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_ Her actual offspring does not suffice a very motherly woman. Such a
woman was Mrs. Batch. Had she been blest with a dozen children, she
must yet have regarded herself as also a mother to whatever two young
gentlemen were lodging under her roof. Childless but for Katie and
Clarence, she had for her successive pairs of tenants a truly vast
fund of maternal feeling to draw on. Nor were the drafts made in
secret. To every gentleman, from the outset, she proclaimed the
relation in which she would stand to him. Moreover, always she needed
a strong filial sense in return: this was only fair.
Because the Duke was an orphan, even more than because he was a Duke,
her heart had with a special rush gone out to him when he and Mr.
Noaks became her tenants. But, perhaps because he had never known a
mother, he was evidently quite incapable of conceiving either Mrs.
Batch as his mother or himself as her son. Indeed, there was that
in his manner, in his look, which made her falter, for once, in
exposition of her theory--made her postpone the matter to some more
favourable time. That time never came, somehow. Still, her solicitude
for him, her pride in him, her sense that he was a great credit to
her, rather waxed than waned. He was more to her (such are the
vagaries of the maternal instinct) than Katie or Mr. Noaks: he
was as much as Clarence.
It was, therefore, a deeply agitated woman who now came heaving up
into the Duke's presence. His Grace was "giving notice"? She was sure
she begged his pardon for coming up so sudden. But the news was that
sudden. Hadn't her girl made a mistake, maybe? Girls were so vague-
like nowadays. She was sure it was most kind of him to give those
handsome ear-rings. But the thought of him going off so unexpected--
middle of term, too--with never a why or a but! Well!
In some such welter of homely phrase (how foreign to these classic
pages!) did Mrs. Batch utter her pain. The Duke answered her tersely
but kindly. He apologised for going so abruptly, and said he would be
very happy to write for her future use a testimonial to the excellence
of her rooms and of her cooking; and with it he would give her a
cheque not only for the full term's rent, and for his board since the
beginning of term, but also for such board as he would have been
likely to have in the term's remainder. He asked her to present her
accounts forthwith.
He occupied the few minutes of her absence by writing the testimonial.
It had shaped itself in his mind as a short ode in Doric Greek. But,
for the benefit of Mrs. Batch, he chose to do a rough equivalent in
English.
TO AN UNDERGRADUATE NEEDING
ROOMS IN OXFORD
(A Sonnet in Oxfordshire Dialect)
Zeek w'ere thee will in t'Univursity,
Lad, thee'll not vind nor bread nor bed that
matches
Them as thee'll vind, roight zure, at Mrs.
Batch's . . .
I do not quote the poem in extenso, because, frankly, I think it
was one of his least happily-inspired works. His was not a Muse that
could with a good grace doff the grand manner. Also, his command of
the Oxfordshire dialect seems to me based less on study than on
conjecture. In fact, I do not place the poem higher than among the
curiosities of literature. It has extrinsic value, however, as
illustrating the Duke's thoughtfulness for others in the last hours of
his life. And to Mrs. Batch the MS., framed and glazed in her hall, is
an asset beyond price (witness her recent refusal of Mr. Pierpont
Morgan's sensational bid for it).
This MS. she received together with the Duke's cheque. The
presentation was made some twenty minutes after she had laid
her accounts before him.
Lavish in giving large sums of his own accord, he was apt to be
circumspect in the matter of small payments. Such is ever the way of
opulent men. Nor do I see that we have a right to sneer at them for
it. We cannot deny that their existence is a temptation to us. It is
in our fallen nature to want to get something out of them; and, as we
think in small sums (heaven knows), it is of small sums that they are
careful. Absurd to suppose they really care about halfpence. It must,
therefore, be about us that they care; and we ought to be grateful to
them for the pains they are at to keep us guiltless. I do not suggest
that Mrs. Batch had at any point overcharged the Duke; but how was he
to know that she had not done so, except by checking the items, as was
his wont? The reductions that he made, here and there, did not in all
amount to three-and-sixpence. I do not say they were just. But I do
say that his motive for making them, and his satisfaction at having
made them, were rather beautiful than otherwise.
Having struck an average of Mrs. Batch's weekly charges, and a similar
average of his own reductions, he had a basis on which to reckon his
board for the rest of the term. This amount he added to Mrs. Batch's
amended total, plus the full term's rent, and accordingly drew a
cheque on the local bank where he had an account. Mrs. Batch said she
would bring up a stamped receipt directly; but this the Duke waived,
saying that the cashed cheque itself would be a sufficient receipt.
Accordingly, he reduced by one penny the amount written on the cheque.
Remembering to initial the correction, he remembered also, with a
melancholy smile, that to-morrow the cheque would not be negotiable.
Handing it, and the sonnet, to Mrs. Batch, he bade her cash it before
the bank closed. "And," he said, "with a glance at his watch, "you
have no time to lose. It is a quarter to four." Only two hours and a
quarter before the final races! How quickly the sands were running
out!
Mrs. Batch paused on the threshold, wanted to know if she could "help
with the packing." The Duke replied that he was taking nothing with
him: his various things would be sent for, packed, and removed, within
a few days. No, he did not want her to order a cab. He was going to
walk. And "Good-bye, Mrs. Batch," he said. "For legal reasons with
which I won't burden you, you really must cash that cheque at once."
He sat down in solitude; and there crept over him a mood of deep
depression . . . Almost two hours and a quarter before the final
races! What on earth should he do in the meantime? He seemed to have
done all that there was for him to do. His executors would do the
rest. He had no farewell-letters to write. He had no friends with whom
he was on terms of valediction. There was nothing at all for him to
do. He stared blankly out of the window, at the greyness and blackness
of the sky. What a day! What a climate! Why did any sane person live
in England? He felt positively suicidal.
His dully vagrant eye lighted on the bottle of Cold Mixture. He ought
to have dosed himself a full hour ago. Well, he didn't care.
Had Zuleika noticed the bottle? he idly wondered. Probably not. She
would have made some sprightly reference to it before she went.
Since there was nothing to do but sit and think, he wished he could
recapture that mood in which at luncheon he had been able to see
Zuleika as an object for pity. Never, till to-day, had he seen things
otherwise than they were. Nor had he ever needed to. Never, till last
night, had there been in his life anything he needed to forget. That
woman! As if it really mattered what she thought of him. He despised
himself for wishing to forget she despised him. But the wish was the
measure of the need. He eyed the chiffonier. Should he again solicit
the grape?
Reluctantly he uncorked the crusted bottle, and filled a glass. Was he
come to this? He sighed and sipped, quaffed and sighed. The spell of
the old stored sunshine seemed not to work, this time. He could not
cease from plucking at the net of ignominies in which his soul lay
enmeshed. Would that he had died yesterday, escaping how much!
Not for an instant did he flinch from the mere fact of dying to-day.
Since he was not immortal, as he had supposed, it were as well he
should die now as fifty years hence. Better, indeed. To die
"untimely," as men called it, was the timeliest of all deaths for
one who had carved his youth to greatness. What perfection could he,
Dorset, achieve beyond what was already his? Future years could but
stale, if not actually mar, that perfection. Yes, it was lucky to
perish leaving much to the imagination of posterity. Dear posterity
was of a sentimental, not a realistic, habit. She always imagined the
dead young hero prancing gloriously up to the Psalmist's limit a young
hero still; and it was the sense of her vast loss that kept his memory
green. Byron!--he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be
a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long,
very able letters to "The Times" about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
Yes, Byron would have been that. It was indicated in him. He would
have been an old gentleman exacerbated by Queen Victoria's invincible
prejudice against him, her brusque refusal to "entertain" Lord John
Russell's timid nomination of him for a post in the Government . . .
Shelley would have been a poet to the last. But how dull, how very
dull, would have been the poetry of his middle age!--a great
unreadable mass interposed between him and us . . . Did Byron, mused
the Duke, know what was to be at Missolonghi? Did he know that he was
to die in service of the Greeks whom he despised? Byron might not have
minded that. But what if the Greeks had told him, in so many words,
that they despised HIM? How would he have felt then? Would he have
been content with his potations of barley-water? . . . The Duke
replenished his glass, hoping the spell might work yet. . . . Perhaps,
had Byron not been a dandy--but ah, had he not been in his soul a
dandy there would have been no Byron worth mentioning. And it was
because he guarded not his dandyism against this and that irrelevant
passion, sexual or political, that he cut so annoyingly incomplete a
figure. He was absurd in his politics, vulgar in his loves. Only
in himself, at the times when he stood haughtily aloof, was he
impressive. Nature, fashioning him, had fashioned also a pedestal
for him to stand and brood on, to pose and sing on. Off that pedestal
he was lost. . . . "The idol has come sliding down from its pedestal"
--the Duke remembered these words spoken yesterday by Zuleika. Yes, at
the moment when he slid down, he, too, was lost. For him, master-
dandy, the common arena was no place. What had he to do with love? He
was an utter fool at it. Byron had at least had some fun out of it.
What fun had HE had? Last night, he had forgotten to kiss Zuleika when
he held her by the wrists. To-day it had been as much as he could do
to let poor little Katie kiss his hand. Better be vulgar with Byron
than a noodle with Dorset! he bitterly reflected . . . Still,
noodledom was nearer than vulgarity to dandyism. It was a less
flagrant lapse. And he had over Byron this further advantage: his
noodledom was not a matter of common knowledge; whereas Byron's
vulgarity had ever needed to be in the glare of the footlights of
Europe. The world would say of him that he laid down his life for a
woman. Deplorable somersault? But nothing evident save this in his
whole life was faulty . . . The one other thing that might be carped
at--the partisan speech he made in the Lords--had exquisitely
justified itself by its result. For it was as a Knight of the Garter
that he had set the perfect seal on his dandyism. Yes, he reflected,
it was on the day when first he donned the most grandiose of all
costumes, and wore it grandlier than ever yet in history had it been
worn, than ever would it be worn hereafter, flaunting the robes with
a grace unparalleled and inimitable, and lending, as it were, to the
very insignia a glory beyond their own, that he once and for all
fulfilled himself, doer of that which he had been sent into the world
to do.
And there floated into his mind a desire, vague at first, soon
definite, imperious, irresistible, to see himself once more, before
he died, indued in the fulness of his glory and his might.
Nothing hindered. There was yet a whole hour before he need start for
the river. His eyes dilated, somewhat as might those of a child about
to "dress up" for a charade; and already, in his impatience, he had
undone his neck-tie.
One after another, he unlocked and threw open the black tin boxes,
snatching out greedily their great good splendours of crimson and
white and royal blue and gold. You wonder he was not appalled by the
task of essaying unaided a toilet so extensive and so intricate? You
wondered even when you heard that he was wont at Oxford to make
without help his toilet of every day. Well, the true dandy is always
capable of such high independence. He is craftsman as well as artist.
And, though any unaided Knight but he with whom we are here concerned
would belike have doddered hopeless in that labyrinth of hooks and
buckles which underlies the visible glory of a Knight "arraied full
and proper," Dorset threaded his way featly and without pause. He had
mastered his first excitement. In his swiftness was no haste. His
procedure had the ease and inevitability of a natural phenomenon, and
was most like to the coming of a rainbow.
Crimson-doubleted, blue-ribanded, white-trunk-hosed, he stooped
to understrap his left knee with that strap of velvet round which
sparkles the proud gay motto of the Order. He affixed to his breast
the octoradiant star, so much larger and more lustrous than any
actual star in heaven. Round his neck he slung that long daedal
chain wherefrom St. George, slaying the Dragon, dangles. He bowed
his shoulders to assume that vast mantle of blue velvet, so
voluminous, so enveloping, that, despite the Cross of St. George
blazing on it, and the shoulder-knots like two great white tropical
flowers planted on it, we seem to know from it in what manner of
mantle Elijah prophesied. Across his breast he knotted this mantle's
two cords of gleaming bullion, one tassel a due trifle higher than
its fellow. All these things being done, he moved away from the
mirror, and drew on a pair of white kid gloves. Both of these being
buttoned, he plucked up certain folds of his mantle into the hollow
of his left arm, and with his right hand gave to his left hand that
ostrich-plumed and heron-plumed hat of black velvet in which a Knight
of the Garter is entitled to take his walks abroad. Then, with head
erect, and measured tread, he returned to the mirror.
You are thinking, I know, of Mr. Sargent's famous portrait of him.
Forget it. Tankerton Hall is open to the public on Wednesdays. Go
there, and in the dining-hall stand to study well Sir Thomas
Lawrence's portrait of the eleventh Duke. Imagine a man some twenty
years younger than he whom you there behold, but having some such
features and some such bearing, and clad in just such robes. Sublimate
the dignity of that bearing and of those features, and you will then
have seen the fourteenth Duke somewhat as he stood reflected in the
mirror of his room. Resist your impulse to pass on to the painting
which hangs next but two to Lawrence's. It deserves, I know, all that
you said about it when (at the very time of the events in this
chronicle) it was hanging in Burlington House. Marvellous, I grant
you, are those passes of the swirling brush by which the velvet of the
mantle is rendered--passes so light and seemingly so fortuitous, yet,
seen at the right distance, so absolute in their power to create an
illusion of the actual velvet. Sheen of white satin and silk, glint of
gold, glitter of diamonds--never were such things caught by surer hand
obedient to more voracious eye. Yes, all the splendid surface of
everything is there. Yet must you not look. The soul is not there.
An expensive, very new costume is there, but no evocation of the high
antique things it stands for; whereas by the Duke it was just these
things that were evoked to make an aura round him, a warm symbolic
glow sharpening the outlines of his own particular magnificence.
Reflecting him, the mirror reflected, in due subordination, the
history of England. There is nothing of that on Mr. Sargent's canvas.
Obtruded instead is the astounding slickness of Mr. Sargent's
technique: not the sitter, but the painter, is master here. Nay,
though I hate to say it, there is in the portrayal of the Duke's
attitude and expression a hint of something like mockery--
unintentional, I am sure, but to a sensitive eye discernible.
And--but it is clumsy of me to be reminding you of the very
picture I would have you forget.
Long stood the Duke gazing, immobile. One thing alone ruffled his deep
inward calm. This was the thought that he must presently put off from
him all his splendour, and be his normal self.
The shadow passed from his brow. He would go forth as he was. He would
be true to the motto he wore, and true to himself. A dandy he had
lived. In the full pomp and radiance of his dandyism he would die.
His soul rose from calm to triumph. A smile lit his face, and he held
his head higher than ever. He had brought nothing into this world and
could take nothing out of it? Well, what he loved best he could carry
with him to the very end; and in death they would not be divided.
The smile was still on his face as he passed out from his room. Down
the stairs he passed, and "Oh," every stair creaked faintly, "I ought
to have been marble!"
And it did indeed seem that Mrs. Batch and Katie, who had hurried out
into the hall, were turned to some kind of stone at sight of the
descending apparition. A moment ago, Mrs. Batch had been hoping she
might yet at the last speak motherly words. A hopeless mute now! A
moment ago, Katie's eyelids had been red with much weeping. Even from
them the colour suddenly ebbed now. Dead-white her face was between
the black pearl and the pink. "And this is the man of whom I dared
once for an instant hope that he loved me!"--it was thus that the
Duke, quite correctly, interpreted her gaze.
To her and to her mother he gave an inclusive bow as he swept slowly
by. Stone was the matron, and stone the maid.
Stone, too, the Emperors over the way; and the more poignantly thereby
was the Duke a sight to anguish them, being the very incarnation of
what themselves had erst been, or tried to be. But in this bitterness
they did not forget their sorrow at his doom. They were in a mood to
forgive him the one fault they had ever found in him--his indifference
to their Katie. And now--o mirum mirorum--even this one fault was
wiped out.
For, stung by memory of a gibe lately cast at him by himself, the Duke
had paused and, impulsively looking back into the hall, had beckoned
Katie to him; and she had come (she knew not how) to him; and there,
standing on the doorstep whose whiteness was the symbol of her love,
he--very lightly, it is true, and on the upmost confines of the brow,
but quite perceptibly--had kissed her. _
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