Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  The first time I went out after King Edward’s death I went for a drive in the park, and was struck by the truth that mourning is by no means a uniform. Women dressed in black differ more than they do at any other time. It is a commonplace to say that we all look our best in it, but, like most commonplaces, this is the impression of a one-eyed observer. What I saw then, and have often observed since, is that black clothes make women appear to be either duchesses or charwomen. They are resolved to wear their rue with a difference; and this is fundamental, for while a man suffers the tortures of the damned if he is not dressed exactly like all his fellows, nothing annoys a woman more than to meet another wearing the same model as herself.

  I was at Wilton at the time of King Edward’s burial on May 20th, and then I noticed that the ‘Church and churchyard were packed. People in every aisle. Everyone in black. Trains and trams all over the country stopped dead at the time of the burial.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  WRITING BOOKS

  Ten or eleven years ago I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea of a story in my head. I had not thought of it before that moment, but it struck me as being a very good subject, and I immediately sat up and scribbled away for three or four hours. I thought at first that it would be finished in one chapter, but when I began to write I found that it was going to be a much bigger thing than that. Before morning I had finished two chapters of The Love Child—my first book.

  Till that night I had never thought seriously of becoming a writer, and now I did not know whether what I was doing would ever be any good. I was sleeping badly at that time and I wrote practically the whole of that first book during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly. I have often thought that in wakeful nights one is quite another person to one’s ordinary everyday self. One ceases to be human and becomes a tangle of the super-human and the subhuman. One is very creative and completely uncritical; an animal, but an animal of peculiar sensitiveness to spiritual suggestion.

  The first draft of The Love Child was written in a few weeks, but when I tried to transcribe it, I found this a most troublesome business. The spiritualized animal which took possession of me in the night wrote a handwriting which was all but completely illegible; and each night’s work took over a week to read. This erratic handwriting still flows from my hand whenever I try to write a book. The mind works so fast that the hands cannot follow it; and if the instrument lags behind, the whole thing is spoilt. I find that I cannot remember the end of any sentence that I begin. I therefore trained myself to compose on the typewriter. The typing of my first drafts is always abominable, but it is at least more legible than my writing of them. Though I am sure to have hit most of the wrong letters, the words come out at about the right length, so I can generally guess what they are.

  Since the night when The Love Child was born, I have become a fairly steady writer, and people often ask me why I didn’t begin before. I began to write about a year and a half after my sister Mildred died. We had been lifelong companions. She was an enchanting talker, and an inspiring listener. All the fun which one gets out of inventing a story and writing it down, all the pleasure which is given to the writer who finds sympathetic readers—all this criss-cross of give and take, Mildred and I had enjoyed together without the labour of writing anything down. We often told each other that we would write books, and she did indeed write one extremely funny one which she afterwards lost; but we found each other’s companionship so completely satisfying that we sought no wider public.

  After her death some dozen of her friends combined to write a little book about her, each one contributing an essay describing that facet of her character which he or she knew best. Harry Newbolt insisted upon my writing a preliminary essay in this book, which he said, wanted a more definite picture of Mildred’s life than could be given by any of the separate writers, and that was really my first piece of writing. The Mildred Book was printed on a hand press at Shaftesbury and was illustrated by Rex Whistler and Stephen Tennant; and when it was finished, the idea of The Love Child suddenly came to me.

  Alice Sedgwick was staying at the Daye House when I wrote my first two chapters, and I showed them to her in the morning. She liked them, and it was entirely because of her encouragement that I went on with the book. Afterwards her sister Anne introduced me to my first publisher, and so this gifted writer became, as she called herself, ‘ Godmother to one of your children’.

  Long before this, while Mildred was still alive, we had once said that As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s would be a good title for a book, and I had gone so far as to write down some suggestions for the first chapter. This phrase had always been one of our family sayings. My elder brothers used to walk with Jane, their nursery-maid, to visit her grandmother, who lived in a cottage in the Hare Warren, a mile and a half away. It was the longest walk they ever took in those days and it became our family measure of distance. I now saw it as a spiritual measure, and used it to suggest the story of a girl whose grandmother was so dominating a personality that all her life she could never walk beyond the sphere of that overpowering influence.

  I liked this subject. The autocratic grandmother was a type I knew well in my father and his sisters. It is a character which charms me, mostly because I could never be at all like it myself. Such characters are rare to-day. They suggest a life lived in a secure and unshakable setting. The tides of varying opinions may sweep to and fro outside it, but all the time it remains completely watertight. The house of such people is indeed built upon a rock. Fashions and opinions may change, the world look this way and that, uncertain what to believe or how to act, but within those impenetrable walls, life goes on as before. The master of the house remains its master. A personality such as this sounds harsh and forbidding, and it may be so at heart, but in the case of my father, I had seen it veiled in an outer garment of courteous old-fashioned manners, which simply made him impossible to argue with. If one ever attempted such a thing, he could always finally and definitely place one in the wrong. The longer one knew him, the more one came to see that his system worked. He had made his own conception of life as he had decided that it should be lived, and he continued to live in that way, whatever the world around him said, thought, or did. The first reaction of youth was naturally to rebel against this overmastering authority; but in order to rebel successfully, the rebel must have his own conception of life, equally complete and equally believed in. Not many people possess this.

  The story of Jane with her few ineffectual struggles is really a symbolic picture of life in my own father’s house.

  I notice that many of my friends feel obliged, when publishing a book, to lay their hand on their heart, and solemnly to protest that it contains no portraits—that all the people described in it are dead or have never lived. I have never done this because I don’t think that real life fits into fiction. When a living person or an actual event is inserted into a novel, it seems completely out of scale and quite unreal. It is a common thing to hear people say to a writer that there is one person, or one episode in his book which really is beyond belief; and the answer nearly always is that that is the only thing in the book which is taken from real life. For my own part I have never been able to get a slice of actual life into a novel: it simply won’t go in. Real life comes into fiction at its two extremes. It first gives the fundamental idea from which a book will grow; and then, from it one can often select those little gestures and unconscious movements by which people express emotion and which often give them their individuality.

  When we lived in the Close at Salisbury, I was never tired of observing how much the beauty and character of the houses there affected the people who lived in them. This was the fundamental idea of The Seraphim Room. It came from Salisbury Close, though not one of the people in that book had ever lived there.

  Then again, I have known a good many dwarfs in my life, and I have always noticed that there are certain mental a
nd moral characteristics which seem to spring from dwarfishness. Then I have further observed that these characteristics are sometimes stronger in those members of a family who are not themselves dwarfs than they are in the dwarfs themselves. Seeing a dwarf appears to affect one more than being a dwarf. This is the idea at the root of Dwarf’s Blood, but again, none of its characters are portraits.

  My father owned a collection of family papers which had at one time been carried off by a footman. Among them this man had discovered an ancient patent of nobility given to a member of the Olivier family. The adventurous footman adopted the title and travelled all over Europe as a marquis. This amusing idea was at the bottom of The Triumphant Footman.

  Fiction is for me far easier to write than history or biography, for in fiction one generally escapes all the labour of research. It was almost by chance that I wrote two biographies. The first was the Life of Alexander Cruden, a name known to most people, though hardly anyone knows more about him than his name. People murmer: ‘Cruden’s concordance,’ though the phrase often conveys nothing at all to their minds.

  I had always wanted to know more about Cruden. When I was a little girl, I was one day sitting on the floor in my father’s study, when my mother came into the room and took from the shelf an enormous tome. She studied it for a few moments and as she pushed it back into the shelf, she said, with a dramatic gesture:

  ‘Right as usual. That man never made a mistake. No wonder he went mad.’

  I was profoundly impressed, and I knew the book was Cruden’s Concordance. Later on, I often remembered those words and wondered whether Cruden really had been mad, and if so, whether the Concordance had driven him out of his mind. At last I found his name by chance in the Dictionary of National Biography. There I learnt that Cruden did indeed go mad, not only once, but three times, and that each time it was a love affair which drove him demented. In the British Museum I read the long and elaborate journals which Cruden kept in the Mad House. I read of his instalment as Reader in French to the Earl of Derby at Halnaker Castle, and of how he had lost his situation because he could not pronounce a single French word. I read of his dramatic love affairs and of the superhuman effort by which he saved a poor sailor boy from the gallows on the very morning fixed for his execution. I found an account of the interview between the absurd yet inspired little bookseller and that most charming of eighteenth-century queens, Caroline of Anspach. There was certainly much more in the life of Alexander Cruden than the compilation of a Complete Concordance to the Scriptures. His was a most entertaining life to write.

  And when Peter Davies asked me to contribute a volume to his series of short biographies I felt obliged to write the life of Mary Magdalen, which was not really a biography at all, but a work built up from a number of the beautiful imaginative and poetic lives of the Saint written during the Middle Ages.

  The book has no value as history. What historical character it may possess lies in the picture it gives of the devotional mind in the Middle Ages. There I can declare that it is faithful and true; for every episode is taken from one or other of the old lives of the Saint which I had long loved to read. Mary Magdalen was fortunate in that her earliest biographers appeared in Provence, where her legend had persisted since the first or second centuries. Then, when these traditional stories began to be written down, the first springs of romance were already rising in the land of the Troubadours. Devotion and Beauty mingled with a simplicity and ease which has seldom been approached. In my Life of Mary Magdalen, I aimed at introducing this sacred Fairyland to those of my contemporaries who did not yet know it.

  Most autobiographies make one wonder at the number of distinguished people known to their writers. Indeed they often seem to have no other acquaintances. Yet I have often thought that many of the humble and unknown people I knew in my childhood and youth are equally worth describing. More so perhaps; for some of these simple Wiltshire men and women were of a type which is fast disappearing. Their lives, their tastes, and their interests were limited in area as those of few people to-day are limited. The Wilton I first remember was a Provincial town in a sense that no town can be in this twentieth century; when the stream of modern life pours through it in motor cars, and the polished accents of wireless announcers sully the purity of its ancient tongue. When they beat the bounds of the borough in those old days they were beating something with a spiritual, as well as a tangible existence. It is something of this old local life that I have tried to recall in Without Knowing Mr. Walkley; and if I fail to interest my readers in the old Wilton characters I have described, the fault is in my pen, not in my subject.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  MIGRANTS

  I often, think that the politest man I ever knew was Frank Brown, who was the bailiff at the Home Farm when we were children. He was a slim, dapper little man, in appearance more like a solicitor than a farmer; and though he looked about fifty, I believe he was never under eighty. On Sunday mornings he always appeared in Netherhampton Church supremely dressed in a black cut-away coat, pale-grey trousers with pin stripes, a tall hat, and gloves of thick lavender suède. His politeness was chiefly shown in those gloves. During the service he took them off and laid them very neatly on the shelf in front of him; and before leaving the church he put them on again and very slowly buttoned them up, for he always walked some way into the park with my father after the service, and according to Frank Brown’s code, gloved hands were essential when walking with rectors. Then came the crux. Some of the family often walked through the park to meet my father, and we sometimes came upon the two men quite suddenly round a comer, or we sat waiting under a tree in the shade, so that they did not see us till they were actually upon us. Then Frank Brown feverishly began to unbutton his right hand glove in order to shake hands with the ladies. It often stuck, and it always took a long time; but while the frantic struggle went on, Mr. Brown never looked at us. He remained bowed over his own hand, and we, too, looked at the distant view, appearing not to see his agonized exertions. When at last the glove was off, each party started up appearing to perceive the other for the first time, and then we cordially shook hands.

  Frank Brown was an enthusiastic naturalist and sportsman, which greatly endeared him to my father; and when they took these Sunday walks together, they were constantly reminding each other of historic runs with the different Wiltshire packs, or they told stories of bustards, badgers, and otters.

  Frank Brown had a very good story about a fox, which he once saw trotting along, within its mouth a curious white thing. At first Mr. Brown could not make out what this was, but after a time he saw that it was rather a large piece of sheep’s wool. He watched the fox till he reached one of the dew ponds on the down, and there he turned round and went backwards into the water, walking cautiously towards the deepest part till he was entirely submerged except for his nose and mouth, which projected from the water, still holding the piece of wool. Then he stood still. Frank Brown was so much interested that he crept near to the water’s edge and looked on, while the fox was far too busy to notice him.

  After a few minutes some black specks appeared on the wool. These increased in number till they completely covered the white surface. Something was coming up out of the water. Then Mr. Brown saw that this was an army of fleas, and that the fox had devised this cunning way of driving his enemies off his body. He waited patiently till the black mass had ceased to increase in size, then he dropped the piece of wool into the pond, walked out of the water and trotted away.

  Wiltshire is like that fox, and so are Wiltshire people. Ever since the dawn of history, successive migrants have crossed it, been shaken off, and have been forgotten. Yet they continue to come. The natives endure them for a time, seeming to ignore them and to go on mouching about the streets, leaning against the walls, hanging over the gates and staring vacantly over bridges into the water. Then they wake up, and shaking off the alien visitors, they go on as before, forgetting all about them.

  To the migrant flitt
ing by on his gaily coloured wings, the corduroy-clad native will always appear drab and dreary. The Cockney thinks the Wiltshire-man unendurably slow and stupid. He is not such a fool as he looks, as was proved once for all by the story of the Moonrakers, which gave the Wiltshireman his nickname. Although this story is very familiar, I will tell it again.

  The village of Bishop’s Cannings lies almost exactly in the middle of the county, and many of the best Wiltshire stories are told of the Bishop’s Cannings men. One evening in the early nineteenth century, an exciseman from London was driving over the downs in the direction of Devizes, and as he neared the village of Bishop’s Cannings, he saw a group of men in charge of a float which was drawn by a donkey. They had pulled up beside a dew-pond and were busily raking the water with their long wooden hay rakes. The exciseman stopped, and in his refined London accent he asked these yokels what in the world they were doing. The stupid fellows pointed to the reflection of the full moon in the pond—large, yellow, and round.

  ‘Zomebody bin and lost a cheese,’ they said, ‘and us be a-raking of un out o’ thic thur pond.’

  This was an excellent story for the exciseman to produce an hour later in the parlour of ‘ The Bear’ at Devizes, and never had he told one with more success. The roars of laughter which received it came from an audience in which every man was well aware that the Bishop’s Cannings pond was a recognized dumping-place for the casks of whisky which were regularly smuggled from the Dorset coast along the green down roads. The ‘ moonrakers’ were well known to all the company present, and this was the kind of joke likely to be appreciated by the ‘ slow’ people of Wiltshire.