Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge Part 7

Arthur told me a delightful story about her. Her father was a testy old country gentleman, very irritable and obstinate.

It happened that an Eton boy was staying in the house, of the blundering lumpish type; he had had more than his share of luck in breaking windows and articles of furniture. One morning Mr. B--, finding his study window broken, declared in a paroxysm of rage that the next thing he broke the boy should go.

That same afternoon, it happened he was playing at small cricket with Maud, and made a sharp cut into the great greenhouse. There was a crash of gla.s.s, followed by Maud's ringing laugh.

They stopped their game, and went to discuss the position of events.

As they stood there, Mr. B--'s garden door, just round the corner, was heard to open and slam, and craunch, craunch, came his stately pace upon the gravel.

They stared with a humorous horror at one another. In an instant, Maud caught up a lawn-tennis racquet that was near, and smashed the next pane to atoms. Mr. B-- quickened his pace, hearing the crash, and came round the corner with his most judicial and infuriated air, rather hoping to pack the culprit out of the place, only to be met by his favourite daughter. "Papa, I'm so sorry, I've broken the greenhouse with my racquet. May I send for Smith? I'll pay him out of my own money."

The Eton boy adored her from that day forth; and so did other people for similar reasons.

I, personally, always rather wondered that Arthur was ever attracted by Miss B--, for he was very fastidious, and the least suggestion of aiming at effect or vulgarity, or hankering after notoriety, would infallibly have disgusted him. But this was the reason.

She was never vulgar, never self-conscious. She acted on each occasion on impulse, never calculating effects, never with reference to other people's opinions.

A gentleman once said, remonstrating with her for driving alone with a Cambridge undergraduate in his dog-cart down to Richmond after a ball, "People are beginning to talk about you."

"What fools they must be!" said Miss B--, and showed not the slightest inclination to hear more of the matter.

There is no question, I think, that Arthur's grave and humorous ways attracted her. He, when at his best, was a racy and paradoxical talker-with that natural tinge of veiled melancholy or cynicism half-suspected which is so fascinating, as seeming to imply a "_past_," a history. He ventured to speak to her more than once about her tendency to "drift." He told me of one conversation in particular.

"I think you have too many friends," he said to her once, at the conclusion of an evening party at her own house. They were sitting in a balcony looking out on to the square, where the trees were stirring in the light morning wind.

"That's curious," she said. "I never feel as if I had enough; I have room enough in my heart for the whole world." And she spread out her hands to the great city with all her lights glaring before them.

"G.o.d knows I love you all, though I don't know you," she said with a sudden impulse.

They were silent for a moment.

Then she resumed: "Tell me why you said that," she said. "I like to be told the truth."

"_You_ may feel large enough," he said, "but they don't appreciate your capacity; they feel hurt and slighted. Why, only to-night, during the ten minutes I was talking to you, you spoke and dismissed eight people, every one of whom was jealous of me, and thinking 'Who's the new man?' And I began to wonder how I should feel if I came here and found a new man installed by you, and got a handshake and a smile."

"Shall I tell you?" she said, looking at him. "I should give you a look which would mean, 'I would give anything to have a quiet talk to you, Mr. Hamilton, but the exigencies of society oblige me to be civil to this person.'"

"Yes," he said, "and that's just what I complain of; it gives me, the new man to-night, a feeling of insecurity-that perhaps you are just 'carrying on' with me because it is your whim, and that the instant I bore you, you will throw me away like a broken toy, and with even less regret."

"How dare you speak like that to me?" she said, turning upon him almost fiercely. "I never forget people." And she rose and went quickly into the room, and didn't speak to him for the rest of the evening.

But just as he was going out he pa.s.sed her, and hardly looked at her, thinking he had offended her; but she came and put out her hand quickly, and said, almost pathetically-

"You must forgive me for my behaviour to-night, Mr. Hamilton. What you said was not true, but you meant it to be true; you believed it.

And please don't stop talking to me openly. I value it very much.

I have so few people to tell me the truth."

I find this conversation narrated in his diary, almost word for word as I have given it. But there is omitted from it, necessarily perhaps, the most pregnant comment of all.

"And yet," he said to me once, as he turned to leave the room after commenting upon their freedom of speech with one another, "I am not in love with her, though I can't think why I am not."

The sequel must be soon told. Miss B-- suddenly accepted a gentleman who was in every way a suitable _parti_: heir to a peerage, of fairly high character.

But to return to Arthur. I can not do better than quote a few sentences of a letter he wrote to me on the event. It conceals-as he was wont to do-strong feeling under the bantering tone.

"As you are in possession of most of my moral and mental diagnoses, I had better communicate to you a new and disturbing element. You remember what I said to you about Miss B--, that I did not care for her. A fancied immunity is often a premonitory symptom of disease: the system is excited into an instantaneous glow by the first contact of the poisonous seed.

"I don't know, at present, quite how things are with me. I labour under a great oppression of spirit. I have a strange thirsty longing to see her face and hear her speech. If I could only hear from herself that she had done what her best self-of which we have often spoken-ratifies, I should feel more content. But she trusts her impulses too much; and the habit of loving all she loves with pa.s.sion, blinds her a little. A woman who loves her sister, her pets, the very sunshine and air with pa.s.sion, hardly knows what a lover is. I can not help feeling that I might have shown her a little better than J--. Still one must accept facts and interpret them, especially in cases where one has not even been allowed to try and fail; for I never spoke to her a word of love. Ah, well! perhaps I shall be stronger soon."

CHAPTER VIII

Arthur Hamilton as an author

I must give a chapter to this subject, because it entered very largely into Arthur's life, although he was singularly unsuccessful as an author, considering the high level of his mental powers.

He lacked somehow, not exactly the gift of expression-his letters testify to that-but the gift of proportion and combination.

His essays are disjointed-discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, pa.s.sages of real and rare beauty jostling with long pa.s.sages of the most common-place rhetoric. His plat.i.tudes, however, to myself who knew him, have a genuine ring about them; he never admitted a truism into his writing till it had become his own by vivid realization. As he himself says:

"I always find a peculiar interest in the solemn enunciation of a plat.i.tude by a dull person who does not naturally aim at effect.

You feel sure it is the condensation of life and experience. Such an utterance often brings a plat.i.tude home to me as no amount of rhetorical writing can."

Still, the reading public will not stand this, and Arthur never found a market.

He wrote voluminously.

I have in my bureau several pigeon-holes crammed with ma.n.u.scripts in his curious sprawling hand. He wrote, when he was in the mood, very quickly, with hardly an erasure. Among them is:

1. A collection of poems (128 in all).

2. A complete novel, called "The Unenc.u.mbered Man."

3. Three incomplete novels, called "Physiognomy," "Helena,"

"From Hall to Hall."

4. Essays on historical and literary subjects, such as "Coleridge,"

"Bunyan," "The Earl of Surrey," "Lucian," etc. These, as far as I can make out, are very poor.

5. A collection of semi-mystical writings and short stories. There is a great fertility of imagination about these, and they are composed in a very finished style. It is not improbable that I shall re-edit these, as they seem to me to be distinctly first-rate work. I give a short specimen of his mystical writing-a style of which he was very fond. It is called:

"The Great a.s.size.

"Now, it came to pa.s.s that on a certain day the G.o.ds were weary. Odin sat upon his throne, and rested his chin upon his hand. And Thor came in, and threw his hammer upon the earth, and said, 'I am weary of walking up and down in the earth, of smiting and slaying; and I know not how to bind or heal up, and I am too old to learn.' And Freya said, 'I am weary of Valhalla and the birds and trees, the perpetual sunshine and the feasts and laughter.' So also said all the G.o.ds.

"And Odin, when the clamour was stilled, rose from his throne, and spoke. He told them of an ancient law of the G.o.ds, so ancient that it seemed dim even to himself, that when the G.o.ds should be heavy and be sad at heart, they should appoint a judgment for men, should open the everlasting records, and call the world to the a.s.size; and Loki should be the accuser, and Night and Day the witnesses, and Odin should deliver sentence, with the G.o.ds for a.s.sessors.

"So Thor stepped out upon the bar of heaven, and blew the steel trumpet that is chained to the door-post of the hall.