IN BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND
The second evening ashore saw us speeding out of London towards
Cambridge and Ely, and beyond to the not-to-be-mentioned spot in the
fens which represented the bosom of the family--G.'s family, that is to
say, for England held no more trace of mine.
I saw prettier English landscapes afterwards, from the windows of
railway carriages, but this first picture of the green country was
overwhelmingly beautiful to my eyes. I had forgotten what the country
grass was like, and the country trees. Our "English trees" of boulevard
and garden had not struck me as inferior to their ancestors in any way,
but here, in these glorious free-flung masses, how different they were.
Throughout my stay and various ramblings in the land, the trees and the
grass were my constant joy. The lawns of English gardens--not bits and
scraps that must not be trodden on, but acres of velvet-soft emerald
carpet always under one's feet, making the loveliest setting for flowers
and tea-parties. It happened in this lucky year that the summer was the
finest the land had known for years, and I think I must have had my tea
on grass more times in that short English season than in all the years
of my sojourn in the brighter country of the South; if I except Bush
picnics--and I need not except them, because the aim of Bush campers is
to keep as clear of grass as possible. I am not ashamed to say that I
could have wept for joy of those English trees and meadows when I first
saw them after the long, long exile. Nothing but the publicity of my
position prevented it. I could only look and look at them till throat
and eyes ached. I could not talk.
The unspeakable memories that thronged the platform at Cambridge! The
last moment of one of the most tragical happenings of my life passed me,
probably, on the very spot where our train halted. At a later day the
ghosts of all the hours belonging to that last moment forgathered with
me in the old quadrangles, and I could not believe they had been there
for forty years. The first glimpse of the towers of Ely was still more
thrilling. That ever I should have lived to see them again! Here, when
soon afterwards we prowled about the place--the first I saw of an
English provincial town after my return--I found my eye hopelessly out
of focus. I ought to have known it better than any spot in the country.
I had lived there and married there, and it had been my last English
home; yet, but for the cathedral, I should not have recognised it.
"_This_ Ely!" I exclaimed. "These little, little, quaint, cramped
streets and houses!" I seemed to have seen them in a picture; they were
incredible as the whole substance of our city of old. Gradually I got
the perspective, but it took two or three visits to do it. The familiar
past enmeshed me with its thousand tentacles. "You don't know me,
ma'am?" a weather-beaten matron emotionally accosted me on the steps of
the post-office--her married daughter drove the cart she hastily
descended from on seeing me. "You don't remember me? I was housemaid at
W---- when you were there on your honeymoon." One of the young maids,
with white satin ribbon in their caps, who stood with their smiling
welcomes on the doorstep of the rectory at W---- when our bridal
brougham drove up in 1870! The tears jumped to my own eyes as I wrung
her toil-worn hands. I nearly kissed her in the open street--and market
day too! Old servants, old friends, stretched arms to draw me into the
groove they had never left--never been thrown out of, as I was--until
the gulf of years sank out of sight, and we fraternised again as if
partings had never been. Yet I could not get the "atmosphere," so to
speak. I am such a fresh-air person! The first time I attended service
at the cathedral where I was such a devout worshipper in my youth,
although it was a Pan-Anglican function, with a stirring American
preacher to it, and my personal interest in the occasion, apart from
that, was intense, I was so overcome with drowsiness that I had to
struggle the whole time not to disgrace myself before the bishops, under
whose eyes I sat. I could easily attribute it to the fatiguing
excitements of the first days in England, but that was no reason why at
each subsequent service at the same place the same phenomenon should
occur. As surely as I went to church at the cathedral, I got deadly
sleepy straight away, and had to fight to keep eyes snapping and head
from rolling off. Suddenly I suspected what the trouble was. I looked up
at the roofs, into the lantern, around the windows--there was not a
crack for ventilation above the doorways, never had been in the hundreds
of years that pious breathings had daily been going up. When I mentioned
the matter to my old friends, who had been going to the cathedral all
the time I had been away, they were rather inclined to be annoyed.
_They_ found nothing wrong with the air of the cathedral. Of course not.
Nor did I in the old days. It was typical of the sea-change my whole
being had undergone.
Well, after that sight of Ely--and a glorious pile it is, from just that
point of view that the London train gives you as it draws near to the
station--after Ely, fen of the fens, that was drowned morass not so very
long ago, now richly cropped, the farms and hamlets standing clear like
things set on a table; then the station in the fields, the little
governess-cart at the gate, the unknown niece at the pony's head; the
short cut across country, and the old farmhouse, a long grey streak on a
wide green sea, with one bright and beautiful splash of colour lighting
up the sober landscape--the flaming orange of an Austrian briar bush in
full bloom on the front lawn. Finally, the bosom of the family, over
which the veil of reticence must fall.
On the following evening--no, the evening after that--I had the
long-dreamed-of bliss of a ramble through English lanes. Although it was
fen country, there were lanes about the farm--green old trees
interlacing overhead, green grass thick as a silk rug underfoot, all the
precious things that used to be in tangled hedge and ditch. I gathered
them, and sniffed them, and cherished them; no words can describe the
ecstasy of the meeting with them again--pink herb-robert in its brown
calyx, the darling little blue speedwell--"birdseye," as we called it;
white cow-parsnip, wild roses (following the may, which had just
passed), buttercups and oxeye daisies and yellow birdsfoot trefoil, and
all the rest of them; their scents, even more than their sweet forms,
overpowering in suggestion of the days that were no more. The
nightingale, to my disappointment, was gone, but the lark and the cuckoo
were rarely silent. A dear brown-velvet "bumble"-bee showed me his
golden stripe again. Nesting partridges whirred up from the hedgerows in
their sudden way and went flickering over the fields--dewy English
fields, exhaling the breath of clover and beanflower, the incomparable
perfume of English earth....
But Norfolk is my county. And not thirty-eight years, but nearly
half-a-century, had passed since I was within its borders, when I
crossed them again about a month after our return. A still longer
interval had elapsed between my departure from the first home that I
remember and my seeing it again--and recognising it in the selfsame
moment.
A Cambridgeshire sister-in-law had been led by various accidental
happenings to rent a house right in the middle of my territory, unaware
that I was not as great a stranger to Norfolk as herself. The haunts of
my childhood lay around her in all directions and close up to her doors,
and never, never had I expected to revisit _them_, except in dreams. G.
can hardly be dragged by an ox chain where he does not want to go, and
he did not want to go to D----, which had no associations for him, even
to see his sister. "Why couldn't she have settled in some decent place?"
he wanted to know, when her affectionate calls to him to come and be
entertained evoked the spectre of boredom which never in any
circumstances appeared to me. The pretty town of her adoption was, from
his point of view, a "hole," with "nothing in it." But my luck was in
when she drifted thither. It was the first court of the sanctuary, so to
speak; the way by which I entered the hallowed places of the past. Every
inch of the old streets, every brick and chimney-pot over fifty years
old, was sacred to me. The bulk of life lay between that past and now,
and the intervening years dropped away as if they had never been.
Over the road from my bedroom window in her house stood a fine old
dwelling, with a sundial on a prominent gable, and a high-walled garden
of which I caught beautiful glimpses through the tall iron gates and
between the ancient trees--quite unchanged. There, when I was a child,
Miss M. kept her Preparatory School for Young Gentlemen, still mentioned
with pride in the local handbooks, although long extinct. "Many of her
old pupils have attained high positions in the world," say they; and I
wonder if these were any of the little men with whom we little women of
eight or nine or thereabouts exchanged furtive glances over the pew-tops
in the old parish church on Sundays. I can see some of their faces now,
and hers, so serene and lofty, as she stood amongst them, her ringlets
showering down out of her bonnet like two bunches of laburnum, a narrow
silken scarf about her well-boned bust. Young Nelsons of the great
admiral's family were amongst Miss M.'s "young gentlemen"; the hero
himself was at school in D----, although his schoolhouse is no more; and
the cocked hat, with two bullet holes through it, in which he fought the
Battle of the Nile, has belonged to the neighbourhood since before
Trafalgar. "Well, Beechey, I'm off after the French again. What shall I
leave my godson?" The hat was asked for, and, says Nelson, "He shall
have it," and the granddaughter of the honoured infant has it still. It
takes a Norfolk person to appreciate the importance of these historic
associations to a little Norfolk town.
On the Denes at Yarmouth there is a tall column, something like one
hundred and fifty feet high, with Britannia ruling the waves from the
apex, that in my time stood majestically alone between river and sea,
and part of its dedicatory inscription, which is in Latin, runs thus:
HORATIO LORD NELSON
Whom, as her first and proudest champion in naval fight, Britain
honoured, while living, with her favour, and, when lost, with her tears;
Of whom, signalised by his triumphs in all lands, the whole earth stood
in awe on account of the tempered firmness of his counsels, and the
undaunted ardour of his courage; This great man NORFOLK boasts her own,
not only as born there of a respectable family, and as there having
received his early education, but her own also in talents manners and
mind.
This will show how little D----, which assisted at his early education,
deserves to be called a "hole, with nothing in it."
Miss M. died or retired in time to leave another set of memories for me
around that old house. I laughed to myself as I looked at the gate
through which a most dashing, black-whiskered gentleman of the D'Orsay
type used to issue of a Sunday morning, gloved in primrose kid, crowned
with glossiest beaver, the glass of fashion to his sex and the
admiration of ours, and thought of his little secret which I daresay he
never knew had been surprised.
His pew in the old church (all open benches now) was close to ours, and
we little girls used to watch him as he entered and stood, turned to the
wall, with his hat before his face, to say his preliminary prayer.
Something aroused our suspicions, and a burning desire to see the lining
of that hat. Patience and perseverance rewarded us with a peep, and
there was a little round mirror fixed to the inside of the crown.
And then I sighed, remembering his sister--I think it was his sister--a
rather swarthy, dark-browed, Juno-like creature, as I recall her;
knowing that I had just been within a touch of meeting her again; an old
old woman....
Once, in the far past, at the first known home, some miles from D----,
we gave a dance. You remember those dances of the fifties, dear reader
who went to them? They were simple affairs; no caterer from outside the
house, no outlay for flowers or band or champagne, or the hire of public
rooms (except for county or hunt balls, and then the claim was light on
the individual pocket). But if they were not as delightful to go to as
the more expensive corresponding functions of these days, I have no
memory worth trusting. I am sure you will say the same.
The guests were dancing by eight o'clock to the strains of the domestic
piano, the polka and the schottische and the varsoviana alternating with
quadrilles and lancers, the waltz a stately gyration round and round.
They were not staled and blasé, those simple people, but as fresh as
children for the game in hand. They had time to play it then. Whole
love stories were enacted in a night, and there was one in which I
played a part which I was too young to appreciate at the time, and of
which that handsome girl of the house opposite was the heroine. In my
ringlets and sandalled shoes, my full-skirted book-muslin frock and blue
sash and shoulder-knots--a little spoiled child allowed to see the fun
for an hour or two when she ought to have been in bed--I was passed from
knee to knee, petted to my heart's content by the adult guests, the
gentlemen especially; and the festive scene is as clear before me now as
it was then. The drawing-room was festooned with wreaths of evergreen
and paper flowers, out of which branched candles in hidden sconces made
of tin; the nursery guard was before the fire; the mirror with the gilt
eagle on the top reflected moving figures that had space to swim in the
mazy dance without jostling each other.
"Do you see that lady in the white dress?" a whiskered nurse of mine
whispered in my ear.
I did--I see her now--her dark eyes flashing, dark cheek glowing, deep
breast visibly swelling with the triumph of the hour--the undoubted
belle of the ball. Her dress was of white tulle, flounced to the waist
and trimmed with a long spray, running obliquely from neck to hem, of
white artificial roses sprinkled with glass dewdrops. A cluster of the
same was set in her abundant dusky hair.
"I want you to take something to her," said he, fumbling. "Don't show it
to anybody, and don't give it to anybody but her."
He closed my little fist over a wad of folded paper, and I dodged
through the crowd and delivered it, and returned to report.
"Did she read it?"
"Yes."
"Did she say anything?"
"No."
"Didn't she take any notice at all?"
"She only laughed."
He fell into sombre reverie, and I left him for more cheerful
companionship.
Later in the evening I was in the vicinity of the belle of the ball, and
she beckoned me, stooped, and whispered. "Take this to Mr G. Don't let
anyone see it. Give it to him when nobody is looking."
I brought him the note, and straightway he forgot me and my services.
The next I saw of him he was sitting in her pocket under the stairs.
And she did not marry him, after all! And now she is an old, old woman!
There was another member of the family (a cousin of these two), whose
portrait in my mental picture gallery has been classed always as a gem
of romantic art.
I only saw her once, and that was after another ball given at the same
old country house where the lady of the tulle dress and dew-sprinkled
roses disported herself with Mr G. I do not think I could have attended
this ball myself, for I have no recollection of seeing the girl I refer
to, who was there, until the following day. Her chaperon, whoever it
was, had left her over in my mother's care, probably to get thoroughly
rested before taking the journey home. In the morning we only heard of
her. She was in bed, being assiduously coddled. Before she came forth
mother gathered her little ones together and thus admonished them:
"Yes, you will see her at dinner, and if you are very good you may take
her for a walk with you this afternoon. But, mind, you must be very
gentle with her. You must take the greatest care of her, because she is
in a decline and very soon she is going to die." We were further
commanded on no account to disclose our knowledge of her sad fate to the
invalid.
She come down to the midday farmhouse dinner, and it was then I took my
indelible picture of her. She was probably eighteen, a willowy slip of a
girl, and with the pathos of her doom about her, the loveliest creature
my eyes (with such an idealising quality in them) had ever seen. That
was the impression, made permanent. Very fair of skin, with golden hair
arranged Madonna-wise in smooth bands; and dressed all in white, looking
the part my mother had given her to perfection--an angel at large,
granted to gross mortals for a little while to be jealously recalled to
her proper place. Her white muslin bodice was long-waisted and
stiffly-boned, and cut to a deep point in front over the bunchy skirt;
but it was lovely. And the gold watch at her side, and the long gold
chain round her neck to which it was attached, gave just the touch of
radiance to the unearthly purity of her appearance, as effective as a
Fra Angelico halo.
We took her for a walk through our fields and lanes, and with awe and
reverence laid ourselves out to take care of her. I remember that we
gathered mushrooms and that she ate some raw, which was unwise of her in
her delicate condition. I also remember (only it spoils the picture to
include such a squalid detail) that some of the little party ate more
than she did, and that one was deadly sick and had to be carried home.
At that point she fades from the scene--went away to die, as I supposed.
This one tragic vision of her made such an impression upon my
imagination that I have thought of her when anything reminded me, for
over half-a-century; but I have never thought of her as being other than
half angel in heaven and half dust of the earth all the time. I thought
of her when I looked out of my window in my sister-in-law's house at the
old house opposite, when first I returned to D----, still with an ache
of pity for a young life defrauded of the common heritage, which we
others, not more deserving, had come into.
But almost immediately afterwards my hostess asked me to go with her to
call upon one of her new acquaintances, a lady who had known me as a
child, had heard of my coming, and wished to see me. She bore the name
of the family which had followed Miss M. at the house with the sundial
on the wall, but as she was a widow that was the name of her husband's
family, and so I had no clue to her.
We found her in the pretty garden of her handsome house close by, and
she welcomed me warmly.
"You remember me?" she queried, when I had taken a basket chair beside
her. "I once stayed at your house at T----. I went to a party your
mother gave, and remained overnight. Don't you remember?"
I said I did, because I knew as soon as I looked at her that I had seen
her before. The forehead and the set of the eyes came back to me from
the past, unmistakably familiar. But the whole time I was there,
although she kept talking of the old times and the old people, I was
cudgelling my brains to place her and I could not. She told me she had
married her cousin and had not changed her name, so that I knew where
she belonged; and yet I could not think of any member of the family
answering to her personal reminiscences. She took me round her garden,
she showed me the rooms she lived in, spoke of her life with her
husband, recently dead, but with her long enough for them to celebrate
their golden wedding together; and yet I could not get myself on to the
right track. I went home with my sister-in-law quite worried and
bothered about it, and lay awake at night to continue my search in the
holes and corners of Memory when the public, so to speak, had left the
building.
Suddenly I discovered her. The face of the deaf old lady of over
seventy, and the angular body that had to lean on an arm or a stick when
it walked abroad, were suddenly transfigured like Faust in the play, and
there hung before my eyes in the dark the beautiful vision of that
golden-haired girl in white whom we had been told to take care of and be
good to because she was to die soon. There was no doubt about it. That
forehead and those eyes, that I had instantly recognised, although I
could not identify them, were hers. She had not been dust of the earth
for half-a-century, but alive all the time--yes, and well and happy; and
now she was in the most comfortable circumstances and apparently far
from her journey's ending still. It was a delightful discovery. Quite an
appreciable sorrow seemed to have been lifted from my heart.
Unfortunately I had no opportunity to see her again, to talk with her
of the old times now that I should know what I was talking about. When
you have but six months in England in which to make up the arrears of
about three-quarters of a lifetime, every visit is a flying visit, every
taste of the old friendships but a tantalising sip.
Down the road from the walled garden of the house I have been speaking
of, another high wall with a door at one end and a carriage gate at the
other, the spreading crown of a great chestnut-tree overtopping the
middle, bounded the street side of another garden, and sheltered from
public view another house which cried to me with a thousand tongues of
memory every time I passed it on my way to and from the railway station.
It was one of my own old homes--the third, not counting my birthplace
(which I left as a baby, and therefore have no knowledge of). The tenant
of this house in D---- was now my sister-in-law's landlord, and I could
have gone through it if there had been time for a polite process of
siege; but because an Englishman's house is his castle, and you cannot
march into it without notice as if it was yours, I was able to see only
the outside of any of my old homes. Perhaps it was as well.
When no one was looking I lingered by the carriage gate, through which
all the front of the house was visible--the pillared porch and flight of
steps within it, the windows of the rooms where we lived when we were a
family of seven or eight, and not of two as we are now; and behind them
I could see with the eyes of imagination all I wanted to know.
The garden had been rearranged. There were greenhouses in it that used
not to be, and the stone lions were gone. In my time two large heraldic
lions, that came from the piers of a park entrance to an estate that had
been brought to the hammer, sat on square pedestals in front of the
house, ornaments of a semicircular lawn that now spread over ground once
cut off for strawberry beds and espalier apple-trees. Under the belly of
one of those lions, whose forepaws served for doorway and his haunches
for shelter from wind and rain, I had my summer reading place. There I
wept over the death of the Heir of Redclyffe, and shivered at the
ghastly imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe. There also I made the little
secret scribblings that were to lead eventually to the writing of this
book. I could not see round to the arbour under the big
chestnut-tree--or where the arbour was--with its processioning groups of
ghosts; nor the thickets of syringa bushes, the scent of which has never
come to my nose without the suggestion of this place to my mind, and
never will. The nose is as sensitive to poetic impressions as the eye
with its rose-coloured spectacles, if not more so. There is a poem of
W.W. Story's which begins:
"O faint, delicious, spring-time violet!
Thine odour, like a key,
Turns noiselessly in memory's wards to let
A thought of sorrow free.
The breath of distant fields upon my brow
Blows through that open door ..."
And just so it is, and was, with me. Every exhalation of English earth
was a magic potion to conjure visions and dreams. It did not need to be
a perfume for the handkerchief, syringa or violet, jasmine or
lily-of-the-valley; the smell of the little herb-robert, whose other
name is something with "stink" in it, was to me--who had not smelt it
for forty years--the most exquisite of all.
But the shrubbery walk around the fruit garden where the syringas grew
was all open border now, not shady and secluded as when I used to pace
it in dusk and dark with the earliest of those fairy emissaries that
come to a girl when she is passing into her teens.... For the peculiar
charm of this garden is that it was the scene of the great transition.
Here I received my first proposal. Heavens! what a shock it gave me. In
fact I was horrified and terrified out of my wits. It came in a letter
surreptitiously conveyed to me through servants. "I love you with my
whole heart. Dare I hope that I am loved in return?"--the startling
words were but the commencement of a long outpouring, but I was so
frightened by them that I dared not read another. In frantic haste I
destroyed the letter, and thereafter went in fear and dread of the
writer--quite a grown man to me, perhaps eighteen--as of an ogre waiting
to devour me. I may point out, by the way, that it is a mistake not to
read letters through--one that I did not make again. This unread letter
contained a request that I would, if I favoured my lover's suit,
indicate the same to him by a certain sign that he alone would
understand, and in my ignorance I made that sign, placing myself where
he could find me, when all my aim was to get as far away from him as
possible. How I hated him for his attentions no words can tell. On the
other hand I rather "cottoned" to a brother of his, who did not write me
love-letters. For little girls do cotton to little boys, and vice versa,
and why not? "I confess I get consolation ... in seeing the artless
little girls walking after the boys to whom they incline ... this is as
it should be," said Thackeray, writing of children's parties. But the
boy to whom I was secretly inclined was never aware of the compliment
paid him, and, almost before I was aware of it myself, he was sadly
removed from my path by an accidental gun-shot. And the boy who
inclined, much more than inclined, to me I took every precaution that
was in my power never to speak to again. I cannot remember that I ever
did so.
But the reader who knows anything at all of human nature does not need
to be told that when I found myself in D---- again, after an interval of
nearly half-a-century, my inclination was rather to see him than to
avoid him. It would be a piquant moment, I felt, that of meeting now, if
his memory of early happenings was as good in old age as mine; even
although no reference to them should be permitted. I quite looked
forward to it.
But it was not to be. Although I had nothing to be ashamed of in
connection with him--very much to the contrary--I did not mention his
name to anybody, also I need not say that I kept to myself the little
affair that had been between us; I merely held an ear cocked for casual
information. And it ended with my leaving D---- without having any news
of him, not knowing even whether he was alive or dead.
But later I dropped across one of his sisters, a widow, who had become
connected by marriage with my husband's family. One day we went in a
little party to the town where she lived and she entertained us to tea.
I sat beside her at table, and inevitably we gossiped of our young days
throughout the meal. She told me what had become of her several
brothers and sisters, and so as last I heard of the one in whom I was
interested.
"I have just had a letter from him," said she, no trace in her face or
voice of any knowledge of the ancient secret. "I told him that you were
in England, and he wishes me to give you his kindest remembrances and to
say he is very sorry not to be able to see you." I forget where she said
he lived, but it was in some far-away county; married, of course, with
grown-up children--no doubt grandchildren--as I have.