My father had been very fond of the Bishop and he was much shocked by his death, so the dinner which now began was a most melancholy meal. My father sat at the end of the table looking very depressed, and the various guests who were staying in the house knew not whether they ought to talk as if nothing had happened, or whether they must fall in with his mood. I tried to think of a subject of which we might talk without jarring too much on my father’s humour, and as he was always immensely interested in natural history, I began on the subject of the unknown birds which I had seen. I had still completely forgotten Miss Moberly’s story, but I described my birds very exactly and appealed to the company to tell me what they were. My cousin Tom Hunt, who was an admiral, laughed at me for describing albatrosses and declaring that I had seen them flying over the Wiltshire water-meadows. He said this was just another of my tall stories about my favourite country.
When I was going to bed, I suddenly recalled the legend of the Bishop’s Birds and I hastily went to my diaries to find what Miss Moberly had said. I could not remember just when she had told me the story, but I found the passage after a long search, and then I saw that she had said her birds were ‘like albatrosses’.
Bishop Wordsworth was a very great man, and it was fitting that the day of his death should be marked by signs in the skies: such things were more appropriate to him than words uttered by rather second-rate eulogists. I find that I wrote in my diary after hearing a succession of funeral sermons about this great man: ‘I hate nothing more than undiscriminating eulogy of someone I love and admire.’ One remark about the Bishop did, however, please me very much. Challis, the Pembrokes’ gardener, said of him that he always spoke as if he were thinking to himself. This was very true. Bishop Wordsworth seemed entirely absorbed in his own deep thoughts, as if he was quite unaware of anything going on around him. This was not really the case.
One afternoon, the Bishop arrived at Wilton with a new setting of the ‘Te Deum’, arranged in a manner which he particularly liked from the liturgical point of view. He handed me the music, and asked me to sing it to him. It is a frightening thing to sing the ‘Te Deum’ through as a solo in the presence of a bishop, but Bishop Wordsworth’s word was law, and I began in a very shaky voice, with Mildred accompanying me on the piano. The Bishop sat down at a writing-table and immediately became absorbed in the proofs of his edition of the ‘Vulgate’. I sang about half of the ‘Te Deum’, and then I saw that his thoughts were entirely on his work and that he seemed to have quite forgotten me. I stopped. Without looking up, the Bishop said: ‘Go on please.’
But I must return to other happenings that cannot be explained but can only be recorded.
I have only once visited the Land’s End. It was Ash Wednesday and one of those blazing Cornish days which turn February into June. I drove out from Penzance alone just about noon in a small Austin car; and then I stood on the edge of that astounding cliff and looked out to sea. Stout Cortez could not have had a wider view. The Land’s End is indeed aptly named. I stared across the Atlantic and as I did so I saw, some miles out to sea, a town which was obviously a very important place. It was a jumble of towers, domes, spires and battlements. That must be on the Scilly Isles, I thought, although I had never heard of any great city there, imagining them to be nothing more than a paradise of greenhouses. While I was still looking, a coastguardsman approached, and I asked him the name of the town.
‘There is no town there,’ he said ‘Only the sea.’
‘Surely you can see all those towers and spires?’
He looked as if he thought that I was quite imbecile, and again he said that I was looking at nothing at all.
When he had gone, I made up my mind that I must be looking at a mirage thrown on to the atmosphere by that peculiarly powerful spring sunshine. Yet I had a lurking hope that I had seen a vision of Lyonesse, which some people say lies sunken under the sea off the Cornish coast.
Later on, I learnt that I was not the only person to have seen such a vision; and I myself saw it once more a year or two later. It was a very different kind of day, and the hour was late evening. I was driving with a Miss Macpherson along the north coast of Cornwall, a few miles east of Land’s End. It was a wet and blowy night, so the atmospheric conditions were completely different to those when I had previously visited the Land’s End. Suddenly I saw again those towers and spires standing immovable out at sea, while the rain blew by them. I asked Miss Macpherson to stop her car.
‘Do you see anything over there?’ I asked.
‘Indeed I do,’ she said, ‘I see a city. I have often been told that from here it is possible to catch sight of the lost city of Lyonesse, but I have never seen it before.’
To hear her say the word Lyonesse pleased me very much, as this was what I had secretly hoped myself.
Some years afterwards I
