Without Knowing Mr Walkley

preferred the stage to his seat at the bottom of the Infants’ Class in Dr. Marks’s school for Burmese Princes in Rangoon. Alfred was on his way to a post in the Burmese Civil Service, and he was put to learn the language in this humble position, when a travelling company came to the town. It was too much. He was ‘off with the raggle taggle gipsies’ and he went through India with them, returning at last to go on to the London stage. My father minded this so much that my own secret desire was never even mentioned, and Mr. Walkley remained my one link with the world of my dreams. It was through his eyes alone that I saw most of the plays of those days, for we seldom went to London, and our only ‘theatre’ was an occasional visit to Salisbury of Mr. Benson’s Shakespearian Company. It is true that I was present at Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s first appearance on the stage, but that took place at Wilton when Lord Pembroke had invited Ben Greet’s Company to play As You Like It in the Park. It had been played there once before, when Shakespeare himself was one of the actors. It is curious that as a girl I saw so few plays, for we all loved acting. Even now I have never seen a pantomime, though I have acted in more than one; but my father never imagined that his children could enjoy what would have bored himself, and a provincial pantomime did not attract him.

It would be unfair both to him and to the theatrical profession to suggest that the stage was my father’s only taboo where his children were concerned. He saw little of them when they were small, but when they grew up, he liked them always about him. Mrs. Morrison called us the Four and Twenty Blackbirds, and said that Papa liked to think that whenever he wanted to open the pie, the birds were all there, ready to begin to sing. It is true that though he always sat alone in the study, he liked us within call. He hated anyone in the house going out to parties. The coming and going worried him. He was truly conservative. As the family party had been yesterday, so he wished it to be to-day, and to-morrow, and so on ad infinitum.

He could not therefore approve of any proposed career for his daughters, and this objection extended to matrimony. He was not actually opposed to the institution in itself, for had he not himself twice married, and entirely happily? But in the case of his children, and more especially of his daughters, his standard was too high. He had an instinctive, sub-conscious prejudice in favour of Archbishops of Good Family as husbands for them, and by ill chance, none of these presented themselves. When my eldest sister fell fatally in love with a young naval officer of blameless character, her engagement was one of those things of which it is not fitting to speak in the family circle; and she only succeeded in marrying the young man at last, by the unfailing courage and determination which persisted through four years of opposition.

I rather shared my father’s fancy for the unattainable in bridegrooms; and the consequence of the various ‘inhibitions’ (as they call them to-day) which he laid upon our youthful ambitions, has been for me a happy life spent, not upon the stage or in any of the other professions which presented themselves, not as a wife, mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother (the fate of most of my friends), but as a lifelong inhabitant of Wiltshire, which is in my eyes, the most beautiful of the English counties. The stage of my early ambitions must have proved but ‘an unworthy scaffold’, a ‘cockpit’, and ‘a wooden O’ compared with the grand spaces of the downs about Wilton; while, in lieu of the many passing acquaintances of a London life, I have my Wiltshire friends.

My father’s early home was at Potterne in the north part of the county. South Wiltshire and North are divided by Salisbury Plain, but there is considerably more than that between them. Even petrol has not succeeded in completely breaking down the strong local patriotism which severs the ‘ chalk’ of the south from the ‘cheese’ of the north, and when my father reached Wilton as a young curate, he was entirely a North Wilts. man. He had not then married my mother, and on his first Sunday in Wilton, when the afternoon service was over, he walked alone on to the hill at the south of the town, and found himself on the old Roman Road which runs from Salisbury to Shaftesbury. He looked over the country. Grovely Forest lay like a long shadow upon the summit of the downs which faced him across the valley. At his feet, the Nadder meandered through water-meadows of a startlingly brilliant green, its course marked by willow copses and by long rows of poplars. He looked eastward, and then the unsophisticated slimness of those delicate trees was shamed by a sudden miracle. Salisbury was out of sight, but before him rose the cathedral spire in all its exquisite artifice. The poplars shook with every fugitive breeze: their faint and fragile grey leaves would change and fall with the passing of the seasons: but the spire stood motionless, and seemingly alone, among the boundless downs, and, far above the trees, it carried eternally towards the sky the superb faith of its builders.

‘This is a place in which to spend a lifetime,’ said my father to himself, for in those minutes his narrower loyalty to one half of his native county had become a larger thing. He never changed his opinion, nor have I, since he once took me to that place and told me how he had first seen it. My brief coquetterie with the unconscious Mr. Walkley fell from me as a little yellow leaf