Part 9
_... If you think that I have much to tell you, ~he adds, 20.8.21~, you are mistaken. Y’day I went for a stroll, turned up a footpath which I imagined would bring me back here, found that it didn’t, after I had gone much too far to turn back, and plodded on and on—my apprehensive mind full of a picture of myself being devoured by onsticelli and stercoraceous geodurpes amid a fine setting of ferns and bracken—until I reached Abingdon. It might have been Oxford, so exhausted was I._
_A boy was bribed to fetch me a car and I returned just before the search-party set out for me. I roam no more. There is a lawn here: let me walk up and down it...._
_I do not despair about Ireland because I never despair about anything._
_And I am ever yours,_
_Tex._
_Your letter of the 23rd, ~he writes, 25.8.21~, found me still here. (The Wharf, Sutton Courtney): I go to-morrow to the Norton Priory till Monday ... and longer if they will have me longer. Then back home; and to Sutro’s for a brief week-end on Saturday._
_Yes, I know Lancaster, its castle, where I have, and its lunatic asylum, where I have never, stayed...._
_It were useless for me to pretend that I have not mislayed your list of addresses. I may find it in some other suit; but you might notify me of your next movement whenever you write. But do not translate m.p.h. as miles per hour. Master of phoxhounds, if you like, or miles per horam; but we English say an hour and not per hour...._
_M. sent an enormous 120 h.p. (hocus pocus) land-yacht to meet me at Portsmouth, ~he writes from Norton Priory, 27.8.21~, relieving me of the worst part of the journey.... N. arrived from town before dinner, bringing with him a ... stockbroker.... They go up on Monday morning, but I stay on till Wednesday, like a gay limpet but a perfectly moral: M’s brother comes down on Monday._
_For the rest, I have the same room, but have not yet cracked my skull against the canopy of the same fourposter; and I am perfectly happy...._
_Your original waybill is found, ~he adds, 30.8.21~; but I have the receipt of no letter from you to acknowledge. N. ... went up after breakfast y’day and brother R. M. came down before dinner. He is a pleasant New Zealander and took a lot out of me at bridge._
_Life here pursues its quiet course. I accompanied M. and W. to the sea’s edge yesterday but found the effort of ploughing through the shingle tolerably exhausting and shall not repeat it to-day. Indeed, the whole family, Miss T. included, are bathing now and I am writing twaddle to you under the pear-tree._
_And, as I live, I think I’ll write no more. I have no more to say; and the papers have just come. I leave here after lunch (eon) to-morrow, spend an hour or two in Chichester cathedral and arrive home in time for my bread and milk...._
On his return to Chelsea and a typewriter, he says, 1.9.21:
_You will be pleased to receive a letter from me in legible type, instead of in that hand which is becoming almost as crabbed as yours. And I continue to address you at Bamborough Castle, though that stronghold figures as something very near Zambuk Castle in your letter of 30 August._
_N. filled me with fears of internecine feuds within your fortress, of bloody strife for the one shady nook of the orchard and so on. You say nothing of these things; and I assume that there has been no slaughter in your time. There was a horrid game when I became a British kid in the early seventies: I am king of the castle! Get out, you dirty rascal! I trembled at the thought of you and N. playing this game against ruthless border clansmen. All’s well that ends well...._
_I lost twenty goodish guineas at three-handed bridge after Brother Roy arrived. He wanted to can everything on the estate: the apples, the pears, the fleas on the dogs’ backs, the flyaway ducks. He wanted to introduce New Zealand mutton-birds into this country...._
_I had a tooth out yesterday, ~he writes, 3.9.21~,—until then I had thirteen of my own left, an unlucky number—and was not at my best.... The tooth was extracted at a high cost, in the presence of a dentist, an anaesthetist and my body-physician but without unpleasant consequences. And this afternoon I go to the Sutros for a brief week-end._
_I have no news, except that I have bought some most attractive socks, or half-hose...._
_... I have no news, ~he complains, 12.9.21.~ I write to you simply out of friendship and duty. I spent five hours at the Zoo y’day.... We lunched there; so did most of the beasts, heavily. You should have seen S. staggering under the weight of about nine pounds of the most expensive oranges, bananas, apples and onions, not to mention sugar, monkey-nuts, and two raw eggs. Say what you will, it is laffable to feed a small monkey with slices of apple till he has both pouches full, all four hands and his mouth. When you hand him the eighth slice, you wait in breathless expectation...._
_I had a tooth extracted last week, reducing the number of my real teeth to twelve. To-day the number of my pseudo-teeth is to be increased to eighteen (quite correct: they swindle you out of a couple) and I propose to lunch at the Reform Club with many gaps in my mouth._
_I have arranged terms for two luvverly rooms at the Tregenna Castle Hotel, St. Ives, from 1 November to 1 April. Rooms face south, away from the beastly ocean; breakfast in the bedroom; baths ~a volonte~. We hope to be well and happy there. I must see much of you before you go to Sweden...._
_... I rejoice to hear that you are going to Copenhagen. It is a charming coquette of a little city, with which you will fall head over ears in love._
_Not to take a second risk, I send this to Crosswood, ~he writes 13.9.21~, and I beg you to lay me at the feet of your gracious chatelaine; and, if E. is there, you can give her the love of her Uncle Tex._
_At the Reform Club ... I played a little bridge ... and won 29/-; then, finding my rate of progress rather slow, I veered off to Cleveland Club and won £7.12.0 more. This satisfied me; and I came home, ate two little fillets of sole, some apple-sauce and custard and (damn the expense) a ha’porth of cheese and so to bed._
_To complete my ~Diary of a Nobody~, I am glad that you have changed your name from Gowing to Cumming and I am_
_ever yours,_
_Tex._
_Many thanks for your letter of y’day, ~he writes, 14.9.21~, bearing traces of the pear skin and plumstones therein mentioned, not to speak of a spot of butter and a small burn from your after-brekker cigarette._
_I have crossed Shap in a swift and powerful railway-train, with a whiskered and spectacled judge of the high court, in the opposite seat. I remember old Day’s teaching me how to observe whether one were going up hill or down by watching the roadside rills:_
_“Water invariably flows downwards,” said he, gravely...._
_Ecclefechan I don’t know and don’t want to; Carlisle, I do; Gretna Green I do: I never want to set eyes on either again. I have a desolating memory of brown fields between Carlisle and Gretna Green. By now you have, I expect, seen as much of England as you wish to see in the course of your natural life...._
_To-day, seized with a sudden lech for art and beauty, my wiff and I are going to Hammersmith to hear ~The Beggar’s Opera~...._
_I have again lost your waybill, ~he writes, 16.9.21~, and cannot tell if this will still find you at Glow-worm Castle._
_~The Beggar’s Opera~ was a great affair._
_Little has happened to me since._
_But to-day Mrs. Asquith and her daughter are coming to play different forms of the game of auction bridge at the Cleveland Club._
_And to-morrow ... ah, to-morrow! To-morrow I am going to stay for the week-end with a hostess, at or near Marlow, whose name I do not even know.... I am promised a perfectly good end; but so were any babies of old who ended in being eaten by the ogress._
_We are never too old for adventures; but pray that I come safely out of this one._
On 30.9.21 he writes:
_Very many thanks for ~The Secret Victory~, with the delightful dedication and preface. I am not at all sure that I shall not read the book again._
_I have just returned from an interview with the local income-tax brigand which filled me with some apprehensions.... After a ... jest or two, I left the brigand’s cave unscathed...._
_I go to the Wharf to-morrow for a week and may stay on a day or two longer, if pressed: I always do, you know...._
I had been invited to deliver some lectures in Sweden and Denmark. Teixeira was good enough to read the manuscript of these, as of almost everything I wrote. With his letter of 3.10.21 he returned the first:
_Here is your lecture ... I really cannot suggest any cuts. My one and only lecture read 2¾ minutes: this is no reason why yours should not read an hour and a quarter. Does any one want to go and sit in a hall, with free light and warmth thrown in for less than an hour and a quarter? No; the Swedes will admire your fluency and be pleased with you._
On my return to England, he asks, 14.11.21:
_When do we meet? We have decided to leave on the 30th. I can lunch with you to-morrow, if you like, and bring you your two Ewald books._
Teixeira’s departure to Cornwall, already delayed by his wife’s illness, had now to be postponed again, as he was prostrated with ptomaine poisoning.
Both invalids were sufficiently recovered to face the journey on 2 December; and, next day, Teixeira sent me news of his safe arrival:
_Tregenna Castle Hotel, St. Ives, Cornwall, 3 December, 1921._
_My dear Stephen:_
_Thanks for your letter that reached me just before I left town. This is my address: what else would it be? And the enclosed ~[an invitation to lecture]~ is sent to show you that you are not the only Beppo on the peach (damn your British metaphors!): you might not believe it otherwise. But you may picture the courteous terms in which I declined._
_There is nothing for nervous dyspepsia or gastric horribobblums like seven goodish hours in a swift and powerful railway-express. I have been free from pain or sickness for the first night since Wednesday week. But I slept little. From 1 a.m. onwards I spent a sleepless, painless night._
_The hotel is comfortable and commodious in an old-fashioned country-house way; no central heating, but big fires; a certain amount of intrigue with Lizzie the chambermaid to secure a really hot bath: you know the sort of thing; immense grounds, a very park of 100 acres, which I shall never leave, because, if I did, I should never get back: we stand too high._
_Bless you._
_Ever yours, Tex._
It was the last letter that I ever received from him; and on Monday, December the fifth, as I was in the middle of answering it, a telegram informed me that he had died that morning. As he was getting up, he collapsed in his wife’s arms and slipped, unconscious, on the floor. Death was instantaneous and, it may be presumed and hoped, painless. He was buried in the Holy Roman Catholic Cemetery at St. Ives; and a requiem mass for the repose of his soul was said at the Brompton Oratory.
Even those with best cause to suspect how nerveless was his grasp on life could not readily believe that one who loved life so well was to enjoy no more of it. “He was spared old age,” said one friend; but to another Tex had lately confessed that he would like to live for ever.
Before he left London, we said good-bye for five months: he was to winter in Cornwall, I in the West Indies. In seeing again the exquisite handwriting of these many hundreds of letters that commemorate our friendship for the last six years of his life, I at least cannot feel that his voice has grown silent or that his laughter is at an end. The big, solemn figure is vividly present; the favourite phrases and the familiar gestures are stamped for ever on the memory of any one that loved him.
I am writing four thousand miles away from St. Ives: and it may be possible to fancy that he has been ordered to remain there longer than we expected. This time there may be no diary; perhaps the only letters will be those already written; he may seem not to hear all that he once loved hearing; but, wherever he has gone, his personality remains behind.
It was an old-standing bond that the survivor should write of the other. I have tried to make Teixeira paint his own portrait. If his letters have failed to reveal him, what can I add? His literary position is unchallenged; those who knew him how slightly soever knew his humour and wit, his whimsical charm, his understanding and toleration. Those who knew him best had strongest reason for loving him most deeply. Those who knew him not missed knowing a ripe scholar, a fine and tender spirit, a great and gallant gentleman, a matchless companion and the truest friend on earth.
_BERBICE, BRITISH GUIANA_ 15 February, 1922.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The Jonkheer Alexander Louis Teixeira de Mattos san Paio y Mendes. The family was Jewish in origin and was driven from Portugal by the persecution of the Holy Office. Teixeira was naturalized a British subject in the middle of the war and gave up his Dutch title. Even before this, he had contracted his full style to Alexander Teixeira de Mattos on ceremonial occasions, to A. Teixeira in departmental correspondence and to Tex or T. in letters to his friends.
[2] I quote from Chapter VII of _While I Remember_, where the genesis of the department is described, though only from hearsay.
[3] Even in Teixeira’s wide reading there were occasional gaps; and, until I brought it to his notice, he was unacquainted with the celebrated life of Sir Christopher Wren by Mr. E. Clerihew and Mr. G. K. Chesterton:
‘Sir Christopher Wren Said, “I am going to dine with some men. If anybody calls Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”’
After reading it, Teixeira’s nightly valediction as he left for his bridge club was: “I think ... yes, I think I shall design St. Paul’s for an hour or two.”
[4] From the notice of his death in _The Times_.
[5] Future letters were dated from ‘Hellgate’.
[6] The Burgomaster of Stillemonde.
[7] Frank MacKinnon K.C.
[8] A short time before, Teixeira, who affected a loathing for music, had been invited to hear the same quartette. Abandoning his usual gentleness of speech and spirit, he had accepted on condition of being allowed to massacre the quartette.
[9] Hymn to Aphrodite.
[10] Eimar O’Duffy’s _Wasted Island_.
[11] Incidentally, my father lived 85 years, during all of which he never spoke of his particular regiment, brigade, division or army corps as anything but the Coldcream Guards; not in jest but in sheer, manly, gentlemanly ignorance.
[12] Perfectly good seventeenth-century English.
[13] _Even the French write_, invariably, un coup d’Etat, le conseil d’Etat, but l’état des coups, l’état du conseil.
[14] The Concise Oxford Dictionary.
[15] The reference here is to a story illustrative of the tricks which a man’s memory sometimes plays him:
Reading in the _Morning Post_, that Mr. John Brown, of 500 Clarges Street, is shortly leaving for Uganda on a big-game-shooting expedition and would like a gentleman to come with him, sharing expenses, thought no more of the advertisement and went about his day’s work. That night he dined intemperately. On being ejected from his club, he was bound for home when he recalled the forgotten advertisement and decided that something must be done about it.
Driving to 500 Clarges Street, he demanded to see Mr. John Brown.
“Are you Mr. John Brown?” he enquired of a sleepy and illhumoured figure in pyjamas.
“I am, sir,” answered John Brown.
“You’re the Mr. John Brown going shooting Uganda?”
“Yes.”
“You want shome one come with you?”
“Yes.”...
“Share ’spenshes?”
“Yes.”
“You put that ’vertisshment in _Morning Posht_?”
“Yes.”
“I thought sho. Shorry knock you up. Felt I musht tell you.... that I’m not coming.”...
[16] They would have gone quite mad over the Russian Ballet.
[17] The story in question was of a member of the Cave-Brown-Cave family, who, after conversing with a stranger in a railway-carriage, was asked his name.
“Cave-Brown-Cave,” he replied. “And may I ask yours?”
“Home-Sweet-Home,” answered his infuriated interlocutor.
[18] In Chancery.
[19] In preparation for visiting South America I had been vaccinated.
[20] Ultimately this was published with the title: _The Law Inevitable_.