one of the men was the lady’s husband, and had come in at a moment when she was making flower arrangements with the stranger, or was immersed in the etiquette of the tea ceremony. The act of violence which would have followed this discovery had been arrested by the entrance of Grandfather’s agent. The participants in this drama had undoubtedly been so horrified by the abrupt manner in which he took over their house and their fate, that the crime of passion which should have followed immediately was postponed, and existed in a state of suspension during their journey halfway across the world. Once the house was reassembled the charm was broken and the action completed. Grandfather felt somehow responsible.
On fine days he used to walk to the Japanese house and tap the oiled paper walls reflectively, or blow the dust off the pretty books which he could not read. Sometimes he stroked the curious little lacquer rosettes which decorated the furniture. He had been told that these were the strange coat of arms of the former owner, and this made him sad and respectful, for he felt that such things should not happen to “his sort of people.” For Grandfather, “his sort of people” constituted the one truly international class, and he would have felt more at home with a Hottentot if that Hottentot were a chief than he would with just any Frenchman or German.
In the late autumn of 1915, when the island of Herm was taken away from him, the British government stationed Australian troops on the island. During several weeks they amused themselves by killing all the remaining birds with slingshots and running the ostriches to death. One day Grandfather decided to walk to the Japanese house, for he felt that he would be more at home there than in the company of these strange people who had been quartered on him. When he came within sight of the pretty little oriental garden with which he had surrounded the house, he stopped frozen with horror. Everything had been devastated; everything destroyed.
He turned back, filled with rage, intending to lodge a protest with the commanding officer. From some distance away he heard one of the old gardeners shouting to him. “Highness, the soldiers have taken the little boat and gone to Jethou with their guns,” he cried. Grandfather hurried to his own room where he kept an old rifle. Carrying it under his arm he rushed toward the cliff from which he had always “studied” his lions. On that cold, damp day he could see the soldiers’ Girl-Guide hats showing over the tops of some large boulders. They were stumbling and falling over the rocks as they stalked the lions; his lions. Grandfather let loose a volley.
The following day he left for Guernsey in spite of all the submarines in the Channel, and he never saw Herm again.
Time and Brother Griphen
The school I went to as a child had an air of the romantic period of Neo-Gothic architecture, which flourished at a time when it was fashionable to build false ruins. The dormitories, halls, classrooms, refectories, chapel, and recreation hall formed a straggling block of ivy-covered buildings attached to an abbey and a monastery by a series of long corridors and vaulted, echoing halls. I still think that it must have been more than a mile from the War Memorial past Great Hall and Little Hall, past the refectory with its raftered and emblazoned roof, forty feet or more above our heads, through a low, vaulted cloister with green stained-glass windows, up to the flight of broad steps which led into the abbey church. From within the church itself you could enter what I suppose must have been very similar cloisters leading to the monastery and the cells of the monks, but I never passed more than a few yards beyond those great doors into those strangely repulsive, smelly halls. At that point you were almost overcome by the odor of stale incense in the folds of black serge robes.
We saw the monks of the monastery enter into the church almost every day, but while they were close to us they were also completely apart. We knew only those few who taught in the school, and even they seemed almost unrecognizable as they sang from under their hoods, sitting back in the shadowed choir stalls. On Sundays certain young boys of the school, dressed in red and white, stood in front of these same stalls and lifted their soprano voices high into the nave of the church. That sound soared and fell back against carved stone and carved wood into the wave of bass voices which seemed to echo from under the dark hoods of the monks. The school was famous for its Gregorian chant, that indescribable music of male voices. The organist was a handsome, stalwart young Russian who had left the concert halls to enter the monastery. The monk named Dom Thomas, who trained and led the choir, looked so much a small neutered cat that you wondered where the music could be hidden in him. These two antitypes forged music which I have never been able to forget.
The great windows, which hung above the part of the church to which we schoolboys were confined, were filled with a greenish glass that cast an almost submarine gloom over the assembled congregation even on the brightest of days. The windows of the transept struck great shafts of light through the haze, and from time to time picked out some boy in the choir who seemed to be the only singer, as his voice blended with the others in a vibrating column of sound which shook the ribs of the whole church. The bass voices flowed out in oily waves and the male soprano echoed back and forth, searching through the columns of stone. In the green sea-light we seemed to be crouched on the hard-beaten, sandy bottom of the sea, filled with an unreasoning despair and sadness, until the organ burst forth with its triumphant toccata and suddenly an army with banners seemed to charge above our heads and meet another army in full flight. The shock of their collision almost brought down the vaulting.
The monks who entered the monastery were chosen, I think, as much for their compatibility as for their religious vocation. There were a number of qualifications. Many of the novices who petitioned the abbot for entrance were the younger sons of rich families, and although they were obliged to take a vow of poverty, they were also obliged to bring a considerable dowry with them when they came. If the monks therefore were at least theoretically poor, the monastery itself was extremely rich and took good care of its investments. The monks were well provided for and their poverty was really only nominal. Their religious duties were numerous and undoubtedly monotonous, but they also had a great deal of time before eternity began in which to occupy themselves with works. If a monk wished to engage in a craft or a hobby he was provided with the very best tools and implements, which were paid for out of the common fund. Their interests ranged from things like beekeeping or carpentry to the arts and the sciences.
The beekeeping monk persuaded his bees to produce a delicate, thin honey the color of pale jade which had the fragrance of spiced pinks and apple blossoms. This honey he sold to the schoolboys at a price so exorbitant that we were led to doubt the nonprofit basis of his little enterprise.
I did not like any of the monks whom I knew with the exception of the art master, who was also a sculptor. Before entering the monastery he had studied in Paris and he was often in trouble with the abbot, who did not appreciate modern art. Dom Hubert was a backslider, I fear, and there is some evidence to show that he read movie magazines. He loved his stoneyard, for it took him away from the rather limited company of his fellow monks, and gave him physical exercise. He would attack a huge block of the local limestone with such furious energy that he often finished with a miniature Madonna and misshapen Child, where, with the same material and a little more care, he might have produced a colossus. I have often wondered since what attacks of temperament he was trying to overcome by turning stone into dust.
One day he was called upon to make a bas-relief, and he started in grimly upon a large piece of stone. He would have liked to make something else, I knew, but the abbot had imposed the condition that he confine himself to religious subjects. As the relief grew under the blows of his chisel, the Madonna’s high cheekbones, large eye sockets, long bob, and awkward gesture toward the child grew more and more familiar. Her mouth was wide and generous and her jawline firm and square. Dom Hubert smiled as he cut a Latin inscription into the stone. STELLA SACRAE SILVAE. When the abbot first saw this work of art he was pleased with it, but even he may possibly have seen the resemblance to Garbo before he translated the inscription into STAR OF HOLLYWOOD. It was too much, I am afraid. Dom Hubert lost his workshop, and I worked on there alone.
It was about this same time that the observatory in the monastery garden burned
