November 25th.
DEAR Agatha,—I anticipated your wish that I should make Chelsea the object of my next pilgrimage. Mrs. D. and I went there yesterday.
The gulls were very busy about nothing over the river, and they harmonised with the colour scheme of the afternoon. Pale sunshine, a sky of washed-out blue, a silver river, wharves, and leafless trees in Battersea Park veiled by a curtain which was part autumn mist and part smoke from the factory chimneys on the south side.
The square brick tower of the old parish church makes a landmark to the barges and steamboats on their silent passing, and at night its clock shines out like a full moon above the plane trees which line the Embankment.
A quaint old place it is inside, with a great west gallery that encroaches almost to the chancel. Where the pews leave off the crowding large tombs begin, and where the tombs end the discoloured walls are covered with coats of arms. All this, seen by the homely light of day, which falls through the windows of plain glass, has an intimate and pleasant appearance. Even the ancient tombs in their proximity to the worshippers seem friendly.
In Sir Thomas More's chapel a certain Arthur Georges, who died in 1660, lies under the feet of the person who happens to occupy the chair which partly hides the inscription on his tomb:—
"Here lies interred the body of that generous and worthy Gent, Arthur Georges, Esq. Here sleepes and feeles noe pressure of ye stone. He that had all the Georges Soules in One. Here the ingenious Arthur lies to be bewailed by marble and our eyes...."
"The ingenious Arthur!" One pictures him. A man who had "a way with women". Apt to get into scrapes, irresponsible, but with a knack of getting out of a tight corner. Kind-hearted, given to take what life offers in the way of pleasure, and always ready to pass on good things, and do a good turn to the under-dog. The inscription goes on to say, "When all the Georges rise he'll rise again," which pious belief set me speculating as to whether I might some day meet the "ingenious Arthur". I'm sure I should like him.
Mrs. Darling was visibly impressed when I told her that the body of Sir Thomas More (whose head had been thrown from London Bridge into his daughter's arms below) was in all probability buried under the church. His tomb in the chancel consists of a ledge and a tablet of black marble surmounted by a flat Gothic arch. On the ledge was a bunch of tawny chrysanthemums and a cross of scarlet immortelles, so the old man who went to the scaffold rather than be a party to the chicanery and concupiscence of Henry VIII is not yet forgotten. Sir Thomas More, it has always seemed to me, carried his asceticism to extreme limits in the matter of his marriage. "Having determined," so says the historian, "by the advice of his ghostly father to be a married man, he was offered the choice of the two daughters of a friend, and although his affection most served him to the second, for that he thought her the fairest and best favoured, yet when he thought within himself that it would be a grief and some blemish to the eldest to have the youngest sister preferred before her, he, out of a kind of compassion, settled his fancy on the eldest, and soon afterwards married her."
More's first marriage, curiously arranged as it was, seemed to have proved happier than his second, and one is driven to the conclusion that the great man lacked discrimination in affairs of the heart. Hear his second wife's tirade when visiting in the Tower. "I marvel," says she, "that you, who have been hitherto always taken for a wise man, will now so play the fool as to lie here in this close-fitting prison, and be content to be shut up thus with mice, and rats, when you might be abroad at your liberty, with the favour and goodwill of the King and his council, if you would but do as the bishops and best learned of his realm have done."