"Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?"
RUPERT BROOKE.
I do not think you have ever heard of the little village of Riff in
Lowshire, Reader, unless you were born and bred in it as I was. If you
were, you believe of course that it is the centre of the world. But if
you were not, it is possible you may have overlooked it in your scheme
of life, or hurried past it in the train reading a novel, not even
looking out as I have done a hundred times to catch a glimpse of it
lying among its water meadows behind the willows.
But unless you know exactly where to look you can only catch a momentary
glimpse, because the Rieben with its fringe of willows makes a
half-circle round Riff and guards it from inquisitive eyes.
Parallel with the Rieben, but half a mile away from it on higher ground,
runs the great white high road from London to Yarmouth. And between the
road and the river lies the village of Riff. But you cannot see it or
even the top of its church tower from the road, because the park of
Hulver Manor comes in between, stretching in long leafy glades of oak
and elm and open sward, and hiding the house in its midst, the old Tudor
house which has stood closed and shuttered so long, ever since Mr.
Manvers died.
When at last the park comes to an end, a deep lane breaks off from the
main road, and pretending that it is going nowhere in particular and
that time would be lost in following it, edges along like a homing cat
beside the park wall in the direction of Riff, skirting a gate and a
cluster of buildings, _laiterie_, barn and dovecot, which are all you
can see of Red Riff Farm from the lane. I point it out to you as we
pass, for we shall come back there later on. Riff is much nearer than
you think, for the ground is always falling a little towards the Rieben,
which is close at hand though invisible also.
And between the park and the river lies the hidden village of Riff.
You come upon it quite suddenly at the turn of the lane, with its
shallow ford, and its pink-plastered cottages sprinkled among its high
trees, and its thatched Vicarage, and "The Hermitage" with the
honeysuckle over the porch, and the almshouses near the great Italian
gates of Hulver Manor, and somewhat apart in its walled garden among its
twisted pines the Dower House where Lady Louisa Manvers was living,
poor soul, at the time this story was written.
I have only to close my eyes and I can see it all--can imagine myself
sitting with the Miss Blinketts in their little parlour at The
Hermitage, with a daguerreotype of the defunct Pere Blinkett over the
mantelpiece, and Miss Amy's soft voice saying, "They do say Lady
Louisa's cook is leaving to be married. But they will say anything at
Riff. I never believe more than half I hear."
The Hermitage stood on a little slice of ground which fell away from the
lane. So close was The Hermitage to the lane, and the parlour windows
were so low, and the lane beyond the palings so high, that the inmates
could only guess at the identity of the passers-by by their legs. And
rare guests and rarer callers, arriving in the wagonnette from the
Manvers Arms, could actually look into the bedroom windows, while the
Miss Blinketts' eyes, peering over the parlour muslins, were fixed upon
their lower limbs.
And if I keep my eyes tightly shut and the eyes of memory open, I can
see as I sit stroking Miss Blinkett's cat the legs of the new Vicar pass
up the lane outlined against a lilac skirt. And Miss Amy, who is not a
close observer of life, opines that the skirt belongs to Miss Janey
Manvers, but Miss Blinkett senior instantly identifies it as Annette's
new spotted muslin, which she had seen Mrs. Nicholls "getting up" last
week.
But that was twenty years ago. I can only tell you what Riff was like
then, for it is twenty years since I was there, and I am not going there
any more, for I don't want to see any of the changes which time must
have wrought there, and if I walked down the village street now I should
feel like a ghost, for only a few of the old people would remember me.
And the bright-eyed, tow-headed little lads whom I taught in Sunday
school are scattered to the four winds of heaven. The Boer War took some
of them, and London has engulfed more, only a few remaining at Riff as
sad-looking middle-aged men, farm hands, and hedgers and ditchers, and
cowmen.
And I hear that now the motors go banging along the Yarmouth high road
day and night, and that Riff actually has a telegraph office of its own
and that the wires go in front of The Hermitage, only the Miss Blinketts
are not there to see it. A literary lady lives there now, and I hear she
has changed the name to "Quill Cottage," and has made a garden in the
orchard where old Nan's cottage was by the twisted pear tree: old Nan
the witch, who grew mistletoe in all the trees in her domain, and cured
St. Vitus' dance with it. No, I will not go to Riff any more, for I do
not want to see any of these things, and least of all the literary lady
who is writing her novels in the quiet rooms where my two old friends
knitted and read Thomas a Kempis.
Twenty years ago, in the days when my father was doctor at Riff and when
Annette came to live there, we could not help noticing--indeed, Mrs.
Nicholls often mentioned it--what a go-ahead place Riff was, far more up
to date than Sweet Apple Tree, and even than Meverly Mill. We measured
everything in those days by Sweet Apple Tree, and the measurement was
always in our favour. We did not talk much about Riebenbridge, where the
"'Sizes" were held, and the new "'Sylum" had just been built. We were
somewhat awed by Riebenbridge, but poor lag-behind Sweet Apple Tree,
lost amid its reeds together with the Rieben, was the subject of sincere
pity to the Riff folk. The Sweet Applers, according to Mrs. Nicholls,
were "that clunch they might have been brought up in a wood." At Riff
everything was cast in a superior and more modern mould. Riff had a
postman on a bicycle with an enormous front wheel, and if he brought a
letter in the morning you could if necessary post an answer to it the
same day in the red slit in the churchyard wall. Now at Sweet Apple Tree
the old man in a donkey-cart blowing on a little horn who brought the
Sweet Apple letters, took away directly the donkey was rested those
which the inhabitants had just composed. And even he did not call if
"the water was out."
Before I was born, when the Miss Blinketts were young and crinolined
and their father was Vicar of Riff, Sweet Apple Tree, as they have often
told me, had no choir, and the old Rector held a service once or twice a
year in his Bath chair. After he took to his bed there was no service at
all for twenty years. No wonder the Sweet Apple folk were "clunch"! How
different from Riff, with its trombone and fiddle inviting the attention
of its Creator every Sunday, and Mr. Blinkett, whose watchword was "No
popery," preaching in his black gown two sermons a week to the favoured
people of Riff.
It was Mr. Jones, Mr. Blinkett's successor, that lamentable person,
meaning well, but according to the Miss Blinketts quite unable to
perceive when a parish was worked on the right lines, it was young Mr.
Jones from Oxford, who did not marry either of the Miss Blinketts, but
who did put a stop to the trombone and fiddle, and actually brought the
choir out of the gallery, and took away the hour-glass from the south
window below the pulpit, and preached in his surplice, and made himself
very unpopular by forbidding the congregation to rise to its feet when
the Manvers family came into church, almost as unpopular as by stopping
the fiddle. You can see the old fiddle still in the cottage of Hesketh
the carrier, next the village stocks. His father had played on it, and
turned "chapel" when his services were no longer required. And it was
young Mr. Jones who actually had the bad taste openly to deplore the
saintly Blinkett's action in demolishing all the upper part of the
ancient carved and gilded screen because at eighty he could no longer
make his voice heard through it.
It was, of course, Mr. Jones who started the mixed choir sitting in the
chancel behind the remains of the screen.
In the last days of the mixed choir, when first Mr. Black came to Riff
(after Mr. Jones was made a bishop), Annette sang in it, with a voice
that seemed to me, and not to me only, like the voice of an angel.
With the exception of Annette and the under-housemaid from the Dower
House, it was mainly composed of admirable domestic characters of portly
age--the elite of Riff--supplemented by a small gleaning of deeply
virtuous, non-fruit-stealing little boys. We are told nowadays that
heredity is nothing. But when I remember how those starched and
white-collared juvenile singers were nearly all the offspring of the
tenors and basses, and of Mrs. Nicholls and Mrs. Cocks who were trebles,
I feel the last word still remains to be said about heredity.
Annette did not sing in it long--not more than a year, I think. It was
soon after she left it that Mr. Black--so I am told--started a surpliced
choir. And here am I talking about her leaving the choir when I have not
yet told you of her arrival in Lowshire, or anything about Red Riff
Farm where her two aunts lived, and where Aunt Maria wrote her famous
novel, _The Silver Cross_, of which you have of course often heard, and
which if you are of a serious turn of mind you have doubtless read and
laid to heart.