And, as I was crossing the road, thus bemused and absentminded, a lady, evidently sight-seeing by herself as I was, crossed it from the other side, and in passing stopped me to ask some question about the way to somewhere. She turned out to be one of our driving party, although I had not noticed her. When I had replied to her introductory query, she said: "I saw you with Mrs B. this morning. You are Mrs C., are you not?" Then she told me she had a sister living in Melbourne, married to a Melbourne doctor, and she wondered if by chance I knew them. I did not know her sister, but the name of her distinguished brother-in-law every Australian knew. This little encounter, opening the lines of the "wireless" to my dear home on the other side of the world, filled up the measure of emotional satisfaction that was so abundantly vouchsafed to me that day.
Or almost. The drive home (by a different route) was as delightful as the drive out. And when I reached Mrs B.'s and the capacious arm-chair, and M.'s most charming tea-table ...
I am afraid I must confess, after all my sentimental rhapsodies, that the crowning joy of my expedition to Rising Castle was the heavenly cup of tea that awaited my return to the starting point.
There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their business and domestic boundaries; who "wouldn't cross the street," as they say, to look at the Parthenon or the Sphinx, or see anything in them if they did; to whom a guide-book, with photographs, means a map and a railway time-table and an indicator of the tariffs of different hotels. But the passion for travel—to "see the world"—has possessed me from my youth up. It has grown with my growth, and has not waned with the waning years. As long as the faculties of vision and locomotion remain to me, I shall cherish dreams of the Sphinx and the Parthenon, Venice, the Swiss Alps, the castles of the Loire, the thousand and one beauty spots of the all-beautiful world, which I have yet to see—trusting in the Fates, which have begun to indulge me, to give me a sight of some of them before I die.
I do not think they could drop me down anywhere and leave me altogether ignorant of where I was, so far and wide has an exploring imagination led me, and so much has it made of its every opportunity, since I first began to read and to look at picture-books. After thirty years of life in the Australian Bush, I went one day to a tea-party in Melbourne, where one of the entertainments provided was a guessing competition. One wall of a room was covered with prints and photographs of public buildings of the world; they were of miscellaneous character, old and new, selected so as not to be too obviously familiar or to give an unfair advantage to experienced travellers amongst the guests. I had never travelled; I do not think I had seen one place of the many represented—except the Wilson Hall of the Melbourne University, which was the only one to puzzle me; yet I won the first prize easily.
Happily, the beauty of a beauty spot is not dependent on human or historical associations, and the Australian Bush fed fancy well when it had no other inspiration. Likewise, when the opportunity to return to England came, unprovided with means for much sight-seeing within the country, or any whatever outside of it, I was too happy in what I had to miss what I had not. It seemed almost as much as I could bear to roam my native county, and see the homes of childhood, Old H—— and Rising Castle as I did; after that satisfaction I felt like being now able to depart in peace—that I had not lived in vain. And when in the month of September—still golden weather, for that English summer was made on purpose for me—I set forth to visit Devonshire, then I felt that Aladdin's Lamp and the Philosopher's Stone were not "in it" with my command of luck.
In my young days, be it understood, with this spirit of enterprise so strong within me, I saw nothing of the world outside the eastern counties, and not much of them, except when the dear eldest aunt mothered me so much too carefully in London now and then; nor had I when, in 1870, I was abruptly detached from my belongings to be taken to the other side of the world—not to see another inch of it until I arrived. But all through those early years I was storing up knowledge of the beauties of England, putting together mental pictures of scenes which I had fair hope of beholding with the eyes of the flesh in time—although, as a matter of fact, I have not seen a tenth of them even yet. As they seemed to come under the head of things attainable that were unattainable, and not, like foreign places, of things unattainable that were unattainable, a reasonable hope was justified. Nor did I stop at hoping. I weeded the garden and gathered snails for pennies, went without sugar for sixpence a week, while my brain seethed with plans for better business, in the effort to give substance to some of my dreams.
All the places in Scott's novels—my first romances, read aloud to us little girls by our mother as we sat at our sewing tasks about her knee; all the castles in the English histories; the lakes and fells of the north, the soft hills and dales of Derbyshire, the moorlands of Jane Eyre and Katherine Earnshaw, the Devon of Lorna Doone and Amyas Leigh....
I cannot count them. But, of them all, Devonshire was my dream of dreams.
My grandmother lived her last years there, and there she died. From her and the aunts we had descriptions of the county and its manifold charms; they only ratified what I had already learned. I think this must have been before the youngest aunt became a royal governess, or it may have been there was an interregnum in her career as such; anyway, she had her home in Devonshire at this time, which may have been a reason why I did not go there. However much I might long to see a place of dreams, I could not have wanted to see it in her company. Besides which, to go to Devonshire from Norfolk, in those days and to untravelled persons of our means, loomed as huge an undertaking as it would now be (not to me, but to rural stay-at-homes) to go to Egypt or Madeira from the same place.
At any rate, I did not go. I communed with my favourite Blackmore (as I now commune with his successor in my regard, delightful Eden Phillpotts), and dreamed of going some day. And when the some day came, it was my last in England for eight and thirty years. For the first time I crossed the land from east to west, on my journey to the ship in Plymouth Sound. Leaving Paddington at night, darkness (not sleep) hid the most of the way, but the light of the May morning came early enough to show me the part I had most longed to see. Pale dawn it was, and the train rushing along, but in all my years of exile I treasured the impressions of the little that I saw; they but fixed the old dream and made it permanent. I still had scarcely begun to realise it, but I seemed to know better what it would be to realise it. "We are to return in five years," I remarked to my drowsy partner, for so we had promised to do, in the innocence of our hearts. "Then we must see Devonshire."
We did not return in seven times five years, and when we did I might never have seen Devonshire, as I have never seen the lakes and fells, or Kenilworth, or hosts of things, but for one of those little happenings which come without warning us of the great ones in their train.
Some few summers ago I went to a new place to spend the Long Vacation with a son whom I was accustomed to companion at such times. Alone of our family, we chose, when choice was ours, the wilds of nature for our holiday resorts; and he sent for me to join him on an island that he had discovered, in a cottage that stood on its own lone beach, where we could live the simple life like Robinson Crusoes, plus the advantages of a general store (only one) and a daily steamer to and from the mainland, within the distance of a healthy walk from our abode. I went, and we had a great time—then and on several subsequent occasions in the same locality. No maids, no dressing; no constraint imposed and no effort required in the heat of the year (the Long Vacation of Australian universities begins in December and ends in March); absolute repose, combined with delightful occupation. We walked out of our beds into our morning bath in the sea, and returned for a plunge or an idle wallow at any time of day that the whim took us. We never failed to bathe (in this only bathroom at our disposal) before sitting down to our evening meal, and more than once I have risen in a hot night to soothe restless nerves in moonlit water. The sea was almost at our threshold, gently lapping a beach as smooth to naked feet as a ballroom floor. On the other side of the island, where it faces the south, the Pacific hurls its weight upon rocky headlands and thunders in rocky caverns as stern and wild as Caledonia's coasts can show. It was there we went for picnics.
Of course, we were not quite alone. The island had been discovered by others and had boasted a tiny watering-place for years. Two hotels and several boarding houses clustered about the single store (there are two now) and the little pier where the little steamer called twice daily, going to and returning from the source of fresh meat and newspapers; and these houses were filled in the summer season, and we numbered friends amongst their guests.
But the point to be mentioned is that our delightfully remote cottage belonged to a gentleman through whom—although we never met or knew each other—I came to realise my dream of some day seeing Devonshire. I often wish I had known him; for by all accounts he was a rare and original person.
In the oldest of our old times, the pre-gold times, when these lands were being "taken up" by a gallant set of young men, cadets of what we call "good" British families, he had been a pioneer squatter. But then, while the days of our history were still the "early days"—before or soon after my own arrival—he went back, married, settled and lived the bulk of his life like any other English gentleman of wealth and social standing, in accordance with the habits and customs of his family. I do not know for how many years he had inhabited his fine house in Devonshire, at which I was a happy guest so recently, but I know they were a great many. Then, a widower, approaching a late old age, he divided his large fortune amongst his nine daughters (reserving what he deemed to be sufficient for his remaining needs), settled the family house upon them for their joint use, and came back to Australia—to the little island on the Victorian coast where by such a small chance we found him.
Still farther along the lonely beach from our little cottage he had built his last home, much of it with his own hands. A four-roomed weather-board house, bare-floored, unceiled—sufficient, and no more. Here he had been living for some time, with one man for his whole establishment—the uncrowned king of the island, who could not meet a child without giving it a coin, or hear of a necessity that he did not exercise all his gentlemanly ingenuity to relieve, as when he sent a sack of sugar to a struggling mother "to make lollies for the little girl"—when two of his eight daughters in England (one was married in New South Wales) came out to see how he was getting on. I think it was not until they arrived that he built new rooms for their accommodation, and it is significant that at the same time he built himself another room quite detached from the house, which he left to their more civilised control, and the maid who was now added to the establishment; but, whether he invited them or not, he had reason to bless their coming. Unless he was the sort of man who would just as soon die alone and untended as not, which he very likely was.
I joined my son on the island the day after the old man met with the accident which caused his death. One of the many children who put themselves in his way at every possible opportunity had been to see him, to announce a birthday and receive the inevitable half-crown, and in the course of the proceedings had spied a small rifle leaning against the wall. It had just been used, or was going to be used, on minahs that were eating the orchard fruit. Unseen by his host, the boy picked up the weapon, and, "fooling" with it, shot his benefactor in the leg. I heard of the mishap, and of the periodical inquiries from our cottage as to the patient's state. No alarm was manifested, and his daughters came to see me. Later, as the wound seemed obstinate, it was thought wise to take it to Melbourne for treatment; and one morning they carried the unwilling invalid along the beach before our cottage to the steamer that was to take him thither. He raised himself from his stretcher, and waved his hand to us, and that was all I ever saw of him. He died in Melbourne some weeks later. But the island, all aweep and heart-broken, got his body back; and his grave on the sandy hill, in the midst of sea waters, seems an appropriate resting-place for such a man—more so than the monumental vaults and tombs that hold the dust of his kin of England.
To his one Australian daughter he left his Australian home. I rented it from her for a year or two. The daughters who had come out to see him returned to their sisters in Devonshire. I stayed with them for some time before they left, and we parted as friends, and with the mutual hope that we might meet again. There was small prospect of a reunion in England then.
But the time came. To my unutterable surprise I found myself there, engaged to pay them a visit. One of them, that is the elder, with her father's nomadic blood in her veins, voyaged back again after a couple of years and set up her tent on the island much as he did, only rather more luxuriously. Her return coincided with my departure, and for the moment I missed her at both ends of the world. But M. was at home, and to her I set forth joyfully on a morning of September, about a year ago from this date of writing.
I took that once formidable journey alone, my husband being absorbed in the pursuit of partridges, which was happiness enough for him. He had been marking them down all the summer and had brought his favourite gun across the world for their sakes; by the same token I had to pack it amongst my clothes because he had not room for it in his own baggage, stuffed with the rest of his sporting paraphernalia. And at first it looked as if the Fates were still inclined to head me off from Devonshire. I was all ready to start a week before I did when I slipped on the stairs and sprained my foot. I signified the necessary postponement by telegram with a foreboding heart, and as soon as I could hobble, in a slipper, flung all regard for appearance to the winds and got ready again, before more accidents could happen. And then I had, so to speak, to fight my way.
I had never travelled any distance alone, having no vocation for independence, but I assured my caretakers that any fool or baby could get about on English railways without risk or trouble. It was otherwise at home, where porters regard themselves, and with reason regard themselves, as your gracious patrons, who do not seek you, but have to be sought.
"All I shall have to do," said I, remembering my drive from Liverpool Street to Eaton Place for half-a-crown, "is to take a hansom to Paddington Station. The porters will do all the rest for me."
"Oh, nonsense," said they, "to waste time and money on cabs, when there is an Underground that will take you straight across the city from one point to the other." They would not hear of it.
By the Underground I was to go, and so carefully was I provided for that an important official of Liverpool Street Station was engaged in a friendly way to meet me there and personally conduct me from train to train. The salient points in my appearance were described to him and his to me, and when he readily undertook the job assigned to him it was reasonably assumed that I was safeguarded as far as human means could do it. That I went wrong after all was not their fault nor mine. It was in the first place the fault of one who told my friend who was the friend of the Liverpool Street official—to whom he immediately forwarded the false information—that I was going by another train. In the second place it was the fault of a porter. Poor, dear porter! In whatever form he waited upon me he was an ideal servant to my Australian notions, although I was sufficiently altruistic to wish him for his own sake the standing of his antipodean brother who is not a servant but a potentate, self-respecting to hauteur in his conscious command of the situation. In the present instance he was but human and over-zealous, and I would not blame him for the world.
When my train from Cambridgeshire drew up at its London platform he was ready for me at the carriage door, as usual. And when I looked beyond him for his superior who was to take charge of me, and saw no one resembling our mutual friend's description of him, I was relieved and pleased. For I had rebelled against the waste of his precious time and the obligation I should be under to him, although overruled by assurances that the favour would be on my side. I had protested that the English porter was all-sufficient for every possible need that could arise.
So now I put myself into his hands with as complete a trust as the highest official or a whole Board of Directors could have inspired; and I told him I wanted to go to Praed Street by the Underground, and asked him to see to everything and put me on the right train. And I gave him sixpence.
Perhaps that was a mistake. I was always being told that I had no business to give a porter more than twopence (the Australian porter will condescend to pocket sixpence, but I never dared insult him with less), and I used to make it threepence when no one was looking, without feeling that I had been too generous, in deference to the customs of the country. It is certainly an odd thing that the only two little railway accidents that befell me in England were due to the only porters I gave sixpences to. It would almost seem as if so much prosperity turned their heads.
On this occasion it was to make assurance of the right train on the Underground doubly sure that I tipped my man the first sixpence; and he laid himself out to earn it in such a way that I was ashamed not to have made it a shilling. He bought me my ticket for Praed Street—that was all right; he put my luggage on the train and myself into the special care of the conductor. He did all that man could do. But it was the wrong train.
I discovered presently that I had been along that same Underground before, on one of my visits to the Franco-British Exhibition. I had not taken much notice of the names of passing stations then, having the usual escort; but now I did. And Praed Street seemed an immense time coming along, whereas Paddington was left farther and farther behind us, and signs of our approach to Shepherd's Bush accumulated. So I spoke to the conductor. Imagine the feelings of an innocent abroad! "There's no Praed Street on this line," said he. "You are in the wrong train."
I kept my head fairly in an experience unprecedented in my career. I confided in the conductor—because I had found that in England you can go to any official in a difficulty, with the certainty of getting good advice and every possible assistance, and he told me what to do. I did it (with my luggage and my lame foot) in the sweat of my brow, somehow. I got out at the next station. For once, no porter, until a passing civilian, appealed to, sought one out for me, who, when he appeared, acted as the dear man invariably did. I returned to the station the conductor had told me to return to; exactly the same thing happened. The civilian in this case connected me with an elderly, slow porter, who seemed to have all the business of the train and platform to himself. I knew what the time was. I thought of where I was in London and of my friends in Devonshire, driving three miles to meet me; and I cried to that poor, doddering old man that I would give half-a-crown to anybody who would help me to catch the Exeter express. He stared at me as if he wanted time to get such a stupendous proposition into his brain; then he sadly realised that he could not do it. But from somewhere out of the ground sprang a vigorous young porter who without loss of time took the matter in hand.
"You run along as hard as you can run," said he, "and I'll meet you under the big clock."
I did run, although in other circumstances I should have believed it almost impossible to put my left foot to the ground. And I ran the right way too, although I did not know it, and although I have a natural genius for taking wrong ones; up and down stairs and along devious passages, sped by the directing fingers and shouts that answered my gasping query to every railway man I passed; and so I came out on a high gallery in the great arena of Paddington Station—to see my train below me, but still far away, and the big clock that was my rendezvous with the luggage porter (nowhere to be seen) pointing to the very minute that the time-table fixed for its departure!
I flew along that bridge to the end, hurled myself almost headlong down the stairs to the platform, reached my train; and there was still no sign of the luggage porter, far or near, and they were shutting the carriage doors, and the guard was lifting his hand to give the signal to start. He was a fine, big, important-looking man—I shall not forget him—and but for my experience of English railway officers it would not have occurred to me to approach him at such a moment; but I had the happy inspiration to do so, and was thereby saved.
"He will be here directly," said that guard with the manners of a prince. "I will hold the train a moment."
He held it for moments that made two minutes before my laggard henchman came into view, and then helped him to bundle my things into the corridor of my carriage, there being no time to seek the van. Blessings on him! I hope it may be my good fortune to travel in his charge again before I die. And I was only a third-class passenger.
That is another of the pleasures of English railway travel. At home we have no third class, and your own servants do not deign to travel second. I do not myself, except sometimes on a country journey, the long-distance trains having a special character and equipment. But in England the third-class carriage was our only wear; but twice did we put on airs and take a second—a first never. In Australia when you ask for your unspecified ticket, unless you are blatantly horny-handed and begrimed with toil, the young man behind the wicket gives you a first-class as a matter of course; in England he gives you a third, with the same inward knowledge that he is doing the proper thing, no questions asked. And with that evidence in your hand of your lack of social consequence, you are of as much importance as anybody to the English official, who is a gentleman every time. My guard of the Great Western could not have done more for me if I had been the queen.
And so, thanks to him, I was off at last. In a full carriage, of course, where I had to sit in the middle, but still, safely embarked for Devonshire. And when the agitation of my nerves subsided I looked at the passing landscape which I had last seen as a girl and a bride and thought of all that had happened—heavens! what hadnothappened?—since that far-off day. Its face might have changed—it must have done—but it was the same country, the same towns and villages, and woods and fields. I had seen them for the first time in the twilight of a May evening in 1870—that evening of farewells and heartbreak, of all evenings in my life—and never since till now ...
One advantage of being a third-classer is that you can chat with a neighbour without misgiving, if you feel that way disposed. I could not read in English trains; it would have been a wicked waste of eyesight when there was so much better than books to look at; and if you do not read you either incline to talk or you are supposed to be ready to do so. There was a little lady in the corner next to me whom I liked the look of, and who apparently returned the compliment, and we made one of those little ships-that-pass friendships, which are often as pleasant as they are brief, before she left me at Newton Abbot, to branch off to Cornwall. She had a school in that county, but had been called from it to a sick brother in America—in the Wild West too—a couple of years before we met; and his illness, death, and difficulties resulting from them had only now released her to return to the quiet life which had been so violently interrupted. So she had had her great experiences and was having them now as well as I. She had left alocum tenensin charge of her school, and she did not know how she was going to find things, nor how she was going to settle down into the old narrow groove again.
As in Port Said, I was minded not to dock my trip of any of its charms, and would not bring the customary private sandwich for my midday repast. There was a restaurant car on the train (we have them too, but I have never used them), and I intended to enjoy the novelty of lunching therein. I had seen photographs of the tempting interiors—third class!—in magazines, and from the platforms of great junctions had peeped at them through their own glass windows. It was another bit of experience to be taken in its course and the most infinitesimal bit was valuable.
So at one o'clock I rose and proudly journeyed down the train. But I had not noticed the preliminary boy sent round to collect orders, and the Master of Ceremonies politely informed me that the tables were filled. Another luncheon would be ready in half-an-hour, he said, but now I was "off" lunching that way, and wished I had catered for myself as usual. Returning to my seat I found my neighbour with her little refreshment set out on a napkin spread over her neat lap. She insisted on my sharing it with her, and after decent demur I did. There was a meat-pie and I had half; two cakes and I had one; two bananas and I had one. Later on I returned her hospitality as best I could by inviting her to tea with me, and then I sampled the possibilities of the restaurant car and found them all that I could wish.
By this time we were in Devonshire. We were actually waiting at Exeter—Exeter, of which I had heard so much, endeared by so many old associations—and I was too deeply engaged with my good tea and nice bread-and-butter to seriously and adequately realise the fact. Alas! when it comes to tea I am afraid I am a gross person.
But I did not see Exeter in 1870. It was dark night then. I do not know if we even passed that way. Later in the afternoon, when I came to the scenes on which that old, old May dawn rose so tragically, you might have offered me tea without my seeing it. I could see nothing but the Devonshire that was all I knew, and think of nothing but identifying as much of it as possible. Ivy Bridge, name as well as place, I had had the memory-print of for all the years, but it lay beyond my goal to-day. That other place, unknown, where the sea came up to the railway and the train ran through and under the red cliffs, I found was Dawlish. Sweet spot, so long beloved! I am told that the one blot on the beauty of Dawlish is the railway on its sea-front. This is from the resident's point of view. Let him remember what its position means sometimes to the passing railway traveller.
Being in Devonshire I sat down on one of the most notoriously beautiful of all the beauty spots of the county. It was traditional that the old gentleman of the island who had had several homes, and the means to make them what he would, never had one in a place that was not beautiful. The island, as I knew, was beautiful, in its wild solitude of sea and sand and ti-tree scrub. Otherwise his family home in England was as great a contrast to the home in which he had chosen to spend his last years as could possibly be found. As I moved about the large rooms and up and down the stairs, every wall set thick with the valuable paintings he had gathered from abroad and from Christie's and from Royal Academy Exhibitions, it was odd indeed to think of the weather-board cottage and the few prints from illustrated papers tin-tacked to its pine lining, which he had deliberately preferred to them. The whole establishment, with all the dignities of fine family furniture, family crested silver, full staff of trained servants, and so on and so on—without one irregularity or eccentricity in its administration—represented the normal English gentleman's life, that of his kin and class, and by general use and wont his own. Yet, of his free choice, he left it all to go and live like Robinson Crusoe in an island hut, with a rough, wood-chopping Friday, and a domestic equipment of Britannia metal and stone china that could not stir the envy of a tramp.
After all, one can understand it. An old Australian, at any rate, can understand it. In his young days he had been a pioneer squatter. What old man looks back on this experience otherwise than with the feeling that he has seen the Golden Age? Never one that I ever met and I have met many. One can realise how the memory of that time of liberty and sunshine swelled and swelled (in a man with the imagination to love pictures and a fair outlook from his windows) as the years of fettering old-world conventions and grey skies went by. The older he grew the brighter shone the lights of the past—as with you and me, dear reader—and the craving to return to the scenes of youth, which are the realms of romance to the aged, must have been in him what the craving to return to England was to me for so many, many years. He had heaps of money, along with a singular power to discriminate between its real and its apparent values. It enabled him to please himself when there remained no dependent family to consider, and he pleased himself by removing it as a burden upon a freeborn spirit, while retaining enough to purchase liberty for the rest of life. I forgot to mention that before he built his island cottage he bought a caravan and in that humblest of homes toured the Australian bush and coast at leisure until he found the spot to suit him in which to make camp permanently.
Never, said his daughters, would he live in any place that was not beautiful.
Well, in Devonshire, at any rate, he had not done so. My spacious room had a great bay of three windows, in which I could sit and batten on beauty to my heart's content. My writing-table stood in one angle, and I could not get on with my letters of a morning for the enchantment of the view. Deep down below me lay a small exquisite lawn (every English lawn is exquisite), shadowed at one side with fine old trees, and all around with a beflowered wall; the old gardener was always pottering there, shaving the grass a little every day, sweeping up every dead leaf that autumn wind brought down. Below the garden again was the sunk road, so deep and steep that I should not have known there was a road but for hearing a carriage now and then and getting a glimpse of the top of the coachman's hat. The farther wall lining the ravine showed just its stone coping at the top, and beyond that was sea—all sea, with the wall cutting across it—unless I turned my eyes to the left, where a splendid red bluff breasted it. Could even Devonshire have composed a lovelier picture to live with? But I am bound to admit that, three mornings out of four, when I got up to look at it, it was lost in fog. However, on the day of my arrival, when the evening light was peculiar, I saw Portland through a telescope; and Portland, I was told, was full forty miles off, and not visible from where we saw it above once in as many years. Ididsee it, but it was not so clear as the old "Stump" on the sea-line that I had looked at from the beach in Norfolk.
Dear M. was determined I should lose nothing of the joy of Devonshire through default of hers; and, with carriage closed, we spent the first two pouring wet days exploring the lovely neighbourhood. It was lovely in the most hopeless downpour. Then came fine weather, and she took me to Exeter. As originally arranged, the plan was not only to "do" Exeter, but also Ottery St Mary, the last home and grave of my grandmother. But when we reached the cathedral city, a long journey, there was so much to see and do that even to me it seemed bad economy to tax time, strength and pleasurable sensation further. I said, "Oh, this is enough for one day!" and we agreed to make it so.
I suppose it would be sinking to the deeps of drivel to say "How beautiful Exeter is," but such is my opinion, all the same. And I walked about it, as I did about most places that I visited in England, with invisible companions, whose presence enhanced its charms. Years and years ago—when I was at B——, between '75 and '78—a dear friend of mine was an old lady of about eighty, the first English lady on the goldfields, who was said to be, and must have been, the handsomest and most delightful woman of that age known to Australian history. She was Devonshire born, and her old husband—a solicitor, who had returned to the practice of his profession when goldfields went out of fashion with his class—told me she had been known as the "Belle of Exeter" in the long ago when he had married her. She loved to talk to me of the Australian "old days," but also she loved to go further back, and tell me of Devonshire and her native city, always winding up with injunctions to me to go there if I ever returned to my native land again. And here I was at last, finding all her loving pride in the place justified.
Could anything in city planning be happier in effect than the position of the cathedral in its quiet oasis amid the streets? Andwhata cathedral, inside and out! I have a cathedral that I call my own, and never thought I should so overcome the power of patriotic prejudice as to admit it could be surpassed by another. But when I returned to Ely last time, looking for my shrine of all perfection, I got a shock to my housewifely sensibilities from its ill-kept condition that wholly unhinged the long-established point of view. The beautiful brasswork was black and green, the beautiful oak carving outlined in grey dust, and in that state I could not take pleasure in looking at them, even for old time's sake. Perhaps they were waiting for some restorations to be done with before turning to with the pails and brooms and chamois-leathers. But all service-time I used to be catching myself absorbed, not in prayers and sermon, but in anxious inward debate as to whether it was not already too lateeverto make those brass gates bright again.
There was no dirt in Exeter Cathedral to dim its complete and finished loveliness, and all its surroundings were in character and keeping with it, "composed" by time and circumstance to make the picture perfect—especially on a golden autumn day. What should be the cast of mind of a bishop privileged to live in such a house and grounds as lie, peaceful and stately and exquisite, under the shadow of the south tower? I like to remember that one bishop of Exeter had a son who was the father of my Eden Phillpotts, whose intellectual inheritance is the love of beauty, uncloistered, unsophisticated; beauty at its primal source in the breast of Mother Nature. M. and I pottered about these precincts, still thinking we were going on to Ottery St Mary, until the spirit of the place so possessed me that I could not tear myself away.
"Oh, this is enough for one day!" I said to M.
She understood, and we stayed, and let Exeter soak in.
She took me to one place and another, and one was the old "Mol's Coffee House" that flourished as such in the sixteenth century, but had been a private house at the time of the Armada. It is now in the occupation of a firm of picture-dealers, who also have the sole right of selling a certain pottery ware of local manufacture. M. was interested in a collection of water-colours they had on view—she is herself a charming water-colourist—but the setting of those pictures was the picture of them all. We climbed a little, dark, twisty oaken staircase that had echoed to the tread of Drake and Raleigh—the self-same stairs, just as when they clattered up and down; and we stood in the self-same oak-panelled chamber where they met their fellow-defenders of England's shores, to discuss and arrange plans for circumventing the enemy. I looked up from the water-colours of to-day to the age-bleached colours of their shields of arms in the age-blackened oak, and thought of those bygone committee meetings. Nothing changed since then, except the living air, and those who breathed it, and their use of the old place. It could not be put to better use. The firm in possession, who deal in art, are artistic enough to respect the relic in their care. The spirits of Drake and Monk and Raleigh, and the rest, might come o' nights to the old rendezvous, and not feel they had no business to be there. In that room I bought a packet of picture post cards—views of Exeter—that, artistically considered, are the best I found in England. Whenever I took one out to scribble on, I put it back in the envelope again, as too good to be defaced in the post and thrown away, and the package is still intact.
Then we went to a shop and I bought an umbrella. Does that seem an incongruous association of ideas? Nothing of the sort. The pleasure I have had, and still have, out of that umbrella, because of the place I bought it in, you would not believe. My hand fondles it every time I wrap its folds around its stick; I cannot put the loop over the button, or take it off, without all the loveliness of Exeter flooding my soul, the memories of that day.
Between luncheon and tea we attended a missionary festival service in the cathedral. It was a Pan-Anglican side-show, not to speak irreverently, with the usual miscellaneous assortment of bishops in attendance. One met the swarming prelates here and there, in the houses of their hostesses, and in places remote from the London centre which had lately been the seething whirlpool of episcopal affairs; and, without going to one of their great programme meetings, I came to know a few, one from the other, and to take an interest in some. For instance, in an American bishop, one of the most vigorous and alert-minded, as he was one of the youngest, a "live" man, who seemed eloquent in his own person of the country he came from; in a black bishop from Africa, who one day waited with me for a long time in the outer shop of a firm of clerical tailors, while my husband (frightfully particular about the cut and set of coats) was being attended to within; above all, in a nice man from India, with whom I spent an evening, mostly on a sofa-for-two, in a London drawing-room. It has been my good fortune to make friends with several bishops, never as bishops, always as unprofessional men. They are bishops who talk shop to me before they are my friends, not afterwards. And I can say of each one of the few who have honoured me by meeting me on my own ground, that as men they are (were, in the case of one long dead and two at the end of life) delightful. You would not think it, viewing bishops, as one does, altogether from the outside; but so it is. On this occasion at Exeter, it was one of our own Australasian prelates who preached the sermon. I did not know him, as bishop or man, and there was not much in his discourse, and I do not like sermons anyhow; rather, I feel that they have outstayed their usefulness, which was doubtless great when the preachers were more learned than those they preached to; but it was an hour and a half of physical repose and spiritual contentment, and I much enjoyed it.
Straight from the cathedral we went to our tea, the—— But no, I will not say it again. After this refreshment we walked about a little more, and there comes to mind a delicious little shop in an alley leading out of the cathedral yard; it sold Devonshire junket and cream and butter, as well as other dairy dainties, some of which were handed to us in card boxes with ribbon handles that were a pleasure to carry the long way home. Also I recall a moment of astonishment at finding that prawns in England were considered cheap at tenpence a dozen. They were exposed on an Exeter market stall at that figure. "Goodness gracious! Do you mean to say those we had at lunch yesterday were that price?" I questioned M., horror-stricken to think how lightheartedly I had ladled them on to my plate, as mere prawns such as went by the name at home, only bigger. Then she told me that her domestic fishmonger charged a penny apiece. And when you think of the importance of pennies in England! I made a mental calculation that at least seven shillings had been sunk in the little dishful that I had reckoned as worth sixpence perhaps—because the prawns were so exceptionally fine.
It was dark when we reached Exeter station, and we had to wait there for our train. We sat down to dinner, without dressing, at a few minutes to nine.
On another day M. took me to Plymouth, the special place of memories, the "take off" for my youthful leap into the unknown world. "Shall I ever see it again?" I asked myself, as I watched it fade in rain on the tragical morning of my departure; and how small a chance there was that I ever should! It was typically spring-time then. Now it was typically autumn.
The heavy fog in which the September day was born yielded to the sun before we started on our expedition, and we had again the sweet English weather that was peculiar to that year. We drove to Cockington before leaving the carriage at Torquay, and Cockington was another place of beauty that I had kept thought of through all my adult life. A friend of mine had wintered at Torquay in the long ago, and in daily letters at the time had word-painted all the neighbourhood for me, supplementing his descriptions with photographs, which adorn a girlish album to this day; and so I knew Cockington well at second hand. But that was not like seeing it on a lovely morning such as this. We left the carriage to walk up the lane of the Forge and through the Park to the little artist's dream of a church, and we poked about inside it, while the lady of the keys jubilated in subdued tones over the recent birth of an heir to the lands it stood on. "These woods,", said M., as we drove away along the narrow, deep-sunk roads, "are thick with snowdrops in the spring." Heavens! What must Cockington be in spring?
Then we took train at Torquay for Plymouth, and there I was again on the oldvia dolorosa, which was that no more. Ivy Bridge, in the shining morning, welcomed me back, all smiles; and the country, which I really saw for the first time, filled me with delight. So richly green, where it was not so richly red! And why have I never seen such cows as those splendid, big, red Devon cows elsewhere? If this is the type of creature bred from Devon soil, the heroic history of the county is explicable—not to mention the quality of its cream.
Shades of heroes were all about us as we perambulated Plymouth town, but all the time I was thinking of a pair of poor young things putting in a last morning (after a bedless and sleepless night) roaming the same old streets, close on forty years ago. I could recognise little beyond the general features of the place, however. The town must have greatly altered since 1870, and the fact is evidenced by the complexion of its more prominent buildings. The great Guildhall was not, nor the second Eddystone lamp-post in the sea; even the Armada Memorial was not, nor the statue of Sir Francis Drake, though one would have expected to recall them, weather-worn and venerable, as having dominated the Hoe for centuries before that. But we have fine modern halls and monuments of our own, and it is the Historic Past in which I live when I have the opportunity; so I turned from the great Guildhall to the grey church alongside, which enshrined the story of seven centuries within its still stout walls. And when I stood on the Hoe, it was not to look at new statues and lighthouses, but across the unchanging Sound, where once lay a "fine new clipper" (as the papers described her); waiting for a wind to waft her on her maiden voyage round the world. She was a vessel of little more than a thousand tons, and hardly visible to the naked eye from that point of view—then. But I saw her ghost in September last, as plain as plain could be.
Then we had a long afternoon at Kingswear and Dartmouth—a still more satisfying experience, if that could be. They are both so old, so beautifully unmodernised and unimproved, cherishing the Historic Past so faithfully! The Naval College, above and apart, does not interfere with it in the least. We "did" Dartmouth first—cradle of the British seafarer from time immemorial—and it was an æsthetic luxury indeed to potter about that old, old church in its old, old graveyard, between which and the houses snuggled up to it a narrow, deep-sunken, paved passage gave right of way to living neighbours, case-hardened against the toxic microbe in all its forms, one must suppose. The rood-screen still bore what I had never seen on rood-screen yet; the figures of the two thieves as well as that of the Saviour—the Calvary complete. The pulpit was the gift of King Charles the First, and apparently in its original state, less the colour and sharp outlines that time had worn away. It is of carved stone, gilded and coloured, shaped like a wineglass, and one wondered that even a small man should dare to trust his weight in it. I could not realise a modern preacher there, or a modern congregation. I should expect to see Richard the Lion Heart and his knights stride in, to be blessed before starting out of harbour for the Crusades; at the least—or, rather, the latest—the Pilgrim Fathers kneeling together, seeking strength to set forth on their equally gallant enterprise.
And those quaint, steep, curly streets, and those old timbered houses, with their projecting upper storeys, all carved and crinkled—they are the same the Pilgrim Fathers said good-bye to, and in which their kin may have lived for centuries before that. The harbour itself has not been altered since King Richard sailed out of it in 1190—so they say, and nothing appears to the contrary. Imagine the seafaring history it has made, the sailor life it has seen! Those very stones that you see and touch and walk about on to-day, those very waters where theBritanniaandHindostannow lie! M. and I had luncheon in a long room, by a window overlooking the quay, and a dozen imaginary pageants of the past entertained my fancy as I ate, looking out upon the now quiet place. There was another wide window at the other end of the long room, and that one gave immediately upon the churchyard. Below it ran the sunk passage which did duty for a street—two people could just about pass each other and nearly on a level with its sill the ancient gravestones presented themselves to view, almost within touch, against the background of that church which seemed to have been there for ever. I think I remember that gravestones of great antiquity lined the passage walls and made a pediment to the window of the restaurant. Could anything be more appropriate to the character of the town?
When we had explored Dartmouth, as far as time allowed, the ferry-boat took us back to Kingswear, where we proposed to have tea with a lady living up on the hill. Here the modern came in, but not until we wanted it—with the soft sofa and the recreative cup. Kingswear keeps its mate over the way in countenance. The new homes tuck themselves unobtrusively into sylvan nooks that soften or hide them—or so it seemed; I must confess that it was tea-time, and I did not take much notice. Besides, the way to the house of M.'s friend was so steep and so striking that I was bound to confine my attention to it. Tier above tier, up shadowed shrubbery pathways and mossed stone stairways, the various footholds of the garden were laboriously gained. The approach reminded me of some I had heard or read or seen pictures of, leading to villas on Italian heights. It was very pretty, and the house when we reached it was more than that. We had but half-an-hour there before we had to seek our train, but it was a pleasant bit of the day. I envied our hostess her house as much as I did anyone in England. From one side of it she looked down upon the harbour—theBritanniaand the Naval College and the green shores; from the other she looked away to the river mouth—Kingswear Castle and the open sea. While immediately around her, and adown her steep garden, she had all the privacy of Sandringham before the avenue was blown down.
Another "day out" enriched my collection of impressions of Devonshire with a set of charming memories. It was the day we went to the wedding.
"Now," said M., when she had explained to me that I was a potential guest, "I am going to show you, one of the finest views in England." Thereupon she described the situation of the country house which was to be the scene of festivity. It stood very high, in beautiful gardens, which dropped down and down in a succession of terraces, ending in a deep coombe and the sea. It was quite a famous beauty spot, apparently, and when I had seen it I should have seen Devonshire at its best. I did not need to be told what that meant.
At daybreak the fog was very thick and so remained till noon. We dressed before luncheon, having a long drive before us, and the fate of feathers and furbelows still hung doubtful. The carriage came round closed, and we slipped into wraps and set forth—my two sister-hostesses and myself—and there was no sign of the weather clearing. We were all fresh-air persons who could not stand being cooped up, and we opened the carriage windows, and the fog visibly flowed in. To me it was an agreeable circumstance—more so, for once, than the brilliant sunshine to which I was almost too well accustomed. It did not rain, nor feel like it; in fact there was not a drop all day, and we could see our way before us, and on both sides as far as the hedges of the deep-sunk, narrow lane-like roads. Those rich autumnal hedges tapestried the impalpable wall behind them with lovely forms that were a joy to study—wreathing ivy, intertwined with pink valerian, cascades of traveller's joy like the foam of our wild clematis at home. What the views beyond must have been I could guess, for we were driving for an hour or more and it seemed to be stiff climbing all the way.
We arrived at the decorated village—a village for a picture-book, if ever there was one. The road where the carriages of the assembling wedding guests were left had the effect of a ravine in its relation to the church above it. We looked up and before us rose an irregular footpath, like a worn-away and dislocated staircase, curving round and about the beflagged and beflowered churchyard hill; and its whole length, which straightened out would have been considerable, was covered with red baize which had evidently taken a good deal of fitting to make it lie so that it would not trip up the bridal company. At the top we could just see the outline of the church and the dim colour and flutter of the most distant flags. Sunshine could not have created a more charming effect.
The church is the crowning glory of that typical Devonshire village. It dates from the fourteenth century and its registers go back to the year 1538, but old age is not all its claim to distinction. It has a precious cradle roof inside and a not less precious rood-screen (time of Richard the Second), and a lovely harmony of every stick and stone with every other, that was a luxury to contemplate what time I sat among the wedding guests awaiting the coming of the bride. To-day the slender shafts of the screen had bridal flowers tied to them and nestling beneath—pink predominating (Japanese lilies, I think), a colour which "went" with the blackened oak as cold white blossoms would not have done. I had but such glimpses of the chancel as the interstices of the screen afforded; understanding that the chancel was a "restoration" I was content with that. I heard afterwards that it had a "squint" and rood-stairs, fourteenth-century brasses and other interesting things, such as I made a reverent study of in my young days.
The bride arrived. She was a young Norwegian lady, and a bright-faced, wholesome, happy-looking creature—as attractive a bride as one could wish to wait on. The English bridegroom looked a good fellow, and I trust he has made her a good husband.
They stood outside the screen and close to us for the first part of the marriage service, which the officiating clergyman declaimed with remarkable enthusiasm; then they passed into the sanctuary for the completion of the rite. As a mere wedding it was like other weddings. The coloured flowers in the decorations (I believe they were all white in the chancel) was the only unusual note.
But when the bride and bridegroom came out of church man and wife together, there were a couple of minutes when the bridal spectacle surpassed anything of the sort that I ever saw. I want to paint the scene, but I know I cannot do it—cannot convey to another who was not there the impression it made on me. The subject may be "genre," but of all the pictures in my gallery I can find none more poetically composed. Let me try to sketch it somehow.
You must first imagine rural Devonshire and one of its sweetest villages; the deep road, the hedges and the trees and the churchyard slopes, the flowers, the flags, the scarlet carpet, the still rainless mist. The red stairway twisting and dropping through the green from porch to gate is now lined with the village children, all in bewreathed new hats (provided by the bride's family), and they hold in their hands baskets of flower petals, with which they bestrew the way of the bridal procession. Down they come—we had preceded them to the road, or I should have lost one of the sights of my life—down they come, winding with the winding path, the bride with her veil up, smiling and bowing, her white train and her young maids behind her; every figure, every feature of the scene, refined and idealised by the (to me) extraordinary atmosphere. Bright sunlight would have made a picture which I should have thought perfect had I not seen it through this pure poetic haze. As a study of fog effects—well, it is no use trying to elucidate the thing further. But I carried it away with the delight of a collector in a work of art that is unmatchable, and now it is safe in my gallery of Blessed Memories, and I would not take any money for it.
When we drove to the house which commanded "one of the finest views in England"—home of the bride's sister—a rather less density of fog would have answered the purpose, instead of which we had rather more. The house, with its platform and all the lawns and flower-beds and marquees thereon, was quite plain to view; the first terrace was visible; some trees between that and the second tier of garden loomed a shade more substantial than their shadows would have been; below and beyond them—nothing. Nothing, nothing but cotton-wool, a white blanket, a wall impenetrable. Not a glimpse, not a hint of the coombe and sea that M. had promised me. So that to this day I do not really know how lovely Devonshire can be, although I can imagine that I know.
The visible house had the more attention paid to it, and within it there was much to charm the eye of a wedding guest, apart from the show of wedding presents. Our Norwegian hostess had brought to her English home treasure of furniture and curios that I had to apologise for staring at as if they were things in a museum; masses of black wood carved all over, and strange pottery and metal ware, drinking-cups and the like; they brought the Norse country, ere while distant and practically unknown, to sight and touch, and set my unsated traveller's soul a-dreaming of snows and sagas, mountains and fjords.
But the Norwegian wedding-cake was the pride of its nation, amongst them all.
In the large marquee where the dinner-destroying marriage feast was spread, there were two of these nuptial trophies, an English cake crowning one long table, a Norwegian the other. The first was the white, three-tiered, much decorated affair that we are familiar with, and I did not go near it. The bride cut it ceremonially, and it was distributed in the usual way. Then, escorted by her bridegroom, she came across the carpeted tent through the smart crowd to where I stood at the other table. "I must 'break' this cake," she remarked, with her pretty foreign accent, and proceeded to do it with her two hands in what one perceived to be the correct Norwegian bridal fashion. In case the reader is as ignorant of the constitution of Norwegian bridescakes as I was until that afternoon, I will try to describe it.
It may have stood two feet high, but obviously the size would depend on circumstances, the same as with our own. In shape it resembled the tall bottles, with their horizontal fluting, in which the ready-made salad-dressing of commerce is, or used to be, purveyed, being a shell formed of graduated rings of cake (much like the wooden rings for stretching drawn-thread-work), laid one upon another from bottom to top. They were as perfectly round and evenly graduated as if the paste had been wound round a cone like cotton on a reel, but that is not how it was done, because each ring was complete in itself and came off whole when the cake was "broken," although previously it had adhered to the rings next to it strongly enough to make the finished erection safe to move and carry. This means, of course, that the stuff is not brittle, but neither is it tough; it bites like a particularly nice macaroon. When the bride had pulled off the two or three top rings, which were broken into pieces of convenient size before being handed round, the hollow within revealed itself filled up with sweetmeats; and here again the purse or fancy would determine the kind and quality of sweetmeats used. A cake of any size, filled with the best "lollies," as we Australians call them, must be at least as costly as the corresponding English cake, although it may not look so. As it goes down, ring by ring, the miscellaneous internal goodies are distributed to keep the surface even, which certainly makes it the more interesting of the two to partake of; and it can assuredly boast the more cunning cookery. I love a new experience, of whatever sort or kind, and I consider the Norwegian wedding-cake an item of value to my store.
Altogether, I had a good time that afternoon—as usual. Family guests allowed me not a moment to remember that I was a stranger, and I was thrown for a while with a lady—introduced to me with special intention as one who knew Australia—with whom I felt at once like an old friend, although she had known Australia only as a tourist, not as an old-timer like myself. We talked Australia and nothing else, but not quite as another lady, who knew Australia as I knew it, had discussed the subject with me at a Norfolk garden-party. We did not largely comment upon the funniness of these stay-at-home English people, the unconsciousness of the poor dears of how way back behind the times they were, and their extraordinarily mistaken notions about us and what we were accustomed to.
The fog had settled down for the remainder of the day, never having lifted since day broke. It took the bride and bridegroom and their carriage, swallowing them up before our eyes as we clustered about the porch to bid them godspeed. Soon afterwards we drove away ourselves. The hedgerow ivy and the foamy traveller's joy and the pink valerian were still to be seen on the roadside banks, so close to us as we pounded down the hills. The carriage windows were down, and the white veil floated about us. I watched the gradual wilting of the already discouraged feathers on the hat in front of me, until at last they hung down lank and shiny, little beads of moisture fringing their tips. I had tucked my own feather boa within my wraps, to save it, but when, reaching home, I drew it off in the hall, it was like drawing a wet sponge along my neck and cheek.
"Take them all to the drying-closet," said M. to her maid. And there our wedding garments spent the night, coming forth dry and fuzzy in the morning.
In Australia the drying-closet is not amongst our domestic appliances, although its principles are applied to laundries. We do not need it. But it is the "long-felt want" of every British home. Unfortunately it is the privilege of the well-to-do. Since I am not likely to be able to afford one, I intend not to wear feather boas when I go to live in England.
Twenty years ago—or was it nearer twenty-five?—a dear girl came to live with me as governess-out-of-school to my young children and general aide-de-camp to myself. It was in the time, which spread over so many years, when I was not strong enough for all the domestic duties that properly belonged to me. I got her through an advertisement—the only time I was ever beholden to such a source for such an acquisition. "A young English lady" was the attractive description of her—the very thing, to my mind, for my bush-bred infants.
I called on her at the Governesses' Home in Melbourne, and engaged her on the spot. She had come to Australia for her health, but if she told me so I did not grasp the fact; she looked as well and as good as I felt she would be comfortable to get on with. Also she had come from a good English house and a well-to-do and well-placed family, and was choosing to earn her living rather than be an expense to her father, from no compulsion but that of her own independent spirit; and this too was a fact I did not grasp. She never allowed me to perceive it. Had she been penniless, with only her casual employer to depend on, she could not have served me more devotedly. She worked far harder than I should have allowed her to do had I divined the secret weaknesses in her sturdy-looking little frame, always with bright face and cheerful voice and unslackening energy and interest. She seemed to have no thought for herself at all. And yet she professed, and still vehemently professes, that the time she spent with us was the time of her life.
However in the end she fell ill—very ill; then the secret weaknesses revealed themselves, and the doctor shook his head over them. We saw that governessing days were over, and her relatives were communicated with. Her father sent out money for her needs and for a first-class passage, and when she seemed able to travel we sent her back to him in the care of a trained nurse. The doctor thought she might live to reach her home, but he was not sanguine.
Well, she did, and is there still, bless her heart. At any rate I trust so, she was a few weeks ago. Although the secret weaknesses seem permanent and she risks her life every winter that she spends in England—unfortunately, the Riviera, substitute for the more beneficial and beloved Australia, is not always practicable—I anticipate that she will be a hale old woman for many years after I am gone.
Through all the long interval between her parting with us at B—— and my meeting with her again, she kept up a loving correspondence, and every letter was a sigh for me to come home or a sigh to be back herself in the sunny land where she had been "so well and happy." I had not the leisure to answer half her letters, but when I was suddenly confronted with the opportunity of my life, and sat down to inform my English friends of the treat in store for them, it was with special satisfaction that I wrote to the one who, I knew, would hail the news with more genuine joy than anybody.
It was not until September that I found time to pay my first visit to her. She lived in Kent, not a hundred miles from Maidstone, to which town she journeyed to meet me—all in the wind and rain which were so bad for the secret weaknesses. Partridges being the only living creatures that my husband was then interested in—they had been available to the gun three days—I went alone. Later on, just before we sailed for home, I went down to her for a last week-end, and he followed to fetch me and to shake hands with her before we left.
On that 4th September when I met her first after the long absence a leading London newspaper made what now seems to me an astounding statement. It declared that "we" had had "the most depressing August ever known in England." All I can say is (and I trust I am not giving a pair of rose-coloured spectacles away) that I have no recollection of the circumstance. It was not a depressing August to me—I can swear to that—and newspapers are notoriously sensational. "Ever known in England" is absurd on the face of it, as the utterance of a probably young man, and certainly of a man whose memory would not reach even as far as the Coronation of Queen Victoria. But I do remember, and frankly admit, that it was a wet day when I went to Kent for the first time. Not only wet, but cold.
But that only made the home-coming to C.'s hearth and heart the warmer.
Warm I knew it would be, but even the loving correspondence, undiscouraged by its frequent onesidedness, had not prepared me for the discovery I made of my peculiar and permanent place in her regard. Of the many happy experiences of life, few can match that of finding you have been one of the deities of a faithful heart for over twenty years of absence without knowing it. But that was only one of the surprises of the day. Having stupidly missed the significance of first-class passages and frequent Riviera winters, I had supposed myself bound for the sort of home that you assume your nursery governess comes from, whereas I arrived at a good country house, with fifty acres of estate to it, the property of her family for generations, and now belonging to her and three sisters jointly; an unpretentious establishment certainly, but handsomely appointed and correctly administered—not like the bush parsonage into which she had fitted herself so unassumingly. When packing in the morning I had rejoiced in the innocence of my heart that, for once, I need not bother myself with a lot of luggage; and I took for my week-end a bag which at a pinch I could have carried in my own hand. When evening came, and a bare-armed and bare-shouldered guest to meet me, and I had nothing but a short cloth skirt and a high-necked blouse to make a toilet of, I thought of something that an experienced globetrotter, fresh from the West African wilds, had once told me. "One thing I have found," said he: "wherever you go, if you haven't been there before," and he was speaking of the least likely places, "it is never safe to go without your evening clothes." I shall not forget that in future. The irony of fate was in it when C. offered me a black satin dinner-gown of her own. Sad—indeed, wild—as I was to be the one to seem to show disrespect to her house, it was something of a comfort to me to find that I had grown so fat in England (from seven stone five on landing to eight stone two the day before this day) that I could not make it meet by inches. I would sooner go to dinner in my petticoat than wear a stitch of anybody else's—even hers, like a daughter as she was; but I could not damp her loving solicitude by saying so.
She heaped luxuries upon me, even luxuries that she could not afford (because I know just how far a quarter of the income of even a nice estate as this was, in the chronic bad times of British agriculture, would go, and that she supplemented it by selling plants from her garden, and sometimes in other ways). When, after our great gossip over our tea by the drawing-room fire, I went upstairs to make bricks without straw, as it were, in my preparation for dinner, I found my pretty bedroom, in which the fine old mahogany shone like glass, exhaling her thoughtfulness all over it. In Australia, where your friends' buggies are also their luggage carts, and where railway porters are so precarious, you get into the habit of reducing your travelling kit to the minimum, and a bulky dressing-gown is one of the things that can be done without for a day or two, if you have an overcoat with you. I had left mine behind, and lo! there hung from a chair by my warm fireside a gorgeous robe of silk, embroidered outside, padded within, and beside it a pair of quilted satin shoes to match—to go to my bath with, although assuredly not meant for such humble use. That was the sort of thing. When a carriage was had all the way from Maidstone, and kept with no regard for the expense of wasted hours, I used the privilege of an old friend and mother to remonstrate with her.
"Oh,don't!" her face and voice checked me from doing it again. "If you onlyknewwhat this is to me!" Well, I did know, and it was knowledge to make one bless one's luck. How little we are aware of it when we are setting bread upon the waters! I had been absolutely unconscious of responsibility for this which came back to me after so many years.
It was only from Friday afternoon to Tuesday morning that I could stay with her on this occasion. But the best was made of that short time as far as she could manage it. I saw as much as possible of the famed Garden of England. Two months later, when I paid her the second visit, I saw a great deal more. Both times my luck in English weather was "in." My very first morning in Kent dawned bright and beautiful—after that cold and rainy eve—and the day was all delightful.
We had breakfast in a sunny little sitting-room upstairs, a room with lots of window light, and furniture covered with that calendered chintz, patterned with flowers on a white ground, which is as cheerful to the spirits as to the eye; C. and her sister who lived with her (the other two being married and in their own homes), and my contented self, their guest. Outside were lawn and old trees and plentiful autumn blossom; the sun poured in; a little fire added a final touch of comfort—for I must not be so low as to say it was bloaters and bacon (C. had remembered my talk of English bloaters in the long ago as she had remembered everything).
The admirable meal concluded I was taken a little walk about the place. The estate had once been devoted to hops, and the back premises of the solid old stone house were encircled by a great wall, broken with the hooded peaks of kilns and lined with immense warehouses, where the crops of the fields used to be treated and stored. Now the kilns were cold and out of gear; the granaries were stores for fruit and ladders and market baskets; and the bulk of the fifty acres of land bore orchards in heavy bearing. I had struck a Kentish fruit farm at apple harvest, which was a sight to see. Waggons were all day loading and driving off with their piles of cases for Covent Garden, yet the army of pickers seemed to make little impression upon the apparently countless millions of apples still rosily shining in the sun. Other fruits were grown, although not to the same extent, and there were lanes and thickets of cob-nut, which I was told is a very profitable commodity, if you have it, but the bushes had failed to bear that season. In view of the growing popularity of vegetarianism, to the charms of which I yielded myself in England, when I found how satisfactorily you could be fed by those who knew how to work the system properly, I advised the sister fruit-farmers to make more of a point of nuts; this was when they mourned sadly over the market price of apples in a good year. I told them how I had spent a week with vegetarians, expecting to be starved, and had been nourished on such rich non-flesh meats that I hardly cared to look at a boiled chicken when I went on to the next house. "Nuts," said I, "that can give you all the feeling of beef and mutton without the gross actuality, have a great future before them. So make haste and start growing them before the other fruit-farmers think of it."
The conformation of this Kentish orchard gave charming views of its several parts, of the pretty, down-dropping village and the distant landscape. There was a slope of applefield, flushed with the colour of its massed fruit in the sun, which sank to a lake with swans on it, on the far side of which an old mill dipped its wheel in the water; trees rose steeply behind the mill, and sweet old houses out of the trees. It was the top of hilly ridges of which the bottom was the famous Weald—and a subject for a painter if ever there was one. When I had walked about enough I visited the warehouses and hop kilns that walled the yard; saw F. wading in her sea of graded apples, directing the workmen whose only overseer she was; stood with C. in an empty oast house, while she reconstructed the busy scenes that were no more, the living functions of the idle furnace and flue, shoot and press, and told tales of a childhood beginning to loom away towards the fairyland where now my own abides. "We used to bring potatoes here, and the hop-dryer would bake them for us in the hot ashes"—alas! But why should I say alas? I am convinced—although I was not always convinced—that it is not a matter for repining that we "live but once."
The Maidstone carriage awaited the completion of an early lunch, and for nearly four hours of the lovely afternoon C. showed me the lovely country. I wish there were more adjectives equivalent to "lovely" and "beautiful," that I might not have to use those two so often; but I must express my feelings, and it is not my fault that the language of tongue and pen is so limited. Everything was lovely, and there is no other word for it but beautiful. I had not been to Devonshire then, but I still think the village of Linton, as I saw it in that weather, beyond compare. Not knowing what a Torquay horse could do, I wondered that ours did not take the hill in what seemed the easier way of sliding down it on his haunches; his labour on my account (but when he struggled upward again, by digging his toes into the cobbles provided for the purpose, I walked) was the only drawback to my almost intoxicating enjoyment of England on that day. I had never before seen the country save from the windows of trains, except in the eastern counties. The charms of English hills and dales were fresh. Not that that made any difference in their effect on me. I cannot believe for a moment that familiarity with such beauty could ever lessen the joy of it.
On the brow of Linton Hill I got out to look at the church. I am not, strictly speaking, a churchy person—this being, perhaps, one of the cases where familiarity runs its normal course—but these English reliquaries, with their histories and their architecture, had a fascination that drew me every time I saw a door open. I ran in alone, as I liked to do, while C. reposed in the carriage, conserving her strength, and the poor horse pulled himself together for the descent; and I looked through the chancel screening to that chapel of the Cornwallis tombs, to be almost startled by the white image of death and peace lying there, in cold and cloistered privacy, while without the sun shone so gloriously, and the happy living people basked and played and busied themselves in it, still possessing their lovely world. It was a sharply impressive thing, coming upon such a conjunction unawares.
By the way, I may as well say here that I took no notes of my English experiences at the time of happening, having no idea of writing a book about them, and I may sometimes mix things up. But I think I am certain that it was Linton Church and the Cornwallis monument and this first drive in Kent that went together.
Down that inexpressible village street we drove, past those dreams of old houses—labourers' cottages, as likely as not—which made my mouth water in envy of the labourers, who doubtless scorned them as out of fashion; and then there opened to us the Weald of Kent.