Great was my disappointment to find that the avenue which had been replaced was not where I had seen it. Instead of going West from the temple, it ran South. For a few minutes, I felt that I must wipe out my memory of that night in October 1916. Then I sat down to hear a lecture given by Mr. Keiller the excavator.
He explained that his reason for beginning work upon the particular avenue which he had now disclosed, was that one or two stones were still standing at its extreme end. These gave him his direction and enabled him with very little difficulty to trace its course. But, he went on to say, an even more interesting piece of work awaited him. Of all the old avenues, the Beckhampton one possessed the most persistent tradition, although none of its stones remained. Here he would find no pointers to guide him, as the standing stones had done on the eastern side; but he said he was determined some day to find that avenue if he could. The audience who heard this lecture was so exclusively archæological that I had not the courage to rise up and offer to guide the excavators to the place where they should dig; but in spite of this cowardice, I hope that the day will come when I shall return to Avebury, there to see standing once more those stones, which, I believe, I am as yet the only living person to have seen above the earth.
Chapter Seventeen
THINGS PAST EXPLAINING
Some time after the visit to Trianon which Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain described in An Adventure, Miss Moberly told me the story of the Bishop’s Birds. There is an old and well-authenticated legend that when a Bishop of Salisbury dies, two white birds are seen, and this legend seems to have been very generally known in Salisbury in the ’seventies and ’eighties of the last century. By the time I heard it, however, it seemed to have passed out of memory. The older generation had ceased to think about it and the younger generation had never heard it.
Miss Moberly was herself the daughter of a Bishop of Salisbury and she said that an hour or two after her father died in 1885, she walked out alone into the palace garden. There she saw two very remarkable white birds which flew up from the ground and disappeared over the cathedral, going in a westerly direction. She described their appearance very carefully—the immense stretch of their wings and their dazzling whiteness; and she asked me not to forget this legend in case the birds should be seen on a future occasion and no note should be made of it. I immediately wrote down in my journal what Miss Moberly had told me, and then it passed out of my mind till the 16th of August 1911.
That day began miraculously. At three o’clock in the morning, my father called us to look out of the window and see Mars and Saturn in conjunction near the moon. The beauty of this sight was ineffable. The moonlight was melting into morning, and the moon herself had become a very pale, silver colour as she went down the sky. In the delicate between-light, the two planets glowed like warm gems of ruddy gold and we watched them as the light grew stronger and stronger, while they became fainter. It was a unique opening for a day which otherwise seemed to promise nothing outside the ordinary.
That afternoon I drove with the Wilton choirboys on their annual picnic and treat. We went to Wardour Castle, where I spent some very delicious and peaceful hours sitting on the grass beneath the ruins while the boys played cricket. The return journey was, however, a nightmare, and one quite outside the imagination of anybody to-day. We had gone in a horse brake, and the job-master was so careful of his beasts that he walked them nearly the whole way home. The first seven miles of that return journey took an hour and a half. The boys revelled in what they called ‘a nice long ride’, and they whiled away the time by asking riddles, which were mostly about pigs or policemen, and then by singing and shouting. I became very tired and I had been leaning back in my seat watching the sky for some time, when I became aware that I was staring at two enormous birds with very long wings. These wings. were so brilliantly white that even their shadowed underside shone like water reflecting light. They flew up over the Hurdcott meadows towards the northwest, and they came up the sky with still wings which did not strike the air. It dawned upon me that I had never seen such birds before, and I called to the boys to look at them. As I did so, we drove under an avenue of trees, and only the smallest choirboy who was sitting next beside me said that he had seen them too. Our horses slowly walked their way to the other end of the avenue, but of course the birds were out of sight when we came out once more into the open. We talked of them a good deal on our way home.
When we got to Wilton, Albert Musselwhite, our Parish Clerk, opened the door of the brake for me to get out at the Rectory, and as he did so he said:
‘I am sorry to tell you that the Bishop of Salisbury is dead.’
Curiously enough, I did not at once think of the birds. I had only heard the legend once and it was not in the forefront of my mind. Also, when Miss Moberly told it to me, I had taken for granted that the mysterious birds must
