later century, or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waistcoat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative letters and tell him where they came from. He had dozens of notebooks filled with sketches of Greek mouldings and cornices: there were sections of the columns of the Parthenon that showed how the drums had been ground round each on the other, till, without any mess of mortar, they adhered so closely that the joint was scarcely visible. There were cedar-wood blocks in the centres of them with bronze pins round which they revolved; the honesty and precision of the workmanship could never be discovered till the column was in ruins. But there was the very spirit and ardency of Greece; and as for the great frieze of horsemen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon it was so placed that only a mere glimpse of it could be had by those who walked in the colonnade. Yet in honour of the goddess and in obedience to the imperious craving for perfection, it, though scarcely to be seen, must be of a fineness and finish unequalled in all the forums of Rome. Then Middleton would take a fragment of Greek pottery from a drawer, or a white lekythus from Eretria, and show me the mark of the potter’s wheel, and how the white ground was laid on after the baking, and how the artist with brush delicate and unerring had drawn the raised arm of the ephebus who laid his garland on the tomb. There were photographs also from the Street of Tombs; in one there was standing a young girl with braided hair. She it was who was dead, and the mother stood in front of her lifting the small face upwards with a hand under her chin, bending to kiss her for the last time, and such of the inscription as remained ran ΧΑΙΡΕΠΕΝΘ.... The rest of the letters was gone, but that was sufficient, and told how her mother gave the final greeting of Godspeed and of farewell to Penthesilea, for in that beautiful tongue “Hail”! and “Good-bye” are the same word and affectionately wish prosperity, whether for one who returns to the home, or goes from the home on the longest journey of all. And Professor Middleton made me realize the serenity of those good wishes for Penthesilea: there was a wistfulness on the part of those who remained, and a wonder and a great hope, and God knows how that struck home to me.... Or a young man sat languid on a rock, and his hunting spear was propped behind him, and beside him just one companion, weary with watching, had fallen asleep. There was no mother there to send him on his way; his friend and his hunting-spear were his comrades on earth, and these he must leave behind him, when to-day he fared out on his new adventure, further afield than ever his huntings had taken him.... And thus to me, the supreme race of all who have inhabited this earth became real. They heard the voice of creation as none other has heard it, and saw as none other has seen. They realized in dawn and in nightfall the attainment towards which all others have fruitlessly striven, showing in marble the humanity of the divine, and the divinity of man; they had birthdays for their gods, and for their dead, who died not, they had the imperishable love that knows not fear.
Professor Middleton never alluded in any way to this archæological tripos which I was to challenge after one year’s work. All the morning, three times a week or more, I used to sit there with my books that I never read, because he, in his dressing-gown, produced, one after the other, little bits of things which would make me love the Greeks for no other reason than for the artistic joy of their works and days. He knew of course that there was a tripos impending, and this in his view was the best way of preparing for it; while for drier stuff he gave me his notebooks on Vitruvius, which would, with his little exquisite sections and elevations, explain all that I need know about the bones and alphabet of architecture. His whole procedure, as I saw then, and his whole object was to make me want to know, down to their sandals and their salad-bowls and brooches, all that was to be learned of the brains of a god-like race. Once, so I remember, a bitter blizzard white with snow beat against the windows, and from some roof near a slate flew off and crashed in the small court at King’s where the mulberry tree grew. “That was Oreithyia,” he said, sucking on his pipe. “Boreas loved her, and blew her away. Rude Boreas, you know. You should read up the myths. Most of Greek sculpture illustrates myths.”
Since the days when I was fifteen, since Beesly and the Trojan Queen’s Revenge, there had been no such inspirer. But Beesly dealt only with language, while under Middleton the dry bones which had come together, not only stood up “an exceeding great army,” but went about their work, and returned to their homes of an evening, and lived and loved. Beesly had brought me to the portals of the house of the people who made Art, and knocked on the door for me. But Middleton pushed it open, and the gold standard of the Greeks that, theoretically, seven years ago I knew to be the only coinage, was now weighed and was found sufficient, and all else whatever baser stuff might load the opposing balance was found wanting.
It was at some time during that year that J. K. Stephen, the founder of the T.A.F., returned to King’s, and instantly for me all the lesser lights of general influence were eclipsed. In presence and personality alike he was one of those who without effort or aim impose themselves on their circle. Had he never said a word, the very fact of his being in the room must have produced more effect that any conversation that might go on round him. He was splendidly handsome, big of head, impressive and regular of feature, and enormously massive in build; slow moving and shambling when he walked, but somehow monumental. He had an immense fund of humour, grim and rather savage at times, at others of such froth and frolic as appeared in the two volumes of verse which he published during the next year, Lapsus Calami, and Quo Musa tendis. But this bubbling lightness was markedly uncharacteristic of his normal self. That it was there, those two volumes proved, but that particular spring, that light-hearted Puck-like quality, he certainly reserved for his verse, which to those who knew him was in no way the flower of his mind. In the dedication to Lapsus Calami, he expresses the desire that the reader should recognize his debt to “C.S.C.” (Calverley of Fly Leaves), he hopes that some one will think that “of C.S.C. this gentle art he learned,” and undoubtedly the reader did think so, for it was certainly C.S.C. whose method inspired some of these poems. But it is just these poems in which he was obviously indebted to Calverley, that are least worthy and characteristic of him. Jim Stephen made, at his worst, amusing neat little rhymes not nearly so good as Calverley’s, but, at his best, he made poems, such as “The Old School List,” of which Calverley was quite incapable. Both also were brilliant parodists, but here J.K.S. had a far subtler art than the man with whom he hoped his readers would compare him. Calverley’s famous parody of Robert Browning, “The Cock and the Bull,” does not touch in point of rapier-work J.K.S.’s poem “Sincere Flattery to R.B.” The one does no more than seize on ridiculous phrases in Browning, and go a shade further in absurdity: the other (“Birthdays”) parodies the very essence of the more obscure lyrics: you cannot read it, however often you have done so, without the hope that you may this time or the next find out what it means. He was the inventor, too, of a peculiarly pleasing artifice with regard to parody, for he put into Wordsworth’s mouth, for instance, in pure Wordsworthian phrase, the exact opposite of Wordsworth’s teaching, and produced a lament over the want of locomotive power in the Lake district. The effect is inimitable: the poet longs to see in those happy days when Helvellyn’s base is tunnelled, and its peak grimy
The dusky grove of iron rails
Which leads to Euston Square,