And Mr. Toft would break away from his little company of dancers and come across the lawn wiping his face—for ‘Hoite-cum-Toite’ a moment before had been a most furious affair. It was a grey face with vague indeterminate features and a bright almost clerical smile in the middle of it. When he spoke it was in a very rich voice.
‘Suppose we try “Fading,” Mrs. Chelifer,’ he suggested. ‘ “Fading is a fine dance”—you remember the immortal words of the Citizen’s Wife in the Knight of the Burning Pestle? Ha ha!’ And he gave utterance to a little laugh, applausive of his own wit. For to Mr. Toft every literary allusion was a joke, and the obscurer the allusion the more exquisite the waggery. It was rarely, alas, that he found any one to share his merriment. My mother was one of the few people who always made a point of smiling whenever Mr. Toft laughed at himself. She smiled even when she could not track the allusion to its source. Sometimes she even went so far as to laugh. But my mother had no facility for laughter; by nature she was a grave and gentle smiler.
And so ‘Fading’ it would be. My mother touched the keys and the gay, sad mixolydian air came snoring out of the harmonium like a strangely dissipated hymn tune. ‘One, two, three . . .’ called Mr. Toft richly. And then in unison all five—the don, the two undergraduates, the two young ladies from North Oxford—would beat the ground with their feet, would prance and stamp till the garters of little bells round the gentlemen’s grey flannel trousers (it went without saying, for some reason, that the ladies should not wear them) jingled like the bells of a runaway hansom-cab horse. One, two, three. . . . The Citizen’s Wife (ha ha!) was right. Fading is a fine dance indeed.
Everybody dances Fading. Poor Mr. Toft had faded out of Oxford, had danced completely out of life, like Lycidas (tee-hee!) before his prime. Influenza had faded him. And of the undergraduates who had danced here, first and last, with Mr. Toft—how many of them had danced Fading under the German barrage? Young Flint, the one who used always to address his tutor as ‘Mr. Toft—oh, I mean Clarence’ (for Mr. Toft was one of those genial boyish dons who insisted on being called by their Christian names), young Flint was dead for certain. And Ramsden too, I had a notion that Ramsden too was dead.
And then there were the young women from North Oxford. What, for example, of Miss Dewball’s cheeks? How had those cabbage roses weathered the passage of the years? But for Miss Higlett, of course, there could be no more fading, no further desiccation. She was already a harebell baked in sand. Unwithering Higlett, blowsy Dewball. . . .
And I myself, I too had faded. The Francis Chelifer who, standing by the dissipated harmonium, had turned the pages of his mother’s music, was as wholly extinct as Mr. Toft. Within this Gothic tomb reposed his mummy. My week-end visits were archaeological expeditions.
‘Now that poor Mr. Toft’s dead,’ I asked as we walked, my mother and I, that afternoon, up and down the little garden behind the house, ‘isn’t there any one else here who’s keen on morris dancing?’ Or were those folky days, I wondered, for ever past?
My mother shook her head. ‘The enthusiasm for it is gone,’ she said sadly. ‘This generation of undergraduates doesn’t seem to take much interest in that kind of thing. I don’t really know,’ she added, ‘what it is interested in.’
What indeed, I reflected. In my young days it had been Social Service and Fabianism; it had been long hearty walks in the country at four and a half miles an hour, with draughts of Five X beer at the end of them, and Rabelaisian song and conversations with yokels in incredibly picturesque little wayside inns; it had been reading parties in the Lakes and climbing in the Jura; it had been singing in the Bach Choir and even—though somehow I had never been able quite to rise to that—even morris dancing with Mr. Toft. . . . But Fading is a fine dance, and all these occupations seemed now a little queer. Still, I caught myself envying the being who had lived within my skin and joined in these activities.
‘Poor Toft!’ I meditated. ‘Do you remember the way he had of calling great men by little pet names of his own? Just to show that he was on terms of familiarity with them, I suppose. Shakespeare was always Shake-bake, which was short, in its turn, for Shake-Bacon. And Oven, tout court, was Beethoven.’
‘And always J. S. B. for Bach,’ my mother continued, smiling elegiacally.
‘Yes, and Pee Em for Philipp Emanuel Bach. And Madame Dudevant for George Sand, or, alternatively, I remember, “The Queen’s Monthly Nurse”—because Dickens thought she looked like that the only time he saw her.’ I recalled the long-drawn and delighted laughter which used to follow that allusion.
‘You were never much of a dancer, dear boy.’ My mother sadly shook her head over the past.
‘Ah, but at any rate,’ I answered, ‘at any rate I was a Fabian. And I went for hearty long walks in the country. I drank my pint of Five X at the Red Lion.’
‘I wish you could have gone without the beer,’ said my mother. That I had not chosen to be a total abstainer had always a little distressed her. Moreover, I had a taste for beefsteaks.
‘It was my substitute for morris dancing, if you follow me.’
But I don’t think she did follow me. We took two or three turns up and down the lawn in silence.
‘How is your paper doing?’ she asked at last.
I told her with a great show of enthusiasm about the cross between Angoras and Himalayans which we had just announced.
‘I often wish,’ she said after a pause, ‘that you had accepted the college’s offer. It would have been so good to have you here, filling the place your dear father occupied.’
She looked at me sadly. I smiled back at her as though from across a gulf. The child, I thought, grows up to forget that he is of the same flesh with his parents; but they do not forget. I wished, for her sake, that I were only five years old.
CHAPTER IV
At five years old, among other things, I used to write poems which my mother thoroughly and whole-heartedly enjoyed. There was one about larks which she still preserves, along with the locks of my pale childish hair, the faded photographs, the precocious drawings of railway trains and all the other relics of the period.
Oh lark, how you do fly
Right up into the sky.
How loud he sings
And quickly wags his wings.
The sun does shine,
The weather is fine.
Father says, Hark,
Do you hear the lark?
My mother likes that poem better, I believe, than anything I have written since. And I dare say that my father, if he had lived, would have shared her opinion. But then he was an ardent Wordsworthian. He knew most of the Prelude by heart. Sometimes, unexpectedly breaking that profound and god-like silence with which he always enveloped himself, he would quote a line or two. The effect was always portentous; it was as though an oracle had spoken.
I remember with particular vividness one occasion when Wordsworth broke my father’s prodigious silence. It was one Easter time, when I was about twelve. We had gone to North Wales for the holidays; my father liked walking among hills and even amused himself occasionally with a little mild rock climbing. Easter was early that year, the season backward and inclement; there was snow on all the hills. On Easter Sunday my father, who considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of church-going, suggested that we should climb to the top of Snowdon. We started early; it was cold; white misty clouds shut off the distant prospects. Silently we trudged upwards through the snow.
Like the page of King Wenceslas I followed in my father’s footsteps, treading in the holes he had kicked in the snow. Every now and then he would look round to see how I was getting on. Icy dewdrops hung in his brown beard. Gravely he smiled down on me as I came panting up, planting my small feet in his large tracks. He was a huge man, tall and broad-shouldered, with a face that might have been the curly-bearded original of one of those Greek busts of middle-aged statesmen or philosophers. Standing beside him, I always felt particularly small and insignificant. When I had come up with him, he would pat me affectionately on the shoulder with his large heavy hand, then turning his face towards the heights he addressed himself once more to the climb. Not a word was spoken.
As the sun mounted higher, the clouds dispersed. Through the rifted mist we saw the sky. Great beams of yellow light went stalking across the slopes of snow. By the time we reached the summit the sky was completely clear; the landscape opened out beneath us. The sun was shining brightly, but without heat; the sky was pale blue, remote and icy. Every northern slope of the glittering hills was shadowed with transparent blues or purples. Far down, to the westward,
