Talking is, however, quite a good subject for conversation, and I like to remember good talks in the past, or even isolated phrases. I often find in my old diaries, a telling phrase I heard, or a little picture I saw, written down with no context, and I can remember nothing else about them. Yet those passages make my diary worth while. They interrupt the record of every day, with its inevitable everyday-ness.
Mrs. Stephen Musselwhite bubbled with phrases and was a rattling good talker. Every time one went to see her, she threw off something which was worth jotting down. Her neighbours called her ‘ False Emma’; but, as she said: ‘ Folks say I’m proud, but I’m not. I just don’t care about talking to anyone but you, and the Saviour, and the Clutterbucks.’ She was as fastidious about books as about the company she kept, and she returned a book which had been lent to her saying: ‘ No thank you. I only like good books, about God and death.’
‘That’s my slop basin,’ she called out recklessly, as she gave herself another cup of tea, and threw into the grate the tea leaves from her first cup; and then she turned to me with an appraising look, and said: ‘You’re little and desperate. You ought to marry a lord with a thousand a year.’
One of her sons emigrated to Canada, where he bought a farm, and my father said he was glad to hear he had fallen on his feet.
‘Fallen on his feet?’ said Mrs. Musselwhite, indignant. ‘Indeed he hasn’t. He rides a ’orse.’
A few years later, this son died in Canada, and Mrs. Musselwhite who, as we know, liked ‘God and death’ was much consoled by hearing of the ‘Glass ’earse’ which was used at the funeral. ‘Something better’n what we ’as ’ere,’ she said. She was rather puzzled when she heard that the funeral had taken place some way from the farm, and she decided that her son ‘must have lived in a little country place just outside Canada, much like Barford is to Wilton.’
Mrs. Strong was another phrase-maker, and she said scornfully of a somewhat feckless neighbour whose child had died:
‘I ’ad to do everything for her this morning. She couldn’t so much as lay out a cat, as the saying is.’
Excited, speakers at Suffragette meetings have been known to let fall some unexpected utterances.
‘I don’t stand before you as a woman,’ declared a rather peculiarly dressed female speaker on the Market Cross at Wilton one day. She then condoled with those unfortunate women ‘whose nearest male relative is a MAN’, and defiantly demanded—‘No Taxation without Legislation’.
In those same pre-war days of Suffrage debate, I once heard Lady Robert Cecil (herself an ardent Suffragist) say impatiently, on hearing that a publisher had refused Walter de la Mare’s Nursery Rhymes as ‘unsuitable for children’:
‘I suppose they sent it to be read by some idiotic woman.’
Whereat Sir Henry Newbolt took her ear-trumpet and said gravely down it:
‘Not a case for giving women the vote then?’
At a missionary meeting, the speaker declared fervently: ‘I believe—in fact I know—that there will be black men in Heaven.
They want to go there as much as we do, but they don’t know the way. WE DO.’
It was, however, neither the salvation of black men, nor votes for women, but a friendly tea-party for Sunday School teachers which brought forth this, said very rapidly:
‘I didn’t hear direct, but I heard sideways, and I wished the earth would sink and open me up.’
Miss Aikman then asked the meaning of the word ‘Bounder’, which she had heard used about one of her friends.
No one was quite sure as to this, but everyone agreed that it was something complimentary.
This scrap of conversation is very unintelligible:
He said: ‘ How’s your mother?’
I said, most sarcastically: ‘Quite well thank you.’
But that delicate sarcasm has evaporated.
For many years we had at the Rectory a most inspired gardener named Chalke. He was not a great talker, but if anyone ever had the Green Thumb, it was he. The garden was his one thought. He could not live away from it, and on summer evenings, when we were at dinner with the windows open, we never failed to see Old Chalke come back from his cottage, to slip through the garden gate for a last prowl round his flower beds. He was like a mother who shades her candle with her hand as she steals into the night nursery to see that the little ones are safely asleep.
When my sister once showed Old Chalke a particularly delightful photograph she had taken of the garden, he looked at it for some time with his ‘fat affectionate smile’, and said:
‘Wheelbarrer comes out jolly.’
There was poetry in Chalke’s last words. He had got up at five one morning, and was smoking a pipe by the window, when he said meditatively to his wife:
‘We’ve had a lovely rain. Do ’ee hear that blackbird whistling?’
She heard a sudden movement and looked towards him. The old gardener was sitting dead in his chair while the blackbird whistled.
Remembered scenes are often scenes of choirs, for choirs naturally make pictures. I wish I had seen the old west gallery choirs—trombones, flutes, and the round mouths of singing girls; and still more I wish I heard them oftener now, the music floating freely down from above, and compelling the congregation to join. There is lovely singing of this kind in the little village Church of Untergrainau not far from Oberammergau, where on any Sunday it seems as if every person in the church was breaking into spontaneous and rapturous devotion in the music of Bach or of Handel, and this entirely because the choir is behind them. I heard something of the same sort at a wedding in Woodford Church in Wiltshire.
Choir practices are often more delightful to see than to hear.
