The House by the RiverHerbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
General
The House by the River
Herbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; Poets -- Fiction
They met at the Whittakers', and Lord Milroy presided. Lord Milroy was
one of those useful and assiduous noblemen who live in a constant state
of being in the chair. One felt that at the Last Day he would probably
be found in the chair, gravely deprecating the tone of the last speaker
and taking it that the sense of the Committee was rather in favour of
the course which commended itself to him. For although he was courteous
and statesmanlike and suave, he was passionately attached to his own
opinions, and generally saw to it that they prevailed.
On the matter of this memorial he speedily formed an opinion. There were
many alternative proposals--some of them attractive, but expensive or
impracticable, some of them merely fantastic. One man took the view that
the work and character of Stephen Byrne would be most suitably
commemorated by the endowment of a school of poetry in Northern
Australia, where the arts were notoriously neglected. The school, of
course, would bear the name of Stephen Byrne, and this would be a
perpetual link between Australia and the mother country. The Old
Savonians pointed out to the Committee that the gymnasium at Savonage,
where Stephen Byrne had spent perhaps the happiest years of his life,
must somehow be enlarged--if it was to keep pace with the expansion of
the school. And the spirit of the founder's motto, "Mens sana in corpore
sano," could hardly be so perfectly expressed as by the commemoration of
a fine mind in the building up of fine bodies. Besides, there was no
prospect otherwise of getting the gymnasium enlarged. The
representatives of Monckton Parva were more ambitious. They said that
the place where a man was born and the place where a man lived
afterwards were the two great geographical monuments of his life. Since
the Committee did not see their way to arrange for a memorial in each
of these places, why not somehow unite them? The house where Stephen was
born was now unhappily situated between a brewery and a tannery; and
unless sufficient funds were subscribed to provide for the total
destruction of the brewery and the tannery, the house as it stood could
scarcely be regarded as a suitable nucleus for the memorial. They
therefore suggested that the house should be demolished or rather
disintegrated, brick by brick, and re-erected in a suitable site in
Hammerton Chase as near as possible to Stephen's house. The house was
small and comparatively mobile; indeed, there was a legend in the
township that the house had been transplanted once, if not twice,
already. Alternatively both the house at Monckton and the house at The
Chase might be razed to the ground and re-erected as one building on a
neutral site in Kensington, or perhaps Lincolnshire, a county which
Stephen had mentioned very favourably in one of his poems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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