Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

Glor be Jee

  Who bitter pains

  Pour me life

  From sacred veins.

  He pressed his hands on the keys and blew vigorously while the boys sang lustily, for he had practised them well in advance. The tune too is quite easy to sing when accompanied in this manner.

  An unbroken feud existed between Mr. Corby and his neighbour Miss Sargent, the Head of the Girls’ School. Their two doors were barely six inches apart, and at the same hour on each day, these doors opened simultaneously for the two teachers to pass to their respective schools. Later on they returned simultaneously to their houses. Yet they hated each other so much that for fifteen years they never spoke except on ceremonial public occasions. Hers was a very different character to his. She had the grace in living which he lacked. As a girl, she must have been very pretty, and she and her sisters (who often visited her) retained to middle life considerable personal charm. Miss Sargent was immensely interested in human nature. The study of character absorbed her, and also the daily events of other people’s lives. She loved people, whether they were her pupils, her assistant teachers, her neighbours, or the friends and relations of any of these. She knew all about the Queen and the Royal Family, as well as the public men and women of the day. She enjoyed gossip and always had plenty to tell. She loved her garden, and even more she loved wild flowers. On Shrove Tuesday, when the schools had a half-holiday, Miss Sargent always took us as children for a walk to a far-off spur of Grovely Wood. There she knew she would always find the first primroses. Never was winter so long or spring so lagging that she failed to find at least some tiny buds hardly showing above the ground. These we carried home with her, to open in a dish of moss in the warmth of her sitting-room. And on Ascension Day, which then always began at Wilton with a Communion Service at five in the morning, Miss Sargent was in Grovely soon after six, picking great bundles of bluebells and bracken. She had too that gift of arranging flowers in the peculiarly intimate way which is only possessed by those who love them very much. Miss Sargent was enthusiastic in all things. She was keenly interested in needlework, embroidery and knitting, and was for ever trying some fresh pattern or design. She loved music, books, life—everything—except Mr. Corby. His wife had a long distressing illness, and then Miss Sargent was the best of neighbours, waiting on the invalid, cooking for her, running in to visit her, cheering her with her stores of gossip; but only when the master of the house was out of it. She would not meet him.

  Mrs. Corby died during the school holidays, and that week Miss Sargent wrote resigning her post as schoolmistress. She did not even come back to pack her things, but sent a sister to do this for her. A year later, she returned as Mrs. Corby.

  This was the explanation. When Miss Sargent first came to Wilton, she had found her neighbour a widower, for Mr. Corby’s odd difficult personality secured for him in all three charming wives. He soon asked Miss Sargent to marry him, and was accepted. Before the engagement was announced, the lovers quarrelled bitterly, and then parted for the holidays. Before the next term began, Mr. Corby avenged himself by marrying someone else. So these two lovers became enemies, and lived worlds apart, though side by side. He was a reserved man. She appeared to be a completely open-hearted woman. No one can guess at their inner feelings during those years, but they proved themselves to be people of a fine sense of honour, and of great self-control. They might have made a mess of things, but they accepted the consequences without involving other people. During those years they ceased to know each other socially. Mr. Corby made a success of his marriage, and Miss Sargent of her school.

  Sinca, ‘the Russian Sailor’, was a great person in the old Wilton days. Lord Pembroke found him somewhere on his travels, and brought him to Wilton as house-carpenter. He was obviously a Slav, with his short square figure, and his flat face marked with smallpox. He spoke very quickly, in a deep hollow voice, which sounded as if he had his head in a bucket. He never walked, but he ran everywhere, on the level, or up and down the ladders which seemed to be his native place. The Wilton Mummers had a phrase, ‘a foreign-off man’, and this describes Sinca, who was always ‘off’ somewhere with his foreignness. Making and letting off fireworks were among his far-fetched tricks, and when we had a display, he was in his element. Then the amazing little figure could be seen, darting in and out of the darkness, now bending behind some curious contraption on a frame, which then fizzled and sparkled, and turned into a whirring Catherine Wheel; now appearing in a completely different part of the scene from which would soon rise the long swoop and the soft explosion of a rocket in the air, its stars falling quietly above a crowd of upturned faces; and then Sinca would be found crouching behind a bouquet of Roman Candles, sending their heart-shaped flowers soaring to the sky. Crackers were child’s-play to Sinca, and he loved to set them hopping and sputtering among a crowd of people; for he himself was not unlike a cracker, mischievous and erratic.

  Sinca’s history was mysterious and romantic. A day or two before the bombardment of Sebastopol, two little Russian boys, aged about four or five, strayed out of the town into the English lines. The soldiers made friends with them, and the General decreed that they should be detained in camp till after the bombardment, as they would be safer behind, than in front of, the British guns. The children were brought into the town with the army, and criers were sent out, asking for their parents. No one claimed them. Their relations were either dead, or had left the town. What was to be done with the little Russian waifs? Two English officers adopted them, brought them home, and had them educated and taught trades. The children could never tell their surnames, and the soldiers named them Alma and Inkerman. Simeon Sinca was the little boy’s way of pronouncing his name of Simeon Inkerman, and so he was called to the end of his life. Thus the Russian sailor came to port at Wilton, where he married the nurse of my elder brothers, and between them they produced a family extremely unlike the Wiltshire children among whom they played.

  Albert Musselwhite was the grave-digger, and with his mixture of fun and sentiment, he would have been in his element in the graveyard of Elsinore. Children loved him. He rollicked with them, and had them always under control. I have seen three hundred children screaming with laughter at his jokes at a Band of Hope meeting; and when the noise went beyond bearing, he said: ‘See my ’and. When it goes up—SILENCE.’ Up went his hand, and you could hear a pin drop.

  Generations of children learnt from Albert to be useful, for he knew that no game is so delightful to a child as is being given something real to do. Under his guidance we first learnt to decorate the church, and to arrange the books in the pews, while his own children were adept dusters from the age of three. He was our chief friend from his middle age, when I first remember him, till he had become a very old man with thick white hair and beard.

  The church tower was Albert’s kingdom. He sat in the belfry, chiming three bells at once, one with each hand and one with his foot, and he taught us to chime them too. On great days, when bonfires were lit on the hills, Albert led us up the long difficult dusty ladders to the top of the tower, whence we looked triumphantly over miles of the country round. My younger sister Mildred was afraid to climb those ladders, but her faith in Albert was so complete that she fearlessly made the perilous journey up and down, perched on his shoulders.

  If the church tower was Albert’s domain, there were days in the year which were his days. Boat-race day was one. We were hotly on the side of Oxford, so he always teased us by wearing a piece of pale-blue ribbon, and by sending us envelopes addressed in a feigned writing, and containing pale-blue bows inscribed: ‘Sure to win.’ But Christmas Day was his chief day in the year, and Albert’s Christmas began at least six weeks before December 25th.

  About the middle of November, we could never meet Albert without his rummaging in his pocket for a bit of mistletoe, and then began a frantic chase, over house and garden, till the only safety was to lock one’s self into the smallest room to be found. There was no sentiment about this. It was
a pitched battle, and I have never since experienced so utter a sense of defeat as on those occasions when Albert did catch me and kiss me under the mistletoe. Once he even approached my very dignified mother with two little leaves and a white berry, and we marvelled as we saw that she did not run away, but remained gravely sitting in her chair, and said: ‘ALBERT.’ This did intimidate him, and he withdrew to chase the boys.

  Wilton then had its poet, Edward Slow, the carriage-builder, a man of rugged face and figure, and with a loud resonant voice which sounded all down the street when he met a friend for a quiet talk. He was a master of the old Wiltshire speech, and his rhymes were not merely written in the dialect, but they came up directly from the dialect mind. He was an entirely descriptive writer, and he described what fell under his own eyes. Slow was no visionary. He was a racy and realistic observer, and his subjects were those things which outstand in the memory of the untravelled countrymen—public dinners, foxhunting, or a visit to London. When country fairs are things of the past, Slow’s Our girt Zeptember Vair will bring before the mind of future generations, exact and living pictures of the events of every hour in the day of the chief West of England sheep fair in the nineteenth century. But by then, the poem will be written in a dead language, for Slow’s was the true Wiltshire dialect, unspoilt by any school-board varnish. He was the last of the old minstrels, for his rhymes really came to life when he read or recited them himself, giving immense delight both to himself and his hearers.

  Slow had the countryman’s distrust of the foreigner, and some few years before the Great War, he received a letter from a German Philological Society, inviting him to go to London to have gramophone records made from his reading of some of his poems, in order to help these scholars to learn the true pronunciation. Slow was immediately suspicious. He was convinced that the Germans had some ulterior motive, and he refused to answer the letter. Several more came, and at last he silenced these determined correspondents with a postcard on which he wrote in his large deliberate handwriting:

  ‘Mr. Slow does not intend to go to London.’

  Years afterwards, he read in the Daily Mail that the Italian repulse by the Germans had been prepared for by a previous penetration of the villages behind the lines by Germans who had learnt the North Italian patois from gramophone records. He cut this report out of the paper, and carried it for months in his pocket, to show to every one he met how far-sighted he had been.

  Slow believed in a Freemasonry among poets, and thought that they should always be ready to exchange their works one with another. He wrote to Lord Tennyson telling him this, and enclosing a copy of his ‘Wiltshire Rhymes’, and he was very proud when a copy of the Poet Laureate’s poems came in return; and in the train he could always find out when a fellow passenger was a writer, and would get into conversation and arrange an exchange of ‘Works’.

  Slow’s Wilton patriotism was his strongest emotion. His ‘Wilton Chronology’contained every important Wilton date from the earliest Saxon records to the last conversazione given by the Mayor in the town hall. Red-letter days in his life were the dates of the bestowal of the ‘ ancient Borough’s’ new Charter, or the opening of the new cemetery. Those events excited his deepest emotions. Cemeteries were always favourite spots for Slow, who said that when he visited a new place, his first walk was always to its cemetery. He liked to learn the names on the gravestones.

  When his carriage-building days were over, Slow retired to a villa he had built for himself and had called ‘ Ellandune’, which he believed to be the original name of Wilton. Here he collected and read books on local history; and on Wednesdays he repaired to Wilton House to act as guide to visitors. Slow had no æsthetic sensibility, but he knew about the pictures because they had been collected by Earls of Pembroke, and were among the prides of ‘our little Borough’. Though the visitors must have been puzzled by his idiom, the personality of their guide would make them realise that at Wilton they were in the heart of the Wessex of King Alfred.

  Chapter Twelve

  OXFORD

  It was a surprise to me to find myself at Oxford as a student of St. Hugh’s Hall. My ‘home-keeping youth’ had not till then seemed to tend in any such direction. Only episcopal pressure could have landed me on this unexpected shore. The present Archbishop of Canterbury gave the first gentle impetus. He was not then even a bishop, but as Mr. Lang, he once gave some University Extension Lectures on History at Salisbury, and I went to them with my governess Miss Hocker. These were followed by the one really proud moment in my life. After the lectures, there was an examination, and Miss Hocker and I both entered for it. Only two names appeared in the first class—hers and mine. Then Mr. Lang said that I ought to read for History Honours at Oxford. Thus the seed was planted, but it lay dormant for some years more. Then Bishop Wordsworth stepped in. In memory of his first wife, he endowed a scholarship to be held at one of the Oxford Women’s Colleges, and he put pressure on my father to allow me to enter for it the first time it was awarded. Papa consented, being convinced that I had no chance of winning it. So was I. But I unexpectedly did. Then there was the circumstance that the Head of St. Hugh’s was Miss Moberly, a cousin of my mother’s, and the daughter of yet another Bishop of Salisbury. Though now a ‘Scholar’, I had not passed Smalls, or any equivalent entrance examination. I knew no Euclid or Algebra, and my only Latin had been taught me by my mother, who knew enough to get my brothers into their private schools. I quickly had some lessons in mathematics from an old schoolmaster in Salisbury and I rubbed up my Latin; but I had to take my University entrance examination at the end of my first term at St. Hugh’s. Thus unprepared, I embarked on a University career.

  Only one of my fellow-students had, like myself, been educated at home. She was a Scotch girl, and she took to me from the first because she found that I knew how to pronounce the name ‘Menzies’. This was my only social success in that first term, and with most of the students I was not popular.

  The women’s colleges of those days must have been rather like the upper forms in girls’ schools, and they had the same laws of etiquette. Of these I was not only ignorant, but I was unaware that they even existed. I went to Oxford thinking that college life was merely a rather cabined edition of ordinary social life, and I blundered badly, not knowing that I was blundering at all. On one occasion, I should have known better, and perhaps I did.

  A week or two after I arrived, the Hall gave a party to the students of Lady Margaret Hall next door. The entertainment was to be an extemporized play with rather a large company, and when we met to rehearse it, I found myself in my element. I was used to acting, so I took charge of the rehearsal, planned the scenes, allotted the parts, and told everybody what to do. I was quite unaware of the fact that I had taken too much upon myself, and that the other performers saw that I needed a lesson. Everything seemed to me to be going very well, and then came the night of the party. The guests arrived, and I went to the dressing-room. It was oddly empty. Then there began to arrive messages from one after another of the company saying that they were unable to act. We were reduced to four. They were Florence Etlinger, a gifted creature, half German, half Russian, who afterwards founded an Operatic and Dramatic School in London, and died as she was on the verge of making it a success; Dorothy Wordsworth, a great-grand-niece of the poet, who also died young, as she was about to make her debut as a Shakespearian actress; Evelyn Hatch, who with her sister Beatrice later made a small success in playing in private houses scenes from ‘Jane Austen’, ‘George Eliot’, and ‘Mrs. Gaskel’; and myself. We faced each other, listening to the gay chatter of the assembled and expectant audience.

  Then I had a good idea. We took our dilemma on to the stage, and called it ‘ The Sorrows of a Stage-Manager’. I entered alone, hopefully, and then our three performers came on to the stage again and again, bringing the most absurd and ridiculous excuses from the absent ones. With every defection, I recklessly told the few who remained to double, treble, and quadruple their par
ts.

  We made the most grotesque and impossible doubles. The bride ‘played opposite’ to herself as bridegroom: the victim was her own executioner, and cut off her own head: the subject of a robbery picked her own pocket. The actresses became contortionists, twisting themselves about to be in two places on the stage at one time. We enjoyed it immensely, and so did the audience, who had no idea that anything else had been contemplated. But it was not a tactful thing to do in face of those who should have been behind the scenes.

  Fortunately, after this I was ill for some weeks, and before I was able to return to the world of St. Hugh’s, Miss Moberly told me with a lurking smile that she had heard of my lack of good college manners. I had talked to my seniors, lounging in a chair with my hands, clasped behind my head, and I had even been heard to whistle in one of the passages. This last crime showed great acuteness of hearing on somebody’s part, for my whistle has always been fainter than a grasshopper’s chirp. Miss Moberly said I must conform to the customs of the college.

  In those days, the education of schoolgirls was mainly in the hands of people who believed in the segregation of spinsters. Many schoolmistresses had seldom spoken to a man unless he stood to her in the relation of father, pastor, or tutor. Born a spinster, she had found herself at school with other little spinsters, being taught by more spinsters a few years older than themselves. At those early women’s colleges, she met other spinsters from schools like her own. Having passed her university examinations, she hastened back to school to become a teacher in her turn. Her evenings were spent in the Common Room with her fellow-teachers, and her holidays with them, climbing the Alps. In the eyes of the young men of her class, she had always seemed too learned to be spoken to, so there could be for her no escape from this vicious circle. Not of course literally a vicious one, for this mode of life produced more vacuums than vices; and it might indeed be said that the vacuums of yesterday are filled with the vices of to-day.