Although it is now fifty, instead of "forty years on," I indignantly disclaim the "feeble of foot," whilst reluctantly pleading guilty to "rheumatic of shoulder." It is common to most people, as they advance in life, to note with a sorrowful satisfaction the gradual decay of the physical powers of their contemporaries, though they always seem to imagine that they themselves have retained all their pristine vigour, and have successfully resisted every assault of Time's battering-ram. The particular sentiment described in German as "Schadenfreude," "pleasure over another's troubles" (how characteristic it is that there should be no equivalent in any other language for this peculiarly Teutonic emotion!), makes but little appeal to the average Briton except where questions of age and of failing powers come into play, and obviously this only applies to men: no lady ever grows old for those who are really fond of her; one always sees her as one likes best to think of her.
I have already divulged one family secret, so I will reveal another. Some few years ago my three eldest brothers were dining together. Each of them professed deep concern at the palpable signs of physical decay which he detected in his brethren, whilst congratulating himself on remaining untouched by advancing years. The dispute became acrimonious to a degree; the grossest personalities were freely bandied about. At length it was decided to put the matter to a practical test, and it was agreed (I tell this in the strictest confidence) that the three brothers should run a hundred yards race in the street then and there. Accordingly, a nephew of mine paced one hundred yards in Montagu Street, Portman Square, and stood immovable as winning-post. The Chairman of the British South African Chartered Company, the Chairman of the Great Eastern Railway Company, and the Secretary of State for India took up their positions in the street and started. The Chairman of the Great Eastern romped home. We are all of us creatures of our environment, and we may become unconsciously coloured by that environment; as the Great Eastern Railway has always adopted a go-ahead policy, it is possible that some particle of the momentum which would naturally result from this may have been subconsciously absorbed by the Chairman, thus giving him an unfair advantage over his brothers. It is unusual for a Duke, a Chairman of an important Railway Company, and a Secretary of State to run races in a London street at ten o'clock at night, especially when the three of them were long past their sixtieth year, but I feel certain that my confidence about this little episode will be respected.
I fear that this habit of running races late in life may be a family failing. During my father's second tenure of office as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he was still an enthusiastic cricketer, and played regularly in the Viceregal team in spite of his sixty-four years. The Rev. Dr. Mahaffy, Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin, also played for the Viceregal Lodge in his capacity of Chaplain to the Viceroy. Dr. Mahaffy, though a fine bowler, was the worst runner I have ever seen. He waddled and paddled slowly over the ground like a duck, with his feet turned outwards, exactly as that uninteresting fowl moves. My father frequently rallied Dr. Mahaffy on his defective locomotive powers, and finally challenged him to a two hundred yards race. My father being sixty-four years old, and Dr. Mahaffy only thirty-six, it was agreed that the Professor should be handicapped by wearing cricket-pads, and by carrying a cricket bat. I was present at the race, which came off in the gardens of the Viceregal Lodge, before quite a number of people. My father won with the utmost ease, to the delirious joy of the two policemen on duty, who had never before seen a Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland racing a Professor of Trinity College.
I myself must plead guilty to having entered for a "Veterans' Race" two years ago, at the age of sixty-one, at some Sunday School sports in Ireland. I ran against a butler, a gardener, two foremen-mechanics, and four farmers, but only achieved second place, and that at the price of a sprained tendon, so possibly the "feeble of foot" of the song really is applicable to me after all. The butler, who won, started off with the lead and kept it, though one would naturally have expected a butler to run a "waiting" race.
I was at Harrow with the Duke of Aosta, brother of the beautiful Queen Margherita of Italy. H. R. H. sported a full curly yellow beard at the age of sixteen, a somewhat unusual adornment for an English schoolboy. When I accompanied my father's special Mission to Rome in 1878, at a luncheon at the Quirinal Palace, Queen Margherita alluded to her brother having been at Harrow, and added, "I am told that Harrow is the best school in England." The Harrovians present, including my father, my brother Claud, myself, the late Lord Bradford, and my brother-in-law the late Lord Mount Edgcumbe, welcomed this indisputable proposition warmly—nay, enthusiastically. The Etonians who were there, Sir Augustus Paget, then British Ambassador in Rome, the late Lord Northampton, and others, contravened her Majesty's obviously true statement with great heat, quite oblivious of the fact that it is opposed to all etiquette to contradict a Crowned Head. The dispute engendered considerable heat on either side; the walls of that hall in the Quirinal rang with our angered protests, until the Italians present became quite alarmed. Our discussion having taken place in English, they had been unable to follow it, and they felt the gravest apprehensions as to the plot the foreigners were evidently hatching. When told that we were merely discussing the rival merits of two schools in England, they were more than ever confirmed in their opinion that all English people were hopelessly mad.
To one like myself, to whom it has fallen to visit almost every country on the face of the globe, there is always a tinge of melancholy in revisiting the familiar High Street of Harrow. It is like returning to the starting-point at the conclusion of a long race. The externals remain unchanged. Outwardly, the New Schools, the Chapel, the Vaughan Library, and the Head-Master's House all wear exactly the same aspect that they bore half a century ago. They have not changed, and the ever-renewed stream of young life flows through the place as joyously as it did fifty years ago. But....
"Oh, the great days in the distance enchanted,
Days of fresh air, in the rain and the sun."
At times the imagination is apt to play tricks and to set back the hands of the clock, until one pictures oneself again in a short jacket and Eton collar, going up to school, with a pile of books hugged under the left arm, and the intervening half-century wiped out. But, as they would put it in Ireland, these lucky, fresh-faced youngsters of to-day have their futures in front of them, not behind them. Then it is that Howson's words, wedded to John Farmer's haunting refrain, come back to the mind—
"Yet the time may come as the years go by,
When your heart will thrill
At the thought of 'The Hill'
And the day that you came, so strange and shy."