Part 27

Another poet on Boar’s Hill was Robert Nichols, still another neurasthenic ex-soldier, with his flame-opal ring, his wide-brimmed hat, his flapping arms and ‘mournful grandeur’ in repose (the phrase is from a review by Sir Edmund Gosse). Nichols served only three weeks in France, in the gunners, and was in no show; but he was highly strung and the three weeks affected him more than twelve months affected some people. He was invalided out of the army and went to lecture in America for the Ministry of Information on British war-poets. He read Siegfried’s and my poetry, and apparently gave some account of us. A legend was started of Siegfried, Robert and myself as the new Three Musketeers. Not only was Robert not in the Royal Welch Fusiliers with Siegfried and myself, but the three of us have never been together in the same room in our lives.

That winter George and Ruth Mallory invited Nancy and myself to go climbing with them. But Nancy could not stand heights and was having another baby; and, for myself, I realized that my climbing days were over. My nerves were bad, though possibly still good enough for an emergency, and beyond improvement. I was, however, drawn into one foolhardy experience at this time. Nancy and I were visiting my parents at Harlech. My two younger brothers were at the house. They played golf and mixed with local society. One evening they arranged a four at bridge with a young ex-airman and a Canadian colonel who was living in a house on the plain between Harlech Castle and the sea. The elder of my brothers got toothache; I said that I would take his place. The younger, still at Charterhouse, demurred. He was rather ashamed of me now as a non-golfer, a socialist, and not quite a gentleman. And my bridge might discredit him. I insisted, because at that time Canadian colonels interested me, and he made the best of it. I assured him that I would try not to wound his feelings. The colonel was about forty-five—tough, nervous, whisky-drinking, a killer. He was out of sorts; he said that his missus was upstairs with a headache and could not come down. We played three or four rubbers; I was playing steadily and not disgracing my brother. The colonel was drinking, the airman was competing. Finally the colonel said in a temper: ‘By God, this is the rottenest bridge I’ve ever sat down to. Let’s go bathing!’ It was half-past ten and not warm for January, but we went bathing and afterwards dried ourselves on pocket handkerchiefs. ‘We’ was the colonel, myself and my brother. The airman excused himself. The bathe put the colonel in better humour. ‘Let’s go up to the village now and raid the concert. Let’s pull some of the girls out and have a bit of fun.’ The airman gigglingly agreed. My brother seemed embarrassed. The colonel said: ‘And you, you bloody poet, are you on?’ I said angrily: ‘Not yet. You’ve had your treat, colonel. I went bathing with you and it was cold. Now it’s my treat. I’m going to take you climbing and make you warm. I want to see whether you Canucks are all B.S. or not.’ That diverted him.

I took them up the castle rock from the railway station in the dark. After the first piece, which was tricky, there would have been little climbing necessary if I had followed a zig-zag path; but I preferred to lead the colonel up several fairly stiff pitches. The others kept to the path. When we reached the top he was out of breath, a bit shaky, and most affable—almost affectionate. ‘That was a damn good climb you showed us.’ So I said: ‘We’ve not reached the top yet.’ ‘Where are we going now?’ he asked. I said: ‘Up that turret.’ We climbed into the castle and walked through the chapel into the north-western tower. It was pitch dark. I took them left into the turret which adjoined the tower but rose some twenty feet higher. The sky showed above, about the size of an orange. The turret had once had a spiral staircase, but the central core had been broken down after the Cromwellian siege; only an edging of stones remained on the walls. This edging did not become continuous until about the second spiral. We struck matches and I started up. The colonel swore and sweated, but followed. I showed him the trick of getting over the worst gap in the stones, which was too wide to bridge with one’s stride, by crouching, throwing one’s body forward and catching the next stone with one’s hands; a scramble and he was there. The airman and my brother remained below. I was glad when we reached the second spiral. We climbed perhaps a hundred and twenty feet to the top.

When we were safely down again most of the whisky was gone. So I said: ‘Now let’s visit the concert party.’ I had heard the audience dispersing, from the top of the turret. We visited the artistes. The colonel was most courteous to the women, especially the blonde soprano, but he took a great dislike to the tenor, a Welshman, and told him that he was no bloody good as a singer. He cross-examined him on his military service and was delighted to find that he had been for some reason or other exempted. He called him a louse and a bloody skrim-shanker and a lot more until the blonde soprano, who was his wife, came to the rescue and threatened to chuck the colonel out. He went out grinning, kissing his hand to the soprano and telling the tenor to kiss the place where he wore no hat. The tenor turned courageous and shouted out something about reading the Scriptures and how morally unjustifiable it was to fight. We all laughed till we wheezed. Then the colonel said we must get a drink; he knocked up a hotel barman and even got inside the bar, but the barman refused to serve him and threatened to call the police. The colonel did not raid the shelves as he would have done half an hour before when the whisky was fiercer in him; he merely told the barman what he thought of the Welsh, broke a glass or two and walked out. ‘Let’s go home and have some more bridge.’ He walked arm-in-arm with me down the hill and confided as one family man to another that his nerves were all in pieces because his missus was in the family way. That was why he had broken up the bridge-party. He had wanted her to have a good sleep. ‘If we go back quietly now, she’ll not wake up; we can bid in whispers.’ So we went back and he drank silently and the airman drank silently and we played silently. I had three or four glasses myself; my brother abstained. We stopped at three-thirty in the morning. The colonel paid up and went to sleep on the sofa. I was eighteen shillings and my brother twelve shillings up at sixpence a hundred. I was sick and shaking for weeks after this.

In March the second baby was born and we called him David. My mother was overjoyed. It was the first Graves grandson; my elder brothers had had only girls; here, at last, was an heir for the Graves family silver and documents. When Jenny was born my mother had condoled with Nancy: ‘Perhaps it is as well to have a girl first to practise on.’ Nancy had from the first decided to have four children; they were to be like the children in her drawings and were to be girl, boy, girl, boy, in that order. She was going to get it all over quickly; she believed in young parents and families of three or four children fairly close together in age. She had the children in the order she intended and they were all like her drawings. She began to regret our marriage, as I also did. We wanted somehow to be dis-married—not by divorce, which was as bad as marriage—and able to live together without any legal or religious obligation to live together. It was about this time that I met Dick again, for the last time; I found him merely pleasant and disagreeable. He was at the university, about to enter the diplomatic service, and had changed so much that it seemed absurd to have ever suffered on his account. Yet the caricature likeness remained.

XXVIII

I met T. E. Lawrence first at a guest-night at All Souls’. Lawrence had just been given a college fellowship, and it was the first time for many years that he had worn evening dress. The restlessness of his eyes was the first thing about him I noticed. He told me that he had read my poems in Egypt during one of his flying visits from Arabia; he and my brother Philip had been together in the Intelligence Department at Cairo, before his part in the Arab revolt had begun, working out the Turkish order of battle. I knew nothing about his organization of the Arab revolt, his exploits and sufferings in the desert, and his final entry into Damascus. He was merely, to me, a fellow-soldier who had come back to Oxford for a rest after the war. But I felt a sudden extraordinary sympathy with him. Later, when I was told that every one was fascinated by Lawrence, I tried to dismiss this feeling as extravagant. But it remained. Between lectures at Oxford I now often visited Lawrence at All Souls’. Though he never drank himself, he used always to send his scout for a silver goblet of audit ale for me. Audit ale was brewed in the college; it was as soft as barley-water but of great strength. (A prince once came down to Oxford to open a new museum and lunched at All Souls’ before the ceremony; the mildness of the audit ale deceived him—he took it for lager—and he had to be taken back to the station in a cab with the blinds drawn.) Nancy and I lunched in Lawrence’s rooms once with Vachel Lindsay, the American poet, and his mother. Mrs. Lindsay was from Springfield, Illinois, and, like her son, a prominent member of the Illinois Anti-Saloon League. When Lawrence told his scout that Mr. Lindsay, though a poet, was an Anti-Saloon Leaguer, he was scandalized and asked Lawrence’s permission to lay on Lindsay’s place a copy of verses composed in 1661 by a fellow of the college. One stanza was:

The poet divine that cannot reach wine, Because that his money doth many times faile, Will hit on the vein to make a good strain, If he be but inspired with a pot of good ale.

Mrs. Lindsay had been warned by friends to comment on nothing unusual that she met at Oxford. Lawrence had brought out the college gold service in her honour and this she took to be the ordinary thing at a university luncheon-party.

His rooms were dark and oak-panelled. A large table and a desk were the principal furniture. And there were two heavy leather chairs, simply acquired. An American oil-financier had come in suddenly one day when I was visiting T. E. and said: ‘I am here from the States, Colonel Lawrence, to ask you a single question. You are the only man who will answer it honestly. Do Middle-Eastern conditions justify my putting any money in South Arabian oil?’ Lawrence, without rising, simply answered:‘No.’ ‘That’s all I wanted to know; it was worth coming for that. Thank you, and good day!’ In his brief glance about the room he had found something missing; on his way home through London he chose the chairs and had them sent to Lawrence with his card. Other things in the room were pictures, including Augustus John’s portrait of Feisul, which Lawrence, I believe, bought from John with the diamond which he had worn as a mark of honour in his Arab headdress; his books, including a Kelmscott _Chaucer_, three prayer-rugs, the gift of Arab leaders who had fought with him, one of them with the sheen on the nap made with crushed lapis-lazuli; a station bell from the Hedjaz railway; and on the mantelpiece a four-thousand-year-old toy, a clay soldier on horseback from a child’s grave at Carchemish, where Lawrence was digging before the war.

We talked most about poetry. I was working at a book of poems which appeared later under the title of _The Pier-Glass_. They were poems that reflected my haunted condition; the _Country Sentiment_ mood was breaking down. Lawrence made a number of suggestions for improving these poems and I adopted most of them. He told me of two or three of his schemes for brightening All Souls’ and Oxford generally. One was for improving the turf in the quadrangle, which he said was in a disgraceful condition, nearly rotting away; he had suggested at a college meeting that it should be manured or treated in some way or other, but no action had been taken. He now said that he was going to plant mushrooms on it, so that they would have to re-turf it altogether. He consulted a mushroom expert in town, but found that it was difficult to make spawn grow. He would have persisted if he had not been called away about this time to help Winston Churchill with the Middle-Eastern settlement. Another scheme, in which I was to have helped, was to steal the Magdalen College deer. He was going to drive them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls’, having persuaded the college to reply, when Magdalen protested and asked for its deer back, that it was the All Souls’ herd and had been pastured there from time immemorial. Great things were expected of this raid. It fell through for the same reason as the other. But a successful strike of college-servants for better pay and hours was said to have been engineered by Lawrence.

I took no part in undergraduate life, seldom visiting my college except to draw my Government grant and exhibition money; I refused to pay the college games’ subscription, having little interest in St. John’s and being unfit for games myself. Most of my friends were at Balliol and Queen’s, and in any case Wadham had a prior claim on my loyalty. I spent as little time as possible away from Boar’s Hill. At this time I had little to do with the children; they were in the hands of Nancy and the nurse—the nurse now also did the cooking and housework for us. Nancy felt that she wanted some activity besides drawing, though she could not decide what. One evening in the middle of the long vacation she suddenly said: ‘I must get away somewhere out of this for a change. Let’s go off on bicycles somewhere.’ We packed a few things and rode off in the general direction of Devonshire. The nights were coldish and we had not brought blankets. We found that the best way was to bicycle by night and sleep by day. We went over Salisbury Plain past several deserted army camps; they had a ghostly look. There was accommodation in these camps for a million men, the number of men killed in the Imperial Forces during the war. We found ourselves near Dorchester, so we turned in there to visit Thomas Hardy, whom we had met not long before when he came up to Oxford to get his honorary doctor’s degree. We found him active and gay, with none of the aphasia and wandering of attention that we had noticed in him at Oxford.

I wrote out a record of the conversation we had with him. He welcomed us as representatives of the post-war generation. He said that he lived such a quiet life at Dorchester that he feared he was altogether behind the times. He wanted, for instance, to know whether we had any sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, and whether he could trust the _Morning Post’s_ account of the Red Terror. Then he was interested in Nancy’s hair, which she wore short, in advance of the fashion, and in her keeping her own name. His comment on the name question was: ‘Why, you _are_ old-fashioned. I knew an old couple here sixty years ago that did the same. The woman was called Nanny Priddle (descendant of an ancient family, the Paradelies, long decayed into peasantry), and she would never change her name either.’ Then he wanted to know why I no longer used my army rank. I said it was because I was no longer soldiering. ‘But you have a right to it; I would certainly keep my rank if I had one. I should be very proud to be called Captain Hardy.’

He told us that he was now engaged in restoring a Norman font in a church near by. He had only the bowl to work upon, but enjoyed doing a bit of his old work again. Nancy mentioned that we had not baptized our children. He was interested, but not scandalized, remarking that his old mother had always said of baptism that at any rate there was no harm in it, and that she would not like her children to blame her in after-life for leaving any duty to them undone. ‘I have usually found that what my old mother said was right.’ He said that to his mind the new generation of clergymen were very much better men than the last.... Though he now only went to church three times a year—one visit to each of the three neighbouring churches—he could not forget that the church was in the old days the centre of all the musical, literary and artistic education in the country village. He talked about the old string orchestras in Wessex churches, in one of which his father, grandfather, and he himself had taken part; he regretted their disappearance. He told us that the clergyman who appears as old St. Clair in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ was the man who protested to the War Office about the Sunday brass-band performances at the Dorchester Barracks, and was the cause of headquarters no longer being sent to this once very popular station.

We had tea in the drawing-room, which, like the rest of the house, was crowded with furniture and ornaments. Hardy had an affection for old possessions, and Mrs. Hardy was too fond to suggest that anything at all should be removed. Hardy, his cup of tea in hand, began making jokes about bishops at the Athenæum Club and imitating their episcopal tones when they ordered: ‘China tea and a little bread and butter (Yes, my lord!).’ Apparently he considered bishops were fair game. He was soon censuring Sir Edmund Gosse, who had recently stayed with them, for a breach of good taste in imitating his old friend, Henry James, eating soup. Loyalty to his friends was always a passion with Hardy.

After tea we went into the garden, and Hardy asked to see some of my recent poems. I showed him one, and he asked if he might make some suggestions. He objected to the phrase the ‘scent of thyme,’ which he said was one of the _clichés_ which the poets of his generation studied to avoid. I replied that they had avoided it so well that it could be used again now without offence, and he withdrew the objection. He asked whether I wrote easily, and I said that this poem was in its sixth draft and would probably be finished in two more. ‘Why!’ he said, ‘I have never in my life taken more than three, or perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid of it losing its freshness.’ He said that he had been able to sit down and write novels by time-table, but that poetry was always accidental, and perhaps it was for that reason that he prized it more highly.

He spoke disparagingly of his novels, though admitting that there were chapters in them that he had enjoyed writing. We were walking round the garden, and Hardy paused at a spot near the greenhouse. He said that he had once been pruning a tree here when an idea suddenly had come into his head for a story, the best story that he had ever thought of. It came complete with characters, setting, and even some of the dialogue. But as he had no pencil and paper with him, and was anxious to finish pruning the tree before it rained, he had let it go. By the time he sat down to recall it, all was utterly gone. ‘Always carry a pencil and paper,’ he said. He added: ‘Of course, even if I could remember that story now, I couldn’t write it. I am past novel-writing. But I often wonder what it was.’

At dinner that night he grew enthusiastic in praise of cider, which he had drunk since a boy, and which, he said, was the finest medicine he knew. I suggested that in the _Message to the American People_, which he had been asked to write, he might take the opportunity of recommending cider.

He began complaining of autograph-hunters and their persistence. He disliked leaving letters unanswered, and yet if he did not write these people pestered him the more; he had been upset that morning by a letter from an autograph-fiend which began:

Dear Mr. Hardy,—I am interested to know why the devil you don’t reply to my request....

He asked me for my advice, and was grateful for the suggestion that a mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital (‘Swanage Children’s Hospital,’ put in Hardy), which would forward a receipt.

He said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph-hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written ‘his shape _smalled_ in the distance.’ Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough—only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect’s office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer’s _Iliad_, he protested: ‘Oh, but I admire the _Iliad_ greatly. Why, it’s in the _Marmion_ class!’ Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)

We went off the next day, but there was more talk at breakfast before we went. Hardy was at the critics again. He was complaining that they accused him of pessimism. One man had recently singled out as an example of gloom a poem he had written about a woman whose house was burned down on her wedding-night. ‘Of course it is a humorous piece,’ said Hardy, ‘and the man must have been thick-witted not to see that. When I read his criticism I went through my last collection of poems with a pencil, marking them S, N, and C, according as they were sad, neutral or cheerful. I found them as nearly as possible in equal proportions; which nobody could call pessimism.’ In his opinion _vers libre_ could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’ About his own poems he said that once they were written he cared very little what happened to them.

He told us of his work during the war, and said that he was glad to have been chairman of the Anti-Profiteering Committee, and to have succeeded in bringing a number of rascally Dorchester tradesmen to book. ‘It made me unpopular, of course,’ he said, ‘but it was a hundred times better than sitting on a military tribunal and sending young men to the war who did not want to go.’

This was the last time we saw Hardy, though we had a standing invitation to come and visit him.