Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  Candles are the perfect light for choirs, as anyone will agree who remembers a service in Magdalen Chapel at Oxford, or in King’s College, Cambridge. There is a week in the year when Evensong begins by daylight, the rich colours of the medieval glass glowing behind the heads of the choristers. Then darkness creeps up, those colours turn to ashes, and there springs to life, beside each singer, a thin white flame which has really been lit all the time. Those lines of surpliced figures, and the row of pointed flames have a very chaste beauty.

  Never can I forget a Choral Festival in Salisbury Cathedral when great clusters of banners—thirty or forty at once—were grouped together at intervals in the procession of choirs. They appeared from the light outside the West Door, and surged up and down over the steps into the nave, swaying and bending as they came under the porch, and making a confused and moving sea of colour. Their restless shadows fell upon the faces of choirboys who moved along, their eyes on their books, singing very earnestly. Every time those banners moved under the high austere pointed arches, the effect was miraculous. Then came a moment when they were all held rigid and aloft, while the massed choirs stood before the altar to sing ‘Ein Feste Burg’. Far away at the east end, Bishop Ridgeway stood like a small statue in his mitre and cope of cloth of gold. My father, who saw things vividly, said that he looked like a chess bishop, and he did.

  Chapter Eleven

  MORE WILTON CHARACTERS

  I suppose that in those old days my father was the most outstanding character in Wilton, and he is very difficult to describe. He was like a force of nature, moulding one’s life, and yet never a part of it. He was too important to be that. The immense force and impetus of his personality came largely from the fact that for years he had disciplined himself to live by unalterable rules which extended to his every action from the least to the greatest. Even his meals were significant. They never varied, when he was at home, and, perhaps for that very reason, he went away less and less. For breakfast, he had two fillets of sole, two pieces of toast and marmalade, and two cups of cocoa-nibs: for luncheon, two mutton chops and two baked apples: for tea, two slices of bread and butter: at night, two cigarettes. At dinner he allowed some variety, but this was not an exception to his rule: it was a part of the rule, which laid down that the evening was a time for a sedate and well-regulated social life.

  His days were exactly planned. Matins in the church at eight: breakfast at eight-thirty: leave the house at eight-forty-five (after which we had family prayers without him): prayers in the chapel at Wilton House at nine, and so on throughout the day. He enjoyed thus to dovetail his work, including in his day a good number of fixed engagements between which he fitted the many unexpected demands which are made on the time of a country parson.

  From this record of my father’s day, he might appear easy to know—a mere man of routine. Yet this is far from the case. The routine was on the surface: it had been deliberately assumed: beneath the uniformity was a man of quite another type.

  My father used to tell us that when he left Oxford, he decided that he disliked his handwriting, which was ugly, irregular, and illegible. He therefore changed it, making it firm, clear, and very balanced. So it remained. This too was himself.

  There were in my father two people—the natural man, and the man formed by reason, judgment, and a religion based on the Church Catechism, and centred round the duty towards God, and the duty towards thy neighbour. He did not ask from the faith which he so firmly kept, any mystical consolations: he demanded a definite line of conduct. Probably the fundamental traits in a character are never wholly obliterated, but by the time I knew my father, the Old Adam in him had become as completely sublimated as was his handwriting. He had adapted himself to the mould which he had made.

  His Latin blood equipped him with a disposition which was active, lively, witty, artistic, and amusing. He was musical, highly strung, sensitive, and nervous. A small light figure, he won many a steeplechase at Christ Church, and distinguished himself at Oxford in the game of ‘real’ tennis, as he always called it. He hunted a great deal, and was an extremely good shot. He loved travel, knowing the small towns of Italy as well as the great celebrated places; and his walking tours with Oxford friends made him acquainted with all parts of the Highlands as well as the English Lake Country.

  After becoming a clergyman, he gradually gave up all these pursuits, not, at first, because he thought them wrong (though he did ultimately almost think that they were) but because he was resolved to give every faculty he possessed, every ounce of energy, every moment of time, to the service of the Church. The swift firm steps carried him now no farther than the limits of his beloved parish: his sporting clothes were exchanged for clerical attire which was, even in those days, ultra-correct: the slim figure which he had delighted to keep down to ‘Derby weight’ became, without adding an ounce of weight, that ‘commanding presence’ which made Lady Pembroke declare that she always thought him ‘taller than George’, her husband of six feet six in height. Nobody would have guessed that he was to the end of his life an extremely nervous man, for he had taught himself an unshakable composure of manner, and could handle a difficult meeting, or face an unexpected emergency with unruffled ease.

  Such self-control can only be achieved, as the Bible says: ‘by prayer and fasting’, and it must have cost my father a great deal of both. When he first came to Wilton, he still hunted occasionally with the Blackmore Vale, and kept a hunter at Sherborne; he shot frequently with the young Herberts; he played lawn-tennis two or three times a week with his curates. Then he found that all these things were taking him away from the work of his life, and by degrees they were all given up. To the last, he was completely at home when he got on to a horse, but he never kept one after he became Rector of Wilton. Only once do I remember his even contemplating the idea of shooting, and then he accepted a most tempting invitation to shoot grouse with a cousin in Scotland. He packed his guns, and started for the station. On the way, he thought he ought not to go, and he turned back and came home. But though for years he never shot, he did not lose his eye, and I remember once when we were children, we looked with him across a little stream at the end of the garden at the poultry field of a smallholder. Running about among the chickens was a huge rat. Papa sped back to the house and brought his gun. Then he climbed up on to a paling, and holding the gun at a most difficult angle, he picked out that rat among all the bustling chickens, and it rolled over dead amidst a chorus of squawks from the hens.

  Gardening was a recreation he allowed himself, for though it was a pleasure, it was also ‘working in the garden’. He and my mother looked supremely happy and serene on summer evenings when she sat on her camp-stool beside him while he weeded, and a robin usually perched on the handle of the weeding-basket.

  Sometimes when he was reading or writing in the study, with the forbidding label ‘Engaged’ hung outside, the door would suddenly be found open, and the room empty. He had sprung up, and gone out to bud a rose. This he always found complete refreshment when his head was tired.

  As life went on, my father became more and more austere, and he expected his family to become so with him. Nay more, he insisted that they should, and he was very autocratic. Looking back now upon that life, which my father’s determination of character had built into so logical and definite an achievement, one feels for it only an immense and wholehearted admiration, yet candour compels the admission that he was at times extremely difficult to live with. He expected his sons and daughters to adopt his own peculiar rule of life, and he used no persuasion to dispose them to this. He commanded. Probably there is never comfortable elbow-room in a house for more than one idealist.

  My father, who enjoyed conversation, and was himself a very good talker, lost much of the pleasure of this most agreeable art because everyone coming into the house seemed to know by instinct that nothing must be spoken of, of which he did not approve. This limited the range of conversation at his table. If he could once have admitted a g
reater freedom, he would soon have enjoyed it very much, but he was as rigid in this as in other things. His mind had been made up within his self-imposed limits, he was a delightful and sparkling conversationalist—witty, vivid, and picturesque. Living with him was great fun when he allowed it to be so.

  The many interesting people we met at Wilton House in those days cannot fairly be called ‘Wilton Characters’, yet they made the character of the place in which we grew up. George Lord Pembroke and Gety his wife were very remarkable people, and to Wilton came most of the interesting men and women of the day. Lord Pembroke was the most beautiful being I ever saw—beautiful alike in person and in spirit. He was immensely tall, with a small head, a short dark beard, and wonderful Russian eyes which were set in his head at a curious drooping angle. He walked with steps which seemed too short for the length of his legs, and this gave to his carriage a manner of bewitching modesty. He was a man of great intellectual power with deep, sad thoughts, and a rare sense of nonsense and of fun. Disraeli had made him an under-secretary of State at the age of twenty-three, and must have seen in him one of the romantic, aristocratic, political dreamers of his own early novels. But by then Lord Pembroke had already lived more than half of his short life, and his health quickly broke down under the strain of politics. Disraeli’s insight was justified however, for Wilton now became a country house such as he depicted in Lothair, filled with a succession of statesmen, travellers, artists, writers, and beautiful women.

  Like more than one of his predecessors, Lord Pembroke married a Talbot, and Lady Pembroke was a woman of magnificent appearance. She was tall and very dignified, and her figure was well adapted to the brocades and the elaborate dresses of her day. She wore them splendidly, and somehow she succeeded in remaining very dignified even when her very long thick hair of pale chestnut colour fell in loops upon her neck, as it often did. The Pembrokes were very advanced for the times in which they lived, for they both walked about the country without hats, so that many of their neighbours thought them quite mad. Lord Pembroke used to walk thus for miles about the estate, dropping in at one of the down farms for a bit of bread and cheese, and sometimes finding that he had walked so far from home that he had to borrow half a crown from his farmer host to take him back to Wilton by train. It is curious to remember that in those days, before telephones and motor cars, a walk of fifteen miles on one’s own estate could end in marooning one quite out of reach of the household and horses one had left behind a few hours before.

  It was also possible to lose oneself on Salisbury Plain in a carriage. Lady Pembroke used to take us for drives in a phaeton and pair with a groom perched up behind, and we drove for miles over the turf where there were no roads and no sign of human habitation. The huge horizon enfolded a vast circle of green undulations, and there were often no landmarks in sight for many miles. Lady Pembroke loved this, and we used to drive on and on, stopping at intervals for the groom to stand up in his seat and scour the country with his eyes till he saw something—a clump of trees, or a barn—which gave him his bearings, and then we knew where we were.

  Lady Pembroke always did what came into her head. She planted ivy all over the park, training it upon the trunks of the trees, and refusing to believe that anything so slender could possibly harm the forest trees which it so gracefully throttled. When she could no longer bear the shabbiness of Katie Thynne’s old hat, she threw it into the fire before us all, and gave her a wonderful new one the next day; and her sympathy with the lobsters caught by a party in the yacht, compelled her to throw them back into the sea, although their scarlet shells proclaimed that they had already been boiled. Once, when Lady Pembroke was sitting talking with my mother at the Rectory, the gardener began to mow a narrow strip of grass outside the window. The machine kept starting and stopping and starting again, and it made an irritating fidgety noise. My mother, who was accustomed to writing letters to the accompaniment of five-finger exercises played on the piano, ignored this in her calm disciplined way. Not so Lady Pembroke. She sprang to her feet, and with her fingers in her ears, she ran to the window and leaned out, crying: ‘Stop! STOP!! STOP!!!’

  Mamma thought this extremely uncontrolled.

  Lady Pembroke’s waywardness made her often alarming. She invited us to tea, and then forgot all about it, and when we arrived she begged us to go away. Sometimes she was seized with the whim of dressing one of us up in some fantastic ridiculous dress, to appear as a caller, as a practical joke on another guest, and she would allow no refusal. There were days when she allowed us to talk recklessly and disrespectfully about our elders, for she loved to be amused; but then she often repented, and wrote a touching humble letter telling us that we had been wrong, and she still more wrong to listen.

  Lord Pembroke’s three sisters were all married to remarkable men. Lady Mary was the wife of Baron Freddy von Hügel, perhaps the profoundest Christian thinker of his day. He was very deaf, and his talk was an amazing jumble of German philosophical terms and of schoolboy slang. He used whichever vocabulary most nearly approached the fresh original thought which he was flashing out from the caverns of his spirit. Being with him was like going into King Solomon’s Mines. Lady Maud’s husband was Hubert Parry the composer —a whirlwind of genius. He loved outdoor sports, and most of all, dangerous ones. His family at last refused to sail with him in his little yacht off the Sussex coast, as he preferred these excursions far more when they ended with a capsize and a swim home. Lady Maud declared that in his early days as a motorist, he ‘ always came home covered with blood’, and I remember his skating on the Rectory pond when, in the midst of an elaborate figure, he fell in, the ice cracking in all directions. All the other skaters fled to the bank, and there sat Hubert Parry, as if he was in his bath, and looking extremely jolly and happy, head, feet and arms supported on the ominously cracking ice. He quickly jumped out and ran dripping to the kitchen, from whence he returned with a red-hot salamander. With this he melted down all the jagged pieces of ice, so that the skating the next day should not be spoilt.

  Lady Maud’s great beauty was ravaged by ill-health and completely ignored by herself. Her extremely dilapidated clothes were hung on her anyhow, but her appearance continued to be most distinguished, while the sudden flash of her smile, and the brilliant glance of her magnificent eyes, gave great rarity to her beauty. She loved teasing, and it was often really for the pleasure of teasing somebody that she first embraced the ‘Causes’ which she adopted. Nothing delighted her more than to gaze proudly at some conventional acquaintance as she marched by in a Suffragette procession.

  Lord Pembroke’s youngest sister was that dazzling woman Lady Ripon, whose husband was distinguished too, for he was the best shot in the country. Unlike her sisters, Lady Ripon was a great figure in Society. She was recognized as a social queen in most European capitals, and at Wilton I chiefly remember the gaiety of her laughter. She hid us in her bedroom when Lady Pembroke had told us to go home, and there we watched her being dressed for dinner by Ellen Mitchell, her old nurse, who lived in the town, and who came every evening to see her when she was at Wilton. I think that, to the end of her life, Lady Ripon loved Ellen more than anyone else.

  In the town of Wilton lived many interesting people. Near by the semicircular wall and gateway of stone and brick which faces the church, and makes so charming an entrance to the school, is a building containing the two houses of the head teachers. In my early years, one of these was occupied by Mr. Corby with his wife and family, and the other by Miss Sargent. Mr. Corby was a Cornishman, and the Head Master of the Boys’ School. He looked as if he was made entirely of bone, even to the texture of his hard black hair, and his short pointed beard. His large aquiline nose was fierce, and when he smiled, the smile seemed only to be a rather difficult movement of his lower jaw. Mr. Corby’s old pupils had a great respect and affection for him, but at first sight, I never saw a sterner face than his. That smile in the jaw was nearly always cut short by the firm black beard. His personality was l
ike his native county, that harsh Cornish moorland, slate-coloured and forbidding, yet haunted by sudden appearances of those Celtic Leprechauns which are like no other kind of fairy. Such were the odd dark gleams of fun which sometimes crossed Mr. Corby’s face.

  The tin mine which had belonged to his family was derelict, as are many others in the county, and Mr. Corby never seemed to go home. Perhaps he had no relations left there. This dark man had come up alone from the land of Celtic twilight, though he himself was more like a Celtic night, black and sinister. Yet he possessed an unexpected charm: his was the quality of chicory which is both crisp and bitter.

  Mr. Corby was no musician, but on the Tuesday in Holy Week it was the custom for the Head Master of the Boys’ School to play the harmonium at the morning service in the church. The children of the various schools took turns to form the choir during that week, the head teachers accompanying them. Mr. Corby would not let down the boy’s school by sending a substitute organist. He may not have been musical, but he was acute. His choice of hymns was limited to those appropriate to Holy Week, yet among these he discovered one which can be so interpreted as to be easier to play than any other hymn in the book. He played it unfailingly every year for at least fifteen years, and no one recognized this except ourselves. The hymn was ‘Glory be to Jesus’, and this is the tune:

  The notes lie anyhow under the hand, but Mr. Corby cleverly simplified it still further. By turning most of the crotchets into minims, he could reduce to seven the number of notes in each half of the tune. This was his version:

  When Mr. Corby played over his interpretation of the tune, it carried with it a kind of shorthand or telegraphic suggestion of the words, thus: