It was very delightful, of course, to be making a little money from the book, after so many years of strenuous work, and though the sum she had earned was still a modest one (about £3,200 by January, 1889), it enabled her and her husband to make plans for the future and to embark on the purchase of some land for building in the still unspoilt country to the east of Haslemere. Here, on Grayswood Hill, overlooking the vast tangle of the Weald as far as Chanctonbury Ring and the South Downs, a red-brick house of moderate size, cunningly designed by Mr. Robson, gradually arose during 1889 and the first part of 1890; but while it was still building a fortunate accident placed in our way the chance of living for three months in a far different habitation—John Hampden’s wonderful old house near Great Missenden, which was then in a state of interregnum, and might be rented for a small sum.
“It will be quite an adventure,” wrote Mrs. Ward to her publisher in July, 1889, “for in spite of the beauty and romance of the place there is hardly enough furniture of a ramshackle kind in it to enable us to camp for three months in tolerable comfort! But by dint of sending down a truck load of baths, carpets and saucepans from home we shall get on, and our expenses will be less than if we took a villa at Westgate.”
And to Mrs. Johnson, of Oxford, who was coming with her whole family to stay there, Mrs. Ward wrote three days after her arrival:
‘The furniture of the house is decrepit, scanty and decayed, but it has breeding and refinement, and is a thousand times preferable to any luxurious modern stuff. I am perfectly happy here, and bless the lucky chance which drew our attention to the advertisement. I will not spoil the old house and gardens and park for you by describing them—but they are a dream, and the out-at-elbowness of everything is an additional charm.”
So for three months we stayed at Hampden, revelling in its beauty and its spaciousness, learning to know the Chiltern country with its chalk-downs and beech-woods, entertaining many visitors, including the much-loved Professor Huxley, and watching anxiously for the ghost that walked in the passage outside the tapestry-room on moonlight nights. It never walked for us, though Mrs. Ward sat up many times to woo it, but there were plenty of ghosts of another sort in a house that had sheltered Queen Elizabeth on one of her “progresses,” that still possessed the chair in which John Hampden had sat when they came to arrest him for ship-money, and that had guarded his body at the last, when his Greencoats bore it thither from Thame to lie in the great hall for one more night before its burial in the little church across the garden. At first there were no lamps, and we groped about with stumps of candles after dark, but gradually all the more glaring deficiencies were remedied and Mrs. Ward settled down to a happy three months of work on her new novel, David Grieve. But as she wrote of her two wild children on the Derbyshire moors, or of young David and his books in Manchester, the very different scene around her formed itself in her mind into a new setting, from which arose in course of time Marcella.
Meanwhile it was not Hampden’s ghost but Elsmere’s that still haunted her, in the sense that the “New Brotherhood” with which the novel ended would not die with it, but struggled dumbly in the author’s mind for expression in some living form. Some time before she had been deeply impressed by a visit she had paid to Toynbee Hall with “Max Creighton,” as she wrote to her father, when she found that “in the library there R.E. had been read to pieces, and in a workmen’s club which had just been started several ideas had been taken from the “New Brotherhood.” The experience had remained with her; she had brooded and dreamt over it, and now when she returned to London in the autumn of 1889 she began for the first time to try to work out the idea in consultation with certain chosen friends. “Lord Carlisle came and had a long talk with M. about a proposed Unitarian Toynbee somewhere in South London”—so wrote the little sister-in-law (herself an orthodox Christian) in her journal on November 11, 1889. And a little later: “Mr. Stopford Brooke came and had a long talk with her about a ‘New Brotherhood’ they hope to start with Lord Carlisle and a few others to help.”
Was it to be a new religion, or a re-vivifying of the old? The impulse to build up, to re-create, was hot within her; could she not appeal to her generation to help her in following out this impulse towards some practical goal? Was there not room for another Toynbee, inspired still more definitely than the first with the ideals of a simpler Christianity? The dæmon drove; surely the very success of her book showed that this was the need of the new age in which she lived. She plunged into the task, and only time and Fate were to reveal that the “new religion” was doomed to take no outward form, but to work itself out in ways undreamt of as yet by the author of Robert Elsmere.
CHAPTER V
UNIVERSITY HALL—DAVID GRIEVE AND “STOCKS”
1889-1892
THE conversations with Stopford Brooke and Lord Carlisle mentioned in the last chapter contained the germ of all that public work which was to claim henceforth so large a share of Mrs. Ward’s life. Up to this point she had hardly taken any part in London committees; indeed, those spacious days were still comparatively free from them, and it is remembered that when the first meeting of the group with whom she was discussing her new scheme took place at Russell Square,[15] one irreverent child in the schoolroom next door said to its fellow, “What’s a committee?” “Oh,” said the elder, in the manner of one who imparts information, “it’s when the grown-ups get together, and first they think, and then they talk, and then they think again.” At the moment no sound was audible through the wall. “They must be thinking now,” said the instructor carelessly, leaving his junior to the solemn belief, held for many years, that a committee was a sort of prayer-meeting.
That first group, who discussed and finally approved Mrs. Ward’s draft circular announcing the foundation of a “Hall for Residents” in London, consisted of the following men and women besides herself: Dr. Martineau, Dr. James Drummond, of Manchester College, Oxford, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Lord Carlisle, Rev. W. Copeland Bowie, Dr. Estlin Carpenter, Mr. Frederick Nettlefold, the Dowager Countess Russell, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and lastly, Dr. Blake Odgers, Q.C., who acted as Hon. Treasurer. Mr. Copeland Bowie, who helped Mrs. Ward for several months as a “kind of assistant secretary,” has recorded his impressions of those crowded days in an article which he wrote for the Inquirer on April 3, 1920: