[28] I remained at Westminster a year, judging that period to be as long as I could support the daily risk of detection by pupils or colleagues. Sometimes—now that it is all over—I blush to think of the subjects that I essayed to teach; and sometimes I blush to recall the lessons that I actually taught. Since leaving, I have seen my year's work passed in more candid review than was possible at the time and have been honoured with a place in the repertory of imitations in which Westminsters love to indulge whenever two or three are gathered together. If one or two of my least promising pupils pay me the compliment of saying that I taught them at least something, one or two of the most promising now ask me how it was that I never discovered them cribbing in form or thrusting strange gifts down the necks of their neighbours. Our warfare was waged with good humour for the most part, though only a schoolmaster knows how highly his sense of justice may be tested in dealing with some one who is personally antagonistic to him. With many I am proud to say that I made lasting friendships: during the later years of the war I received letters from every front and my old pupils came to see me when they were on leave; since the war they write from Africa and America, I meet them in London and Oxford, we abandon ourselves to school "shop", and they embarrass me by occasionally addressing me as "sir". To my friends of the Modern Transitus from Play Term, 1914, to Election Term, 1915, to the Classical Transitus, the Modern Sixth, the Mathematical Sixth, the History Sixth and the Seventh, wherever you may be, I send greeting; my injustice was unintentional, my incompetence incurable; I should be well pleased to think that your memories of me are a hundredth part as kindly as my memories of you. For perhaps the first three cautious days you were a little awed by me: the cap and gown were imposing. I was taller than any of you, as an Old Westminster I knew too much about detention school and penal drill; above all, I also had lived in Arcady and had sat at those very desks not ten years before; does it comfort you to know that my awe of you continued for three terms? If ever the prayer-bell had not rung before I shewed that I could not solve some diabolical equation! If you had argued a little more confidently against my magisterial rulings! If you could have seen into my mind during the first week, when I took down your names, ranged you in alphabetical order and guided myself despairingly by the two red-heads in the form!
[29] I believe that the Education Office section, appropriately enough, threw into Latin elegiacs the general confession beginning: "My beat extends from (the sentry-box) to (the gate on Constitution Hill) and must be patrolled regularly ..."; I never saw a copy.
[30] When Lord Emmott, the Director of the War Trade Department, invited me to serve under him in the summer of 1915, I intended to come only for the school holidays; as, however, the work of the blockade increased steadily, I asked Dr. Gow to release me for as long as I might be wanted.
[31] As it had been in existence for five months before I entered it, I can only describe its early history from hearsay.
[32] Six years before, on the first night of The Blue Bird, I remember constructing from the name of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos a mental picture of some one very tall, very thin, very dark and saturnine, with a long amber cigarette-holder and a single eyeglass depending from a broad black ribbon. I had not then seen Max Beerbohm's caricature of him; and, at our first meeting, I murmured to myself, as hundreds have done before and since: "Of course! The old sheep in Alice Through the Looking-Glass." As hundreds have done before and since, I surrendered to his charm; and there is no friend to whom I owe more. For over three years we worked together, many hours a day for six days a week; our minds and moods found something always in common; in five years there cannot have been many days on which we did not meet or telephone or write. In the next five years may there be as few!
I am not alone in fashioning an imaginary figure to bear such a name. I am told that a distinguished black-and-white artist, meeting the name fortuitously, would walk pensively through the streets of London thereafter, searching the faces of the passers-by for one that would fit his ideal, Alexander-Teixeira-de-Mattos conception. And, when they met, I wonder if the artist was as much frightened as every newcomer to the department. On my second morning I looked up suddenly into a white impassive face; eyes unchanging in expression regarded me through the tortoise-shell spectacles which bestrid the impressive nose; the mouth was tightly-shut; neither word nor movement explained this paralysing figure which had glided to my table like some wandering sphinx. "I am not sure whether your minute intends to convey ..." he began at length and to my indescribable relief. Fear departed with that word, and we collaborated in redrawing the minute. Sometimes the Teixeira panic spread to distant committees which only knew his exquisite handwriting and his disabling knowledge of English; they hastened to do his bidding and to avert his wrath; no chairman likes to apologize twice for "the curiously pococurantist attitude of your committee", few care even to have the apology accepted with the words that consigned so many controversial files to oblivion: "Pray say no more. A.T."
[33] Sir Ian Hamilton's Gallipoli Diary is one of many military documents that shew that civilian morale at home cracked before the morale of the soldiers under fire. There was a fantastic legend that the English were unvaryingly calm and resolute, with a calmness and resolution that became calmer and more resolute with every demand. Nothing is farther from the truth. There was a panic when the Amiens despatch was published; and every outburst of popular violence or madness had panic as its origin and explanation. The spy-mania, the attack on Lord Haldane, the conscription campaign, the hunt for aliens and, finally, the Pemberton-Billing case were each in turn the result of a panic caused by accumulated despondency or by the violent despair induced by a sudden reverse. The east-end Jews who cowered in tube stations during air-raids had their own means of shewing fear; but it was not the only means.
[34] This is becoming a conventional aftermath of any war in which the vanquished is so heavily defeated that he has to make a superhuman effort to galvanize his country into new life. The same alarms were spread by the Germans about the French in 1875.
[35] "It is said," writes Mr. Walter Roch in Mr. Lloyd George and the War, "that as a result of this Conference ('the Constitutional Conference which sat in secret between the two General Elections in 1910, and tried to reach a settlement of the constitutional issue, by agreement'), in the course of which a wide range of topics must have been discussed, Mr. Lloyd George then proposed, and committed to writing, a scheme for a Coalition Government which would settle the question of the House of Lords and Home Rule, adopt some form of National Service, and finance the Navy by means of a loan. But the details of this scheme are only vaguely known and add to our confusion."
I am not aware, however, that the allegation has ever been denied.