I had no idea after we had made this arrangement if Hugh was alive or not; often I had to wait till they got round some awkward corner, and then make my way after them. Places that would have been easily traversed by a roped party, took on a totally different aspect, when two men unroped were carrying another, and when the fourth of the party had to traverse them alone. What chiefly occupied my benumbed mind was the sort of telegram that would be sent to my father when we got down to the foot of the glacier below, where there was communication with Pontresina. Should I be sending a telegram that Hugh was dead, or should I have slipped, and thus be incapable of sending a telegram at all, or would nobody come back?... For some hour or so this procession went on its way: after I had waited for the trio to get round some rock or obstruction on the ridge, I followed, and caught sight of them again a dozen yards further down. Whether they were carrying a corpse or not I had no idea.
Gradually we came to the end of this ridge. I had waited for them to scramble over a difficult passage, and then they disappeared round a corner. One of the guides had loosened a rock, and when I tried to step on it, it gave way altogether and rattled down the almost precipitous slope to the side. I had recovered on to my original standing-ground, but with that rock gone, and being alone and unroped, it took me some couple of minutes, I suppose, to find a reliable foothold. When that was done, a couple of steps more brought me, as it had brought them, completely out of the wind, and on to a broiling southern slope. Fifty feet below me there came another corner, which they had already passed, and I could see nothing further. I went round that corner, and found the two guides roaring with laughter and Hugh quite drunk. He was making some sort of ineffectual attempt to sit on the point of his ice-axe. He was not dead at all: he was only drunk. The moment, apparently, that they had got out of that icy blast, his heart-action must have reasserted itself, and there was a half-pint of raw brandy poured into an empty stomach to render accounts. With thick and stumbling speech, he staggered along, assuring us that he had only been rather sleepy.... And so he had, and I emptied the fine snow that had been driven in about my knees through my knickerbockers, and had no need to send any telegrams.
Except for that adventure, which I would gladly have done without, Pontresina was an uneventful place, rather picnicky and wearisome. There was a friend of my sister Maggie there under the sentence of the white death: there was an elderly bishop who attached himself somewhat to our party: there was Miss Margot Tennant whom then I met for the first time; and after a rather dull fortnight, I turned back to England to embrace the career, at Chester, of a serious archæologist.
Now there was no particular reason why the Corporatn of Chester should allow a young gentleman from Cambridge University to pull the city walls about, in the hope of extracting therefrom Roman tombstones, even though he was quite willing that these monuments, if discovered, should be presented to the local museum. So with a view to securing a warmer welcome, I had got my father to write to the Duke of Westminster at Eaton, and this was a gloriously successful move. I went over to see him, explained the plan, and got his support. He in turn wrote to the Mayor urging the claims of archæology on an enlightened town, and gave me £50 to augment the grant from the Würtz fund. The technical part of the work, the underpinning of the wall, the subsequent building of it up again in case we extracted Roman tombstones from it was entrusted to the city surveyor: local subscriptions came in, and tombstones of considerable importance came out, for we found that a legion, “Legio Decima Valeria Victrix” (The victorious Valerian), whose presence in England was hitherto unknown, had been stationed at Chester. Professor Mommsen, the historian, must be informed about that, and the copies of these tombstones must be sent him, and these produced a letter of congratulation and acknowledgment from the great man. I skipped with joy over that, for was not this an apotheosis for the family dunce, that Professor Mommsen should applaud his work? And again I skipped when one of the famous post-cards came from Hawarden, asking me to come over and tell Mr. Gladstone about these finds. The sense of diplomacy spiced that adventure, for profoundly ignorant though I was about politics, I had just the prudence to be aware that Eaton and Hawarden must not be put, so to speak, into one pocket, since Mr. Gladstone with his policies of Home Rule for Ireland and the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church had digged a gulf of liquid fire between himself and the Duke. There must be nothing said that could tend to stoke that, and strict was the guard that I set on my lips.
All are agreed on the sense of the terrific latent energy with which that quiet country-house was stored: there was high tension in its tranquillity. You felt that if you touched anything a great electric spark might flare with a cracking explosion towards your extended finger.... I got there during the morning and was at once taken to see Mr. Gladstone. He was in his study, sitting at his “political” table: that other table was the table where he worked at Homer, so he presently explained to me, suggesting though not actually stating the image which flew into my mind, of his boiling over, so to speak, at the political table, that furnace of fierce contention and white-hot enthusiasm, and of his putting himself to cool off from controversy by the Ionian Sea. He instantly plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain as if nothing else really mattered or ever had mattered to him, and pored over the copies of a few inscriptions I had brought him. But he wanted more lively evidence than a mere copy.
“I should like to see the squeezes of these,” he said. “Do you know the only proper way to make squeezes? You take your sheet of blotting-paper, and after you have washed the stone, you lay it on, pressing the paper into the letters of the inscription. Then sprinkle it with water, but by no means wet your paper before you have laid it on the stone, because it is apt to tear if you do that. Then take a clothes brush—not too stiff a one—and tap the surface over and over again with the bristles. By degrees you will get the paper to mould itself into all the letters of the inscription, and where there are letters apparently quite perished, it will often show you some faint stroke from which you can conjecture what the missing letter has been, though it is invisible to the eye. And let your blotting paper get dry before you remove it. Otherwise again you may tear it. Yes, we are coming to lunch: we know,” he said to Mrs. Gladstone, who came in for the second time to say it was ready.
I do not of course pretend to reproduce the precise wording of this little dissertation on blotting-paper-squeezes, but there or thereabouts was the substance of it,
E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 22 [[Page 269]