Adventures and Enthusiasms. E. V. Lucas
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yet, four years ago, and all inexplicably, the star had gone from his hotel. It was monstrous, an outrage. Four years ago—without warning and for no cause.
When he had looked at the new edition of Baedeker which a visitor had left about and saw it, he could not believe his eyes. He had called his wife—every one: they were also incredulous. It was like a thunderbolt, and earthquake. After all their hard work too, their desire to please, their regular customers, so contented, who came again and again. Was not that the test—that they came again and again? Obviously then the guide-book was wrong, guilty of a wicked injustice.
What did he think could have happened? All he could suppose was that one of Herr Baedeker's agents, staying there incognito, had had some piece of bad fortune; some accident of the kitchen impossible to prevent, but isolated, had occurred and he had taken offence. But how unfair! No one should judge by a single lapse. So many rivals still with stars and he without!
Thus would the Golden Eagle complain, day after day, during my sojourn, always ending with the assurance that I would help him to get the star back, would I not?—I who had such influence.
And now there is to be, I suppose, a new system of guide-book astronomy. If the Golden Eagle has survived the War he may, in the eclipse of Baedeker, be more resigned to his lot: the substitute for that travelling companion may confer a star of his own. But I do not propose to stay with him in order to make sure.
A MORNING CALL
The card of invitation—for which I have to confess that, like a true social climber, I had to some extent angled—came at last, stating that my visit would be expected on the following day at noon precisely, and that evening dress was to be worn. As I did not receive it until late at night, and as some medals had to be bought and a carriage and pair hired, I was busy enough after breakfast. The medals were for distribution afterwards among certain intimates, and the carriage and pair was to convey my friend and me to the reception, because we wished to enter at the gate of honour, and if you would do this you must have two horses. A single horse, and you are deposited at the inferior door and have a long walk.
It was to one of the most famous buildings in the world that we are going—possibly the most famous—and the horses' hoofs had a brave resonance (not wholly to be dissociated from thoughts of Dumas) as they clattered swiftly over the stones, beneath archways, past sentries, and through spacious and venerable courtyards, to the foot of the famous stairway. After ascending to an ante-room, where colossal guards scrutinised us and splendid lackeys took our hat, we were shown into the reception-room, in the doorway of which an elderly gentleman in black with a black bag was talking with such animation to a major-domo that we had to interrupt them in order to pass.
In this reception-room, an apartment of some splendour, in which we were to meet our host, sufficient guests had already assembled to occupy most of the wall space—for that is how we were placed, in four lines with our backs to the walls. There were about ninety in all, I calculated, of whom many were priests and nuns and many were women, the rest youths, a few girls, and a very few civilian men. It needed only the swiftest glance to discern that my friend and I were the only ones who had complied with the regulation about evening dress. This, naturally, greatly increased our comfort, since we became at once the cynosure (as the learned would say) of every eye. In the centre of the room was a little knot of officials, including four or five soldiers, all chatting in low tones and occasionally glancing through the door opposite that by which we had entered, which gave upon a long corridor. So for some twenty minutes we waited, nervous and whispering, when suddenly the officials stiffened, the soldiers hurriedly fetched their rifles from the far corner (a proceeding not without humour when one considers all things), and the whole ninety of us sank on our knees as a little quick, dark man, dressed in white, entered the room.
To be on one's knees, in evening dress, at twenty past twelve in the day, facing a row of people, across a vast expanse of carpet, similarly kneeling, and being also a little self-conscious and hungry, is not conducive to minute observation; but I was able to notice that our host was alert and bird-like in his movements and had a searching, shrewd, and very rapid and embracive glance. Beneath his cassock one caught sight of elaborate slippers, and he wore a large and magnificent emerald ring.
As he was late he got briskly to work. Each person had to be noticed individually, but some had brought a little problem on which advice was needed; others required solace for the absent and afflicted; most, like myself, had medals of the saints which were to be made more efficacious; and three or four of the priests were accompanied by far from negligible or indigent old lady parishioners, to whom such an event as this would be the more memorable and valuable if a little conversation could be added. Hence, there was work before our host; but he performed his task with noticeable discretion. To me, whom at last he reached, he said nothing; but my friend, who is of the old persuasion, put to him the case of a dying youth and obtained sufficient assurance to be comforted. And all the while I could see the elderly gentleman in black with the black bag glancing round the walls from the doorway—his function, as I afterwards learned, being that of a doctor intent upon restoring to consciousness those (and they are numerous) who swoon under the immensity of this ceremony.
Having come to the last of his visitors, our host retired to the middle of the room and delivered a short address on the meaning of his blessing and the importance of rectitude. He then blessed us once again, collectively, and was gone, and we struggled to a vertical position, the elderly ladies finding the assistance of their attendant priests more than useful in this process.
My knees, too, were very sore; but what did I care? I had seen Pope Benedict XV.
THE TRUE WIZARD OF THE NORTH
It is no disrespect to the author of the Waverley Novels to say that the true Wizard of the North was born on a Sunday in 1805, in a cobbler's cottage at Odense, in Denmark, when Scott was thirty-four.
Hans Christian Andersen's father, a cobbler, was a thoughtful, original, and eccentric man—as cobblers have the chance to be. On the day that his little Hans was born, he sat by the bed-side and read to the child Holberg's "Comedies." It made no difference that the audience only cried. Later the father became his son's devoted slave and companion, reading to him the "Arabian Nights," constructing puppet theatres and other entertaining devices, and entrusting him with his peculiar views of the world and religion. The mother was, in the words of Mary Howitt, Hans Andersen's first English translator, "all heart"; from her perhaps came his instant readiness to feel with others, his overmastering sense of pity, his smiling tears, while from his father much of his odd humour and irony. But there was still another influence. Like a child of genius of our own race with whom Hans Andersen has not a little in common, Charles Lamb (who in 1805 was thirty), the boy was much with his grandmother, his father's mother, a distressful gentlewoman who, having come upon evil days, lived in great poverty with an insane husband, a toy-maker, and kept the home together by acting as gardener to a lunatic asylum. To little Hans, who was often with her, she would tell stories of her own youth and that of her mother, who had done an extremely Andersenian thing—had run away from a rich home to marry a comedian.
Now and then Hans would accompany her to the asylum itself. "All such patients," he has written, in "The True Story of My Life," "as were harmless were permitted to go freely about the Court; they often came to us in the garden, and with curiosity and terror I listened to them and followed them about; nay, I even ventured so far as to go with the attendants to those who were raving mad. … Close beside the place where the leaves were burned the poor old women had their spinning room. I often went in there and was very soon a favourite. … I passed for a remarkably wise child who would not live long; and they rewarded my eloquence by telling me tales in return; and thus a world as rich as that of the 'Thousand and One Nights' was revealed to me. The stories told by these old ladies, and the insane figures which I saw around me in the