It was different again with the younger children, whom he saw less frequently, or with one or other of his many grandchildren, who saw him as a kind of eccentric sage, excessively tolerant in most areas but obstinate and adamant in others, and sometimes giving advice of a kind they did not comprehend at the time.
It was this way with his daughter Helen, devilishly wary, he thought, when he quizzed her on southern Ireland's response to Carson's bloodcurdling threats from Ulster. When she told him the Catholic south was recruiting to raise a force capable of confronting the Orangemen, he said, "Will you carry a message from me back to that husband of yours, my dear? Tell him to leave the sealing of this business to the British. I speak as a Home Ruler from Gladstone's day and that bill is law. Only one thing can stop you going your own way now, and I'll tell you what it would be—if you people jump the gun ahead of Ulster and put yourselves in the dock!"
She was still digesting this when he added, with a smile, "You can remind Rory Clarke of something else. Tell him that your mother's mother was as Irish as the shamrock, and landed penniless in Liverpool ahead of the potato famine. So you've really no call to feel an exile over there."
In truth she had forgotten and it made her thoughtful during the remainder of her stay. It went some way to explain, perhaps, her identification with the Irish and her tendency, since her second marriage, to look at history through Irish eyes, and she said to him, on the last day of her visit, "You're as English as anyone I know. What made you back Home Rule all those years ago? You never set eyes on your mother-in-law, or so Mamma tells me."
"No, I never did, but I served in Ireland in the 'fifties, a year or so after the Great Hunger as they call it, and I understood their grievances. It didn't take me all that long to realise the English had been asking for this how-de-do for seven centuries. Bad as things were, they weren't peculiar to Ireland and the Irish. You're looking at a man old enough to recall seeing men transported for poaching and petty theft. Not all were from County Cork and County Mayo. Some were from Hampshire, Dorset, and right here where we're sitting."
* * *
Giles called less often, spending an occasional weekend at Tryst between his parliamentary chores in Westminster and Wales. Adam felt great sympathy for a man who, at the age of forty, had been robbed not only of the woman he loved but also his faith in British democratic traditions. There was no more talk of Giles joining the Labour Party, however (although the presence of Keir Hardie as his constituency neighbour at Merthyr Tydfil was a permanent temptation) but he was disenchanted with the conformity of the Liberals. He said, when they were discussing Women's Suffrage one day, "Do you remember what Abe Lincoln said on the practice of slave-owning before the Civil War out there, about it being impossible for a nation to remain half-free and half-slave? Well, that's how I've come to feel about us. For as long as we deny women the vote how can we prattle on about the home of the free, Father?" When Adam said he should use the analogy in a speech in the House, he replied, with a smile, "Oh, I plan to. The next time we get a debate on the issue. And don't think I begrudge the chances of preferment I've given up by identifying myself with the suffragettes. I owe that much and more to Romayne, wouldn't you say?"
Adam said, gently, "You still miss her, don't you?"
Giles nodded. "The only relief I get from the permanent ache is in the valleys, doing what little I can for the people who sent me to London."
"Well, you can warm your hands there, boy," Adam told him. "Personal local representation is the only justification for your profession, and from what I hear and read most of 'em up there forget as soon as they've counted the votes." And then, taking a chance, "Have you ever thought of marrying again, my boy?"
"Oh, I've thought of it," Giles said, and then, perking up somewhat, "I might even surprise you and mother one of these days."
And before very long he did, confounding them utterly by turning up, uninvited, with a very pleasantly disposed but rather sad-looking woman of what Henrietta described as "a sensible age." Giles introduced her as Sister Gwyneth Powell, presently on the staff of Westminster Hospital, whose home was close to his headquarters at Pontnewydd.
Long before he told them how they had met on the night of Romayne's death (he withheld the story of Miss Powell's part, years ago, in that flare-up over a hat in an Oxford Street store) they had wholeheartedly approved of her, although neither Giles nor Gwyneth hinted at anything more than friendship and mutual political sympathies. Even so, when the carriage taking them back to Bromley Station was out of sight, Henrietta said, "Well, Adam?" And there was no mistaking the matchmaking gleam in her eye.
"I'd put it at odds on. In less than a twelve-month, m'dear." And then, "When will I learn to mind my own business? I advised him to remarry the last time he was over. If it goes off at half-cock I'll feel responsible."
"She seems very steady and sensible," Henrietta said, disregarding him. "For my part, he could go further and fare worse."
2
He had his silent visitors, too, what he called his Grace and Favour tenants whom he encountered pottering about his terraces and coppices, or taking a breather up on the wooded spur, or when he was immersed in his newspapers on the knoll behind the Hermitage museum.
There was the pair of nuthatches, rare in these parts, who nested in the bole of an elm and were, he would have said, the least demanding of his charges, for their neighbours, an army of tits, were forever swooping on the bird tables he had set up hereabouts, squabbling among themselves for the fat he hung there and the split maize he spread upon the ground. Every kind of tit—great tits, with their neat black skullcaps, blue tits by the dozen, and an occasional crested tit or marsh tit, though only once did he catch a glimpse of the long-tailed variety. There were finches, too, a swarm of them, but one particular chaffinch, who seemed to him not only extraordinarily long-lived but unusually perceptive, for he ignored the largesse on the tables and always made a personal approach for crumbs of cheese Adam balanced on his boot. He told Giles—the only one among his children who shared his tolerance for this army of blackmailers—that Joe, the chaffinch, not only knew the whole range of cheeses but could distinguish between his sound and his artificial leg, distrusting the latter's stability, for if, by chance, he put cheese on his left boot, Joe would execute a furious little dance about his feet, waiting for it to fall. But if he placed it on his sound leg he would hop right up and eat it on the spot, waiting until Adam spread his hand with more cheese, when he would perch on his thumb.
Giles, smiling at this recital, said, "It's queer, I always thought of you as a city man. You seemed to belong in that slum beside the Thames in my younger days, and I can remember you jeering at city merchants who turned themselves into squires the moment they made their pile. At what point in your life did Wordsworthia set in?"
"Around the time of that yard fire, I imagine. I was seventy then, late in the day but not too late. I saw everything I'd slaved for for over forty years go up in smoke in two hours. It struck me then, for the first time, I think, that everything but land, and what thrives on it free and wild, is a short-term credit, likely to be called in any time. I begrudged every day I spent there after that."
Just beyond the plank verandah of The Hermitage was a buddleia and on hot days he would move out there to watch the butterflies skirmishing round every blossom. Red Admirals, Peacocks, Tortoiseshells, Commas, and his firm favourites, the local Chalkhill Blues, all making a Donnybrook Fair of the bush. He sometimes watched them for thirty minutes at a stretch. But the birds and the butterflies, with the single exception of Joe, the cheese connoisseur, took him very much for granted, whereas his warier tenants did not, regulating their comings and goings by the degree of solitude he enjoyed.
There was the old grey badger, whose set was inherited from a line of ancestors stretching back to a time when this part of the Weald formed the western margin of the Rhine estuary. He was a suspicious old codger and it took Adam months to win his confidence, but once this was achieve
d Old Blubb (his grizzled, flattish head and wary looks reminded Adam vividly of Blubb, the ex-coachee who managed the Kentish Triangle in the 'sixties) took him very much on trust when he poked around looking for fresh bracken for his set. On the spur behind the house there were other familiars, an old dog fox that had learned the hunt never drew this near the house and rarely ventured off limits. Adam would watch him upwind, "loping along like a Pathan scout," Adam observed, and wearing a self-satisfied grin on his return from a successful hunting foray. He thought, as he watched, I'll wager he's led every local pack about here a dance or two in his day, but they'll never catch him now. He's like me, a born survivor.
Down on the banks of the stream that he had diverted from the river to keep his lily-ponds filled, he often saw otters, voles, herons, and the comical long-tailed field mice who seemed to live mainly on insects they found on the wild irises, although Adam knew their winter stores of food were treasure houses of berries, nuts, peas, and grain.
It was watching these tenants of his, over a period of months and years, that went some way towards adjusting his views about the world outside. He reasoned, They manage their affairs much better than we do. Stick to their own patch and never kill, save for food. Whereas, look at us. We've been roaming and pillaging ever since we came out of the trees, and it'll bring us down in the end.
And then, when the evenings grew shorter, he would take to going into the house, and paid visits to his inanimate friends. Here, too, he had his favourites, some of them under glass and never handled save by himself or a fellow connoisseur. There were many examples of the English and Irish glass blowers' art, opaque glasses with twist stems, baluster stem glasses with a royal monogram, a pair of magnificent Jacobite goblets, engraved with the image of the two Pretenders, and a flagon showing the Stuart rose with six petals.
He was less zealous of his silver-ware, extending to Henrietta and Phoebe Fraser the privilege of keeping the pieces bright, but the maids were forbidden to handle his china after one dropped a Derby comport and made the mistake of trying to excuse herself by saying, "I was in that of a rare hurry, sir." He was usually very tolerant with the servants, but Rachel, the culprit on this occasion, got a tonguelashing. "If the man who had made the comport had been in that of a hurry," he roared, "you wouldn't have had the privilege of laying your hands on a piece of craftsmanship made by people who took their work seriously! From now on I'll do the china dusting in this house, and that's an order!"
It was one of his very rare flashes of temper, for usually the mere contemplation of his treasures brought him serenity. He loved to ponder the moulded decoration in the form of mermaids and festoons on his George I salt cellars, the fan and chrysanthemum motifs on his early Worcester glazes, and his choice pieces of Nantgarw, Pinxton, Coalport, and Rockingham. But above he loved of his late eighteenth-century English furniture, pier tables, pole-screens, rosewood veneered tables inlaid with brass, japanned corner cabinets, the Torricellian barometer in the hall, and his magnificent breakfront bookcase, veneered with curled mahogany, measuring nine feet, two and a half inches by twelve feet five inches and holding nothing but calf-bound books, the earliest an atlas, dating from the sixteenthcentury, the latest a first edition of Gulliver's Travels.
He could tell how and when he had acquired each piece; by cajolery, by hard bargaining, and sometimes (for he was a shrewd and a not altogether scrupulous collector) by pretending to do a customer a favour by relieving him of something he regarded as inherited junk. There was very little in the house that was made outside Britain. "We're the finest craftsmen in the world," he would claim. Adding with a characteristic touch of cynicism, he said, "At least, we were, before chaps like George got it into their heads that everything had to be done at the double!" And when George reminded him that he, too, in his heyday, had advertised the speed of his deliveries in the press, he said, "So I did, but I had more sense than to treat a consignment of Worcester china as if I was hauling a load of turnips. Look at our insurance files if you want proof of it. No, no, I reckoned one claim a month was excessive and proof of bad bedding-down or sloppy offloading."
If there was one part of his collection that afforded him more contemplative satisfaction than another, it was his picture gallery, where, he would claim, "There isn't a canvas that won't treble in value before you boys trundle me up to that churchyard yonder, some that haven't done so already for that matter."
If he was prejudiced in favour of English silversmiths, English and Irish glassblowers, and English cabinet makers, he was more catholic in his taste for paintings. Up here, along the wainscotted walls of the east and west galleries, or concentrated in the big drawing-room where there was a north light, he had several Dutch masters, including a Van Huysum, two Fragonards, a Claude, and a Granach, besides a selection of English landscape artists, among them a Constable that he had bought at an auction—"Held on a day when a timely blizzard kept everyone with a longer purse away from the auction mart!" He took great pleasure in his English landscapes, for they reminded him of his forays up and down the shires since his first prospecting trip on horseback in 1858. In addition to Constable, artists like Crome, Cotman, Richard Wilson, and Bonnington were well represented, reproducing the four seasons and most areas of the country, and when some of his more pernickety visitors expressed regret that he had never been able to get his hands on the work of one or more of the greats, a Leonardo, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, he would protest, "But, damn it, I didn't haul goods across Italy or Holland or Spain! I made my living right there, in that narrow country lane, dragging a ton of goods over that very hill, or fording that particular river and often in that kind of weather!"
It was a strange kind of conceit, but they left him to it. After all, he was a very old man and could be forgiven his eccentricities.
Nine
Upon St. Vitus's Day
On the twenty-fifth of June 1914, a thick-set, middle-aged man wearing the uniform of a general of the Austro-Hungarian Army set out on the first engagement of a three-day assignment in the province of Bosnia, in southeast Europe.
Plumed, girdled, fiercely moustached and over-bemedalled, he accompanied his wife, Sophie, in a drive from the small spa of Ilidze into the capital, Sarajevo. His approach was greeted with respectful acclaim on the part of the mixed population of Serbs, Croats, and Turks, and the Serbo-Croat shout of "Zivio!" betokened his welcome. But that was no more than his due as heir apparent to the AustroHungarian throne.
In the local bazaar, where he and Sophie did a little shopping, the crowds were so thick that his entourage had to clear a path for the visitors, but one man, a narrowfaced, slightly-built nineteen-year-old, did not shout "Zivio!" He was too absorbed taking stock of the couple he was to shoot dead three days hence, on Saint Vitus's Day, June 28, a Serbian national holiday.
The movements of these three people, the Archduke Ferdinand, his morganatic wife, Sophie, and their slayer, Gavrilo Princip, over the next seventy-two hours were to have a direct impact upon the lives of every man, woman, and child in Europe; to some extent, every man, woman, and child then living on the planet, and succeeding generations; to a time long after the hauling firm of Swann-on-Wheels had been forgotten. Because of them, because of their momentary impulses and trivial decisions within this short span of time, ten million Europeans were to die violent deaths within the next four years. Double that number were to live out their lives as chronic or partial invalids. Empires would dissolve, national frontiers would undergo drastic changes, and crowned monarchs would become hunted fugitives. Yet neither of these, two men, momentarily within touching distance of one another, were aware of more than a tiny fraction of those whose lives were cut short by their encounter. Their encounter that day, or their ultimate confrontation three days later.
* * *
The ensuing two days were spent by the Archduke witnessing the manoeuvres of twenty-two thousand troops in the mountain country near the capital; by Princip, the assassin, in brooding, conferring w
ith fellow assassins and visiting, for the purpose of renewing an oath, the grave of a dead revolutionary called Zerajic, buried in that portion of the Sarajevo churchyard reserved for criminals and suicides.
At the conclusion of the army manoeuvres, the Archduke, well-pleased, wrote, "I had been convinced that I would find nothing but the best and my expectations were fully confirmed by the outstanding performances of all officers and men." On the same day, Princip, together with two fellow conspirators, wrote a postcard to a common friend living in Switzerland, but what they wrote is not recorded.
* * *
Far away to the southeast, in Punjab mountain scenery more dramatic than the Bosnian crags, Alexander Swann's occupations during these corresponding days of June had something in common with these men.
Seven thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas, breathing an atmosphere rarefied not only by the mountain air but by the social graces and taboos of the British Raj, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Swann had occasion both to brood and to write, as he studied the reports of a batch of young officers undergoing a course of instruction in a climate that their fellow subalterns, sweating it out on the plains, would have envied. For Simla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, was, by European standards, the most civilised and salubrious town in the subcontinent of India at that time. A visiting artist had written of it, "Everything here is so English… one would fancy oneself in Margate."
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