That was all. It seemed very pointless. The next evening, Lord and Lady Lathom arrived, and Miss Wingfield at once recognized them as the two people she had seen in the crystal. Lady Radnor asked them whether they had family prayers on the previous night. They had.
‘Did anyone move while they were going on?’
Then Lady Lathom said that during prayers, she had gone to Lord Lathom and had asked him to say a special prayer for the bride and bridegroom. He had silenced her with his hand, telling her that he had already decided to do so.
The point of this story here is that nowadays few people would recognize the chair-smelling scene as the ceremony of family prayers. The present generation hardly ever sees it, though for those of us who are relics of Queen Victoria’s day, nothing more vividly recalls the atmosphere of duty and decorum in which we grew up. Great houses had their chapels and chaplains, and, early in the century, even their sermons. My father, who came to Wilton in the ’sixties as Chaplain to Lord and Lady Herbert of Lea, used to tell us that one Sunday evening, when Bishop Wilberforce was a guest in the house, he rose up at the end of prayers, and delivered one of those hour-long sermons to which the mid-Victorians were accustomed. At the harmonium sat Eddy Hamilton, an Eton friend of the sons of the house, waiting to play a final hymn. Like the young man who tired of St. Paul’s sermon at Troas, Eddy too, after a time, ‘sunk down with sleep’; but unluckily his elbows fell upon the keyboard and his feet upon the bellows. A roar of discordant notes startled the congregation, and woke the sleeper; while the Bishop probably thought he was being ‘blowed down’, like a preacher in Salisbury Cathedral, who had once gone on for two hours, and at last came to the end of the patience of the organist.
In ordinary houses, family prayers did not rise to the dignity of a sermon, although the master of the house would sometimes expound from a commentary. Prayers were generally said, not in a chapel, but in the breakfast-room, and disrespectful people made play with jokes about ‘praying to the urn’. It is true that an accompaniment of bubbling and boiling often made a background for the voice; while a flustered member of the family was sometimes seen rising hurriedly from his or her knees, to blow out the light under a too vigorously spitting kettle.
The routine was fixed. Chairs were placed in a row for the servants, who marched into the room in strict order of precedence. Generally they first sat on their chairs for a Bible reading, and then they turned over to ‘ smell them’. The family knelt informally round about the breakfast-table, ostensibly attending to the service, but sometimes taking surreptitious peeps at the bundles of letters which had been placed on the table before each person’s seat.
An old lady living in Wilton had been the heroine of what must have been surely the one and only romance of family prayers. She had belonged to a large family of sisters, living with a most severe parent in Smith Square, Westminster. The sisters were all heiresses, but such was in those days the standard of chaperonage, that none of them had ever found herself alone with a young man. Our old friend had at last collected a lover, but how could he propose? Privacy was impossible. This ingenious young man had the brilliant idea of proposing during family prayers, and we made many guesses as to how he achieved it.
My brother Harold decided that he responded fervently in the Litany.
‘I beseech thee to have me good Laura.’
Laura was not her name, but doubtless the adored one was quick enough to glance demurely in her admirer’s direction when she murmured her next AMEN.
Evening prayers were not general except in clerical houses, but even there they sometimes failed in their effect through being introduced too unexpectedly into the stream of common life. It was often a great shock at Wilton Rectory, when we were playing games after dinner, to see the door suddenly open to admit a swift procession which disposed itself discreetly on its knees before the chairs at the far end of the room. The parlour-maid detached herself from the others, and, approaching my father, she presented him with a book. Laughter was abruptly stilled. Conversation froze on the lips. Counters rolled from the card-table. Everyone, flopped down to ‘smell their chairs’. But it must be admitted that this swift turnover to devotion was too sudden for any but the most gymnastic minds.
It was the servants who usually took the family by surprise, but once, at any rate, in our house, the tables were turned. My father must have been bored with his evening, and looking at the clock, he saw that the servants were late for prayers. He rang the bell sharply. There was a pause. He rang again. This time the kitchen-maid appeared, covered with confusion, as the rule of the house was that the young maids should not appear at evening prayers. They were supposed to be in bed. Now this embarrassed girl had to report that the upper servants were ‘having a game’ and were all dressed up, so they couldn’t possibly appear. They were not let off. A grave message was sent, ordering them to change, and to appear in ten minutes. Exactly at that moment, the door opened, and the customary procession entered. The carriage of the maids was perfect. Their figures stiff and rigid in the firm stays which controlled their panting: the parlour-maid handed the Prayer Book without meeting my father’s eyes: he took it with his usual gravity; and then all the flushed and guilty faces were comfortably buried in the chair seats. Only when Mildred and I were having our hair brushed upstairs did we learn that our respectable maids had actually been dressed as men, and had worn trousers—whose, we never learnt.
My first dinner party was at the palace at Salisbury in the days of Bishop Wordsworth. Most of the guests were old and very dignified, but there was one young man of my own age, Algy Bathurst. After dinner, he and I withdrew to a distant corner for a little light conversation, when all at once we caught sight of the last of the other guests disappearing through the drawing-room door. We had been left isolated. Horrified at the idea of doing the wrong thing, we followed at full speed, only to catch sight of that same figure vanishing through yet another door. We followed. Inside stood an unsmiling chaplain, who gravely motioned us in opposite directions. We did as we were told and then at once we found ourselves face to face in choir stalls on either side of a chapel. Before we had had time to pull ourselves together, yet another chaplain had begun to read compline. I have never forgotten the shock of that unprepared volte-face.
Family prayers are nowadays not easy to arrange because the routine of our days is so unlike that of the last century. It would be truer to say that our days have no routine. But in Queen Victoria’s time, country life was very regular, and we did not sit lightly in our places. We were glued in. Day followed day in an admired regularity. My parents were really annoyed even to hear of people moving rapidly and frequently (in the then meaning of those words) from one place to another. Most people stayed at home, except for certain regularly planned visits, which were generally as annual as Christmas Day, and were always arranged weeks, or even months ahead. No one appeared unexpectedly from motors or aeroplanes. And the whole household fell into this steady round. Servants were engaged as under-housemaids, nursery-maids, or kitchen-maids, and moved slowly up to the higher grades. If they ‘left to be married’, it was only after a courtship lasting two or three years at least. Meals were always at the same hours, and nobody was ever late. Everyone came down to breakfast. Not to do so would interfere with the routine of the whole house. In one house in Dorset where I stayed every year with my parents, the party assembled in the drawing-room before breakfast, to move from there to the breakfast-room in strict order of precedence, when the butler had flung open the door to announce that ‘Breakfast is served, Sir Richard’.
Before this, our host had read prayers in the hall, and from his place, he fortunately could not see the staircase, upon which belated guests would perch themselves at different heights. As the servants were filing out, a covey of figures fluttered up from these various levels, trying to give the impression that they were all rising from their knees on the floor of the hall.
A hostess of course never stayed in her room for a m
eal except during her confinements, and these were carried out with the same unfailing regularity as were all other engagements in this completely planned life.
Nowadays, both guests and servants are always going and coming, and it is almost impossible to arrest their rapid flight for long enough to invite them to family prayers. Also, people’s servants are too often paid strangers, rather than family friends, and with them most people would be too shy to suggest praying. Sometimes this cowardice is misplaced. In Bishop Donaldson’s drawing-room at Salisbury a year or two before his death, there was one day a conversation about family prayers. The Bishop asked if many people still had them, and nearly everyone said ‘ No’. Mrs. Buckley was one of the exceptions, and she said that one of her reasons for keeping up the practice was that her servants liked it so much.
‘In fact,’ she went on, ‘it’s all I can do to prevent my guests from coming too.’
‘Prevent them from coming?’ asked the Bishop, astounded.
‘Of course. They would make me far too shy.’
Everybody laughed, but she was quite right. Reading prayers is a very frightening thing. I am used to reading aloud, and I like doing it. In fact I often compel the guests in my house to listen while I indulge in this pastime. But when I have once or twice found myself on my knees, reading collects which are quite familiar to me and are quite easy to read, then a most extraordinary tremor comes into my voice. It floats up and down to an accompaniment of little sobs which nothing can control. I remember being suddenly called upon to read prayers when my mother was ill, when my voice sounded so exactly as if I was crying, that the servants left the room in tears too, thinking that I must have heard the invalid’s death warrant. After that, I often read prayers when my parents were ill, but I never allowed even my sister to hear me doing so.
After the war, when the Women’s Land Army was being dissolved, I was present at an evening service on its last Sunday, at one of our Wiltshire hostels. It was read by a welfare officer in charge, and as we began, she turned to me and said:
‘You will give a Blessing at the end, won’t you?’
There was no time to say no. The service had begun, and never shall I forget how my heart beat through those seemingly interminable prayers. Fortunately I have a good memory for hymns, and a very short one came into my mind. When the moment came, I faltered out No. 551 in Hymns, Ancient and Modern. Everyone in the room had often sung it, but they failed to recognize it when they heard it spoken; and they thought my ‘ Blessing’ was a completely original inspiration.
My aunt, Amy Eden, who always seemed able to meet any situation, sympathized with and shared this panic. She told me that she was once called upon to read prayers at Eden Court when my grandfather and his chaplain were both out. She got on well till the last prayer of all, when she saw, printed before her:
‘The Grace of our Lord, etc’.
She read those five words aloud, and then her mind became a blank. She stared speechless, through what seemed an endless pause. At last a voice rose up from that part of the room where the servants were patiently ‘smelling their chairs’, and the little prater was finished by James, my grandfather’s old servant.
Of course he should have been chosen from the first to be the deputy chaplain, for he was extremely episcopal. I only once remember my grandfather’s staying at Wilton, for I was not very old when he died; but when Grandpapa and James arrived together, we were much confused. We knew that one of them was a bishop, and we could not imagine which. Grandpapa was very gay and lighthearted, while James was unfailingly solemn, and we decided that it must be he. So when one day my father found my small brother in the hall and asked: ‘Where’s the Bishop?’, Harold promptly answered: ‘In the pantry.’
Every Monday morning, at Wilton Rectory, the final collect at family prayers was the one I liked best in the week. This is how I heard it.
‘The sisters mercifully O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers. And dispose the way of Thy servants toward the attainment of everlasting salvation; that, among all the changes and chances of this mortal life, they may ever be defended by Thy most gracious and ready help; through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
Wonderful it always seemed to me that there could exist a prayer made specially for Mamie and Mildred and me; and even more wonderful that it should have in it words of such peculiar beauty. Sometimes a little suspicion fluttered into my mind that we were really meant to pray for Nuns and Sisters of Mercy, but I would not listen to this. I wanted the prayer for ourselves.
Not for years did I learn that the first two words in that Collect were really ‘ Assist us’. How empty and desolate it then sounded in my ears, denuded of that sudden splendid cry to heaven for ‘The sisters’, left henceforth to wander bewildered, undefended among the changes and chances of this mortal life! Still, to have heard it thus wrong for the first ten years of my life gives me, to this day, a sense of personal possession in that prayer. Those childish mistakes were among the things which made the practice of family prayers most worth while.
People sometimes enjoy discussing what it is which makes the most fundamental difference between life to-day, and life in Queen Victoria’s time. I should say it was something like this. Nowadays, home life is almost entirely free from regulation of any kind. This does not mean that most people are individually more free than they were: it is a difference in orientation. The ‘Leisured Classes’ have almost ceased to exist, and nearly everybody has a profession or a ‘Career’. Girls willingly exchange the conformities of family life for the independence of working all the week in a shop or an office. The young men who used to make up those Monday to Friday shooting parties are now in the city. Home life for all of these must be crowded into a breathless week-end. And even the slow rhythm of life in the country has become a perpetual syncopation. The accent is shifted. The beat no longer falls with the steady Common Time of organized domesticity. It is broken by motor cars and aeroplanes. Family life has adapted itself to embrace the unorganized jostle of the pavement, and few houses have an atmosphere of their own. This is a loss, but those who regret it must realize that it was only achieved because people were then ready to accept routine in their homes, and to realize that that routine was creating something which was worth creating.
I look back on my youth, and I see a regulated existence which is now almost inconceivable even for those of us for whom it was once the only imaginable mode of life. Social life was then so organized that it seemed to have a momentum of its own, independent of the idiosyncrasies, the wishes, or the convenience of individuals. It had been arranged to exhibit an acknowledged purpose in life, and a faith in what lay outside. This gave it dignity and character. More, it made it into an artistic whole, though those who had planned it would have been the last to look at it in that way. But having been planned, it did not admit of alteration. The wheel of our lives then rotated slowly. It was more powerful than ourselves. Its spokes were the successive events of the days, the weeks, the years. To those spokes we were bound. We rotated with them. They moved and happened independently of the whims of any individual. Family prayers was one of the spokes.
Chapter Five
OLD VINEY AND OTHER WALKERS
Old Viney shared with our gardener what they call in North Wilts a Splittus, or house split between two families. It had originally been one of the small cloth-mills or factories which were common in Wilton in the eighteenth century, and the mill stream dived underground to pass beneath it. In the middle was a large brick hall, its roof supported by a wooden pillar, and the two households lived on either side of this. Viney always wore a white smock frock, which was most becoming to his tall figure. He had been the driver of the last mail coach which went over the hill to the Chalke Valley, and he used to tell us that before starting down the steep and narrow hill which goes from the Race Plain to Coombe Bissett, he always pulled up his horses and listened. If he heard no sound of creaking wheels or lumbering cart, he said to the guard: ‘Start blowi
ng.’ The guard blew his horn, and he went on blowing while Viney whipped up his horses and galloped them headlong from top to bottom of the hill. The road lies between high banks, where there is no room to pass. Once they were off, nothing could have pulled up the horses, and if anyone had begun to come up the hill when the coach’s mad career had begun, it must have been the end of them all.
Viney was a boy at the time of Queen Victoria’s Coronation, and he made up his mind to go to London to see the sight. He and a boy friend set off to walk from Wilton. Before they reached Andover, the companion fell out, with blistered feet, and Viney walked on alone. About twenty miles from London, he was overtaken by an empty hearse, returning from a funeral in the country. The driver offered him a lift, and in this lugubrious vehicle Viney made his entrance into London. When the Coronation day came, he walked to the door of the Abbey, no man saying him Nay, and there he stood to watch the Queen get out of her carriage. As he said, he ‘could have touched her’. So easy were things in those days for anyone who saw no preliminary difficulty in first walking eighty-four miles, on the chance of seeing the Queen, and then, making no further fuss about it, walking eighty-four miles home again.
To-day, walking is no longer a recognized means of getting from one place to another. It is only a recreation. As such, it has its own delight, yet a dignity has departed from it since it ceased to be an accepted mode of transit. In the twelfth century, Brother Samson walked to Rome and back with a message to the Pope from his monastery in England; and when he returned to learn that his king, Richard Coeur de Lion, was a prisoner somewhere in Hungary, he at once walked off to look for him there. Even in my own day, Hilaire Belloc walked to Rome, and made about that journey the most delightful of his books.
Viney was not the only man of his day to walk to London from Wiltshire. A few years earlier, there had been Mr. Brown, who constituted himself the voluntary caretaker of Stonehenge. He loved the stones, and watched them summer and winter, always ready to talk of them to the rare visitors who appeared; and during his many hours alone there, he was at work on his own masterpiece. This was a plaster model to scale of Stonehenge as he saw it in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Every stone was modelled with the utmost care, and while the work was in process, nothing interrupted the artist, except an occasional walk to Salisbury, nine miles away, to buy fresh materials. When it was finished, Mr. Brown offered it to the British Museum, and it was accepted. He put no trust in the professional carriers of his day. He resolved to take it to London himself. So he put his beloved work of art on to a pair of trucks, and wheeled it direct from Salisbury Plain to the museum. The most surprising thing about that journey is that it only took two days and two nights. He pushed his barrow into the courtyard, and showed the porter his letter from the trustees, which he had carried up in his pocket. Without further question, the two men then carried the model into the hall and set it down there. Then, Mr. Brown turned on his heel, took up the handles of his truck, and wheeled it empty back to Stonehenge.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 5