CHAPTER XV

FERISHTAH

HEN I left Oxford I was still eighteen months under

W age, I was still a ward of Chancery, and I only had

the £400 a year my guardians allowed me to live on. None the less I was determined that nothing would induce me to have anything more to do with P. L. any more than with Oxford, and I succeeded in hiring a little jerry-built semidetached house about a mile away from the river at Hampton at a rental of £26 a year. My Uncle Rollo was horrified when I told him, and pointed out that as a minor I had not the capacity to contract or to sign a lease. My only answer was to tell him that the lease was signed, possible or impossible, and that if any attempt was made to interfere with me I should not disclose the position of the house. There was great agitation, there were great comings and goings, and there was considerable pressure. My only answer was to remain perfectly firm, and to point out that without the gravest public scandal they could not very well attempt to restrain the liberty of a man of twenty. Finally they invoked the Lord Chancellor who was at that time Lord Selborne and an old personal friend. When I was visiting some friends at Cambridge I received a telegram instructing me to present myself in his room at the House of Lords. I did so, and Selborne was very kind and very fatherly, and hinted at my legal position. To this my only answer was to say that technically it might be so but in practice it was not. Finally he invited me to pray with him, and being unwilling to hurt his feelings I knelt down with him at his table in his room while he prayed aloud for guidance. Birched by a Bishop, sent down by the great Jowett, and prayed over by the Lord Chancellor; my experiences were accumulating. We parted on the most friendly terms, and I think I succeeded in convincing him that although obstinate I was entirely without vice, and as a result my guardians compromised with me on the footing of my accepting a tutor to live with me. The man they chose was

Graham Balfour, a very gentle person, perfectly upright, and of the most kindly disposition; he was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, and has recently published some reminiscences of him. At our first interview we approached each other warily with an eye cocked like two strange dogs, but soon became very good friends. I think it was not long before he found my people as trying as I did. And so we settled down quite happily in my little cottage, which I named Ferishtah, after Browning's book, which had just been published, and which I succeeded in furnishing from top to bottom for the sum of £100 in addition to my college furniture; a feat which would be impossible in these post-war days.

Here I lived in some content owing to the position of great freedom that I found myself in. I was no longer bothered in any way with P. L., and I had no examinations to keep me busy. It was rather a sudden change from the hard work of Oxford, but I was by no means idle, and in addition to exercise, chiefly on the river, I did a great deal of reading, some classics, but mostly English. My tutor Balfour was an agreeable enough companion, and at any rate provided someone to talk to in the evenings who was intelligent. I also did a great deal of visiting, and was fairly frequently at Cambridge; not Oxford, which except for my one formal visit to Jowett some three or four years later, I did not re-visit for about twenty years. I did not see much of anyone except my contemporaries, for I was angry with all others and desired no dealings with them.

The establishment consisted of one of those middle-aged, indeterminate females known as general servants, who did everything for me as satisfactorily as one could expect. Needless to say I also had a cat of my own, and one of the illustrations shows her reposing happily upon one of my tables. This, however, was only the beginning of our animal kingdom, for in the garden of my neighbouring semi-detached there used to play several girls whom, from their number, we used to call "the orphans." My private belief is that they had both a father and a mother, but these we never saw. A possession which we did see, however, was a number of guinea-pigs, and we used to borrow these over the fence and play with them, but my experience is that you cannot play much with a guinea-pig. My friends often came to stay with me, and I managed to put up an incredible number considering my limited accommodation. The group photograph shows one of my parties at the rickety pillars of my semi-detached proudly blazoning forth its new name of Ferishtah. The people shown in the group are:-Ion Thynne on one gate

post with his stick in the air, P. U. Henn on his right, and Osman Edwards on the wicker chair. Edgar Jepson is sitting on the other gatepost, and the limp figure next to him in a straw hat is me. The man sitting down and the one standing behind him are Roberts and Long Roberts respectively.

I had one peculiar amusement. I had acquired a horrid little derringer somewhere which couldn't shoot straight, and jerked up like anything, and I used to practise shooting indoors at the neck of bottles at distances varying from one to eight yards. When the landlord re-took possession he must have found pounds of lead embedded in the walls of his rooms, and a good deal of plaster missing -I cannot think why I never had to pay for dilapidations. I wonder now what the neighbours thought of us-in those days I never recognized their existence. Always excepting the orphans who were very friendly, and one of whom grown up solicited some subscription from me at Teddington Station some seven or eight years later and reminded me that she had been an orphan.

We were about half a mile from our railway station, which was Hampton, and about a mile from the river and the village of Hampton. Our favourite short excursion was to go down to Tagg's Island or Molesey Lock, but when we wanted some strenuous rowing we turned our heads up stream. It was from Ferishtah that I attended my first and only Derby. Two of us borrowed the washerwoman's donkey cart and drove the seven or eight miles in this across country to the course. It seemed to me quite a traditionally correct way of attending the Derby. When motorists were grumbling at the increased tax long before the present crushing burden I suggested that I should drive down to the House of Lords in a smart turn-out drawn by two donkeys to represent the only untaxed vehicle left.

On one occasion when we were deprived of the services of our general servant we did the whole of the housework ourselves, and one of the illustrations shows us with the symbols of our avocations. I acted as a very indifferent cook; Balfour, who is holding up the bath, looked after the water and the slops, and the third man, with the blacking brush, was our tweeny maid.

In my second year at Ferishtah I had a serious accident. I had a model engine with a very large spirit lamp for making steam. While we were running the engine I notced that the spirit lamp was leaking, and I rushed out into the garden with it. As I was throwing it away it exploded, and the burning spirit flew

all over my left leg, which was terribly burnt from the top of my boot to the knee. They said I was very funny rolling about on the grass in agony to try and put the flames out, and shouting: "Put me out. Put me out." I dare say I was, but I wasn't amused. I was ultimately extinguished by Balfour with a bucket of slops from the kitchen. I hobbled upstairs, my trousers were torn or cut off, some sort of temporary dressing was put on to keep the air out, and I lay on my bed waiting for the doctor. I had half an hour of the most exquisite agony I have ever endured, with a clear realization of how unpleasant Hell might be. As a counter irritant I tied a string to the foot of my bed and kept pinching and hurting my fingers with it to give me something else to think of. The doctor did not come for three-quarters of an hour, and by this time the acute pain had subsided, and I was comfortably smoking a pipe. He dressed and bound the leg properly and then said: I will give you a sleeping draught for to-night, as, of course, the shock will have upset you." I said: "Upset me! fiddlesticks, my pulse is perfectly quiet, and I shall sleep quite well," and I did, eight hours.

I had a good deal of pain some two or three days later when he put the second dressing on and I was kept in my bed altogether some six or eight weeks by this accident. When I was nearly convalescent, I went to visit my dear old friend, Mrs. Dick, at Winchester, and I remember the acute agony I suffered when I first began to try to walk again, and put my leg to the ground. It was exactly like having red-hot knitting needles stuck into one's leg all over. However, with the exception of a week of influenza in 1899, when it was first invented, this is the only occasion on which I have had to stay in bed since the age of seventeen, so I have not much to complain of.

I lived at Ferishtah altogether from June, 1885, to July, 1887, and for the sake of convenience I have collected my Ferishtah experiences together, but they were in fact interrupted by a visit of six months to America, with which I deal in the next chapter. Not long after my return from America I came of age, and my money and possessions were handed over to me by my guardians. I then learnt for the first time of a most high-handed and illegal action of which they had been guilty. On the staircase landing at Ravenscroft my father had a cabinet with glass doors stacked with letters in cardboard cases all neatly arranged and preserved because they were of interest. All these letters he had