Читать книгу The Romance of a Pro-Consul - James Milne - Страница 22

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Things call to each other after the great silence has fallen, scenes come together, and that is how it seems here.

A ship, bound on a far voyage, lay in Plymouth waters the day that the Queen succeeded to the throne. It was laden with an expedition for the new wonderland of the Australias, whither it duly sailed. As leader, the expedition had a young lieutenant of the 83rd Foot Regiment, George Grey.

On a spring afternoon, fifty-seven years later, there landed at the same port, from a New Zealand liner, an aged man who received marked attention. He was as a gnarled oak of the wide-ranged British forest, and the younger trees bent in salute to him. It was Sir George Grey, returned finally to the Motherland, which had sent him forth to build nations.

He had gone in a tubby wooden craft, the winds his carrier, across oceans that were pathless, except to the venturer. He returned by steam, through seas which it had tamed to the churn and rumble of the screw. What thought in the contrasting pictures of the world! The two Englands might have met each other in the street, and passed, strangers.

'From the windows of my hotel at Plymouth,' Sir George recalled, 'I watched the citizens proclaim the young Queen. Who among them could have imagined the glorious reign hers was to be? It was to surpass in bounty of achievement all foretelling.'

Now, he would meet, for the last time, the Sovereign who, like himself, had tended the rise of Oceana. This was at Windsor, to which he had summons soon after he reached England. He had been exalted a member of the Privy Council, and must be sworn in by the Queen. The tribute was cheerful to him, since the very nature of it set seal upon his services to the Empire. The longing for some word of England's remembrance had assuredly been in his heart, which had often been left desolate. It was all rapture to England, like a child's to its mother.

'For mere honours themselves,' was his broad attitude thereon, 'I entertain no special regard. A title to one's name, a red ribbon, or something else, what are they but baubles, unless there is more? What more? Why, they hand down a record of the public work that a person may have endeavoured to perform. In that respect they should have esteem, being the recognition of efforts to serve Queen and people.

'Nothing could be more unfortunate than that a country should neglect services rendered to it. The loss is its own, because, apart from justice to the individual, his example is not kept alive to encourage others coming after. In so far, then, as that reasoning may apply to myself—not very far, perhaps—I do sincerely value any honours I have received. Not otherwise; and it is easy to understand that a distinction, granted without adequate cause, might exercise a really pernicious effect upon the tone of a nation.'

While Sir George awaited the Queen's commands at Windsor, she sent him them. He was not to go on his knees, a usual part of the ceremony of swearing in a Privy Councillor. She had remembered, with a woman's feeling, that here was a patriarch, nimble no longer.

The meeting between Queen and servant was stately, in that they were the two people who linked most intimately Great and Greater Britain. To them Oceana was a living, sentient thing, not merely a glorious name and expanse. It had squalled in their ears. They could go back to the beginnings, could witness the whole panorama of the Colonies unroll itself. They stood for the history of a high endeavour, which had been nobly crowned. Oft, there had been weary clouds across the sky, not seldom heavy darkness. But the sun was kept shining, and finally all had become light. Oceana was grown up, and she gathered the four corners of her robe into that Windsor audience chamber.

Of the Queen's order Sir George had the simple deliverance, 'It showed how careful Her Majesty is to manifest a strong consideration for all those who come in contact with her, a most taking quality in a Sovereign.' Yet, for the first time in his life, he was to disobey that Sovereign. Nothing, not even her protest of 'No, no,' could stop him from getting down on his knees, as if he had been a younger subject. The infirmities were conquered by his desire to pay to the Queen that reverence and loyalty which had always been hers. The bonds of age were burst, although his quaint complaint about himself that very evening was, 'You know I want a minute or two to get in motion.'

Despite bowed shoulders and rusty joints, he still had something of the lithe, strenuous carriage of his youth. In his dignity of manner, there almost seemed to you a glimpse of the gallant age when forbears had gone whistling to the headsman. He was of a line which counted in English history, which among its women had a Lady Jane Grey. His mother, with the mother's wistful love and pride, had traced that line for him. He was not deeply moved, unless by the romance and the tragedy that gathered about it.

But the aristocrat abode in the democrat, nature's doing. He was of the people in being whole-souled for them; he was not by them. Verily, he had been through the winters in their interest. The ripe harvest was in his hair, which had become thin above a face, rugged with intellect; over a broad, decisive brow, strewn with furrows. It was a head of uncommon shape, with bumps and a poise, indicating at once the idealist and the man of action. There it spoke truly, for Sir George was both; the two were one in him.

The chief secret of his personality seemed to rest in his eyes, and it was in them you met the dreamer of dreams. 'So I was often called,' he would mention, 'and the answer is to hand. Many of the dreams which I dreamt have been realised; that knowledge has been permitted me. Whether it is any comfort I'm not sure, because, after all, my dreams are not nearly exhausted.

'Dreaming dreams! I trust that Englishmen will never cease to do that, for otherwise we should be falling away from ourselves. To dream is to have faith, and faith is strength, whether in the individual or in the nation. Sentiment! Yes, only sentiment must remain, probably, the greatest of human forces governing the world.'

The store, reflected in Sir George's eyes, was what gave him his control over men. In those depths, blue as a summer sky, were many lights, which caught Robert Louis Stevenson and were comprehended of him. The return observation was, 'I never met anybody with such a bright, at moments almost weird, genius-gifted eye, as that of Stevenson.' Sir George could fire imagination in the most ordinary mortal, carrying him off into enchanted realms. He sailed to strange skies, a knight-errant of a star, and he could tow the masses with him. He lifted them out of themselves, and put a label on their vague yearnings. They had imagination, the instinct upward, and were grateful to have it discovered.

The poetry of Sir George's nature flavoured his language, alike in manner of delivery and turn of phrase. It had a quaint old-world style; it fell slowly, in a low, soothing voice. He might have spent his, days in the cloister, rather than in the din of hammering up hearths for the Anglo- Saxon. Perhaps it was that he had talked so long to the hills of Oceana, catching their simplicity and music. You were reminded of the measured English of an old and lovable book, just as you grew used to read in his face what he was to say, before the words had begun to flow. Never was there a face more quick to reflect the mind, more pliable to humour, more luminous at some stirring idea or deed, more indignant at the bare notion of a wrong inflicted, softer at the call of sympathy.

Sir George had travelled to Windsor with the Earl of Rosebery, then Prime Minister, and that was an agreeable memory. Being asked what characteristics he noted as most prominent in the Premier, he replied: 'Oh, his extraordinary readiness at seeing the humorous side of anything, his almost boyish love of fun. He seems to have a power of dismissing the weight of public affairs, of diverting himself with the playfulness of youth.' Sir George was living in Park Place, St. James's, and on returning from Windsor the Premier drove him there. His rooms were at Number 7, and here the street ended in a sharp incline, with somebody's yard beyond.

Sir George suggested that the coachman should stop, and let him down at a point where the horses could readily turn. 'Not at all,' Lord Rosebery insisted, 'I'll drive you to the door and we'll manage to turn somehow.' A trifle anxious, Sir George waited on his door-step to see how this was to be done.

'Quick of eye,' he related, 'the coachman discerned the possibilities of the yard at the top of the incline. Accordingly, he whipped into it, wheeled round, and trotted gently away past me. There sat the Premier in the carriage, waving his hat in a triumph, the fun of which quite infected me.'

Sir George appreciated kindly attentions the more, in that he was himself a king in courtesy, with his heart ever on the latch. He estimated the side of Lord Rosebery's character, thus manifested, to be among the best ornaments he could have. 'It seems clear to me,' were his words, 'that he is a man of sincerity and simple nobility, one who wishes with all his heart to do what he can for his fellow men.' That was Sir George's test of all public effort, as it had been what he applied to himself. There could be none higher.

Mere weight of years could not quench the ardour and hope which had always burned so brightly in Sir George Grey. As well expect him to forget that chivalrous manner of his, bewitcher of the veriest stranger. He would, find his tall hat, search out his staunch umbrella, and convoy the visitor forth, when the hour of parting had arrived. Nothing less would suffice him, and as to his company, it was a delight for ever. Another veteran might have been lonely with a younger generation knocking at the door, indeed in full possession. He was not; he strode in the van with the youngest.

Yet he felt, perhaps, the void time had wrought in the circle of his friends. He held the fort silently, while the long scythe cut another swathe very near him. He heard that his friend, James Anthony Froude, who had been lying ill in Devonshire, was steadily losing strength.

'I have made inquiries about him, poor fellow,' he murmured, 'but now I must telegraph for the latest particulars. He and I are old companions, and I have liking and admiration for him. When he visited me at my island of Kawau, off the New Zealand coast, we had a capital while together. He wanted to ask me, if I approved the manner in which he had written Carlyle's life, a subject that brought him a good deal of criticism. My reply was that I believed Carlyle would have wished to be presented just as he was; not a half picture, but complete, for that would ultimately make him appear all the greater.'

Somewhat before his illness, Froude published a book, and the London daily paper which Sir George Grey took in, had a handsome review of it. 'I'll send the cutting to Froude,' he declared; 'it will do him good to know that his latest writings are thoroughly appreciated.' Within a few days, he had news from Devonshire that Froude had been able to have part of the article read to him, and that he was gratified by it. Sir George was happy at his little service having carried so well, and mentioned a larger one which Froude had wished to render him.

'Hardly was I in England this time,' the history of it ran, 'than I had a letter from Froude, intimating how glad he would be to put my name forward for that high distinction, the Oxford honorary degree. This gave me a grand chance to rally him, since I was already in possession of the honours of Oxford and Cambridge. Those of the former I received after my first administration of New Zealand, those of the latter when I was re- called from South Africa. At Oxford, the students, with riotous zest, sang the "King of the Cannibal Isles," which, more or less, I had been. Froude had forgotten all that, but he agreed that no man could hope to have such a treat twice in a lifetime.'

It would have been curious if Sir George, a maker of British Parliaments, had not found his way to their cradle at Westminster. He had himself been a candidate for membership, but the House of Commons was only to know him as a visitor. 'Why,' he said, 'I met Adderley, now in the Lords, who once wanted to impeach me. Perhaps I deserved to be impeached—I don't remember!—but anyhow we had a very agreeable chat about old days.' Sir George, as a Privy Councillor, had been escorted to the steps of the throne in the House of Lords. There he met again the Marquis of Salisbury, who, as Lord Robert Cecil, had stood up for him, years and years before, in the Commons, even to the extent of criticising the English of Bulwer Lytton's despatches. When he went to Australasia, to fortify his health and study the New World, he was the guest, for a period, of Sir George in New Zealand.

'Some of his friends,' said the latter, 'were great friends of mine; for example, Beresford Hope, who founded the "Saturday Review," and Cook, who edited it. Lord Robert was tall and slight, and, when he came to New Zealand, not at all strong. While he was with me, he saw a good deal of the manner in which a Colony was conducted, and of the relationships between it and the Mother Country. He would read the despatches that I wrote and received, and generally made a study which may have proved useful to him in his subsequent career.

'As I recollect Lord Robert Cecil in New Zealand, he was not more fond of exercise than Lord Salisbury appears to be to-day, always being studious. He did not care to take long walks, but once I persuaded him, with another young Englishman, to go and see the beautiful Wairarapa Valley. They walked there and back, and on the last evening, while returning, were caught in a terrific rain-storm. They sought the shelter of some rocks, contrived to make a fire, and over it dried their shirts.'

Nothing afforded Sir George more genial occupation than a talk about books or politics, the latter always on the lofty ground to which, somehow, he could at once lift them. He had a knack of taking a question and shaking it on to your lap. You had it, as you never quite had it before, and to your fascinated ear the version seemed the only possible one. The secret was that Sir George laid hold of the kernel of a subject, and worked outwards—an expositor, not a controversialist. When evening waned he would turn to Epictetus, and then to a well-thumbed New Testament. It was the hour of meditation.

'I have studied the New Testament in various languages,' he said, 'thus getting more insight of it than I could have got through a single language. Never, during my early exploring work, was I without my New Testament to comfort and sustain me. The Sermon on the Mount is the great charter of mankind, its teachings the highest wisdom for all times and all climes. It and other pieces, which I might select, are of exceeding beauty and full of guidance and counsel. They inculcate in the human heart a love of one's fellows, irrespective of colour.'

He read that teaching into the happier London which greeted him, after an absence of more than twenty-five years. At last, the museums and art galleries were really open to the people, who thronged them, drinking in knowledge. He noted the children playing in the parks, and they were better dressed, the parks themselves better kept. You can judge a nation by the state of its children's boots, and these had fewer holes. The poor London had, and ever would have, but she was not the callous mother of other years. She felt for those who were down.

Sir George would ride by 'bus, except, indeed, when in pursuit of some volume for that beloved library at Auckland. Then, nothing would satisfy his eagerness but hot foot and back with the trophy, scanning its pages in his scholar's joy. But a-top the 'bus was the working man, homeward bound, and he was getting more out of life. Manhood was in him, he evidently had at last a free, firm seat in the saddle of which Providence had always held the stirrup.

The feeling of human brotherhood was wider, deeper, the benefits springing therefrom apparent all round. Penny fares were bringing classes into contact with each other, who were formerly as far divided as if they had lived in different planets. The London policeman's upheld hand, was an eloquent speech on the sacred meaning of law to a free people. Youth helped age to a seat in a public vehicle, and the bricklayer quenched the fire of his pipe because the smoke annoyed a lady sitting behind him.

Sir George would have built a bricklayer's statue on the best site that London could provide. Not that he was fond of statues, unless they happened likewise to be art; but that such a one would have carried its meaning. There was already a statue of himself at Cape Town, and his Auckland admirers had a scheme for another.

'No doubt they'll take care it does you justice,' he was joked.

'Well, I don't know,' he answered, a smile puckering his face, 'but perhaps they should wait until I'm gone. They might want to pull it down again, if I did not behave all right. Now, that would hurt my feelings.'