by—that is the question, who was it by? I would give anything to know. The name of the author seemed to me at the time quite familiar, that is to say, a name one had heard people talk about, like Trollope or Whyte-Melville. The story was that of an impecunious family who led a gay life in London at a suburban house called the Robber’s Cave, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were always in debt, and finally, to escape bailiffs, they shut themselves up in a castle on the seacoast, where they were safe unless a bailiff should succeed in entering the house, and present the writ to one of the debtors in person. The bailiffs tried every expedient to force a way into the castle, one of them dressing up as an old dowager who was a friend of the family, and driving up to the castle in a custard-coloured carriage. But the inmates of the house were wily, and they had a mechanical device by which coloured billiard balls appeared on the frieze of the drawing-room and warned them when a bailiff was in the offing.
One day when they had a visitor to tea, a billiard ball suddenly made a clicking noise round the frieze. “What is that for?” asked the interested guest. “That,” said the host, with great presence of mind, “is a signal that a ship is in sight.” As tea went on, a perfect plethora of billiard balls of different colours appeared in the frieze. “There must be a great many ships in sight to-day,” said the guest. “A great many,” answered the host.
Whether a bailiff ever got into the house I don’t know. The picture on the cover seems to indicate that he did. The book was in Everard’s cupboard for years, and then, “suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.” I never have been able to find it again, although I have never stopped looking for it. Once I thought I had run it to earth. I once met at the Vice-Provost’s house at Eton a man who was an expert lion-hunter and who seemed to have read every English novel that had ever been published. I described him the book. He had read it. He remembered the picture on the cover and the story, but, alas! he could recall neither its name nor that of the author.
In French Les Malheurs de Sophie, Les Mémoires d’un Âne, Sans Famille, were the first early favourites, and then the numerous illustrated works of Jules Verne.
Walter Scott’s novels used to be held before us like an alluring bait. “When you are nine years old you shall read The Talisman.” Even the order in which Scott was to be read was discussed. The Talisman first, and then Ivanhoe, and then Quentin Durward, Woodstock and Kenilworth, Rob Roy and Guy Mannering.
The reading of the Waverley Novels was a divine, far-off event, to which all one’s life seemed to be slowly moving, and as soon as I was nine my mother read out The Talisman to me. The girls had read all Walter Scott except, of course, The Heart of Midlothian, which was not, as they said, for the J.P. (jeune personne) and (but why not, I don’t know) Peveril of the Peak. They also read Miss Yonge’s domestic epics. There I never followed them, except for reading The Little Duke, The Lances of Lynwood, and the historical romance of The Chaplet of Pearls, which seemed to me thrilling.
I believe children absorb more Kultur from the stray grown-up conversation they hear than they learn from books. At luncheon one heard the grown-up people discussing books and Chérie talking of new French novels. Not a word of all this escaped my notice. I remember the excitement when John Inglesant was published and Marion Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs and, just before I went to school, Treasure Island.
But besides the books of the day, one absorbed a mass of tradition. My father had an inexhaustible memory, and he would quote to himself when he was in the train, and at any moment of stress and emotion a muttered quotation would rise to his lips, often of the most incongruous kind. Sometimes it was a snatch of a hymn of Heber’s, sometimes a lyric of Byron’s, sometimes an epitaph of Pope’s, some lines of Dryden or Churchill, or a bit of Shakespeare.
One little poem he was fond of quoting was:
“Mrs. Gill is very ill
And nothing can improve her,
Unless she sees the Tuileries
And waddles round the Louvre.”
I believe it is by Hook.[2] I remember one twilight at the end of a long train journey, when Papa, muffled in a large ulster, kept on saying:
“False, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury,”
and then Byron’s “I saw thee weep,” and when it came to
“It could not match the living rays that filled that glance of thine,”
there were tears in his eyes. Then after a pause he broke into Cowper’s hymn, “Hark my soul,” and I heard him whispering:
“Can a woman’s tender care
Cease towards the child she bare?
Yes, she may forgetful be,
Yet will I remember thee.”
But besides quotations from the poets he knew innumerable tags, epitaphs, epigrams, which used to come out on occasions: Sidney Smith’s receipt for a salad; Miss Fanshawe’s riddle, “ ’Twas whispered in heaven, ’twas muttered in hell”; and many other poems of this nature.
My father spoke French and German and Spanish. He knew many of Schiller’s poems by heart. Soon after he was married, he bet my mother a hundred pounds that she would not learn Schiller’s poem “Die Glocke” by heart. My mother did not know German. The feat was accomplished, but the question was how was he to be got to hear her repeat the poem, for, whenever she began he merely groaned and said, “Don’t, don’t.” One day they were in Paris and had to drive somewhere, a long drive into the suburbs which was to take an hour or more, and my mother began, “Fest gemauert in der Erde,” and nothing would stop her till she came to the end. She won her hundred pounds. And when my father’s silver wedding came about, in 1886, he was given a silver bell with some lines of the “Glocke” inscribed on it.
Mrs. Christie was decidedly of the opinion that we ought to learn German, and so were my father and mother, but German so soon after the Franco-Prussian War was a sore subject in the house owing to Chérie, who cried when the idea of learning German was broached, and I remember one day hearing my mother tell Mrs. Christie that she simply couldn’t do it. So much did I sympathise with Chérie that I tore out a picture of Bismarck from a handsome illustrated volume dealing with the Franco-Prussian War—an act of sympathy that Chérie never forgot. So my father and mother sadly resigned themselves, and it was settled we were not to learn German. I heard a great deal about German poetry all the same, and one of the outstanding points in the treasury of traditions that I amassed from listening to what my father and mother said was that Goethe was a great poet. I knew the story of Faust from a large illustrated edition of that work which used to lie about at Coombe.
But perhaps the most clearly defined of all the traditions that we absorbed were those relating to the actors and the singers of the past, especially to the singers. My father was no great idolater of the past in the matter of acting, and he told me once that he imagined Macready and the actors of his time to have been ranters.
It was French acting he preferred—the art of Got, Delaunay, and Coquelin—although Fechter was spoken of with enthusiasm, and many of the English comedians, the Wigans, Mrs. Keeley, Sam Sothern, Buckstone. The Bancrofts and Hare and Mrs. Kendal he admired enormously, and Toole made him shake with laughter.
At a play he either groaned if he disliked the acting
