Kipling is not the meekest of men and I marvelled at his patience.
“They might give me a start,” he sighed; “I would like to have had them on, just once.”
Engelberg is too low to be a good sports centre. We had some muggy weather, and to kill time I got up some private theatricals. Kipling's boy and girl were there. They were jolly children. Young Kipling was a suffragette and little Miss Kipling played a costermonger's Donah. Kipling himself combined the parts of scene-shifter and call boy. It was the first time I had met Mrs. Kipling since her marriage. She was still a beautiful woman, but her hair was white. There had always been sadness in her eyes, even when a girl. The Hornungs were there also, with their only child, Oscar. Mrs. Hornung, née Connie Doyle, was as cheery and vigorous as ever, but a shade stouter. Both boys were killed in the war.
It was election time in England, and the hotel crowd used to encourage Kipling and myself to political argument in the great hall. I suppose I was the only man in the hotel who was not a Die-hard conservative. Kipling himself was always courteous, but not all the peppery old colonels from Cheltenham and fierce old ladies from Bath were. Notwithstanding, on wet afternoons, when one couldn't go out, it wasn't bad sport. Conan Doyle in his memoirs writes me down as one “hot-headed and intolerant in political matters.” When I read the passage I was most astonished. It is precisely what I should have said myself concerning Doyle. I suppose the fact is that tolerance is another name for indifference. A man convinced that his views, if universally adopted, would be of ineffable service to humanity, is bound to attribute opposition to stupidity or else to original sin. Socrates himself—if Plato is to be trusted—was quite an intolerant person. I am not sure that, arguing with Socrates, I would not rather he called me a fool and have done with it, than proceed to prove it to me, step by step, according to that irritating method of his. Thrasymachus, I am prepared to wager, thought Socrates one of the most intolerant men he had ever met. If Doyle can get into touch with Thrasymachus, he might put it to him if I am not right. Not until we have come to see that man's goal lies within him, not without—that what we call the “progress of the Race” is never towards the truth, but always round it, do we become tolerant—on most matters of opinion.
The road has disappeared. The motor track has taken its place. But the wheel is a poor substitute for the ribbons. I speak as an old coachman. It was good sport, going for a drive with jolly horses that you loved; who knew they were part of the game, and took care that it never got dull. I have a city friend who, in the old days, whenever he would take his mind off business worries, would have out his dog-cart, and drive tandem through Piccadilly and the Broadway, and so home by Richmond Hill and Brentford. Now, he takes out his motor, and all he has to do is to watch the policeman. It is no help to him whatever. Driving a coach and four was interesting but, compared with tandem driving, it was restful. In a team your leaders were coupled together and, unless they had talked it over beforehand and arranged upon a signal, could not suddenly turn round and look at you. Your tandem leader could, and sometimes would; and then you had to be quick with the flick of your whip: and maybe an oath or two, thrown in. Of course, the perfectly trained tandem was easy to take anywhere; but such was only for the rich: and, after all, there was more fun when your horses were not mere machines, and you had to watch their twitching ears and try to guess what they were thinking. I had a little Irish horse. He was a born leader. I did not have to drive him, beyond just giving him a general idea of where I wanted to get. He would pick his own way through an agricultural town on market day, leaving me to concentrate myself upon the wheeler. But that was when he was feeling good. And when he wasn't, he was just a little devil. I had some Oxford boys staying with me one summer. The horses hadn't been out all day, and the boys suggested a tandem drive by moonlight. We didn't take my old coachman, and he didn't clamour to come.
“I should keep my eye on the Little 'un, if I were you, sir,” he advised me, as he handed me the reins. “I don't like the way he has been picking up his feet.”
We started all right. “Pat” let his collar hang and seemed sleepy, but I knew his head was full of mischief: I could feel it through the eighteen feet of rein. In the hope of discouraging him, I turned up a narrow road with a high bank on either side. He still seemed drowsy, but I wasn't trusting him. It was a winding road. Suddenly, at a bend, he flung up his head and laid back his ears. “Hold on,” I shouted. The next moment we were charging up the bank. There was nothing else to be done but to let the wheeler follow: a dear quiet girl, when left to herself; but Pat always gave her a bit of his devil. The two men behind were shot out, but hung on, and managed somehow to scramble back. I wish they hadn't. I could have got on better without them. We cleared the top, and then they started cheering. We went through that cornfield at twenty miles an hour. I saw an open gate and made for that. We crossed a lane and through the hedge to the other side: by good luck it was chiefly bramble. The two fools at the back, I gathered, were unhurt. They were singing “Annie Laurie.” We took the Ewelme golf links still at the gallop. They seemed to me to be all bunkers. At the Icknield corner, I managed to get the horses on to the road. It rises four hundred feet in a mile and a half; and at Swyncombe, Pat agreed to my suggestion that we should pull up and have a look at the view. We returned home, via Nettlebed, at a gentle trot. Beyond having lost our hats, and the temporary use of my left eye, we were not much damaged. My Oxford friends crowded round Pat and congratulated him. The youngest of them, who had an indulgent mother, offered me my own price for him, then and there. He had been bitten with the idea of starting a tandem of his own.
Poor Pat! I had to shoot him when the motors came. He had never let anything pass him on the road, before, and one day, at the Henley Fair Mile, he ran his last race. He was only a few days short of twenty then: though you wouldn't have thought it. He had had a good time.
Tandem driving is asking for trouble, sooner or later. I had driven tandem, summer and winter, for over ten years, in and out among the Chilterns, which isn't an easy country; and my escapes had put it into my head, I suppose, that nothing ever could happen to me. And then, one afternoon, driving quietly round a corner at eight miles an hour, I tilted over a heap of stones that had been shot out there that morning for road-mending and broke poor Norma Lorimer's leg. She and Douglas Sladen were staying with us at the time. Sladen had remained behind to write a book-review in answer to a telegram: which shows how wise it is always to put duty before pleasure. Fortunately, we were near home, and some labourers quickly came to our assistance. I got on my bicycle and rode down to Wallingford, and wired for a bone setter; and when I started to return, I discovered I had broken an ankle. I had not known it till then, when my excitement had begun to cool down. I remember we boys had a way of getting into the Alexandra Palace by climbing a tree and dropping down inside the fence. One day, I slipped and fell upon the spikes. I felt nothing at the time, except the desire to put distance between myself and a young policeman who seemed to have suddenly sprung out of the earth. It was my mother who noticed that my arm was in ribbons. Nature, red though she be in tooth and claw, provides an anæsthetic. It was man who invented cold-blooded cruelty. Miss Lorimer stayed with us for a month, and forgave me. She talked as if all I had done had been to provide her with a good excuse for a pleasant holiday. But I was glad of that broken ankle. I'd have felt mean merely saying “I'm sorry.” We used to play croquet on crutches.