"I remember," I said, "my father telling me that the only way for a man of no family and no wealth to get on in the English army or navy was either by servility or silence. He added that I was incapable of both. Perhaps Kitchener's trying silence!"
"I will go to Suakim," I added, "if you will give me a letter to him. I will see Kitchener and let you know what I think of him."
I had already engaged in Cairo a Levantine Jew intepreter; he spoke English nearly as well as I did, and boasted that he spoke perfect Arabic; it seemed to me he knew nearly every known tongue, for his modern Greek was better than mine, and his Italian perfect.
In due time I went to Suakim and called on Kitchener and was invited by him to dinner. There were a couple of sheiks at the table, and from time to time Kitchener spoke to them in Arabic. His French was not good, though I had understood that he had passed some years as a young man in France. This surprised me so much that I asked him whether he knew Arabic.
"I am pretty useful at it," he said.
When I got home I told my secretary what Kitchener had said. He burst out:
"I know Kitchener; I met him in Cyprus, worked for him: he knows no Arabic, not he! He knows nothing: he's a mere ignorant bluff. I tell you what to do. I'll teach you two or three Arabic proverbs; you shoot them off at dinner: the sheiks will understand, but Kitchener won't."
He insisted so vehemently and so contemptuously about Kitchener's ignorance that I resolved to put it to the test, for his manner at the dinner had not impressed me; he had gotten his reputation through silence and not through wisdom, in my opinion. So I spent an hour learning two or three Arabic sentences till my secretary told me that I pronounced them perfectly.
The next night, dining again with Kitchener, I took the opportunity and shot off the wittiest of them. The sheiks burst out laughing and answered me in Arabic, and I grinned as if I understood what was said. Kitchener turned to me and said, "You know Arabic?"
"Oh, I am not useful at it," I replied. But I noticed that after that he used no more Arabic.
I came away from Suakim with the one word for Portal which I gave him the first day at lunch. "No one," I said, "ever was so great a soldier as Kitchener looks."
Some months later I found that Portal shared my contemptuous opinion of Kitchener's ability. And the South African war only confirmed my opinion.
As soon as Roberts left South Africa, the war under Kitchener dragged on. He founded a system of blockhouses, hoping to surround the Boers. I said his blockhouses were made for blockheads and predicted that he would achieve nothing with them; and he did achieve nothing, except waste of a huge sum.
When I got to know Lord Roberts after the war and came to a high appreciation of his soldier's insight, I wanted to get his opinion of Kitchener, and he gave it to me without circumlocution.
"You know," he said, "after beating Cronje by flank attacks, I sent Kitchener after him to round the Boers up and bring them to surrender. He had seen how I conducted the fight: I didn't dream of telling him anything about it; he must have understood, I supposed. The next news I got was that he pursued Cronje and his beaten force of four or five thousand men and attacked them at Paardeberg. He attacked them in front and lost twelve hundred men in an hour and had to draw off beaten. I almost cried when I heard it. When I came up I found the Boers by the river and immediately began a cross fire of artillery. The cross fire was deadly; the Boers took shelter in the river bed and 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.