‘Only once,’ she said: ‘and then I was driving with my sister and she saw nothing.’
On the day of my visit to the Land’s End, I had another rather incongruous adventure. When the coastguard had gone away, I sat for some time on the cliff, until my eyes were so dazed with sunlight that I could no longer see the towers of Lyonesse. But what I did see was a very neatly dressed man, who clambered up the cliff from below and suddenly appeared within a few yards of me. He approached me very politely, and taking off his bowler hat, he said:
‘Excuse me madam. Can you take photographs?’
I said that I could.
‘Then would you oblige me by taking mine,’ he said. ‘I can never find anyone at these interesting spots who will take my photo. Be sure that you get the picture well in the middle of the plate.’
I took the camera and looked into the finder. The stranger had moved to the edge of the cliff and he had miraculously taken from his pocket a telescope, which he had extended and was holding to his eye as he looked across the ocean. Christopher Columbus himself could not have had a more adventurous air. I pressed the button and gave the camera back, but then I lost my head. I forgot to give the man my address and to ask him for a copy of that picture I possess no memento of this curious scene.
Inexplicable things do happen to me, although I do not call myself ‘ psychic’, as people say. One more peculiar anecdote shall now be told. I was lying awake one night in my room at the Daye House. The Park gates were locked so that no one could approach the house. It was midsummer, when it is never altogether dark. I heard something fall rather gently to the ground, and I thought it must be a book which had slipped off my bed. I leant out and looked on to the floor. In the dim light I thought that I saw a tennis racket. I knew I must be wrong, for not only did I not possess such a thing, but I knew that there never had been one in the house. I waited half an hour and looked again. It was still there. It was a tennis racket. I got out of bed and picked it up. Yes. In my hand I held a racket, and not a very modern one. It was an old-fashioned shape, slightly curved and many of the strings were broken. There is nothing to add to this story, for the appearance of that mysterious racket in my bedroom has never been explained. If it was an apport left as a joke by a passing spirit, I can only say that the sense of humour of those in another world is very different from ours.
BOOK III
WILTON ONCE MORE
PREAMBLE
THE DAYE HOUSE
About the year 780 Alcuin was called from his Seminary in Yorkshire to become the chief master in Charlemagne’s new schools in France. Then one of his Northumbrian pupils wrote a ‘ Lament’, which can be read in Miss Waddell’s ‘Medieval Latin Lyrics’. Here are some lines from her translation:
O little house, O dear and sweet my dwelling,
O little house, for ever fare thee well!
The trees stand round thee with their sighing branches,
A little flowering wood for ever fair.
Small streams about thee, all their banks in flower,
And there the happy fisher spreads his nets.
And there are lilies white and small red roses,
And every bird sings in the early morning,
Praising the God who made him in his singing.
These lines perfectly describe my fourth and last home.
The Daye House had been the Wilton Park dairy, and we revived for it the old dialect name, when it became vacant and the Pembrokes offered it to us because they knew our love for Wilton. Here I found again my lost soul.
Only the traveller who is well acquainted with the whole width of the river valley lying between Salisbury and Wilton, will choose to come from one to the other by way of Netherhampton; though there alone will he find unspoilt the broad expanse of water-meadows. After Netherhampton be turns into a little lane, shaded by silvery green abeles. Between this and the meadow runs a very narrow canal, beyond which, far away, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral rises on the skyline. This lane follows the eastern wall of Wilton Park, and a gate in the wall opens almost immediately on to The Daye House.
‘The little flowery wood’ is made of small winsome trees, and from out of their tangle there rises a horseshoe of Scotch firs. When the evening sun slants over the house, these great trees leap into prominence—dark burning torches surmounted by smudges of somber blue-green foliage.
Here and there, through the trees on the north side of the house, can be seen the glint of the water of the Nadder River, flowing by a few yards away; and to the south the woodland gives place to pasture fields dotted with trees and cows, where rabbits hop in and out of their holes, and do their best to pop through the fence protecting the garden and to eat up everything inside.
The house is, as David Cecil said, both sensible and fanciful. It might be a keeper’s cottage if it were a little less elegant; and if it were not quite so sober and workaday, it could easily be one more of those small pavilions of pleasure which were dotted about the park during the eighteenth century. Its somewhat fanciful name recalls the entirely sensible purpose for which it was built in the ’fifties of the last century, and for which in
