Transcriber’s Note: The chapter numbering in this book is as printed: there is no Chapter VIII and no Chapter XII.

TEX

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

TEX

A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE
OF

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

BY
STEPHEN McKENNA

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1922

Printed in U.S.A.

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
Binghamton and New York

To
ALFRED SUTRO

I dedicate to you this slight tribute to the memory of our friend. You were the luckier, in knowing him the longer. I shall be more than content if you find, in reading this book, as I found in reading his letters again, that he has returned to us even for a moment and that a whim of his language or an echo of his laughter has recreated the triple alliance which he founded.

I trust also you may be long without finding out the devil that there is in a bereavement. After love it is the one great surprise that life preserves for us. Now I don’t think I can be astonished any more.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Letters.

TEX

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

I

“A great translator,” one friend wrote of Teixeira, “is far more rare than a great author.”

Judged by the quality and volume of his work, by the range of foreign languages from which he translated and by the perfection of the English in which he rendered them, Teixeira was incontestably the greatest translator of his time. Throughout Great Britain and the United States his name has long been held in honour by all who have watched, cheering, as the literature of France and Belgium, of Germany and the Netherlands, of Denmark and Norway strode along the broad viaduct which his labours had, in great part, established.

Of the man, apart from his name, little has been made public. His love of laughing at himself might prompt him to say: “When you write my Life and Letters ...”; but his modesty and his humour would have been perturbed in equal measure by the vision of a solemn biography and a low-voiced press. “I was a little bit underpraised before,” he once confessed; “I’m being a little bit overpraised now.” Since the best of himself went impartially into all that he wrote, his conscience could never be haunted by the recollection of shoddy workmanship, even in the days before he had a reputation to jeopardize; nor, when he had won recognition, could his head be turned by the announcement that he had created a masterpiece. If he enjoyed the consciousness of having filled the English treasury with the literary spoils of six countries, he dissembled his enjoyment. In so far as he wished to be remembered at all, it was not as a man of letters, but as a friend, a connoisseur of life, a man of sympathy unaging and zest unstaled, a lover of simple jests, a laughing philosopher. Of their charity, he wished those who loved him to have masses said for the repose of his soul; he would have been tortured by the thought that, in life or death, he had brought unhappiness to any one or that, dead or living, he had prompted any one to discuss him with pomposity. “Are you not being a little solemn?” was a question that alternated with the advice: “Cultivate a pococurantist attitude to life.”

“If there had been no Alice in Wonderland,” said another friend, “it would have been necessary for Tex to create her.”

Those who knew the translator of Fabre and Ewald, of Maeterlinck and Couperus only by his awe-inspiring name must detect in this a hint that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos had a lighter side to his nature; the suspicion can best be established or laid by the evidence of his own letters.

The present volume is an attempt to sketch the man in outline for those readers who have recognized his talent in scholarship without guessing his genius for friendship. “The apostles are not all dead,” he wrote, in criticism of the legends that were growing up around the men of the nineties; “many of them are your living contemporaries; you could, if you like, receive at first hand their memories of their dead fellows.” ... It is the purpose of this sketch to present one ‘apostle’ as he revealed himself to one of his disciples. A biography and bibliography will be found in the appropriate works of reference. Only a single chapter has been attempted here; of those who knew him during the nineties, which he loved so well and of which he preserved the tradition so faithfully, perhaps one will write that earlier chapter and describe Teixeira in the position which he took up on their outskirts. And one better qualified than the present writer should paint this sphinx of the bridge-table, with his perversity of declaration and his brilliance of play. “You have made your contract,” admitted a friend who was partnering him for the first time; “but ... but ... but why that declaration?” “I wanted to see your expression,” answered Teixeira with the complacency of a man who did not greatly mind whether he won or lost, but abominated a dull game. Those who knew him all his life may feel, with the writer, that the last half-dozen years constitute, naturally and dramatically, a chapter by themselves. They are the period of his literary recognition and, unhappily, of his physical decline; of his emergence from seclusion; of his first public services and his last private friendships.

By 1914 Teixeira stood in the forefront of English translators; and, through his labours, translation had won a place in the forefront of English literature. Almost simultaneously with the outbreak of war, he was attacked by the heart-affection that ultimately killed him; and the record of this period is the record of an invalid. Ill-health notwithstanding, he offered his energy and ability to the country of his adoption; and, in an emergency war-department largely staffed by men of letters, the most retiring of them all became enmeshed in the machinery of government. From his marriage until the war, Teixeira had lived an almost monastic life, only relaxing his rule of solitary work in favour of the bridge-table. Once set in the midst of appreciative friends, this sham recluse found himself entertaining and being entertained, joining new clubs, indulging his old inscrutable sociability and almost overcoming his former shyness.

For three-and-a-half out of these last seven years, one of Teixeira’s colleagues worked with him almost daily at the same table in the same room of the same department. The rare separations due to leave or illness were countered by an almost daily correspondence, conducted in the spirit of an intimate and elaborate game; and, when the work of the department ended, the letters—sometimes interrupted by a diary or suspended for a meeting—kept the intimacy unbroken.

So written, they are as personal, as discursive and—to a stranger—as full of allusion as the long-sustained conversation of two friends. It is to be hoped that, in their present form, they are at least not obscure; of these, and of all, letters it must not be forgotten that the writer was not counting his words for a telegram nor selecting his subjects for later publication.

From his half of the correspondence—in a life untouched by drama—Teixeira’s personality may be left to reconstruct itself. Not every side of his character is revealed, for an interchange conducted primarily as a game afforded him few opportunities of exhibiting his serene philosophy and meditative bent. The absence of all calculation from his mind—a part of his refusal to grow up—may, for want of counter-availing ballast, be interpreted as flippancy. And, as the man was greater than the word he wrote and the word he translated, his letters have to be supplied by imagination with some of the radiance which he shed over preposterous story and trivial jest. Charm, which is so hard to analyse in the living, is yet harder to recapture from the dead; but, if the record of a single friendship can suggest loyalty, courage, generosity and tenderness, if a whimsical turn of phrase can indicate humour, patience and an infinite capacity for providing and receiving enjoyment, Teixeira’s letters will preserve, for those who did not know him, the fragrance of spirit recognized and remembered by all who did.

II

In the autumn of 1914 a censorship department was improvised in the office of the National Service League. A press-gang of two, working the clubs of London and the colleges of Oxford, established the nucleus of a staff; and the first recruits were given, as their earliest duty, the task of bringing in more recruits. As the department had been formed to examine the commercial correspondence of neutrals and enemies, the first qualification of a candidate was a knowledge of languages; and, in the preliminary search for recruits, Alfred Sutro convinced the friend who had succeeded him in translating Maeterlinck that a man who was equally at home in English, French, German, Flemish, Dutch and Danish, with a smattering of ecclesiastical Latin, was too valuable to be spared. Teixeira joined the growing brotherhood of lawyers, dons and business men in Palace Street, Westminster, advising on intercepted letters and cables, curtailing the activities of traders in contraband, assimilating the procedure of a government department and being paid stealthily each week, like a member of some criminal association, with a furtive bundle of notes.

It was his first experience of the public service, almost his only taste of responsibility; and it marked the end of the cloistered life. Though he brought to his new work a varied knowledge of affairs, Teixeira had participated but little in them since his marriage in 1900. The friends of his youth, when he was living in the Temple,—John Gray and Ernest Dowson, William Wilde (whose widow he married) and William Campbell,—such acquaintances as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, Robert Ross and Bernard Shaw, Leonard Smithers and Frank Harris, were for the most part scattered or dead; and, though he kept touch with J. T. Grein, Edgar Jepson, Alfred Sutro and a few more, he seemed at this time, after Campbell’s death, to lack opportunity and inclination for making new friends.

His gregarious years, and the varied experience which they brought, belonged to an earlier period. Coming from Amsterdam to London in 1874 at the age of nine, the son of a Dutch father and an English mother, Teixeira[1] placed himself under instruction with Monsignor Capel and was received into the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In blood, faith and nationality, the Dutch Protestant of Portuguese-Jewish extraction had thus passed through many vicissitudes before he married an Irish wife, became a British citizen and died a Catholic. Traces of the Jew survived in his appearance; of the Dutchman in his speech; and his intellectual and racial mixed ancestry was betrayed by a cosmopolitan outlook. Ignorant of many prejudices that are the native Briton’s birthright, he remained ever aloof from the passions of British thought and speech. If he respected, at least he could not share the conventional enthusiasms nor associate himself with the conventional judgements of his new countrymen. He wrote of his neighbours among whom he had lived for more than forty years, with an unaffected sense of remoteness, as “the English”; after his naturalization, he was fond of talking, tongue in cheek, about what “we English” thought and did; but, in the last analysis, he embodied too many various strains to favour any single nationality.

After being educated at the Kensington Catholic Public School and at Beaumont, Teixeira worked for some time in the City and was rescued for literature by J. T. Grein, who made him secretary of the Independent Theatre. By his work as a translator and as the London correspondent of a Dutch paper, he lived precariously until his renderings of Maeterlinck, whose official translator he became with The Double Garden, called public attention to a new quality of scholarship. Though he flirted with journalism, as editor of Dramatic Opinions and of The Candid Friend, and with publishing, in connection with Leonard Smithers, translation was the business of his life until he entered government service. He is best known for his version of Fabre’s natural history, which he lived to complete and which he himself regarded as his greatest achievement, for the later plays and essays of Maeterlinck, for the novels and stories of Ewald and for the novels of Couperus. These, however, formed only a part of his output; and his bibliography includes the names of Zola, Châteaubriand, de Tocqueville, President Kruger, Maurice Leblanc, Madame Leblanc, Streuvels and many more. One work alone ran to more than a million words; and he married on a commission to translate what he called “the longest book in any language”.

The improvised censorship was not long suffered to function unmolested. The home secretary, learning that his majesty’s mails were being opened without due authority, warned the unorthodox censors that they were incurring a heavy fine for each offence and advised them to regularize their position. Simultaneously, the Customs were thrown into difficulty and confusion,[2] by the proclamation of the king in council, forbidding all trade with the enemy: in the absence of records, investigation and an intelligence department, it was impossible to say whether goods cleared from London would ultimately reach enemy destination; and the censors who were watching the cable and wireless operations of Dutch and Scandinavian importers seemed the natural advisers to approach. At this point the embryonic department, which had risen from the ashes of the National Service League, joined with a licensing delegation from the Customs to form the War Trade Department and Trade Clearing House.

Drifting about Westminster from Palace Street to Central Buildings, from Central Buildings to Broadway House and from Broadway House to Lake Buildings, St. James’ Park, the War Trade Intelligence Department, as it came to be called, was made the advisory body to the Blockade Department of the Foreign Office, with Lord Robert Cecil as its parliamentary chief, Sir Henry Penson, of Worcester College, as its chairman, and H. W. C. Davis, of Balliol, as its deputy-chairman. Teixeira, as the head of the Intelligence Section, controlled the supply of advice on the export of “prohibited commodities” to neutral countries; as a member of the Advisory Board, he came later to share in responsibility for the department as a whole. Among his colleagues, not already named, were “Freddie” Browning, the first organizer of the department, O. R. A. Simpkin, now Public Trustee, H. B. Betterton, now a member of parliament, Michael Sadleir, the novelist, R. S. Rait, the Scottish Historiographer-Royal, John Palmer, the dramatic critic, and G. L. Bickersteth, the translator of Carducci.

When the department came to an end, Teixeira resumed his interrupted task of translation, which had, indeed, never been wholly abandoned; his daily programme during the war was to work at home from 5.0 a.m. till 8.0 a.m. and in his department from 10.0 a.m. till 6.0 p.m. or 7.0 p.m., then to play bridge for an hour at the Cleveland Club, returning home in time for a light dinner and an early bed.[3]

Leisure, when at last it came to him, was not to be long enjoyed: early in 1920, a further break in health compelled him to undertake a rest-cure, first at Crowborough and then in the Isle of Wight. He returned to Chelsea in the spring of 1921 and spent the summer and autumn working in London or staying with friends in the country, to all appearances better than he had been for some years, though in play and work alike he had now to walk circumspectly. Towards the end of the year he went to Cornwall for the winter and collapsed from angina pectoris on 5 December 1921.

In a life of nearly fifty-seven years Teixeira escaped almost everything that could be considered spectacular. Happy in the devotion of his wife and the love of his friends, unshaken in the faith which he had embraced and untroubled by the misgivings and melancholy that assail a temperament less serene, he faced the world with a manner of gentle understanding and a philosophy of almost universal toleration. His only child—a boy—died within a few hours of birth; Teixeira was troubled for years by ill-health; he was never rich and seldom even assured of a comfortable income. Nevertheless his temper or faith gave him power to extract more amusement from his sufferings than most men derive from the plentitude of health and fortune. Of a malady new even to his experience he writes: “Is death imminent? Why do I always have the rarer disorders?” He loved life to the end—the world was always “God’s dear world” to him—; to the end, he, who had known so many of the world’s waifs, continued forbearing to all but the censorious. “I was taught very early in life,” he writes, “to make every allowance for men of any genius, whereas you look for a public-school attitude towards all and sundry.... You see, if one cared to take the pains, one could make you detest pretty well everybody you know and like. For everybody has a mean, petty, shabby, cowardly side to him; and one had only to tell you of what the man in question chooses to keep concealed.” ...

“Life,” said Samuel Butler, “is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.” Those who met Teixeira only in his later years must have felt that he was born a master of his instrument; it is not to be imagined that there could ever have been a time when he was ignorant of the grace, the urbanity, the consideration and the gusto that mark off the artist in life from his fellows.

III

Though his letters contain scattered references to the principles which he followed in translation, Teixeira could never be persuaded to publish his complete and considered theory. His excuse was that he had never been able to write more than eight hundred words of original matter, a disability that once threatened him with disaster when he was invited to lecture on the science and art of bridge to the members of a club formed for mutual improvement and the pursuit of learning. After being entertained at a fortifying banquet, Teixeira delivered his eight-hundred words. As, at the end of the two and three-quarter minutes which his reading occupied, the audience seemed ready and even anxious for more, he read his address a second time. Later, he began in the middle; later still, he ran disgracefully from the hall.

The method which he followed in translation has, therefore, to be reconstructed from the internal evidence of his books and from personal experience in collaboration.

“I shall not,” wrote Matthew Arnold in criticizing Newman, “in the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad ‘affected its natural hearers.’”

The first quality that distinguishes Teixeira from most of the translators whose work and methods of work have swelled the controversial literature of translation is that he confined himself to modern authors. Unacquainted with Greek and little versed in Latin, he was never faced with the difficulty of having to imagine how an original work affected its natural hearers. Maeterlinck and Couperus were his personal friends; Fabre and Ewald, who predeceased him, were older contemporaries; it is only with de Tocqueville and Châteaubriand that he had to gauge the intellectual atmosphere of an earlier generation. In judging whether his English rendering left on the minds of English readers the same impression as the original had left on its “natural hearers”, he had a court of appeal always available; and, while the English reader is “lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work”, the foreign author can testify to the fidelity with which his text has been followed and his spirit reproduced. “What a magnificent translation The Tour is!” Couperus writes; “what a most charming little book it has become! I am in raptures over it and have read it and reread it all day and have had tears in my eyes and have laughed over it. You may think it silly of me to say all this; but it has become an exquisitely beautiful work in its English form. My warmest congratulations!”

To achieve this illusion, Teixeira began his literary life with the most essential quality of a translator: an equal knowledge of the language that was to be translated and of the language into which he was translating it. English and Dutch came to him by inheritance; French and Flemish, German and Danish he added by study; and throughout his working life he was incessantly sharpening, polishing and adding to his tools. Limitless reading refreshed a vast vocabulary; meticulous accuracy refined his meanings and justified his usages. His dictionaries were annotated freely; and the margins of his manuscripts were filled with challenges and suggestions for his friends to consider, until his own exacting fastidiousness had at last been satisfied. Apart from professional lexicographers, it would have been difficult to find a man with more words in current use; it would have been almost impossible to find one who employed them with nicer precision. Learning sat too lightly on his shoulders to make him vain of it, but no one could hear or correspond with him without realizing the presence of a purist; he seldom quoted, mistrusting his memory, confessed himself an amateur in colloquial dialogue and refused with equal obstinacy to venture on English metaphors and English field-sports. “I do not know the difference between a niblick and a foursome,” he would protest. “When you say that your withers are unwrung, I do not know whether you are boasting or complaining. What are your withers? Have you any, to begin with? Do you ‘wring’ them or ‘ring’ them? And why can’t you leave them alone?”

Not content with mastering five foreign languages, Teixeira created a new literary English for every new kind of book that he translated. His versions of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, Couperus’ Old People and The Things That Pass, Fabre’s Hunting Wasps and Ewald’s My Little Boy have nothing in common but their exquisite sympathy and scholarship; four different men might have produced them if four men could be found with the same taste, knowledge and diligence. Fabre’s ingenuous air of perpetual discovery demanded the style of a grave, grown-up child; Maeterlinck’s mystical essays invited a hint of preciosity and aloofness, to suggest that omniscience was expounding infinity through symbols older than time; and the atmospheric sixth-sense of Couperus had to be communicated by a sensitiveness of language that could create pictures and conjure up intangible clouds of discontent, guilty terror, suppressed antagonism or universal boredom. In reading the original, Teixeira seemed to steep himself in the personality of his author until he could pass, like a repertory actor, from one mood and expression to another; his own mannerisms are confined to a few easily defended peculiarities of spelling and punctuation.

For a man who must surely have divined that his calibre was unique, Teixeira was engagingly free from touchiness. In translating a book, as in organizing a department, he was magnificently grateful for the word that had eluded him and for the criticism which he had not foreseen. A purist in language and a precisian in everything, he realized that a living style is throttled by too great obedience to rules; but he was afraid, even in dialogue, of unchaining a wind of colloquialism which he might be unable to control; and, in constructing the deliberately artificial speech of his Maeterlinck translations, he recognized that he lacked his readers’ age-old familiarity with the English of the Bible. Though his passion for consistency led him to say: “My name ought to have been Procrus-Tex,” he stretched out both hands for an authority that would justify him in broadening his rule. “I have always spelt judgment without an e in the middle,” he declared in 1915, when, with the gravity that characterized his more trivial decisions, he had abandoned violet ink, because it seemed frivolous in war-time, and the long s (ſ), because it bore a Teutonic aspect. “I am too old to change now; and you know my rule, All or None.” Four years later he announced: “In future I shall spell ‘judgement’ with an e in the middle. The New English Dictionary favours it; you assure me that it is so spelt in your English prayer-book; and Germany has signed the peace terms.”

No comparison with other translators can be attempted until another arise with Teixeira’s range of languages and his volume of achievement. He himself could never say, within a dozen, how many books he had translated; but in them all he created such an illusion of originality that they are not suspected of being translations until his name is seen. In a wider view, he undermined the pretensions of those who boasted that they could never read translations; and, if no one is likely to be found with all his gifts, he at least prepared the way for a new school of translators. It may be hoped that, after the battles which he fought, important foreign authors will not again be sacrificed to illiterate hacks at five-shillings a thousand words: it may even be expected that competent scholars will no longer disdain the task of translating contemporary works. All literary predictions are rash; but there seems little risk in prophesying that Teixeira’s renderings of Fabre, Couperus and Maeterlinck will be read as long as the originals.

The tangible fruits of his astonishing industry are only a part of his achievement: it is to him, in company with Constance Garnett, William Archer, Aylmer Maude and the other undaunted pioneers, that English readers owe their escape from the self-satisfied insularity with which they had protected themselves against continental literature. When publishers have been convinced that translations need not be unprofitable and when a conservative public has discovered that they need not be unreadable, a future generation may be privileged to have prompt access to every noteworthy book in whatsoever language it has been written, without waiting as the present generation has had to wait for an English rendering of Tolstoi, Turgenieff, Dostoieffski and Tchehov.

In conversation Teixeira took little pleasure in discussing himself; in correspondence he could not help giving himself away. The reader will deduce, from his slow surrender of intimacy, the shyness that ever conflicted with his sociability; the absence of all allusions to his literary work, save when he fancied that a second opinion might help him, is evidence of a personal modesty that amounted almost to unconsciousness of his position in letters. Diffidence and sociability, first conflicting, then joining forces, led him in his departmental work to discuss every problem with a friend; and in all personal relationships, he needed an hourly confidant because everything in life was an adventure to be shared and might be worked in later to the saga with which he strove to make himself ridiculous for the diversion of his company. “Thus,” he writes of a childish freak, “do the elderly amuse themselves for the further amusement of a limited circle.” Weighty commissions were assembled, daring expeditions set out under his leadership to choose a dressing-gown for country-house wear; the grey tall-hat with which he surprised one private view of the Royal Academy was no less of a surprise to him and even more of an abiding pleasure. For a year or two afterwards he would telephone on the first of May: “If you will wear your goodish white topper to-day, I will wear mine”; and once, when these conspicuous headpieces were in evidence, he led the way to Covent Garden Market, with the words: “It is not every day that the women of the market see two men in such hats, such coats and such spats, standing before a fruit-stall with their canes crooked over their arms and their yellow gloves protruding from their pockets, consuming the first green figs of the year in the year’s first sunshine.”

In conversation he once boasted that he was never bored; and, though every man and woman at the table volunteered the names of at least six people who would bore him to extinction, the boast was justified in that, however irksome one moment might be, it could always be invested afterwards with the glamour of an eccentric adventure. Somewhere, among his immediate ascendants, there must have been a not too remote ancestor of Peter Pan. On his fifty-sixth birthday, Teixeira was having a party arranged for him, with a cake and fifty-six tiny candles; for days beforehand he had been asking for presents of any kind, to impress the other visitors in his hotel; and, if he knew one joy greater than receiving presents, it was finding an excuse to give them.

With the heart of a child in all things, he had the child’s quality of being frightened by small pains and undaunted by great; a cut finger was an occasion for panic, but the threat of blindness found him indomitable. Herein he was supported throughout life by the faith which he had acquired in boyhood and which he preserved until his death. “I save my temper,” he once wrote, “by not discussing religion except with Catholics or politics except with liberals. There’s room for discussion in the nuances; there’s too much room for it with those who call my black white.” ... While it was generally known among his friends that he was a devout Catholic, only a few were allowed to see how much reliance he placed in religion; and he would grow impatient with what he considered a morbid protestant passion for worrying at something that for him had been immutably settled.

In political debates he would only join at the prompting of extreme sympathy or extreme exasperation. His native feeling for the Boers in the Transvaal was little shared in England during the South African war; and his loathing for English misrule in Ireland was too strong to be ventilated acceptably among the people whom he met most commonly in London. His connection with the Legitimist cause came to an end with the outbreak of war: though he had hitherto delighted in penetrating between the sentries at St. James’ Palace and placarding the wall with an appeal to all loyal subjects of the rightful king, he was unable to continue his allegiance when Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria became an enemy alien.

Legitimacy and Catholicism, apart from other claims on his regard, gratified a love for ceremonial and tradition that would have been more incongruous in a liberal if Teixeira’s whole equipment of beliefs, practices and preferences had not been a collection of incongruities. Though he detested militarism, he could never understand why the English civilians omitted to uncover to the colours; hating pomposity, he enjoyed the grand manner in address and, on being greeted by a peer as “my dear sir,” replied “my dear lord” in a formula beloved by Disraeli. As a relief to an accuracy of expression which he himself called Procrustean and pernickety, he would transform any word that he thought would look or sound more engaging for a little mutilation. It was a bad day for the English of his letters when he read Heine and entered into competition for the most torturing play upon words; his case became hopeless when he was introduced to a couple of friends who could pun with him in four or five languages. It was this bent of mind that may justify the description of him[4] as the son of Edward Lear and the grandson of Charles Lamb.

Underlying the whimsical humour of his letters and peeping through the mock solemnity of his speech was a young child’s concern for the welfare of his friends: himself never growing up, he never outgrew his generous delight in any success that came to them; their ill-health and sorrow were harder to bear than his own; and he shewed a child’s impulsive generosity in offering all he had in comfort. Sympathy, help, experience and advice were at hand for whosoever would take them: he had too long lived precariously to forget the tragedy of those who failed and failed again; he knew life too well to grow impatient with those who failed through no one’s fault but their own.

Love of life, enduring to the end, knowledge of life, increasing every day, combined to join this heart of a child to the experience of an old man. As a connoisseur of food and wine, as of style and manner, he belonged to a generation that ranked life as the greatest of the fine arts. To lunch with him was to receive a liberal education in gastronomy, though his course of personal instruction sometimes broke down for lack of material: from time to time he would announce with jubilation that he had discovered some rare vintage in some unknown restaurant; a party would be organized to sample it, only to be informed that the last bottle had been consumed by Mr. Teixeira the day before.

As an explorer, he remained, to his last hour, at the age when a boy lingers rapturously before one shop after another, enjoying all impartially, sharing his enjoyment with every passer-by, confident that life is an unending vista of glittering shop-windows and that the day must somehow be long enough for him to take them all in.

IV

Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Teixeira, discovered later—to the subject’s delight—in the waiting-room of an eminent gynaecologist, emphasizes the most strongly marked natural and acquired characteristics of his appearance: a big nose and a liking for the fantastic in dress. There is hardly space, in the drawing, even for the tiny hat of the music-hall comedian, so devastating is the sweep of that nose, outward from the lips, up and round, annihilating forehead and cranium until it merges in the nape of the neck. Of the dress no more need be said than that it looks like a valiant attempt to live up to the nose.

As this caricature has not been published in any collection of Max Beerbohm’s drawings, it was probably unknown to most of those who were brought into the Intelligence Section of the War Trade Intelligence Department, there to be introduced to its head, to receive the handshake and bow of a courtier and to wonder how Tenniel could have drawn the old sheep in Alice Through the Looking-Glass without Teixeira as a model. Tall and broad-shouldered, with thick black hair and a white face, tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, and a cigarette in a holder, taciturn, impassive and unsmiling, Teixeira never failed to conceal that he was more shy than his visitor. With articulation as beautifully clear as his writing and in words not less exquisitely chosen than the language of his books, he would introduce the newcomer to those with whom he was to work. Messengers would be despatched to bring an additional chair and table. In the resultant confusion, the immense, silent figure would walk away with a heavy tread, to find that a pile of papers, two feet high, had risen like an Indian mango where there had been but six inches a moment before. A voice of authority, rolling its r’s like the rumble of distant artillery, would telephone for more messengers; in time the pile would dwindle until the spectacles and then the nose and then the cigarette-holder were visible. In time, too, the newcomer recovered from his fright and set about learning the business of the department.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear “this Olympian creature”, as Stevenson called Prince Florizel, addressed by Sutro as “Tex”; and, although the first terror was disabling, even the newcomer realized that every one in the section seemed happy. The Olympian creature never lost his temper, he condescended to jokes and invented nicknames; the appalling gravity was found to be a mask for shyness and a disguise for bubbling absurdity.

In the summer of 1915 the machinery of the blockade was still making. The department, overworked and understaffed, was inadequately housed in a corner of Central Buildings, Westminster. In the autumn it moved to Broadway House, in Tothill Street; and one newcomer was invited to sit at Teixeira’s table as deputy-head of the section. Thenceforth, until the armistice, we worked together daily, save when one or other was on leave or ill and during the early summer of 1917 when I was sent to Washington. The office, changing almost weekly in personnel, underwent reconstruction when the blockade was modified in 1918: Teixeira became secretary to the department; I succeeded him as head of the intelligence section; and, when I left in 1919, he stayed behind to help in dismantling the old machine and in assembling a new one to supply economic information to the peace conference.

Our correspondence for the last three years of the war was restricted to the times when one of us was away. These absences grew more frequent as Teixeira exchanged one illness for another. His letters present him as a government servant rejoicing in his work, tingling with the new sense of new responsibility and, “from his circumstances having been always such, that he had scarcely any share in the real business of life”, suggesting irresistibly a comparison with Dr. Johnson at the sale of his friend Thrale’s brewery, “bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an exciseman”. So much of them, however, is taken up with departmental business that I have drawn sparingly upon them.

V

The first five months of 1916 were a time of relatively good health for Teixeira; and our correspondence contains little more than an invitation, which he acknowledged in departmental language.

I wrote:

Tuesday, Jan. 4th, 1916.

Though long I’ve wished to bid you come and dine,

Your way of life stood ever in the way;

For you, I gather, go to bed at nine

And rise at five (or five-fifteen) next day.

Yet Tuesday brings my chance. At half-past eight

I go to guard my king; but, ere I go,

With meat and wine I purpose to inflate

My sagging stomach for an hour or so.

Then will you join me? Seven o’clock, I think:

The Mausoleum Club is fairly near:

Whate’er your heart desire of food and drink,

And any kind of clothes you choose to wear.

S. McK.

We should be glad, replies Teixeira, if this application could come up again in say a fortnight’s time.

A. T.
Trade Clearing House.

When next I was summoned for duty as a special constable, the application was submitted again; and Teixeira dined with me at the Reform Club. Later in the year, though he had been warned by William Campbell, the greatest friend of his middle years, that a man who laughed so much would never be admitted to membership, I was allowed to propose him as a candidate; and from the day of his election he became one of the most popular figures both in the card-room and in the south-east corner of the big smoking-room, where his most intimate associates gathered.

His hours of work, to which the first stanza refers, have already been mentioned; his methods call for a word or two of description. The library in Cheltenham Terrace looked out over the Duke of York’s School and was lined with book-cases wherever windows, fire-place or door permitted. The furniture consisted of a sofa, which was used for hat-boxes and more books; a writing-table, which was used for anything but writing; a revolving book-case, filled with works of reference; and the editorial chair from the office of The Candid Friend. Seating himself in dressing-gown and slippers, between the fire-place and the revolving book-case, Teixeira dug himself into position: a despatch-box under his feet raised his knees to an angle at which he could balance a dictionary upon them, with its edge resting on a miniature bureau; on the dictionary rested a blotting-pad; and every book that he needed was in reach either of his hand or an elongated pair of “lazy-tongs”; scissors, string, sealing-wax, india-rubber and knives were ingeniously and menacingly suspended from nails in the revolving book-case; on the top stood cigarettes, matches, a paste-pot and a vast copper ash-tub; and the colour of his violet carpet was chosen to conceal the occasional splashings of a violet-ink pen. With a telephone on one side to put him in touch with the outside world and with a bell on the other to secure his morning coffee, Teixeira could work without moving until evicted by force.

In the beginning of June, he was ordered to Malvern.

No news, he writes on the 10th, except that I have arrived and had some tea....

There are hawthorns at Malvern and rhododendrons of -dra but also the most bloodthirsty hills. And there was an officer in the train who told me that the feeling in Franst was most “optimistic”.

The proprietress of this hotel pronounces my name Teisheira. This must be looked into.

I s’pose I’m enjoying myself, he writes next day. I feel very restless.

[My cook], I forgot to tell you, was mounting guard over the dispatch-box like a very sentinel, with hands duly folded: a most proper spectacle. I nearly died, but not entirely, hunting for my porter up and down the length of the longest train you ever saw (I am sure this must be correct, in view of the fact that you never did see this particular train)....

This hotel is not so uncomfortable: I slept eight hours; I have a writing-table in my room; my bath was too hot to get into; these are signs of human comfort, are not they? Nor is the food nasty. Fortunately, there is not much of it. I ordered me a bottle of Berncastler Doctor. They brought me Liebfraumilch. I waved it away, saying that hock was acid and gave me gout. Then, persuaded to be a Christian, I sent one running after it before the doctor was opened and drank two glasses; and it was delicious; and I have no gout.

Why I sit boring you with this dull stuff I do not know: it is certainly not worth including in the Life and Letters.

Two days of solitude set him athirst for companionship.

Good-morning, fair sir, he writes on 12.6.16. I hope this finds you as it leaves me at present, a little improved in health. But I would not wish my worst enemy the weariness from which I am suffering.... Picture me buying useless things so that I may exchange a word with a shopman; for no one talks to me here. Also the weather is bitterly cold.

And next day:

I have ... talked at length to a highly intelligent Dane, with a massy pair of calves that do credit to his pastoral country. But he has returned to town this morning.

They play very low at the club, fortunately, for I lost 13/-, which would have been £10, had I been playing R.A.C. points. Also they make me too late to dress for dinner, which doesn’t matter: nothing matters in this world.

For the rest, I have reason to think that I shall begin to cheer up from to-morrow and to remain cheerful until Saturday. That is “speech-day”—I presume at Malvern College—when I expect to see an awful invasion of horribobble papas and mammas.

Bless you.

The hoped-for cheerfulness has not yet arrived, he laments on 14.6.16. I live in one of the most tragic of worlds. But ... I have had more conversation. The place of the Dane with the fatted calves ... has been taken by a parson, a passon, a parsoon, an elderly parsoon with the complete manner of the late Mr. Penley in The Private Secretary: he would like to give every German a good, hard slap, I am sure. He is a much-travelled man; and his ignorance of every place which he has visited is thoroughly entertaining....

I am becoming popular at the club: they took 12/- out of me yesterday. I must set my teeth and get it back though.

The influx of odious parents, he writes on 18.6.16, with their loathy, freckled criminals of offspring has flustered the waiters and is spoiling all my meals. What I do now is to change for dinner after all and come in exactly an hour late for meals. They have some way of keeping the food—such as it is—piping hot; and so I do not suffer unduly for avoiding the sight of some, at least, of the carroty-headed boys and their thick-ankled sisters....

Ah well! I can begin to count the days until I am back among you; and a glad day that will be for me! Nobody in the world, I think, hates either rest or enjoyment so much as I do.

Good-bye. I am going for a walk. I tell you frankly, I am going for a walk. I tell you this frankly....

On Teixeira’s return to the department, our correspondence was suspended until I went to Cornwall for a week’s leave in August. When I wrote in praise of my surroundings, he replied with a warning:

You are probably too young ever to have heard of ... a play-actress ... who brought a breach of promise action ... and earned the then record damages of £10,000. She took a cottage somewhere the other day and brought her mother to live in it. The mother said, “This is just the sort of place I like; I shall be happy here,” then fell down the stairs and was dead in half an hour....

... Remember me to the Atlantic....

The next letter contained a story from Ireland:

Sligo, 18 August 1916.

... Here, in this most distressful country, we are about to experience again the blessings of coercion, administered by Duke, K.C., and Carson, high priest of the cult. In Sligo, the other day, two ladies treating each other in a public-house, the barman intervened at the tenth drink, saying:

“Stop it now; ye can’t have any more; troth, I won’t sarve ye again. Don’t ye know it’s Martial Law that’s on the people?”

Whereupon one of them enquired of the other:

“For the love of God, Mrs. Murphy, what’s he talking about at all? Who’s Martial Law?”

To which her friend replied sotto voce:

“Whist, don’t be showing your ignorance, ma’am! Don’t ye know he’s a brother of Bonar Law’s?”...

As official papers accompanied every letter, a trace of departmental style is occasionally visible in private notes:

War Trade Intelligence Department, 23 August, 1916.

“Harry Edwin” ate a grouse last night and drank many glasses of port. You can imagine the sort of grumpy commensal that he is to-day.

A. T.

“Harry Edwin.”
To see.
23.8.16.

Seen and approved.
H. E. P.

... Don’t overbathe, he adds as a postscript. Why be so reckless? You remind me of the London city “clurks” who arrive in Switzerland one evening, run straight up the Matterhorn the next morning. I believe that two per cent of them do not drop dead.

The Sehr Hochwohlgeboren und Verdammter Graf Zeppelin, he writes on 25.18.16, did some damage last night at Greenwich, Blackwall (a power-station) etc. For the rest, no news. I am picking up not wholly unconsidered trifles at the Wellington and benefiting your Uncle Reggie pro rata. [Bridge winnings at this time were thriftily exchanged for War Savings Certificates.] This morning I (pro)-rated the girl ... at the post-office for not “pushing” those certificates. I said that, whenever any one asked for a penny stamp, she should ask:

“May we not supply you with one of these?”

It went very well with the audience.

This morning, he writes later, I have bought my thirteenth fifteen-and-sixpennyworth of Uncle Reggie. Mindful of my injunction to “push” the goods, the post-office girl ... urged me to buy a £19.7. affair which would be good for £25 in five years’ time. Alas! Still, there are hopes.

In his preface to The Admirable Bashville, Bernard Shaw explains his reason for throwing it into blank verse: “I had but a week to write it in. Blank verse is so childishly easy and expedious (hence, by the way, Shakespeare’s copious output), that by adopting it I was enabled to do within the week what would have cost me a month in prose.” Pressure of work sometimes drove Teixeira to a similar expedient in rimed verse:

Letter just received, he writes in haste on 26.8.16. to acknowledge the account of a bathing mishap:

With great relief at noon I found

That S. McKenna was not drowned.

Many thanks for the pendant to these lovely verses.

P.S. I note—and we all note—he adds—that you never express the wish to see us all again. How different from my Malvern letters! Ah, what a terrible thing is sincerity!

VI

On Holy Saturday, 1917, I was asked by the deputy-chairman whether I would represent the department on the mission which Mr. Balfour was taking to Washington with a view to coordinating the war-organization of Great Britain and the United States.

For the next two months Teixeira and I communicated whenever a bag passed between the British Embassy and the Foreign Office, overflowing into a brief journal betweenwhiles. He also disposed of my varied correspondence with uniform discretion and with a courage that only failed him when unknown mothers asked him if I would stand sponsor to their children.

The enquiries into the cause of your absence, he writes on 12.4.17, have been distressing. More people ask if you are ill than if you are being married. The unit of the last idea was Sutro, who then went off to Davis and found out what he wanted to know....

13 April.

The work is pretty stiff and I doubt if I can make this desultory diary as gossipy as I could have wished. And, after all, it will seem pretty stale and jejune by the time it reaches you....

Your whereabouts are known now in the dept. and will be at the club to-morrow, if any one asks me again. Hitherto great wonder has reigned; but the “no blame attaches to his name” stunt has worked exquisitely.

The figure of Max Beerbohm’s caricature is seen in the following paragraph:

I have ordered eight new coloured shirts, bringing the total up to 23. Then I have about a dozen black-and-white shirts; and only seven dress-shirts, I find. This makes 42 in all. My father’s theory was that no gentleman should have fewer than eighty shirts to his name. Times have changed; and we are a petty and pettyfogging generation of mankind. On the other hand, I have 33 ties, exclusive of white ties. I feel almost sure that my father did not have so many as that. And I outdo him utterly in boot-trees, of which I have just ordered a pair to be marked “L8” and “R8,” meaning thereby that it is my eighth pair. Sursum corda.

Teixeira believed with almost complete sincerity that he would die on 21 April 1917. The origin of this belief he never explained to me; and I do not know whether he confided it to others. This accounts for the following entry:

Shall I live, I wonder, till the 22nd, to write to you that I am still alive? When I allow my thoughts to dwell upon 21.4.17, now but six brief days off, there rises to them the memory of the horrible Widow’s Song which Vesta Victoria used to sing. I will start the next page with the chorus; for you, poor young fellow, know nothing of the songs that brightened the Augustan age of the music-halls.

Read and admire:

He was a good, kind husband,

One of the best of men:

So fond of his home, sweet home,

He never, never wanted to roam.

There he would sit by the fire-side,

Such a chilly man was John!

I hope and trust

There’s a nice, warm fire

Where my old man’s gone.

Gallows-humour, my dear executor, gallows-humour!

16 April.

Yesterday being a fine day, I have caught cold. A bad look-out, executor, a bad look-out!

Adieu, cher ami.

You will observe a brief hiatus, he writes on 19 April, 1917. A letter begun to you on the 16th is reposing in my drawer at the department, where I have not been since then, having succumbed to an attack of bronchitis. And [my doctor] will not let me out till the 21st (“der Tag!”) at the earliest.

Der Tag was reached ...

21 April, 1917.

It was a comfort and a joy to read this morning that your party has arrived safely at Halifax. I propose to pass this bloudie day without any cheap philosophizing. I am about cured of my bronchitis, I think, though fearsomely weak; and, if I “be” to “be” carried off to-day, it’ll be a motor-bus or -cab that’ll do for me. Look out for a letter from me dated to-morrow. I hope the voyage has done you all the good in the world....

... and survived.

22 April, 1917.

Ebbene, caro mio Stefano! You will be able to tell your grandchildren that you once knew a man who for twenty years was convinced that he would die on the day when he was fifty-two years and twelve days old and who lived to be fifty-two and thirteen....

Bottomley has turned against the new government and is adumbrating his ideal government. He retains the present foreign secretary, but nominates H. H. A. as lord chancellor and Sir Edward Holden as chancellor of the exchequer. He wants Beresford as minister of blockade. Oof!

Robbie Ross has a story of a German poet, one Oskar Schmidt, “a charming fellow,” who, armed with the best letters of recommendation, went to Oxford and spent several agreeable weeks there. The fine flower of his observations was:

“Der Oxfort oontercratuades, dey go apout between a melangolly and a flegma.”...

24 April, 1917.

Your name appeared in the Times yesterday; and I am now able to read daily, or I hope, shall be, how Mr. McKenna bowed, raised his hat and, escorted by cavalry, took his first cocktail on American soil. I do hope that you are not only having the time of your life but feeling amazingly well. J. pictures you a victim of indigestion; but I, knowing your justly celebrated strength of character, have no fears on that score. Cura ut valeas.

4 May, 1917.

This is a private-view day. The sun is blazing truculently. I am wearing a new shirt, white with black and yellow lines (the Teixeira colours), and the white hat and all’s well in God’s dear world.

That these sartorial efforts were not wasted is shewn by the next entry:

5 May, 1917.

... From yesterday’s Star:

“Society Sees the Pictures

“The beautiful spring day induced one Beau Brummel to sport a white box-hat”!!!

VII

In the middle of May I cabled to Teixeira in code, asking him to forward no more letters; and I did not hear from him again until my return to England in the second week of June.

As soon as I was ready to take his place, he went to Harrogate for a cure and remained there for six weeks. For part of the time I took his place in another sense of the phrase. At the end of July the Air Board commandeered my flat; and, until I could find, decorate and furnish another, Teixeira and his wife most kindly placed their house at my disposal. This will explain the following extract:

Harrogate: 15 July, 1917.

Here is the key. Come in when you like, make yourself as comfortable as you can and forgive all deficiencies. I feel a compunction at not having the physical energy to “clear” things a bit for you; but there you are....

I have started my cure, he writes on 18.7.17, which promises to be a most strenuous, arduous and tedious affair. I have to take daily two soda-water tumblers of strong sulphur water and two ordinary tumblers of warm magnesia water; and on alternate days (a) a Nauheim bath and (b) a hot-air bath....

It is raining steadily. This doesn’t matter. But that sulphur-water, on an empty stomach, at 8 a.m.! Two-and-twenty ounces of it, hot! The stench of it! It is said to remind one of rotten eggs; but, as I have never smelt a rotten egg, it reminds me of nothing and only suggests hell.[5]

Sugar seems to have been more scarce in Harrogate than in London; and Teixeira’s appeals and contrivances were always pathetic and sometimes frantic.

My wife did manage to get half a pound of it flung at her head this morning, he writes on 19.7.17. I had so entirely forgotten the essential rudeness of the people of Yorkshire that its discovery came upon me as an utter surprise. I amuse myself by overcoming it with smiles. Smiles are unfamiliar symptoms to them and take them aback.

You may tell Sutro that I have bought a dozen silk collars.

After weary weeks of nauseating treatment, he writes:

It will be an awful sell if this cure ends without doing me good. Still I always hope. Whatever happens I shall want at least a week’s after-cure which I should probably take here: simply a rest and air, without any waters or baths. But what is your Cornish date?

I replied, 27.7.17.

By this time you will have seen that our minds have been working on parallel lines towards the same conclusion that an after-cure is quite essential. It will suit me perfectly well to stay here until, and including, Friday the 24th, or later if you like. My Cornish arrangements are quite fluid....

For all your pagan pose, he writes, you are a fine old Irish Christian gentleman, as is proved by your suggestion of an after-cure, dictated no doubt at the identical moment when I was writing my answer to it. At any rate, I prefer to think of you as a Christian brother rather than as a Corsican brother. As I said, I shall probably take that after-cure, but take it at Harrogate, which is about as bracing a spot as any in the three kingdoms. To go straight to the sea might set up my rheumatism again, if indeed it is suppressed; there is no sign yet of that desiderandum....

It is necessary to insert my letter of 30.7.17 in order to explain Teixeira’s reply to it.

I went home for the week-end, I wrote, and travelled up this morning with C. H. C. has a new and most amusing game. It consists of inviting people to stay with him for the week-end and encouraging them to bathe in the river Thames and only disclosing, when the damage has been done, that the bed of that ancient river is richly studded with broken bottles. There was a small boy in the carriage with one badly injured foot as a result of C.’s pleasantry. I did a conspicuous St. Christopher stunt and carried the boy on my shoulders the entire length of the arrival platform at Paddington....

I, Teixeira answers, 30.7.17, once carried Willie Crosthwait, then aged 14, the whole length of the Euston departure platform. That beats you (and perhaps caused the best part of my present troubles). He is now an army chaplain; and I sit moaning at Harrogate.

Ululu!

My eviction took place in the first week of August; and on 3.8.17 I wrote to Teixeira:

I am thinking of moving to Chelsea on Tuesday.... You may remember a story of Benjamin Jowett in connection with two undergraduates who persisted in staying up at Balliol throughout the Long Vacation. Jowett, by way of gently dislodging them, insisted first that they should attend Chapel daily. The undergraduates grumbled, but obeyed. Jowett, seeing that his first attack had failed, arranged with the kitchen authorities that the food served to these recalcitrant young scholars should be entirely uneatable, and in the course of time their spirit was so much broken that they left him and Balliol in peace. He is reported to have said, as he watched them driving down to the station: “That sort goeth not forth but by prayer and fasting.” So with me. I have manfully withstood the stalwart labourers who break walls down all round me throughout the night; but, when the porters are paid off, the maids deprived of their rooms, the hot-water supply disconnected and the gas cut off at the main, I feel that I may retire with dignity and the full honours of war....

Make yourself as comfortable in Chelsea as you can, he answered on 4.8.17. As at present advised, we return on Wednesday fortnight, the 22nd....

The days here speed past on wings, thanks to their monotony. Waters at 8; again at 10.30; a bath or baths at 11; lunch at 1.30; a jog-trot drive from 3 to 4; bridge; dinner at 7.30; massage at 9; all this with unfailing regularity. I believe far more in my masseuse (she lives at this house) than in my doctor. It will amuse your father to hear that this genius is prescribing for me in the matter of rheumatism, neuritis and fibrositis in the arm without having once had my shirt off! I make suggestions, at the instance of the masseuse, and he promptly annexes them as his own:

“Tell me, doctor, may I do so-and-so?”

“You are to do so-and-so; and this very day!”

The doctors here generally have the very worst name; but there is nobody to pull them up or show them up.

The place teems with people whom I know and don’t want to see.

The rain it raineth every day and all day....

My cure is now over, he writes on 12.8.17; it has been long and costly; it has done me no good at all. Indeed my main affliction is worse; certain movements of the right arm which were possible with comparative ease before I came down are now nearly impossible. On Saturday, at the final consultation, when I took leave of my doctor and paid him five guineas, he told me for the first time that I have no neuritis but that I have bursitis. All the while, mark you, he has been treating me for fibrositis. It is a consolation to know, however, that I have no arthritis. What I have been having is what the vulgar would call a hi-tiddlyhitis high old time....

A week later I went again to Cornwall on leave.

Do devote yourself, wrote Teixeira, 25.8.17, at any rate for the first ten days of your absence, to becoming very well and strong. I have never seen you quite so ill as yesterday and I was infinitely distressed about it. Treat yourself as though you were an exceedingly old man like me. Then when you have entered upon your rejuvenescence you can begin to play pranks with yourself again....

Later he added:

Be careful not to honour the Atlantic with more than one immersion a day....

And, 30.8.17. I am exceedingly busy, but I am enjoying it all. My health is as bad as ever and I have recovered my famous lead-poisoning hue. I expect you, however, to return with the bloom of roses and the stains of coffee on your cheeks. So make up your mind to sleep and do it....

In the first week of September there began the most persistent series of air-raids that occurred at any stage during the war.

Last night, Teixeira writes, 5.9.17, was made hideous by a pack of confounded Germans who came over London and created no end of a din. I looked out of the window, saw one shell burst in a south-easterly direction, debated whether to go below or remain in bed and remained in bed.

[My cook], from her basement, appears to have obtained a much clearer aural view:

“Didn’t you hear them two raiders firing bom-m-ms at each other, sir?”

There spoke your Sinn Feiner: they were both raiders to her. The row lasted for over two hours; and I feel an utter wreck. Lord knows what mischief the brutes have done this time.

Vale et nos ama.

Next day, in a letter dated, City of Dreadful Nights, he adds:

Last night no air-raid was possible, because of an appalling thunderstorm, which kept me awake for another three hours. If you have ever heard thunder rolling for fifty seconds without intercession and giving sixty of these rolls to the hour, you will know the sort of thunderstorm it was.

This description prompts him to an anecdote:

“Then there’s Roche, the resident magistrate. Don’t go shooting Roche now ... unless it’s by accident. What does he look like? Well, if ye’ve ever seen a half-drowned rat, with a grey worsted muffler round its neck, then ye know the kind of man Roche is!”—Speech quoted before the Parnell Commission.

On my return from Cornwall, my flat was not yet ready for me, but the Teixeiras’ hospitality allowed me to continue staying with them.

You will be as welcome on Thursday night as peace at Christmas, wrote Teixeira, 9.9.17. [My cook] is away on a holiday and there is a possibility that she will not be back by then; and in the meantime there is nobody else. You may, therefore, have to submit to a modicum of discomfort: ... your boots will probably have to accumulate to some extent before they are cleaned on the larger scale. You have so many boots, however, that I venture to hope that this will not incommode you unduly.

This welcome was seasoned later by a story which Teixeira invented, describing his efforts to dislodge me. According to this, he used to fall resonantly from his bedroom to his study at 5.0 each morning and, if this failed to rouse me, he would mount the stairs again and continue to throw himself down until I waked. At 6.0 a cup of tea would be brought me; at 7.0 the morning paper; at 8.0 my letters. When I went to my bath at 8.30, Teixeira used to assert that he flung my clothes into a suit-case, tiptoed downstairs and laid the case on the doorstep. His tactics failed because I only waited until he was locked in the bathroom before creeping down and retrieving the case.

As our leave was over for the year, there was no further exchange of letters save when one or other was absent from our department.

I have read the new Maeterlinck play[6]—a good theme infamously treated, I find myself writing, 27.12.18. I beg you to scrap the third act and with it your regard for M’s feelings; then rewrite it with a little passion, a great deal of fear and unlimited un-understanding horror. The invasion of Belgium wasn’t a Greek tragedy where the afflicted prosed and philosophised—with a chorus dilating on cattle-yas; it was noisy, bloody and, above all, unbelievable. Maeterlinck has brought no nightmare into it....

Letter just received, he replied next day. You are a highly illuminated and illuminating critick. Your remarks upon that play are exactly right (as I now know, having just read my first three Greek plays)....

I enclose, he writes 10.8.18, 1¾ chapters of the Couperus classical comedy-novel [The Tour], which I amused myself by doing because you insisted so emphatically that the book should be done. But I will go no further till I have your verdict. Don’t trouble to do any work on this; the marginal refs. were merely inserted as I went along. Just see if the thing is the sort of thing that’s likely to take on; and talk to me about it when you see me....

IX

In 1918 Teixeira’s health had so much improved that he was able to dispense with all violent and disabling cures.

This was the period when he was, socially, in greatest request. I introduced him, in the spring, to Mr. and Mrs. Asquith, who shewed him much hospitality and great kindness from this time until his death. His leaves were now usually spent with them at Sutton Courtney; but, since he required to take little or no sick-leave, the number of letters exchanged in this year is small.

At the armistice, he left the Intelligence Section to become secretary to the department; and, though we worked in the same building for two or three months more, I naturally saw less of him than when we shared the same table. The last communication that passed between us as colleagues, like the first, written three years before, contained an invitation. Its form must be explained by reference to Stevenson’s and Osborne’s Wrong Box. Rudyard Kipling has mentioned, in A Diversity of Creatures, the sublime brotherhood to whom this book is a second Bible.

“I remembered,” [he writes in The Vortex], “a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the Tregonwell Arms ... with nine ... versions of a single income of two hundred pounds, placing the imaginary person in—but I could not recall the list of towns further than ‘London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitzbergen.’ This last I must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly became human and went on: ‘Bussoran, Heligoland, and the Scilly Islands’—‘What?’ growled Penfentenyou. ‘Nothing,’ said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand affectionately. ‘Only we have just found out that we are brothers.... I’ve got it. Brighton, Cincinnati and Nijni-Novgorod!’ God bless R. L. S.[7]...” One of the greatest living authorities on The Wrong Box was a member of the Reform Club; and, on joining, Teixeira found it necessary to his self-protection to study the most aptly-quoted work in the world.

My invitation was couched in the cryptic terms of the brotherhood:

MATTOS. Alexander William de Bent Teixeira, if this should meet the eye of, he will hear something to his advantage by lunching with me to-day at the far end of Waterloo Station (Departure Platform) or even at Lincoln’s Inn.

War Trade Intelligence Department.

30 December, 1918.

On leaving the department early in 1919, I saw and heard little of Teixeira until he invited me to collaborate in the translation of The Tour. Occasional divergencies of opinion about translating Latin words in the English rendering of a Dutch novel had the very desirable result of making Teixeira set out some few of the principles which he followed.

Couperus sends me this postcard, he writes, 29.4.18:

“Amice,

“You are of course at liberty to act according to your taste and judgement. I do not however understand the thing: in every novel treating of antiquity the classical word sometimes gives a nuance to the untranslatable local colour. And every novelist feels this: See Quo Vadis, in Jeremiah Curtius’ translation. However, do as you think proper.

“Yours,

“L. C.”

He has us on the hip with his Jeremiah Curtius. And I feel more than ever that you were too drastic in your views and I too weak in yielding to them....

We should always guard ourselves against the bees in our bonnets. When I produced Zola’s Heirs of Rabourdin, the stage-manager said his play-actors couldn’t pronounce Monsieur, Madame and Mademoiselle to his liking: might he try how it would sound with Mr., Mrs., and Miss Rabourdin? He tried!

If your principle were carried to any length, you would have to call a pagoda a tower, a jinrickshaw a buggy, a café a coffee-house, a gendarme a policeman (i.e. a sergent-de-ville), a toga a cloak, a gondola a wherry, an Alpenstock an Alpine stick, a ski a snowshoe: one could go on for ever!

Yet I am ever yours,

Tex.

In the spring and summer of 1919 our letters became more frequent. Though Teixeira spent most of his time in his department, I employed the first months of liberation in staying with friends. The translation of The Tour went on apace; and arrangements were made for the English publication of Old People and the Things That Pass. If he had given his readers no other book by Couperus or by any other writer, he would still have established two reputations with this.

It’s a funny thing, he writes, 21.5.19; 4:57 a.m.; but I find that I can no longer trs. Latin, even with a dictionary. I suppose it’s because I can’t construe it. Would you mind putting a line-and-a-bit of Ovid into English for me? Here it is:

Materian superabat opus, nam Mulciber illic

Æquora celarat.

... My intentions are to go down to I. for 5 or 6 days on the 5th of June and to join my wife at Bexhill on or about the 18th for 3 or 4 weeks.

“Bexhill-on-Sea

Is the haven for me,”

sang Clement Scott in a visitors’-book discovered by Max Beerbohm, who tore him to pieces for it in the Saturday, in an article signed “Max.” Scott, pretending not to know who Max was, flew to the Era and wrote his famous absurdity, “Come out of your hole, rat!” Gad, how we used to laugh in those days!...

My reply began:

I resent your practice of heading your letters with the unseemly time at which you leave a warm and comfortable bed. And I dated my own: 22 May, 1919. Cocktail-time. What would you think of me if I headed my letters with the equally unseemly time at which I sometimes go to bed? I have been working so late one or two nights last week and this that the times would coincide, and you might bid me good-morning as I bade you good-night....

I went ... to a musical party.... I felt that it was incumbent upon me to see whether you had done anything in the matter of the Belgian quartette.[8] You will be shocked to hear that the quartette is not only still in existence, but has added a supernumerary to turn over the music of the pianist....

On 7.6.19, he wrote from Somersetshire: You are—it is borne in upon me that you must be—a secret autograph-hunter. Here am I, hoping to do nothing but sleep 26 hours out of the 24, to do nothing ever, to the great ever; and here come you, hoping for a letter, lest you be pained. A scripsomaniac, my poor Stephen, a scripsomaniac you will surely be, if you do not check yourself in time.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I know that I am Satan rebuking sin; but was Satan ever better employed? Far rather would I see him rebuking sin than prompting letters for idle hands to write.

Well, I know that I am staying in Somersetshire with I., who is at this moment speeding towards the Hôtel du Vieux Doelen at the Hague, to nurse a sick friend. Ker pongsay voo der sah? And I am happy as the day is long, petted and coddled by his delightful mother, lolling from the morning unto the evening in the open air and doing not one stroke of work. And utterly at my ease, not even blushing when my brother cuckoo mocks me from the tree-top, as he does sixty times to the minute.

I return on the 12th; on the 13th I go cuckooing at the Wharf, returning on the 16th; ... on the 18th I join my wife at Bexhill; how, I ask you, can I come a-cuckooing in Lincoln’s Inn?

Nor do see any chance of touching The Tour while I am here. I am really too busy to do aught but play the sedulous cuckoo in Cockayne. So let my visit to you be a pleasure (to both of us) postponed....

To this I replied, 14.7.19: I lunched yesterday with one Butterworth, who is opening up a publisher’s business. In the course of conversation I mentioned to him your translation of Old People and the Things that Pass. More than that, I took upon myself to lend him my copy of the American edition so that he might have an opportunity of forming his own opinion of it. You may, if you like, call me interfering and presumptuous, but I have not committed you in any way to anything, and yesterday’s transaction may be regarded as no more than the loan of a book from one person to another. I, as you know, feel it a reproach that that book is still unpublished in England, and, if Butterworth thinks fit to make you a good offer, no one will be better pleased than me....

On 26.7.19 he wrote from Bexhill: If it comes on to rain as it threatens daily, I shall be returning The Tour to you quite soon; and in any case it will go back to you before I leave here on the 15th of July: I must reduce the weight of my luggage; I had to run all over the town to find two stalwart ruffians to carry it to the attic where I sleep.

You need not look at it before we meet unless you wish; but you may like to do Cora’s song[9] in your sleep meanwhile; and my additional comments and queries are few.

I am leading here that methodical humdrum life which alone makes time fly. When I return to town you shall see me occasionally at the opera, but not oftener than twice a week. You will have to look for me, however, for I shall be stalking behind pillars, cloaked in black, like Lucien de What’s-his-name, hiding from my black beast, Lady....

P.S. Can you tell me if Beecham intends to do any light operas at Drury Lane in addition to that tinkly, overrated Fille de Madame Angot? I am dying to hear the whole Offenbach series before I die.

A letter from Bexhill, dated 2.7.19, touches on one general principle of translating:

... With all deference, a translator’s first duty is not to translate. His first duty is to love God, honour the king and hate the Germans. His next duty is to produce a version corresponding as near as may be with what an English original writer, if he were writing that particular book, would set down. His last duty is to translate every blessed word of the original....