A New Medley of Memories

by Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

I had planned to finish while at Oxford my greatly belated work for the Encyclopædia, but was (perhaps unduly) mortified to find how much my progress was impeded by my altered conditions of eyesight. Let me, however, record here, pour encourager les autres similarly handicapped, that the initial difficulty of focussing (very serious and very discouraging at first to a one-eyed man) tends to disappear not only quickly but completely. "Un poco paciencia," as we say in Brazil; kind Mother Nature steps in with her compensations, and one can only feel grateful—I hope and believe that I did—at suffering so little from what seems, and after all is, so serious a privation.

Two of Lovat's nephews were now undergraduates at Trinity, Cambridge, whither I went over to see them from Oxford. They gave me luncheon in their quaint low-ceiled rooms in Trinity Street, took me to see their sister (a pupil in a convent school), and escorted me over some of the "lions," wanting to know at every turn whether I did not admit that Cambridge was infinitely superior to Oxford. I handsomely owned that we possessed nothing quite so fine, in their different ways, as King's Chapel, the famous "backs," and the Fitzwilliam Museum (to say nothing of the Catholic church); and they were both pleased at this tribute, though it must be confessed that the absorbing interest of their lives at that period seemed less to be architectural masterpieces than the internal mechanism of motor-bicycles, about which they, in common with many of their undergraduate friends, appeared to be quite curiously infatuated. I went on from Cambridge (an insufferably tedious journey) to Douai Abbey, our Berkshire monastery, where one was always sure of a welcome of Benedictine heartiness, and where I gave a lantern-lecture on Brazil, of a popular and superficial kind, to the good monks and their pupils. This reminds me that, as a supposed authority on negroes (many Englishmen, I firmly believe, are under the impression that the population of Brazil is almost exclusively black!), I was invited by my friend the Warden of Wadham to meet the Master of Pembroke at dinner, in order to discuss the advisability or otherwise of admitting black, brown and yellow men freely into the university. The Warden (a Scotsman who had never, I think, been out of Britain) was all in favour of the "open door"; whereas the little Master of Pembroke, who had been bishop of Barbadoes, and knew a thing or two about blacks, was strongly for the "keep 'em out" policy, and I was entirely with him. We had an interesting evening's talk; but the solution of this not unimportant question (which the foundation of the Rhodes Scholarships had brought much to the front) did not of course rest with us. The mention of Rhodes reminds me that a conspicuous memorial tablet had lately been erected to him in the Schools: the design was good and simple, but the lettering of the inscription (as is too often the case on modern monuments) so deplorably bad as to spoil the whole effect.[[8]]

Walking through Magdalen cloisters on a sombre November afternoon, I came unexpectedly on the poor young King (or ex-King) of Portugal, who was looking through the college with a single companion. He looked (who could wonder)[[9]] pale, depressed and nervous; and I was shocked at the change in his appearance since I had seen him at Blenheim on the occasion of his previous visit to England. Professor Oman (who had been his guest in Portugal for the anniversary celebrations at Busaco) met him, I believe, accidentally in High Street, and showed him all over All Souls and the Bodleian; but I heard that his listless and apathetic demeanour underwent little change. To be a "Roi en exil" almost before reaching man's estate is about as dreary a lot as could fall to any man; and one could only hope that fate had something better in prospect for the young monarch so early and so tragically dethroned.

I got to Ampleforth Abbey, on my way north, in time for our great Benedictine festival of All Saints of our Order; but the "sweet vale of Mowbray" was wrapt in mist and rain, and the boys' holiday spoilt. I gave a lecture to them that evening on the lighter side of Brazil, with stories of snakes and niggers; and another next evening on the work of the religious orders, especially our Benedictines, in the evangelization of that vast country. I lectured in the new college theatre, a really fine room, and acoustically very satisfactory, though I did not care for the semi-ecclesiastical woodwork. When I got back to Fort Augustus a few days later, I found Lovat, Lochiel, and other local magnates there, discussing the fate of our poor little railway, which the N.B. Company, tired of working it at a loss for several years, had given notice to close after New Year.[[10]] Two pieces of news reached me soon after my arrival—one that Congregation at Oxford had declined, by a good majority, to abolish compulsory Greek; the other that the Brazilian Navy was in full revolt, and the crews of their two new Dreadnoughts (one the São Paulo, whose captain and crew had come to England with me) were firing their big guns from the harbour into the city! I could only hope that our poor abbey, which must have been in the direct line of fire, had not suffered.[[11]]

My own plans were almost matured for returning to Brazil early in 1911; but it seemed prudent now to "wait and see" if this naval émeute really portended anything like a general revolution. Meanwhile I had been authorized to accept an invitation from the Norfolks to stay with them at Norwich, for the opening of the great church which had been many years a-building, at the Duke's expense, in his titular city. He had taken the "Maid's Head," a delightful old half-timbered inn, for our party, which pretty well filled it. I said an early mass on Our Lady's festa, December 8, in the lady-chapel (a memorial of the Duke's first wife),[[12]] of the vast, austere, and splendid church—the only modern church in which I have ever felt as if I were in a mediæval cathedral. Breakfasting afterwards with the clergy—mostly Irish—the news of Ninian Crichton Stuart's victory at Cardiff[[13]] (which came to us by wire) was a bit of a bombshell; but the "Maid's Head" party were of course delighted. The inaugural services were very splendid, though unduly prolonged by a sermon an hour long; and though for once there was no after-luncheon oratory, the bishop preached for another full hour in the evening. The tediousness of my long journey back to Scotland next day was aggravated by an amateur politician (with a wheezy cough) in my carriage, who bored me almost to tears with a rechauffé of his speeches at various election-meetings; but I consoled myself by reading in an evening paper that the Unionist candidate for Ayr had increased his majority five-fold. At Edinburgh I came on my energetic old brother-in-law Glasgow, who had come in from Ayrshire (he was then not far off seventy-eight) to dine at a naval banquet and to vote for the Representative Peers. I went for the week-end to the Kerrs at Woodburn, meeting there a serious young publisher, who offered me very good terms to write a detailed history—it has never yet been written—of Scottish Catholicism since the Reformation: a fascinating subject, and one with which I should have loved to grapple, but life is too short to do all, or even half, that one would like to do.

With an hour or two to spare in Glasgow on my way to the Highlands, I lunched with my friend (the friendship was personal, not political) the editor of the Observer, at his Radical Club. In the middle of the meal a member rose with a long face, and announced an unexpected Unionist victory at Tavistock—whereat, to the consternation of every one, I cheered loudly! I reached Fort Augustus the same evening, to learn of the death, at the advanced age of ninety-three, of our kind old friend and neighbour Mrs. Ellice of Invergarry, one of the last of the great landladies who a few years before had by a curious coincidence owned and managed (very capably, too) some of the largest estates in the North of Scotland. The vast Glengarry property, once the domain of the Macdonells, and stretching from the Caledonian Canal to the western seaboard, had been under Mrs. Ellice's sole control since her husband's death more than thirty years before. We at Fort Augustus, as well as the numerous Highland Catholics resident on her estate, and under our spiritual care, had always found in her a most friendly, kind and considerate neighbour.

Two happenings I recall at Fort Augustus during these December days—one a remarkably interesting lecture on the theory of lake-temperature from a Mr. Wedderburn, who had been recently on the Scottish loch survey; and the other event was our all (that is, all the priests of the monastery) being called on to vow, promise, swear and sign, individually and collectively, our adherence to the Creed of Pope Pius IV., which I had sworn to some thirty-six years before.[[14]] This act of submission, enjoined on every Catholic priest in Christendom, was part of the vigorous campaign against Modernism initiated by Pope Pius X. Having discharged this duty, I betook myself to Keir, to spend Christmas with the Stirlings. It was a family party, including the Lovats and a few others, and we spent the season in homely Dickens fashion, with ghost-stories and snapdragon and a priceless Early Victorian conjurer in a crumpled dress suit, who accompanied tricks of really incredible antiquity with a "patter" almost prehistoric. One day we drove down to survey the grand old cathedral of Dunblane, very carefully restored (of course for Presbyterian worship) since I had last seen it. As we entered, we heard the opening strains of Elgar's Ave Verum—

(a Eucharistic hymn by a Catholic composer!) being played on a fine organ, and wondered what old John Knox would have thought about it all. Meanwhile the Catholics of Dunblane, a devout and fervent little flock (so I was told), had perforce to content themselves with a poor loft, where I preached to them on two Sundays. At Stirling, not far distant, there was a new church designed by Pugin—a rather dismal and angular edifice, but anyhow spacious and well kept. On my return journey to Fort Augustus, I found myself condemned, by the unholy rivalry of the Caledonian and North British Railways, to a four hours' wait at Crianlarich, where I found the temperature, on a frosty January morning, quite as "invigorating" as did the fabled tourist.[[15]] I had a few busy days at the abbey preparing for my return to South America. My passage was booked for the middle of January: I had devoted a week to farewells to relatives and friends—and then came the anti-climax! On the very day on which (like the poor Sisters of Mercy) I was to have "breasted the billows of the Atlantic"[[16]] en route for Brazil, I received so discouraging and peremptory a letter from my London oculist, as to the risk to my remaining eye of a possibly stormy winter voyage, that I had perforce to abandon the idea, and to return (like the bad sixpence of poor Grissell's story)[[17]] to my northern monastery, where I received so brotherly a welcome home that I did not, after the first disappointment, regret the change of plan. I was inducted again into my old office of librarian (first entrusted to me twenty-seven years before); and our young organist having gone into residence at the Benedictine Hall at Oxford, I acted for a time as his substitute. The post of subprior being presently vacated by the departure of the then holder of the office for a Liverpool mission, that also was committed to me; and as our good prior was at this time to some extent invalided, I found myself pretty fully occupied, more especially as I had in those days a curiously cosmopolitan correspondence (much of it on literary or antiquarian matters), which could not be neglected. I recall receiving by a single mail (on St. Benedict's Day, as it chanced), letters from India, North America, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Soudan!