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91b Harley Street, W.,

March 15, 1910.

My dear Rupert,

It gave me real joy to see your hand-writing again this morning on the breakfast-table. Only last week I had been thinking that one of your rare letters was about due. So you have just had the time of your life, have you, during your last shoot in Kashmir, and find Meerut, as a result, pretty deadly—and oh to be in England now that April's nearly there? A pestilent thing, isn't it, this divine discontent? Only last week I had a letter from old Bob Lynn. You remember Bob. You were his fag, I think, for half a term. London, London, London—that was the burden of his desire; and he with a trout stream, by turns cavernous and romantic and sheerly lyrical, splashing his very doorstep!

And now here are you, too, sighing for Pall Mall and the Park, whereas I, who have them both, would hold six months at Meerut as a cheap price indeed for those seven weeks of Kashmir forests. Is it racial, or universal, or merely temperamental, I wonder, this passionate yearning to be elsewhere—some uncrushable remnant of Romance? I give it up. I am sure that it is a nuisance; and equally certain that it is in reality the very salt of life.

Coming home sometimes in a tube railway-carriage—the latest invention of the modern impersonal Devil—I glance down the long line of returning City faces. There they are, sleek, absorbed, consciously prosperous. And I wonder if they are to be read as indications of an absolute content; or do they conceal, by some stern effort of will, a restless desire for snow mountains, forests, moors, streams, sunshine, anything in fact that is the antithesis of Oxford Circus? It is hard to believe it; and yet I am not so sure that it is even unlikely. For as Matthews, the alienist, said to me the other day, the only really contented people are usually to be found in lunatic asylums. So we must give them the benefit of the doubt. But it's news that you want and not surmise.

And first of all let me reassure you, and with no shadow of professional reserve, about your aunt—I was almost going to write your mother—Lady Wroxton. For a month or two, it is true, I was really in anxiety about her. Sir Hugh's death was a literal dividing in twain of every interest of her life, and the very breadth and diversity of these was the consequent measure of her suffering. But, as you know, that fine, deep-founded will of hers could never really fail her. And even in the darkest days of her first grief and almost complete insomnia it was there for us inadequate physicians to work upon—our stay and hers. Since then she has been resting down at Stoke, and has been progressing slowly but steadily. I saw her last month for half an hour, and Rochester, one of the best of G.P.'s, has written to me with increasing confidence in each letter; so that I hope, when you return in the autumn, you will find her again the strong, serene woman whom we both love so well.

As regards ourselves—well, if the ratio between happiness and history that is supposed to hold good for nations is equally true of families, ours must be singularly blessed. For, upon my soul, I find it very hard to think of any at all. We are all a little older, of course, and both Esther and I have made modest additions to our equipment—of grey hairs. For me there is, at any rate, in this the compensation of that increasing maturity of appearance which lends weight to my opinions in the eyes of a good many of my patients. For Esther, I suppose, there is none. But (I speak of course as a husband. And who should know better?) they are not altogether unbecoming.

And it is chiefly in the children that the march of time is being most visibly displayed for us. Every month, or so it seems to us, they are altering before our eyes. And the adventures, as a consequence, have been chiefly theirs. Horace, for example, has filled out and solidified to an alarming extent during the last year or so, tips the scale at thirteen stone, ventures an occasional opinion on wine and the other members of its trinity, and has succeeded in attaining his Rugger "blue." It is his last year at Cambridge though and I'm afraid that the memory of his one and only Varsity match at Queen's is likely to be a little chequered. For, as you probably know, it was a record defeat; and though both teams were fairly matched as regarded the forwards, Oxford was vastly superior in all other departments of the game, as the sporting papers say. But it was a great spectacle for the onlookers. The Oxford threes, magnificently set in motion by their stand-off half, were quite an ideal picture of clever and unselfish attack. Time and again they swept down the field, alert, speedy, and opportunist, in the cleanest sense of the word. The weakness of the opposition flattered them, no doubt. But it was a splendid and invigorating exhibition for all that, and one that must have sent the blood tingling enviously down a good many middle-aged arteries. For there's always something superbly tonic about this particular match, emanating even more from the surrounding crowd than from the actual struggle of healthy young athletes that it has come to witness. There is no other large crowd quite like it, so unanimously well-coloured, clean, and cheerful, so lusty of shoulder and clear of eye. The winter air has set a colour in the girls' cheeks, to be heightened presently by the instructed ardour with which they follow the doings of their cousins and brothers, or cousins' and brothers' friends. And even the old duffers among us seem to don an infectious vitality as we greet our grey-haired friends by rope and doorway. The strained eyes and late-night cheeks that are not uncommon at such comparable gatherings as those at Lord's and Henley are to be sought in vain at this mid-winter festival. And I can think of no sounder answer to the modern cries of race-degeneracy than a stroll round Queen's at half-time. "Ah, but that shows you merely the cream," you may tell me. But then races, like milks, must be judged, I think, by the cream that they produce. And this particular spectacle at Queen's is sufficiently reassuring both as to quality and amount.

Well, it was a great game, and I wish you could have been there to see it. Molly, with the halo of Newnham still upon her, was as enthusiastic as her tradition will allow, while Claire, on a special holiday from her school at Eastbourne, was quite openly broken-hearted for poor Horace's sake. However, he got enough hero-worshipping next day to soothe the most wounded of defeated warriors. The more prosaic problem of how to tackle his future is troubling him now; and I more than half suspect him of designs on Medicine.

Molly, on the other hand, is disturbed by no such uncertainty. She is already on the committee of the W.S.P.U., which being interpreted means the Women's Social and Political Union; and concerns herself vigorously with the vexed questions of adult suffrage and the feminine vote. Besides this she is assistant manager of a girls' club in Hoxton, and combines an intense faith in the political future of her sex with an ardent admiration for Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw. Religiously, she is, for the moment (to the acute distress of some of our nearer relatives), inclining to an up-to-date form of polytheism; but hedges with an occasional (rather unobtrusive) attendance at a more orthodox early service. Fortunately she is inveterately addicted to the coldest of cold baths, the roughest of towels, and a plentiful breakfast. Moreover another phase of experience is presenting itself modestly, but with a quite unmistakable sturdiness, to her consideration. He is a nice, open-air sort of boy (entre nous, Bob Lynn junior. What fogies we are getting, to be sure), untroubled about the constitution of his ego, and frankly bored by politics, but with a passion for his microscope that must be running, I think, a very neck-and-neck sort of race with his admiration for Miss Molly.

Tom, as you know, is still at Rugby; and about him we are all, that is Esther and I and Jakes, his house-master, a little anxious. For it seems that during the latter part of his Christmas holidays, which he spent with a friend at Scarborough, he fell very deeply under the influence of one of those ardent, but dangerous, people possessed of what they describe as a passion for souls. This particular one, a sort of nondescript with private means, was what he called, and what he has tried to make Tom and his friend, an "out and outer."

Obviously shyly, Tom sent us a programme of this man's meetings—he was holding a mission to schoolboys—from which we gathered that his particular spiritual preserves are confined to our larger public schools. He was a little careful to emphasise this. Boys from elsewhere were only permitted to hear him by special introduction. He has not apparently been to a public school himself; but owns, or was once owned by, one of the more recent colleges at Cambridge. I hope that I am not writing this too bitterly, for I am trying to be kind to his motives. But the results of his efforts upon Tom have been, up to the present, rather devastating. The boy is quite clearly in earnest, has been indeed very profoundly stirred. With one or two others he has started a meeting for prayer in his house, has given up singing his comic songs, and has been systematically tackling his fellows about their souls' health.

Knowing a little bit about the boy, I should scarcely have been able to believe all this, if Jakes hadn't written to me so very fully about the matter. He is acting quite wisely, I think—has given full permission and facilities for their little meetings, with a gentle word or two about the inadvisability of too much publicity. Nevertheless a certain amount of natural, and, as I can't help feeling, healthy hostility has sprung up against the movement—a hostility that we both fear is being interpreted by the boys, and their spiritual adviser, as persecution for their Lord's sake.

I doubt if you'll understand much of this. Your temperament has always been too downright, too untroubled with spiritual questionings, too simply aware of the "things we don't talk about." "Isn't this all rather like cant?" I can imagine you wondering. But it isn't by any means all cant. And that is what makes the whole question so difficult to deal with. For into the warm nest of the boy's soul this holy blunderer has thrust his easy, ignorant fingers, pulling out, as it were, the fledgling spiritual secrets. They were not ready for the air and the light and the winds. They were tucked away, as a wise Nature meant them to be, under the protecting feathers of the natural boy's carelessness. And now, since they have been plucked out into the open for all the world to see, they must needs flap their premature wings in a sort of pitiful, earnest foolishness. While we, who know so well what has really happened, can only stand by, at whatever cost, to see that the half-sprouted pinions may not beat themselves into some permanent distortion or futility—may become, after all, those strong, supporting structures that they were designed for at their birth.

And all the while there will be the ever-present danger of the natural boy himself discovering suddenly, in a dumb sort of way, that his fledgling has been making (as he will most certainly put it) a little fool of itself. And then how desperately likely will he be to disown it altogether, to his lifelong incompleteness. Self-constituted missioners to schoolboys should be required to possess a licence. And it should be pretty difficult to obtain.

Claire you will still find, I think, when you come home next autumn, very much of the pure child, for all her fifteen and a half years. Hockey and Henty bound her physical and mental horizons, and she writes periodical letters to Tom urging the army as the only possible profession for him. And now I must put a stop to what will seem in your bachelor eyes the prosy outpourings of the typical family man. But then your Kashmir precipices are not for all of us, you know; and I have only just been giving you what you asked for.

Yours as ever,

Peter Harding.

P.S.—There will of course be a spare bedroom and a well-stoked fire here against your return next October.