The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
Burne-Jones windows were installed at St. Philip’s, and the church was worthy of becoming what it now is, the Cathedral of Birmingham.
Preoccupied as he often was, deep in church affairs to the exclusion of all others, he remained a family man, confident of his children’s support. He could be, and often was, exceedingly angry with them, and sometimes cuffed the elder boys all the way round his study, but he was perfectly tolerant of their jokes at the expense of his dignity. One Sunday his private chapel was mysteriously full of the scent of Popish incense; once, when he was on a visitation, he found that his hostess had been told (by Eddie) to be sure to supply him with a bottle of whisky—“the Bishop could not do with less”—and with a pair of black silk stockings, in case he had forgotten his own. Once a representative of the press called at their holiday rectory, and since there were no servants and Mrs. K. felt that the family might be considered too informal, Winnie and Ethel obligingly did duty as cook and parlor maid; only Eddie told the reporter that both of them were deaf and dumb, and could be addressed only in sign language; this caused Winnie to drop the soup. The Bishop marveled, thinking of his own industrious and obedient boyhood, at where such ideas could come from.
St. Philip’s Rectory never became completely settled territory. There was always an unpredictable element. But the boys were going ahead unchecked, maintaining their early promise. All were winning prizes and scholarships, and their father was accustomed to measure progress by such things. As soon as it was dark, wherever they were, there was a cry, as though from the Inferno, for lamps and candles, so that the children could get down to their studies. Beyond his knowledge, however, there were stirrings, intimations of nature and poetry and human weakness, which could never be confided either in him or in Mrs. K., who, in Eddie’s phrase, in spite of her sterling qualities, seemed to them “rather drawing-roomy.” There were certain aspects of sea and cloud and open country that brought to them, as it did to Housman’s Shropshire Lad, “into my heart an air that kills”—certain poetry, too, that would always have the power to bring them together, Sylvie and Bruno, Catullus, Matthew Arnold, Housman himself, Cory’s epitaph:
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
They knew that this was nothing more than an inaccurate translation from the Greek, made by an Eton schoolmaster to help out his class; later, they knew that the schoolmaster had had to leave Eton under a cloud, and take a different name. But the power of the two verses to remind them of each other, across time and space, was beyond this, and indeed beyond “rational argument.”
Still, every morning, at family prayers, the whole household knelt down together, while the ancient coffee-machine simmered ferociously in the background, and the unity and peace, like that of England itself, seemed unlikely to be broken.
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