by Mike Read
Brooke uses a similar arrangement as part of the start of his poem:
… In my flower beds I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow…
Tennant writes of ‘Red Roses’ and ‘Meadow-sweet’, and Brooke of ‘An English unofficial rose’ and ‘Thrilling-sweet’. Both gardens are set at a river’s edge, and both describe the different atmospheres in them, by day and night. Tennant writes, ‘I know this garden at dawn’ and ‘When all the cobwebs drenched upon the lawn’, while Brooke has a ‘spectral dance before the dawn’, with ‘a hundred Vicars down the lawn’. Tennant knows her garden ‘when night’s sands have run, And yet no daylight shows upon the skies’, in Brooke’s garden ‘black and white, creep whispers through the grass all night’. They both eulogise over their respective meadows, Tennant confessing, ‘I love these meadows’, and Brooke writing of his ‘deep meadows’. Early birds, too, feature in both, the fifth verse of Tennant’s poem containing the line ‘Before the birds awake, before the sun’, Brooke’s ‘Old Vicarage’ using ‘grey heavens the first bird’s drowsy calls’. In her last verse Tennant writes of her garden ‘That it should be encompassed by no hedge’, while Brooke wrote, ‘Unkempt about those hedges blow’. Tennant has leaves ‘listening, waiting for the little breeze’, as there is no moment there ‘in the quiet trees’; Brooke, however, longs to ‘hear the breeze sobbing in the little trees’. ‘Rout’, it must be agreed, is an unusual word to use in a poem about gardens, but it is found in both: in ‘Flowers and Weeds’ ‘our places in the motley rout’, and in ‘The Old Vicarage’ ‘The prim ecclesiastic rout’. In her revision of the poem, also in 1908, Tennant set her garden in the month of May: ‘the scent of May in flower round fields’; Brooke extolling the virtues of the same month: ‘How the May fields all golden show’. Is it pushing the proposed influence of Pamela Tennant’s poem too far to suggest that the cluster of words in the sixth verse might well have suggested, and been incorporated into, another of Brooke’s classic poems, ‘Dining-Room Tea’? Tennant writes of ‘flower-cups’, ‘the air a-stream’ and ‘glittering’, within three lines and, albeit in a different context, Brooke also uses within three lines ‘marble-cup’, ‘hung on the air, an amber stream’ and ‘glittering’. Both poems also refer to petals dropping.
At the time of writing her poem, Pamela was the wife of Sir Edward Tennant (later to become Lord Glenconner). In 1922 she married former Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey.
On the Saturday night of his weekend with George Wyndham at Clouds, Rupert wrote from his bed, to Cathleen:
Dear child
Champagne and port and whisky make one too sleepy to write. Nor is there anything frightfully important to write about – except the fact that you are incomparably the most loveable and lovely and glorious person in the world, and I’ve a dim, sleepy idea I may have mentioned that before. I’ve been discussing literature and politics with my host all night, and to send myself to sleep I’m going to continue making up a poem that’s in my head. In this interval I write … Outside the wind’s howling like anything (this place is 700 feet above the sea). It’s been raining … My American photographer has sent a photograph of me -Eddie says it’s very good. I think it’s rather silly … My literary labours haven’t been progressing very well. The only complete poem I’ve produced lately is –
There was once a lovely Cathleen
I don’t think she can ever have been
It’s not likely you know
Perhaps I dreamt it so
There aren’t really such things as Cathleen
It rather expresses my occasional state of mind. The champagne was good. The port was very good. But I’m thirsty for you.
Dearest child, goodnight.
Rupert
Only weeks after Brooke’s visit on 9 June, George Wyndham died in Paris. Rupert wrote to Eddie Marsh from America: ‘But I was shocked last night to hear about Wyndham. It seemed abrupt.’ Even in November when he wrote to Marsh from Fiji, a fondness for the man he knew only briefly is clearly still there: ‘Talking of affairs at home (of which I think continually, to the exclusion of romance) there’s nice things in the Cornhill article on Wyndham. I wish he hadn’t died!’
Among the functions Rupert attended in London were the Ballets Russes performing Les Sylphides at Covent Garden, the Fabian Society debate with George Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc, and Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra, conducted by Thomas Beecham. His favourite London show was Hullo, Rag-Time!, which had opened at the Hippodrome in December; Brooke thoroughly embraced the new ‘ragtime’ craze, which the older generation saw as rather subversive and modern. Cathleen Nesbitt, who thought Brooke ‘such tremendous fun’, often accompanied him:
[W]e went to see Hullo, Rag-Time!, and he saw it ten times I’m told, altogether, seven of which I was with him. But sometimes I’d get a letter saying ‘I cheated – I took someone else to see it – because it’s so wonderful everybody should see it.’ He adored the excitement and sort of panache of it.
The revue had been devised by Max Pemberton and Albert de Courville with music by Louis Hirsch and additional songs by various songwriters including Irving Berlin. The cast comprised Bonita, Jamieson Dodds, Lew Hearn, Shirley Kellog, Gerald Kirby, Eric Roper, Maud Tiffany and Brooke’s favourite, Ethel Levey, with Hirsch conducting the Ragtime quintet. The show opened at London’s Hippodrome on 23 December 1912, and contained such songs as ‘How Do You Do Miss Ragtime’, ‘Hitchy Koo’, ‘You’re My Baby’, and two Irving Berlin songs, ‘Ragtime Soldier Man’ and ‘Snooky Ookums’. Brooke made countless references to the show, which enticed him back time and time again, in his letters to Cathleen Nesbitt: ‘I see we shall scarcely know Hullo, Rag-Time! when we see it again: for Ethel Levey has introduced “Waiting For The Robert E. Lee”, in her own version, and some new performers have appeared.’ In another missive, he bemoans the temporary demise of his favourite singer: ‘Ethel Levey is out of Hullo, Rag-Time! all this week – I expect you know. I thought it worthwhile preventing your disappointment, in case you didn’t know.’ It was another part of his life shared more with his new London friends than with the old guard of neo-pagans. In a letter to Ka he informed her that the latest London news was: ‘A new American review (It’s funny to think that Rag-time perhaps means nothing to you).’
While Hullo, Rag-Time! was his favourite show, the Pink and Lily was his favourite watering hole. The pub sits high in the hills above Princes Risborough, just over 2 miles out of town on the Lacey Green-to-Hampden road and was discovered, presumably, during one of his frequent walking tours of the Chilterns or perhaps on his visits to John Masefield’s cottage. Rupert adored the Chilterns, frequently walking from Wendover to the Pink and Lily to take in the deep cool woods and the splendid north-westerly views over the Thames valley. The Chilterns form the central section of a great chalk belt that runs from the coast of Dorset to the Wash, the hills running in a virtually straight line like vertebrae south-west to north-east, and over 50 miles in length. The range has its beginnings in Berkshire, before running into Oxfordshire and through Checkendon, Nettlebed and Stonor, then over the border into Buckinghamshire and eventually Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire; its chalk escarpment towns include Princes Risborough, Wendover, Tring and Markyate, up to Lilley Hoo, north-east of Luton. This is where the Chilterns are accepted as ending, although the hills continue north-east to Baldock and beyond. A section of the Icknield Way, a pre-Roman route, runs to the north of the Chilterns, for a majority of their course; it is the oldest known road in Britain, dating from the Bronze Age or earlier, although improved in parts by the Romans, and the route eventually runs up to Norfolk. Brooke wrote of the Icknield Way:
I’ll take the road…
The Roman road to Wendover
By Tring and Lilley Hoo
As a free man may do…
Rupert’s much-loved Pink and Lily made the
transition from a private house around 1800, when Mr Pink, a butler from nearby Hampden House, moved there, followed a little later by Miss Lillie, a chambermaid from the same residence. The former employees of the Hampden family set up home together, and, although unmarried, had a son, Richard, who took his mother’s name and succeeded them in the hostelry, becoming the registered licensee there in 1833, when he amended the name ‘Lillie’ to ‘Lily’. By the time Rupert was frequenting the Pink and Lily, the landlord and landlady were Mr and Mrs Tom Wheatley, who had taken over the pub around 1900. Mrs Wheatley ran it until it was sold by auction on 5 September 1929, up until when the rent was £12 per annum.
Rupert frequented the hostelry many times with both Cathleen and Jacques Raverat. On one occasion when Brooke was at the Pink and Lily with Jacques he wrote the following lines: ‘Never came there to the Pink / Two men such as we, I think.’ The following couplet came from the mind of Raverat: ‘Never came there to the Lily / Two men quite so richly silly.’
Before Brooke continued:
So broad, so supple, and so tall
So modest and so brave withal
With hearts so clear, such noble eyes
Filled with such safe philosophies
Thirsty for good secure, secure for truth
Fired by a purer flame than youth
Secure as age, but not so dirty,
Old, young, mature, being under thirty
Were ever two so fierce and strong
Who drank so deep and laughed so long
So proudly meek, so humbly proud
Who walked so far, and sang so loud?
After a lunch at the inn the pair left some food by the roadside with this note pinned to it:
Two men left this bread and cake
For whomsoever finds to take
He and they will soon be dead
Pray for them that left this bread.
The pub was the subject of a second piece of light-hearted verse by Brooke.
Ah Pink ah Pub of my desire
Ah lily for my meandering feet!
I am the ash that once was fire.
I would forget that youth was fleet
I wander on till I can greet
At the way’s end so dark and hilly
Firelight and rest a snack to eat
And bitter at the Pink and Lily.
Courage! (I said) my soul respire!
Fate has rewards for the discreet
Thirst will be thirst, till you expire
The tale of love is not complete.
One buys such beer in many a street
And love as good in Piccadilly
And always there is bread and meat
And bitter, at the Pink and Lily.
That Disillusionment’s a liar
Locality a damned deceit he has no pity on a crier
She rambles on, Youth’s still a cheat,
And beer is still a minor treat
And thoughts of love are just as silly
And just as frequent, just as sweet
And bitter at the Pink and Lily.
Prince, I have spoken in some heat
Being tired of love, that’s damp and chilly
Sick of my bloody self conceit
And bitter at the Pink and Lily.
In March 1913, he sat in the small corner room that he usually frequented and scribbled a note to Cathleen: ‘I write in the Pink and Lily. The hill drops a few hundred feet in front, and beyond is half Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. In this little room is the publican, asleep rather tipsy.’
Cathleen and Rupert loved to spend time in the local countryside:
I do remember once when we were walking – we used to go for walking tours in the Chilterns – and we sort of lay down in a bank and held hands … he never kissed me or anything like that; just held hands, and we felt our souls communing in the air, and we both turned round to each other and said Donne’s ‘Exstasie’ – this is it; we had a kind of excitement in the mere touch and look of each other. Donne’s ‘Exstasie’ is no exaggeration of the feeling we had, and we could often come back, you know, from a day in the country … quite drunk with each other.
The Exstasie
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A Pregnant banke swel’d up, to rest
The violets reclining head,
Sat we two, one anothers best.
Outer hands were firmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string;
So to entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation…
On 21 March, Rupert dropped a line to Geoffrey Fry asking him to subscribe to Rhythm, as Brooke’s poems were being published in it: ‘I wrote in January on a puff-puff. Rhythm is being reorganised and permanently draws, hereafter, on Gilbert Cannan, L. Abercrombie, W. W. Gibson, me, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, Hugh Walpole, Dent, A. Rothenstein, Duncan Grant, D. Lees and a hundred more artists.’ Rupert’s poem, which he dismissively describes as being ‘on a puff-puff ’, was ‘The Night Journey’, which had been inspired by the overhead steam railway in Berlin near Dudley Ward’s flat, and tipped its hat to Brooke’s love of the dramatist Strindberg.
The Night Journey
Hands and lit faces eddy to a line;
The dazed last minutes click; the clamour dies.
Beyond the great-swung arc o’ the roof, divine,
Night, smoky-scarv’d, with thousand coloured eyes
Glares the imperious mystery of the way.
Thirsty for dark, you feel the long-limbed train
Throb, stretch, thrill motion, slide, pull out and sway,
Strain for the far, pause, draw to strength again…
As a man, caught by some great hour, will rise,
Slow-limbed, to meet the light or find his love;
And, breathing long, with staring sightless eyes,
Hands out, head back, agape and silent, move
Sure as a flood, smooth as a vast wind blowing;
And, gathering power and purpose as he goes,
Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing,
Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows,
Sweep out to darkness, triumphing in his goal,
Out of the fire, out of the little room…
There is an end appointed, O my soul!
Crimson and green the signals burn; the gloom
Is hung with steam’s far-blowing livid streamers.
Lost into God, as lights in light, we fly,
Grown one with will, end-drunken huddled dreamers.
The white lights roar. The sounds of the world die.
And lips and laughter are forgotten things.
Speed sharpens; grows. Into the night, and on,
The strength and splendour of our purpose swings.
The lamps fade; and the stars. We are alone.
When Rhythm was reconstituted as the Blue Review, in May 1913, Albert Rothenstein was assistant editor, Brooke was on the committee and Murry was still at the helm. Unfortunately it closed down after just three issues; despite financial help from Eddie Marsh, Murry would declare bankruptcy in 1914, unable to keep up payments of the debt incurred by the absconding publisher.
During March, Brooke was living at 5 Thurloe Square in Kensington, London, at the apartment of Albert Rothenstein. They discussed the new discoveries and revelations by the wireless pioneer Marconi, as well as seeing Arnold Bennett’s play The Great Adventure, a dramatisation of his novel Buried Alive. An enthusiast for Bennett’s work, Rupert had also read and enjoyed The Old Wives’ Tale, Hilda Lessways, and seen What the Public Wants on the London stage; and later he wrote to his mother from New Zealand enthusiastically quoting Clayhanger.
In a letter to Walter de la Mare from Kensington Square, Rupert r
eveals a day’s eating habits – at least three square meals. ‘I shall be lunching at Treviglio’s (in Church Street) at 1.30–3.00 … and dining at the Pall Mall, Haymarket at 6.45 (on the balcony) … If you don’t come up for lunch, drink coffee with me. Or come to tea at Gallina’s, opposite the Royalty Theatre.’ He wrote from Rothenstein’s to Cathleen, pledging his love yet determined to leave England for a while to clear his head: ‘I’ve got to wander a bit. You chain one to England horribly.’ His other close friends received pre-departure letters from the Kensington Square address. To Jacques and Gwen: ‘We may meet again in this world – I brown and bearded, you mere red round farmers. When that’ll be, I know not … My literary agent is Eddie. My heart is yours.’ To Francis Cornford he poured out his concern for Ka, still recovering from being let down by him: ‘Ka is still in a bad way … Ka has no one – her family know nothing of her real life, and she won’t see much of them. So her friends have to look after her.’ On a final postcard to Cathleen, he wrote a poem that was to take the title ‘The Ways That Lovers Use’. He asked her to give it a name and rather obviously she chose the first line.
The Way That Lovers Use
The way that lovers use is this:
They bow, catch hands, with never a word,
And their lips meet, and they do kiss,
– So I have heard.
They queerly find some healing so,
And strange attainment in the touch;
There is a secret lovers know,