At that second, daunted by the yap and yelp of the terriers below it, a grey squirrel leapt out of a small tree and bolted across the grass. It had until Christmas to live, Siviter informed us. After that he would shoot it, thereby the filberts the creature had filched from his trees and buried around the estate for winter fare would have a chance to germinate in the spring.
We came to a small clutch of dogs’ graves. On one was inscribed with clear affection, ‘Our Dachshund Billy 1888-1901, A Wise and Humorous Friend’.
Daffodils, scillas, wood anemones and fritillaries reached up through rough grass.
We crossed a bridge. Some fifty yards further we came to Park Mill. ‘Just look at the rabbeting, the mortising, the mitreing, the dovetailing, the joinery,’ Siviter exclaimed in admiration. ‘And done so long ago.’ He pointed at an assembly of wheels, pipes and cable. ‘But here, Gentlemen, is a miracle of our age, electric light at the touch of a switch. Put together by Sir William Willcocks, one of the most interesting fellows I have ever met, the very man who built the Aswan Dam and modestly spoke of it to me as ‘that trifling affair on the Nile’.’
He added, looking directly at Holmes, ‘You may not be a man of Empire but you cannot deny where-ever the English arrive, we find primitive tribal societies. As the President of our League puts it so well, it is England’s special duty to fight ‘The savage wars of peace /Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease’. When the time comes for us to depart, we shall leave behind roads, railways, telephone and telegraph systems, farms, factories, fisheries, mines, trained police, and a civil service.’
Subsequently the imperial figure of Willcocks, Siviter told us, ‘wandered through Babylon and Baghdad’, building dams on the Tigris and Euphrates.
He continued, ‘To drive the generator, Willcocks de-clutched the corn-grinding mechanism and installed this turbine. The current is carried by 250 yards of deep-sea cable to batteries in an outhouse. We get four hours of light from ten 60-watt bulbs each evening.’
I saw Holmes begin to look abstracted. To avoid breaking into a roar of laughter which would surely have hurt Siviter’s feelings, I burst out, ‘Ah, and I assume it takes a fair amount of water?’
‘2000 gallons an hour,’ replied Siviter triumphantly. ‘Through a 14-inch pipe. I would offer a demonstration but as you see, the pond is exceptionally low. We have used it up in supplying extra current for my guests.’
He pointed to the upper floor of the Mill.
‘We cleared the mill-attic as a workshop for the artist - you will know of him from his recent appointment as President of the Royal Academy. I commissioned him to paint an oil or two on the Fuseys’ estate at Scotney Castle across the Kent border, some twelve miles from here as the crow flies. Lord and Lady Fusey are great friends of mine. Pevensey should be back here shortly to hang the canvases up to dry.’
Our host turned us back the way we came Led by the dogs we retraced our steps through the gardens. As we picked our way across the Wild Garden Siviter entertained us with an amusing story of baboons chasing him on Table Mountain. This was followed by a more curious happening three years before, at Crick’s End, early on the second day of his residence. His wife and children were still in the former home at Roehampton. After a night of recurring fever (‘from my days in India’, Siviter reminded us) he rose before sun-up to make a cup of herbal tea, no servants having yet been engaged. Outside, a thick mist which rolled in during the night had yet to dissipate. He entered the breakfast-room to find himself staring at a sinister group of grey-beards, wizened monks as at a séance, attired in the black habit of the Dominican Order, immune to a battalion of cockroaches so thick on the stone floor they almost touched each other. To Siviter, not yet recovered from the fever, the monks had the look of uneasy spirits just risen from their graves. One wore a heavy habit enclosing his body like a bell, with a pilgrim’s staff and sack, a breviary on his lap. So clearly was such an assembly a ghostly inheritance passed on with the building or the hallucination of his still-disordered imagination and upset sensibility that ‘hoping the strange visitors were not too briskly summoning me away in the dim world that lies beyond the grave’, Siviter strode on towards the kitchen stove, expecting to walk right through them, but they were solid. He had a difficult apology to make. As they were there for alms he gave them the half a leg of mutton delivered the previous day, some capers, a generous monetary donation, a half-full brown stone jar of overproof West Indian rum, and several bottles of Kops Ale discovered in an armoire secrète. Damp had warped the cupboard’s doors and hampered the lock which had to be broken. ‘It was from that experience that I wrote the verses of The Portuguese Monk of the Barefooted Carmelites.’
It was nearing time for us to sup before we sang, or, rather, to take tea on a velvet lawn near the mulberry tree, at a long table covered by embroidered linen. Our repast would be informal, in the style anglais - standing under umbrellas in the drizzling rain. The meal comprised thin slices of bread and butter and a jelly compounded from the half-rotted small brown fruit of the medlar tree. It brought back my memories of Johnston’s Fluid Beef.
Siviter and I held a brief, rather conspiratorial chat on our methods of writing before reaching amiable agreement that our styles were Continents apart.
While closing in on the tea and medlar jelly, our host took us on a diversion through the house. On a tiger-skin rug in Siviter’s study stood a long, shallow fruit basket of insubstantial wicker-work, filled with a litter of curiosities - ancient broken pottery, delicate papyri, assorted bronze ornaments of Far East origins, a planchette, and such fandangles as a tiger’s tooth attached to a bell. Beyond lay a collection of green jade dishes and badly-cracked Imperial yellow rice bowls retrieved from an excavated tomb. Siviter explained Chinese Court etiquette prescribes that when a Sovereign dies, every rice or other bowl adorned with the royal cypher must be smashed, with fresh ones manufactured for the new Emperor. After he interviewed Tung Fu-Hsiang, leader of the Boxer rebellion, for the London Times he purchased this collection in the Native City, just outside the Chien-Men gate of Peking.
From such collection of almost unimpeachable authenticity and utmost rarity Siviter had built a European reputation in at least one branch of research, Asiatica, where his power of purse from sales of Eastern tales (nearly the equal of Kipling’s) gave him great advantage in the race for fame.
We Debut As Public Speakers
Our brief encounter with tea and medlar jelly came to its end. For a moment Holmes engaged Siviter in talk about the richly-woven Persian and Kashmiri rugs spread across the floor of the Grand Hall. My friend’s knowledge was gained in Lower Egypt and Persia during the Great Hiatus of 1891-94 when he was thought dead. We ascended the adzed twisted double staircase, through age visibly out of true. Thus we came to the place of trial, our first public speaking engagement.
We entered an entirely different and icier world. By deliberate and extraordinary contrast to the Grand Hall, the parlour exuded an air of mediaeval England. To judge by the smell of many tobaccos, it doubled as a smoking-room. The stiff furniture, chosen for compatibility with the house’s age, looked - and proved to be - uncomfortable. In the precise centre, adorned with two mauve antimacassars and positioned like a Princely gadi was a fine copy of a Knole sofa, inspired by the 17th Century original at the great Kent country house of the Sackvilles twenty-five miles to the north. The room was a cabinet of remarkable talismans. Everything was worthy of inspection.