Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  When we got to Wilton, Albert Musselwhite, our Parish Clerk, opened the door of the brake for me to get out at the Rectory, and as he did so he said:

  ‘I am sorry to tell you that the Bishop of Salisbury is dead.’

  Curiously enough, I did not at once think of the birds. I had only heard the legend once and it was not in the forefront of my mind. Also, when Miss Moberly told it to me, I had taken for granted that the mysterious birds must of necessity be seen in the Close. I had therefore no emotion but a startled sorrow, for the Bishop’s death was completely unexpected. So much so, that most of his household staff had gone to London for a day’s excursion, and his children had gone to a flower show.

  My father had been very fond of the Bishop and he was much shocked by his death, so the dinner which now began was a most melancholy meal. My father sat at the end of the table looking very depressed, and the various guests who were staying in the house knew not whether they ought to talk as if nothing had happened, or whether they must fall in with his mood. I tried to think of a subject of which we might talk without jarring too much on my father’s humour, and as he was always immensely interested in natural history, I began on the subject of the unknown birds which I had seen. I had still completely forgotten Miss Moberly’s story, but I described my birds very exactly and appealed to the company to tell me what they were. My cousin Tom Hunt, who was an admiral, laughed at me for describing albatrosses and declaring that I had seen them flying over the Wiltshire water-meadows. He said this was just another of my tall stories about my favourite country.

  When I was going to bed, I suddenly recalled the legend of the Bishop’s Birds and I hastily went to my diaries to find what Miss Moberly had said. I could not remember just when she had told me the story, but I found the passage after a long search, and then I saw that she had said her birds were ‘like albatrosses’.

  Bishop Wordsworth was a very great man, and it was fitting that the day of his death should be marked by signs in the skies: such things were more appropriate to him than words uttered by rather second-rate eulogists. I find that I wrote in my diary after hearing a succession of funeral sermons about this great man: ‘I hate nothing more than undiscriminating eulogy of someone I love and admire.’ One remark about the Bishop did, however, please me very much. Challis, the Pembrokes’ gardener, said of him that he always spoke as if he were thinking to himself. This was very true. Bishop Wordsworth seemed entirely absorbed in his own deep thoughts, as if he was quite unaware of anything going on around him. This was not really the case.

  One afternoon, the Bishop arrived at Wilton with a new setting of the ‘Te Deum’, arranged in a manner which he particularly liked from the liturgical point of view. He handed me the music, and asked me to sing it to him. It is a frightening thing to sing the ‘Te Deum’ through as a solo in the presence of a bishop, but Bishop Wordsworth’s word was law, and I began in a very shaky voice, with Mildred accompanying me on the piano. The Bishop sat down at a writing-table and immediately became absorbed in the proofs of his edition of the ‘Vulgate’. I sang about half of the ‘Te Deum’, and then I saw that his thoughts were entirely on his work and that he seemed to have quite forgotten me. I stopped. Without looking up, the Bishop said: ‘Go on please.’

  But I must return to other happenings that cannot be explained but can only be recorded.

  I have only once visited the Land’s End. It was Ash Wednesday and one of those blazing Cornish days which turn February into June. I drove out from Penzance alone just about noon in a small Austin car; and then I stood on the edge of that astounding cliff and looked out to sea. Stout Cortez could not have had a wider view. The Land’s End is indeed aptly named. I stared across the Atlantic and as I did so I saw, some miles out to sea, a town which was obviously a very important place. It was a jumble of towers, domes, spires and battlements. That must be on the Scilly Isles, I thought, although I had never heard of any great city there, imagining them to be nothing more than a paradise of greenhouses. While I was still looking, a coastguardsman approached, and I asked him the name of the town.

  ‘There is no town there,’ he said ‘Only the sea.’

  ‘Surely you can see all those towers and spires?’

  He looked as if he thought that I was quite imbecile, and again he said that I was looking at nothing at all.

  When he had gone, I made up my mind that I must be looking at a mirage thrown on to the atmosphere by that peculiarly powerful spring sunshine. Yet I had a lurking hope that I had seen a vision of Lyonesse, which some people say lies sunken under the sea off the Cornish coast.

  Later on, I learnt that I was not the only person to have seen such a vision; and I myself saw it once more a year or two later. It was a very different kind of day, and the hour was late evening. I was driving with a Miss Macpherson along the north coast of Cornwall, a few miles east of Land’s End. It was a wet and blowy night, so the atmospheric conditions were completely different to those when I had previously visited the Land’s End. Suddenly I saw again those towers and spires standing immovable out at sea, while the rain blew by them. I asked Miss Macpherson to stop her car.

  ‘Do you see anything over there?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ she said, ‘I see a city. I have often been told that from here it is possible to catch sight of the lost city of Lyonesse, but I have never seen it before.’

  To hear her say the word Lyonesse pleased me very much, as this was what I had secretly hoped myself.

  Some years afterwards I met Miss Macpherson and reminded her of this and I asked her if she had ever seen the city again.

  ‘Only once,’ she said: ‘and then I was driving with my sister and she saw nothing.’

  On the day of my visit to the Land’s End, I had another rather incongruous adventure. When the coastguard had gone away, I sat for some time on the cliff, until my eyes were so dazed with sunlight that I could no longer see the towers of Lyonesse. But what I did see was a very neatly dressed man, who clambered up the cliff from below and suddenly appeared within a few yards of me. He approached me very politely, and taking off his bowler hat, he said:

  ‘Excuse me madam. Can you take photographs?’

  I said that I could.

  ‘Then would you oblige me by taking mine,’ he said. ‘I can never find anyone at these interesting spots who will take my photo. Be sure that you get the picture well in the middle of the plate.’

  I took the camera and looked into the finder. The stranger had moved to the edge of the cliff and he had miraculously taken from his pocket a telescope, which he had extended and was holding to his eye as he looked across the ocean. Christopher Columbus himself could not have had a more adventurous air. I pressed the button and gave the camera back, but then I lost my head. I forgot to give the man my address and to ask him for a copy of that picture I possess no memento of this curious scene.

  Inexplicable things do happen to me, although I do not call myself ‘ psychic’, as people say. One more peculiar anecdote shall now be told. I was lying awake one night in my room at the Daye House. The Park gates were locked so that no one could approach the house. It was midsummer, when it is never altogether dark. I heard something fall rather gently to the ground, and I thought it must be a book which had slipped off my bed. I leant out and looked on to the floor. In the dim light I thought that I saw a tennis racket. I knew I must be wrong, for not only did I not possess such a thing, but I knew that there never had been one in the house. I waited half an hour and looked again. It was still there. It was a tennis racket. I got out of bed and picked it up. Yes. In my hand I held a racket, and not a very modern one. It was an old-fashioned shape, slightly curved and many of the strings were broken. There is nothing to add to this story, for the appearance of that mysterious racket in my bedroom has never been explained. If it was an apport left as a joke by a passing spirit, I can only say that the sense of humour of those in another world is very different from ours.

  BOOK III
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  WILTON ONCE MORE

  PREAMBLE

  THE DAYE HOUSE

  About the year 780 Alcuin was called from his Seminary in Yorkshire to become the chief master in Charlemagne’s new schools in France. Then one of his Northumbrian pupils wrote a ‘ Lament’, which can be read in Miss Waddell’s ‘Medieval Latin Lyrics’. Here are some lines from her translation:

  O little house, O dear and sweet my dwelling,

  O little house, for ever fare thee well!

  The trees stand round thee with their sighing branches,

  A little flowering wood for ever fair.

  Small streams about thee, all their banks in flower,

  And there the happy fisher spreads his nets.

  And there are lilies white and small red roses,

  And every bird sings in the early morning,

  Praising the God who made him in his singing.

  These lines perfectly describe my fourth and last home.

  The Daye House had been the Wilton Park dairy, and we revived for it the old dialect name, when it became vacant and the Pembrokes offered it to us because they knew our love for Wilton. Here I found again my lost soul.

  Only the traveller who is well acquainted with the whole width of the river valley lying between Salisbury and Wilton, will choose to come from one to the other by way of Netherhampton; though there alone will he find unspoilt the broad expanse of water-meadows. After Netherhampton be turns into a little lane, shaded by silvery green abeles. Between this and the meadow runs a very narrow canal, beyond which, far away, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral rises on the skyline. This lane follows the eastern wall of Wilton Park, and a gate in the wall opens almost immediately on to The Daye House.

  ‘The little flowery wood’ is made of small winsome trees, and from out of their tangle there rises a horseshoe of Scotch firs. When the evening sun slants over the house, these great trees leap into prominence—dark burning torches surmounted by smudges of somber blue-green foliage.

  Here and there, through the trees on the north side of the house, can be seen the glint of the water of the Nadder River, flowing by a few yards away; and to the south the woodland gives place to pasture fields dotted with trees and cows, where rabbits hop in and out of their holes, and do their best to pop through the fence protecting the garden and to eat up everything inside.

  The house is, as David Cecil said, both sensible and fanciful. It might be a keeper’s cottage if it were a little less elegant; and if it were not quite so sober and workaday, it could easily be one more of those small pavilions of pleasure which were dotted about the park during the eighteenth century. Its somewhat fanciful name recalls the entirely sensible purpose for which it was built in the ’fifties of the last century, and for which in my childhood it was still being used. The large octagonal dairy room has vanished. Gone are its marble floor and the painted Dutch tiles on its walls. Gone is that dramatic mosaic picture of a lion struggling with an enormous emerald green serpent which used to ornament the threshold. The dairy stood away from the house, with which it was connected by a straight narrow passage so that it looked like a frying-pan with its handle, and now the dining-room stands on the site of all that milk-panned playfulness.

  On all sides, the grave little grey stone cottage breaks into surprises. Its high slated roof makes it look like a French farm-house, and one approaches the plain cottage door by a tiny colonnade, the pillars of which came from the pavilion which used to stand on the bridge near-by, and which was carried away to another part of the park to become the Park School. Windows from the old dairy are set into the rounded apse at the end of the dining-room, and the ‘æil-de-bæuf’ in the bedroom overhead is like a port-hole. The small turret in the centre of the house might be a pigeon cote. Its sides are decorated with little clusters of columns and with recesses which hold monograms. We added a long wooden room to the southwest comer of the house and now its walls are quite covered with roses and honeysuckle. G. M. Young once compared this room to the British Empire, saying that it began as a shanty and ended as a palace. When we first built it, it was undisguisedly a hut, its sections clearly indicated by thin lathes of dark wood, and in those days only the pointed roof protected us from winter cold or summer heat. Its walls were distempered in apricot colour and the mantelpiece was merely a rough beam of old oak found in a barn at Quidhampton.

  Since then my friends have practically remade the room. Rex Whistler classicized it with a ceiling and a formal panel above the fireplace; and he painted the amusing little wreaths on its beams as a surprise for me one night when I was dressing for dinner before a party. Geoffrey Taylor and John Stuart-Wortley laid the large squares of pale brown ash wood, which now make the floor; and the pictures are mostly presents from their painters. Willie Walton chose the piano, and bookcases encroach more and more on to the wall space. It is now a very pleasant room in which to sit, either alone or with a few friends.

  Chapter Eighteen

  REMEMBERED VOICES

  Visitors to the Daye House nearly always remark on the green silence which seems to encircle it, and this quietness is truly one of its chief characteristics. Yet, outside and in, some of my happiest memories there are memories of voices—the birds outside and conversation within.

  Throughout the spring months, the Daye House lies within a ‘Charm of birds’. The park wall encloses a bird sanctuary, and from four in the morning until past sunset, there rises from the woods and copses in the park a confused medley of harmonious jangling songs. At this time in the year, the house seems to become actually a part of the wood. It is possible to distinguish the separate notes of those birds who happen to be singing near-by; but beyond and behind these, there continues away into the distance a widening circle of sound. The whole air is full of it.

  Till I lived in the Daye House, I had no idea of how elaborate is the language used by birds. Thrushes especially have an immense vocabulary; and I copied down one morning, as carefully as I could, the actual words sung by a thrush in the laburnum outside window. This was his song:

  Wit. Wit. Willy, Willy, Wit

  Tchelitchef. Tchelitchef.

  O-o-o-oy.

  Dirt. Dirt. Dirt

  Birdy, birdy, pretty birdy

  Quick. Quick.

  Give me a Liqueur. Give me a Liqueur.

  Tch. Tch. Tch.

  He’s wheeling in tea and balloons.

  See. See. See.

  Be brave. Be brave.

  Wor-r-rds. Wor-r-rds. Wor-r-rds.

  Be a cheat. Be a cheat.

  Give me some tea.

  Just now. Just now.

  I’ve been wet. I’ve been wet.

  Not a word. Not a wor-r-rd.

  Beer. Beer. Beer.

  No he won’t. No he won’t.

  Happy. Happy.

  Wobble a woodle too.

  Piano. Piano.

  Cruel. Cruel.

  Stand. Come here.

  Did you see? Did you see?

  Boys boiling in oil.

  Willy cot. Willy say

  Oh we know. Oh we know.

  We go wheeling along.

  Se-e-e. Where is he? See sir. See sir.

  Let me kiss you.

  Chicken beef and ham

  Give him gurls. Give him gurls.

  Is he going to scream! to scream?

  What a spree! What a spree!

  I cannot pretend that the talk inside the house often reaches this level of unexpectedness, but conversation has always been the chief amusement in the Daye House. This is because there is not room in it for a large party. When there are many people staying in a house, games will bring them together, but they only come between a handful of intimates. For them, talk is the thing.

  During our first two years here, Mildred’s talk made the charm and the character of the house; and now, nearly thirteen years after her death, it is hard to recapture and to express its peculiar quality. It was pitched in a very quiet key, yet never was conversation more full o
f surprises. So demure she looked as she sat there, and yet so unexpected were the things she said. People, their lives and their characters, were her absorbing interest, and she saw far more deeply into things than do most gossips. For gossip was what she enjoyed— talking about things which are happening to one’s acquaintances; but with Mildred this gossip was threaded on to a tiny silken cord of inspired knowledge of the characters of the people about whom she gossiped. She cared for them more than for the things they did; and because of this their doings were to her more interesting and her talk about them was always illuminating. Mildred used to say that she never read a book, and indeed I seldom saw one in her hand. She was far too busy gardening or making things. Yet she seemed to have read everything and her talk was rich with half-expressed allusions to her reading. Her conversation was infinitely more enjoyable to one whose mind was quick enough to recognize these. It has been said of her that she ‘never finished a sentence, and if she fell in with a courteous stranger who seemed to expect to listen to the end, her embarrassment was complete. But those half sentences gave a nuance to her talk, which a whole one would have blurred. She hated explaining herself and never did. Her speech was like music: its real meaning began where words leave off.’

  Mildred looked at the world through very personal lorgnettes, which she held a little bit askew, making what she saw just odd enough to be funny without interfering with the truth of her vision. In the memorial volume written by some of her friends after her death, there is not one of the little studies which does not attempt to describe her talk.

  Dolly Ponsonby said: ‘Her great quality was what is ordinarily called a gift of sympathy, but which, in Mildred’s case, I would call interest. There was nothing you could do, or say, or write to Mildred—the smallest thing—that did not interest her profoundly. There seem, now that she is gone, so many things that one could only tell to Mildred. To say that she was sympathetic is true, but does not exactly describe her attitude of mind. She did not necessarily agree with you because she liked you and this gave her companionship a savour. If she disagreed with her friends, they were never offended, because she was so amusing, so genuinely interested and concerned … and with Mildred we felt clever, amusing and attractive.… Certainly she had the power of transmuting prosaic and everyday things into exciting and funny things. She could extract amusement from a door-scraper.… She retained some of the absurd caprices of youth, enthusiasms or dislikes for unaccountable things; there was the charm of the unexpected and the unexplained.’