Here Will Be No Mention at All
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101 911 REMEMBER AND BE GLAD BT CTfiTHIA ASQJJITH Autobiography : Haply I May Remember Novels; The Spring House One Sparkling Wave Short Stories; What Dreams May Come for Children; Everything Easy I Wish I Were You The Children's Ship (Editor) Anthology ; She "Walks in Beauty Plqy; No Heaven For !Me The Author Coming Out CTMTHIA ASQfflTH REMEMBER AND BE GLAD * For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile " Than that you should remember and be sad Christina Rossttti. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SOWS NEW YORK 1952 CI7IrxsLjrJ.es Scrit>ner:r-*s Scxrxs .A... TTi-tGir anci CONTENTS Letter to a Friend i "Mary Elcho at Stanway" 3 . A Gallery of Guests 24 Coming Out 57 Beauties 85 Charles Whibley 91 Edwardian Girlhood 103 Salad-days Letters 128 D. H. Lawrence 133 Two Cotswold Characters 151 Country House Visiting 163 " " The JVfeo; Elizabethans 198 Postscript 207 209 ILLUSTRATIONS The Author Coming Out Frontispiece The Author's Mother facing page 16 The Author's Father 1 7 Arthur Balfour in his First Motor Car 32 Stanwqy 33 The Professor (Sir Walter Raleigh) 48 Drawing of the Author's Husband by Lucy Graham Smith 49 The Author in early twentieth century hat 64 Clementine Hosier (Mrs. Winston Churchill) 80 Charles Whibley, from a painting by Sir Gerald Kelly, P.R.A. 96 The Author with her Sisters 128 D. H. Lawrence, 1914 144 Mr. and Mrs. Winston Churchill shortly after their Marriage 192 Edward Horner 1 93 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR kind permission to quote copyright poems my grateful thanks are due to Mrs. Frieda Lawrence and Messrs. William Heinemann Ltd. for verses by D. H. Lawrence; the literary executors and Messrs. Constable & Co. Ltd. for verses by Sir Walter Raleigh; the literary executors and Messrs. Hollis & Carter Ltd. for a verse by Francis Thompson; Mrs. Raymond Asquith for verses by Raymond Asquith. C. A. LETTER TO A FRIEND You made me write Haply I May Remember, and now you demand more much more. Hazlitt said, "To be a writer, you must flay yourself and sell the skin." Please remember that to flay myself is quite outside the scope of my ambition. Another writer, a very different one, has also condemned my book in advance. " Ouida declared, Memories can only be made agreeable to the public by base treason to others as well as want of dignity to but find oneself." I don't propose to betray anyone ; should you my book both too praising of others and too reticent about myself, kindly do me the justice to remember that when I undertook this task I made it clear that I would NOT write the story of my life, but merely "recollections of people, places and moods". This book is not intended to be an autobiography; it is merely a scrapbook or if you prefer it, an anthology of memories, so naturally I shall choose to dwell on pleasant memories, and shall write about people I liked. And yet many of the friends in whose company I found most delight may scarcely figure in this volume or the next. Of some there will be no mention at all. This will not be because I have shrunk from remembering the dead, but either because my pen has quailed before the hopelessness of trying to put into words what these friends were like, or simply because they did not happen to fall into whatever pattern this book may weave. You may perhaps think when I tell you of certain "public that the world then figures" that I write flippantly, seeing was already in a state of ferment. The mercifully bloodless revolution through which we have lived had already started, and we were aware ofit. The First World War was impending. REMEMBER AND BE GLAD But remember that I don't to you of all people attempt to " depict these "figures in their political and sociological aspects; I merely give you my own impressions ofthem as human beings relaxing for two days in the country after their labours of the week. Some of them were prophets and advocates of revolu- tion: others resisters of any rapid change. All of them were striving to administer the affairs of mankind wisely, humanely, equitably and disinterestedly. I shall write of them just as I remember them disporting themselves in my parents' home, a No Man's Land on which men as diverse as Arthur Balfour and Sidney Webb, George Wyndham and H. G. Wells frequently met, either temporarily to forget, or amicably to discuss their vast differences ofopinion. Don't expect me to think kindly of you while, conscious of despair, I stare at the unbroken white expanse of paper before me, or after hours of frustration, at an overflowing waste- paper basket. And yet I realise that I shall be grateful to my taskmaster, for whatever the travail of writing, I know that I shall greatly enjoy remembering reliving fragments of my life. In these dark days many of my contemporaries tell me that they find the thought of the past too sad to dwell upon. Survivors of a generation from which death has taken far more than its usual toll of friends, life far more than its natural toll of illusions, they try to forget dead friends, dead hopes dead selves. Others, driven by nostalgia to the opposite extreme, live in the past almost entirely to the exclusion of the present. Refusing to accept any fiirther dividend life might declare them, they let the memory of precious friends held in death's dateless night stand between them and any new friends they might make. "Better by faryou shouldforget and smile that Than you should remember and be sad" . .? I shall take neither alternative. I can't forget and smile: I won't remember and be sad. I'll remember and be glad. C. A. 'MART ELCHO AT STANWAY : You tell me that in re-reading H, G. Wells' New Madtiasdli you came upon his tribute to my mother: "those were the great days of Mary Elcho at Stanway". Now you want Mary Elcho's daughter to tell you something of those days. Oddly " enough, I still think of my mother as Mary Elcho'*. I never became reconciled to her name changing to Wemyss. Fortunately for me the days to which Wells refers those of my mother's heyday as a hostess coincided with my own so- called "growing-up", so that instead of being limited to the ordinary social fare of a debutante, I had the fun of meeting in my own home various interesting members of the older generation, and of asking my contemporaries to meet them too* I told you that while I was a child the months spent each year in London seemed but little more than an interruption to my real life, I had very much this same feeling when, still rather a somnambulist, still seeing life through that iridescent haze in which so much of youth is passed, I left London at the end of my first season, an experience which though in many ways it had been an exciting, even an entrancing adventure, had yet never seemed more than an intimation of things still to come. I remember my sense of returning as it were from the merely transitory to the eternal when I came home and the atmosphere of Stanway closed round me once again that charged atmosphere haunted not by ghosts but by the per- sisting past. The very timelessness of the place; its memory- smell the ofthe stirring unanalysable ; anchoring sound church clock hourly breaking the silence that was so much more than the mere absence of noise all these familiar things seemed to enfold me like wings. One great advantage my friends and I enjoyed an advan- 3 REMEMBER AND BE GLAD tage our descendants lack was the ease with which we could meet one another in the pleasantest possible surroundings. It was delightful to be able to ask, at your parents' expense and trouble, anyone you liked to come and stay with you. And it was so simple. I merely had to write invitations, tell my mother at what time I expected my friends, and they would be met at the station and blithely welcomed by both hostess and staff. All I had to do was to show them to the rooms prepared for them, arrange whom they should sit between at dinner, and organise evening games. I deliberately said at our parents' "trouble" as well as at their expense, because, despite all that is claimed for those days now vaguely described by that much over-worked adjective "spacious", it is a fallacy to suppose that any woman who ran a large and hospitable country house ever had a light job. The simplicity of pre-war domestic life has been greatly exaggerated. True, the well-to-do hostess did not need to do any actual housework herself, for servants were easy to find, and so long as the supply still exceeded the^demand, comparatively easy to keep. But being human, however efficient and obliging, they always tended to quarrel with one another, so that domestic politics were often inflamed and very preoccupying. And what a vast amount of organisation keeping "open house" involved ! Little did we young people realise we took so much for granted how much we were laboured for, what labyrinthine plans were woven for our enjoyment. Morning after morning I would find my mother what we called "cop- ing" her breakfast tray pushed to one side, her bed littered with sheets and sheets of paper scribbled all over with tangled plans for the day, and I would have to try to help her to comb out some of the worst of these tangles, for though she was not good at delegating, she liked sympathy, and, even if to only reject it, advice.