Laughter in the Next Room

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

As a Captain in the Grenadier Guards, Osbert Sitwell came unscathed through the heavy fighting in Flanders, and with the final victory in 1918 he, his sister Edith, and his younger brother Sacheverell turned to the arts with that sense of release and opportunity which the war had so long suppressed.

His friends and acquaintances included Shaw, Mary Webb, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, the Huxleys, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Isadora Duncan — the seething artistic and literary and

fashionable world of a London newly awakened from the long night of the First World War. Osbert Sitwell gives us charming, unconventional portraits of these people, and resumes the account of his intense, almost medieval father, his delightful but impractical mother, and the life at Renishaw, the ancient family residence in Derbyshire. This is the second of four installments to be drawn from the new volume of his autobiography, begun in Left Hand, Right Hand! (1944) and carried on in The Scarlet Tree (1946) and Great Morning! (1947)

13

THE Next War was still twenty years ahead in time and it seemed clear that men were not such fools as ever to let it occur again. The crowd celebrating the Armistice had reason to be glad. For drunk and sober, for living and dead, for the bodies torn and twisted, and eked out with the flesh of others, the war was over, the first great democratic war, and we were entering the period for which we had fought. Now the years had arrived in which we could prove our worth. For me, as for many others, a period of the most intense activity set in: all the energy repressed for years, or let loose into unsuitable channels, was freed at last. I attempted to make up for the years of which I had been cheated. Within two years I had stood for Parliament, produced a long book of poems, become an editor of a quarterly devoted to modern art and literature, interviewed D’Annunzio at Fiume, contributed innumerable articles on many subjects to the newspapers, and in conjunction with my brother had organized the first large exhibition of modern French pictures held in London since 1914.

I had formed, also with my brother’s help and advice, a collection of modern pictures, defective in some respects though it was, because of our lack of money; I had written art criticism, and had become a regular contributor of vers-libre satires which appeared as leading articles (the only ones of their kind in any paper) to the Daily Herald, then edited by George Lansbury with Siegfried Sassoon as the literary editor. From these I selected two satires, and adding to them a third which had appeared in the Nation, made of them a sixpenny book, entitled The Winstonbury Line, devoted for the most part to an attack on that great personality, since then so much inflated by a long span of almost autocratic power, who had gazed at me so many years before from almost every inch of the walls of the schoolroom improvised within the mauve tents of Chesham Place. The assault was directed against a policy that, by supporting ineffective armed resistance to the new regime in Russia, made of it an enemy, forever suspicious, and at the same time sealed the fate of those poor weak creatures it had deposed, and who were now held in its clutches.

This pamphlet was published by the late Mr. Henderson of “The Bomb Shop” in the Charing Cross Road, an elderly Scottish Socialist in a brown tweed suit, with a flaming red tie, spectacles, and a Trotskyite beard. He was very kind and genial, in spite of a certain cynicism of appearance, as well as enterprising, and under his auspices, the volume sold at Albert Hall “Hands-off-Russia! ” meetings and elsewhere in such great numbers — though without profit to myself, for I had neglected to ask for a contract — that for many years it remained my best-known work.

my my It will be seen from the foregoing passage with what fury I applied myself to life; equally, it will appear from what follows that it did not impress everyone, any more than did the similar multiform energies unloosed by my brother. Thus there was a well-known remark made at this time by Miss Burton, Robert Ross’s former housekeeper, who now let rooms in Half Moon Street. A rotund, warmhearted, loyal, and likable comedy-character from Shakespeare, she had somehow strayed into the Victorian Age and dipped herself in its finery. Always elaborately dressed in silks and velvets, with fretwork insertions, her large contours hung about with keys, brooches, signet rings, and Wagnerian jewels (she had a great love of Wagner’s operas), while to crown all, there would be on great days, balanced on high brown-gray rolls of hair, a largebrimmed flat hat, spread with ostrich feathers, she suggested something of the jovial, indeed rollicking, good sense of a portrait by Franz Hals, and many of her dictums delivered in a voice that still retained a delightful Hampshire coo and burr were memorable, and gained a circulation among connoisseurs. Thus she confided to her tenant and my friend, Lord Berners, that “Them two Sitwells ‘ave got into a grove.”

On another occasion, again, I heard myself described as lazy. Arnold Bennett was present when this judgment was passed, and began to roar with his laughter, with which he was obliged to struggle as with his words, until his whole face grew red, rather as the body of an octopus changes color, and the upstanding hair of his head, and his mustache, always so bristly, seemed to bristle still more. When he had mastered his attack, and could again get his breath, he remarked, “That’s good! The trouble with Osbert is that he has seven professions, not one, and a life devoted to each.”

Elsewhere I have written an account — though it will not be published until later — of how a first meeting with Arnold Bennett had led eventually to my becoming one of the three editors of Art and Letters. Arnold had most generously offered to finance my editorship of it: but this in the end had not proved necessary, for Frank Rutter, the owner of the paper, wished to reconstitute it and of his own accord offered to Herbert Read and myself the joint editorship of the literary side, while allowing us, moreover, to influence him in the pictorial.

It is interesting to look back at the contributors to this quarterly. Our first number of Art and Letters (Winter, 1918-1919) included poems by Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Osbert Sitwell, and Sacheverell Sitwell; prose by Ginner, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read, and Frank Rutter; illustrations by GaudierBrzeska, Kramer, Wadsworth, and Wyndham Lewis, by whose hand also was the cover design.

It was in connection with the revival of Art and Letters, at the old Café Royal, with its smoky acres of painted goddesses and cupids and tarnished gilding, its golden caryatids and garlands, and its filtered, submarine illumination, composed of tobacco smoke, of the flames from chafing dishes and the fumes from food, of the London fog outside and the dim electric light within; through which haze one caught sight of such monumental figures as Jacob and Mrs. Epstein, immense in this artificial gloaming, and superb in their own way — the same way as his busts, conjured up, and transposed by magic from color into form, out of the most intractable material, from the later and more lurid portraits of Rembrandt — of Augustus John, like some kind of Rasputin-Jehovah, and of Ronald Firbank, seated askew, and laughing consumedly to himself or shuddering in the intervals between the glasses, and of a hundred bowler-hatted bookies and artistic publishers; it was here, then, in these surroundings, that the three prospective editors had luncheon.

This was the first time I had met Herbert Read, at the time a very young officer, beginning his career as a poet. I had seldom known then anyone of a finer, more unselfish, personal quality, possessed of so little self-conceit, or with a more true and wholehearted devotion to those paintings and writings, which though others may think sometimes wrongly, he esteems. Perhaps I liked him so greatly because of the difference in temperament between us; like a roundhead, he is extravagant only in the lengths to which art austerity carries him: whereas I am extravagant in all else. He bears a plain distrust towards the sumptuous and the easily pleasing; whether owing to the early struggles which he has so vividly, and often touchingly, described in his autobiography, The Innocent Eye, to his experiences in the war, which had earned him the D.S.O. and the Military Cross, or to his very nature itself, he had already developed a look of premature seriousness. His rather rueful smile was not easy to command; but when it suddenly broke up the gravity of his face, it certainly lightened his whole appearance. Making an acquaintance, which grew into friendship, with him was a source of great pleasure to me at this time, and subsequently to my brother and sister.

14

MOST of the contributors to Art and Letters were friends of mine already: and the majority of them were young, of my own age, though among them, too, were numbered men older than myself, such as Matisse (whom I have never met) or the veteran soldier and writer-painter, Percy Wyndham Lewis, who had returned lately to civilian — I nearly wrote civil — life. For many years now, he had been simultaneously at the center and on the outskirts of the circus dirt-storm his presence invariably provoked. In fact, his geniality had long been proverbial. He had been the leader of the Vorticists, the editor of Blast, a celebrated publication of pre-war days; he had been, in earlier times, a student at the Slade School: though I do not know quite when.

But it was in the days of which I write — in the summer of 1919, to be precise — that one night we were dining, he and my brother and sister and I, at Verrey’s when he made a celebrated pronouncement. The restaurant was full; many of the diners sat by themselves at table, in order better to appreciate the excellence of the dishes (the elderly patron, with a pointed beard, walked slowly from table to table, in the French manner, to see that all was served and well cooked). Against a setting of dust-colored brocade, and opposite my brother sat Lewis. At the end of dinner, in the quietness, he first made a calculation with a pencil on an old matchbox and then, with the usual yellowing cigarette stub clamped to his upper lip while he spoke, its smoke drifting across his left eye, which, in accordance, he had partially to close, thus imparting to his face a more than customarily knowing look, said firmly, but in a carefully lowered voice: —

“Remember! I’m thirty-seven till I pass the word round!” The seriousness with which he laid this injunction upon us so intimidated my sister that she has told me that, until many years later, if a doctor came to see her and, in the course of examining her chest, commanded, “Say 99,” she would instinctively and invariably reply instead, “37!”

In those days whereof I write, a Norwegian fishing cap — made apparently on a pudding-basin model, and I suppose of some kind of cloth (though the material more suggested brawn), with a short, fat all-round rim, the front of which just afforded shade to his eyes — had long ousted his black sombrero in the same way that a robust and rather jocose Dutch convexity had replaced the former melancholy and lean Spanish elegance of his appearance. A carefully produced sense of mystery, a feeling of genuine suspiciousness, emanated from him and pervaded all he did, hovered, even, over the most meager facts of his daily life in the large, rather empty studio. But he was covered, too, with Bohemian bonhomie, worn like an ill-fitting suit, and he could be, and often was, a diverting companion and a brilliant talker.

Every Thursday evening when we were in London, my brother and I would dine at a restaurant on the first floor of a building in Piccadilly Circus, in company with certain friends, who as a rule comprised T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, and Ezra Pound as well as Lewis. Each of us sat, back to the wall, at a separate table, and this distance helped to make conversation self-conscious or desultory. Ezra Pound was inclined to mumble into his red beard, a habit perhaps brought on by his defensiveness, the result, in turn, of attacks delivered on himself during the years of his domicile in England. He was particularly a type the English do not understand or appreciate.

As a consequence of his attitude and conduct in the 1939 war, little good is heard of him today: and it is perhaps as well to recall that among the considerable number of poems he has written, some of which are apt to seem pretentious, for his scholarship is not sure and he often relies on it overmuch, he has written some very beautiful and original poems. His kindness was very great to many young authors and artists, but he seldom allowed it to be suspected by its recipients. And I remember almost the last time I met Yeats, I mentioned that I had seen Pound in Italy, and he remarked, “Anyone must like Ezra, who has seen him feeding the stray cats at Rapallo.” More important than all else, it must be remembered that he discovered Gaudier-Brzeska, and did much to make known the genius of T. S. Eliot; whose work was a source of so much pleasure and excitement to my sister, my brother, and myself, both at the time of which I write and through all the years that have passed since.

In the autumn of 1917, he, and my brother and sister and I were among the poets chosen to read their verse for charity one afternoon at Mrs. Colefax’s house. The night before, a dinner party was given for the chairman, Sir Edmund Gosse, the organizers, Madam Vandervelde and Robert Ross, and for those reading. It was then that we saw Eliot for the first time; a most striking being, having peculiarly luminous, light yellow, more than tawny, eyes: the eyes, they might have been, of one of the greater cats, but tiger, puma, leopard, lynx; rather than those of a lion, which for some reason display usually a more domesticated and placid expression. His face, too, possessed the width of bony structure of a tigrine face, though the nose was prominent, similar, I used to think, to that of a figure on an Aztec carving or bas-relief.

Though he was reserved, and had armored himself behind the fine manners, and the fastidiously courteous manner, that are so particularly his own, though, too, the range and tragic depths of his great poetry were to be read in the very lines of his face, and though, in addition, he must have been exhausted by long hours of uncongenial work, his air, to the contrary, was always lively, gay, even jaunty. His clothes, too — in London, he usually wore check or “sponge-bag” trousers, and a short black coat — were elegant, and he walked with a cheerful, easy movement. If it be or be not true that the technique of a poet is his etheric body, yet in this instance, the comparison is particularly apt: for Eliot’s muscular conformation and his carriage and the way he moved seemed to explain the giant muscular control of rhythm he has acquired. . . .

To return to the reading, the next day the poets met again on a platform, in a drawing room. Sir Edmund was in the chair, with four or five of us on either side of him. When Eliot arrived a few minutes late, he was rebuked publicly by Sir Edmund (though in fact the young man had come straight from the bank in which he was then working). But the high lights of the day were already gathered there; Robert Nichols—who seemed to have added to his own considerable role that of a benevolent vice-chairman — and Irene Rutherford McLeod. Their renderings of their poems deeply moved the fashionable audience. As for Eliot, he showed no trace of annoyance at being reproved: for one manifestation of the good manners I have cited was that he never allowed his companions to suspect the fatigue he must have been suffering: nor did he ever repine openly at the extraordinary fate which constrained such a poet to such a task, but he endured it with a jaunty patience, if puzzled at times — though doubtless with all a tiger’s fiery core of impatience at the heart.

15

MY WORK no less than my inclination had brought me, in the last two years before the end of the 1914 war, into touch with many of the creative intelligences then at work in England. The Poetry Bookshop constituted, under the most considerate and, indeed, inspired of hosts, Harold Monro, a great meeting place: for not only was he a friend of all the poets of his own generation, but new work always attracted, though it may sometimes have irritated him. He was indulgent to all poets. He liked new ideas even when they did not match his own, and in the large, comfortable, paneled rooms above the shop, he would often of an evening bring together whole schools of poets of the most diverse faith, opinions, and temperament. Since his death there has been no one to match him in this respect. Sometimes there would be battle, but always one heard the literary news and was told of small incidents, which though the world’s foundations have been shaken since those days continue even now to come back to the mind.

Whatever outbreaks had taken place, one left Harold Monro’s parties enlivened, and grateful to him: for he was an excellent host. But though I formed several friendships at the Poetry Bookshop, the chief were with my host and his beautiful wife Alida. When I felt worried I would often go in and interrupt the business of selling books, in order to consult them and gain the benefit of their valuable advice, or sometimes myself to amuse them by relating some ridiculous instance of literary life, until occasionally customers would grow resentful and Harold would be recalled with a jolt to inquiries and prices.

Harold Monro’s establishment was, of course, in its scope and personnel, in the volumes of verse, and the occasional or regular periodicals it published, as different from other bookshops as it was removed from them in space, for it occupied a mediumsized house of Rowlandsonian aspect — with a pediment bearing in its center within an elliptical circle an appropriate date — in Devonshire Street, running out of Theobald’s Road, a narrow street, rather dark, but given over to screaming children, lusty small boys armed with catapults, and to leaping flights of eighteenth-century cats: nevertheless, albeit the Poetry Bookshop was so unlike in character to the ordinary run, yet there were others in their various ways no less distinctive, and this is perhaps the place to emphasize how large a part bookshops played in the lives of my brother and myself — as, no doubt, of all authors who, even those most widely apart, share, perhaps, this one trail in common. Thus the broad length of the Charing Cross Road, sloping downwards from the Palace Theatre to the Hippodrome especially, constituted a favorite saunter in a free hour.

Walking down the road, and zigzagging continually across it, you came first to Jaschke’s, now Zwemmer’s, the spot of all others in which to find new editions of foreign books and the latest quarterlies or monthly magazines devoted to modern art and literature from Paris, Rome, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and the other capitals of intellectual life. ... A little further along, you reached “The Bomb Shop,” which I have already mentioned, where the proprietor waited, standing near a table at the back, ready to discuss politics sympathetically with any of the eager Fabians, Socialists, Anarchists, or Bolshevists who peered myopically through their thick lenses at the books stacked on shelves painted scarlet, or who read the newspaper cuttings relative to capitalist atrocities that hung pinned up on the wall. He showed himself equally ready, too, to slang, in his sharp Scottish voice, any intruding Tory who ventured to make a remark of any sort. Books, the political theories and implication of which prevented their being in demand elsewhere, could always be obtained here, for this was the rather combustible political center of the district. . . .

Almost opposite, a little higher up, you could visit one of the aesthetic centers of the quarter, as devoid of all political tendencies, except a love of personal freedom, as it was full of ideas; a shop presided over by C. W. Beaumont, now the eminent writer on choreography and dancers, the historian of the ballet in Western Europe, and the leading English balletomane. Even in those early days, he was already a friend of my brother’s and mine, for we had first met him in 1914 or 1915.

The scene of so much action was small, consisting of a front room of no great size, a winding iron staircase at the back of it, that seemed to belong to one of Harrison Ainsworth’s novels and certainly must descend to a dungeon (how often have I not started to climb down it to make sure, only to be halted once again by the vertigo inevitably induced by its mazy metallic convolutions!), and behind the shop, the proprietor’s diminutive sanctum, lined with books, lit always by electric light, and containing many relics of great dancers, past and present. On a shelf on one wall could be examined a specialty of the shop, a line of flat figures cut out of wood, and painted to represent dancers in such works as Carnaval, Petrouchka, L’Oiseau de Feu.

Sitting by the door — and, as for that, so minute was this closet, by everything, by wall and books and window — Cyril Beaumont, with his closely cropped, suave, orange head of hair that revealed the shape of the cranium, was always to be found smoking a cigarette, at his desk, a Babel’s Tower of books and papers. He would be thinking out new schemes — such as the printing press below, now celebrated, which he was already then planning — with so much intentness that the entry of a customer would often give him a start. Notwithstanding, once he had grown used to the idea, he was, plainly, pleased to see us, and would tell us of many things, of incidents, for example, that had occurred during the day, and of strange customers, for life in the Charing Cross Road is always full of surprises. Mrs. Beaumont would enter, too, to talk or sometimes give us tea: but all such conversation was misleading: for Cyril Beaumont’s even and casual voice disguised a will of iron: the shop was pervaded by his personality and by that of his wife, and as full of energy as a dynamo. . . . So it was that often, in an idle moment, Sacheverell would say to me, “ Let us go and see Beaumont.”

16

As WILL be seen from the foregoing pages, I had found then very numerous friendships among an unusually large range, I believe, of persons: but I acknowledged no claim except that of the artist.

I had shed, too, many inherited friendships, and tried to free myself from the shackles of class: (but voluntarily to unclass oneself is no easy matter!). With the same eagerness with which I sought new intellectual contacts, so I fled from my elderly relatives, near or distant. When I saw them, I tried to elude them, for the war had drained my patience, and they seemed to enclose me in the atmosphere in which I had grown up. I loved to be with my brother and sister: I sought, too, the society of various cousins of my own age: but the rest, the Golden Horde, now stiff-jointed, and unable to hunt more than four days a week, the Fun Brigade, its laughter stifled or wheezy, the Bevy, all of these, I endeavored to shun.

As the years went by, I found myself inevitably drawn back to my beginnings. It is impossible to escape. The lines of the left hand are indelibly incised — more deeply than those of the right, which are subject to change. Certain people are given you in life, and the places in which to see them. You can add others: newcomers, but the first group returns, is forced back on you by circumstances: I cannot presume to pronounce how or why — but that is my belief. Perhaps in the beginning, the illusion of freedom of choice is necessary. At any rate I possessed it. . . . At a party in the Adelphi on the night of the Armistice, there was no single person I had known before the war.

By the end of the following month, December, 1918, I had already fought and lost an election, and by the middle of April had succeeded in leaving the Army — always a difficult thing to effect when troops are no longer wanted in great numbers. After a long period — or at least it seemed long — in a Military Hospital in London, I was given a medical board, and told I could go on leave pending my release from the Service. ... I suppose I was in the ward for about a month or six weeks. The hospitals everywhere were crowded with the victims of the great plague, Spanish influenza, as it was called (surely a death disease born of the; holocaust and carrying the very sense of the dead and their sufferings into the bones). Placed on arrival in the Influenza Ward, I contracted the illness three times, and it affected my heart. But the nurses seemed impervious to mortal ills, chatting brightly through the groans of the dying under the naked electric light bulbs swaying in an icy draft. Tea was the great uplifter of souls — Indian tea, of course. Even the corpses were called at four in the morning.

Into this artificial paradise created by germ and tea-leaf immersion, visitors were admitted on certain afternoons — it may have been on every afternoon — and the silent elongated forms of Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey could occasionally be seen drooping round the end of my bed like the allegorical statues of Melancholy and of a rather satyr-like Father Time that mourn sometimes over a departed nobleman on an eighteenthcentury tombstone. Lytton’s debility prevented him from saying much, but what he did say, he uttered in high, personal accents that floated to considerable distances, and the queer reasonableness, the unusual logic of what he said, carried conviction.

As an instance of his brevity, so off the point and on it, there is a remark of his that comes to my mind. When he was in Rome, Princess San Faustino entertained him to luncheon, and treated him and her other guests to a long explanation of a scheme she had recently thought of, to aid the unemployed. It was all dependent on growing the soya-bean. Factories, and synthetic chocolates and motorcars and building material and bath salts, all were to be made of this magic substance. She worked the whole idea up to an enthusiastic but boring climax, when she turned to the guest of honor, and appealed to him.

“ Mr. Strachey, what do you think of my scheme? ”

He replied in his highest, most discouraging key, “I’m afraid I don’t like beans!”

As for Aldous, Nonchalance, perhaps, more than Melancholy, should have been the image we took him to represent. He was then very young, I think twenty-three. Though often silent for long periods, he would talk for an equal length of time with the utmost fascination. Versed in every modern theory of science, politics, painting, literature, and psychology, he was qualified by his disposition to deal in ideas and play with them. Nor would gossip, or any matter of the day, be beneath his notice: though even these lesser things would be treated as by a philosopher, with detachment and an utter want of prejudice. But he preferred to discourse of more erudite and impersonal scandals, such as the incestuous mating of melons, the elaborate love-making of Lepidoptera, or the curious amorous habits of cuttlefish. He would speak with obvious enjoyment, in a voice of great charm, unhurried, clear without being loud, and utterly indifferent to any sensation he was making. Thus the most surprising statements would hover languidly in air, heavy with hospital disinfectants. “From their conduct,” I remember his announcing on one occasion, “one must presume that the Octopus has read Ovid on Love.”

Unconscious of the public interest, Aldous would proceed on his conversational way in a genial effort to amuse me. And to the invalids, as they lay there with nothing to do except read an old, torn, tea-stained copy of the Tatler, or Punch, a whole new world was revealed. Many of them understood for the first time what was being said round them, for they were in that passive state where they were bound to listen, so that truth could enter. How greatly I enjoyed this conversation! But soon Aldous would fall to silence again, drooping into a trancelike state of meditation.

These and other distinguished visitors, then, created a stir among the inmates of the ward, for they little resembled the friends of other patients, either in appearance or in their conversation. It was plain that everyone was enjoying himself: and this suited no one. So it was soon rumored with confidence among nurses and doctors, I was told, that if I remained there much longer, such was the force of my subversive example, “the whole ward would go Bolo” — then regimental and hospital cant for Bolshevist.

17

IN the course of time, however, I got better, or at any rate well enough to be allowed out for walks. My sojourn in the Military Hospital had in no way helped me and I still felt very ill. Indeed it must have shown in my looks, because when I met Roger Fry one day in the street, he was so much struck by my pallor and thinness that, with his invariable kindness, he said that, plainly, I needed feeding up, and must come and have luncheon with him in his studio the next day. I arrived there, accordingly, and found luncheon set out for two amid the confusion, the rags, paints, turpentine, pile of drawings, books, shoes, dead flowers, cracked looking-glasses and shaving brushes, and all the other litter of a painter’s room. My generous host, who would certainly never have troubled to provide such delicacies for himself, had ordered oysters: but as I tasted the first, a horrible doubt assailed me. . . . Waveringly, I began: —

“What unusual oysters these are, Roger. Where did you get them?”

“I’m glad you like them,” he replied, with the spirit and intonation of the quarter, “they come from a charming, dirty little shop round the corner!”

After that, I somehow curbed my hunger, and hid the oysters under their shells. As he cleared away the plates, he took a tin out of some steaming water, and said, “And now we will have some Tripe à la Mode de Caen.”

Setting my jaw, I ate on.

My illness continued for some weeks after I left hospital: but, all the same, life was returning, flowing into its old channels (that, the pre-knowledge of it, was precisely what the world had been celebrating on November 11, 1918). Old friendships were now able to be renewed. Already, before I had left London, Robins had returned from Germany. So much had happened to him and to me since I had last seen him on August 2 1914, that at first he seemed almost a stranger, and he did not talk much of his experiences at Wittenberg, the notorious prison camp where typhus had been rife, and in which he had been incarcerated from December, 1914, until December, 1918. He told me of one incident, however, that occurred at the end of his captivity, and which I have always remembered. Of the Armistice he heard in the following fashion. For several days previously, the most brutal of his jailers, Under-Officer Hildebrand, had been noticeably more amiable in his manner. Now, on the morning of the 11th of November, this man rushed into Robins’s room, looking distraught, and shouting: —

“Our good old German God has deserted us!”

“Didn’t you know that, Under-Officer?” Robins replied. “I did. Why, he’s been a prisoner in England for these past three months!”

Henry Moat, too, had swum, whalelike into our ken again. During the election in December, I had gone to see Bill Moat, Henry’s brother. Hearing that Henry had been, or was being, demobilized, and would shortly return to Whitby, I asked for his address, and my mother wrote to him and asked him to stay with us at Scarborough at Christmas. (My father would be away — and that was an advantage, for they both still disapproved of each other strongly at the time.) He accepted. We found him very little changed, a little heavier, his face a little redder, perhaps.

18

HENRY brought with him the assurance of the past: but the future, too, was shaping itself, and soon, after a fortnight or so in Oxford, I went abroad for pleasure for the first time since 1914, to stay with Mrs. Ronald Greville, a great friend of mine and a personality of power and discernment. She had inherited great riches, and being herself a brilliant organizer and woman of business, had much increased them. But her outward life — for few persons can have guessed the attention she gave to her affairs and to charity — was spent at Polesden Lacey and 16 Charles Street. These two houses were the resort of foreign and imperial, no less than metropolitan statesmen, and of foreign ambassadors, and they possessed a kind of unobtrusive luxury of life and background that I have never encountered elsewhere. The potency of her character enabled her to infuse her splendid entertainments with a sense of fun and enjoyment that rendered them more memorable than their magnificence, or the beauty of their setting. A word, a look, a glance, would indicate a complete grasp of any situation which might arise, and a sure knowledge of how to handle it. She liked to fill her house with celebrated and beautiful people, but was equally happy dining with an obscure friend at some small restaurant in an unfrequented French or Italian town.

Her influence was remarkable, and she lived at the center of things, knowing what was taking place, and judging it with accuracy. In addition, in the course of long journeys through Africa, Asia, and America, her eye had been as observant as it was at home, and she could foretell who would be the coming figures in the countries she visited. As a result her advice was most valuable, and she was consulted by many people of importance, and she played thus a considerable part behind the scenes. In the best sense worldly — that is to say versed in the ways of the world, and supremely well qualified by nature and experience to manage people and situations — she retained a natural simplicity that at the same time inspired her with a certain contempt for the fashionable life in which she nevertheless spent much of her time.

The only daughter of the Scottish millionaire and Liberal member of Parliament and Privy Councilor, William McEwan, she had been brought up very frugally, in spite of his great wealth and generosity; she always retained a slight Scottish intonation and use of phrase, exemplified, for instance, in the way she used to say, “Amn’t I?”, and she had inherited from her father the shrewdest powers of appraisal. She used often to say, “My dear, I know I’m not an educated woman,” and she was certainly better versed in the hearts of men and women than in books — but she was a clever woman herself, though clever in the most feminine way. Her grasp of politics and business was masculine, it is true, but the way in which she went to work was essentially feminine. Politics, more than art, was what she loved and best understood (though her eye for quality often told her which were the good writers): and she could distinguish and sum up the virtues and the failings of politicians with an eye — and occasionally a tongue — as sharp as a needle.

Since her mind weighed men and women so finely, with so much acumen, and since in consequence they were not able to take her in, she possessed, as well as many devoted friends — especially among the young, in whom she found the qualities upon which she set the greatest store, quickness, courage, directness, and freedom from affectation and pomposity — many enemies. This enchanted her, for she was courageous and an accomplished warrior, and liked to be able to make use of her technique, acquired through many years.

Pretensions enraged her, and we of a younger generation especially admired the almost Elizabethan gusto with which she set to combat and vanquish those of her contemporaries who indulged in them. If the point had been reached where a bubble had to be pricked, no one could perform the operation with a more delicate skill and, indeed, virtuosity. Looking at the complacent and the assured, conventional and pompous, she would often start her campaign with the slogan “I think I must have gypsy blood.” But, alas, she often found these women against whom she marched with banners flying — they were nearly always women, for she had few enemies among men — too timid to show their hostility to her to her face. On the contrary, they would try to ingratiate themselves and be rewarded for their trouble with snubs that, like Allingham’s Three Ducks on a Pond, were “to be remembered for years, with tears.” Thus, when she entered an assembly, many a fashionable hostess quailed; but her manner, unless specially provoked, was even to those she disliked unimpeachable: though it left them in no doubt of the feeling she entertained towards them: an all too comprehending word, a congratulation where an attack might have been expected, would lay her enemies low: but she never committed the error of underrating them, and made full allowance to them, even for such imponderable assets as personal charm, manner, or amusing talk.

To her friends she was as loyal, warmhearted, and generous as she showed herself implacable to those whom she disliked. As for myself, from the time of our first meeting in 1916, until her death in September, 1942, she was a never failing friend, and of the greatest help in giving me counsel in the innumerable positions of difficulty in which I contrived to get myself. Invariably her advice would prove correct, even when it concerned that most difficult of matters, the management of my parents. Nor was she ever afraid of telling one straight out, in what, direction one was following a wrong or delusive track.

19

I HAD not seen Monte Carlo since the visit I had paid it for the day when I was eleven, and it was so long since I had been in a Mediterranean country — for four years at twenty is a long time — that I had forgotten, in those fifty months of darkness, the sumptuous plenitude of Italian light,¹ the spears and beams, and banners illuminated even on apparently sunless days, the goldenspangled afternoons, the glowing of hillside and mountain in the evening sun, which clothes it with eagle wings; still more, the marvel of its flawless days, when the great azure dome is only flecked occasionally with a golden ripple, or a great, flat, white cloud sails like a swan across the calm immensity, and when there are minute beauties, as well as majestic, and every small rock cactus or tiny plant can be seen radiating light, drawing in the heat, basking like an emerald lizard, and then the beauty of the hackneyed sunset hour, when the sea has a pallor, as though the moon were already shining on the blue transparency of its water, and the great circular sun sinks into it, and as it goes, piles and rains rose petals onto the mountains before the acronical grape-bloom of sky and sea enfolds them.

I had forgotten the bombastic, contaminated beauty of this particular place, the cliffs of bright painted houses, row after row of cube and rectangle lying on the rock shelves, the lines and garlands of lights at night, the iron stations, light as chinoiserie pavilions, throughout the year wreathed carelessly with clumps and clusters and bouquets of flowers in pastel shades, the flights of steps, steep or shallow, the bulbous, preposterous hotels, the citadel of the whole Principality, the Casino, contorted, heavy, overrich but the very Temple of Chance, situated in a sacred grove, the statue by the hand of Sarah Bernhardt that graces the side of the enormous building, the miniature quays down below, the tunnels, with their sudden blare of daylight, loud as a great sound, the small yachts and sailing vessels in the harbor, the bars and cafés, the Italian smell of coffee in the back streets, the shapes of octopus, sun fish, and mollusc in the Marine Museum, and repeated in fleshy but more stilted green forms by the succulent vegetation outside.

Now, in March, 1919, the little pleasure-city was balanced between two worlds, past and present. The Russian influence was already dead or dying: but its symptoms remained, the great villas, to be pulled down later or split up. People still talked of the luxury in which the Grand Dukes had lived here, of how, when they went back to Russia, they would send their linen from St. Petersburg right across Europe, to be washed at Charvet’s, the famous shirtmaker in the Place Vendôme in Paris, and of how, when they could not come to Monte Carlo in the winter, special trains from the Principality and its neighborhood would bring them carnations and roses for their Muscovite banquets.

But today the members of the Imperial family who had frequented Monte Carlo were scattered, many of them in prison or murdered. Only the Grand Duchess Anastasia, whose behavior had not long ago shaken whole countries — notably Germany, where her daughter had married the Crown Prince — was still to be seen, wearing a flaxen wig, sitting on a stool at the bar of the Hôtel de Paris or in the old Sporting Club. The Grand Duke Dmitri, on the other hand, subsequently for many years to be met in these surroundings, was still near to the horror of Rasputin’s death, which he had helped to plot and carry out, and had not yet arrived here.

Harry Melville, that stylized cosmopolitan, the singular product of the genteel eighties and epigrammatic nineties, was staying at the Hôtel de Paris, and in the intervals of telling those interminable stories that won him a certain social renown, was working excessively hard at introducing his many acquaintances to one another, especially I thought, perhaps actuated by the genuine spice of wit and grain of malice in his nature, those least equipped by nature and circumstances to make friends. But, if this were so, the great conversationalist, as many had for long deemed him, defeated his own purpose, for, when present, he prevented all others from making their views heard, stifling them under the lightweight; longueurs of his tortuous and trivial monologues: nevertheless, he was by nature gay, and by conviction wanted others to enjoy themselves.

Among the persons to whom he ceremoniously presented me were the mistresses of several Grand Dukes, now lost, captive, or massacred in the country which for so long had cherished them. These placid French women, of middle age, so well conducted, so quietly if fashionably dressed, and who still liked to dance a little, had been pastured for almost a generation on meadows of malachite, where the field flowers to be plucked were composed of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires: yet now they could hear nothing of the fate of their masters. One must make the best of things, they would sigh to themselves: they were not badly provided for, with enough to leave to their relatives, to give their nephews and nieces a start in life (they were full of family feeling and domestic virtues, and did not wish their young people to know the same privations they had been through). Their little laughs trilled out as coyly as ever, and their jewels shone under the winking electric light of the Principality.

Yet the change they noticed, they admitted; the sound of the Russian accent had almost vanished from the Rooms. No longer did bearded boyars and Grand Dukes make even hardened gamblers hold their breath as they watched them play. That had gone on, right, up till the outbreak of the war. But the golden age of its reign had been in the years just before and just after 1900. And a story Mrs. Greville told me at this time illustrates the lively corruption of the earlier period. In 1892, a famous Russian lady went to live with the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich: but while the Grand Duke was away, she was visited by his cousin, the Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich. ... In the early 1900’s Mrs. Greville was staying at the Hôtel de Paris, so as to be near her father, who was very ill and under the care of the famous Swiss doctor who then practiced at Monte Carlo. Going up in the lift one evening, she met the Grand Duke Sergei, who greeted her with the remark: —

“You’re just the person I wanted to see. Your father, I hear, employs the Swiss doctor: is he really a good man? My little son is very ill with tuberculosis, and I thought he might be the right doctor for him.”

Mrs. Greville was astonished, for this was the first she had heard of the Grand Duke’s son. However, she showed no tremor of surprise, and gave the doctor the excellent character he deserved. Soon after this, she returned to England: but was obliged to come out to Monte Carlo again six months later. The very morning she arrived, the doctor sent a message to ask if he might call on her to obtain her advice on a difficul, matter. She sent back word to say she would be delighted to see him whenever he liked to call. He came the same afternoon, and looked worried and nonplused.

“I find myself in an awkward position,” he began. “I know you will not betray my confidence. I have been treating a Russian, a young boy, for tuberculosis. When he left my clinic, the Grand Duke Sergei wrote me a letter, in which he thanked me for curing his son, and enclosed a check for three thousand francs. . . . Now, the Grand Duke Andrei has written me a letter in identical terms, and sent me the same amount. What am I to do?”

“Accept both checks,” Mrs. Greville replied firmly. “Never impugn a woman’s honor!”

20

AMONG the few persons to whom Harry Melville introduced me that I wanted to meet — though, even then, not fanatically, for I had never seen her dance, and knew little of her — was Isadora Duncan. She was dividing her time between Nice and the Hôtel de Paris at Monte Carlo. We spoke for a moment one evening. The next morning, early — early, that is to say, for Monte Carlo — about half past nine (at which hour the porters have stopped washing the marble steps of the Casino, and the green-aproned gardeners have ceased sweeping up the few leaves that have fallen onto the precious circle of grass, so carefully tended, have removed a cobweb or two from dewy hedges of green, and have watered beds of carnations and begonias and nameless variegated leaves, writhing in blue and puce), I went out for a walk.

Only the tops of the palm trees caught the light, which lay like feathers, soft and rosy, on roof and terrace. In the side streets no one was yet stirring, except a few tradesmen, who still presented their ordinary appearance, without the oily-eyed smiles reserved for customers, smoked cigarettes, while they pulled the shutters up with a roar of wooden slats, and fumbled rather clumsily, as they placed in the windows the jewels intended to lure lucky gamblers. Piles of oranges and tangerines, baskets of flowers, were revealed in the florist s and fruiterers, and the girl in the chocolate shop was taking rows of chocolates from trays of paper and arranging them on silver dishes in a window. A strong, sweet, sticky smell issued from the door. Otherwise there was no sign of the life for which the flights of steps, the streets, the terraces and colonnades lay set.

The glass roofs of winter gardens flashed in the sun. . . . Suddenly, in front of me, down a steep street which seemed crushed between the gray, bulky backs of elephantine hotels, and yet, for all its featurelessness, seemed, too, to bear a resemblance to a complicated stage background, I saw a figure advancing with a peculiar grace of carriage and spring of step, in her hands a bunch of violets and narcissus. It was Isadora Duncan. The beauty of the apparition — she was no longer young — was entirely unpremeditated. Though she had known tragedies, there was an irresistible air of life in her approach, and as she advanced she seemed to bring with her some of the carefree sweetness and innocence of the antique world, of Greece and the heroes in their world of sea and sky and trees. So, she walked down this street, where, under the light, even the dull plaster facades seemed burgeoning with the spring, until she came to the young avenue of pepper trees, the plumy leaves of which made a trembling shadow on the pavement. Now, however, she saw me, and recognized me, and we walked together.

In the next few weeks, I saw a certain amount of her, and came greatly to like her. And I had reason, withal, to be grateful to her, for I developed a rather severe infection of the eyes from the Riviera dust of those days, and the English doctor whom I had called in told me that it would be a long business, and he must come to see me twice a day (at a charge of two guineas a visit): but when Isadora Duncan heard this, she said, “Nonsense. I’ll take you to an eye doctor I know in Nice: only you mustn’t mind having to wait for half an hour in a queue.” She motored me over there in the afternoon, to a house in a back street. After I had waited in the queue, as I had been told I should have to do, I was summoned into the dingy consulting room, where a fat, bearded little figure peered up at my eyes. After a careful examination, he mixed me some drops, grunted, squeezed two drops into each eye, charged me ten francs, and sent me away. . . . By the next morning, to the English doctor’s great consternation, I was cured!

In later years, as indeed in earlier, stories reached me of Isadora’s wild existence, culminating in her strange death. However, in a favorite phrase of Davis, my old nurse, “I must speak as I find,” and I can only vouch for the dignity clearly to be seen in her, and for the delight with which she invested life when you were with her, and for her kindness, and for her intelligence, as keen, I presume, in her art as in matters of everyday life. And when her name is mentioned, or I see it written, I recall with pleasure that figure coming down the steep incline of street, against the immense background of the big hotels, and think of the humanity and warmth her coming imparted to the scene.

21

IT WAS at Biarritz that the news reached me that I was at last a free man, released by the military authorities. Immediately packing my uniform, my gold-braided hat, and great gray coat with brass buttons, in a hamper, I launched it on the turbulent waters of the Bay of Biscay. At first, the waves kept on bringing it back to me, as if to indicate that a new war was coming, but eventually I could see a speck, floating away under the wheeling sea gulls towards the Spanish coast, where doubtless it was washed up, and its contents taken to be connected with some spy mystery of international ramification—or is it still locked, perhaps, in the frozen Antarctic, or caught and moldering in the Sargasso Sea? . . . My splendid peacetime scarlet tunic had been lost — and never to this day has it been found, unless by moths, satiated with their favorite feasts of camphor, naphtha, and DDT, and now winging their way, as if hunting, through forgotten lofts. The bearskin I still retained in London, and gave later to Mrs. Powell — my brother’s and my own dear friend, cook, and housekeeper from 1917 until her death in 1930 — to be made into a muff. And very handsome it turned out!

Mrs. Powell had an ample, beautiful presence, like that of some Venetian woman with braided hair in a portrait by Titian, or by Palma II Vecchio, and she resembled too one of the mysterious women who sit always in the background, in the intense shade cast by the fat-leafed trees in a picture by Dosso Dossi. Her skin was clear, her eyes were wide, gray-blue, and generous, her hair was brown, full of wheat-colored lights, her face, of a heavy, but classical, mold.

With her, she brought an air of happy, primitive abundance, so that she might, else, have been a corn-goddess presiding at a harvest festival: and all her stories of early childhood (she was the eldest of the many children, I think ten, of a Herefordshire farmer) reflected this quality and outlook; tales of pigs and geese and poultry, of eggs and honey, of gathering mushrooms in meadows, picking bilberries on mountain and moor, or plucking apples in the gold and red livery of the sun from the tops of old trees in walled orchards, or cattle, or stories of lambs lost on the mountainside, and of the escapades and tumblings of her small brothers and sisters. Since she had been given but little education save that which the spectacle of nature afforded her, I often wondered at her generosity of spirit, no less than at her usually fine taste in objects and literature, and true and subtle understanding of people.

In the course of time she became a leading authority on my father’s psychological foibles and subtle plans for my improvement, as well as expert in foiling them on my behalf. And she had many strange experiences with him — as, for example, when he called at my house in London, having only just found out — or, rather, come to suspect — that I possessed it though my brother and I had been installed in it for two years. In order to make sure, he walked from the end of the street, rang at the door, and asked who lived there. Mrs. Powell had happened to answer the bell herself, and albeit he would not give his name, and she had never seen him, she immediately guessed who he was, and in reply to his inquiries, improvised brilliantly a hostess of her own name — a Mrs. Powell, to whom the house belonged, and with whom Sacheverell and I were staying. Mrs. Powell was away for the day, it appeared, and had left word that no one was to be let in. . . . On this occasion, my father retired, no wiser than he had arrived: and she said to me about him, “He’s the finest gentleman I ever saw, but he has a thin voice: I don’t like thin voices.” It was a long time before he found out that the house was rented by my brother and me, and when, still ignorant of this fact, he later succeeded in making good an entry, he remarked to me wistfully, as he looked at the pictures hanging on the walls, “I had no idea what an interesting woman, your hostess, Mrs. Powell, must be.”

At thirteen years of age, she had been taken away from the school she attended, and sent out from the remote farm to earn her living in service. In later years, though she was so uncensorious, this fact a little rankled; and I recall how after returning from a summer holiday, she told me of this visit to her father. He still lived in the same ancient, square stone house, so remote from the life of towns, standing in a dark stretch of country among the peaty airs and bilberries native to the stony uplands bordering Wales. All day long she would be out, for she still loved all young animals and birds and plants: and in the evening she would sit in the kitchen, opposite her handsome old father in his high-backed chair.

“When I die,” he used to observe to her in his lordly way — for he always talked, and unfortunately acted, in a spacious manner — “I intend to be buried in the city of Hereford.”

And Mrs. Powell would always reply, “Well, I’m sure I don’t know who’s going to pay for it. I’m not, this time: that’s certain. I’ve had to pay often enough for you while you’re alive! ”

This repetitive, rather gloomy fragment of evening conversation was founded on her resentment at having been sold into slavery, and was out of key with her character: which was on a grand scale. But she had been still a child, and had suffered greatly from homesickness, crying herself to sleep every night in an attic at Castle Howard, above the painted cupids and allegorical figures, and under the beams of the great house in which she had been given her first situation. All her money had to be sent to her parents, and when she began to earn more, indeed, for most of her life, if anything was wanted at her home, Mrs. Powell was obliged to find the money for it.

22

AFTER she had left Castle Howard, at seventeen or eighteen, she had become stillroom maid, under the authority of the redoubtable Mrs. Selby, at Londesborough, in my grandmother’s time. So she had known many members of my mother’s family, and revered them, and she loved Londesborough and the country round it. In London, she liked to get out of the hot kitchen — a rather old-fashioned basement, hung with modern pictures — into the air as much as she could, and so sometimes, of a rich autumn evening, I would see her sitting at the open window, her face glowing, her dress assuming classical folds, both taking on part of the glory of the setting sun. Her expression, on these occasions, as she gazed over the treetops at the sky, was one of puzzled but genial melancholy, if such a slight contradiction may be allowed, and her hands would be hidden in the large muff I had given her, which would rest on the sill.

In the morning, again, when she went out shopping, she would issue forth with her muff on her arm. She liked to do her own buying, and just as, herself an artist in her own profession, she had, as I have said, aesthetic feelings, so that in later years, she was the only person who warned me not to sell my magnificent picture of Modigliani’s which hung in my London house, and she could understand also the full scope of the masterpiece Arthur Waley had created in his great translation of Lady Murasaki’s novel, The Tale of Genji, so, too, she found a pleasure, comparable to the gratification that can be provided by pictures or books, in the material of food, greeting one, when she came in, with such words as, “I saw the loveliest piece of turbot in the King’s Road: a really lovely thing,” or “They’ve a beautiful saddle of lamb at Bowen’s, sir, I wish you’d go and see it.” And the phrases she used, after this style, were perfectly sincere, the meaning to be accepted literally.

She loved her art and was expert at it. In illustration of this, it is no less indicative of Mrs. Greville’s special understanding of character than of Mrs. Powell’s nature that towards the end of her life, when she had made a transient recovery from a severe illness and operation, and when Mrs. Greville wished, because of what my housekeeper had been through, to show her kindness of a sort that would really appeal to her, suddenly the inspiration came; would Mrs. Powell, she asked, care to spend the evening of the following day in the kitchen at 16 Charles Street, watching the celebrated French chef who was in charge there cook and dish up for a dinner party of some forty people? Mrs. Powell accepted the invitation with rapture, and it was my opinion that the enjoyment she derived from, and interest she took in, all she saw on that occasion benefited her health more than would have a whole month spent by the seaside. She returned at midnight, in an entranced condition at the splendor of the batteries, the china, the service: though she told me, with the confidence that a perfect knowledge of her own great gifts inspired, that she knew she could have turned out a finer, better dinner herself, had she possessed a kitchen equally well equipped, and similar aid and accessories.

Sometimes Mrs. Powell’s enthusiasm, no less than the inherent profusion so evident in all she did or said, carried with it consequences unusual, and always to herself, unexpected. Thus when, for example, she purchased cranberries, in order to make a sauce to accompany a turkey, there might arrive — admittedly because calculation was not her strongest point, but also, no doubt because this lavishness fitted in with her whole temperament — a whole scarlet mountain of these bitter berries. After the fashion of goats on the hills we would be obliged to feed on them for whole weeks, and even then, many would in the end have to be given away. But her aesthetic perception seldom led her astray, she never bought any food that was not perfect in its own fashion, nor did she ever purchase an ugly object for use in the house.

Once, however, it is true, I returned from abroad to find that in my absence she had made for me a cushion of black satin, and had embroidered upon it an ice-cream-pink rose, with a few leaves of an arsenical green, and had placed it in the drawing room: but she quickly saw her mistake, and before I had been home two days, and though I had thanked her most gratefully for her present, and I believe had shown no signs of my real feelings, it was withdrawn. It just disappeared, and was never seen or mentioned again. But to pictures, for example, she brought an eye, unafraid, observant, receptive, and unaffected by the current trends of respectability and condemnation.

Almost the only time I saw traces of her having been annoyed was when a contemporary chat-spinner had contributed the following item to an evening journal: “The Sitwell brothers have achieved the impossible, and persuaded their cook to work in a kitchen hung with pictures of the modern school.” I came in late the night that this had appeared, and found on the table a piece of paper, addressed to myself. On it, scrawled in Mrs. Powell’s straggling hand, was written: —

SIR
Please tell the young gentleman who wrote about the kitchen that servants are individuals like other people, and not a separate race. I happen to like modern pictures.
Your obedient servant
E. POWELL

But she liked old masters, too, and, shortly before her death, spent a holiday in Spain, with a friend, Mercedes, a niece of the Grand Penitentiary of Seville. She stayed for a happy day or two in Madrid, to see the El Grecos there and at Toledo, and then moved to Seville for Holy Week. She appreciated and understood the people and the works of art and the dances and music, even flamenco, and her power of enjoyment, her generosity, which a little resembled that of a Spanish woman, and the lovely amplitude of her flesh, won her many friends among the Spaniards.

I like to think of her, in an embroidered shawl, in a mantilla and high comb, sitting in the garden, or the patio, full of orange blossom and of violets, so much finer and more scented at Seville than in any other region, taking the air, so delicately fragrant, full of light as a crystal, even in the shade, but when I write of her, it is in London, again, that I see her, going out, finding a pleasure in the frosty morning (for frost seems to carry you back to the country and its life), having to be careful not to slip on the pavement, and so moving at a leisurely, stately pace, with the muff on her arm. At her side would accompany her my enormous, tawny mastiff, Semiramis, lifting her paws and prancing with the joy of the morning, and having some of the same steadfast and beautiful attributes.

The bearskin, indeed, had made a most successful muff, and its adaptation was less wasteful than the way in which I had disposed of the other portions of my uniform. But this casting of it upon the waters had been symbolic and necessary to me. By means of it, I vainly sought to be rid of my own past. Yet, though perhaps less diffident than formerly, I was still doubtful of my own capacities, dissatisfied with them as every young artist should be (otherwise what causes would impel him towards new experiments?).

In particular, therefore, I remember one long walk with Sacheverell by the lion-voiced waves of the Atlantic. Here, though the air was soft, in spite of its strength, the ocean had the force of a winter’s gale in Scarborough, thundering upon the rocks, beyond the dry, powdery sands into which the feet sank so that walking was difficult: but we went on and on, while Sacheverell rallied my spirits — for I was still ill, weak, and angry after the cruelty and folly of a long war, and distressed, too, by new and more grave difficulties with my father, many of them arising from my own fault, and harassed by the slowness with which I worked — and adumbrated a sketch of the future, telling me in what direction I should evolve, and what would be my standing in twenty-five years’ time, if my writing developed as he hoped it would. Even then he already exercised the curious power — which, contrary to the usual process, has grown, with the passing years — of being able to inspire other artists, whether older or younger than himself, with a new creative force. . . . But the diffidence I have mentioned was not, I believe, the attitude that I adopted in the world: it was a part, only, of my character, and not to be viewed by the public — least of all, by that section which had read of, but had not read, my work. I possessed my share of vanity and conceit as well, a quick mind, a quick tongue —which often spoke before I was ready — and I hope a sharp pen.

To many, therefore, who were led to adopt this view of me by angry critics, I seemed — for the great public of the newspapers has no sense of background or of category — an arrogant arriviste, who indulged in what could, most kindly, be considered as automatic writing; who had no sense of the past, no care for tradition or for the future. And in the course of the next ten years, many caricatures of me appeared, and showed me as an elderly dwarf, obviously of Middle Eastern origin. This was of considerable help to me, for my unknown enemies were surprised and baffled when they saw me, large, fair and, I suppose, of a very English style.

(To be continued)