Margot Asquith, an Autobiography Part 12

The only place I look upon as home which does not belong to me is Archerfield [Footnote: Archerfield belonged to Mrs. Hamilton Ogilvie, of Beale.]--a house near North Berwick, in which we lived for seven years. After Glen and my cottage in Berkshire, Archerfield is the place I love best in the world. I was both happier and more miserable there than I have ever been in my life.

Just as William James has written on varieties of religious experience, so I could write on the varieties of my moral and domestic experiences at that wonderful place. If ever I were to be as unhappy again as I was there, I would fly to the shelter of those Rackham woods, seek isolation on those curving coasts where the gulls shriek and dive and be ultimately healed by the beauty of the anch.o.r.ed seas which bear their islands like the Christ Child on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Unfortunately for me, my father had business which kept him in London. He was in treaty with Lord Gerard to buy his uninteresting house in an uninteresting square. The only thing that pleased me in Grosvenor Square was the iron gate. When I could not find the key of the square and wanted to sit out with my admirers, after leaving a ball early, I was in the habit of climbing over these gates in my tulle dress. This was a feat which was attended by more than one risk: if you did not give a prominent leap off the narrow s.p.a.ce from the top of the gate, you would very likely be caught up by the tulle fountain of your dress, in which case you might easily lose your life; or, if you did not keep your eye on the time, you would very likely be caught by an early house-maid, in which case you might easily lose your reputation. No one is a good judge of her own reputation, but I like to think that those iron gates were the silent witnesses of my milder manner.

My father, however, loved Grosvenor Square and, being anxious that Laura and I should come out together, bought the house in 1881.

No prodigal was ever given a warmer welcome than I was when I left the area of the Great Western Railway; but the problem of how to finish my education remained and I was determined that I would not make my debut till I was eighteen. What with reading, hunting and falling in love at Easton Grey, I was not at all happy and wanted to be alone.

I knew no girls and had no friends except my sisters and was not eager to talk to them about my affairs; I never could at any time put all of myself into discussion which degenerates into gossip. I had not formed the dangerous habit of writing good letters about myself, dramatizing the princ.i.p.al part. I shrank then, as I do now, from exposing the secrets and sensations of life. Reticence should guard the soul and only those who have compa.s.sion should be admitted to the shrine. When I peer among my dead or survey my living friends, I see hardly any one with this quality. For the moment my cousin Nan Tennant, Mrs. Arthur Sa.s.soon, Mrs. James Rothschild, Antoine Bibesco, and my son and husband are the only people I can think of who possess it.

John Morley has, in carved letters of stone upon his chimney- piece, Bacon's fine words, "The n.o.bler a soul, the more objects of compa.s.sion it hath."

When I first read them, I wondered where I could meet those souls and I have wondered ever since. To have compa.s.sion you need courage, you must fight for the objects of your pity and you must feel and express tenderness towards all men. You will not meet disinterested emotion, though you may seek it all your life, and you will seldom find enough pity for the pathos of life.

My husband is a man of disinterested emotion. One morning, when he and I were in Paris, where we had gone for a holiday, I found him sitting with his head in his hands and the newspaper on his knee.

I saw he was deeply moved and, full of apprehension, I put my arm round him and asked if he had had bad news. He pointed to a paragraph in the paper and I read how some of the Eton boys had had to break the bars of their windows to escape from fire and others had been burnt to death. We knew neither a boy nor the parent of any boy at Eton at that time, but Henry's eyes were full of tears, and he could not speak.

I had the same experience with him over the wreck of the t.i.tanic.

When we read of that challenging, luxurious ship at bay in the ice-fields and the captain sending his unanswered signals to the stars, we could not sit through dinner.

I knew no one of this kind of sympathy in my youth, and my father was too busy and my mother too detached for me to have told them anything. I wanted to be alone and I wanted to learn. After endless talks it was decided that I should go to Germany for four or five months and thus settle the problem of an unbegun but finishing education.

Looking back on this decision, I think it was a remarkable one. I had a pa.s.sion for dancing and my father wanted me to go to b.a.l.l.s; I had a genius for horses and adored hunting; I had such a wonderful hack that every one collected at the Park rails when they saw me coming into the Row; but all this did not deflect me from my purpose and I went to Dresden alone with a stupid maid at a time when--if not in England, certainly in Germany--I might have pa.s.sed as a moderate beauty.

CHAPTER V

A DRESDEN LODGING HOUSE--MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE WITH AN OFFICER AFTER THE OPERA----AN ELDERLY AMERICAN ADMIRER--YELLOW ROSES, GRAF VON-- VON--AND MOTIFS FROM WAGNER

Frau von Mach kept a ginger-coloured lodging-house high up in Luttichau-stra.s.se. She was a woman of culture and refinement; her mother had been English and her husband, having gone mad in the Franco-Prussian war, had left her penniless with three children.

She had to work for her living and she cooked and scrubbed without a thought for herself from dawn till dark.

There were thirteen pianos on our floor and two or three permanent lodgers. The rest of the people came and went--men, women and boys of every nationality, professionals and amateurs--but I was too busy to care or notice who went or who came.

Although my mother was bold and right to let me go as a bachelor to Dresden, I could not have done it myself. Later on, like every one else, I sent my stepdaughter and daughter to be educated in Germany for a short time, but they were chaperoned by a woman of worth and character, who never left them: my German nursery- governess, who came to me when Elizabeth was four.

In parenthesis, I may mention that, in the early terrible days of the war, our thoughtful Press, wishing to make money out of public hysteria, had the bright idea of turning this simple, devoted woman into a spy. There was not a pressman who did not laugh in his sleeve at this and openly make a stunt of it, but it had its political uses; and, after the Russians had been seen with snow on their boots by everyone in England, the gentlemen of the Press calculated that almost anything would be believed if it could be repeated often enough. And they were right: the spiteful and the silly disseminated lies about our governess from door to door with the kind of venom that belongs in equal proportions to the credulous, the cowards and the cranks. The greenhorns believed it and the funkers, who saw a plentiful crop of spies in every bush, found no difficulty in mobilising their terrors from my governess --already languishing in the Tower of London--to myself, who suddenly became a tennis-champion and an habituee of the German officers' camps!

The Dresden of my day was different from the Dresden of twenty years after. I never saw an English person the whole time I was there. After settling into my new rooms, I wrote out for myself a severe Stundenplan, which I pinned over my head next to my alarm- clock. At 6 every morning I woke up and dashed into the kitchen to have coffee with the solitary slavey; after that I practised the fiddle or piano till 8.30, when we had the pension breakfast; and the rest of the day was taken up by literature, drawing and other lessons. I went to concerts or the opera by myself every night.

One day Frau von Mach came to me greatly disdressed by a letter she had received from my mother begging her to take in no men lodgers while I was in the pension, as some of her friends in England had told her that I might elope with a foreigner. To this hour I do not know whether my mother was serious; but I wrote and told her that Frau von Mach's life depended on her lodgers, that there was only one permanent lodger--an old American called Loring, who never spoke to me--and that I had no time to elope.

Many and futile were the efforts to make me return home; but, though I wrote to England regularly, I never alluded to any of them, as they appeared childish to me.

I made great friends with Frau von Mach and in loose moments sat on her kitchen-table smoking cigarettes and eating black cherries; we discussed Shakespeare, Wagner, Brahms, Middlemarch, Bach and Hegel, and the time flew.

One night I arrived early at the Opera House and was looking about while the fiddles were tuning up. I wore my pearls and a scarlet crepe-de-chine dress and a black cloth cape with a hood on it, which I put on over my head when I walked home in the rain. I was having a frank stare at the audience, when I observed just opposite me an officer in a white uniform. As the Saxon soldiers wore pale blue, I wondered what army he could belong to.

He was a fine-looking young man, with tailor-made shoulders, a small waist and silver and black on his sword-belt. When he turned to the stage, I looked at him through my opera-gla.s.ses. On closer inspection, he was even handsomer than I had thought. A lady joined him in the box and he took off her cloak, while she stood up gazing down at the stalls, pulling up her long black gloves.

She wore a row of huge pearls, which fell below her waist, and a black jet decollete dress. Few people wore low dresses at the opera and I saw half the audience fixing her with their gla.s.ses.

She was evidently famous. Her hair was fox-red and pinned back on each side of her temples with Spanish combs of gold and pearls; she surveyed the stalls with cavernous eyes set in a snow-white face; and in her hand she held a bouquet of lilac orchids. She was the best-looking woman I saw all the time I was in Germany and I could not take my eyes off her. The white officer began to look about the opera-house when my red dress caught his eye. He put up his gla.s.ses, and I instantly put mine down. Although the lights were lowered for the overture, I saw him looking at me for some time.

I had been in the habit of walking about in the entr'actes and, when the curtain dropped at the end of the first act, I left the box. It did not take me long to identify the white officer. He was not accompanied by his lady, but stood leaning against the wall smoking a cigar and talking to a man; as I pa.s.sed him I had to stop for a moment for fear of treading on his outstretched toes.

He pulled himself erect to get out of my way; I looked up and our eyes met; I don't think I blush easily, but something in his gaze may have made me blush. I lowered my eyelids and walked on.

The Meistersinger was my favourite opera and so it appeared to be of the Dresdeners; Wagner, having quarrelled with the authorities, refused to allow the Ring to be played in the Dresden Opera House; and every one was tired of the swans and doves of Lohengrin and Tannhauser.

There was a great crowd that night and, as it was raining when we came out, I hung about, hoping to get a cab; I saw my white officer with his lady, but he did not see me; I heard him before he got into the brougham give elaborate orders to the coachman to put him down at some club.

After waiting for some time, as no cab turned up, I pulled the hood of my cloak over my head and started to walk home; when the crowd scattered I found myself alone and I turned into a little street which led into Luttichau-stra.s.se. Suddenly I became aware that I was being followed; I heard the even steps and the click of spurs of some one walking behind me; I should not have noticed this had I not halted under a lamp to pull on my hood, which the wind had blown off. When I stopped, the steps also stopped. I walked on, wondering if it had been my imagination, and again I heard the click of spurs coming nearer. The street being deserted, I was unable to endure it any longer; I turned round and there was the officer. His black cloak hanging loosely over his shoulders showed me the white uniform and silver belt. He saluted me and asked me in a curious Belgian French if he might accompany me home. I said:

"Oh, certainly! But I am not at all nervous in the dark."

OFFICER (stopping under the lamp to light a cigarette): "You like Wagner? Do you know him well? I confess I find him long and loud."

MARGOT: "He is a little long, but so wonderful!"

OFFICER: "Don't you feel tired? (With emphasis) _I_ DO!"

MARGOT: "No, I'm not at all tired."

OFFICER: "You would not like to go and have supper with me in a private room in a hotel, would you?"

MARGOT: "You are very kind, but I don't like supper; besides, it is late. (Leaving his side to look at the number on the door) I am afraid we must part here."

OFFICER (drawing a long breath): "But you said I might take you home!!"

MARGOT (with a slow smile): "I know I did, but this is my home."

He looked disappointed and surprised, but taking my hand he kissed it, then stepping back saluted and said:

"Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle."

My second adventure occurred on my way back to England. After a little correspondence, my mother allowed me to take Frau von Mach with me to Berlin to hear the Ring der Nibelungen. She and I were much excited at this little outing, in honour of which I had ordered her a new black satin dress. German taste is like German figures, thick and clumsy, and my dear old friend looked like a hold-all in my gift.

When we arrived in Berlin I found my room in the hotel full of every kind of flower; and on one of the bouquets was placed the card of our permanent lodger, Mr. Loring. I called out to Frau von Mach, who was unpacking:

"Do come here, dearest, and look at my wonderful roses! You will never guess who they come from!"

FRAU VON MACH (looking rather guilty): "I think I can guess."

MARGOT: "I see you know! But who would have dreamt that an old maid like Loring would have thought of such gallantry?"

FRAU VON MACH: "But surely, dear child, you knew that he admired you?"