At last we reached the drawing-room, furnished with rather florid French furniture dating from the 1890’s, the sofa and chairs looking as if they would break if anyone sat upon them. The walls were crowded with cabinets and shelves, upon which was a multitude of ornate Victorian china ornaments, all thickly coated with dirt. In the half-darkness of that gloomy afternoon, we seemed to have entered a house which had been abandoned thirty years before, by someone who could not endure the misery of living in it, and had suddenly left it, turning the lock behind him. Yet two people were still living there.
Only the dining-room seemed as if it might be inhabited by ordinary human beings, for here a fire was burning, a single place was laid and a bottle half-filled with whisky stood on the table. It was the only thing in the house which was not covered with dust.
We looked out of the windows: the view was infinitely appealing in its quiet beauty. We looked back into the room: it seemed that no one could ever again live within walls which had been so long haunted by that dingy horror.
When I drove through France a year or two ago with my nephew Tony, I was reminded of sightseeing with my father. For Tony too the enjoyable part of a journey is the actual travelling. He likes going from place to place, though he does not care much about places. Of course our actual means of transport could not be more unlike those of my father’s day. The sleepy wagonettes had been replaced by the roaring Ford V8. That journey was the most appalling one I ever took, for Tony’s favourite speed was eighty-seven miles an hour, and at this pace we rattled over pot-holes and ridges, and leapt the cassis which compose the surface of the celebrated French Routes Nationales, with their deceptive appearance of regularity. I was hurled about in all directions, and after a few days’ travel, I was black and blue all over; but Tony sat solid and immovable, pinned in beneath the wheel. We called ourselves the Pea and the Cauliflower.
At this breakneck pace we rattled through the valley of the Loire, briskly looking in at the Renaissance castles, walking through miles of underground caves, the walls of which were stacked with millions of bottles of champagne, and spending an occasional day in one of those old local capital towns with their many-windowed palaces standing sheer upon the streets.
On that tour we went to Les Baux. Legend says that when Mary Magdalene and her companions had completed their miraculous voyage from Palestine, their boat drifted over the then flooded land of the Camargue and was stranded at the foot of a hill upon which Les Baux stands. We reached the place late in the evening and left our car in the village. Then we climbed up a little pilgrim’s path which leads to the church. Here there is a tiny terrace, sheltered and still, from which one can look away over mile upon mile of quiet hill country. I turned from watching this great expanse and went towards the church behind me. The west door was open; and it was already dark inside. It was like looking into a cave, and I waited till my eyes should grow accustomed to the darkness. As I did so, a sudden light shone out in front of the altar, and above it there appeared what seemed to be a floating face. It had a quiet, still beauty. In form it was a rounded oval, and there was warm, red colour on the cheeks. The face was motionless, its dark eyes lowered and gazing on the light beneath them with an expression of tender care and watchfulness. My heart stood still, for my thoughts were fixed on St. Mary Magdalene. This must be her apparition. In a few seconds two hands gently raised the light and set it above the face. Then I knew that this woman was the Sacristan of the little church and that she had lowered the altar lamp, had re-lit it, and then had put it back into its place. She came down from the altar and knelt for a few minutes before the sanctuary before going to toll the bell. I realized that when I watched the Sacristan at her daily work, it had seemed to be the vision of a saint.
We were at Monaco on Good Friday, and there we saw the traditional religious procession which every year passes through the old town that night. It is completely medieval. No ‘ historically correct’ fancy dresses recall a modern pageant. These people merely twist a bit of coloured stuff about their everyday clothes, and they become the people of Palestine.
A few hundred yards across the bay, the lights of Monte Carlo shone with the steady and unflickering brilliancy of electricity. So they had shone each night throughout the winter. That clear confident illumination missed the unique character of this one night. In Monte Carlo, it was just another night passing among a thousand; but here, in Monaco, it was Good Friday. Once again, as for hundreds of years past, there was no light in the street but that sent by flickering candles set on window-ledges; and through this semi-darkness the lights of the procession came and went. The streets are too narrow for spectators; and we moved from corner to comer to meet again and again these little ranks of grave and earnest country people, carrying their lights and their sacred emblems; or to watch the procession as it contracted itself sufficiently to pass slowly out of sight down some street which was even narrower than the rest. The processional lights were candles tied on to sticks and protected by large shades of cream-coloured cardboard. The effect was that of long-stalked round white flowers, softly lit from within. Sometimes the procession moved to the music of old Church tunes, sung rather waveringly by the thin shrill voices of choirboys—voices possessing so little carrying power that the sound went out with unexpected suddenness if the procession rounded a curve in the street. Sometimes there was an interval of heavier music, when the dull thud of crape-covered drums and the blatant harshness of brass instruments took their turn, playing a local traditional funeral dirge.
The circles of shaded candlelight, the children’s faces, their eyes, and their singing mouths—all were round, sacred, and solemn like consecrated wafers. The Twelve Apostles were men in their ordinary working-clothes, and across their shoulders they had draped pieces of red, blue, or green cloth. The Holy Women had covered their heads with long black veils which fell to their feet. Above the Crucifix was a little tent-shaped roof of black velvet. The life-sized image of the dead Christ reposed upon a canopied bier. The golden statue of the Blessed Virgin was rigid, with no hangings either of triumph or of grief.
It took an hour for the procession to perambulate the many streets of the little town, but at last it reached the church, the facade of which was rather incongruously floodlit. Then the lurching candles, and the carefully borne images passed up the very steep and high flight of steps and through the west door. Darkness closed in upon the little twisted streets.
On the following day Monte Carlo took its turn and showed us a typical spectacle of the modern world. Its streets also wind round and about, and as in Monaco on the previous night, they were empty but for those who took part in the pageant. That day we saw an International Motor Race; and its music, like that of Monaco, was intermittent, coming and going among the curves of the streets. This time it was no sad and ancient music, but the terrific and shattering roar of the cars as they hurtled past our stand again and again. The course was fifty times round the town and it was a great feat of human endurance and skill. It was also a miracle that no one was killed. Our seats were near a bend, and once a car skidded there, blocking the road just out of sight of the other competitors coming up behind. Officials frantically waved flags. Spectators shrieked from the Tribunes, but five or six other cars had blindly hurled themselves upon the wrecked one before it was towed out of the way. It was very exciting, and very noisy, and our national pride was gratified by the fact that the three first cars were of British make. Nevertheless, I shall soon forget the Monte Carlo motor race, but I think I shall always remember Good Friday at Monaco.
Chapter Twenty
THE DEATHS OF KINGS
On the night of the 20th of January, 1936, my sister Mamie and I were alone at the Daye House, and we sat together in the long room through two hours which were till then unparalleled in history. King George was dying, and at ten o’clock a Committal Service was broadcast to all stations in the Empire. Science then achieved a hitherto unthought of combination of community and seclusion.
We felt as if we had been brought into the King’s own room, which yet itself remained intimate, personal, and private. We also, in our room, were intimate, personal, and private, though we knew that our emotions in those hours were shared by other quiet listeners all over the world. Till a quarter past twelve we sat listening to the great tragic clanging of each quarter of an hour by Big Ben, followed each time by the announcer’s voice always saying the same words: ‘ The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’ At twelve-fifteen we learnt that the King was dead.
The universal emotion of the next few days has not been forgotten, and everyone repeated that never before had the death of a sovereign been received with so keen a sense of personal bereavement. It is true that King George’s subjects had had opportunities of knowing their King which had not been possessed by previous generations. Everyone knew his appearance on the films and his voice on the wireless. He is said to have described himself as ‘a very ordinary fellow’, and this brought him near to the many ordinary fellows over whom he reigned. Those words of his may possibly describe the natural equipment with which King George set out, for he seemed to possess merely the ordinary gifts and tastes of a thousand of his subjects; but it was not that which won him the estimation he possessed when he died. The world had come to realize that there must be real greatness in a spirit which could thus take the elements of an ordinary man and out of them create a man who so stood out among his fellows. King George’s subjects believed and knew that his only aims were the good of his people and the peace of the world. Other men have honestly sought the same things, but very rarely without some probably quite unconscious bias. Every man of experience in public affairs must have gained that experience somewhere—in politics, in a service, in a profession, or in a trade. Thus he naturally possesses a double loyalty: the King had only one—his loyalty to the public good.
The world marvelled that all this was realized so vividly by humble village people all over the Empire. They put it down entirely to the influence of the wireless; and if I had not re-read my diary of 1901, I too should have said that never before had we experienced anything at all like it. But I found that what I then wrote might almost have been a record of those days in January thirty-five years later. In 1901 I wrote that every cottage seemed plunged in personal sorrow, and that Mrs. Gale, a woman of eighty years old living in an almshouse, said to me: ‘I think the Queen wer’ just overwhelmed wi’ this war, and seeing Lord Roberts last week brought it all home to her.’ She had spoken as if Queen Victoria belonged to her own family. And then, when George V died, in 1936, an old-age pensioner said to me: ‘It’s hard to lose a dear friend.’
I am horrified to discover how much older I am than most writers. I seem to be completely out of date. Almost everyone who wrote about the death of King George was either a child or a baby in arms when he succeeded; and none of them knew Queen Victoria except by hearsay. They made up their minds that when the Queen died, the world would doubtless have felt her death to be the end of an epoch, but they were convinced that her people as individuals had no sense of personal loss. They said that this had to be, because the Queen for many years had lived in such retirement that nobody could possibly have thought of her as anything but a crowned and honoured mummy.
My diary in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign gives a very different impression. We were all very much aware of the Queen. A year or two before her death I said to my father’s old friend Sidney Meade that I could not bear to think of outliving the Queen: to which he replied, rather heartlessly as it seemed to me: ‘ Then you’ll have to die pretty quick.’ I remember being welcomed when I went to visit a racy old Wiltshire woman with the words: ‘I couldn’t be more pleased if ’ee wer’ Queen Vic herself.’ It was the natural phrase which leapt to her lips. And when the Queen died three weeks after the beginning of the twentieth century, an old farmer said to me: ‘The end of the century seemed to mean nothing at all. The end of the Queen is the end of everything.’
We first heard that the Queen was ill on January 19th, when the papers said that she was not well and would stay indoors, but that afternoon Lord Pembroke went to Osborne because she was much worse. After that, we somehow got news many times during the day, for I wrote in my diary on Sunday that ‘the Queen’s illness was hanging over us like a dark fog’ and that she ‘varied every hour’. All the 21st we were ‘in a ferment of anxiety about the Queen’, and on the 22nd, ‘we tried not to believe the bad bulletins that came’. That evening, just after eight o’clock when we were having dinner, we very surprisingly got ‘ a telephone message’ (from whom I cannot say) telling us that the Queen had died at six-thirty. Telephones were then evidently looked upon with great suspicion, for we refused to believe the invisible speaker, till a telegram came from Lord Pembroke with the same news, ‘and then the church bell began to toll at once’. I wrote that night: ‘It is impossible to believe. Impossible. Will people in after days ever realize a quarter of what those awful words mean to us? The Queen is dead.’
The next morning every man and woman in Wilton from the highest to the lowest appeared in mourning—such deep, overwhelming black too. In these days no one has ever seen such blackness.
Only a few of these black-robed people stood round the market cross to hear the Mayor proclaim King Edward VII, which he did in ‘a melancholy voice, ending with God Save the Queen.’ The crowd shouted ‘King’ but nobody knew whether they ought to cheer or not, till a doleful cornet struck up the National Anthem, and then everybody joined in.
Queen Victoria was buried on February 2nd, and on the previous day her coffin was brought from Osborne to London. We watched the beautiful sea pageant from Southsea Castle. The day was absolutely still and the Solent was veiled in a thin frosty mist such as Turner would have liked to paint. An avenue of huge black battleships indicated the funeral route, and in the still air the smoke from their minute guns hung overhead in billows of golden brown. It was late afternoon and the sun was already low in the sky, its pale rays throwing upon the sea a miraculous path of faint gold light upon which the procession was to pass. A dense crowd stood on the beach. Everyone in black. Everyone completely silent. They seemed not human. Down the golden way came eight destroyers all dead black; and following them, came alone the tiny Royal Yacht Alberta, with a motionless Admiral standing like a statue in the bows. An equally motionless Naval A.D.C. stood at each corner of the coffin, which could clearly be seen on deck covered with a white pall. The silent passage of the yacht, the immobility of the figures, and that great dumb, black crowd watching from the shore made the scene like something watched through a telescope from a very long way off. Other royal yachts followed, all of them larger and more important than the Alberta which had borne the Queen, and last of all came that magnificent white man-o’-war, the German Emperor’s yacht Hohenzollern. When all was over, the dense throng which had covered the common and filled all the surrounding streets, moved away in dead silence.
Between the death of the Queen and her funeral, I see by my diary that I spent several mornings in working designs in purple velvet appliqué, which I sewed on to heavy black hangings for the church. I then covered the velvet with jewels. This seems to have been a very big piece of work, but I had so completely forgotten it that when these hangings were shown to me at the time of King George’s funeral, I could not remember that I had ever seen them before. What I had not forgotten, but what takes up far less space in my diary than do those hangings, is that on the morning of the funeral the King’s printers had not delivered our copies of the special service which was to be held simultaneously in churches all over the country. My father would never admit defeat, and he was resolved that no King’s printers should prevent his expected congregation of eight hundred people from following the funeral service in Wilton Church. He therefore decreed that we should write out enough copies for them. I shall never forget that morning. Typewriters did not then exist except in the most modernized offices. No one possessed a duplic
ator. We had only our hands and our pens. There existed some horrible contraptions called ‘jellies’ on which it was possible to reproduce very uncertainly and unevenly about fifteen copies from one manuscript, and we also possessed what we called a printing press, which would make twenty or thirty copies in vivid purple ink. We collected a party of nine or ten of the young women of Wilton, and we spread ourselves over the drawing-room, the dining-room, the schoolroom, the hall and the staircase. There, from nine to one, we all wrote, rolled, pressed, squashed, and jellied; till it seemed that the burial service for Queen Victoria must be for ever written, rolled, pressed, squashed, and jellied on our hearts. But now I cannot remember one word of it. Thus was spent the morning of the Queen’s funeral day, and by two o’clock, some four or five hundred copies had been written out. Almost every other person was able to have one, for more than a thousand people came to the service, crowding into the aisles when all the seats were full. The people were very silent except for the sounds of unconcealed sobbing.
I can find little in my journal about the death of King Edward VII, for, when he died, I was ill in London, so I had little opportunity of seeing how his death affected people. I remarked that Hailey’s Comet was then between the earth and the sun for the first time in fifty thousand years, and I quoted Shakespeare’s words: ‘The Heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.’ A day or two later when I was well enough to get up and look at it out of the window, it seemed to be only ‘a faint smudge of rather luminous cloud’.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 21