It would fortunately be irrelevant to my narrative to attempt to convey the messy tedium of the succeeding three hours. In my office it is my habit to insist that every file of papers, even if taken directly from a safe, should be dusted before appearing on my desk. Here I was positively smothered in grime within twenty minutes.
Holroyd quickly professed to find occasion for taking a hopeful view of our quest. This was because, every now and then, we came upon bundles of personal papers which had evidently at some time been hastily examined and then put carelessly aside. Some of them bore a scrawled endorsement on an outer leaf or cover in what was undoubtedly the hand of that impatient and aspiring third Marquess who had (quite literally, in this context) shaken the dust of Vailes off his feet. Grandmamma: pious rubbish appeared on the cover of a substantial notebook into which some Senderhill lady had transcribed passages of particular edification encountered in her reading of eighteenth-century divines. More from Noah’s Ark . . . Poor Uncle Humphrey’s dotages . . . Miscellaneous twaddlings not worth examining . . . Licentious versifying by Timothy S. but damned dull: these were some of the spot judgements we came across. It scarcely seemed to me that all this afforded us much rational encouragement. Yet, however this may have been, my friend’s sheer drive was rewarded. In a chest containing for the most part a mere litter of loose papers he came upon a commonplace book, bound in finely-tooled vellum. Across this had been scribbled, with what struck me as even more than the third Marquess’s usual brutality, Some unlicked cub’s romantick lucubrations.
‘I wonder!’ Holroyd said, and handed the volume to me. ‘Have a look.’ As he glanced at me I was more than commonly conscious of the cold glitter in his light-blue eyes – and I even asked myself (it is evidence of the atmosphere I was coming to feel around me) whether he owned an unconfessed clairvoyant power which was at this moment exercising itself.
‘Very well,’ I said, and opened the book.
On the inner cover there was a book-plate. It was a fancifully allegorical and not a regularly heraldic affair. Against a background of mountains, fountains, and what appeared to be leaves swept before a gale, a lion which had just broken a massive chain was about to spring upon its prey – a prey not in any prosaic or realistic sense likely to prove succulent or rewarding, since it consisted of a skeleton somewhat rakishly sporting royal robes, a sceptre, and a crown. Beneath this inchoate insurgence appeared the surprisingly formal inscription: The Honble. Bertrand Julian Fitzalan Senderhill Armig, and beneath this again there had been added in ink: Commensalis E.C. But in another ink this last had been struck out, and there had been substituted some lines now so faded on the paper that they appeared only uncertainly as a fragment of verse in which a world of woes was made to rhyme with tyrants and foes. Then, in yet another ink, and in a handwriting rather more maturely formed, came: AEdes Christi in Academia Oxoniensi. And to this finally had been added:
Eheu fugaces,
Postume, Postume,
Labuntur anni.
Domus et placens
Uxor.
‘Odes, two, fourteen,’ I heard Holroyd murmuring in my ear. ‘Eheu fugaces, of course. “How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth” – eh? Eton or St Paul’s, Christ Church or Christ’s: the lament comes to every grown schoolboy’s lips. Ho-ho! But what about domus et placens uxor? Optative, one may say. We’ve been told young Bertrand didn’t make it. He perished unmarried and at nineteen.’
My friend was excited. My own feelings I find it hard accurately to recall. But at least I had feelings. I am in no doubt about that, and it would have been humiliating had it not been so. An age and an order were compressed in the memorial before us – and it was none the less compelling or ending with a kind of cry. I recalled Holroyd’s telling me that morning, on the strength of what he had found printed record of, that Bertrand Senderhill had soon decided he’d had enough of Oxford. But at Eton already one could now guess that he had been a rebel, as his idol Shelley had been before him. There could be no doubt about the idolatry. It was there in the touchingly absurd book-plate. It was there in the scrap about woes and foes. I had remembered the place in which that comes: a place in which a hounded schoolboy dedicates himself to truth and justice and freedom. Suddenly I knew that the youth whose drowning had mysteriously risen up before Lord Lucius Senderhill in a vision was alive in my mind – far more so than Lord Lucius himself, whom I had known, and who had more than once gravely shaken hands with me.
‘Look at the other side,’ Holroyd said.
I did as I was told. The fly-leaf bore an inscription in a woman’s hand:
To Bertrand Senderhill from his Mother on his sixteenth Birthday, in the hope that it may be employed for the furtherance of his private Devotions.
‘The poor lad was meant to compose prayers in it,’ Holroyd said. ‘And copy out bits from Tillotson and South. We’ll see how far he got with it.’
‘But not in this beastly attic.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Mrs Uff hasn’t ventured to send Martha to disturb us, and we’re now past all chance of tea. We’d better go back to the library, and examine your precious find at leisure. It’s my bet that what we’ll find copied into it will be chunks of Rousseau and Voltaire – and Godwin and Thelwall and Tom Paine. The heady wine of revolution, as first bottled for young Englishmen about a hundred and eighty years ago.’
‘Perhaps so. Well, come along.’ But Holroyd hesitated, glancing here and there around the disordered muniment room. ‘There’s still the deuce of a lot to rummage through. And coming on one “find”, as you call it, doesn’t mean there mayn’t be others waiting for us.’
‘My dear man, for pity’s sake!’
‘And next door, as well. Just come and take a look at it.’ Hideously stirring up dust with his toes, and once or twice kicking aside heaven knows what residual Senderhill archives as he moved, my friend strode across the floor. I followed resignedly into the adjoining chamber. It was totally different in its dimensions, being no broader but enormously long. I observed with a sinking heart that it did in fact contain further receptacles in which papers and documents might lurk, although here nothing of the kind was simply lying around. For we were now in the presence of junk and lumber in a big way. At one time, I saw, a very large amount of Victorian furniture, bric-a-brac, ornaments, paintings, and peculiarly repellent sub-erotic marble statuary must have been introduced into Vailes, and later simply banished, with a grand disregard of expense, to these unvisited regions. There were upholstered objects of which the outer integument and confining webbing had rotted away, so that they were now all Laocoön-like writhings in rusty steel. Even more distressing were the piles of abandoned bedding that huddled in corners like sullied snow-drifts. It was from these, as Holroyd had remarked earlier, that the feathers came. Indeed, from one peculiarly voluminous mattress, precariously stuffed above a massive wardrobe by which I was standing, a feather now floated down to rest gently on my head. I brushed it hastily away.
‘We’ll find nothing here,’ I said. ‘Unless it’s death by asphyxia as a result of this stuff lodging in our windpipes.’
‘Perhaps another time.’ Holroyd turned away reluctantly, and presently we made our way downstairs. ‘By the way,’ he said suddenly, ‘I suppose the boy has written something in that book?’
‘Yes, of course. Don’t you remember?’ And I tapped the vellum volume, now tucked under my arm. ‘”Some unlicked cub’s romantick lucubrations”.’
‘Ho-ho! To be sure. Well, what are the first words? Just take a peep.’
We paused on the threshold of the library, and I obeyed this injunction.
‘The first words,’ I said, ‘are Perdita, Perdita, Perdita.’
‘Perdita?’
‘Just that. Shakespeare’s heroine, I suppose.’
‘Wasn’t there an actress—?’
‘A very secondary Perdita: Perdita Robinson, who died before this young man was born. No, this is the true Perdita out of The Winter’s Tale. And saluted t
hrice.’
‘Well, I’m blessed.’ Holroyd made his impulsive gesture of taking me by the arm. ‘Avanti!’ he said, and pushed open the door of the library.
What he and I there read, with Bertrand Senderhill’s vellum-bound commonplace book on a table before us, I now proceed to transcribe.
2
Perdita Perdita Perdita
Lately turning over old family papers, I came upon the ledgers (as I suppose they are called) of a certain Bertrand Senderhill (a younger son’s son such as I) turned loathsome usurer regnante Carolo primo. Above each daily record of extortion and rapacity my namesake has written Jesu Jesu Jesu – a pious ejaculation, as that superstitious age would have called this hideous abuse of the name of one whom I revere scarcely less than that of Plato, M. de V., P.B.S himself!
But Perdita Perdita Perdita a second Bertrand can fitfully write. Loveliest girl! Do I not see embodied in thee every beautiful idealism of moral excellence?
1 September 1832
It is now some three years or more since my Mother gave me this book, fondly hoping that the follies and evils of priestcraft would fill its pages one day. Filial respect has restrained me from putting it to any more rational use till now. But now! Perdita, art thou not my religion, my light in the darkness of this age of tyranny and dungeons and chains – chains even riveted (oh, worst oppression!) upon what ought to be the sovereign intellect of Man? Art thou not she who has come as a very redemption from the long, dark misery of a boyhood knowing only misunderstanding and calumny and several frightfully painful beatings? Oh, Perdita, Perdita, my joy!
I renew my resolution not to return to that place. My moral being suffers there. This of being beaten recalls the fact to me. When Wm Gladstone, my schoolfellow but no gentleman, being the son of a rich merchant in the North and a psalm-singing hypocrite to boot, was soundly drubbed in his rooms by the ruffian and drunken element in college for some act of low informing against men comporting themselves irreverently in chapel, did not I feel a dark satisfaction? I am entitled, indeed, to feel contempt for the obscurantist pietism of this upstart Liverpudlian pleb. But ought I not to deplore an assault upon his person, disagreeable although that be to me too? I will NOT go back to Christ Church with its boozings and barbarities thus rampant while Canons loll in monkish slumber in their stalls!
2 September
I regret that contemptuous word pleb. Are not the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power (Gray) anathema to me – I who recognise no other authority than the light of reason flashed upon an independent intellect (? Wm. Godwin)? Among the cottagers here is a family called Cowmeadow. Is it not an honourable, at least a pleasing, name – suggesting, as it does, the innocence of rural nature and of beneficent, non-carnivorous creatures? And what of Stickleback? Does not one think, as he utters it, of children, as yet unstained by the world, playing by some purling stream, or of the long happiness of gazing down into the depths of my own dear lake of Vailes? Joan Stickleback. My Perdita!
3 September
A letter from Jack Palliser. He is at Padua, his father having required him to make certain studies in the botanic gardens there with a view to improving horticulture on the family estates. It is but a dull place, but soon Jack hopes to be in Venice – throned on her hundred isles! He urges me to join him. With him, he says is only a religious caterpillar of a tutor, Dr Blowbody, whose expectations of later favour bring him well under Jack’s thumb. Dear Jack, thou art the most loyal of friends, and yet a sad fellow to whom every woman is but a pair of legs to be parted. Thou knowest nothing, Jack, of the purity of the hearts’ affections. A fig for thy Venetian courtesans! I would as soon obey a summons to the moon. Indeed, even were there no Perdita, could I ever bear to bid Vailes farewell?
Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine captos
ducit et immemores non sinit esse sui.
Some sweet compulsion haunts their native soil
And holds them captive in its mystic toil.
I do not English old Ovid very well. But ‘tis better, Jack, than thou couldst do!
I rather please my fancy with this archaic style I have lit upon. It something reminds me of the beginning of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
5 September
I have spoken to her! I have touched her hand!
12 September
How fortunate that I am known to be studious, and supposed to be (like that humbug Gladstone) ambitious to take a Double First! I have only to have books in my hand, and wander away in this fair autumn weather, to be held blameless even if I fail to present myself for dinner. My father positively orders that, upon my return, chops and claret are to be served to me in my study. And thus I have a little space in which to recover.
And from what a whirl of passion – pure yet tumultuous! From what an elevation of the soul and quickening of every faculty! My darling is not learned – indeed, I see that steps must be taken to teach her something more than her A.B.C. (and perhaps the pianoforte, the laws of pronunciation, and a politer style of dancing than she has hitherto been familiar with) if she is to take her place . . .
But what craven nonsense is this of one so sweetly read in Nature’s lore, whose singing is as the lark’s, whose speech is like a golden shower, and who moves like the waves of the sea! Perdita, thou queen of curds and cream! I have taught thee to call me Florizel. Wilt thou ever—oh, trembling thought!—murmur to me of a bank for love to lie and play on? I could almost wish that there were a hearkening God, that I might thank him for the all of lire, the little of earth, that is my love for my darling. Else where might we already be?
I take my cockle-shell from the boathouse and scud or scull down the lake. At its extremity I conceal the little craft amid the reeds even as she leaves the cottage, her basket in her hand. It so happens that the good Mrs Stickleback – mother, as she must be called, of my surely changeling princess – holds some rustic fame as a compounder of remedies of the herbal kind. She is happy that her daughter should wander the woods all day garnering the materials of her art. So into the forest we fade, hand in hand but without more intimate embrace. (Only once has she allowed me to kiss her, and that as a brother might a sister!) Sometimes, more daring, we walk on the lake’s farther shore.
13 September
I said, with a boldness I scarcely felt, that I would take her to Mama. She has what Mama would call good principles. She is, in fact, a very religious girl – and for this simplicity in her I find I have so great a tenderness that I cannot utter what she would regard as an infidel word. Might not this piety avail with my mother? Perdita says not. Alas, she is undoubtedly right! Humble as her upbringing has been, she has an intellect as clear as mine. Strangely, too, she has something of that aristocratic spirit which I reprobate in myself – linked as it is to centuries of arrogance and oppression. I believe I am liberating my own conduct from it – as Mankind must do! Surrounded as we thus are by the cruel ordinances of Wealth and Privilege, it is exceedingly fortunate that I am myself so strongly armed in Natural Virtue. Otherwise might not this dear girl be betrayed by me? Ah, my Perdita, we shall not be sundered, though years may pass before we are united!
20 September
We are lovers.
21 September
I had thought there were no words for it. But there are, and they are my own poet’s:
The Meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.
Was it one moment that confounded thus
All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
Unutterable power . . . when we had gone
Into a wide and wild oblivion
Of tumult and of tenderness?
I am ashamed of the mawkish and exclamatory stuff earlier written in this book. We must be secret. I must plan. I am not of age. Perdita is older than I, but also a minor. To defeat those who would forbid us marriage I must scheme and tell lies – and take care they are not found out.
22 September
I have told my father about Wm Gladstone being thrashed in his rooms by drunken undergraduates. My father very shocked. I spoke of the low company one is constrained to keep upon at all venturing into the obscurer colleges. Of the ease of wenching, etc. and worse evils at Oxford. A day or two needed for this to sink in. Passion must not make me reckless. A change of plan must appear rational and unimpulsive. Say two weeks. Festina lente. Celerity should be contempered with cunctation, as Sir T. Browne has it.
23 September
By the greatest good fortune, a second letter from Jack Palliser expressly written to show my father. The high standing of scholars, virtuosi etc. in good Italian society, so that improving conversation possible even at a ball. Encouragement to proceed in the best Latin authors derived from actual viewing of monuments of antiquity. Devotion to his tutor Dr Blowbody, with whom he never fails to read for several hours daily. Scope on the Continent for moderate amours with no risk of scandal. Consequent likelihood of his being perfectly content on return to England with whatever matrimonial alliance may be proposed by his family. All this and more, written as if unconstrainedly to a familiar friend, I shall certainly take occasion to show my father. He has always been pleased that Jack has been my intimate – knowing more, one may say, about his lineage than his morals. Jack a good fellow, although he knows no more of love than a young he-goat or bull. I shall show my father this letter when we are at dessert, this evening. I have already read it to Perdita, and explained what an engine we can make of it. She understands it perfectly, whereas it might well be Greek to her. She remains Perdita, although I have now got her out of the romances and know her for the peasant girl she is – and with all the future difficulties that lie in that. No more nonsense. That she is very clever is not of her essence, and is therefore in a sense irrelevant to our love. But it is—how shall I express it?—a piece of uncommon good luck.
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