I look back on my youth, and I see a regulated existence which is now almost inconceivable even for those of us for whom it was once the only imaginable mode of life. Social life was then so organized that it seemed to have a momentum of its own, independent of the idiosyncrasies, the wishes, or the convenience of individuals. It had been arranged to exhibit an acknowledged purpose in life, and a faith in what lay outside. This gave it dignity and character. More, it made it into an artistic whole, though those who had planned it would have been the last to look at it in that way. But having been planned, it did not admit of alteration. The wheel of our lives then rotated slowly. It was more powerful than ourselves. Its spokes were the successive events of the days, the weeks, the years. To those spokes we were bound. We rotated with them. They moved and happened independently of the whims of any individual. Family prayers was one of the spokes.
Chapter Five
OLD VINEY AND OTHER WALKERS
Old Viney shared with our gardener what they call in North Wilts a Splittus, or house split between two families. It had originally been one of the small cloth-mills or factories which were common in Wilton in the eighteenth century, and the mill stream dived underground to pass beneath it. In the middle was a large brick hall, its roof supported by a wooden pillar, and the two households lived on either side of this. Viney always wore a white smock frock, which was most becoming to his tall figure. He had been the driver of the last mail coach which went over the hill to the Chalke Valley, and he used to tell us that before starting down the steep and narrow hill which goes from the Race Plain to Coombe Bissett, he always pulled up his horses and listened. If he heard no sound of creaking wheels or lumbering cart, he said to the guard: ‘Start blowing.’ The guard blew his horn, and he went on blowing while Viney whipped up his horses and galloped them headlong from top to bottom of the hill. The road lies between high banks, where there is no room to pass. Once they were off, nothing could have pulled up the horses, and if anyone had begun to come up the hill when the coach’s mad career had begun, it must have been the end of them all.
Viney was a boy at the time of Queen Victoria’s Coronation, and he made up his mind to go to London to see the sight. He and a boy friend set off to walk from Wilton. Before they reached Andover, the companion fell out, with blistered feet, and Viney walked on alone. About twenty miles from London, he was overtaken by an empty hearse, returning from a funeral in the country. The driver offered him a lift, and in this lugubrious vehicle Viney made his entrance into London. When the Coronation day came, he walked to the door of the Abbey, no man saying him Nay, and there he stood to watch the Queen get out of her carriage. As he said, he ‘could have touched her’. So easy were things in those days for anyone who saw no preliminary difficulty in first walking eighty-four miles, on the chance of seeing the Queen, and then, making no further fuss about it, walking eighty-four miles home again.
To-day, walking is no longer a recognized means of getting from one place to another. It is only a recreation. As such, it has its own delight, yet a dignity has departed from it since it ceased to be an accepted mode of transit. In the twelfth century, Brother Samson walked to Rome and back with a message to the Pope from his monastery in England; and when he returned to learn that his king, Richard Coeur de Lion, was a prisoner somewhere in Hungary, he at once walked off to look for him there. Even in my own day, Hilaire Belloc walked to Rome, and made about that journey the most delightful of his books.
Viney was not the only man of his day to walk to London from Wiltshire. A few years earlier, there had been Mr. Brown, who constituted himself the voluntary caretaker of Stonehenge. He loved the stones, and watched them summer and winter, always ready to talk of them to the rare visitors who appeared; and during his many hours alone there, he was at work on his own masterpiece. This was a plaster model to scale of Stonehenge as he saw it in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Every stone was modelled with the utmost care, and while the work was in process, nothing interrupted the artist,
