there I left them, keeping always a cross fire of artillery ready at all the points they could get out. When they attempted to come out, they were met by heavy artillery fire. Five days afterwards, they all surrendered with a loss to us of under twenty men. I don't want to say anything against Kitchener: he can't even see what is before his eyes; he can't even learn: he is a fool.'
I said, 'Did you tell them that at the Council of Defense?'
'No, no,' said the little man laughing. 'It wasn't my business to tell them. I knew that when I got Cronje's force I had broken the back of the Boers in South Africa, and even Kitchener couldn't utterly spoil the work done.'
But the South African war dragged on under Kitchener till the Boers were brought to submission with a promise of three or four millions to rebuild their houses, and shortly afterwards Campbell-Bannerman was wise enough to give them their liberty again and leave them in power in the Transvaal.
Today, from one end to the other, thanks to this piece of belated wisdom, the Transvaal is as English as it was before the ineffably stupid Boer war.
CHAPTER VIII
I must now tell the greatest amatory experience of my life. I had made a great deal of money with Hooley, and was besides tormented with the wish to complete at any cost my book on Shakespeare. I had done some chapters in the Saturday Review, and Shaw, among others, had praised them highly. It was and is my belief that Shakespeare has been mis-seen and misunderstood by all the commentators. Ordinary men are always accustomed to make their gods in their own image, and so the English had formed a Shakespeare who loved his wife and yet was a pederast; who had made money at his business and retired to enjoy his leisure as a country gentleman in village Stratford after living through the bitter despair of Timon, and the madness of Lear: 'O, let me not be mad, Sweet Heaven… I would not be mad!'
The only particle of truth in the fancy portrait has been contributed by Tyler, who, inspired by Wordsworth's saying that in the sonnets Shakespeare 'unlocked his heart,' proved that the sonnets showed that Shakespeare, about 1596, had fallen in love with a maid-of-honor named Mary Fitton and had been in love with her, as he said himself about 1600, for three years. I came to Tyler's aid by proving that this episode had been dragged into three different plays of the same period, and I went on to show that this love episode had practically been the great love of Shakespeare's life, and had lasted from 1596 to 1608. I proved also that though he disliked his wife, he was perfectly normal; that his fortune rested on the gift of Lord Southampton to him of a thousand pounds when he came of age in 1596; and that so far from having increased his wealth and been a prudent husbandman, he had never cared for 'rascal counters,' and died leaving barely one year's income, probably after the drinking-bout of tradition, in which he had drunk perhaps a little too much, for, to use his own words, he had 'poor, unhappy brains for drinking': a too highly powered ship for the frail hull! Does he not talk in The Tempest of walking to 'still his beating mind'?
All this and more I wanted to set forth, but was it possible to bring such a totally new conception of Shakespeare into life, and so to prove it that it would be accepted? I hated the English climate in the winter, and so I set off in an October fog for the Riviera; and I don't know why, but I went through Nice to San Remo. At San Remo, the hotel life quickly tired me, and I went about looking for a villa. I discovered a beautiful villa with views over both the mountains and the sea and a great garden; but alas, it was for sale and not for hire, the gardener told me.
This gardener deserves a word or two of description. He was a rather small man, perhaps forty-five or fifty years of age, a slight, strong figure, with an extraordinarily handsome head, set off by quite white moustaches- the suggestion of age being completely contradicted by the clearness of the skin and the brightness of his eyes. Ten thousand pounds was wanted for the villa, but the gardener told me that if I bought it, I could always sell it for as much as I paid for it, or more. I took this assertion with a grain of salt, but the end of it was that the gardener amused me so much that I bought the villa and went to live in it.
I ordered my days at once for work and for the first week or two did work ten or twelve hours a day, but one memorable afternoon I came upon the gardener, whom I had taken into my service, reading Dante, if you please, in the garden. I had a talk with him and found that he knew not only Dante, but Ariosto, and Leopardi, and Carducci, and was a real student of Italian literature. I passed a great afternoon with him, and resolved whenever I was tired in the future to come out and talk with him.
Two or three days afterwards I was overworked again, and I went out to him and he said: 'You know, when I saw you at first, I thought we should have a great time together here; that you would love life and love; and here you are writing, writing, writing, morning, noon and night-wearing yourself out without any care for beauty or for pleasure.'
'I like both,' I said, 'but I came here to work; still, I shouldn't mind having some distractions if they were possible; but what is possible here?'
'Everything,' he replied. 'I have been putting myself in your place: if I were rich, wouldn't I enjoy myself in this villa!'
'What would you do?' I asked.
'Well,' he said, 'I would give prizes for the prettiest girls, say one hundred francs for the first; fifty francs for the second; and twenty-five as consolation prizes if five or six girls came.'
'What good would that do?' I asked. 'You wouldn't get young girls that way, and you certainly wouldn't get their love.'
'Wouldn't I!' he cried. 'First of all, in order to see who was the prettiest, they would have to strip, wouldn't they? And the girl who is once naked before you is not apt to refuse you anything.'
I had come to a sort of impasse in my work; I saw that the whole assumption that Shakespeare had been a boy lover, drawn from the sonnets, was probably false, but since Hallam it was held by every one in England, and every one, too, in Germany, so prone are men always to believe the worst, especially of their betters-the great leaders of humanity.
Heinemann, the publisher, had asked me for my book on Shakespeare before I left England, but as soon as I wrote him that I was going to disprove Shakespeare's abnormal tastes, he told me that he had found every authority in England was against me and therefore he dared not publish my book. Just when I was making up my mind to set forth my conviction, came this proposal of my gardener. I had worked very hard for years on the Saturday Review and in South Africa, and I thought I deserved a little recreation; so I said to the gardener, 'Go to it. I don't want any scandal, but if you can get the girls through the prizes, I will put up the money cheerfully and will invite you to play master of ceremonies.'
'This is Tuesday,' he said. 'I think next Sunday would be about the best day.'
'As you please,' I replied.
One Sunday, having given a conge to my cook and waiting-maid, I walked about to await my new guests, the cook having laid out a good dejeuner with champagne on the table in the dining-room. About eleven o'clock a couple of girls fluttered in, and my gardener conducted them into two bedrooms and told them to make themselves pretty and we would all lunch at half-past twelve. In half an hour five girls were assembled. He put them all into different rooms and went from room to room, telling them that they must undress and get ready for inspection. There was much giggling and some exclamations, but apparently no revolt. In ten minutes he came to me and asked me, was I ready for inspection?
'Certainly,' I said; and we went to the first room. A girl's head looked out from under the clothes: she had got into bed. But my gardener knew better than to humor her: he went over and threw down the bed clothes, and there she was completely nude. 'Stand up, stand up,' he said, 'you are worth looking at!'
And indeed she was. Nothing loath, she stood on the bed as directed and lent herself to the examination. She was a very pretty girl of twenty or twentyone; and at length, to encourage her, he took her in his arms and kissed her. I followed suit and found her flesh perfectly firm and everything all right, except that her feet were rather dirty; whereupon my gardener said, 'That's easily remedied.' We promised her a prize and told her that we would return
