TO HIS BROTHER (LP X: 194–5):
Hillsboro
Sept. 29th. 29.
My dear APB,
By this [time] you will have had my cable and the two letters written from Leeboro. As there is a good deal of business I will only give you the bare facts. The operation, in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer. They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home, for ten days. There were ups and downs and some bad spasms of pain from flatulence (apparently the usual sequence to abdominal operations) going over the wound: but nothing really dreadful. Quite often he was himself and telling wheezes, tho’ of course he was often wandering from the dopes.
By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th and my work for next term was getting really desperate, and, as Joey said, I might easily wait several weeks more and still be in the same position–i.e. not really making the progress he should, but not likely to take a sudden turn for the worse. I therefore crossed to Oxford on Saturday Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon. 62 The immediate cause seems to have been some blood moving on to the brain: at least that is how they interpreted it. The facts were that he never woke on Tuesday, and remained all that day in a state of unconsciousness with a rising temperature. Now for business.
1. The business in the office is being carried on under the name of Mr Hayes, solicitor, of Belfast. (The reason is as follows. The moment the news got about there would be applications by other solicitors for the work of the big permanent clients, such as the Corporation, and the Railways, and therefore, before we could sell the business, there would be no business to sell. 63 It is therefore necessary to tell these clients ‘Business as usual.’ but tho’ Condlin in fact does all the work, it cannot legally be done except under the auspices of a qualified solicitor. Mr Hayes receives no payment for lending his name, but any new business which accrues during his nominal reign goes to him. I gave authority for this step to be taken, on the advice of Condlin, seconded by Limpopo (I wish I had time to tell you my adult impression of him!)
2. Condlin is sending you a copy of the Will and as soon as possible, an estimate of the Estate. (In the will, we are given equal shares. Before the operation however the P’daitabird said that, having regard to the insecurity of your career and the comparative security of mine, he would like to leave you more than me: in fact to divide the whole in the proportion of 3 to 2½: it being understood however that if Magdalen failed to reelect me, or any other such contingency made me as insecure as you, you would restore equality. This statement I have made known to Condlin. It has of course no legal status).
3. There are two methods of disposing of the business. a. Sale outright for a lump sum. b. The Drage method.–i.e. the purchaser to make us a fixed annual payment for a given term of years (I mean fixed in amount of course–not a fixed percentage of his takings).
Condlin would advise accepting (b) if the purchaser who on other grounds is most desirable insists on having it so: i.e. not to turn down a good offer solely because the payment is to be deferred.
4. I have postponed the sale of Leeborough until your return, retaining the Witch of Endor as a housekeeper. This, I am afraid will sound very uneconomic. But,
5. Nearly all the silver–i.e. all except a few knives and forks for you and me at Xmas–including much that has been locked up in a trunk in the attics since Mamy’s death–has been packed and sent to the bank.
I think that is all. Please if you possibly can let me have a line by return to say whether you agree with these steps: and also if there is any further certainty when you are coming back. I have lots more to say but, as you may imagine, what between the last few days and piles of my own work and replying to letters of condolence, I am pretty well cooked. You have still every right to work the U.P.A. as regards the date of sailing if it is likely to be any good,
yours,
Jack
P.S. Limpopo is much worse than I remembered (h’m–wha’?)
P.P.S. He drinks too–our whiskey–and ordered a taxi on his own bat on Thursday in which he kept me driving about all day. Old associations are so strong that it was only afterwards that I realised that we were paying for it. (h’m–wha’?)
TO HIS BROTHER (LP X: 197–9):
Hillsboro.
Oct. 17th 1929
My dear W.,
I got your letter of Sept. 27th yesterday and am more disappointed than I can say to hear that you will not be home till April. My pleasant fancy of a last stay at Leeborough together must, among other things, be abandoned.
Perhaps after all the reality would have turned out to be a gloomy, or at any rate an uneasy one. In the meantime someone is already approaching Condlin about the purchase. I am waiting to hear from Condlin the price we can reasonably or without flagrant unreason, demand. The trouble is that this man wants possession by Dec. 1st, and the term doesn’t end till Dec. 7th., and the week end, which is all the absence I could take in term, would be utterly useless towards clearing it out. I shall of course attempt to get the purchaser to be content with possession a little later: but if he won’t he won’t: and if I can’t get the house cleared in time for him, I can’t. So don’t blame me if I let him slip–you see I am in a cleft stick.
Now as to this terrible clearing out itself. To be absolutely safe from selling anything you want to keep my right line would be to store the whole contents of the house until your return: but the price of storage and deterioration wd. eat up or even reduce to a minus quantity the product of the sale. I think therefore I must sell all the furniture except the Chippendale bookcase in the drawing room, the bureau in the study, a bookcase or so, the grandfather clock, the two hall chairs from great grandfather’s Welsh farmhouse, and some such oddments. All silver, jewelry and crockery I shall bring to Oxford and keep for your consideration.
As to books, the situation is difficult and I think I can only go on the principle of selling nothing but absolute rubbish. E. g. I don’t suppose you want to keep the Dumas but you just may, so it can’t be sold. The picture of Grandp’daita I propose to give to Joey. There may be first editions among the novels and so forth. Pictures are even worse. The P’daita portraits of course can’t be sold. We owe Joey a very handsome present for his really very assiduous attendance unpaid, at all hours of the day and night: he is the only member of the family who is propagating: it is not a good picture: and he can’t refuse it. 64 Medici prints will be kept: the other pictures (except of course photos) I suppose can be knocked down. ‘Relics’, MSS or both, of all three generations I shall of course strictly preserve.
As regards money, £1200 is the best offer for the business, and the law library may sell for £500. The list of investments you will understand better than I. The funeral expenses were £55.10.0. Doctors, surgeons, and nursing home have not yet come in. £100, by his directions, (with my v. hearty approval) are to be given to the Witch of Endor.
What you say in your letter is v. much what I am finding myself. I always before condemned as sentimentalists and hypocrites the people whose view of the dead was so different from the view they held of the same people living. Now one finds out that it is a natural process. Of course, on the spot, ones feelings were in some ways different. I think the mere pity for the poor old chap and for the life he had led really surmounted everything else. It was also (in the midst of home surroundings) almost impossible to believe. A dozen times while I was making the funeral arrangements I found myself mentally jotting down some episode or other to tell him: and what simply got me between wind and water was going into Robinson and Cleaver’s to get a black tie and suddenly realising ‘You can never put anything down to his account again.’ By the way, a great deal of his jollities and wheezes remained to the end. One of the best things he ever said was the day before I left–four days before his death. As I came in the day nurse said ‘I’ve been telling Mr Lewis that he’s exactly like my father.’ P. ‘And how am I like your father?’ N. ‘Why, he’s a pessimist.’ P. (after a pause) ‘I suppose he has several daughters.’
As time goes on the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality. You remember ‘Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next. There is none. No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’ 65 How he filled a room! How hard it was to realise that physically he was not a very big man. Our whole world, the whole Pigiebotian world, is either direct or indirect testimony to the same effect. Take away from our conversation all that is imitation or parody (sincerest witness in the world) of his, and how little is left. The way we enjoyed going to Leeborough and the way we hated it, and the way we enjoyed hating it: as you say, one can’t grasp that that is over. And now you could do anything on earth you cared to in the study at midday or on Sunday, and it is beastly.
I sympathise with you in the strange experience of returning to a British Isles which no longer contains a P’daitaheim. I hope that when all your books are set up (presumably in the non-glassed little end room bookcase) in Magdalen, where you can always have an empty sitting room to which you can repair at all hours, I hope that a leave at Hillsboro will be able to pass not unpalatably. Its no good pretending that its the old thing, but there you are.66
You may be grateful for your absence at present in one way. Two nights out of three I sit down at 10 o’clock after my own work to do an hour’s business correspondance with Condlin. Hardly my long suit! By the by about the proportion between your share and mine, I think you ought to know that I have mentioned and shall mention it to no one alive except Condlin: so you need not feel that you are facing a public opinion that cd. misunderstand or criticise. 67 Write when you can.
yours,
J.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Monday [28 October 1929]
My dear Arthur,
A straggling letter in diary form is in process of composition and will be posted in due course: 68 the present is written for practical purposes and contains a proposal wh. I make with some diffidence. However I must take my courage in both hands: here goes.
Warnie is not coming home till April. Therefore the proposed visit by him and me to Leeborough to clear it out at Christmas will not take place. But unless a purchaser turns up I am disposed to leave the house as it stands until his return. The danger is that if I do not do something this vac. a purchaser may suddenly spring on me next term wanting immediate possession, when I could only run across for a week end at the most, and it wd. be almost impossible to do the whole job in the time. I have therefore decided at least to make a start at the end of the present term. I want to have Minto with me and she v. much wants to come: partly that she may have a look at household things of whose value W. and I are ignorant, partly because we shd. both like her to have seen my old home before it goes. But I cannot (and she agrees) take her to Leeborough. There are ghosts there who wd. not be happy to see her nor anxious to make her happy. Also, it wd. look like the traditional insolence of an heir, trampling on the old king’s laws before the crown is warm on his head. But I could take her to Bernagh as a mutual friend of yours and mine.
So what I want to know is could you possibly put the pair of us up (only us two–no Maureen, no cats & no dogs) for a week from Dec. 7th to Dec. 15th. This is the cheekiest proposal I have ever made to any one in my life: but–well, my want is urgent, you are my oldest friend, and I think I can count your mother such too. If it is inconvenient, don’t be afraid to say so. I wait for an answer v. eagerly.
Yrs
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
[4? November 1929]
My dear Arthur,
A thousand thanks! I was ‘all in a flutter of spirits’ when I got your letter for my proposal seemed to me & still seems extraordinarily cool. I am now trying to prevent my anticipations from running so high as to ensure their own disappointment. Lovely sunrise through tall elms twinkling over the frosty grass this morning.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
[11? November 1929]
My dear Arthur,
Yes, it is Sunday 69 morning we shall arrive on, all being well. If you arrive by 9.30 I expect we shall have breakfasted on board, being then hungry, wh. will be no harm as we can then be washing and changing etc while you are at breakfast. I have primed Minto. I presume you have primed your mother. Provided they don’t hurt one another their cross purposes & misunderstandings will be very funny. Selah!
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[Hillsboro]
Thursday Oct 3rd [1929] 70
My dear Arthur,
I have decided to write a snippet to you every odd time when I have a moment and thus gradually to fill up a letter. This is the first snippet. I am feeling better. Oh how delicious the gradual recovery from a time of horror is. There is a good description in The Ring & the Book of this: where a man speaks of beginning to feel again ‘the comfortable feel of clothes And taste of food’. 71 Remember also Herbert’s poem–The Flower I think–‘I once more feel the sun and rain And relish versing.’ 72 It is much colder here and from my window I see the lawn covered with yellow leaves: the long drought had shrivelled them so that they drop early this year at the first touch of cold. I am sleeping solid and it is a delight to wake up each morning with the sense of peace and safety and home. Then I sing in my bath & take Mr Papworth for a run before breakfast, eating my apple the while. Unfortunately the morning has to be given to uninteresting work done as fast as I can manage to get through it–a process which would rob even voluntary work of its interest. How thankful you should be that you never have tasks which are not chosen by yourself. And yet I don’t know. So many things have now become interesting to me because at first I had to do them whether I liked them or not, and thus one is kicked into conquering new countries where one is afterwards at home.
Oct. 4th
Yesterday Barfield came to lunch and afterwards took me out for a drive-and-walk–you see you are not the only friend I sponge on. We walked in the flat fields by the Thames near Iffley. I wonder if you remember Iffley, where the Norman church is. I sat on the bridge at Iffley lock with you and Minto’s doctor brother, Johnnie, (the one who died) and we talked about sailing up the Amazon. 73 It was a luminous grey day yesterday with a fresh wind that curled the river into crisp waves. A fleet of ducks that passed us were going up and down about as much (in proportion to their size) as fishing smacks in a real swell. We also saw two swans and their cygnets. As often happens with the best of friends we were not in a very good talking mood–only that pleasant sense of security that comes from being with those who understand you.
Last night I told Minto about your nursery rime book, and we went all through ‘The dog began to bite the pig’ together, and then the House that Jack built. She said she so wished to be a grandmother so as to tell them to her grand-children. I said that now that she has big spectacles and her eyes look very big through them she could do it most impressively.
To day I worked in the morning and afternoon and walked into town by Cuckoo Lane and Mesopotamia 74 after tea. The real autumn tang in the air had begun. There was one of those almost white skies with a touch of frosty red over the town, and the beginnings of lovely colouring in the college garden. I love the big kitchen garden there. There is something very attractive about rows of pots–and an old man potting–and greenhouses and celery trenches. I suspect that ‘trench’ was a delicious earthy word (like ‘ditch’) before it was spoiled by the war associations. I saw both a squirrel and a fat old rat in Addison’s walk, and had glimpses of ‘it’.
I think almost more every year in autumn I get the sense, just as the mere nature and voluptuous life of the world is dying, of something else coming awake. You know the feeling, of course, as well as I do. I wonder is it significant–in stories nymphs slip out of the tree just as the ordinary life of the wood is settling down for the night. Does the death of the natural always mean the birth of the spiritual? Does one thing never sleep except to let something else wake. Milton found that his genius was never in full tide except in autumn and winter.
We have our first fire to night. Mr Papworth is asleep in his basket and Minto is listening-in 75 and mending on the sofa.
Oct. 6th
I have nothing to tell you about books these days. The mornings and afternoons are occupied with making notes on Loves Labour’s Lost, 76 the last of those four plays which I have been making up all this summer & which will also be associated with this time in my mind. The evenings so far have been nearly always occupied in answering letters of condolence or business correspondence from Condlin. Last night was an exception and I read a short new book, Foligno’s Latin Thought in the Middle Ages, 77 which I strongly suspect of being Fascist propaganda. When a man is very anxious to emphasise (what everyone admitted before), the greatness and influence of Rome, and to suggest that even yet we have not fully appreciated it, my suspicions are awakened–perhaps unjustly. I also glanced through A. E. Houseman’s Shropshire Lad 78 for the hundredth time. What a terrible little book it is–perfect and deadly, the beauty of the gorgon. I think you know it.
I have not yet started meditation again. The difficulty is to find a suitable time. These are not suitable days for sitting out of doors: indoor times are occupied with work or conversation. In bed at night–well work and Headington make me so sleepy that I have never yet mustered the resolution to tackle such a difficult job when the pillow and the sheet and the rain on the window are wooing me to glide away into drowsiness. (By the way I don’t ever remember a time when the coming of sleep was such a positive pleasure to me as it has been since I left Ireland: and by the way there is a fine passage on that subject in Barfield’s novel.) 79 Then in bed in the morning, at early-tea time, I am still sleepier. When I go back into College perhaps I shall be able to fit in five minutes after breakfast. (Memo: can meditation be combined with emptying of the bowels? What a saving of time, specially for a constipated man like you.)
To-day, Sunday, I worked till lunch. After lunch, dug up the hen-run and worked again till tea. All this time it was raining hard. After tea it cleared and I sallied forth for a v. good walk. There was a very high wind, the trees were waving, and a lot of tattered rain clouds were scudding across the sky, unusually low. I walked down Cuckoo Lane and into the Private Road 80 where I had a magnificent view of Oxford below me all gleaming in a sudden dazzling gold break in the cloud. I came home through the fields to old Headington, where the colouring in the hedgerows was rich. But these winds are bringing the leaves down too quickly.
Oct. 10th
We haven’t been having a very nice time for the last day or so as Mr Papworth has been seriously ill, which bothers me not only for the poor beast’s sake, but also for Minto’s, who takes it so to heart and gives herself so much extra work about it. I am also very busy getting ready for term. You can well imagine how I dislike all these preparations because they are always associated with leaving my homely timeless days at Hillsboro and going back to the solitude of my college bedroom and the routine of a time-table. Of course college and ones own rooms & books have their charm: but you know what I mean–especially late at night when people go away and you find that you have let the fire [go] out.
I am slowly reading a book that we have known about, but not known, for many a long day–Macdonald’s Diary of an Old Soul. 81 How I would have scorned it once! I strongly advise you to try it. He seems to know everything and I find my own experience in it constantly: as regards the literary quality, I am coming to like even his clumsiness. There is a delicious home-spun, earthy flavour about it, as in George Herbert. Indeed for me he is better than Herbert.
Oct. 15th?
I have been back in College for about a week and find I can’t go on with this very well. I may try to start another on a more purely diary model. The return to College and its regular routine has done me good: the lag ends of recent horrors have begun to fade in my mind. I am very busy this term, but the beautiful weather over-rides everything.
Yrs
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[Magdalen College]
Thursday Oct. 17th [1929]
Altho I had not gone to bed till one and had then been kept awake by the brilliant moonlight in my room (after walking a half hour in the same moonlight thro’ the grove with Griffiths 82) I woke perfectly refreshed after one of those sleeps deeper than usual which sometimes comes to us in a short night. Went round the walks with Griffiths after breakfast and both enjoyed the bright yellow leaves floating on the water. He packed off and set out to bicycle home to Newbury at 10.
From 10 to 1 pupils. Out home for lunch. Dug the hen run, dug worms for the hens, and took Tykes 83 for the short walk which is all he can manage at present: then at 3.30 walked v. quickly up Shotover getting back about 4.15 for tea. Left home at 5 and got back for pupil at 5.30.
My new book on Marlow 84 had come which I read after dinner. It is chiefly concerned with the appalling career of Poole, 85 who was one of those present when Marlow was murdered: an incredible person who was receiving pay from the Papists for carrying letters to Mary Queen of Scots and also from the govt. for spying on the Papists and Mary: at the same time engaged in litigation with the husband of a woman who visited him while in prison for debt.
Dropped in on Christie 86 for half an hour and was in bed by 11.15 after reading my daily verse from The Diary of an Old Soul.
Mon. Nov. 4th–After breakfast returned to College from home where I had been spending the week end in the hope of getting rid of my flu’ey cold. I had foolishly taken last week end out there in bed, had to get up too soon, and consequently felt v. poorly all week. No pupils on Monday morning. Spent the whole time till lunch answering letters and setting examination papers. A dull job, rewarded by those sudden gleams of fugitive association that have the habit of starting up only when the intellect is fully engaged on something else.
Home for lunch. Dug the hen run and dug for worms. Worms are a case in which the extension of a name has altered a physical feeling for me. From reading Beowulf and the Edda the word ‘Worm’ in the sense of ‘dragon’ has become so familiar to me that I always think of these humble twisters as poor relations of Fafner and Jormungander; their kinship with the monstrous has taken from them the merely disgusting and I can now lift them in my fingers without a shudder. Even if I could not, earth is such a lovely thing that it reconciles one to all its contents. As Minto always says ‘There’s comfort in the clay.’ Took Mr Papworth for his walk. The leaves on the ground are now very thick in Cuckoo Lane. A white liquid sky with horizontal bands of darker grey and a white sun behind them. Not a breath of wind. I had hoped to go and see old Foord-Kelcie 87 after the walk but I am still rather groggy and was tired & sweating when I came back so I did not.
Into college after tea. I intended to write a page or so for you before dinner, but answering letters to Condlin filled up the whole time. After dinner the Michaelmas Club met in my rooms. (An undergraduate society wh. McFarlane and I were instrumental in founding a year ago.) Acton, 88 a funny little chap with a cockney accent but the best philosopher as well as the most earnest and real thinker in College–nothing blasé about him–read an excellent paper on Pessimism. It had the touch of reality about it–quite unlike most young men’s pessimism. A fairly good discussion afterwards till about 11.45 when the Club broke up. McFarlane stayed with me till 12.30 talking by the fire, to the accompaniment of the stags grunting in the grove outside. V. tired.
Tue. Nov. 5th–One of our days. Woke to a great roaring wind that kept the trees in the grove rising and falling with the motion and noise of seas all morning while the leaves fell in showers. Work all morning and home at 1 o’clock, where the Barfields, a pleasant surprise, turned up after lunch. Mrs B. 89 stayed with Minto while he and I took a short walk. Talked chiefly about his novel (this seems to be a practice of my friends!). He said among other things that he thought the idea of the spiritual world as home–the discovery of homeliness in that wh. is otherwise so remote–the feeling that you are coming back tho’ to a place you have never yet reached–was peculiar to the British, and thought that Macdonald, Chesterton, and I, had this more than anyone else. He doesn’t know you of course 90–who, with Minto, have taught me so much in that way <(in that way? No, no.).>
Had to be back in Oxford by 5 to attend Simpson’s 91 class on Textual Criticism (no, no, Arthur–Textual) which I am learning this year in order to teach next. After dinner read with Ker 92 (a pupil) some of the fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Immensely fine. There’s one begins with a man going to the window & looking out and saying ‘No. This light is not the day breaking, nor a fiery dragon, nor is the house on fire. Take your shields & swords.’ 93 Ker shares to the full my enthusiasm for the saga world & we had a pleasant evening–with the wind still roaring outside.
Wed. Nov. 6.–A nasty day. Work all morning. Then lunch in college, which I hate, as there was a college meeting at 2: at which everything went the way I didn’t want it to go. I had just time to rush out home, take Mr Papworth for a run and have tea, returning to give my lecture at 5, take a pupil at 6, dine at 7.15 and receive a visit from a pupil with a terrible stutter at 8.30. Fortunately McFarlane came in at about ten wh. encouraged this poor fellow–to his own relief as much as mine–to take himself off. We then made cocoa and chatted till eleven. V. tired and–the old phraze–v. much ‘entangled in the world’ & v. far in spirit from where I would be.
Thurs. Nov. 7th.–Got an unexpected free evening off owing to a pupil’s having another engagement and like a fool wasted it lounging about in the smoking room till after 10 talking to various people whom I don’t greatly care for of subjects I’m not greatly interested in. Such fools we are.
Dec. 3rd.–I tried hard to keep this up but it wouldn’t do. Awful business correspondence with Condlin filled up any spare hours I had of an evening. I have also got rather into a whirl as I always do in the latter part of the term. I have too many irons in the fire–the Michaelmas Club, the Linguistic Society, the Icelandic Society, and this and that. One week I was up till 2.30 on Monday (talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien 94 who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods & giants & Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind & rain–who cd. turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good?), next night till 1 talking to someone else, & on Wednesday till 12 with the Icelandics. It is very hard to keep ones feet in this sea of engagements and very bad for me spiritually.
I am trying not to look forward too much to next week. How odd it will be to sleep in Bernagh–and to walk into Leeborough with Minto. I wonder does the future hold for us things as strange to our present point of view as this is to our old one? Barfield’s novel 95 is finished and already refused by one publisher. To day there is a fog, and all the trees quite bare now.
In spite of the failure so far I intend to keep up the effort of continuing a journal letter to you. In the Vac. it shd. be easier than in the term, and perhaps habit will at last teach me to fit a portion however small into my day’s routine. But you must do the same. Think how we shall enjoy the product when we are old.
Yrs
Jack
P.S. Give my love to your mother and v. many thanks for having us.
TO HIS BROTHER (LP X: 211–18):
Hillsboro. Dec. 21st 29
My dear APB,
Thank you for your letter of the 2nd Nov. and specially for your generous decision about the money–though it would be mere hypocrisy to pretend it was unexpected. When you say that we have lived long on a communal basis, I am afraid I cannot help reflecting that it has largely been a communism in which I have played the receiving proletarian to your bleeding capitalist: that however is a form justified by the best models. As to the proportions of the money–P’s decision was based on the belief that I was safely and amply provided for while you, despite the surprising quantity of ‘music’ you got out of life, were very poor at the moment and liable to be axed in the near future. I feel justified in taking half because he was of course ignorant that more than one shared my income, and also much too sanguine about the safety of my job. But I want it to be clearly understood that if you get axed (absit omen), 96 and I still have a job, we shall then revert to unequal portions.
This all sounds as if I were in hourly expectation of being turned out of my fellowship, but that is not exactly what I mean. I am simply taking into account the fact that re-election–for which I come up next summer–though very usual is not inevitable or merely formal and depends on far reaching wangles. I do not think it at all probable that the Tutorial board would care to set the ominous precedent of refusing to recommend one of its own members for re-election (too many can play at that game once it is started), but there are anti-English Schools and anti-SPB and the thing is conceivable. All this must sound very strange to you, but you must try to realise what a real democracy like a College means. Suppose Sir, that your continued employment depended on the votes of the other officers in your unit, and that some one (who also rather disliked you personally) wanted your place for an officer of a different type e.g. wanted a horse transport bloke instead, it being impossible to increase the strength…you see the sort of situation which results. There is no reason to be seriously worried about it, and I have already spent longer on the subject than I intended.
Now as to other business. I think I told you in my last letter that a purchaser was nibbling at Leeborough. After inspection he decided not to buy. The episode however gave me rather a fright. If another purchaser turned up next term, what was I to do? He would probably want immediate possession: and, much as you might want to spend another fortnight there in April, I take it you would not wish to do so at the cost of three thousand odd pounds–that would be a curious commentary on our old slogan ‘it’s a very cheap hotel’. Again, the house is so unsaleable that if you turned down one purchaser you might never get another: and pleasant as it may be now to reflect that ‘we still have Leeborough’, the same reflection will rather pall if we are making it fifteen years hence. On the other hand I could not get over for more than a couple of nights in term: so that if such a situation arose, I should probably have to let the place be turned out and a sale held with very little supervision. This alternative was clearly quite out of the question. I accordingly decided to go over at the end of last term and sort things into such an order that if I had to give sudden authority for a sale, no great prying or larceny could go on. I decided to take Minto with me, partly to give her a change, and partly to have her advice about china and linen, and as I felt it wd. be a breach of decorum to take her to Leeborough, we both billeted ourselves at Bernagh for about ten days, arriving back in Oxford today. The following is a record of what I have done.
(1) All keeps in the way of books I have put in the study: i.e. all your books, all my books which I wish to keep, all P’daita books which I know that I want or suspect that you want. The Cambridge Modern History97 and the big translation of Dumas are the inclusions that I felt most doubtful about: but if we finally condemn them they will sell as well a year hence as now.
(2) All Boxonian and pellesmonic documents (after one last unsuccessful search for that ignis fatuus Zoe Pasquali) 98 I have carefully collected into the playbox and placed in the study.
(3) Other papers. These are all in the study in the other playbox and the big chest from the cistern attic. 1. Family letters. Of Grandfather and Grandmother Lewis and Granduncle Thomas Lewis (neither of whom could spell), I have kept all. Of Mammy’s and P’s letters I have kept all except bills, receipts, invitations and the like. Of Uncle Bill and Uncle Dick I have kept a selection (These are such utter rubbish that it was kind to keep any considering the enormous bulk of papers I dealt with). Hamilton letters there were hardly any, but I kept all I could find. All letters of yours (i.e. to and from you) I kept. I took the liberty of removing the envelopes towards the end, as space was by this time becoming a serious question.
2. Diaries. Grandfather’s (Hamilton), yours and fragments of diary by P. 3. Documents relating to Mammy’s academic career, your Mention etc., all of course kept. In the time at my disposal it was quite impossible to arrange these three classes of papers in any sort of order, so I am afraid that both chest and playbox will have to be turned out to find any given piece. What I can say for sure is that I have destroyed nothing of yours that I could find. I would have assembled them if I had found them even remotely assembled–but you know what it is like in Leeborough. It had to be simply a case of taking drawer after drawer, as you came to them, and going on doggedly, often for hours at a stretch.
(4) Pictures. (a) All photographs of yours are either in the drawers of P’s study desk, or with the papers in the chest and playbox. (This means of course that at first I began putting photos in with the letters but later found them too big an item). Family photos e.g. of Mammy, P., ourselves etc, are all in the drawers in the study desk. Various endless photos of our cousins at various ages, or of utterly unknown people, I destroyed. Malvern and Army groups and other large framed photos are all in the study. (b) the two grandfather portraits, the 3 P’daita portraits, the 2 Medicis, the pictures from the little end room, the drawings from the hall, are in the study.
(5) Forrest Reid (a novelist and friend of Arthur’s) 99 and Arthur, with the aid of the leading booksellers catalogues, picked out for me the cream of the novels by which I mean the cream, not from the reading, but from the collector’s standpoint. Here I had to make a decision of my own. I decided, I hope not wrongly, that you would as soon read your Man of Property in a contemporary edition as in a first, listed by booksellers at £17.10.0. I have therefore brought back with me a packing case full of the most valuable of these: a trunk follows containing the less valuable, but still too good to be knocked down at an auction. I shall have about twenty copies of the list typed and send it to several booksellers and take the best offers I get. I ventured to act without authority because the Galsworthys are now about as high as they are likely to go.
(6) The Dud books I have collected altogether on the floor of the landing and some bedrooms. Arthur and Reid have promised to bring a librarian to see them as lending libraries often offer more for ordinary novels in decent condition than a bookseller buying by weight.
(7) Clothes. 1. All clothes of yours except obviously antediluvian dress softs and infantile shirts have been kept, including a great deal which I am pretty sure is useless. 2. All P’s clothes that are in reasonable condition have been kept to provide knockabouts for us. 3. Mammy’s clothes were a very difficult problem. a. some things are in cardboard boxes in the study. I suppose we had better give them as presents to people like Aunt Annie. These are ones in which the material has intrinsic value. b. some small intimate things I burned. c. some things which had no intrinsic value I gave to the Witch of Endor to dispose of among poor people as she chose. All clothes of P’s and yours are in the wardrobe in his dressing room. Condemned clothing (i.e. hopelessly small, torn, or moth eaten) I have partly given to the Witch, partly brought back to give to the very frequent people who ask for clothes at our door. I hope this was a right disposal. You can’t sell such things and to destroy it all (incidentally, how would you set about it?) in a country where dozens of people have no coats, seems rather harsh.
(8) Archpigiebotian miscellanies. The heavy canvas parcel (damnably heavy) in P’s dressing room, the topees, the horrid rubble of spurs, and iron spikes in the same room, the maps, the steel box, the African spear, and everything unintelligible which looked like being yours, I have conveyed to the study.
(9) Silver and jewelry all packed and in the bank except a few things too large, like lamps, and a few things of small value overlooked, which I gathered up and put in the study: besides a modicum for our own table use in the spring if (as I still hope) we are there together again.
(10) China and glass. Minto thought very little of this was good, and what was good was often cracked and defective. A small selection at her advice I put in a special place in one of the pantries and notified the Witch–who agreed about the small value of this item as a whole. (She has served in several big houses and is also a very loyal Leeburian, so I think her opinion good.).
(11) The piano I have sold for £18.0.0 to one French, who came out to value the contents of the house for death duties. Condlin, Arthur, and Minto all advised my acceptance of this figure and indeed were surprised that we got it. (Such payments are made to the account of C. S. Lewis Exctr. of A. J. Lewis decd., at the Bank of Ireland so that there is no danger of their getting mixed up with my private account at Barclay’s Bank in Headington. I should have preferred to have cheques made out to us both, but this is much too simple for the Law who prefer that the present executor (for of course I act qua executor and not as one of the heirs) should act entirely on his own, so that the other executors can have a chance to sue him as and when they turn up).
(12) Mammy’s collection of stamps. P. frequently mentioned this to me and intended it to be sold. In fact he left in the album a note dated 1929 saying ‘Some of these may be worth money’–a note which I have of course preserved as one of the best and least P’daita-ish actions of his life. The best stamps in the album were forgeries, so that I was glad to sell it for four pounds.
(13) I have also sold (a) to Reid: The Graphics 100 and the ‘famous trials’ for £3.2.6. As the Graphics can be bought for 6d a volume, we have no reason to be dissatisfied. (b) To Arthur: the Smaller Temple Shakespeare 101 and some oddments for £4.6.6.
(14) Furniture. I have placed in the study (or left there) the desk, the sofa, the tables, the two screens, grandfather’s chair from the little end room, the soft study chair, one of the drawing room arm chairs, the little end room armchair, four upright armchairs from the drawing room. I have labeled not for sale the two hall chairs, the glazed drawing room bookcase, Mammy’s desk in drawing room (which I can find no key to unlock), the cloak room settle, the two little end room bookcases, and the grandfather clock. (Gramophone, telescope, and microscope also in the study).
Having got thus far, I begin to fear that the impression produced on you will be much as if I had written ‘I have moved all the study furniture into our bedroom and carefully placed all our bedroom stuff in the hall: I have had the water closet seats pulled out and refixed in the little end room at a very moderate cost: I have sunk a swimming bath in the croquet lawn and been fortunate to dispose of a bushel of parsley to Bob Ewart for 9½ d. The collection of bowler hats I am bringing to England to distribute among the dealers who offer the best figures…’
But what my proceedings really boil down to is this: All real treasures and relics are now in the study. All valuables are either in the Bank of Ireland or (like the first editions) in Magdalen. Therefore, if a good purchaser appears suddenly this term wanting immediate possession, I can sell the house and hold a sale of effects at Leeborough, carefully excepting from the sale the whole study and certain things outside the study which I have labeled. I have made the division and can give orders to carry it into effect at a moments notice. In making it I have no doubt committed several errors of judgement and still more of negligence–it is very hard to avoid mistakes in going through thousands of articles. I feel pretty confident that you will not blame me for having made the divide on my own. The only alternatives were to risk the loss of a very considerable sum of money or to leave the division to make itself during a two days visit from me surrounded by auctioneers and relations. The only thing I have left wholly out is the trunk of ‘characters’ in the attic. If you are home before the house is sold, we can act together: if not, it can go to storage with the things in the study.
Of course it is very likely that no one will buy before April–and you may add ‘Or after’: and it is one of the disadvantages of what I have done that in that case you will return to a Leeborough hideously changed by my conversion of the study into a store. But I can say quite honestly from my experience of the last ten days that I believe it will be a damned sight pleasanter to get it all at once like that than to watch it gradually assume that aspect. I certainly had the idea that we could still have a few days of the old type, but as soon as you get there you see that it’s quite impossible. As there are no silences in the Arctic circle, because there’s no noise, so there can be no nonp’daita days when there’s no P’daita. If we are there together in April the only thing to do is to give up from the start any idea that it is the real thing again. If we start on that basis we may get along quite well: on any other you’ll find that it gives you the blues like the devil.
As to the points in your letter. Re List of Securities. Of course in the question of dividing this I shall do nothing till you come home. Like you, I can make very little of it: indeed I cannot sometimes resist a smile at the idea that he keeps the secret of ‘his little bit of savings’ as tenaciously as ever. But there are certainly a good many steam tramways. As to what Condlin means–for the Lord’s sake don’t ask me. A very short interview with Condlin invariably reduces me to the state of wondering which of us is mad. As for gratuities: to the Witch of Endor £100 by P’s own request. To Condlin–I should like to be decent to him, but have no idea what one can do. His social and financial status are so very indeterminate that I am not sure whether he falls in the class to whom one gives money or the class to whom one gives keepsakes. I am rather afraid he falls in that class to whom one gives money, but only in enormous quantities. We must talk this over when we meet.
Window–I am greatly attracted by this idea, but have no idea what the cost would be. 102 I suggest as a preliminary that the sum realised by the sale of Mammy’s jewelry* should be set aside as the basis of a fund for this purpose. Silver. The whole question of valuables kept by me, for of course I shall keep more than you (furniture etc.) is rather a problem. Everything has been valued for probate, so that I suppose we had better add up the values of all articles kept by either of us: and the man with the heavier list (i.e. SPB) hands over the difference. The other way is to auction everything and let us appear as bidders, but I don’t fancy that. I think the best thing would be to hand over our several keeps (excluding communal keeps) for re-evaluation by some competent person–the value for probate being a little lower than real market value. We should then get a sum like this.
|
Realised by the sale. |
£x. |
|
W’s share of this |
£x/2 |
|
J’s share of this £ |
£x/2 |
|
But W. keeps |
£30 |
|
J. keeps |
£150 |
|
J. pays W. £150–30 |
£120 |
|
W. now has |
x/2 plus 120 (plus 30’s worth) |
|
i.e. x/2 plus 150s | |
|
J. now has x/2 plus 150’s worth | |
|
i.e. x/2 plus 150 |
This is no doubt a cumbersome way of representing a simple operation but you know that these things are not my long suit.
One of the pities of the present state of affairs seems to be that it is impossible for either of us to write the other a real letter. I will try to break the spell by giving you some account of my adventures since you last heard from me before the great divide. The chief adventure is the quite new light thrown on P. by a closer knowledge of his two brothers. One of his failings–his fussily directed manner ‘Have you got your keys etc.’–takes on a new air when one discovers that in his generation the brothers all habitually treated one another in exactly the same way.
On the morning of the funeral Uncle Dick arrived before breakfast and came to Uncle Bill who was sleeping in the spare room. I drifted in. After a few greetings, it was with a shock of mild surprise that I heard Limpopo suddenly cut short a remark of Uncle Dick’s with the words ‘Now Dick, you’d better go and take off your collar, huh, (gesture) and wash yourself and that sort of thing, eh, and have a bit of a shave.’ To which his brother, with perfect seriousness replied ‘Now how had we better handle the thing, eh Jacks? You’d better go to the bathroom first and I’ll go downstairs and get a cup of tea. Bill, you’d better lie down (gesture) and cover yourself up and I’ll come and tell you…’ Limpopo (cutting in) ‘Well Dick, get along downstairs, huh, and Jacks will go and tell you, wouldn’t that be best, eh?’
Later in the day we had a session of the wardrobe committee quite in the old manner: and in the afternoon I was told ‘Jacks, show Mrs Hamilton that coat you found. Isn’t it a splendid fit, huh, might have been made for him, wha’?’
Another light came to me during the visit to the undertakers: the whole scene had such an insane air of diabolical farce that I cannot help recording it. After a man with a dusty face had approached me with the assurance that he had buried my grandfather, my mother, and my uncle, a superior person led us into an inner room and inquired if we wanted ‘a suite of coffins’. Before I had recovered from this–and it sounded like the offer of some scaly booking clerk at an hotel in hell–the brute suddenly jerked out of the wall a series of enormous vertical doors, each one of which when lowered revealed on its inner side a specimen coffin. We were quite surrounded by them. Slapping one of them like a drum with his resonant hand he remarked ‘That’s a coffin I’m always very fond of’ and it was then that the ‘light’ came.
Limpopo–and even Limpopo came as a relief in such an atmosphere–put an end to this vulgarity by saying in his deepest bass ‘What’s been used before, huh? There must be some tradition about the thing. What has the custom been in the family, eh?’ And then I suddenly saw, what I’d never seen before: that to them family traditions–the square sheet, the two thirty dinner, the gigantic overcoat–were what school traditions and college traditions are, I don’t say to me, but to most of our generation. It is so simple once you know it. How could it be otherwise in those large Victorian families with their intense vitality, when they had not been to public schools and when the family was actually the solidest institution they experienced? It puts a great many things in a more sympathetic light than I ever saw them in before.
But apart from these two lights, what I carried away from those few days was the feeling (perhaps I mentioned it before) that all the other members of that family were only fragments of our own P’daitabird. Uncle Dick has the wheezes, but only the crudest of them and none of the culture. In Joey you see the wheeze side of the character gone to seed–the man whose conversation is nothing but giggles. In Limpopo, of course you see simply all the bad points without any of the good: with the additional property of being an outrageous bore, which is the one thing P. never was at any time.
His idea of conversation is almost unbelievable. On the evening of the day of his arrival, after dinner, having been supplied with whiskey, he drew up the little wooden seated study chair to the fire, and having placed his little tubby body in it and crossed his flaccid hands on his belly, proceeded to enunciate the following propositions. ‘I usually leave town about quarter to six, huh, and then I get out to Helensburgh about quarter past and walk up to me house, eh, and then I (Jacks I’ll have another drop of that whiskey) put on an old coat, huh, then I come down and have something to drink and a bit of a chat with your Aunt Minnie, huh, and then…’ Without any exaggeration, he kept me up till 1.30 with this drivel. The last night, when the Hamiltonians were there, was much better. Limpopo explained that he had given up dealing with Hogg. ‘The last suit he sent me…the trousers came up to my chin (gesture)…I was very nearly going to law with him.’ Uncle Gussie: ‘I think you should. You should have gone into court wearing that suit.’ Limpopo (with profound gravity) ‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to have done that, huh.’
While in Ireland we had two days off from work. On one the Greeves’s motored us up the coast road and up the glens of Antrim: on the other Uncle Gussie and Aunt Annie took us down to Cloghy to their cottage at the end of the Ards. The beauty of both drives you know without need of description. Which reminds me, come what may, you and I must have that walk to the Mournes: after a fortnight or so of breaking up and other horrors at Leeborough, it would be just the thing to get the taste out of our mouths. I don’t know that I have any other news. I seem to have read nothing except for work–indeed to have had no normal life or leisure–for ages. One scrap worth quoting comes to my mind from a Wynyard letter of yours which I read before putting it into the box. It began ‘Mrs Capron died today and we are all very sorry about it. Mr Capron is in a very bad temper over it.’ Ex ore infantium 103–could that be bettered? One book I did read during P’s illness was ‘All quiet on the Western front’: 104 but perhaps I mentioned that to you before.
I suppose I shall hear from you again before April–let me have exact dates of arrival as soon as you can. By the way, do they schedule troopships to arrive at a certain day–or week–or month? I feel more bored at present than I ever remember feeling.
yrs,
Jack
* If any. Jewelry is not v. easy to sell at present I hear.
P.S. If we had both volumes of the 1st Editn. of the Jungle Book 105 we could probably get £40 or £50 for it: but after hunting high and low I can find only one.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Hillsborough,
Headington,
Oxford.
[27 December 1929]
My dear Arthur,
The perfect guest again! An awful thing has happened: I find that I have not got with me my three most valuable keys. I have wired to the Ulster Monarch 106 & had an answer to say that they cannot be found. My last hope is that they are in the study. Will you please look and then let me know, but do not send them till further notice. There are three tied together with string, two ordinary looking keys and one very short & shiny one. They may be in the key hole of my father’s desk–i.e. the small one in the key hole & the other two hanging from it–or on the top of the same desk. As one of the keys is my college key which will cost me £100 if I lose it, I am rather in a stew & shall be glad to have a line as soon as possible. Just like me, you will say.
Many thanks & much love from us both. Minto is writing in a few days.
Yrs
Jack
P.S. Of course have a look elsewhere, but if they’re not in the study I expect they’re a gonner. If you get them please take them home with you (after making sure that the desk is locked) & guard them carefully till further notice. Shall write as soon as I can. 107
Hillsboro
1929]
Dec. 21st
Although if I had had my choice I should have preferred some real talk between you and me alone, still I think it worth while to say that I felt something very pleasant in our final chat with John 108 and our drinking on board the Ulster Monarch. On occasions that are rather melancholy a plunge into the cheery and homely world of ‘good fellows’ and women has something of the same wholesome effect as a romp with dogs or children; it was specially appropriate to this visit too, since the main thing that I bring away with me is a new view of John. Besides, as Barfield said when Christie interrupted us one night that he was staying in College, it is rather important that friends should occasionally share together their experience of a third person.
Dec. 22nd
I think the L.N.W.R. mainline must run through the dullest country in the British Isles–tho’ of course no country is without some charm. I read Grace Abounding in Everyman, having (you remember) read Mr Badman in the same volume on the way over. Grace Abounding is incomparably the better of the two. Some of the sentences in it reach right down. ‘But the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness’ 109–‘I thought I could have spoken of his love and his mercy even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me’ 110–‘I could not find that with all my soul I did desire deliverance.’ 111 Of course a great part of it paints the horrors of religion and sometimes almost of insanity. What do you make of the curious temptation that assailed him just after he had been converted and felt himself united to Christ; when a voice kept saying ‘Sell Him, sell Him’: sometimes for hours at a stretch, until in mere weariness Bunyan blurted out ‘Let Him go if he will’ 112–which afterwards led him into despair, believing he had committed the unpardonable sin?
I suppose this is the same mental disease of which you and I have felt a trace in the impulse to throw ones new book in the fire–some strange twist that impels you to do a thing because it is precisely the one thing of all others that you don’t want to do.
I should like to know, too, in general, what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more, the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what?
Dec. 23rd
Delighted to get back to my books again and did a good morning’s work on Chaucer, mostly textual problems. Too wet for anything but a short walk after lunch. In the evening wrote part of a long letter to Warnie. I find I am (so far) surprisingly little upset about the affair of my keys.
Dec. 24th
Into town in the morning to get my hair cut, and then, before lunch, began indexing my Bunyan. I had a lovely walk in the afternoon–a perfect winter day with mellow sunlight slanting through a half frosty mist on the grey fields, the cosy farms, and the tall leafless elms, absolutely unmoving in the air. On my way back the sun was down and it was cold. I passed two men engaged in penning sheep and walked just by the baa-ing crowd, whose breath looked like smoke.
At seven in to College to dine, which I didn’t much enjoy as I got an awful bore called Parker 113 on my left and on my right the Italian professor 114 whose English is so bad that I can’t understand him, and who is so deaf that he can’t understand me.
At 9 o’clock we went up into hall for the Christmas Eve revels, which of course I have never seen before. The hall looks very noble with its green branches, and a roaring fire and the centre cleared, and a Christmas tree. Female guests, including, of course Minto and Maureen, were in the musicians gallery. From 9 to 10 the choir gave us the first part of the Messiah: a great mistake, I thought, with only a piano at our disposal for accompaniment. Then came an interval during which those who had no guests remained in hall for supper and to watch the choir boys having their Christmas supper, which is the best sight of all: I, and others in the same plight, went down to common room to feed our ladies on sandwiches and hot negus and talk small talk. We returned to hall to find lights out and candles lit on the tree and to hear carols: all the really good ones like the Coventry Carol and In dulci jubilo and one by Byrd that I never heard before. This last comes just on the stroke of midnight after the Vice President has sent a message to the ringers to begin the peals. I had been rather bored with the proceedings earlier in the evening but at this moment the glorious windy noise of the bells overhead, the firelight & candlelight, and the beautiful music of unaccompanied boys voices, really carried me out of myself. We then have sack passed round in a loving cup and pledge one another and so break up: home by taxi at about 12.30.
Taking it all in all, with the walk and the evening, and the blessed sense of charity, so rare in me,–the feeling, natural at such a moment that even my worst enemies in college were really funny and odd rather than detestable, while my friends were ‘the many men so beautiful’ 115–this was as good a day as I could wish to have. If only it wasn’t for those damned keys!
Dec. 25th
A slack day. All up very late after our debauch of the night before. Went for several short strolls with Mr Papworth, but no real walk. My afternoon one, about five o’clock was the best: an evening of bitter wind with the trees lashing one another across a steel coloured sunset. Afterwards–as a Christmas treat!–I read a modern novel, H. G. Wells’ Meanwhile 116 which deals chiefly with the General Strike, and contains very good comic elements. You and I ought to read, think and talk of these things more than we do.
Dec. 26th
Another lazy day. Went in to College at about 10.30, by arrangement to go for a walk with McFarlane. We were on the road by about eleven. Neither of us was at first disposed for more than desultory chat. The trudge out of Oxford was tedious (as always) and I did not really begin to enjoy myself till we had climbed Cumnor Hill. Once through the beautiful grey and mossy village of Cumnor, I became extremely pleased with everything. Walking on unfrequented paths, we hardly met a soul: the sky was palest blue, without a cloud or a breeze, and the weak sun laid a lovely unity of pale colour over the ploughed fields, the haystacks and the church towers in each village. ‘Unity of colour’ is not just a phrase–I mean that everything, except the woods (which of course were brownish-black) and the crows, was almost the same colour of chilly greenish grey.
As we dropped down the far side of the hill the floods began to spread themselves out wider and wider below us. Where the Thames should have been there was a sheet of water about a mile broad, intersected with the tops of hedges and polled willows. We began to wonder whether we could reach the ferry at Bablock Hythe. I was in favour of taking off shoes & stockings, not, of course, to wade the river, but to wade the shallow flood to the real river bank where the ferry begins. McFarlane however couldn’t as one of his feet was bandaged under the sock as the result of wearing a tight shoe yesterday. However, when we got there, and called, the man at the pub brought a punt not only across the river but across the floods to where we stood. Once over, we feasted in the pub on bread & cheese, beer, and a following cup of tea–my invariable walking lunch. It left us in that delightful state which (I remember) Harwood once described–‘One is neither full nor hungry and goes on like a ship.’ As it was boxing day, no one was working in the fields, and all was so still that the wheeling starlings made quite a noticeable noise.
You know how it sometimes is when you are out for a day’s jaunt–as it has so often happened to you and me–that there comes a period when things are getting better and better every moment till suddenly one says ‘Oh!’ or ‘By God!’ and that is IT–the centre of the whole day, the thing one will remember it by. Such was the moment when the old man came over the gate in the frost-mist up by our wood: or when we saw the fire that night near the house of the sinister old man who sold lemonade: or when we were shown into the postmistress’s cottage above the glens of Antrim. To day was of course totally different from all these. It happened by luck that two things came at the same moment.
We came round a turn into the village of Stanton Harcourt and suddenly got a view of the towered manor house and the church, across a farmyard, where a very fine old horse with a white star on his forehead was looking at us across a half gate. That was the first thing. And at the very same moment–this is the second thing–the ringers in the church began practicing their peal. It sounds poor on paper, but the thing about it was the sense of absolute peace and safety: the utter homeliness, the Englishness, the Christendom of it. And then I thought of Antrim only a week or so ago, and what you said (in the rainbow and sleet scene on Divis–itelf another instance of this apex in the day’s outing) about the ‘broad-mindedness’ of the infinite–Antrim that’s desolate and keen in July, Stanton Harcourt and all the sleepy Cumnor country (isn’t the very name Cumnor good) which is snug and dreamy and like cotton wool even in winter.
Perhaps it is less strange that the Absolute should make both than that we should be able to love both. Bacon says ‘The whole world cannot fill, much less distend the mind of man.’ 117 (By the way, that is the answer to those who argue that the universe cannot be spiritual because it is so vast and inhuman and alarming. On the contrary, nothing less would do for us. At our best, we can stand it, and could not stand anything smaller or snugger. Anything less than the terrifyingly big would, at some moments, be cramping and ‘homely’ in the bad sense–as one speaks of a ‘homely’ face. You can’t have elbow room for things like men except in endless time and space and staggering multiplicity.) 118
A few miles beyond Stanton Harcourt–in the tower of that manor house, by the way, Mr Pope translated ‘his Iliads’ 119–the peace of the afternoon was broken by brutes in the distance firing guns. The only good result of this was that it started a pair of white owls to blunder across our road, stupid with the daylight, poor chaps, and very grotesque to see. We had tea at Eynsham, and sitting over the fire in the pub there we fell (at last) into serious conversation–about the rival claims of reason and instinct. We continued this on the homeward journey–a long stretch of road (we dared not try the tow-path in the floods) which would have been dull by daylight. Now that the stars were out it was good enough. The remains of the sunset was before us, and all between us and it seemed to be water. McFarlane observed that it was one of the rare occasions on which night seemed a tangible thing: and looking back I saw what he meant, for the darkness and stars did seem to come up at our backs and then stop just over our heads, while in front was twilight.
We got back to Oxford, very happy but very footsore and tired, at about 6.30, and I was home (by bus) at about 7. Finished Meanwhile after supper and took a hot bath to cure my stiffness–this being the first real exercise I have had for ages. It only needed a more perfectly receptive companion–such as you–to have made it one of the really great days: not that McFarlane is half bad, and one ought to learn to like more, and more different, people.
Dec 27th
Worked at Chaucer all morning. After lunch as I was carrying a plate into the scullery I suddenly got one of those vivid mental pictures that memory sometimes throws up for no apparent reason–a picture of the deep stony and brambly vallies on the side of Scrabo, wet and grey as they were one day when you and I came down that way. ‘Jesus, the times this knight and I have had!’ 120 (That’s from Henry IV. Read it all, but specially the scene where Falstaff meets his old acquaintance Shallow in the country–one of the best ‘Do you remember’ conversations in any book that I know.)
After lunch Maureen took Mr Papworth for a walk, which always gives me a blessed liberation to go where I choose: for much as I like Mr P., his presence is a considerable restraint. You can’t go that way because there is a dog that fights: and you can’t go that way because there are sheep and you have to keep him on the lead. In fact it is rather like Dick Swiveller’s walks in London. 121 I bussed into College, took out the second chapter of my book 122 & left it at the house of a Professor in Marston who had promised to give me his views on it. Thence home up the hill under grey and windy skies with a little rain. I tried my practice of keeping myself free from thought–a mere sponge to sense impressions–for a certain part of the way. Later I hope to resume the higher stage of meditation proper. Went on with Chaucer before supper: afterwards wrote to Condlin, Aunt Annie, Uncle Bill, Uncle Dick and you.
Dec. 28th
Went to Barfield’s to day for my stay. Thanks awfully about the keys–your wire was a great relief. When will your big letter arrive?–
Yours
J