The Puppet Show of Memory. Baring Maurice

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      Elizabeth and Susan learnt the piano, and Margaret was taught the violin by Herr Ludwig, a severe German master. John, my eldest brother, was an accomplished pianist and organist; Everard, my third brother, played the piccolo. Cecil sang, and my mother was always bewailing that he had not learnt music at Eton, because his house-master said it would be more useful for him to learn how to shoe a horse. This, alas! did not prove to be the case, as he has seldom since had the opportunity of making use of his skill as a blacksmith. The brothers were all at Eton when I first went into the schoolroom, but they often used to visit us in the evening at tea-time, and sometimes they used to listen when Chérie read aloud after tea.

      Echoes of the popular songs of the day reached both the nursery and the schoolroom, and the first I can remember the tunes of are: “Pop goes the Weasel,” which used to be sung to me in the nursery; “Tommy, make room for your Uncle”; “My Grandfather’s Clock”; “Little Buttercup” from Pinafore, which used to be played on a musical box; “Oh where and oh where is my little wee Dog?” with its haunting refrain.

      Later we used to sing in chorus and dancing a pas de trois, a song from a Gaiety burlesque:

      “We’ll never come back any more, boys,

      We’ll never come back any more.”

      And, later still, someone brought back to London for Christmas the unforgettable tune of “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” which in after-life I heard all over the world—on the lagoon of Venice and in the villages of Mongolia.

      One day after luncheon—on Sunday—John played the “Two Grenadiers” at the pianoforte, and I remember the experience being thrilling, if a little alarming, but a revelation, and a first introduction into the world of music.

CHAPTER II

       THE NURSERY AND THE SCHOOLROOM

       Table of Contents

      Life was divided between London from January to August, then Devonshire till after Christmas. In the nursery and the early part of the schoolroom period we used to go to Coombe in the summer. Coombe seemed to be inextricably interwoven with London and parallel to it; and I remember dinner-parties happening, and a Hungarian band playing on the lawn, unless I have dreamt that. But there came a time, I think I must have been six or seven, when Coombe was sold, and we went there no more, and life was confined to Membland and Charles Street. London in the winter, and summer in Devonshire, with sometimes brief visits to Devonshire at Easter and Whitsuntide, and brief visits to London in November, when my father and mother went up by themselves.

      It is not any false illusion or the glamour of the past that makes the whole of that period of life until school-time was reached seem like fairyland. I thought so at the time, and grown-up people who came to Coombe and Membland felt, I think, that they had come to a place of rare and radiant happiness.

      But I will begin with London first.

      This was the routine of life. We all had breakfast at nine downstairs. I remember asking how old my father was, and the answer was fifty-three. As he was born in 1828 and I was born in 1874, I must have been seven years old at the time of this question. I always thought of my father as fifty-three years old. My brothers John, Cecil, and Everard were at Eton at Warre’s House, and Hugo was five years old and still in the nursery.

      After breakfast, at about a quarter to ten, my father drove to the City, and he never came home to luncheon except on Saturdays.

      

      We went for a walk with Chérie, and after this lessons lasted from eleven, I think, till two, in the schoolroom.

      The schoolroom was a long room with three windows looking out on to the street. There was a cottage pianoforte at an angle, and in the niche of one of the windows a small table, where Chérie used to sit and read the Daily News in the morning. We each of us had a cupboard for our toys, and there were some tall bookcases, containing all the schoolroom books, Noel and Chapsal’s Grammar, and many comfortable, shabby books of fairy-tales. We each of us had a black writing-desk, with a wooden seat attached to it, in which we kept our copybooks, and at which we did our work. A long table ran right down the middle of our room, where we did our lessons, either when everyone did them together, collectively, with Chérie, who sat at the head of the table, or with Mrs. Christie, who sat at one side of the table at the farther end.

      At two o’clock we all came down to luncheon, and as my mother was at home to luncheon every day, stray people used to drop in, and that was a great excitement, as the guests used to be discussed for hours afterwards in the schoolroom.

      Lady Dorothy Nevill, who lived in the same street, used often to come to luncheon and make paper boats for me. She used also to shock me by her frank expression of Tory principle, not to say prejudice, as we were staunch Liberals, and Lady Dorothy used to say that Mr. Gladstone was a dreadful man.

      Mr. Alfred Montgomery was a luncheon visitor, and one day Bobby Spencer, who was afterwards to be Margaret’s husband, was subjected to a rather sharp schoolroom criticism owing to the height of his collars. I sometimes used to embarrass Chérie by sudden interpellations. One day, when she had refused a dish, I said: “Prends en, Chérie, toi qui es si gourmande.” Another day at luncheon a visitor called Colonel Edgcumbe bet my mother a pound there would be war with France within three years. I expect he forgot the bet, but I never did. Another time my mother asked Mademoiselle Ida what was the most difficult piece that existed for the pianoforte, and Mademoiselle Ida said Liszt’s “Spinnelied.” My mother bet her a pound she would learn it in a month’s time (and she did).

      There were two courses at luncheon, some meat and a sweet, and then cheese, and we were not allowed to have the sweet unless we had the meat first, but we could always have two helpings if we liked. After luncheon we went for another walk. At five there were more lessons, and then schoolroom tea, presided over by Chérie, and after that various games and occupations, and sometimes a visit to the drawing-room.

      There were two drawing-rooms downstairs, a front drawing-room with three windows looking out on to the street, and a back drawing-room at right angles to it. The drawing-rooms had a faded green silk on the walls. Over the chimney-piece there was a fine picture by Cuyp, which years later I saw in a private house in the Bois de Boulogne. The room was full of flowers and green Sèvres china. In the back drawing-room there was a grand pianoforte and some bookcases, and beyond that a room called the gilding-room, a kind of workshop where my mother did gilding. I only once saw a part of the operation, which consisted of making size. Later on this room became the organ room and was enlarged. The drawing-room led to a small landing and a short staircase to the front hall. On the landing wall there was an enormous picture of Venice, by Birket Foster, and from this landing, when there was a dinner-party, we used to peer through the banisters and watch the guests arriving. We were especially forbidden to slide down the banisters, as my mother used to tell us that when she was a little girl she had slid down the banisters and had a terrible fall which had cut open her throat, so that when you put a spoon in her mouth it came out again through her throat. When Hugo, the last of the family to be told this story, heard it, he said, “Did you die?” And my mother was obliged to say that she did not.

      On the ground floor was a room looking out into the street, called the library, but it only possessed two bookcases let into Louis XV. white walls, and this led into the dining-room, beyond which was my father’s dressing-room, where, when we were quite small, we would watch СКАЧАТЬ