The
Life of General William Booth
Vol.
2 ~ Chapter 22 ~ 1903
Contents
APPROACHING OLD AGE
IN A SUBURBAN VILLA
IT
is time that we interposed between these chapters, which contain extracts
from the letters and diaries of William Booth, some account of his situation
as a widowered householder. For although he became more than ever a
wanderer over the earth’s surface after the death of Catherine
Booth, there were spells in his life when he bided gratefully at home
in his little red-bricked villa on the north of London.
This villa of Rookstone, at Hadley Wood, was built for him by the Salvation
Army, and he paid the Army 4 per cent on its cost. I well remember how
the old man exclaimed to me, on my last visit to Rookstone, in 1911:
“Well, this is the house they have built for me; this is what
they have done for me — the Salvation Army! — it’s
their gift to me, a corner of the world to die in — and I pay
‘em four per cent on the money!” He laughed in his beard,
stumped over to the window, and exclaimed, “Well, it’s not
such a bad little hole, is it? The furniture’s mine. I paid for
that!”
This humorous grumble did not mean that he was either ungrateful to
the Army or unhappy in his house. It meant that the very modest and
extremely commonplace villa represented the sum total of the Salvation
Army’s financial benefit to William Booth — William Booth
who had been accused for nearly fifty years of trading on the religious
sympathies of wealthy people. And it pleased him to reflect that he
actually paid interest on the capital sum provided by the Army to build
a lodging for its General. He liked to laugh over the fact, seeing it
as something of a joke.
There are references to the building of this house in the journal of
1903:
Met
the Chief and the Architect at the House they have been building for
me near by the present habitation.
It was a disappointment in various respects. It is not a very large
affair, but containing two good spacious rooms for my use, such has
been the Chief’s object in its erection — it being all but
impossible to find anything like a sitting or bed-room in which you
can breathe or have space to turn round. So far so good—but some
of the other accommodations were a disappointment — to wit, there
is considerably more light than agreeable. However, there is nothing
perfect in this world, and as I have not been able to look after it
myself beyond seeing the Plans when first prepared, I suppose I must
take it as I find it. -
Left for Hamburg at 4.45. Bade good-bye to the House where I have spent the last 10 years. Had much comfort and innumerable blessings in it. My belongings in the shape of tables, chairs, and the like, are to be removed during my absence on this Campaign. Then I return to another domicile a few yards away.
My people have built me a house they think for the remainder of my days. It is not a large affair, but it has two decent light rooms, one for working and the other for sleeping in. I should not stay here, but the Chief lives so close by. Moreover, I am the servant of the Army, and must live as well as work when and under such conditions as seems most likely to advance its interest.
But,
in truth, he liked this house and was proud of it; moreover, he spent
some of his happiest hours under its roof. For although he was occasionally
depressed by a feeling of solitude, he was still kept so busy by Army
business that he had no time and no excuse for more than a passing depression
of this kind. Moreover, there is no doubt that he came to value an occasional
day of rest. Old age brought him a relish for quiet and developed in
him a taste for domestic tidiness.
One of the first changes in his habits as soon as he was settled into
this widower’s establishment (he had refused every invitation
to live with any of his children) was a curious and almost finical attention
to the appointments of his house. He liked the furniture to look nice.
He insisted that things should be in their place. The same methodical
cleanliness which had always characterized his personal habits was seen
in the order of the house. It was a silent, restful, occasionally almost
somnolent dwelling.
The rooms seemed not only to have lost the fiery and tempestuous atmosphere
of their occupant, but to have acquired the spirit of the General’s
afternoon nap. Through the open windows came the singing of birds, the
humming of bees, and the scent of garden flowers. No one ever banged
a door, whistled on the stairs, or made a clatter with the hardware
in the kitchen. The sunlight that streamed through the windows revealed
no dust on the backs of chairs or along the ledges of the tables. There
was no disorder of papers on the writing-desk. The polished fire-irons
had a look of fixity. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked with the soothing
and reposeful sotto voce of a cat’s purring. The carpet was laid
for eternity.
Although the General was not a man of fastidious taste, and would have
been disposed to scorn the idea of aesthetics in furniture, he nevertheless
had the Japanese instinct for space and simplicity. He insisted that
the rooms should not be crowded with furniture nor the walls with pictures,
like an exhibition. His furniture was not beautiful, but it was solid.
He valued a thing for its usefulness and its stability. His arm-chairs
were comfortable, and their coverings were as lasting as their frames.
No amount of tramping would ever wear a track in his carpets. He never
bought an ornament.
For a year or two after the death of Catherine Booth his mind in its
solitude was harassed by the old eternal question, “Why?”
He would sometimes speak to Bramwell and write to Emma of this haunting;
more often he would commit to his journal the feelings of these passing
fits of dejection:
I
am certainly feeling very much alone and at times get frightful fits
of depression. I cannot understand them. I suppose other people have
to grapple with the same kind of thing.
The difference in me at different times on and off the platform is amazing.
My memory at one time is a blank — always bad — but at other
times dreadful, and yet I find it all but impossible to do anything
with notes.
Then I have always a feeling that I am such an object of criticism.
Pressmen, parsons, my own people, etc., and the penitent-form at the
finish.
I expect the only remedy is more faith in God.
. . . very weary and pining for a few hours off the rock of toil and
responsibility — if that were possible.
. . . trying to make men good is indeed a weary, disheartening business.
I wonder why God has not given the world up long ago!
. . . Another “Xmas day” has flown — who knows whether
I shall see another on earth. If any days are kept in Heaven one would
think that this would be. But there we shall in all probability mark
the flight of time — or duration, by whatever name it may be called
— in a different fashion. . . . Oh to be ready. My darling has
had three ‘Xmas days in Heaven now. How different ‘Xmas
is without her. Yes, and everything else to me. But God is mine —
He is with me. And with him I ought to be of Paradise possessed.
He wrote to his dearly loved son on one occasion:
I don’t speculate in any estimates of your nearness and dearness to me. It will go unexpressed for this life anyway. When we meet darling Mamma again on the “Evergreen Shore” we will not only sing of His love but talk of ours. I feel as if life was a broken, cracked affair now. We shall have it repaired then — nay, as the Jew has it, made “better as new.”
He
was not a man, as the reader may have gathered, who cared for society
or could unbend even as a relaxation. Like George Sand, in one respect
at least, he was tormented by divine things, and loathed chatter almost
as violently as he abominated iniquity. We find in one of his diaries,
during a sea voyage, a savage criticism of those about him for wasting
time over dinner:
It
is now 6.30 and my people have gone to the Saloon for an hour and a half
of wasted time — or worse — named dinner. How any one naming
the name of Christ can do it I cannot understand. I protest and am absent.
My usual cup of tea and toast has served me very well. I must try and
find a secretary who will be of the same manner of thinking with myself.
But how and when? There’s the rub. There is no “pick-me-up”
for me but sleep and endurance.
In spite of these moods, existence for the old General at Rookstone was,
on the whole, pleasant enough until at the end of his life the visitation
of blindness came to try the last fragments of his patience. He took a
leading part in the Conferences of the Salvation Army, kept a secretary
in residence, and had another always coming and going from Headquarters.
But there were merciful intervals of tranquillity. He was contented for
many days to sit in his arm-chair by the fire reading a book, listening
to reports from the scattered battlefields of the Army, discussing new
plans with his Staff, and, for recreation, teasing those about him with
a kind of “chaff” which was mordant enough in tone but which
yet never hurt the feelings of its victims. It was here, too, that the
old man commenced bee-keeping. He wanted to give to the Self-Denial Funds
of the Army money which he himself had earned, and to this end he bought
bees and hives, planting his little garden with flowers which bees love,
and selling the honey which the bees stored in his hives.
This partial return to the spirit of hobby which the reader will remember
characterized his relationship as a young father with his sons, although
consecrated now by a touching desire to help the funds of the Army, is
an interesting light on the man’s psychology. It is true that he
gave very little time to his bees and flowers, but that he thought about
them at all is worthy of remembrance.
Then came seasons of real activity, when the comfortable arm-chair and
the silence and the peace of Rookstone irked him beyond patience, and
at these times he threw off apathy, floundered into the open world, and
went storming up and down the country in a crusade against sin, indifference,
and poverty.
Sometimes, too, he would descend upon the Staff at International Headquarters,
and stir them up with a vigour which, even if it quickened enthusiasm.
sometimes impeded for the moment the smoothness and precision of the machinery.
Then he had fits of restlessness, and would undertake long journeys and
embark upon fiery crusades sometimes without properly counting the cost;
only the prevision of his Staff saved him on such occasions from disaster.
He would return after many weeks or months from these most trying ordeals
to the repose of Rookstone, and once more draw his arm-chair to the fire,
take a book from the shelves, and sit down in the solitude of his widowerhood
to nod for an hour or two over the pages and dream of the past.
Besides the visits of Bramwell Booth and his wife, who at this time more
than at any other were a constant providence to the old man, General Booth
had one great pleasure, namely, the writing of domestic letters. His letters
to Bramwell Booth are a library in themselves, and it has been a perpetual
astonishment to the present writer how this overworked and overburdened
man found the time, much more the inclination, to indite such long and
innumerable epistles.
The explanation seems to be that idleness was insufferable to his nature,
and that when he was worn out by public meetings and interviews and journeys,
he went to his writing-table as another man goes to his couch or his bed.
Articles and addresses he wrote laboriously and as part of his toil, but
it refreshed him to write both to his children and to certain of his Officers
and friends. He was never too tired to tell the children how greatly he
loved them, and how ardently he longed for them in his absences.
Among the letters of his old age, those to his daughter Eva show one with
what simple and human affection he thought of his children, and yet how
this natural love of a father was always mingled with the religious occupations
of his life. A birthday letter from Eva Booth, written from Toronto, helps
one to see how very dearly he was loved by his children. She says to him:
“What cause the whole world has for gratitude to God for every year
of your life; what millions of hearts and homes you have been the means
of brightening with God’s salvation; what a lot of people you have
made happy who were once wretched; what a multitude you have made rich
who were once poor.”
And she concludes: “You know my love for you, my ever-burning, all-absorbing
desire to please you in every particular, to comfort you, to help you,
and in some small measure to brighten the other end of life’s journey
for you, to live in your heart, and to spend every energy in the front
ranks of the battle that you are waging.” Signing herself, “Ever
in fondest and unchanging love, Your own little soldier child.”
Here follow two letters from the General to his daughter
MY
DEAR, DARLING EVA — I hear that you are seriously ill again. What
a calamity! How sorry I am. However has it come about?
I wish you were here so that I could give you a kiss and we could have
an hour’s talk together, but this cannot be for the present.
Do you want to make me happy? Get better, and keep better — the
winter will be here directly.
God is good. I love Him and His people and His work! You must keep believing.
All the storms will soon be over; we shall meet above and have good times
there.
Don’t bother to answer my letters, although yours are always welcome.
I have about twenty articles to write before I leave for Australia. They
work me like a beast of burden — or harder still!
Well, then, darling, let us stick to the Blood and Fire simplicity and
humility which has made the Salvation Army what it is.
Good-bye, my dear, dear girl. I wish I could be with you and kiss and
bless you. Cheer up! Let us cast ourselves on God. He is a great Comforter.
My keenest trials are very much on your own pattern. I have to live a
lonely life. Besides Bramwell, I have no one; but he is out-and-out. But
let us take courage and go forward. You are doing a great work, a work
for eternity, a work that can never be measured. I must close, —
Believe me fondly,
YOUR AFFECTIONATE FATHER.
MY
DARLING EVA — Why did I not think of Christmas Day? How stupid!
-- How unsentimental — how unfatherly — how untenderly, and
as many other evil qualities, have I proved myself by this lapse of memory.
As it was in the beginning, etc., etc., etc. Well, what shall I say? I
can only ask forgiveness, and promise — no, I won’t promise
anything in the way of improved memory, but I will send you ten thousand
kisses and assurances of tenderest love and fatherly concern, for all
that affects my darling Eva affects me.
God bless you and keep you and carry you as in the hollow of His hand.
I pray for you. My remembrances, Christmas remembrances of you, if not
too late, and best wishes for the New Year for each member of your household,
not excepting Gypsy and Adjutant Page.
I love you tenderly, and long after your health and happiness and everything
that is good for earth and Heaven.
YOUR AFFECTIONATE FATHER.
Mrs.
Bramwell Booth was a constant visitor to Rookstone, and her children,
to whom the General was devoted, never failed to give him pleasure when
they came to sit beside his chair. He loved to talk with those who understood
his work in the world. He could be not only interesting but delightful
and amusing when he was perfectly sure of sympathy.
One of Bramwell’s daughters tells of his affection and solicitude
for his numerous grandchildren — the love that created theirs. He
would write them long letters even on his arduous tours; would discuss
the affairs of their Corps, offer advice as to subjects for addresses
and the management of meetings, and inquire with a sincere and sympathetic
interest into the results of their labours. They always looked forward
with the greatest excitement to his tea-parties. The old man made a delightful
host.
As children they used to wake him with carols every Christmas Day he spent
at home, running across to his house with their musical instruments while
it was yet dark, creeping to his room, and surprising him each year with
a new song. But one Christmas the contents of their stockings were so
wonderfully gratifying, that they lingered too long, and were presently
dismayed to hear the tapping of a stick in the hall, and then the stentorian
tones of the General singing, “Christians Awake!” They scuttled
into bed, and hid under the bed-clothes, to be dislodged by Grandpapa’s
stick amid a happy din of shrieks and laughter.
No wonder that this old man was adored by children