On our national festival of St. Andrew I had the pleasure of admitting two novices to profession—the first ceremony of the kind since 1908. We kept also this month the "silver jubilee" of two of our fathers, of whom one had been born without an ear (in the musical sense), and had never sung mass in his life, but on this unique occasion chanted the Gospel as deacon. December brought wild and stormy weather, which did not, however, interfere with our customary activities; and many of our fathers were at this time out giving missions, or temporary assistance to invalided or absent priests. One of my Boyle nephews—a flying-man like his younger brother—was married this month to the daughter of an Australian judge:[[12]] I could not be present, but telegraphed to him, "The best of luck to you on earth and in the air!" An unwelcome December visitant was an epidemic of gastric influenza, which prostrated some of our community for a week or two; but all were recovered, and most of our wanderers returned, for the Christmas festival—a real old-fashioned one as regarded the weather, with hard frost and snow lying seven inches deep. This was a rather unusual state of things at Fort Augustus, where the comparatively high temperature of Loch Ness (never known to freeze even in the hardest winters) seemed to affect the whole district.[[13]] Lochaber too, where winter is as a rule wild and wet rather than cold, was this year frostbound and snowed up; and our afternoon diversion, on a Sunday which I spent there, was to trudge a mile or two through the snow and see the red deer fed by hand—a pretty and unusual spectacle.
Among the domestic incidents of the New Year was the opening of our village drill-hall, to be available to "all denominations" for recreational purposes. Hitherto the "Churches" had run their own halls on more or less exclusive lines; but in the new one the Protestant lion was to lie down, so to speak, with the Catholic lamb (or vice versa!) and all was to be harmony and peace. I inaugurated the new era by a lantern-lecture on "Unknown Brazil," which a kindly newspaper report described as "brimful of information and sparkling with anecdote and humour!" It was anyhow a successful start and the hall proved a really valuable addition to our village assets. I was unable to attend the next lecture—a most interesting illustrated history of the old Fort—being called south to attend the funeral of the Bishop of Galloway, an old and faithful friend of our house, with whom I had been intimate for close on forty years. The funeral procession, with crucifix and choir, vested clergy and mitred prelates, passing through the streets of Dumfries thronged with silent mourners, was one of the most remarkable spectacles I ever witnessed in Scotland. Bishop Turner had long been on terms of close friendship with the Bute family; but Bute and his brothers, being all abroad, were represented by their brother-in-law Colin MacRae. I went south from Dumfries, having some business with Cardinal Bourne, who talked, inter alia, of the chapel (St. Andrew's) in his cathedral which was being adorned at Bute's expense, and of the question whether the numerous texts should be in Latin or English. I was all for Latin in the metropolitan cathedral of the Empire, the resort of worshippers of every tongue and every nation. His Eminence, however, favoured English, and I (like Mr. Alfred Jingle) "did not presume to dictate."[[14]] I was elected this week a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, of which the big, quiet, and well-furnished library was to me the chief attraction. The Protestant drum had been, I was assured, if not beaten, at least discreetly tapped, by a small clique of members in connection with my candidature—a curious fact in what somebody describes as "the so-called twentieth century"; but a gracefully-worded telegram from my proposer and seconder[[15]] informed me that the plot (if there ever was one, which I rather doubted) had failed. I went to Arundel for the Lourdes festival, always kept solemnly there; found the kind Duke and Duchess encircled, as usual, by a cloud of youthful Maxwells, and heard Bernard Vaughan (just returned from the U.S.A.) preach eloquently on "The claims of the Church" with a distinctly American accent, and, later on, regale us in the smoking-room with a choice collection of American chestnuts!
I got back to our abbey just in time to give the last blessing to our good old brother Nathalan, who died at the age of ninety-nine, the patriarch of the Benedictine Order in these islands and possibly in Christendom. A native of Glengairn, he spoke the Aberdeenshire idiom of his mother-Gaelic with remarkable purity and fluency; and he could talk for hours about beasts and birds, old smuggling adventures, second sight, and cognate subjects. His grandfather had fought for Prince Charlie at Culloden; and he knew the name and history of every Glengairn man who had taken part in that historic battle. A man of robust faith and deep practical piety, he was content and happy in the monastery, which he had only entered when well over seventy. He was totally blind (though otherwise in good health) for some time before his death; and morning after morning his bowed and venerable figure, supported by a younger brother, might be seen wending its way to the chapel where he daily heard mass and received Holy Communion. I was glad to be at home for the closing hours of the life of the good simple old man, whose death made a felt blank in the family circle of our community.
The early months of the eventful year 1914 passed quickly and quietly enough at our Highland abbey. We resolved soon after Easter to accept the contract for the building of the choir of our church—a venture of faith, for the necessary sum was not yet all in hand; but we felt that we were justified in making a start. A few days later came the interesting and gratifying news that the elevation of Abbot Gasquet to the Cardinalate—often rumoured in recent years—was actually decided on. This entailed an "extraordinary" meeting of Chapter in connection with the Abbot-president's resignation of that office; and going south to attend it, I took the occasion of accepting an invitation to officiate at the Corpus Christi procession at Arundel. It was a curiously impressive function in that old-world English town: the long cortège of clergy and choristers and people, with the tall Venetian lanterns, scarlet and gold, waving above their heads as they passed slowly, to the sounds of sacred psalmody, under the grey walls of the castle and back into the great church of St. Philip. I went on from Arundel to Oxford, to stay with Father Maturin, the acting Catholic chaplain there (his undergraduate flock now numbered nearly a hundred), and was delighted to see the good work he was doing. One was always sure of a good story from him; and à propos of his wish to introduce hymn-singing at his Sunday services, he told me of the Sunday-school superintendent who, dissatisfied with the children's dead-alive singing of the well-known temperance hymn, "Little Drops of Water," himself repeated the first line, adding, "Now, please, put a little spirit into it!" My old tale of the don who objected to men coming to church in slippers reminded him, he said, of a college dean he had heard of in his Cowley days, who, to an undergraduate asking leave to go down to attend his great-aunt's funeral, replied after some hesitation, "Well, you may go; but I must say I do wish it had been for a nearer relation!"[[16]]
The June of 1914 was exceptionally hot, and I found the long journey to the Highlands so intolerably tedious and dusty that I could not resist jumping out of the train at the head of Loch Lomond, and staying the night there. I wrote on a picture postcard to an editorial friend in London—"not for publication," but just to tantalize him in his stuffy sanctum in Fleet Street:
Delightful little Highland inn. Just dined—purée aux pois, a Loch Lomond trout (pink and flaky), an excellent mutton chop, and gooseberry pie. Here is a view of Loch Lomond from my window, but the Ben has its lace nightcap on. The colours are simply exquisite.[[17]]
Later in the summer I attended a great gathering at Downside (fifteen bishops and ten abbots were guests of the abbey) for the solemn reception of Cardinal Gasquet at his mother-house. There were imposing church functions, of course, concerts, speeches galore, and on the closing day of the festivities a luncheon-party of six hundred, after which we (Cardinal, bishops, and abbots) motored off in clouds of dust for Bristol and Cardiff, for the opening of the Eucharistic Congress there. I stayed for the week at the castle, where were also Cardinals Bourne and Gasquet, the Gainsboroughs, and others; the Butes gave a banquet one evening, followed by a great reception, in honour of the assembled dignitaries, who were also entertained by the Lord Mayor in the splendid town hall. Just a fortnight after the closing of the Congress, Germany declared war on Russia and France; and three days later, on the midnight which ushered in the feast-day of Saint Oswald, the English soldier-saint and martyr, Britain took up arms against Germany. Jacta est alea!
The reverberations of the Great War were not unfelt even in our quiet home among the Highland hills; and our life, like the life of every class of the community in those years of storm and stress, was affected profoundly, and in many ways, by the struggle which for four long years was rending the civilized world. A detailed record of those years of war, even so far as we were touched by it, would be out of place in this chronicle of peaceful days. Many of our former pupils, and some who had worn our habit and shared our life in the cloister, fought, and more than one died, for king and country: a band of devoted priests—few indeed, yet a large proportion of our total number—worked throughout the war, at home and abroad, as chaplains in the army and the navy, two of them being severely wounded, and two decorated by the King for their good service; and, finally, we who perforce remained at home had the consolation and satisfaction of receiving into our provisional hospital a long succession of wounded soldiers, Belgian and British, and of co-operating with the good people of our village and neighbourhood in the work of tending and succouring them. So, according to our measure, we "did our bit" like the rest, and could feel, when the day of peace at length dawned, that we had tried to render service to our country at a time when she had a right to the service of all her sons.
*****