CHAPTER XIII
LIFE AT STOCKS, 1908-1914—THE CASE OF RICHARD MEYNELL—THE OUTBREAK OF WAR
STOCKS, during the first sixteen years that Mrs. Ward inhabited it, was a dear but provoking house. Built in 1772 by the Duncombe family, at the expense of the earlier manor-house at the foot of the hill, it had been added to in the mid-nineteenth century in a spirit of small economy, so that the visitor as he drove up beheld an unlovely eastern side, with a squalid porch jutting out into the drive and a mean little block of “bachelors’ rooms” joined on to the main Georgian building. Though Mrs. Ward loved the southern and western sides of the house, the eastern side was always an offence to her; she longed to tear down the porch and to plan some simple scheme for unifying its whole aspect. After many hesitations, the plunge was finally made in 1907. The family retired to Stocks Cottage, the little house among the steep hanging woods of Moneybury Hill where the Neville Lytteltons had stayed so many summers, and thence watched the slow disintegration and rebuilding of the “big house.” For, of course, once the process was begun, three-quarters of the Georgian structure was found to be in a state of decomposition, with floors and ceilings that would have crumbled at another touch, so that long before it was finished the visit to America had come and gone and the Anti-Suffrage campaign was launched. When at length the new Stocks could be inhabited, in the autumn of 1908, the alterations were beautiful indeed, but had been expensive. There was thenceforward an unknown burden in the way of upkeep which at times oppressed even Mrs. Ward’s buoyant spirit.
And yet how she loved every inch of the place—house and garden together—especially after this rebuilding, which stamped it so clearly as her and her husband’s twin possession. Whether in solitude or in company, Stocks was to her the place of consolation which repaid her for all the fatigues and troubles of her life. Not that she went to it for rest, for the day’s work there was often harder than it was in London, but the little walks that she could take in the intervals of work, down to the kitchen-garden, or up and down the lime-avenue, or through the wood behind the house, brought refreshment to her spirit and helped her to surmount the labours that for ever weighed upon her. Here it was that the near neighbourhood of her cousins of “Barley End”—Mr. and Mrs. Whitridge in summer and Lord and Lady Sandhurst in winter—meant so much to her, for they could share these brief half-hours of leisure and give her, in the precious intimacy of gossip, that relaxation which her mind so sorely needed. Then, in summer, there were certain spots in the long grass under the scattered beeches where wild strawberries grew and multiplied; these gave her exquisite delight, bringing back to her the hungry joys of her childhood, when she would seek and find the secret strawberry-beds that grew on the outcrop of rock in Fox How garden. But the more sybaritic delights of Stocks were very dear to her too—the scent of hyacinths and narcissus that greeted her as she entered the house at Christmas-time, or the banks of azalea placed there by Mr. Keen, the incomparable head-gardener. Keen had already been at Stocks for fifteen years before we came to it in 1892, and he lived to gather the branches of wild cherry that decked his mistress’s grave in 1920. In summer he would work for fifteen hours a day, in spite of all that Mrs. Ward could say to him; his simple answer was that he could not bear to see his plants die for lack of watering. So Keen toiled at his garden, and Mrs. Ward toiled at her books, her speeches and her correspondence, each holding for the other the respect that only the toilers of this world can know.
Her habits of work when she was settled at Stocks were somewhat peculiar, for method was not her strong point, and it often seemed as though the day’s quota was accomplished in a series of rushes rather than in a steady approach and fulfilment. No breakfast downstairs at 8.30 and then a solid morning’s work for her, but a morning beginning often at 5.30 a.m., with the reading of Greek, or writing of letters, or much reading, for the reading of many books was still her greatest solace and delight. “For reading, I have been deep in Emile Faguet’s Dix-huitième Siècle,” she wrote to Mrs. Creighton in August, 1908, “comparing some of the essays in it with Sainte-Beuve, the reactionary with the Liberal; reading Raleigh’s Wordsworth, and Homer and Horace as usual. If I could only give three straight months to Greek now I should be able to read most things easily, but I never get time enough—and there are breaks when one forgets what one knew before.”
Greek literature meant more and more to her as the years went on, and though she could give so little time to it, the half-hour before breakfast which she devoted, with her husband, to Homer, or Euripides, or the Agamemnon, became gradually more precious to her than any other fraction of the day. She was of course no scholar, in the ordinary sense, and her “quantities” both in Greek and Latin frequently produced a raucous cry from her husband, to whom the correct thing was, somehow, second nature; but the literary sense in her responded with a thrill both to the glories and the restraints of Greek verse, so that such a passage as Clytemnestra’s description of the beacons moved her with a power that she could hardly explain to herself. The influence which Greek tragedy had obtained upon her thought is well seen in the opening chapter of Diana Mallory.
Then, at eight o’clock, would come breakfast and post, and, with the post, the first visits from the rest of us and the planning of the day’s events. Usually she did not appear downstairs till after ten, and if, as so often happened, there were friends or relations staying in the house she would linger talking with them for another half-hour before disappearing finally into her writing-room. Then there would be a short but intensive morning’s work—sometimes wasted on Anti-Suffrage, as she would wrathfully confess!—lunch and a brief interval for driving on the Common or in Ashridge Park, after which work would begin again before four o’clock and continue, with only a nominal break for tea, till well after eight. She rarely returned to her task after dinner, for this would infallibly bring on a bad night, and indeed the long spell in the afternoon left her with little energy for anything but talk or silence in the evening.
Such, in approximate outline, was her day when nothing from outside caused an unusual interruption, but life at Stocks seemed often fated to consist of interruptions. First and foremost there might be guests in the house, who must be taken for a picnic on the Ivinghoe Downs or on Ringshall Common, or else there might be visitors from town on business—the Warden of the Settlement, an American publisher, a theatrical manager; telegrams would come up the drive from the little village post-office (for the telephone was not installed till 1914), while always and ever there was the tyranny of the post. One Sunday the contribution of Stocks to the village post-bag was duly certified at eighty-five letters, while forty to fifty was a very usual number. The evening post left at 6.30, and not till this was out of the way could Mrs. Ward enjoy that fragment of the day which she regarded as the best for real work, when letters and all other interruptions were cleared from the horizon. Her sitting-room was always a mass of papers, wonderfully kept in order by Dorothy or Miss Churcher; but in spite of the neatness of the packets, there would come days when the one letter or sheet of manuscript that she wanted could not be found, and the house would resound with the clamour of the searchers. Indeed Mrs. Ward could never be trusted to keep her small possessions, unaided, for very long, for being entirely without pockets she was reduced to the inevitable “little bag,” which naturally spent much of its time down cracks of chairs and in other occult places. When her advancing years made spectacles necessary for reading and writing, these added another complication to life, but fortunately there was always some willing slave at hand to aid in recovering the lost—or rather her family would half unconsciously arrange their days so that there should be some one. Once she declared with pride to a friend that she had travelled home alone from Paris to London without mishap, but on inquiry it was found that “alone” included the faithful Lizzie, and only meant that, for once, neither husband nor daughter had accompanied her.
Her letters to Mrs. Creighton during these years give many glimpses of her life.
“I am writing to you very early in the morning—6.30—,” she wrote on August 4, 1910, “a time when I often find one can get a real letter done, or a difficult bit of work. These weeks since the middle of June have been unusually strenuous for me. Anti-Suffrage has been a heavy burden, especially the effort to give the movement a more constructive and positive side. Play Centres have been steadily increasing, and there were three Vacation Schools to organize. The Care Committees under the L.C.C. are beginning to wake up to Play Centres, and lately I have had three applications to start Centres in one week. Then I have also begun a new book [The Case of Richard Meynell] and even completed and sent off the first number. But I am very harassed about the book, which does not lie clear before me by any means. Still, I have been able to read a good deal—William James, and Tyrrell, and Claude Montefiore’s book on the Synoptics, and some other theology and history.
“Life is too crowded!—don’t you feel it so? Every year brings its fresh interests and claims, and one can’t let go the old. Yet I hope there may be time left for some resting, watching years at the end of it all—when one may sit in the chimney corner, look on—and think!”