Part 2

For a man who must surely have divined that his calibre was unique, Teixeira was engagingly free from touchiness. In translating a book, as in organizing a department, he was magnificently grateful for the word that had eluded him and for the criticism which he had not foreseen. A purist in language and a precisian in everything, he realized that a living style is throttled by too great obedience to rules; but he was afraid, even in dialogue, of unchaining a wind of colloquialism which he might be unable to control; and, in constructing the deliberately artificial speech of his Maeterlinck translations, he recognized that he lacked his readers’ age-old familiarity with the English of the Bible. Though his passion for consistency led him to say: “My name ought to have been Procrus-Tex,” he stretched out both hands for an authority that would justify him in broadening his rule. “I have always spelt judgment without an e in the middle,” he declared in 1915, when, with the gravity that characterized his more trivial decisions, he had abandoned violet ink, because it seemed frivolous in war-time, and the long s (ſ), because it bore a Teutonic aspect. “I am too old to change now; and you know my rule, All or None.” Four years later he announced: “In future I shall spell ‘judgement’ with an e in the middle. The New English Dictionary favours it; you assure me that it is so spelt in your English prayer-book; and Germany has signed the peace terms.”

No comparison with other translators can be attempted until another arise with Teixeira’s range of languages and his volume of achievement. He himself could never say, within a dozen, how many books he had translated; but in them all he created such an illusion of originality that they are not suspected of being translations until his name is seen. In a wider view, he undermined the pretensions of those who boasted that they could never read translations; and, if no one is likely to be found with all his gifts, he at least prepared the way for a new school of translators. It may be hoped that, after the battles which he fought, important foreign authors will not again be sacrificed to illiterate hacks at five-shillings a thousand words: it may even be expected that competent scholars will no longer disdain the task of translating contemporary works. All literary predictions are rash; but there seems little risk in prophesying that Teixeira’s renderings of Fabre, Couperus and Maeterlinck will be read as long as the originals.

The tangible fruits of his astonishing industry are only a part of his achievement: it is to him, in company with Constance Garnett, William Archer, Aylmer Maude and the other undaunted pioneers, that English readers owe their escape from the self-satisfied insularity with which they had protected themselves against continental literature. When publishers have been convinced that translations need not be unprofitable and when a conservative public has discovered that they need not be unreadable, a future generation may be privileged to have prompt access to every noteworthy book in whatsoever language it has been written, without waiting as the present generation has had to wait for an English rendering of Tolstoi, Turgenieff, Dostoieffski and Tchehov.

In conversation Teixeira took little pleasure in discussing himself; in correspondence he could not help giving himself away. The reader will deduce, from his slow surrender of intimacy, the shyness that ever conflicted with his sociability; the absence of all allusions to his literary work, save when he fancied that a second opinion might help him, is evidence of a personal modesty that amounted almost to unconsciousness of his position in letters. Diffidence and sociability, first conflicting, then joining forces, led him in his departmental work to discuss every problem with a friend; and in all personal relationships, he needed an hourly confidant because everything in life was an adventure to be shared and might be worked in later to the saga with which he strove to make himself ridiculous for the diversion of his company. “Thus,” he writes of a childish freak, “do the elderly amuse themselves for the further amusement of a limited circle.” Weighty commissions were assembled, daring expeditions set out under his leadership to choose a dressing-gown for country-house wear; the grey tall-hat with which he surprised one private view of the Royal Academy was no less of a surprise to him and even more of an abiding pleasure. For a year or two afterwards he would telephone on the first of May: “If you will wear your goodish white topper to-day, I will wear mine”; and once, when these conspicuous headpieces were in evidence, he led the way to Covent Garden Market, with the words: “It is not every day that the women of the market see two men in such hats, such coats and such spats, standing before a fruit-stall with their canes crooked over their arms and their yellow gloves protruding from their pockets, consuming the first green figs of the year in the year’s first sunshine.”

In conversation he once boasted that he was never bored; and, though every man and woman at the table volunteered the names of at least six people who would bore him to extinction, the boast was justified in that, however irksome one moment might be, it could always be invested afterwards with the glamour of an eccentric adventure. Somewhere, among his immediate ascendants, there must have been a not too remote ancestor of Peter Pan. On his fifty-sixth birthday, Teixeira was having a party arranged for him, with a cake and fifty-six tiny candles; for days beforehand he had been asking for presents of any kind, to impress the other visitors in his hotel; and, if he knew one joy greater than receiving presents, it was finding an excuse to give them.

With the heart of a child in all things, he had the child’s quality of being frightened by small pains and undaunted by great; a cut finger was an occasion for panic, but the threat of blindness found him indomitable. Herein he was supported throughout life by the faith which he had acquired in boyhood and which he preserved until his death. “I save my temper,” he once wrote, “by not discussing religion except with Catholics or politics except with liberals. There’s room for discussion in the _nuances_; there’s too much room for it with those who call my black white.” ... While it was generally known among his friends that he was a devout Catholic, only a few were allowed to see how much reliance he placed in religion; and he would grow impatient with what he considered a morbid protestant passion for worrying at something that for him had been immutably settled.

In political debates he would only join at the prompting of extreme sympathy or extreme exasperation. His native feeling for the Boers in the Transvaal was little shared in England during the South African war; and his loathing for English misrule in Ireland was too strong to be ventilated acceptably among the people whom he met most commonly in London. His connection with the Legitimist cause came to an end with the outbreak of war: though he had hitherto delighted in penetrating between the sentries at St. James’ Palace and placarding the wall with an appeal to all loyal subjects of the rightful king, he was unable to continue his allegiance when Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria became an enemy alien.

Legitimacy and Catholicism, apart from other claims on his regard, gratified a love for ceremonial and tradition that would have been more incongruous in a liberal if Teixeira’s whole equipment of beliefs, practices and preferences had not been a collection of incongruities. Though he detested militarism, he could never understand why the English civilians omitted to uncover to the colours; hating pomposity, he enjoyed the grand manner in address and, on being greeted by a peer as “my dear sir,” replied “my dear lord” in a formula beloved by Disraeli. As a relief to an accuracy of expression which he himself called Procrustean and pernickety, he would transform any word that he thought would look or sound more engaging for a little mutilation. It was a bad day for the English of his letters when he read Heine and entered into competition for the most torturing play upon words; his case became hopeless when he was introduced to a couple of friends who could pun with him in four or five languages. It was this bent of mind that may justify the description of him[4] as the son of Edward Lear and the grandson of Charles Lamb.

Underlying the whimsical humour of his letters and peeping through the mock solemnity of his speech was a young child’s concern for the welfare of his friends: himself never growing up, he never outgrew his generous delight in any success that came to them; their ill-health and sorrow were harder to bear than his own; and he shewed a child’s impulsive generosity in offering all he had in comfort. Sympathy, help, experience and advice were at hand for whosoever would take them: he had too long lived precariously to forget the tragedy of those who failed and failed again; he knew life too well to grow impatient with those who failed through no one’s fault but their own.

Love of life, enduring to the end, knowledge of life, increasing every day, combined to join this heart of a child to the experience of an old man. As a connoisseur of food and wine, as of style and manner, he belonged to a generation that ranked life as the greatest of the fine arts. To lunch with him was to receive a liberal education in gastronomy, though his course of personal instruction sometimes broke down for lack of material: from time to time he would announce with jubilation that he had discovered some rare vintage in some unknown restaurant; a party would be organized to sample it, only to be informed that the last bottle had been consumed by Mr. Teixeira the day before.

As an explorer, he remained, to his last hour, at the age when a boy lingers rapturously before one shop after another, enjoying all impartially, sharing his enjoyment with every passer-by, confident that life is an unending vista of glittering shop-windows and that the day must somehow be long enough for him to take them all in.

IV

Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Teixeira, discovered later—to the subject’s delight—in the waiting-room of an eminent gynaecologist, emphasizes the most strongly marked natural and acquired characteristics of his appearance: a big nose and a liking for the fantastic in dress. There is hardly space, in the drawing, even for the tiny hat of the music-hall comedian, so devastating is the sweep of that nose, outward from the lips, up and round, annihilating forehead and cranium until it merges in the nape of the neck. Of the dress no more need be said than that it looks like a valiant attempt to live up to the nose.

As this caricature has not been published in any collection of Max Beerbohm’s drawings, it was probably unknown to most of those who were brought into the Intelligence Section of the War Trade Intelligence Department, there to be introduced to its head, to receive the handshake and bow of a courtier and to wonder how Tenniel could have drawn the old sheep in _Alice Through the Looking-Glass_ without Teixeira as a model. Tall and broad-shouldered, with thick black hair and a white face, tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, and a cigarette in a holder, taciturn, impassive and unsmiling, Teixeira never failed to conceal that he was more shy than his visitor. With articulation as beautifully clear as his writing and in words not less exquisitely chosen than the language of his books, he would introduce the newcomer to those with whom he was to work. Messengers would be despatched to bring an additional chair and table. In the resultant confusion, the immense, silent figure would walk away with a heavy tread, to find that a pile of papers, two feet high, had risen like an Indian mango where there had been but six inches a moment before. A voice of authority, rolling its r’s like the rumble of distant artillery, would telephone for more messengers; in time the pile would dwindle until the spectacles and then the nose and then the cigarette-holder were visible. In time, too, the newcomer recovered from his fright and set about learning the business of the department.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear “this Olympian creature”, as Stevenson called Prince Florizel, addressed by Sutro as “Tex”; and, although the first terror was disabling, even the newcomer realized that every one in the section seemed happy. The Olympian creature never lost his temper, he condescended to jokes and invented nicknames; the appalling gravity was found to be a mask for shyness and a disguise for bubbling absurdity.

In the summer of 1915 the machinery of the blockade was still making. The department, overworked and understaffed, was inadequately housed in a corner of Central Buildings, Westminster. In the autumn it moved to Broadway House, in Tothill Street; and one newcomer was invited to sit at Teixeira’s table as deputy-head of the section. Thenceforth, until the armistice, we worked together daily, save when one or other was on leave or ill and during the early summer of 1917 when I was sent to Washington. The office, changing almost weekly in personnel, underwent reconstruction when the blockade was modified in 1918: Teixeira became secretary to the department; I succeeded him as head of the intelligence section; and, when I left in 1919, he stayed behind to help in dismantling the old machine and in assembling a new one to supply economic information to the peace conference.

Our correspondence for the last three years of the war was restricted to the times when one of us was away. These absences grew more frequent as Teixeira exchanged one illness for another. His letters present him as a government servant rejoicing in his work, tingling with the new sense of new responsibility and, “from his circumstances having been always such, that he had scarcely any share in the real business of life”, suggesting irresistibly a comparison with Dr. Johnson at the sale of his friend Thrale’s brewery, “bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an exciseman”. So much of them, however, is taken up with departmental business that I have drawn sparingly upon them.

V

The first five months of 1916 were a time of relatively good health for Teixeira; and our correspondence contains little more than an invitation, which he acknowledged in departmental language.

I wrote:

_Tuesday, Jan. 4th, 1916._

_Though long I’ve wished to bid you come and dine,_ _Your way of life stood ever in the way;_ _For you, I gather, go to bed at nine_ _And rise at five (or five-fifteen) next day._

_Yet Tuesday brings my chance. At half-past eight_ _I go to guard my king; but, ere I go,_ _With meat and wine I purpose to inflate_ _My sagging stomach for an hour or so._

_Then will you join me? Seven o’clock, I think:_ _The Mausoleum Club is fairly near:_ _Whate’er your heart desire of food and drink,_ _And any kind of clothes you choose to wear._

_S. McK._

_We should be glad, ~replies Teixeira~, if this application could come up again in say a fortnight’s time._

_A. T._ _Trade Clearing House._

When next I was summoned for duty as a special constable, the application was submitted again; and Teixeira dined with me at the Reform Club. Later in the year, though he had been warned by William Campbell, the greatest friend of his middle years, that a man who laughed so much would never be admitted to membership, I was allowed to propose him as a candidate; and from the day of his election he became one of the most popular figures both in the card-room and in the south-east corner of the big smoking-room, where his most intimate associates gathered.

His hours of work, to which the first stanza refers, have already been mentioned; his methods call for a word or two of description. The library in Cheltenham Terrace looked out over the Duke of York’s School and was lined with book-cases wherever windows, fire-place or door permitted. The furniture consisted of a sofa, which was used for hat-boxes and more books; a writing-table, which was used for anything but writing; a revolving book-case, filled with works of reference; and the editorial chair from the office of _The Candid Friend_. Seating himself in dressing-gown and slippers, between the fire-place and the revolving book-case, Teixeira dug himself into position: a despatch-box under his feet raised his knees to an angle at which he could balance a dictionary upon them, with its edge resting on a miniature bureau; on the dictionary rested a blotting-pad; and every book that he needed was in reach either of his hand or an elongated pair of “lazy-tongs”; scissors, string, sealing-wax, india-rubber and knives were ingeniously and menacingly suspended from nails in the revolving book-case; on the top stood cigarettes, matches, a paste-pot and a vast copper ash-tub; and the colour of his violet carpet was chosen to conceal the occasional splashings of a violet-ink pen. With a telephone on one side to put him in touch with the outside world and with a bell on the other to secure his morning coffee, Teixeira could work without moving until evicted by force.

In the beginning of June, he was ordered to Malvern.

_No news, ~he writes on the 10th~, except that I have arrived and had some tea...._

_There are hawthorns at Malvern and rhododendrons of -dra but also the most bloodthirsty hills. And there was an officer in the train who told me that the feeling in Franst was most “optimistic”._

_The proprietress of this hotel pronounces my name Teisheira. This must be looked into._

_I s’pose I’m enjoying myself, ~he writes next day~. I feel very restless._

_~[My cook]~, I forgot to tell you, was mounting guard over the dispatch-box like a very sentinel, with hands duly folded: a most proper spectacle. I nearly died, but not entirely, hunting for my porter up and down the length of the longest train you ever saw (I am sure this must be correct, in view of the fact that you never did see this particular train)...._

_This hotel is not so uncomfortable: I slept eight hours; I have a writing-table in my room; my bath was too hot to get into; these are signs of human comfort, are not they? Nor is the food nasty. Fortunately, there is not much of it. I ordered me a bottle of Berncastler Doctor. They brought me Liebfraumilch. I waved it away, saying that hock was acid and gave me gout. Then, persuaded to be a Christian, I sent one running after it before the doctor was opened and drank two glasses; and it was delicious; and I have no gout._

_Why I sit boring you with this dull stuff I do not know: it is certainly not worth including in the Life and Letters._

Two days of solitude set him athirst for companionship.

_Good-morning, fair sir, ~he writes on 12.6.16~. I hope this finds you as it leaves me at present, a little improved in health. But I would not wish my worst enemy the weariness from which I am suffering.... Picture me buying useless things so that I may exchange a word with a shopman; for no one talks to me here. Also the weather is bitterly cold._

And next day:

_I have ... talked at length to a highly intelligent Dane, with a massy pair of calves that do credit to his pastoral country. But he has returned to town this morning._

_They play very low at the club, fortunately, for I lost 13/-, which would have been £10, had I been playing R.A.C. points. Also they make me too late to dress for dinner, which doesn’t matter: nothing matters in this world._

_For the rest, I have reason to think that I shall begin to cheer up from to-morrow and to remain cheerful until Saturday. That is “speech-day”—I presume at Malvern College—when I expect to see an awful invasion of horribobble papas and mammas._

_Bless you._

_The hoped-for cheerfulness has not yet arrived, ~he laments on 14.6.16~. I live in one of the most tragic of worlds. But ... I have had more conversation. The place of the Dane with the fatted calves ... has been taken by a parson, a passon, a parsoon, an elderly parsoon with the complete manner of the late Mr. Penley in ~The Private Secretary~: he would like to give every German a good, hard slap, I am sure. He is a much-travelled man; and his ignorance of every place which he has visited is thoroughly entertaining...._

_I am becoming popular at the club: they took 12/- out of me yesterday. I must set my teeth and get it back though._

_The influx of odious parents, ~he writes on 18.6.16~, with their loathy, freckled criminals of offspring has flustered the waiters and is spoiling all my meals. What I do now is to change for dinner after all and come in exactly an hour late for meals. They have some way of keeping the food—such as it is—piping hot; and so I do not suffer unduly for avoiding the sight of some, at least, of the carroty-headed boys and their thick-ankled sisters...._

_Ah well! I can begin to count the days until I am back among you; and a glad day that will be for me! Nobody in the world, I think, hates either rest or enjoyment so much as I do._

_Good-bye. I am going for a walk. I tell you frankly, I am going for a walk. I tell you this frankly...._

On Teixeira’s return to the department, our correspondence was suspended until I went to Cornwall for a week’s leave in August. When I wrote in praise of my surroundings, he replied with a warning:

_You are probably too young ever to have heard of ... a play-actress ... who brought a breach of promise action ... and earned the then record damages of £10,000. She took a cottage somewhere the other day and brought her mother to live in it. The mother said, “This is just the sort of place I like; I shall be happy here,” then fell down the stairs and was dead in half an hour...._

_... Remember me to the Atlantic...._

The next letter contained a story from Ireland:

_Sligo, 18 August 1916._

_... Here, in this most distressful country, we are about to experience again the blessings of coercion, administered by Duke, K.C., and Carson, high priest of the cult. In Sligo, the other day, two ladies treating each other in a public-house, the barman intervened at the tenth drink, saying:_

_“Stop it now; ye can’t have any more; troth, I won’t sarve ye again. Don’t ye know it’s Martial Law that’s on the people?”_

_Whereupon one of them enquired of the other:_

_“For the love of God, Mrs. Murphy, what’s he talking about at all? Who’s Martial Law?”_

_To which her friend replied ~sotto voce~:_

_“Whist, don’t be showing your ignorance, ma’am! Don’t ye know he’s a brother of Bonar Law’s?”..._

As official papers accompanied every letter, a trace of departmental style is occasionally visible in private notes:

_War Trade Intelligence Department, 23 August, 1916._

_“Harry Edwin” ate a grouse last night and drank many glasses of port. You can imagine the sort of grumpy ~commensal~ that he is to-day._

_A. T._

_“Harry Edwin.” To see. 23.8.16._

_Seen and approved. H. E. P._