Frank Mathew was a nephew of Father Mathew, the great temperance preacher. Frank wrote delightful Irish stories for The Idler. I am convinced he would have made a name for himself in literature if he had stuck to it. Alas! he came into money and married happily.
A snow slope is the most dangerous thing to negotiate. One day, Mathew and I walked up the Scheidegg. The hotel was not then built. It was only a hut in those days. We were looking forward to getting something to eat, but found the old landlord too scared to attend to us, crying, and hardly able to stand. He had been watching through his telescope, and had just seen three men follow one another down a snow slope and over one of the precipices of the Jungfrau. Their bodies were recovered a few days later. They were three young Italians who had ventured without a guide.
The amateur photographer is the curse of Switzerland. One would not mind if they took one at one's best. There was a charming photograph in The Sphere one winter of my daughter and myself, waltzing on the ice at Grindelwald. It made a pretty picture. But, as a rule, beauty does not appeal to the snap-shotter. I noticed, in my early ski-ing days, that whenever I did anything graceful the Kodak crowd was always looking the other way. When I was lying on my back with my feet in the air, the first thing I always saw when I recovered my senses, was a complete circle of Kodaks pointing straight at me. Poor Rudyard Kipling never got a chance of learning. I was at Engelberg with him one winter. He was in the elementary stage as regards both skating and ski-ing; and wherever he went the Kodak fiends followed him in their hundreds. He must have felt like a comet trying to lose its own tail.
I took him one morning to a ski-ing ground I had discovered some mile or more away: an ideal spot for the beginner. We started early and thought we had escaped them. But some fool had seen us, and had given the hulloa; and before we had got on our skis, half Engelberg was pouring down the road.
Kipling is not the meekest of men and I marvelled at his patience.
“They might give me a start,” he sighed; “I would like to have had them on, just once.”
Engelberg is too low to be a good sports centre. We had some muggy weather, and to kill time I got up some private theatricals. Kipling's boy and girl were there. They were jolly children. Young Kipling was a suffragette and little Miss Kipling played a costermonger's Donah. Kipling himself combined the parts of scene-shifter and call boy. It was the first time I had met Mrs. Kipling since her marriage. She was still a beautiful woman, but her hair was white. There had always been sadness in her eyes, even when a girl. The Hornungs were there also, with their only child, Oscar. Mrs. Hornung, née Connie Doyle, was as cheery and vigorous as ever, but a shade stouter. Both boys were killed in the war.
It was election time in England, and the hotel crowd used to encourage Kipling and myself to political argument in the great hall. I suppose I was the only man in the hotel who was not a Die-hard conservative. Kipling himself was always courteous, but not all the peppery old colonels from Cheltenham and fierce old ladies from Bath were. Notwithstanding, on wet afternoons, when one couldn't go out, it wasn't bad sport. Conan Doyle in his memoirs writes me down as one “hot-headed and intolerant in political matters.” When I read the passage I was most astonished. It is precisely what I should have said myself concerning Doyle. I suppose the fact is that tolerance is another name for indifference. A man convinced that his views, if universally adopted, would be of ineffable service to humanity, is bound to attribute opposition to stupidity or else to original sin. Socrates himself—if Plato is to be trusted—was quite an intolerant person. I am not sure that, arguing with Socrates, I would not rather he called me a fool and have done with it, than proceed to prove it to me, step by step, according to that irritating method of his. Thrasymachus, I am prepared to wager, thought Socrates one of the most intolerant men he had ever met. If Doyle can get into touch with Thrasymachus, he might put it to him if I am not right. Not until we have come to see that man's goal lies within him, not without—that what we call the “progress of the Race” is never towards the truth, but always round it, do we become tolerant—on most matters of opinion.
The road has disappeared. The motor track has taken its place. But the wheel is a poor substitute for the ribbons. I speak as an old coachman. It was good sport, going for a drive with jolly horses that you loved; who knew they were part of the game, and took care that it never got dull. I have a city friend who, in the old days, whenever he would take his mind off business worries, would have out his dog-cart, and drive tandem through Piccadilly and the Broadway, and so home by Richmond Hill and Brentford. Now, he takes out his motor, and all he has to do is to watch the policeman. It is no help to him whatever. Driving a coach and four was interesting but, compared with tandem driving, it was restful. In a team your leaders were coupled together and, unless they had talked it over beforehand and arranged upon a signal, could not suddenly turn round and look at you. Your tandem leader could, and sometimes would; and then you had to be quick with the flick of your whip: and maybe an oath or two, thrown in. Of course, the perfectly trained tandem was easy to take anywhere; but such was only for the rich: and, after all, there was more fun when your horses were not mere machines, and you had to watch their twitching ears and try to guess what they were thinking. I had a little Irish horse. He was a born leader. I did not have to drive him, beyond just giving him a general idea of where I wanted to get. He would pick his own way through an agricultural town on market day, leaving me to concentrate myself upon the wheeler. But that was when he was feeling good. And when he wasn't, he was just a little devil. I had some Oxford boys staying with me one summer. The horses hadn't been out all day, and the boys suggested a tandem drive by moonlight. We didn't take my old coachman, and he didn't clamour to come.
“I should keep my eye on the Little 'un, if I were you, sir,” he advised me, as he handed me the reins. “I don't like the way he has been picking up his feet.”