Of course I saw that this cock-and-bull story could not possibly be true. It was obvious that this pretty young art student had quite another reason for wishing to get out of London, though I could not guess what it was. As she refused to give the names of anyone to whom we could refer for her character, it was impossible to enrol her in the Land Army; but I passed on her story, as she had told it to me, to a farmer near Westbury, who had asked for a couple of girls for seasonal weeding. He said that he would take the risk of employing her and her friend, as he had no jewels worth stealing; so he engaged them both, and they worked for him quite satisfactorily for some months before they disappeared once more into the unknown from whence they had come.
Chapter Sixteen
REVENANTS OF THE PLAIN
In a paper game, we were once asked to write down what we thought to-day to be the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ and one of my selections was ‘Stonehenge with the twenty miles round it’ I still cannot think of anything more wondrous. Perhaps the word ‘miles’ is too feeble and inadequate, for Salisbury Plain is an Infinity lying in an Eternity. The earth possesses vaster distances; but none can be more utterly endless: and on that Plain the monuments of the past are so ancient that they seem to have become part of nature herself. They belong as truly to the landscape as do the molehills thrown up last night.
Speaking geographically, Salisbury Plain embraces all the high land between the Oxfordshire Downs and the Isles of Purbeck and of Portland on the Dorset coast; but, in common parlance, it generally signifies the twenty miles or so of undulating uplands which lie between Salisbury and Devizes. Stonehenge stands almost in the middle of this district; and when Pepys wrote his diary in the seventeenth century, it appears to have been divided from Salisbury by ‘ some great hills even to fright us’, though I know not where those hills can be to-day. Perhaps we are less easily frightened than the urban Pepys. This plain is now to a great extent a military training ground, and many a grumble is heard about the soldiers, and the way in which they are spoiling the countryside. Yet the plain is far greater than any army; and as one drives or rides over the seemingly level miles, passing, on the way, camps pitched on the turf, or regiments marching on the road, one looks back a minute later, to find that camp and regiment have vanished, leaving the Plain as serenely empty as before. For in those great spaces, the undulations are dwarfed into invisibility, although they are big enough to swallow an army on the march or a city of tents.
So Salisbury Plain remains the same great silent immensity, in spite of the many thousand men who train there every year. The plovers still turn and topple over it, their soft high-pitched voices blowing about in the sky; and the tiny larks still run swiftly up and down their invisible ladders of song. The wild flowers on the Plain are the smallest in the world, and yet, by their very multitude, they change the colour of the downs as one season succeeds another, and they fill the air with faint, indefinable fragrances.
These quiet spaces are profoundly haunted, and yet Salisbury Plain possesses few, if any, actual ghost stories. I know of no one who claims to have seen an apparition of what must have been one of the most beautiful and tragical funeral processions in the world’s history, when for two nights and the best part of two days, Sir Lancelot and his seven companions went on foot the long forty miles from ‘Almesbury unto Glastonbury’, escorting the bier upon which lay, with face uncovered, the body of Guinevere the Queen. Sir Thomas Malory tells us that ‘an hundred torches were ever burning about the corpse of the queen, and ever Sir Lancelot with his seven fellows went back about the horse bier, singing and reading many an holy orison, and frankincense upon the corpse incensed’. If strength and poignancy of feeling are the cause of hauntings, one might expect still to meet those figures on that long way of sorrow, but the beautiful vision has never been seen.
The Tattoo beaten by the Drummer Boy of Salisbury Plain is not heard to-day; and no one has seen the desperate chase when Mr. Dean, the farmer of Imber, pursued Benjamin Colclough, the highwayman who robbed him on his way home from Devizes market one October evening in 1859. Surely it might be expected that the turf would still echo the footfalls of those galloping horses, for the chase lasted full three hours, and only ended when Benjamin at last was ridden down by the farmer, and fell dead on Chitterne Down. There is still to be seen by the roadside the sinister grey tombstone-like monument which was ‘erected as a warning to those who presumptuously think to escape the punishment God has threatened against Theives [sic] and Robbers’.
These intense personal emotions do not touch the great impersonal changelessness of the Plain. They vanish in it, as the passing traveller is swallowed up in those great spaces, leaving them still unalterably lonely. No The hauntings of the Plain are not personal, they are universal. The word ‘Revenant’fits them better than ‘Ghost’. Abstract presences seem to come and go upon the Plain, and they pass like the cloud shadows which move eternally over its still, impassible face.
Among such apparitions are those hounds of an uncouth and ancient breed which, within the memory of man, have been met pursuing their unattainable quarry in King John’s hunting ground of Cranborne Chase. Thus they hunted, not on one day in any one year, but day after day and year after year throughout the centuries which we look back upon as a compact and definite epoch, and which we call the Middle Ages. Or again, there are the two white birds with widespread wings which never beat the air, who rise up from the spaces above the Plain, when a Bishop of Salisbury has died. They are mourning for no individual. They merely tell the passing of one more figure in that long line of Prelates who have sat in the Bishop’s Throne beneath the spire which has watched the Plain for six hundred years.
And now comes my own experience, as impersonal as any; and so unlike the ordinary ghost story that it was years before I knew that it contained any element of the supernatural.
It was a dark October evening during the war, when I was superintending the Wiltshire Women’s Land Army. In those unhappy years, my work was of all others the least unhappy, for it took me, not to scenes of pain in hospitals, nor to hear the endless whir of machinery in munition factories, but instead, to peaceful farms, where girls milked cows, or ploughed the fields, or harvested the crops. In those years I learnt my way about every part of Wiltshire, much of which had hitherto been unknown to me. That evening I asked the way from Devizes to Swindon and then drove on alone in my small two-seater car. It was between five and six, and a wet, dreary night.
After a few miles, I left the main road, and then I soon entered a very strange avenue. I was passing through a succession of huge grey megaliths, which stood on either hand, looming like vast immovable shadows within a curtain of softly falling rain. At once I knew where I must be. I was evidently approaching Avebury, that great prehistoric monument, older perhaps than Stonehenge and with a far more complicated plan. This part of Wiltshire was at that time quite unknown to me, but I had often seen pictures of Avebury in archæological books.
Like Stonehenge, Avebury was originally a circular megalithic temple, but unlike it, it was approached by stone avenues, extending in some instances for over a mile. In the old days, this must have added immensely to the impression created by the place; and now, coming upon it thus unexpectedly for the first time, I immediately felt its grandeur, and was dominated, even at some distance away, by the sense that I was nearing an ancient and a very wonderful place. By now it was raining hard, but I told myself that wet or fine, I must certainly get out of the car when I reached Avebury for nothing would induce me to miss this first opportunity of seeing it.
At the end of the avenue, I reached the great earth-work which surrounds the temple, and I climbed on to the bank. There beneath me I saw the huge stones, not standing more or less undisturbed in their lonely circle as they do at Stonehenge, but, far fewer in number than they once had been, standing or fallen in irregular formation, with cottages built among them interrupting the ancient plan. This did not surprise me, for I already knew
that the village of Avebury was built actually within the old circle, its cottages standing rather incongruously among the megaliths, from fragments of which they were built.
This might be expected to spoil the effect of grandeur which Avebury should give; but on that particular night a village fair happened to be in progress. Although it was true that houses and people did take from Avebury that peculiar mystery which Stonehenge gains from its loneliness on the downs, yet I now saw that during the centuries, Avebury had gathered a new romantic character. The temple and the cottages possessed a unity, for the houses have not only grown up among the stones, they are of the stones. The vandalism which long ago hewed up the megaliths and made from them little houses for farm labourers to dwell in with their families, has succeeded in blending the one with the other. The old stones of Avebury are humanized as Stonehenge will never be.
And the fair that night brought out this aspect of the place. It looked right. The grand megaliths and the humble cottages alike were partly obscured by the failing light and the falling rain, but both were fitfully lit by flares and torches from booths and shows. Some rather primitive swing-boats flew in and out of this dim circle of light: cocoanuts rolled hairily from the sticks upon which they had been planted: bottles were shivered by gun-shots and tinkled as they fell to the ground. And all the time, the little casual crowd of villagers strayed with true Wiltshire indifference from one sight to another. Those great stones, the legacy of architects of an unknown race, had succeeded in adapting themselves completely to the village life of another day. I stood on the bank for a short time watching the scene; and then I decided that too much rain was falling down the back of my neck, so I got into the car and drove away.
I drove away for nine years, for that time passed before I visited Avebury again. This time I went there as a sightseer with a friend, and we walked round the embankment and looked at the village and finally went to get some tea at the inn. While we sat there, waiting for the kettle to boil, my friend took up a guide book which was lying on the table, and suddenly she exclaimed:
‘Listen. What does this mean? You saw a ghost Fair when you were here before.’
Then she read to me that a fair had formerly been held every year at Avebury, but that it had been abolished in 1850.
So long had passed since the night I saw the fair, and so absolutely normal had it then appeared to me, that now I found great difficulty in answering the questions which at once occurred to my mind. How, for instance, had the people been dressed? As far as I could remember, very much as country people still did dress at the time I was seeing them. An impression remained of browns and other dark, rather dull colours—of clothes which toned with the rainy night. Then again, had I heard the noise of the fair or had I only seen it? I thought I remembered voices and music and rifle shots and the clicking of balls against cocoanuts, but how far away from me had those sounds seemed to be? I supposed that they must have sounded quite normally near, or I should have felt that I was seeing something uncanny. This I certainly had not felt at the time.
But now there seemed to be no doubt that in October 1916, I had watched a scene which must have taken place at least sixty-six years earlier.
The following year I was again at Avebury, this time as a member of a learned society which was studying the monument, for now I wanted to find out as much about it as possible. Sitting there on the bank, in a group of elderly savants, I told them my story of the fair. Their manners were too good to betray their incredulity, but one of them asked:
‘By which way did you approach Avebury that night?’
‘Not the way we came to-day. I came through the avenue of megaliths.’
‘That had disappeared before the year 1800.’
So not only the fair but the whole of my experience that night from the time I left the village of Beckhampton a mile away, had taken me back to some time in the eighteenth century. I must have stepped back in time, as did Miss Moberly and her friend at Trianon, who in 1901 walked on paths, crossed bridges, and saw cascades, which had ceased to exist a hundred years earlier.
Mr. J. W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, in writing of this Trianon experience, says that, according to his theory of serialism, ‘all our individual minds are merely aspects of a universal common-to-all mind, which mind has for its four-dimensional outlook all the individual outlooks’.
This is what I was trying to suggest in what I wrote above about the character of Salisbury Plain. Here, if anywhere, one feels as if one had been taken up into that ‘ universal common-to-all mind’. It is not a question of ‘seeing ghosts’ or of ‘having visions’: it is that sometimes, under the influence of that great spirit that seems ever brooding over the Plain, one’s own little outlook is lost, and one is incorporated into something older and bigger and wiser than oneself. One knows what the past was like.
Of course I at once wanted to know whether or not that avenue ever did exist. Traditionally, as I have said, Avebury was originally approached by more than one avenue; but of the Beckhampton one by which I must have come that evening, there exists to-day no trace.
It was therefore with immense interest that I heard a year or two ago that the avenue was being excavated, that many of the megaliths had been found lying buried where they had fallen, and that these were being set up again in their original positions. I went to Avebury to see the work in progress.
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 conjuncti
on 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.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 17
