ABSTRACT
Walter de la Mare We actually met on Dorchester station’s down platform. He showed a child’s satisfaction and a rare courtesy almost peculiar to himself, in his immediate apology that in spite of every effort he had failed to get me a cab. Simply because the complete fleet of Dorchester’s cabs had been secured by people with tickets for the first performance of a dramatised version of Tess.1 Therefore, having compelled me to give my bag into his keeping, we set out on foot. [...]
And so at length we came to his house, Max Gate. It had been of his own design and building; indeed, his first [article] had been entitled ‘How I Built Myself a House’.2 It was not in the least like ‘The House Beautiful’, but resembled that style of writing which he said you must not make continuously flawless, since, then, it may become too much of a strain on the reader! What, however, would have redeemed, for me at any rate, sheer downright impossible ugliness was the fact, which he confided to me, that when the builders were cutting the approach to the house they had, by accident, chopped off the skull from a Roman skeleton. He showed me, too, afterwards, a sepulchral stone with a Latin inscription. A Legion had been quartered on Max Gate’s site. And, since he thought the presence of the stone ‘inauspicious’, he had persuaded a dense mat of ivy to creep down, and so hide its inscription from the light of day. But I expect the moonbeams crept through the mat round about midnight.
