Wilbraham was obviously a sentimentalist and an enthusiast; there was
the extraordinary case shortly after I first met him of his
championship of X, a man who had been caught in an especially bestial
kind of crime and received a year's imprisonment for it. On X leaving
prison Wilbraham championed and defended him, put him up for months in
his rooms in Duke Street, walked as often as possible in his company
down Piccadilly, and took him over to Paris. It says a great deal for
Wilbraham's accepted normality and his general popularity that this
championship of X did him no harm. It was so obvious that he himself
was the last man in the world to be afflicted with X's peculiar habits.
Some men, it is true, did murmur something about "birds of a feather";
one or two kind friends warned Wilbraham in the way kind friends have,
and to them he simply said: "If a feller's a pal he's a pal."
All this might in the end have done Wilbraham harm had not X most
happily committed suicide in Paris in 1905. There followed a year or
two later the much more celebrated business of Lady C. I need not go
into all that now, but here again Wilbraham constituted himself her
defender, although she robbed, cheated, and maligned him as she robbed,
cheated, and maligned every one who was good to her. It was quite
obvious that he was not in love with her; the obviousness of it was one
of the things in him that annoyed her.
He simply felt apparently that she had been badly treated (the very
last thing that she had been), gave her any money he had, put his rooms
at the disposal of herself and her friends, and, as I have said,
championed her everywhere. This affair did very nearly finish him
socially, and in his regiment. It was not so much that they minded his
caring for Lady C--(after all, any man can be fooled by any woman)--but
it was Lady C's friends who made the whole thing so impossible. Such a
crew! Such a horrible crew! And it was a queer thing to see Wilbraham
with his straight blue eyes and innocent mouth and general air of
amiable simplicity in the company of men like Colonel B and young
Kenneth Parr. (There is no harm, considering the later publicity of his
case, in mentioning his name.) Well, that affair luckily came to an end
just in time. Lady C disappeared to Berlin and was no more seen.
There were other cases into which I need not go when Wilbraham was seen
in strange company, always championing somebody who was not worth the
championing. He had no "social tact," and for them at any rate no moral
sense. In himself he was the ordinary normal man about town, no prude,
but straight as a man can be in his debts, his love affairs, his
friendships, and his sport. Then came the war. He did brilliantly at
Mons, was wounded twice, went out to Gallipoli, had a touch of
Palestine, and returned to France again to share in Foch's final
triumph.
No man can possibly have had more of the war than he had, and it is my
own belief that he had just a little too much of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account