My life and loves Vol. 4 Page 13

  I must have spoken with intense bitterness because at the end of the lunch Lord Desborough, in saying "Good-bye" to me, said: "I am afraid, Harris, we must part; when you speak against England as you do, it is like speaking against my mother; I cannot bear it. I am sorry, but we mustn't meet again."

  I realized then that I was completely out of touch with the English, and as the gloomy days went on, I came to be more and more isolated.

  I don't know how to express what I felt about that inexcusable war and my detestation of the men who brought it about. I think everyone who reads what I have written about Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner must admit that I have treated them more than fairly, with sympathy, indeed, and a desire, above all, to omit no good feature of character, no gift of intellect.

  But they worked together to bring about the South African war, and afterwards I always said and felt that they were viler than any criminal, two of those whom Dante meant when he said they were hated of God and of His enemies.

  After the war, Chamberlain invited me to dinner and I replied, regretting that I couldn't accept. He met me a day or two afterwards in the lobby of the House of Commons and came up to me, smiling.

  "Your letter rather surprised me," he said. "I thought we were friends and that you would tell me when you would be free, in case you had an engagement."

  I replied, "I am very sorry, Mr. Chamberlain, but I can only see you as the maker of the war in South Africa and I cannot meet you with any decent, friendly feeling. I think it a horrible thing to have done. I mustn't speak about it or I should be insulting, and I have no wish to insult you."

  "I am sorry," he replied, "but I did what I regarded as my duty."

  I said, "I know, but the word 'duty' is worse than prostituted," and I hurried away.

  Milner, too, I saw afterwards, met in fact at a certain house, but when he spoke to me I went past him as if I hadn't seen or heard him. I was told afterwards that both Chamberlain and Milner spoke of me as a "savage without manners," but there are higher laws than those of manners.

  Swinburne wrote a shameful sonnet in August, 1899, which was printed in The Times in defense of the war. He speaks of the Boers as "dogs, agape with jaws afoam," and ends with Strike, England, and strike home.

  Meanwhile, Lord Roberts had taken over the commander-in-chief-ship and the whole war had altered. I did not know Roberts at all well. Years before, he had invited Sir Charles Dilke to pay him a visit on the northwest frontier of India and see what he had done with the British forces in Afghanistan.

  Dilke asked me to go with him and at first I consented eagerly, but when I talked it over with Wolseley, he persuaded me that I was wrong: he told me that Roberts had nothing in him at all-was a little fighting Irishman under the thumb of his wife, Lady Roberts; he was sure I should only be losing my time. I could see no reason for Wolseley's condemnation, for I had always found him fair minded: I took his advice in this instance and told Dilke I couldn't go with him; and so I missed Roberts. Towards the end of the year 1899 a story was told me which led me to think that I would have to alter my opinion about him.

  When it became plain that Buller could do nothing except make a fool of himself in South Africa, and lead his troops to defeat and disaster, the Defense Committee under Lord Hartington got together to consider matters, and for some unknown reason they all agreed that Roberts ought to be sent out; but the Secretary of State for War objected. "We passed Roberts over," he said, "who was the senior, and sent out Buller. How can we go back to Roberts now? How can one confess such a blunder?"

  "Quite easily," said Lord Hartington; "tell Roberts that we made fools of ourselves and we are sorry for it and beg him to come to our help; say that England wants him."

  The moment the War Secretary broached the matter to Roberts, he exclaimed, "At last, at last!"

  The Secretary of War asked him what he meant. He replied, "You know they sent me out in '80, but when I got to Cape Town I found that Gladstone had just made peace after the bitter defeat of Majuba. The news sent me down to my cabin crying with rage-to make peace after such a defeat!

  But when I thought it over I felt certain that if I lived long enough my time would come, so I resolved to give up drinking and smoking and live as long as I could for the chance of redeeming our name; that's why I said, 'At last.'"

  "I wanted to apologize," said the Secretary, "for passing you over and sending Buller out."

  "No apology needed," said Roberts, "I have my chance at last. I will do the work; you can tell them so."

  One day I read in the paper that Roberts when to church on Sunday at Cape Town, and I must confess this gave me a shock, till a friend told me the story that I have just told here. At any rate, Roberts went forward through Cape Colony and through the Free State to the Transvaal and led his troops against the chief force of the Boers under General Cronje and won a complete victory-almost without loss. One word in the account made the victory clear to me: the correspondent said that Roberts, holding the Boers in front, made a flank attack.

  When he returned to England a couple of years later, I got to know him, and asked him, had I been right in my thought about his tactics.

  He said, "Quite right. The Boers had come from all parts of a country three times as big as England: the Boers from the north of the Transvaal couldn't possibly know anything about the Boers from the south, so when they were on the battlefield I knew that there could be no cohesion among them; and at the same time, I realized perfectly that they were far better shots than the troops of my army, so I protected my front with a cross fire of artillery while attacking their flanks, and at once saw I was justified; the Boers began to retreat; successive flank attacks broke up the whole organization, and my artillery turned the retreat into a rout."

  The bringing of two or three hundred thousand English soldiers up through Cape Colony and the Free State held Cape Colony to quietude, and the brains of Lord Roberts did the rest. The defeat and retreat of Cronje was the turning point of the war.

  People still talk of Kitchener as if he had been the equal of Roberts, and I have heard the victory in South Africa attributed to his generalship, so I must tell what I think of Kitchener. I had met him first when I was in Cairo fifteenodd years before. I had gone out partly to cure bronchitis and partly to get an understanding of Egypt. I met Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, in Cairo; and he introduced me to his assistant, who was a far abler man, Gerald Portal, afterwards Sir Gerald Portal, who died all too soon for England.

  Gerald Portal came and lunched and dined with me at Shepheard's Hotel, and took me to the English Club; and at the English Club one day he asked me whether I knew Kitchener; I shook my head. "The Chief," he said, "Sir Evelyn Baring, thinks a great deal of him, but I couldn't form such a high opinion about him: he was so silent."

  "I remember," I said, "my father telling me that the only way for a man of no family and no wealth to get on in the English army or navy was either by servility or silence. He added that I was incapable of both. Perhaps Kitchener's trying silence!"

  "I will go to Suakim," I added, "if you will give me a letter to him. I will see Kitchener and let you know what I think of him."

  I had already engaged in Cairo a Levantine Jew intepreter; he spoke English nearly as well as I did, and boasted that he spoke perfect Arabic; it seemed to me he knew nearly every known tongue, for his modern Greek was better than mine, and his Italian perfect.

  In due time I went to Suakim and called on Kitchener and was invited by him to dinner. There were a couple of sheiks at the table, and from time to time Kitchener spoke to them in Arabic. His French was not good, though I had understood that he had passed some years as a young man in France. This surprised me so much that I asked him whether he knew Arabic.

  "I am pretty useful at it," he said.

  When I got home I told my secretary what Kitchener had said. He burst out:

  "I know Kitchener; I met him in Cyprus, worked for him: he knows no Arabic, not he! He know
s nothing: he's a mere ignorant bluff. I tell you what to do. I'll teach you two or three Arabic proverbs; you shoot them off at dinner: the sheiks will understand, but Kitchener won't."

  He insisted so vehemently and so contemptuously about Kitchener's ignorance that I resolved to put it to the test, for his manner at the dinner had not impressed me; he had gotten his reputation through silence and not through wisdom, in my opinion. So I spent an hour learning two or three Arabic sentences till my secretary told me that I pronounced them perfectly.

  The next night, dining again with Kitchener, I took the opportunity and shot off the wittiest of them. The sheiks burst out laughing and answered me in Arabic, and I grinned as if I understood what was said. Kitchener turned to me and said, "You know Arabic?"

  "Oh, I am not useful at it," I replied. But I noticed that after that he used no more Arabic.

  I came away from Suakim with the one word for Portal which I gave him the first day at lunch. "No one," I said, "ever was so great a soldier as Kitchener looks."

  Some months later I found that Portal shared my contemptuous opinion of Kitchener's ability. And the South African war only confirmed my opinion.

  As soon as Roberts left South Africa, the war under Kitchener dragged on. He founded a system of blockhouses, hoping to surround the Boers. I said his blockhouses were made for blockheads and predicted that he would achieve nothing with them; and he did achieve nothing, except waste of a huge sum.

  When I got to know Lord Roberts after the war and came to a high appreciation of his soldier's insight, I wanted to get his opinion of Kitchener, and he gave it to me without circumlocution.

  "You know," he said, "after beating Cronje by flank attacks, I sent Kitchener after him to round the Boers up and bring them to surrender. He had seen how I conducted the fight: I didn't dream of telling him anything about it; he must have understood, I supposed. The next news I got was that he pursued Cronje and his beaten force of four or five thousand men and attacked them at Paardeberg. He attacked them in front and lost twelve hundred men in an hour and had to draw off beaten. I almost cried when I heard it. When I came up I found the Boers by the river and immediately began a cross fire of artillery. The cross fire was deadly; the Boers took shelter in the river bed and there I left them, keeping always a cross fire of artillery ready at all the points they could get out. When they attempted to come out, they were met by heavy artillery fire. Five days afterwards, they all surrendered with a loss to us of under twenty men. I don't want to say anything against Kitchener: he can't even see what is before his eyes; he can't even learn: he is a fool."

  I said, "Did you tell them that at the Council of Defense?"

  "No, no," said the little man laughing. "It wasn't my business to tell them. I knew that when I got Cronje's force I had broken the back of the Boers in South Africa, and even Kitchener couldn't utterly spoil the work done."

  But the South African war dragged on under Kitchener till the Boers were brought to submission with a promise of three or four millions to rebuild their houses, and shortly afterwards Campbell-Bannerman was wise enough to give them their liberty again and leave them in power in the Transvaal.

  Today, from one end to the other, thanks to this piece of belated wisdom, the Transvaal is as English as it was before the ineffably stupid Boer war.

  CHAPTER VIII

  San Remo

  I must now tell the greatest amatory experience of my life. I had made a great deal of money with Hooley, and was besides tormented with the wish to complete at any cost my book on Shakespeare. I had done some chapters in the Saturday Review, and Shaw, among others, had praised them highly. It was and is my belief that Shakespeare has been mis-seen and misunderstood by all the commentators. Ordinary men are always accustomed to make their gods in their own image, and so the English had formed a Shakespeare who loved his wife and yet was a pederast; who had made money at his business and retired to enjoy his leisure as a country gentleman in village Stratford after living through the bitter despair of Timon, and the madness of Lear: "O, let me not be mad, Sweet Heaven… I would not be mad!"

  The only particle of truth in the fancy portrait has been contributed by Tyler, who, inspired by Wordsworth's saying that in the sonnets Shakespeare "unlocked his heart," proved that the sonnets showed that Shakespeare, about 1596, had fallen in love with a maid-of-honor named Mary Fitton and had been in love with her, as he said himself about 1600, for three years. I came to Tyler's aid by proving that this episode had been dragged into three different plays of the same period, and I went on to show that this love episode had practically been the great love of Shakespeare's life, and had lasted from 1596 to 1608. I proved also that though he disliked his wife, he was perfectly normal; that his fortune rested on the gift of Lord Southampton to him of a thousand pounds when he came of age in 1596; and that so far from having increased his wealth and been a prudent husbandman, he had never cared for "rascal counters," and died leaving barely one year's income, probably after the drinking-bout of tradition, in which he had drunk perhaps a little too much, for, to use his own words, he had "poor, unhappy brains for drinking": a too highly powered ship for the frail hull! Does he not talk in The Tempest of walking to "still his beating mind"?

  All this and more I wanted to set forth, but was it possible to bring such a totally new conception of Shakespeare into life, and so to prove it that it would be accepted? I hated the English climate in the winter, and so I set off in an October fog for the Riviera; and I don't know why, but I went through Nice to San Remo. At San Remo, the hotel life quickly tired me, and I went about looking for a villa. I discovered a beautiful villa with views over both the mountains and the sea and a great garden; but alas, it was for sale and not for hire, the gardener told me.

  This gardener deserves a word or two of description. He was a rather small man, perhaps forty-five or fifty years of age, a slight, strong figure, with an extraordinarily handsome head, set off by quite white moustaches- the suggestion of age being completely contradicted by the clearness of the skin and the brightness of his eyes. Ten thousand pounds was wanted for the villa, but the gardener told me that if I bought it, I could always sell it for as much as I paid for it, or more. I took this assertion with a grain of salt, but the end of it was that the gardener amused me so much that I bought the villa and went to live in it.

  I ordered my days at once for work and for the first week or two did work ten or twelve hours a day, but one memorable afternoon I came upon the gardener, whom I had taken into my service, reading Dante, if you please, in the garden. I had a talk with him and found that he knew not only Dante, but Ariosto, and Leopardi, and Carducci, and was a real student of Italian literature. I passed a great afternoon with him, and resolved whenever I was tired in the future to come out and talk with him.

  Two or three days afterwards I was overworked again, and I went out to him and he said: "You know, when I saw you at first, I thought we should have a great time together here; that you would love life and love; and here you are writing, writing, writing, morning, noon and night-wearing yourself out without any care for beauty or for pleasure."

  "I like both," I said, "but I came here to work; still, I shouldn't mind having some distractions if they were possible; but what is possible here?"

  "Everything," he replied. "I have been putting myself in your place: if I were rich, wouldn't I enjoy myself in this villa!"

  "What would you do?" I asked.

  "Well," he said, "I would give prizes for the prettiest girls, say one hundred francs for the first; fifty francs for the second; and twenty-five as consolation prizes if five or six girls came."

  "What good would that do?" I asked. "You wouldn't get young girls that way, and you certainly wouldn't get their love."

  "Wouldn't I!" he cried. "First of all, in order to see who was the prettiest, they would have to strip, wouldn't they? And the girl who is once naked before you is not apt to refuse you anything."

  I had come to a sort of i
mpasse in my work; I saw that the whole assumption that Shakespeare had been a boy lover, drawn from the sonnets, was probably false, but since Hallam it was held by every one in England, and every one, too, in Germany, so prone are men always to believe the worst, especially of their betters-the great leaders of humanity.

  Heinemann, the publisher, had asked me for my book on Shakespeare before I left England, but as soon as I wrote him that I was going to disprove Shakespeare's abnormal tastes, he told me that he had found every authority in England was against me and therefore he dared not publish my book. Just when I was making up my mind to set forth my conviction, came this proposal of my gardener. I had worked very hard for years on the Saturday Review and in South Africa, and I thought I deserved a little recreation; so I said to the gardener, "Go to it. I don't want any scandal, but if you can get the girls through the prizes, I will put up the money cheerfully and will invite you to play master of ceremonies."

  "This is Tuesday," he said. "I think next Sunday would be about the best day."

  "As you please," I replied.

  One Sunday, having given a conge to my cook and waiting-maid, I walked about to await my new guests, the cook having laid out a good dejeuner with champagne on the table in the dining-room. About eleven o'clock a couple of girls fluttered in, and my gardener conducted them into two bedrooms and told them to make themselves pretty and we would all lunch at half-past twelve. In half an hour five girls were assembled. He put them all into different rooms and went from room to room, telling them that they must undress and get ready for inspection. There was much giggling and some exclamations, but apparently no revolt. In ten minutes he came to me and asked me, was I ready for inspection?

  "Certainly," I said; and we went to the first room. A girl's head looked out from under the clothes: she had got into bed. But my gardener knew better than to humor her: he went over and threw down the bed clothes, and there she was completely nude. "Stand up, stand up," he said, "you are worth looking at!"