good at mental diagnosis, added that burnish without which good manners often lose half their power. What she particularly insisted on was the practice of that graciousness of which she herself afforded so admirable an example. Naturally, like a good mother, she always reproved us for bad manners, or for being unkind to other children, or selfish, or affected, or oafish, or sulky. Her direst thunders, however, were kept for anything which approached ill-breeding. Giving ourselves airs, or "posing," or any other form of juvenile vulgarity, were well-nigh unforgivable sins.

But she did not content herself with inculcating the positive side of good manners. She was equally strong on the negative side. For example, if there was a party of farm tenants, or cottagers, a school-feast, or anything of the kind, both when we were small and half grown-up, she insisted that we must never dream of keeping in a corner by ourselves. We must go and do our duty in entertaining our guests. No excuses of shyness or not liking to talk to people one didn't know, or suggestions that they would think us putting on side if we went up to them, were allowed for a moment. The injunctions we received were that, at a party in our own house, we must never think of our own pleasure or enjoyment, but must devote ourselves wholly and solely to the pleasure of our guests. The sight of anyone sitting moping in a corner and looking bored or unhappy was the destruction of a party. Such persons, if seen, must be pounced upon at once, amused, and made much of, till they were perfectly happy, as "the guests who got more attention than anybody else." In a word, we were taught that the strength of the social chain is its weakest link. It was quite safe to leave the big people, or the big people's children, to look after themselves. The people to be made much of and treated like royalty were those who looked uncomfortable or seemed to feel out of it. The result was that my mother's parties were never a failure. Though her ill-health never allowed her to be a hostess on a big scale, her parties, whether in Somersetshire or at Cannes, were always voted delightful. Everyone, from Somersetshire farmer or clergyman, to the notables of a Riviera winter resort, owned her social charm. As an example of it, I remember how one winter, which we spent at Bournemouth, for my mother's health, the invalid's drawing-room became at once the centre of a memorable little society, consisting, as far as I remember, of people whom we had never known before. There was a delightful old Mr. Marshall, of the Marshalls of the Lakes, who used to come and play whist with her, and with whom we boys sometimes rode. Though he was about eighty, he kept up his riding and liked to have a boy to ride with him. Another old gentleman, attractive in his manner, in his dress, and in his kindly, old-fashioned dignity, was Lord Suffolk. He dressed like "the Squire" in the old _Punches_. He wore a low-crowned, broadish-brimmed hat, Bedford cord breeches and gaiters, and a light-brown or buff cloth coat and waistcoat. He had two invalid daughters, and these, if I remember rightly, were the cause of the family having a villa at Bournemouth.

It was, however, either at the house-parties at Chewton or at Strawberry Hill, which were hardly considered complete by Lady Waldegrave without my mother, or else again at Cannes in her own villa that she made her main impression upon people of the greater world. Though of good parts, she was not in any sense intellectual. I never heard her attempt to say brilliant things or epigrammatic things, or to talk about books or historic people.

She was, like so many charming women, perfectly natural and perfectly at her ease, and full of receptive interest. When she talked it was always to draw out her interlocutor and never to show off her own cleverness. She was quite as popular, indeed I had almost said more popular, with women as with men, and had as great a fascination for young people as for old. I remember well our pleasure in being told of a letter written by one of the big London hostesses who had come out to Cannes, made my mother's acquaintance, and fallen a charm to her winning voice, her warm regard, and her gracious eyes. She had written to a friend, saying, in effect,

What on earth did you mean by not telling me more about your cousin, Lady Strachey? She turns out to be one of the most delightful people I have ever met, and yet you never breathed a word about her. Why did you want to keep her to yourself? Through your selfishness I have missed three or four weeks of her.

It is notoriously difficult to describe charm, and I shall make no attempt, except to say that my mother's spell did not consist in good looks in the ordinary sense of the word. She had a witching expression, an exceedingly graceful carriage of her head and body, and a good figure; but her face was so mobile and so entirely governed by her smile that photographs and pictures were always pronounced as "impossible" and "utterly unlike."

Though she was in no sense nervous, the attempt to sit for her picture seemed at once to break the spell and destroy that "_beau regard_" which was, I feel sure, the secret of the pleasure she spread around her. No doubt she took trouble to please, but she had the art of concealing her art. No one ever criticised her as "theatrical" or "artificial."

Her children fully felt her charm. Looking back, I can now see that she, most wisely, took as much trouble to fascinate us as she did the rest of the world. She would not mind this remark, for she was no naturalist, but held that you ought to take as much trouble to be polite and to give pleasure to your nearest and dearest as to strangers. Anyway, we were never allowed to be rude or careless to her, or to anybody else merely because they were well-loved relations. We never failed to get up from our chairs when she entered the room, or to open doors for her, or to show her any other physical form of politeness. But she did not inculcate this by anything approaching harshness, or by a sharp tongue. All she did was to make us feel that we were uncouth bores, to be pitied rather than condemned, if we failed in the minor politenesses.

No doubt she was assisted here by the fact of being an invalid, and also by the good example which my father set us. He was one of the best-bred of men as well as one of the noblest and most simple-hearted. I shall never forget the patient courtesy with which he would treat some old village woman who was positively storming at him in regard to alleged grievances. His politeness, however, never had in it any studied element. Nobody could ever have said that he was overdoing it. Again, there was no inverted snobbishness about him. He was quite as polite to a great lady as to a cottager's wife.

I will undertake to say that in his whole life he had never shown off--a thing which could be said of very few men, but which, after all, is the secret of all good breeding.

But to return to my mother. She also never showed off, though with her the art of pleasing and being pleased was very carefully studied. She inherited this quality from her father, Dr. Symonds. She also found in him her example for the exact conduct of the social code. I remember her saying that, though her father was a very hard-worked doctor, and often had to take meals quickly and at odd times, he made it an absolute rule, no matter how busy he was, never to get into a rush, or be fussed, or do things in a huggermugger way. If he came in late and tired, he would eat his dinner as quietly and decorously as if he had got several hours before him. Everything had to be done decently and in order. He would not dream of getting up from his chair if he wanted an extra spoon or fork in a hurry, but would either send one of his children to get it for him or else ring the bell for the butler.

This was not an attempt at grandeur, but due to a feeling that if he once got into chaotic ways he would go to pieces. Probably he felt the necessity all the more from the fact that he was a widower and might the more easily have dropped into untidy and slovenly household ways.

I have no time to dwell on my mother's most intimate friendship with Lady Waldegrave and with their habit of writing daily letters to each other, and of the social and political life which my mother shared with her friend as well as her health would permit. For my present purposes, what matters, though it sounds abominably egotistical to say so, is the effect of my mother upon my character and life. Unquestionably the fact of her being an invalid was a great lesson. In the first place, it did a great deal to educate her children to be unselfish. It was a rule of the house that everything was to be sacrificed to my mother's comfort, for she was often not only in great pain but dangerously ill. My father was, in any case, the most unselfish of men, but we might have regarded that, as children often will, as a kind of personal quality of his own, like a lame knee, or a dislike of draughts, or a fondness for cold mutton, or other simple forms of living. When we saw his daily and hourly sacrifice of himself to my mother and that tenderness of heart which never failed him, we must have been made of rock or oak not to be inspired by an example so noble and fraught with so magnificent a pathos. We showed badly in comparison with our father, but still we had him always before us, and if we were ever tempted to exhibit selfishness or want of consideration to my mother, his devotion was a standing, though never an open, rebuke, and brought the bitterest remorse.

My mother maintained the true dignity of the sickroom. She never complained either of the hard fate which chained one who loved the world and its amusements so much to her bed, nor, again, did she ever cherish or show the slightest grievance if we had seemed unkind or had not done what she would have liked us to do. It is needless to say that the effect of this was exactly what she would have desired, though not admitted even to herself, for she was not a person at all self-conscious or self-analytical in these matters.

The fact remains that people who are brought up in a house with an invalid, where that invalid has the love, respect, and devotion of the head of the home, get a valuable lesson. There is more than that. The sight of pain and suffering and the imminence of sorrow and danger, if it be not too terrifying, is good for children. It makes them early acquainted with the realities of life and its essential sternness. Then, when death or sorrow makes its inevitable descent, the child is prepared to meet it, or knows, at any rate, the spirit in which it ought to be met. Those who have never seen Death or heard the swing of his scythe, till he suddenly bursts upon them, or upon those they love dearly, are greatly to be pitied. They have not learnt the art of quietening the soul in face of an inexorable command.

_Timor mortis_ is a reality, and we can be, and ought to be, prepared for it. The sick-room, if children are made to understand its significance in a wise and kindly spirit, and through the conduct of such people as my father and my mother, is a teacher of no mean order.

CHAPTER V

MY FATHER'S STORIES OF THE STRACHEY FAMILY

Delightful as were my father's literary and historical stories and observations, already described, I liked them best when they dealt with our own family and its traditions. My father, though without a trace of anything approaching pride of birth, knew his own family history well, and was never tired of relating stories of "famous men and our fathers that begat us." As a great Shakespearian devotee, he specially delighted to tell us of our direct ancestor, William Strachey, "the friend of Ben Jonson," for so we knew him.