FORTY YEARS AFTER THIS is the personal history of a
great love affair which shook official society in Cairo from top to bottom at the turn of the
century. In those days, society was exclusive, secure, and hedged-in with formalities, with power to make or mar careers, and sometimes ruthless in the ostracism it meted out to those who broke its rules. Here is the story, frankly told in a charming
natural style, of how Major Charles a Court, later to be known as Colonel Repington, Military Correspondent of The Times, and a pundit on European affairs, fell in love with and won the
affection of beautiful Lady Garstin, wife of the Under-Secretary for Public Works in Egypt, swept her off her feet by the power of his wooing, and in spite of his infidelity to her, held her affection till the day of his death twenty-seven years later. That Mary North, as she then was, should have been encouraged and persuaded by her friends and relations to marry William Garstin, then a coming man in the Egyptian Service some twenty years her senior, whom she did not love, does not seem to have struck anyone as unwise. All the natural charm and warm heartedness of a young girl broke itself pathetically against the cold formality of a husband who, accord- ing to her account, regarded her merely as a social asset and a possession. There were children of the marriage, and they were a real bond between the two, but when the debonair and forceful personality of Charles a Court swung into her orbit there was no strong citadel at home to withstand his siege.
Major a Court as he then was—he took the name of Repington on succeeding to a family estate in 1903—was on the staff of the Army of Occupation in Egypt, and in the round of social life it was inevitable that he and Lady Garstin should meet frequently.
His artistic and intellectual interests made an immediate appeal to her sensitive nature. One day he sent her a little engraved seal with " Repondez vite" engraved round it.
" This seal" (he wrote) "had been given by the great Lord Nelson to his grandmother, who, in her turn, had given it to him, telling him to keep it until he found the woman who was to be the love of his life. He now sent it to me. I sat looking at the seal, my heart pounding, all my being on fire. . . . I was the woman for whom he had been waiting, just as, all unconsciously, I had been waiting for him. But realisation followed instantly on this thought. e had not waited. I was married. He was married. We had b,ui given hostages to fortune in our children. There was nothing— absolutely nothing—to be done. I sent back the little seal."
Mrs. Repington describes how from that moment her life was to be a continual repetition of this situation—siege warfare, with an enemy within the gates. She had found, as he had found, the love of her life. She was twenty-nine and had never been in love before, and it can be a terrible thing when two people, no longer in their first youth, fall desperately in love.
Steps were taken to keep him out of Cairo, but when she took the children home to England, love-letters began arriving by every mail. Soon the importunate lover, who was never slow to translate ideas into action, arrived on the scene on short leave from the Egyptian campaign. The glamour of a brave soldier, perhaps soon to be killed, was added to that of the letters, written by the man who was later to make his mark as a writer. Lady Garstin capitulated, and they spent a " honey- moon " together in London before he went back to the war. Still attempts were made to separate the lovers. A " Council of War " was held and Repington signed a document in which he undertook not to see or write to Lady Garstin as long as she was not persecuted on his :account. This agreement was before long broken on both sides, and every attempt of ihe
lovers to live with their respective spouses seemed doomed to failure. The death of Lady Garstin's little daughter, which is most poignantly described, was the cruel blow which snapped the last thread holding her to her home life and led to the unregretted throwing-in of her lot with Colonel Repington nearly three years later.
The rest of the book deals with their life together, till his death in 1925, and through it all there are delightful portraits of personalities of the time : Lord Cromer paying a mid-morning call in the friendliest way to arrange a tactful dinner-party ; Lady Oxford, then Miss Margot Tennant, already the most talked-of young woman of the day, arriving with her parents in Cairo and firmly doing exactly as she liked; Lady Hamilton, then Mrs. Ian Hamilton, at Hythe in 1898 " very slender, very fair, very dignified, and most exquisitely dressed in a graceful artistic style all her own;" or in later days Mrs. Annie Besant, Lord Haldane, H. G. Wells, or Rabindranath Tagore at their Hampstead home. There came a time when disillusionment set in, yet no breath of criticism is allowed to spoil the impressicn of the halcyon blue of their companionship.
Reading these pages, it seems as though the protagonists themselves were helpless to stem the march of events at the beginning as the very thing which might have saved them— loving sympathy at home—was denied. It is almost incredible that any husband should have been so blind as to forbid his wife to seek counsel from her priest, because he did not approve of her recent conversion to Roman Catholicism, just when she most needed it : but so it was. Repington, like Don Juan, was a law unto himself where women were con- cerned, as Mary Repington learnt to her cost, and she had to put up with this and much besides in order to share her life with him. It is a romance against the rules, arid Mrs. Repington has described it with a candour which is typical not only of the present age, but of a woman whose brave heart never faltered once the die was cast, who could forgive • grievous wrongs, when the time came, without bitterness.
JANET LEEPER.
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