CARRINGTON MEWS,

SHEPHERD MARKET,

November 25th.

DEAR Agatha,—I anticipated your wish that I should make Chelsea the object of my next pilgrimage. Mrs. D. and I went there yesterday.

The gulls were very busy about nothing over the river, and they harmonised with the colour scheme of the afternoon. Pale sunshine, a sky of washed-out blue, a silver river, wharves, and leafless trees in Battersea Park veiled by a curtain which was part autumn mist and part smoke from the factory chimneys on the south side.

The square brick tower of the old parish church makes a landmark to the barges and steamboats on their silent passing, and at night its clock shines out like a full moon above the plane trees which line the Embankment.

A quaint old place it is inside, with a great west gallery that encroaches almost to the chancel. Where the pews leave off the crowding large tombs begin, and where the tombs end the discoloured walls are covered with coats of arms. All this, seen by the homely light of day, which falls through the windows of plain glass, has an intimate and pleasant appearance. Even the ancient tombs in their proximity to the worshippers seem friendly.

In Sir Thomas More's chapel a certain Arthur Georges, who died in 1660, lies under the feet of the person who happens to occupy the chair which partly hides the inscription on his tomb:—

"Here lies interred the body of that generous and worthy Gent, Arthur Georges, Esq. Here sleepes and feeles noe pressure of ye stone. He that had all the Georges Soules in One. Here the ingenious Arthur lies to be bewailed by marble and our eyes...."

"The ingenious Arthur!" One pictures him. A man who had "a way with women". Apt to get into scrapes, irresponsible, but with a knack of getting out of a tight corner. Kind-hearted, given to take what life offers in the way of pleasure, and always ready to pass on good things, and do a good turn to the under-dog. The inscription goes on to say, "When all the Georges rise he'll rise again," which pious belief set me speculating as to whether I might some day meet the "ingenious Arthur". I'm sure I should like him.

Mrs. Darling was visibly impressed when I told her that the body of Sir Thomas More (whose head had been thrown from London Bridge into his daughter's arms below) was in all probability buried under the church. His tomb in the chancel consists of a ledge and a tablet of black marble surmounted by a flat Gothic arch. On the ledge was a bunch of tawny chrysanthemums and a cross of scarlet immortelles, so the old man who went to the scaffold rather than be a party to the chicanery and concupiscence of Henry VIII is not yet forgotten. Sir Thomas More, it has always seemed to me, carried his asceticism to extreme limits in the matter of his marriage. "Having determined," so says the historian, "by the advice of his ghostly father to be a married man, he was offered the choice of the two daughters of a friend, and although his affection most served him to the second, for that he thought her the fairest and best favoured, yet when he thought within himself that it would be a grief and some blemish to the eldest to have the youngest sister preferred before her, he, out of a kind of compassion, settled his fancy on the eldest, and soon afterwards married her."

More's first marriage, curiously arranged as it was, seemed to have proved happier than his second, and one is driven to the conclusion that the great man lacked discrimination in affairs of the heart. Hear his second wife's tirade when visiting in the Tower. "I marvel," says she, "that you, who have been hitherto always taken for a wise man, will now so play the fool as to lie here in this close-fitting prison, and be content to be shut up thus with mice, and rats, when you might be abroad at your liberty, with the favour and goodwill of the King and his council, if you would but do as the bishops and best learned of his realm have done."

Mrs. Darling said that was what she called "a sensible woman," but when I explained the marital complications of Henry VIII, and the particular offence with which the Lord Chancellor was charged, the old lady changed her front, saying she was glad some one had had the "spunk to stand up to that ole rapscallion in the 'tammy'!" Mrs. D. is evidently familiar with pictures of the amorous monarch.

We found our way to that corner of the church where are the chained books. Mrs. D., whose knowledge of literature included, by hearsay, "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," accorded a glance of fearful curiosity at the brown back of the dread old volume. The books, the verger told us, were taken out of the case and dusted once a month, and I envied the person to whom the task was allotted.

I think, though, I'd choose a bright early morning when morbid fancies do not find easy foothold. "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," in the old church at dusk, might raise ugly phantoms which no bell or candle could lay.

In these ancient buildings, which are so jealous of the admission of light, the sunbeams play impish pranks once they gain entrance. They are as elusive as ghosts, and as nimble as fairies. They throw ruddy gleams on discoloured walls, setting old brasses afire, and giving a semblance of warmth to the sculptured features of the dead. The venerable walls are the target for their elfish tricks and wanton caresses, their fugitive withdrawals and stealthy returns. The soundless game was in progress as we left the church, and I shall always picture the quaint homely old building touched to beauty by the tender flitting of these noiseless visitors.

Crosby Hall, that fragment of antiquity, is within a stone's throw of the church, and to anyone not knowing the story of its presence there, it must appear a strange erection standing in the centre of a piece of waste ground surrounded by a hoarding. It was a daring and ingenious idea to uproot it from its native soil in Bishopsgate Street, and if the horrid crime had to be done, no better spot than Chelsea, on the site of Sir Thomas More's garden, could be found for its transplanting.

We walked all round the hoarding seeking entrance, and at last found a hitherto unnoticed door. The caretaker said the Hall was not open to visitors, except by appointment, but that if we liked we could go in. We went and found the place like a huge, cold barn, its fine oak flooring chalked out for Badminton, whilst into the cavernous old fireplace, decorated with Sir John Crosby's crest—a ram, armed and hoofed—had been put a hideous iron stove. The magnificent timber roof, forty feet above, looked down on these innovations sadly, and the glorious oriel window, with the old glass emblazoned with coats of arms, was eloquent of the times when Richard, Duke of Gloucester, entertained there in 1470, and of such occasions as the visit of Princess Katherine of Aragon to Sir Bartholomew Bird, or the masque performed by the students of Gray's Inn before Queen Elizabeth. What changes of fortune have visited it since! amongst which it has figured in turn as a Presbyterian Chapel and a restaurant! The caretaker's voice echoed hollow in that husk of a building from which the kernel is gone. It had borne its transplanting ill, and even the ghosts, I felt, had deserted it.

Outside, we found the world transfigured by the setting sun, and I left Crosby Hall behind with a sensation of relief. For once in my delvings into the past I had missed the thrill, but the blood-red sun over the river provided a compensation, and I thought of the little house where J. M. W. Turner died close at hand. If ever he haunts the spot it would be at such an hour, when the wizardry of the sinking sun casts its spell of romance and mystery over the most commonplace objects. All too short are such moments, but Turner, that mad genius who lived with his visions of splendour in the midst of dirt and squalor, "the wizened, meagre old man," has snatched and imprisoned for those who come after him the fleeting miracle.

Mrs. Darling, who is tolerant of what she considers my "balmy" propensity for "staring at nothink," occupied herself with watching the craft on the river whilst I meditated before the little green-shuttered house. It lies below the level of the footpath and behind the frontage line of its neighbours, seeking, it seems, as would the man who lived, worked and died there, to evade notice. J. M. W. Turner's action in suddenly and secretly leaving his "den" in Queen Anne's Street to take refuge in Cheyne Walk was dictated by a mad impulse to go into hiding, and one pictures the flight of the strange old man who wanted only to be left alone with his tyrannical mistress, Art. The house is described as being "next door to a ginger-beer shop close to Cremorne Pier". There is no ginger-beer shop now, only "The Aquatic Stores," and Cremorne has long disappeared.

I looked up at the windows and wondered from which one it was that the dying painter watched the gates of heaven open to let out the mystic flood of colour and take in the departing sun. There was the iron balcony on the roof, erected by Turner himself, so that he should not fall off when busy there at his easel. How well he must have known the limitless moods of the river! The silence of its inexorable tides, its liquid fire under the flaming sun, its pale shiver under the silver moon, and its black despair on a winter's night.

Mrs. Darling interrupted my meditations to inform me that a policeman was observing me with suspicion, and that she thought it would be advisable to move on. She said she had noticed on former occasions that my "ixcentrik 'abits" had attracted unwelcome notice, but that she hadn't liked to mention the matter for fear of making me nervous. Pure imagination on the old lady's part, of course, but she finds a certain pleasurable excitement in such fancies, and so I humoured her by walking on with an air of assumed indifference calculated to allay the apprehensions of any "nosey" member of the force.

4th December.

It was too late when we left Cheyne Walk to go to Carlyle's house, and we have paid another visit to Chelsea to-day. The weather which, so far, has been kind to our wanderings, turned the disagreeable side of its face to us this afternoon. The wind was blowing a gale from the north-east, and pieces of paper and dead leaves flew as high as the topmost branches of the plane trees along the Embankment. Mrs. Darling was quite cheerful. She said the cold weather "agreed" with her feet, but, for myself, old age slapped me insultingly in the face with every spiteful gust of the biting blast.

No. 28 Cheyne Row, built in 1708, has a modest exterior which somewhat belies its interior. I rang the bell, the sound prolonging itself in a tinkle that seemed to take a journey to some remote corner of the house, and almost before its warning voice had ceased the door was opened by a girl whose glance set at rest my fears of intrusion. She ushered us into a dim, drab room wainscotted from floor to ceiling, but before I go any further, Agatha, I have a confession to make. It was not Carlyle whom I had chiefly come to see. If the maid had answered my ring and said, "Mr. Carlyle is out, but Mrs. Carlyle is at home," I should certainly not have turned away; indeed, I'm afraid it would have been difficult to disguise my satisfaction at the prospect of a tÊte-À-tÊte with Jane Welsh—Jane, who never sunk her individuality to the extent of becoming "the wife of Thomas Carlyle". Jane, who has always been, and always will be, "Jane Welsh" and not "Jane Carlyle" to her admirers.

It was Jane who had lured me to the old house on this bleak afternoon when I should have been sitting over the fire, forgetting my sixty-five years in a novel of youth. Jane, who in her cheery way describes the house as "an excellent lodgement, and most antique physiognomy, quite to our humour; roomy, substantial, commodious, with closets to satisfy any Bluebeard, ..." and who, in an earlier letter on the same subject, says, "I have a great liking to the massive old concern with the broad staircase and abundant accommodation for crockery. But is it not too near the river? And another idea presents itself along with that wainscot—if bugs have been in the house! Must they not have found there as well as the inmates room without end?" I hope, by the way, that the dear lady's fears were unfounded, but judging from her later letters, I have my doubts.

How shall I describe to you the effect of that chill, prim room, seen in the light of the bleak winter afternoon! One thing of living beauty alone made a link with the present—a great bunch of tawny yellow and white chrysanthemums which a worshipper had brought to the shrine on this, the birthday, of the great man. We had chosen an auspicious date for our visit, and inspired by the coincidence, I sought to animate the dry bones with life. Over the fireplace hangs a picture in which Jane is represented sitting by the fire in this very apartment, whilst her spouse, attired in a plaid dressing-gown, stands with his back against the mantel. Here is the identical room, the identical tables and chairs, the horsehair sofa and pictures, but the room no more resembles the home-like one in the picture than do dried rose leaves placed between the leaves of a book resemble the scented freshness of freshly plucked velvety petals. Ah, well! the dead cannot live again in this world, and those of us who visit ghosts' houses must leave our more material selves on the doorstep.

Everywhere are portraits of the sad, brooding face of Thomas Carlyle. Mrs. D. said the late Mr. D. used to look like that "when 'e'd lost a bit on a 'orse," and I was moved to explain that identical results may be obtained by widely different causes. Who would choose to be a genius if he realised that loneliness was the price? Loneliness, with Jane by the fireside! Strange problem! I looked at her portrait in youth, the heart-shaped face with the parted lips and frank eyes, the dark curls and beautiful throat, and as I looked sentences in her letters came to mind. Referring to her choice of a husband, she says, "Indeed, I continue quite content with my bargain; I could wish him a little less yellow and a little more peaceable, but that is all." And again, when writing to him, she says, "Try all that ever you can to be patient and good-natured with your povera piccola Gooda, and then she loves you, and is ready to do anything on earth that you wish.... But when the signor della casa has neither kind look nor word for me, what can I do but grow desperate and fret myself to fiddlestrings."

Referring to a birthday present from him, she says, "Only think of my husband, too, having given me a little present! He who never attends to such nonsense as birthdays, and who dislikes nothing in the world so much as going into a shop to buy anything.... Well, he actually risked himself in a jeweller's shop and bought me a very nice smelling bottle!"

Poor little wife! Poor husband, too, when after her death he has so often to say, "Ah me! too late, too late". Yet they loved each other well, and when Thomas Carlyle wrote on her tombstone, "For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband," and added that she was "suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out," no one doubts that the words came from the deepest depths of his heart.

In the china closet a glass case contains some pathetic mementoes—a yellowed old lace cap worn by Mrs. Carlyle, a brooch with the portrait of her dog Nero, given by the mistress to "little Charlotte," a sock of Carlyle's with his initials neatly marked in red thread, and two small cardboard boxes, each containing locks of the hair of Thomas Carlyle and his wife. Trivial things, which yet in their haunting intimacy are too sacred, it seems, to be stared at by the curious sightseers.

In a corner hangs an etching that deserves a more prominent place, the desolate picture of a funereal cortÈge wending its slow way against a bleak background of snow and leaden sky.... Thomas Carlyle is being carried to his last rest, and surely the Great Scene Shifter had well chosen the setting. The simple dignity of the procession approaching over the white countryside, the little group of humble folk awaiting its arrival at the gate of the churchyard, the frozen silence of the dead day—what could be more touching or impressive!

As we mounted the stairs on our way to the upper rooms, Mrs. D., who had said nothing for quite five minutes, remarked that, for her part, she couldn't see why people weren't allowed to rest in their graves. Even Mrs. D.'s scepticism and want of imagination was not proof against those little mementoes in the glass case, and I think she resented her inability on this occasion to take refuge behind the usual, "'Ow d'yer know it's all true?" The old lady was visibly depressed, and, to cheer her up, I asked her if she had ever worn a "bustle," quoting a letter of Jane Welsh's, in which she wrote, "The diameter of the fashionable ladies at present is about three yards; their bustles (false bottoms) are the size of an ordinary sheep's fleece. Eliza Miles told me a maid of theirs went out one Sunday with three kitchen dusters pinned-on as a substitute."

Whereupon Mrs. D., between laughter and breathlessness, had to pause on the top stair whilst she adjusted her hat at a still more rakish angle, and ejaculated, "Oh, saucy!"

It is well nigh impossible, in the later portraits of Mrs. Carlyle, to recognise the girl in the miniature. The dark brooding face is almost forbidding, and one is forced to the conclusion that the portraits have little real likeness to the original. Jane, with a vitality that upheld her through years of bodily and mental suffering, with a gaiety and wit which won her the admiration and homage of those celebrated men who went to see her husband, and stayed to make friends with her, Jane could never have looked like that! No doubt the coal-scuttle bonnet and severe style of hair dressing had a great deal to do with it. The fashions in those days were not kind to the middle-aged woman. All the same, when I looked at a portrait of Lady Ashburton, Carlyle's friend and patron, I found there a woman whose beauty could triumph over such handicaps. Jane thought Lady Ashburton a "cat," and the insolent eyes and disdainful curve of "Harriet's" mouth incline me to think Jane was right. Comparisons are unkind, but one is forced to the conclusion that whilst Lady Ashburton's face might well be her fortune, Jane Welsh would have to draw on her wit and intellect.

The cold wind outside roared round the cold house, and a piano-organ in the street ground out a hymn. Down below the bell tinkled. More visitors were arriving, and wishing to keep in advance of them, we left the drawing-room for Mrs. Carlyle's bedroom.

"Red bed," says Carlyle in a letter to his wife, "will stand behind the drawing-room"—and here it is! A four-poster with bare laths hung with faded red curtains and flounce. There is nothing more intimate than a bed, but this bed, standing so many years unwarmed by human contact, has outlived all such associations. It was not always a kind bed, either, judging from the tragic account in her letters of Jane's sleepless nights. "Oh!" she writes, "if there was any sleep to be got in that bed wherever it stands!" (alluding to a change in the position of her bed at Chelsea). "But it looks to my excited imagination, that bed I was born in, like a sort of instrument of red-hot torture; after all those nights I lay meditating on self-destruction as my only escape from insanity." A woman who could express her sufferings in such vivid language would be spared no iota of misery. Pin-pricks, which a stupid person might ignore, would to Jane be sword-thrusts.

As one thinks of her one remembers those words written by her husband: "Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" and there, on the wall close at hand, hangs the photograph of her grave in Haddington Church.

But, dear me, Agatha, this won't do! I don't want (to quote my pal, Mrs. D.) to give you the "bloomin' 'ump". One must remember that Jane was not always ill or unhappy. Jane had her bright days and her friends, "dandering individuals dropping in," Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson. Note this little vignette of the latter: "Passing through a long, dim passage" (she was at the theatre) "I came on a tall man leant to the wall, with his head touching the ceiling like a caryatid, to all appearances asleep, or resolutely trying it under most unfavourable circumstances. 'Alfred Tennyson,' I exclaimed in joyful surprise. 'Well,' said he, taking the hand I held out to him and forgetting to let it go again, 'I should like to know who you are. I know that I know you, but I cannot tell your name.'"

Then, too, there was Macready, D'Orsay, Lord Houghton, and Mazzini. Of the latter she says, "He told me there was nothing worth recording except that he had received the other day a declaration of love. Of course, I asked the particulars. Why not?—and I got them fully." And again, "He had had two other declarations of love! 'What, more of them?' 'Ah, yes!—unhappily! They begin to rain on me like sauterelles!'"

Mrs. Darling said there was "nothink in that!" Her old man had had six proposals before she herself annexed him. I inquired how she had succeeded in capturing such a shy bird, and she said it only needed a bit of confidence and a lot of soft soap. Any woman could marry any man if she properly set her mind to it. The news was rather disquieting; also, it was not exactly flattering to one's vanity to reflect that, apparently, no woman had been anxious enough to marry me to set her mind properly to the task.

When we mounted the last flight of stairs and entered the attic study we seemed to leave Jane behind. Carlyle himself met us on the threshold of this refuge, fondly planned with dreams of quiet in which he could work unmolested. As a matter of fact, it did not repay him for the discomforts endured whilst it was being built. "My room," he writes, "is irremediably somewhat of a failure, and 'quiet' is far off me yet."

The afternoon was beginning to draw in and a little fire glowed in the old-fashioned grate. Perhaps that was why the attic study seemed the most cheerful room in the house. It might not be "sound"-proof, but, at least, the wail of the north-east wind, as it careered round the old walls, was lost here, and through the ground glass window came a warm light which suggested a fragment of sunset somewhere out in the stormdriven sky. The apartment had a hermit-like atmosphere, although there could have been but little peace for the man who travailed as Carlyle did over his gigantic tasks. One recalls to mind such words as "I was in the throes of the French Revolution at this time, heavy laden in many ways and gloomy of mind...." "I, in dismal continual wrestle with 'Friedrich,' the inexcusable book, the second of my twelve years 'wrestle' in that element." ... "Hades was not more laborious than that book, too, now was to me."

What must it have been to one, who so travailed in the birth of those children of his brain, to lose as he did, through the "miserablest accident" of his whole life, the first volume of the French Revolution? And surely never man behaved so chivalrously to the friend who was the innocent cause of the disaster as did Carlyle to the unfortunate Mill. Poor John Stuart Mill! One imagines with a shudder his feelings when, with the black consciousness of the awful news he had to impart, he stood on the doorstep of No. 5 Cheyne Row waiting admittance! A visit to the dentist would, in contrast, have been an occasion of happiness. The thought of what that wretched man must have suffered diverts my mind from the contemplation of the cruel blow to the victim. The picture of Mill as, after having made his terrible disclosure, "he sat three hours trying to talk of other subjects," passes the bounds of tragedy and almost verges on the ludicrous. How he must have longed to go! and how Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle must have ached to see the back of him!

Dusk was gathering on the stairs and in the grey empty rooms as we left the attic, and we had to go carefully round the corners. Was it the whisper of a silken gown, or the swish of the wind through the branches of the bare trees in the little garden which accompanied us? Who can tell? Who wants to tell? Leave us some room for speculation—some peg on which to hang our hopes of things beyond which we can see and handle.

We walked down the little street at the end of which is the Embankment gardens, and there, in the blue twilight amidst the purple branches of the bare trees, is a seated figure. A figure of which even the distant view conveys a suggestion of profound and brooding melancholy. There sits Carlyle, watching for ever the silent passing of the river. Silver lights dotted the wharves opposite, and in the west, behind the four tall chimneys of the power station, there was yet a smouldering red amidst the almost extinct fires of sunset.

Perhaps if the mute lips could speak they would echo the once written words, "Yes, poor mortals, such of you as have gone so far, shall be permitted to go farther: hope, despair not".

And on that note I close this long epistle.

Ever your friend,

GEORGE.