By Heart

He said it to her after breakfast, standing on the hearthrug in her sitting room with his hands behind his back, as he had said things to his tutor at the Rosenau when he was nine.

I have been induced to preside at the Meeting of this Society, from a conviction of its paramount importance to the great interests of humanity and justice.

She sat on the sofa with her feet on a stool, because Dr Locock had said that she should put her feet up whenever she could, and she had decided to obey Dr Locock in this one particular and in nothing else. She was nearly four months gone with the child now. It had begun to show a little, under the loose morning gown, and she had begun to stop minding; the first weeks had been wretched, and she had been cross with everybody, and with him most of all, and then one morning in May she had woken up and been well, and been happy, and had told him so as if it had been his doing. She listened to the speech with her head on one side, watching his mouth.

I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion.

He had composed it himself, and had gone over the English with Anson for the idiom and with nobody at all for the sense, because the sense was his own. Then he had learnt it by heart. He had been saying it to himself for a week, in his dressing room and in the garden and in his bath, until the words had worn smooth and stopped meaning anything and then, round about Saturday, had begun to mean something again. He knew where the difficult sounds were. There was the and this and that, which he could do now if he thought about them, and atrocious and persevering, which he could do if he did not, and Christianity, where his tongue had tripped every time until Thursday and had not tripped since.

But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity, and the best feelings of our nature.

It did not trip now. She nodded.

Let us therefore trust that Providence will prosper our exertions in so holy a cause, and that (under the auspices of our Queen and Her Government) we may at no distant period be rewarded by the accomplishment of the great and humane object for the promotion of which we have this day met.

He stopped. It had taken a little under two minutes. He had timed it, more than once.

“Under the auspices of our Queen,” she said, and smiled at him. “I like that part best.”

“You are supposed to like the part about Africa.”

“I like Africa very much. I like the Queen better.” She held out her hand to him and he took it. “You will be very good, my dearest. You are always very good when you have prepared, and you have prepared until I could say it myself. I very nearly can.”

He said that she must not, or there would be nothing left for him to do; and she laughed, and let him go to dress.

---

Cart dressed him, as Cart had dressed him every morning for years.

Isaac Cart was from Morges, on the lake a little west of Lausanne, a quiet, careful man of nearly thirty who had come to England with him in February and had married there on the first of April, a girl from his own canton; and Albert had been more pleased by the marriage than by most things that had happened to him in England. Cart was Swiss. Albert had never thought about this one way or the other until May, and since May he had found himself thinking about it a good deal, because London had.

On the night of the fifth of May an old gentleman named Lord William Russell, Lord John Russell’s uncle, had been murdered in his bed in Norfolk Street, off Park Lane, with his throat cut; and on the eighth his valet had been taken up for it, a young Swiss named Courvoisier, from the Pays de Vaud, who had been in his service five weeks. The trial was to come on in the middle of June. London talked of nothing else. Old gentlemen who had been shaved by the same man for twenty years now sat up in their chairs and watched the razor in the glass. Greville, the Clerk of the Council, was going about saying that half the world went to sleep expecting to have its throat cut before morning, and that the other half had hidden the carving knives. Several of the Queen’s ladies had begun to look at Cart, when he passed them on the back stairs, as if he were a large dog of uncertain temper.

Cart had said nothing about it. He was not a man who said things. But on the morning after the arrest Albert had found him standing at the window of the dressing room with a newspaper in his hand, not reading it, and had seen in his face a thing he had sometimes seen in his own in the glass since February, when he caught sight of himself without expecting to: the face of a foreigner who has understood that he is being looked at. Albert had taken the paper from him and said in French that the man was a criminal and nothing to do with him, and that he, Albert, would be obliged if Cart would go on shaving him exactly as before. Cart had said, Bien, monseigneur, and had gone on exactly as before; and they had never spoken of it again.

He stood now while Cart brushed the coat, and looked at his own face in the glass, and found it pale.

---

The carriage went down the Mall and along the Strand at a quarter to eleven in a crowd that thickened as it went, until by Charing Cross it was moving at a walk, and the people on the pavements were looking in at the windows and taking off their hats.

Exeter Hall stood on the north side of the street, a tall plain front with a pair of columns at the door, and the Great Room inside it was one of the largest rooms in London: a long hall with a gallery round three sides and an organ at the end, built nine years ago for the great religious meetings of the spring, the missionary societies and the Bible societies and the societies for the abolition of everything that the Evangelicals thought ought to be abolished. Albert had been told what to expect, and it was not enough. He came up the stairs behind Mr Buxton and Dr Lushington and out on to the platform at eleven precisely, and the whole hall rose.

There were five or six thousand of them. They stood on the floor and in the gallery and on the benches, men in black and women in bonnets, Quakers in drab with their hats on, clergymen in white neckcloths, a great field of faces turned up towards the platform in the grey morning light from the high windows; and as he came forward they cheered him, and went on cheering, and the organ began the anthem and they sang it, all of them, five or six thousand voices, God save our gracious Queen, so that the sound came up off the floor at him like heat. He had not been cheered like this in England. He had been cheered for the Queen, standing beside her, and cheered at a little distance, as one cheers a carriage. This was cheering for him. He stood at the front of the platform with his hands at his sides and did not know what to do with his face.

Then they sat down, all at once, with a noise like surf, and it was very quiet, and he began.

He said it as he had said it on the hearthrug. He did not look at the paper in his hand, and he did not look at any one face, but at the middle of the room, at the height of the gallery rail, as his tutor had taught him; and he heard his own voice go out into the great hall, thinner than he would have liked and more foreign, and the hall take it and hold it. At the blackest stain upon civilized Europe there was a murmur, like wind. At this great country will not relax in its efforts they began to cheer, and he had to wait, standing quite still, until they had done. At under the auspices of our Queen they cheered again, louder, and he thought of her on the sofa with her feet on the stool saying that she liked that part best, and very nearly smiled, and did not.

It took a little more than two minutes. When it was over they stood up again and cheered for a long time, and Mr Buxton took his hand in both of his and shook it as if he were working a pump, with tears in his eyes, and said something about the Prince’s name being joined from this day to the cause of the poor African, which Albert did not altogether follow because the cheering was still going on. He sat down. His hands, he found, were perfectly steady. They had been steady all morning. It was his knees that had not been.

---

The resolutions went on for nearly two hours. Mr Buxton moved the first, at great length, about the Niger, and about steamers that would go up it carrying the Bible and the plough, and the hall applauded every steamer. A bishop seconded him. Dr Lushington moved the second, and an archdeacon seconded it, and spoke at length about Africa, which he had not visited.

He thought, while the archdeacon was speaking, about what he had not said.

He had said England, and this great country, and civilized Europe. He had not said America. He had thought about it, in the week of composing, and had decided against it, as he had decided against it in April when the address came from the American Commons and the newspaper paragraph with it, a hundred and forty-one to thirty-eight. The Society existed to put down the trade in slaves, the ships and the barracoons and the Middle Passage; it did not concern itself with slavery where slavery was lawful, and in the Queen’s American kingdom slavery was lawful, from Virginia to the Gulf, and its Commons had just voted not to speak of it even to her. Its Charter forbade her British ministers to advise her about it. It forbade nobody to speak about the slave trade. But the President of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade was the husband of the Queen of America, and he could not stand up in Exeter Hall and say America without saying something about her that she had not said herself; so he had not said it. He had said all once, in April, on a sheet of her paper, and that was as much as he had found it possible to say, and he did not know whether anyone in America had noticed. He thought that it would be a long time before he knew.

Sir Robert Peel spoke last, very well, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and was cheered nearly as loudly as Albert had been, which Albert noted, and filed, as he filed everything about Sir Robert Peel, since he had a feeling that he would one day need to know a great deal about him.

When Peel had done, Albert left, at five minutes to one, with the meeting still sitting, because it had been agreed that he should; and the hall rose for him again as he went, and the anthem began again behind him on the stairs, and in the Strand the crowd had grown so large that the carriage could hardly move, and people put their hands on the doors and the windows and called out to him, God bless your Royal Highness, and God bless the Queen, in a hundred voices. He sat back against the cushions with his hat on his knee and let them. He found that he was very tired, and very happy, and that he would have liked above all things to have somebody to tell.

---

She was waiting for him in the corridor at the top of the stairs, which was not where the Queen waited for anybody.

“Well?” she said. “Well? They told me you were cheered all down the Strand. Lord Melbourne has sent a note that the meeting was a great success and that you spoke with excellent effect. Tell me all of it. Were you nervous? You were nervous. You said Christianity properly; I know you did.”

He told her all of it, walking up and down her sitting room as she had walked up and down it in April, while she sat with her feet on the stool and interrupted him; about the five or six thousand, and the anthem, and Mr Buxton working the pump handle, and Sir Robert Peel’s thumbs. She laughed at Peel’s thumbs. She was delighted with him. She told him that she had been anxious all morning and had not been able to settle to anything, and that she would write it all down in her journal tonight: that he had been very nervous, and had repeated his speech to her that morning by heart, and that it had gone off extremely well. He said that she should leave out the part about his being nervous. She said that she would not, because it was true, and because it was the part she liked.

Then the door opened and the Baroness came in, with a red box under her arm.

Lehzen did not knock. She had never knocked, at that door; she had been coming through it since the Queen was five years old, and it had not occurred to her, he thought, that a marriage was a reason to begin. She curtseyed to the Queen, and to him, very correctly, and said that Lord Melbourne’s box had come round from the Treasury, and that Lord Melbourne himself would wait upon Her Majesty at half past three; and she put the box down on the Queen’s writing table, where the keys were, and went out again.

The Queen looked at the box. Albert looked at the Queen. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“I must just look at it,” she said. “It will not take long.”

“Of course.”

He went to his own rooms, and sat down at the organ, and played a fugue of Bach’s that he did not have to think about, rather loudly, for some time.

---

It was not that she kept things from him. He had to be fair, and he was always fair, even to himself, which was more than most people bothered with. She did not keep things from him. She simply did not bring them to him. She had been Queen since she was eighteen, and had done the business alone, with Lord Melbourne at her elbow and the Baroness at the door, and had done it, by every account, very well; and when she was with Albert she wished to talk about other things. She had said so, quite simply, when he had tried in April to ask her about a dispatch from Constantinople. She had said that she did not like to talk about business when they were together, because they might differ, and she could not bear to differ with him.

He had told this to Anson, because he had to tell somebody, and Anson was his secretary now and had become, without either of them quite intending it, his friend. And Anson had told him, a few days ago, with great discretion and visible embarrassment, that Lord Melbourne had said almost exactly the same thing to him. Lord Melbourne had raised it with the Queen, Anson said, at the Prince’s wish. And the Queen had told Lord Melbourne that it proceeded entirely from indolence, that she knew it was wrong, but that when she was with the Prince she preferred to talk upon other subjects. And Lord Melbourne had said to Anson, in his lazy way, that he thought the real obstacle in Her Majesty’s mind was the fear of a difference of opinion; and Stockmar had added, as Stockmar would, that the Queen was influenced more than she knew by the Baroness.

So it was known. Melbourne knew it, and Anson, and Stockmar, who knew everything and approved of nothing that he had not arranged. The Baroness knew it, and kept the keys. Albert had been married sixteen weeks, and he was the President of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade, and five thousand people had stood up for him that morning and sung; and he did not know what was in the red box on his wife’s writing table, and would not be told unless he asked, and could not ask without making her afraid of differing with him, which was the one thing in the world she could not bear.

He played the fugue to the end, and then played it again, more softly.

He would be patient. He had decided that in February, and he decided it again now, at the organ, with his hands moving on the keys. He was twenty. She had been twenty-one for a week. There was the child coming at the end of the year, and when it came there would be things she could not do and he could, and she would let him, because she would have to; and after that it would be easier, and after that it would be the rest of their lives, which was a long time. He had a great deal of time. It was the one thing in England, he thought, that nobody had voted to give him less of.

---

They went down to Claremont at five, for three nights, so that she could be quiet before the Derby. She wished very much to see the Derby. She had not been since she was a child, and Albert had never been at all, and she had made him promise that he would ride about among the crowd on the Downs and come back and tell her everything, which he had promised, though he had a strong feeling that the English at a horse race would be the English at Exeter Hall with the hymns left out.

Claremont was Uncle Leopold’s house, and the Queen’s favourite of all her houses because it was not hers. It was also the house where Uncle Leopold’s first wife had died, Princess Charlotte, the heir to the throne, in childbed, twenty-three years ago, in the November, with her child. Albert had known that all his life, as he knew most things about his uncle’s life, from his uncle. He had not thought about it until this spring. He did not say it to the Queen. She knew it better than he did; it had been the reason, in the end, that she was born at all. He did not think that she thought about it either, and he did not mean to be the one to make her.

The carriage went out of the Palace by the garden gate and turned left, up the hill between the long brick wall of the Palace garden and the railings of the Green Park, towards Hyde Park Corner and the Kensington road. The people were along the railings in the afternoon sun, as they always were, waiting, and they took off their hats as the Queen went by, and she bowed to them, and Albert bowed to them, and a small boy on the railings waved a green branch.

“On Thursday we shall be back,” the Queen said, “and then the season will begin properly, and we can drive out every afternoon again, as we used. I have missed it. I like this road. They always wait for us.”

He said that he liked it too. It was true. He had liked it from the first afternoon, in February, when she had told him its name.

They went over the top of the hill, under the arch, and out of sight of the railings; and it was the first of June.