Part 3

Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie: Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: _Here he lies where he long’d to be;_ _Home is the sailor, home from the sea,_ _And the hunter home from the hill._

But enough of mortality! Let me tell you a little thing that happened yesterday. An Italian I used to know, a clerk, who has been in England for three or four years, came in to say goodbye. He is going home.

“You’ll be glad to be seeing your wife again after all this long while,” I said.

He pondered. “My wife, I don’t know,” he replied at last: “but my leetler boy, Oh, yais!”—Good night, my dear.

R. H.

XXX

SEPTIMUS TRIBE TO VERENA RABY

MY DEAR SISTER,—I hasten to thank you for the timely case of champagne which you have sent for Letitia. It will, I am sure, revive her, even though the vintage is a little immature. I consider 1911 to be still too young, which reminds me that it is in the correction of errors such as this, trifling but easily evitable, that I could be of so much use to you on the kind of periodical supervising visit to your establishment (now necessarily neglected through your most regrettable accident) which I have before suggested, and which, even at great personal inconvenience, I am still ready at any time to pay. At the present moment, however, it seems to me that a visit from Letitia would be even more desirable, for when one is sick and surrounded by comparative strangers, who should be a more welcome guest than a sister? And it is long since you two have met. Apart from the pleasure of reunion, the little change would do Letitia good. Save for myself, who am not, I am aware, too vivacious a companion, the poor dear sees almost no one. With a slightly augmented income she could take a place in society here far more appropriate to her birth; but when one has not the means to return hospitality one is a little sensitive about accepting it. Awaiting your reply, I am, your affectionate brother-in-law,

SEPTIMUS TRIBE

XXXI

VERENA RABY TO RICHARD HAVEN

MY DEAR RICHARD,—This is my first letter in my own hand and it must be short. I am very grateful to you. Would not that be a nice epitaph—“He never disappointed”? Well, it is true of you.

Your idea of the short poems is perfect and I have already learned some.

Nesta is excellent company, but I fear she is giving me more time than it is fair to take. Every now and then, when she is apparently looking at me, I can see that her glance is really fixed on her children, many miles off. The far-away nursery look.

It is _almost_ worth being ill to discover how kind people can be. If it is true (and of course it is) that to give pleasure to others is the greatest happiness, then I can comfort myself, as I lie here apparently useless, that I have my uses after all, since I am the cause of that happiness in so many of my friends.—Yours,

V.

XXXII

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

DEAREST VERENA, your testimonial gave me extraordinary pleasure, and I wish it was true.

I don’t say, in spite of your charming piece of altruistic reasoning, that you are lucky to be in bed, but to have to remain in a remote rural spot while England is getting herself into order again is not a bad thing. For it is a slow and rather unlovely process. Just at the moment War seems, as one remembers it (and of course I speak only of England, not of the Front), a more desirable condition than Peace. There is no doubt that the country is a fit place for Profiteeroes to live in.

I felt sure that you knew Clifford’s excellent nonsense for the young. As you don’t know it, you shall; but not yet! A surprise is brewing.

With the steady assistance of my invaluable Miss Faith and her little Corona (which is not, alas! a cigar, but a typewriter) I have amassed already a collection of brief poems such as may gently occupy your thoughts in the wakeful sessions of the night. These I shall dole out to you, one by one, for you to take or leave as you feel “dispoged.” I have not gone beyond my own shelves, but if ever I find myself with the run of somebody else’s no doubt I shall find many more, probably equally good or even better. We might call it the _Tabloid Treasury_ when it is ready?

Having sent you the other day all those elegiac efforts, I am now copying out three or four short poems where the poets take stock and prepare to put up the shutters, and here again the quality is high. The most famous example is, of course, Landor’s:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

But Landor had a predecessor who said much the same in a homelier manner:—

My muse and I, ere youth and spirits fled, Sat up together many a night, no doubt: But now I’ve sent the poor old lass to bed, Simply because my fire is going out.

Stevenson must have had Landor’s lines in mind when he made this summary of his own career:—

I have trod the upward and the downward slope; I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

A final example, from the French of the Abbé Regnier:—

Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught, And spent my little life without a thought, And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim, Should think of me, who never thought of him.

Don’t be afraid; in future I shall send you only one poem at a time.

R. H.

XXXIII

HORACE MUN-BROWN TO VERENA RABY

DEAR AUNT,—If I have from time to time bothered you with my financial schemes I am very sorry. But I have an active brain, and too few briefs. Also I want to be in a sound financial position, and, under more favourable circumstances, most of my projects would, I am sure, succeed. But you are the only capitalist that I know, and just at the moment you are, I now realize, not in a position to take any deep interest in monetary ventures. I ought to have thought of this before, and I apologise.

I write to you to-day for a very different purpose and that is, to enlist not your bank balance but your sympathy and, I hope, active help. In a nutshell, I want to marry Hazel. I have laid my case before her more than once, but she refuses to take me seriously. I am aware that I am not so superficially gay and insouciant as the majority of the young men of to-day; I know only too well that I cannot jazz and that I prefer dances where an intervening atmospheric space divides the partners. But, though I may be old-fashioned, surely I have compensating qualities of value in married life. What I feel is that if only Hazel could be persuaded that I am in deadly earnest, and that marriage is not one of—what she calls—my “wild-cat schemes,” she would begin to look upon me with a new eye. I am very human _au fond_, dear Aunt, and, in my own way, I adore Hazel. Would you not try to persuade her to be more kind and understanding?—I am, your affectionate nephew,

HORACE MUN-BROWN

_P.S._—On reading this letter through, I find that I have made what looks rather like a pun—that passage about Hazel and a nutshell. I assure you, my dear Aunt, it was unintentional. I should never joke about love.

XXXIV

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

MY DEAR, I have found you a Reader, but I hate to part with her. It would not, however, do for anyone so young and comely to sit at the bedside of a hale man of my years, and so you shall have her. But O her voice! Irish, and south-west Irish at that. In point of fact, Kerry, with hints of the Gulf Stream in it, all warm and caressing.

Miss Clemency Power—that is her pretty name—is not, I take it, in any kind of need, but she worked all through the War and wants to continue to be independent. And quite right too, say I. And Robbie Burns said it before me, in one of his English efforts:—

the glorious privilege of being independent,

he called it.

Miss Power is going to you on Thursday on a month’s probation, and she is my gift to you, remember: I have arranged it all. It is very Sultanic to be distributing young women like this, and you must be properly grateful. I was never Sultanic before.

Here’s a nice thing my sister Violet’s charwoman said yesterday. Violet seems to have been looking rather more wistful than usual, but for no particular reason. The charwoman, however, noticed it and commented upon it.

“You look very sad this morning,” she said. “But then,” she added, “ladies generally do.”

“Why is that?” Violet asked.

“They have such difficult lives,” she said. “It’s their husbands, I think.”

“But you have a husband.”

“Yes, but we don’t notice our husbands as much as you do. They come in and they’re cross and they swear, and we let them. We’ve got our work to get on with. But with ladies it’s different; they take notice.”

Your daily poem:—

He who bends to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

If you trap the moment before it’s ripe The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe; But if once you let the ripe moment go, You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

A lot of wisdom there, but for most of us, who are so far from being children, rather a counsel of perfection.—Good night.

R. H.

_P.S._—A travelling friend tells me that outside the gate of the Misericordia, in Osaka, Japan, is this notice, the meaning of which is clear after a moment’s examination: “The sisters of the Misericordia harbour every kind of disease and have no respect for religion.”

XXXV

CLEMENCY POWER TO THE HON. MRS. POWER

DEAREST MOTHER,—I have got a job at last—the least like a War job that you could imagine. I have been engaged to read for an hour or so every day to a Miss Raby, a lady who owing to an accident has to lie still for months and months. After all my adventures in France this is a great change.

Miss Raby lives near Kington in Herefordshire, a long way from London and indeed a long way from anywhere, but it is fine country and there are splendid hills to walk on, Hargest Ridge in particular, where the air is the most bracing I ever knew, and you look over to the Welsh mountains. She has an old spacious house in its own grounds, but I am lodging with one of the villagers; which I greatly prefer. Miss Raby has a nurse, and one of her nieces, a Mrs. Rossiter, who is charming, is with her. I am a sort of extra help and am gradually being allowed to do more and more and now have had the picking of the flowers entrusted to me.

Miss Raby herself is the sweetest creature, a kind of ideal aunt. She is somewhere in the forties, I suppose, and had a very full life, in a quiet way, before she was ill, and she is very brave in bearing her inactivity, which must be terribly irksome at times and especially in very fine weather. I am here nominally to read, but we talk most of the time, and she is never tired of hearing about the War and all my experiences. She knows the part of the garden that every flower comes from, and I think her greatest joy every day is her interview with the gardener.

One thing I have discovered is how very few books bear reading aloud. The authors don’t think of that when they are writing and so the words are wrongly placed. Another thing is that books that are silly anyway are heaps sillier when read aloud.

I ought to say that although I am in Miss Raby’s service (don’t wince) she is not my employer—I was engaged by a Mr. Haven, her oldest friend, who has presented me to her!—Your loving

C.

XXXVI

VERENA RABY TO RICHARD HAVEN

DEAREST RICHARD,—I like the woman thou gavest me very much and rejoice in her brogue, and I am very grateful to you, always. Tell me more about the state of things. I can bear it.—Yours,

V.

XXXVII

VERENA RABY TO HAZEL BARRANCE

DEAREST HAZEL,—I have had a rather pathetic letter from poor Horace, who, after long wooing you in vain, comes to me (I hope this isn’t betraying his confidence: I don’t think it is really) as a new legal Miles Standish. Young men at the Bar are not usually so ready to seek other mouthpieces, are they? Not those, at any rate, next to whom I used to sit at dinner parties in the days when I was well and now and then came to London.

Of course, my dear child, I am not going to interfere. To be quite candid, I don’t want you to marry Horace. I think you would condemn yourself to a very stuffy kind of existence if you did, and I am against first-cousins marrying in any case. But his appeal gives me an opportunity of saying what I have more than once wished, and that is that you would revise your general attitude to marriage. Again and again in your letters to me I have detected a bitterness about it, the suggestion that because some couples have fallen out, all must sooner or later do so. This isn’t true. But even if it were, it ought not to deter us, for all of us must live our own lives, and make our own experiments, and all of us ought to believe that we are the great splendid triumphant exceptions! It is that belief—I might almost call it religion—which I miss in you and which seems to be now so generally lacking. Put on low grounds it might be called the gambling spirit, but it is a form of gambling in which there is no harm, but rather virtue. I often wish that I had had more of it, but I was unfortunate in having my affections so enchained by one who too little knew his mind, nor sufficiently valued his captive, that I was never free to consider offers.

Marriage may always be a lottery and often turn out disastrously, and even more often be a dreary curtailment of two persons’ liberty, but it is a natural proceeding and, unless one utterly denies any purpose in life, a necessary one; and I am all in favour of young people believing in it. I wish that you were braver and healthier about it, but I don’t want you to become Mrs. Horace Mun-Brown, and I am telling him so.

This is the longest letter I have written since I took to my bed; indeed I believe it is the longest I ever wrote.—Your loving

AUNT V.

XXXVIII

SEPTIMUS TRIBE TO VERENA RABY

MY DEAR SISTER,—I was grieved to learn from a third party that you are no better; indeed rather worse. Letitia and I were hoping that every day showed improvement. In the possibility that one deterrent cause may be too much thought, it has occurred to us that the presence in the house, to be called upon whenever needed, of a soothing voice, might be a great solace and aid. Such a voice transmitting the words of the poets, the philosophers or even the romancers, could not but distract the mind of the listener from her own anxieties and gradually induce repose. Letitia, to whom I have been reading for some years, will tell you—with more propriety than I can—how melodious and sonorous an organ is mine. You have but to say the word and it is at your service.—I am, your affectionate brother-in-law,

SEPTIMUS TRIBE

XXXIX

ANTOINETTE ROSSITER TO HER MOTHER

DEAREST MUMMY,—When you come home you will find another baby here, only it isn’t a real baby, it’s a puppy. A spaniel. Mr. Hawkes gave it to us and he says we are to own it together so that each of us has a bit. He says I am to have its stomach and mouth, which means I have got to feed it, and Cyril is to have its front legs and ears, and Lobbie its hind legs and tail, and its tongue is to belong to us all. I have told Cyril that you and Daddy ought to have an ear each but he won’t give them up. The ears of a spaniel are the nicest part, next to the lips. It is a girl and Mr. Hawkes says that this means that when it grows up it will be fondest of Cyril. We have named it Topsy because it is a girl and black. Do come home soon and see it.—Your everlastingly loving

TONY

x x x x x x x x x x

XL

NESTA ROSSITER TO SEPTIMUS TRIBE

DEAR UNCLE SEPTIMUS,—Aunt Verena asks me to thank you for your kind offer, but to say that a trained reader has already been secured. With love to Aunt Letitia,—I am, yours sincerely,

NESTA ROSSITER

XLI

HAZEL BARRANCE TO VERENA RABY

DEAR AUNT,—You were the kindest thing to write to me like that. Such a long letter too! I hope you weren’t too tired after it. But, alas! the pity is it has not converted me. Marriage for every one else if you like, but not for me. I have seen too much of it, nor do I seem to want any of the things it gives except escape from home. But it would be escaping only to another form of bondage. Every one is not made for domesticity and I am sure I am not. I hate everything to do with the preparation of meals. I even rather hate meals themselves and would much prefer to eat only when I felt hungry, a little at a time and fairly often and alone. The idea of munching for evermore punctually and periodically opposite the same man both repels and infuriates me. I wonder if you can understand this. The thought of Horace under these conditions is too revolting.

Since I wrote to you Horace has actually been to father, behind my back; but father is much too pleased with my likeness to himself to be unsporting, and Horace was sent away with the warning that he hadn’t an earthly—but if he cared to persist he must come to me direct and to no one else. He would have gone to mother for a cert if she had not been so wholly occupied with the affairs of the next world.

Father was really funny about it. “What does Horace want to marry for, anyway?” he said: “he knows how to speak French”—this referring to his old theory that what men most want in wives is a gift of tongues when travelling abroad.

But apart from not wanting to marry, marriage frightens me. It means losing the fine edge of courtesy and kindness and tenderness. I see so many married people—girls I knew when they were engaged—one or two to whom I was bridesmaid and they are all so coarsened by it and take things so for granted. I don’t think anything is sadder than the way in which little pretty indulged sillinesses when a girl is engaged, become detestable in her husband’s eyes after they are married. Losing umbrellas, for example.

That’s the end of my grumbling about marriage. This correspondence, as the editors say, must now cease, and henceforth I will write only when I have something cheerful and amusing to tell you. I have been selfishly using you far too long.—Your loving

HAZEL

XLII

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

MY DEAR, I am delighted to hear about my Irish girl. Some day I should like to be ill myself—nicely, languidly ill, without pain—just for the pleasure of having her read to me.

I hope you aren’t letting the papers prey on your mind. Far better not read them, or, rather, not hear them read; but I expect that is to suggest too much. After a great war there must always be a period of ferment and unrest, and that is what we are undergoing now. I don’t in the least despair of cosmos emerging, but nothing will ever be the same again and it will be a very expensive chaos for years to come.

What chiefly worries me is the impaired standard of efficiency, the scamping, the cheating and the general cynicism. I seem to discern a universal decrease of pride. The best, the genuine, has gone, and substitutes reign. Tradespeople no longer keep their word and are impenitent when taxed with it. A certain amount of dishonesty must, I suppose, be bred of a war. Officers, for example, had to be fed and couldn’t be expected to inquire too closely of their batmen where the chickens came from, and no doubt a good deal of this bivouacking morality persists. But I wish it hadn’t affected life so generally. I rather fancy that what this old England of ours is most in need of is a gentleman at the helm. A nobleman would not be bad, but a gentleman would be better. No harm if he were rich and could win the Derby. But where to find him? He is a gift of the gods, to be proffered or withheld according to their whim or their interest in old England. If they are tired of us (as now and then one can almost fear), then we may never get him.—Yours,

R. H.

And here is to-day’s poem, a very brief one but a very striking one too:—

Reason has moons, but moons not hers Lie mirror’d on the sea, Confounding her astronomers, But, O! delighting me.

XLIII

VERENA RABY TO HAZEL BARRANCE

MY DEAR HAZEL,—My last letter too, on this subject, but you must answer it. There is much in yours with which I sympathize and I think I understand all of it. There is a vein of almost fierce fastidiousness in our family (your grandfather had too much of it) which is discernible in you, but I don’t despair of seeing a deal of it broken down when you meet the right man. So much of what you say about things seems to me to be due to your manlessness. I don’t believe that any wholly right view of life is possible to celibates or those who have never loved. They must see it piecemeal. I don’t despair of you at all, but you must get out of the habit of expecting perfection. And where would the fun of marriage be if it was not partly warfare—give and take?—Your truly loving and solicitous

AUNT V.

_P.S._—Don’t stop writing about yourself if you have any prompting to. What is an old bed-ridden woman for but to try and help others?

XLIV

PATRICIA POWER TO CLEMENCY POWER

YOU DEAR LUCKY CLEM,—I am so glad you are fixed up all comfy and I wish I could do the same, but Herself won’t hear of it. She says that one mad daughter out in the world when there is no need for it is enough. I can’t make her see that it isn’t the money that matters, but the importance of doing something for the sake of one’s own dignity. All the same, some one must of course stay with her. I’m sure that if I were to go, Adela wouldn’t stick it another minute. But remember me if you ever hear of an opening or if this Mr. Haven of yours is proposing to distribute any more damsels among his friends.

Herself has been very fit lately and we’ve got two more Dexters—such pets. One is named Dilly and the other Dally, but that’s not their nature. We liked the names for them, that’s all. So far from being their nature, they give quarts of milk.

We went over to the Pattern at Kilmakilloge last week in the motor-boat, but Tim wouldn’t let us stay long because the boys were out with their shillelaghs and he was fearful of a fight. But it was great fun. Dr. O’Connor was there with his new wife, very massive and handsome, and he was so comically proud of her, and Mr. Sheehan was as mischievous as ever and even invited us to play lawn tennis at Derreen by moonlight. It would have been funny if we had and Lord Lansdowne had turned up. We walked round the lake once, with the cripples, and gave shillings to I don’t know how many beggars, and then Tim forced us away. Every one was jigging then, except those who were singing in the inn. Good night, lucky one.—Your only

PAT

_P.S._—This did not get off last night and now I re-open it to say that I am enclosing a letter which arrived this morning and has all the appearance of being the handiwork of a beau. I like the writing, so decisive and distinct.

P.

XLV

BRYAN FIELD TO CLEMENCY POWER

[_Enclosure_]

DEAR MISS POWER,—I promised I would let you know when I was returning to England. Well, I am due next week, for the hospital is closing. I suppose you don’t know of a nice snug little practice in a good sporting neighbourhood with several wealthy _malades imaginaires_ of both sexes dotted conveniently about? That’s what I want, a kind of sinecure. Forgive the low ambition. Indeed I am punished already for indulging it, for see how double-edged the word “sinecure” is, and what a sarcasm on my profession!